Phenom Cogn Sci (2011) 10:45–65

DOI 10.1007/s11097-010-9160-4

Emotional clichés and authentic passions:

A phenomenological revision of a cognitive theory
of emotion

Kym Maclaren

Published online: 16 April 2010

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This paper argues for an understanding of emotion based upon Merleau-
Ponty's conceptions of embodiment and passivity. Through a critical assessment of
cognitive theories of emotion, and in particular Solomon's theory, it argues (1) that
there is a sense in which emotions may be judgments, so long as we understand such
judgments as bodily enactments of meaning, but (2) that even understood in this
way, the notion of judgment (or construal) can only account for a subset of emotions
which I call "emotional clichés," and not for authentic passions. In contrast with
Solomon's account which conceives the subject as constituting, this account of
emotion requires us to understand subjectivity as moved by meanings in the world,
and as sometimes, in an authentic passion, dispossessed by those meanings.

Keywords Phenomenology . Emotion . Merleau-Ponty . Embodiment . Subjectivity .

Solomon . Judgment . Contitution

Introduction1

Cognitive theories of emotion are often criticized for their inability, on the critic’s
view, to account for the passivity of emotions.2 In response to such criticism, Robert

1
I would like to thank John Russon for a helpful conversation that gave rise to this paper. I give my thanks
also to both anonymous reviewers for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, especially reviewer 1
for perceptive and useful comments and interesting leads for future thought.
2
See for instance, Griffiths 1997, What Emotions Really Are, 27-30; Roberts 1984, “Solomon on the
Control of Emotions”; Elster 2000, Alchemies of Mind.
K. Maclaren (*)
Department of Philosophy, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria St., Toronto, ON M5B 2K3, Canada
e-mail: Kym.maclaren@ryerson.ca
46 K. Maclaren

Solomon, one of the main proponents of a cognitive theory of emotions and perhaps
the most frequent target of this criticism, has rehabilitated his theory.3 Where his
initial theory claimed only that emotions are judgments actively—though often
unreflectively—made by us,4 he now claims that such judgments can be “bodily
judgments” analogous to “kinesthetic judgments”.5 Because bodily judgments are
unreflective, they (and their affective feelings) are experienced by us as passive
occurrences, though they are in fact active ways in which we constitute the meaning
of a situation. Solomon thereby tries to explain the experience of passivity in
emotion, while still maintaining that emotions are activities on our part.
Since Solomon does not explore in detail what makes kinesthetic judgments (and
therefore bodily judgments) possible or how they work, the first aim of this essay is
to extend and clarify the notion of kinesthetic judgment through Merleau-Ponty’s
notions of embodiment and habit. While attempting to show how Solomon is right to
turn to kinesthetic or bodily judgments to understand the experienced passivity of
emotions, I also argue that our elaboration of his theory of emotion requires us to
acknowledge a greater sense of actual (and not merely experienced) passivity in
subjectivity: we must now think subjectivity as inherently embodied and as moved
by meanings in the world—though these meanings are also actively taken up and
further determined by the subject. But furthermore, this essay contends that, even
with the notion of kinesthetic judgment properly understood, Solomon’s cognitive
theory of emotions and theories like it can account for only a subset of emotions that
I will call “emotional clichés.” The emotions that are not accounted for, which I will
call “authentic passions,” reveal an even deeper form of passivity, a form of
subjectivity that is fundamentally dispossessed by its world, such that subject and
object are not yet fully distinct and there is not yet the kind of agent that could enact
judgments.

A cognitive theory of emotion

In reaction to the idea (typically though not uncontroversially attributed to William

James)6 that emotions are merely qualitatively sensed inner feelings, cognitive
theorists have called to our attention the intentionality of emotions. Emotions, they
note, are oriented towards a certain object or state of affairs, and they involve an
evaluation of that object or situation. Such intentionality, they claim, must be
cognitive. For, when we consider the meaningfulness of the evaluations involved,
3
Though Solomon claims to be “revising” his earlier work (Solomon 2007, Not Passion’s Slave
[henceforth NPS], 185), in fact, his later theory seems to be more an elaboration or rehabilitation of his
earlier theory. His early work claimed that the judgments that emotions are, are often unreflective
judgments. His later work elaborates this by claiming that these unreflective judgments can be “bodily
judgments,” and by clarifying that these bodily judgments may have an affective feel to them. He does
acknowledge that his earlier use of “voluntary” and “choice” with respect to emotion might overstate the
issue (e.g., NPS, 192), but this seems to be more a matter of settling for less polemical rhetoric now than
of transforming his initial theory in any substantial way.
4
See for example, Solomon 1980 “Emotions and Choice” and 1977 Passions, esp. ch. 8.
5
NPS, ch.11.
6
For arguments that James’ theory of emotion is more nuanced than this, see for example Redding 1999,
The Logic of Affect.
Emotional clichés and authentic passions 47

we find that they imply certain thoughts, beliefs, judgments, or appraisals. To be

afraid of this person’s appointment to a position of power is, for instance, to believe
that people can abuse the power that is granted them and to judge that this person is
likely to do so and that this will have ill effects. Such beliefs, thoughts, judgments,
or appraisals are often made explicit when a person is asked why she feels as she
does: “because he will ruin all the progress we’ve made.” Far from being merely
incommunicable sensations, then, emotions seem to be subjective attitudes involving
communicable and thus conceptually articulable content; they are apprehensions of a
certain state of affairs, involving evaluations that function as claims or judgments
about its meaning, and these judgments seem to be informed by a set of beliefs or
thoughts.7
Perhaps the most controversial articulation of a cognitive theory of emotion is
given by Robert Solomon. I will focus on his theory in order to reveal the significant
degree of truth in it, while also pointing out some key limitations.
Convinced that we must become responsible for our emotions and not use them as
excuses for our actions, Solomon argues, in his earlier work, that emotions are active
judgments on our part (e.g., Passions, ch.8): based upon our character, commit-
ments, interests, and beliefs, we judge a situation to be (for example) threatening, or
conducive to our happiness, and this judgment which constitutes the meaning of the
situation for us is our emotion.8 As acts or enactments of judgment, our emotions
also have ends or purposes: they are strategies deployed so as to constitute the
situation in a way that somehow serves our own purposes.9 Emotions can thus be
said to have a logic: “they proceed purposefully in accordance with a sometimes
extremely complex set of rules and strategies” (Passions, 240). We can become
emotional without experiencing our own choice or activity in the process and
without immediately recognizing how our judgment is following rules or
strategically serving our own purposes; but on Solomon’s account, this is only
because the evaluative judgment enacted is unreflective (190).
The conception of subjectivity involved here is noteworthy. Solomon understands
our evaluative judgments as constitutive of the emotional meaning of our situation,
and thereby as also constitutive of our self-identity: “the Self of concern here is…
surreal, constituted by us according to our values and our interests…. We are what
we make of ourselves… according to our own ways of thinking and feeling about
ourselves” (83). The self, then, can be described in two ways, as that which
constitutes and as the identity that is constituted. But these two sides are not fully
separable; rather, the self is an “insubstantial” (89ff.) agency that is self-determining:
“The Self is not the faceless form that wears the masks of everyday life, a
transcendental Self that is never seen. But neither is the Self the sum of those

7
Though there is great disagreement concerning the details of cognitive accounts of emotion (are the
evaluations involved in emotions properly called judgments, construals or appraisals? In what sense are
thoughts or beliefs involved? What is the nature of these thoughts? etc.), this can serve as a delineation of
what cognitive theorists have in common, so long as we accept the terms used in a way that is open to
further precision. Examples of cognitive theorists are: Bedford (1984), Kenny (1963), Lyons (1980),
Solomon (1977), Neu (1977), Nussbaum (2001), Roberts (1988), Davidson (1973).
8
Solomon 1977 says: “[t]he passions, the bearers of values, constitute our world, our surreality.” (The
Passions, 19).
9
See, for instance, The Passions, 241ff.; and “Emotions and Choice” [henceforth EC].
48 K. Maclaren

masks…. Rather, the Self is the wearing of those masks” (91). Subjectivity, on this
account, is an active self-determining through taking up facts and opinions about
ourselves and constituting them into a coherent self-image (91).
In light of this conception of emotion as an activity and of the self as self-
determining, it is not surprising that one of the key criticisms leveled at Solomon is
that his account of emotion cannot account for the passivity of emotion. There are at
least three ways in which we might speak of the passivity of emotion: (1)
experientially, emotions seem importantly different from our active, cognitive
evaluations of the world, ourselves and others; (2) we often seem to be passively
assailed by emotions, and (3) we are often not in full possession of an emotion’s
meaning but rather seem to be carried away by something that eludes our grasp.
First, the idea that emotions are evaluative judgments informed by logically
linked beliefs and thoughts seems strange for emotions often seem to oppose
themselves to our explicitly held cognitions and to mark themselves out as belonging
to a different realm than that of reason and logical connection. As critics of cognitive
theories have noted, it is not unusual to find people who espouse, intellectually,
specific convictions (e.g., that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality), and yet
have emotional reactions that are opposed to those convictions (e.g., they are
repulsed when they learn that a close friend is a lesbian).10 The fact, too, that
emotions are found in infants and animals who seem to lack inferential abilities
suggests that emotions do not presuppose or involve the ability to draw inferential
connections amongst beliefs or thoughts.11 And finally, critics note that one can
make an evaluative judgment of a situation without feeling the emotion that, on
Solomon’s account, is nothing more than that evaluative judgment.12
Secondly, the idea that we actively constitute the emotional meaning of an object
or situation seems at odds with the sense, within many emotions, that we are
confronted by a particular meaning and that this meaning is overwhelming precisely
because we have no say in it, no control over it.13 The meaning seems to assail us,
rather than having its source in us.14
Finally, though sometimes emotional people are able to articulate what it is that
they are feeling and why (“I’m angry because he cheated on me”), it is often the case
that they are not able to do this. Indeed, individuals can even be unaware that they
are experiencing an emotion (“I am NOT ANGRY!!”). The elusiveness of emotions—
the ways in which they seem to resist being put into words and fully comprehended, the

10
See, e.g., Calhoun 1984 “Cognitive Emotions?”
11
Deigh 1994 (“Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions”) uses this fact of “primitive emotions” as he
calls them to argue against contemporary cognitive theories. Cf. Robinson 1995, “Startle.”
12
See for example, Robinson 1983, “Emotion, Judgment, and Desire,” 733 and Roberts 1984, “Solomon
on the Control of Emotions,” 398.
13
As Solomon often notes, there are some cases of emotion that follow upon a line of reasoning, and thus
that seem to be emotions that we actively think our way into. We may, for instance, after thinking about a
certain state of affairs, come to the realization that although it initially seemed benign, it actually has
dangers built into it, and then start to fear. Here, it is true, we are not simply immediately confronted by
the emotional meaning of the situation, and the emotion seems to be premised upon our line of thought.
Nonetheless, it does not necessarily follow from this either that all emotions follow from a line of thought,
or that this emotion is nothing other than the constitution of a certain meaning based upon our own line of
reasoning.
14
Heidegger 1996, Being and Time, 129. Compare Robinson, 1995 “Startle.”
Emotional clichés and authentic passions 49

ways in which they seem to entangle us so that we feel dispossessed by them rather than
comprehending of them—seems importantly at odds with the idea that emotions are
evaluative judgments that we have actively made, based on beliefs and thoughts that we
have.
In Solomon’s later writings, he attempts to respond to such criticisms in part by
reeling in the rhetoric of his earlier claims: he says, for instance, that the phrase
“emotions are choices” was perhaps too strong for articulating his key idea that we
are agents in relation to our emotions.15 At the same time, he notes that, in speaking
of evaluative judgments, he intends to include “bodily judgments” (e.g., NPS, 192,
213) like those that we find in non-emotional kinesthetic judgments (see, e.g., NPS
187-192), which are “nonreflective, nondeliberative, inarticulate judgments” (NPS,
187). Solomon provides an example of a kinesthetic judgment: “We judge that the
size of the next step on the stairway will be identical to the several we have already
descended and move our bodies accordingly, our minds entirely on the conversation
we are having with our companion” (NPS, 187). Since this judgment is something
we are actively making without experiencing ourselves as actively making it, and
since it is based upon our own history and beliefs about how the built world works,
it illustrates that we can enact judgments without articulating them for ourselves and
without self-consciously thinking through the logical connections involved. The
meanings constituted by these kinesthetic judgments are thus experienced as
passively encountered rather than as having their source in us. Emotional judgments
are bodily judgments like this, on Solomon’s recent elaboration of his account.
The analogy that Solomon draws between the bodily judgments that emotions are
and kinesthetic judgments is a helpful beginning to a line of thought that is not fully
thought through. To better understand the nature of emotions, we must better
understand how such a thing as a “bodily judgment” can take place. It is here, I
propose, that Merleau-Ponty’s account of habit and embodiment might be of some
help. We will see that there is something basically right about Solomon’s claim that
emotions are bodily judgments, but that it requires that we rethink the nature of
subjectivity such that (1) perception is understood as informed by embodiment and
(2) emotional experience is understood as our being meaningfully moved by the
world, and thus as involving passivity.

Habit and the embodied subject

Merleau-Ponty argues that perception is an achievement that is fundamentally

mediated by our material resources, our motor engagement with the world, our
history, and our habits. The world to be perceived, on his account, is not already
made up of determinate objects with discrete subject-independent properties; rather,
it is fundamentally indeterminate or ambiguous, and it comes to be disambiguated
only through our embodied engagement with it. Initially, things in the world offer up
merely equivocal directives or “affordances”16; they have a general sens in all the

15
See for example, Not Passion’s Slave, 213, 229.
16
Gibson 1986, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
50 K. Maclaren

connotations of this French word—namely, a direction, a meaning (especially

vague, intuitively grasped meaning), a sense. This sens moves us to engage with
it in a particular manner—a sea urchin motivates a tentative touch, whereas rabbit
fur encourages stroking. It is in engaging with the thing that we determine or
realize (both in the sense of acknowledge and make real) its properties. For
instance, we perceive a certain texture in the tree’s bark only because we are of a
certain size, have hands and skin, and have learned to move our hands in specific
ways that take up and realize the bark’s texture; in contrast, the inchworm, because
of its size and bodily resources, will realize in the tree’s bark a very different
texture.17 And thus, infants lack perception of properties like weight, texture,
shape, and depth until they have developed the prerequisite mobility in their hands
and eyes.18
The properties and meanings that are realized in things are therefore always also
reflections of our own embodiment: things “are clothed in human characteristics”;
they are, in the psychoanalytic sense of the word “complexes”.19 They come to hold
within them, at a perceptual, non-conceptual level, a history of our own interactions
with them.
The more familiar a thing becomes or the more we are in the habit of interacting
with it, the more it will offer itself to us as calling for this kind of movement rather
than that. Our habits will shape which possibilities for engagement stand out to us
and solicit us most compellingly. For example, though there are many ways of
playing a certain chord on the guitar, simply holding the guitar, or playing a certain
song will solicit from the hand of a practiced musician this hand position rather than
that. The manner in which the world gives itself to us in perception is thus
thoroughly mediated by our bodily resources and our habits of interaction, and the
more we develop habits of interaction, the more a thing comes to be disambiguated
for us and disclosed to us in a certain way.
Those habituating movements that serve to disclose to us and determine for us
things in the world happen, Merleau-Ponty argues, at the level of our meaningful
perceptual-motor engagement with the world. They are neither blind mechanical
reflexes nor movements guided by thought. Walking, for example, is only in
pathological cases an action which we must guide consciously;20 but that does not
mean that it is a blind automatism. It cannot be a matter of encountering a
conditioned stimulus that automatically sets off a conditioned response, since our
environment regularly offers singularly new stimuli and requires that we deal with
new terrains and surprises underfoot. Were we simply to repeat a certain reflexive
movement in a robotic manner, we would quickly fall down. The habit of walking is
rather the unreflective, embodied capacity to perceive environmental demands and,
moved by them, to reorganize our whole bodily bearing in terms of them, in order to
manage this particular slope, this gravelly surface, the weight of today’s over-filled

17
Cf. Woolf 1921 “Kew Gardens.”
18
Bushnell and Boudreau 1993, “Motor development and the mind: The potential role of motor abilities
as a determinant of aspects of perceptual development.”
19
Merleau-Ponty, World of Perception, 2004, 63-64.
20
See for instance the case of IW, considered by Gallagher and Cole 1995 in “Body Schema and Body
Image in a Deafferented Subject."
Emotional clichés and authentic passions 51

backpack, and my aching muscles from yesterday’s hike.21 Against the dualistic
separation of mind and body which places intelligence in the mind and conceives of
the body as blind mechanism, we must admit a kind of bodily intelligence at work in
our habitual engagements.
In defense of the idea that intelligence resides solely in the mind, someone might
turn to the idea of unconscious or subpersonal thoughts and claim that it is such
thoughts that guide one’s intelligent bodily movements. Here, an example will serve
to refute this idea: the driver of an 18-wheeler handles a right hand turn with ease,
though she has never before encountered a turn at quite this angle, in the context of
this particular narrowness of road. Her ability to manage the turn is not premised
upon any thinking; were she to think out the precise route to take, she would need to
do relatively sophisticated geometry and physics to figure out the exact angle of this
turn, how a trailer whose wheels are set 40′ back will pivot on its back axle, what
curve the tractor must make in order for the trailer to cut the correct tangent, and
what speed will make the centrifugal forces manageable.22 Certainly, she does not
consciously think this through, but nor could this calculation be happening
unconsciously, for even a truck driver without an education in geometry and
physics, who would not know where to start on this mathematical problem, can
make this turn skillfully. The driver’s ability to make this turn is, then, a function of
the kind of habits she has developed. By habituating herself to this particular rig, and
incorporating its material resources into her own embodiment, she has developed a
new way of perceiving: she now perceives in terms of the resources available to her;
or to say the same thing in different words, the perceived situation now offers itself
up in terms of her resources. What the driver perceives is not a factual, merely
objective set of affairs which she then evaluates in order to be able to deal with it;
rather, she encounters a situation that affords her particular routes of action and
solicits from her certain kinds of movements—braking, shifting gears, and turning
the wheel just so. With the acquisition of a habit, one’s world comes to be
immediately (though still to some extent indeterminately) perceptually framed in
terms of one’s developed powers; that world sketches out for the perceiver a certain
style of response.23
What is crucial for our discussion of emotion, here, is in the first instance the
relative passivity of habitual actions: intelligent bodily responses to the environment
are neither explicitly willed, nor the caused effect of unconscious thought processes;
rather, the sensed world, itself, motivates movement. Far from having its meaning

21
For prolonged defenses of this claim, see Merleau-Ponty 1963 The Structure of Behavior, 93-128
(Merleau-Ponty 1972 La structure du comportement, 102-138); and “The Spatiality of One’s Own Motility”
in the Phenomenology of Perception [henceforth PP, and Pdlp for the original French edition, 1945]).
22
In fact, the geometrical problem is even more complicated than this, since the driver would also have to
take into consideration how the narrowness of the roadways constrains the curve that she can take with the
tractor, and how the location of the fifth wheel on the tractor affects how the trailer is drawn along and
pivoted on its back wheels.
23
The argument here is that perception is not separable from movement. This is a challenge to traditional
notions which suppose that movement is a process set off by perception and inherently separate from
perception. On Merleau-Ponty’s account, perception both is already shaped by one’s movements and itself
lays out routes for further movement, soliciting those movements. See Barbaras 2000, “Perception and
Movement.”
52 K. Maclaren

actively attributed by a subject, the sensed world presents itself immediately as

framed in certain terms, and as having a suggestive meaning already at work in it.
These suggestive meanings solicit particular kinds of movements, and the driver’s
movements are the fulfillment of those solicitations, rather than actions that have
their source fully within her.
In fulfilling vague solicitations experienced in the world, however, our move-
ments equally determine that which is to be perceived. Our hand motions, for
instance, are both moved by and determine for us the texture of the tree bark. Here,
we are able to give some content to Solomon’s idea of ‘kinesthetic judgments.’ For
our responsive bodily motions can be said to enact a judgment: this is so. This is not
an inferential or reflective judgment, but the perceptual-motor realization of a certain
determinate property for us. Engaged by something still relatively indeterminate and
undefined, solicited by it, our motions define that thing for us.24
Movements and actions, then, can be understood as kinesthetic judgments. Here,
rather than a subject who receives inputs, processes them internally in conscious or
unconscious cognitions, and then actively attributes values or meanings to things
factually perceived, we have the embodied enaction of a meaningful perception of
things. Determinate meanings and unreflective evaluations, on this account, are
realized in one’s bodily interaction with the world, and not in some inner,
introspectible subject. This is the truth of Solomon’s notion of “kinesthetic
judgments” and of his claim that we “constitute” the world in its meaningfulness
through our judgments.
But our explication of kinesthetic judgments also shows that the meanings and
evaluations enacted are as much a result of how the world moves us sensually as they
are of our active bodily taking up of directives and affordances in the world. It is
precisely because the meanings we find in the world are motivated by that world that
we experience a fundamental passivity in perception. Even in the case where we are
moved to take up a situation in habitual ways, it is the situation itself that holds the
history of our habits, that appears within the frame of an already instituted meaning;
thus, it is the situation itself that does the moving. It is too narrow, then, to say only
that we “constitute” the meaning of the situation. It is more true to say that we take
up and further determine meanings that are already indeterminately instituted within
the situation at hand. Constitution is derivative upon institution, activity upon
passivity.25 This is one important reason that we do not experience ourselves as
24
In the case of the truck driver: she encounters a situation which, by virtue of her habits, already sketches
out in indeterminate ways a certain style of response. In taking up those solicitations, the truck driver
disambiguates the sketch, crystallizes a definite form of response, and thus, in her very actions, determines
retrospectively the meaning of the situation. Once she has acted, we can look back, analyze her actions
and say because the situation is so, she had to move in these ways. But such retrospective analysis
overlooks the fact that it is by virtue of moving in these ways that the situation comes to be just so; her
actions clarify and articulate the situation. There are several ways in which to negotiate a right-hand turn,
and a different orchestration of movements would have determined the situation in a different manner,
would have realized it differently. Merleau-Ponty speaks of these different ways of realizing a certain goal
(e.g., a right-hand turn) as different “systems of equivalences.” Though they each realize the same general
goal, they involve different ways of organizing our bodily actions in terms of the world and the world in
terms of our bodily actions. See, Merleau-Ponty 1964a e.g., Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence
[henceforth ILVS] 54, 61.
25
Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s 2003 criticism of the constituting consciousness, and his substitution of the notion
of institution in L’Institution.
Emotional clichés and authentic passions 53

giving meaning to things and that we rather experience that meaning as residing in
the things themselves. The meaning of things is, in our perceptual experience,
something to be answered to, clarified, articulated, rather than something actively
attributed by us.

Emotions as embodied judgments

If we accept that our actions are embodied judgments and that the meaning or value
of a thing or a situation is initially realized in our perceptual-motor engagements
with the world, then it is not a far reach to claim that our emotions are embodied
judgments too. They too may be perceptual-motor realizations and determinations of
nascent, indeterminate meanings offered by our situations.
Both Sartre and Solomon (inspired by Sartre) have argued that emotions are a
kind of judgment and that they realize a certain meaning or they “make it so.” These
judgments, they contend, make sense of a situation in such a way as to make it
manageable. Sartre, for instance, speaks of an individual’s sudden fit of anger when,
in the context of mutual mockery, he finds himself without a witty comeback.26 The
individual’s anger, on a Sartrian analysis, is a way of dealing with the situation.
Through his anger, he transforms a situation whose demands he can no longer meet
and where he is at risk of being humiliated, into a situation where he is master. His
anger, in this instance, enacts a claim that the other has wronged him, and thereby
realizes a repositioning of himself and the other. Where once the other, through her
mockery, lorded it over this individual, his anger now puts her in the place of having
to answer to him and to defend herself.
Solomon gives a similar example:
Joanie wants to go to a party: her husband does not. She begins to act bored
and frustrated; he watches television. She resigns herself to reading, sighing
occasionally. He asks if she has picked up some shirts from the laundry: she
says ‘no.’ He flies into a rage. He needs shirts (he has hundreds). He needs one
of those (they are all the same). She is negligent (she was busy). She takes
advantage of him (she stays with him)…. Their encounter is short-lived. She
goes off to read; he settles back before the television. The party is out of the
question. (EC, 263)
Here, anger resolves the man’s situation, Solomon argues, by “get[ting] his wife’s
mind off the party and stop[ping] her irritating reminders”(263). The man’s anger is
his judgment that his wife is negligent, and has not cared adequately about him.27 It

26
Sartre does not give a full analysis of this example: he brings it up to illustrate what is right about
Dembo’s understanding of emotion (Sketch for a Theory of Emotions, 46 [henceforth STE]). But drawing
upon Sartre’s own theory of emotions, we can interpolate what his analysis of this emotion would have to
be.
27
Solomon is focusing here on how emotions are “actions, aimed at changing the world” and thus
“purposive” (262-3). He does not, in this example, explicitly spell out the judgment that is involved in this
emotion. But based on his earlier argument that emotions are judgments (257), we can interpolate what
kind of judgment is involved here, and how it works to “change the world” and to define its object (258).
54 K. Maclaren

casts her as the offender and himself as the wronged party, and therein realizes a new
positioning of each in relation to the other. Whether or not his wife endorses this
way of configuring the situation, the husband’s angry reaction at least manages to
produce a chasm between them, to “get her off his back” and to leave him in peace
to watch his television. It realizes for him a distance and freedom from his wife.
Even emotional responses that might seem like failures to deal with a situation
turn out, on this account, to be judgments that transform a situation and make it
manageable. Consider, for instance, breaking down in tears. A patient is on the verge
of confessing something momentous to her psychiatrist when instead she breaks
down and starts crying. This, Sartre argues, is not a total failure to manage the
situation; in fact, it is quite effective (STE, 45-6, 69-70). The emotional response of
crying enacts the judgment “this is a situation that I am not up to; I am someone who
needs comfort and support; I need you to be my consoler rather than my judge.” In
enacting such a judgment, the patient’s emotional response transforms the situation:
it brings into being a new form of interpersonal relation. Initially, the situation was
headed towards a confession in which the patient might potentially be judged by her
doctor and would have to take responsibility for her hidden secrets; with her tears,
she transforms herself into someone to be cared for by others and makes it the case
that her doctor is called upon to sympathize with and be concerned for her. Her tears
thus effectively relieve the tension of this situation and allow the patient to avoid the
anxiety of responsibly promoting a bond rather than a contemptuous chasm between
herself and her doctor.
We can understand why both Sartre and Solomon might understand these
emotional responses as a kind of choice: for there is indeterminacy in each of the
situations faced, such that each situation could have been taken up and realized in
different ways. To name just a few alternative outcomes, the patient could have
courageously confessed; the husband could have responded caringly to his wife’s
sighs; the mocked individual could have laughed at himself. Each of these ways of
responding would have developed different possibilities within these situations and
realized—brought into being—very different interpersonal relations, very different
ways of being oneself in relation to others.
But our account of embodied subjectivity allows us to understand such “choices”
as functions of a basic passivity, wherein the individual is perceptually moved to take
up the situation in particular terms.28 On this account, the fact that these situations
were determined or realized one way rather than another reveals not so much an
activity on the part of each person as something about their character or the habitual
ways in which their sense of self in relation to others is given to them. Like the truck
driver’s habitual sense of her rig, which configures the perceived world in terms of
the resources available to her, the individual’s habitual sense of herself, her own
capacities and the resources available in a relationship also configure her world for

28
Solomon recognizes that the “choice” being made in an emotional judgment need not be a choice
between a set of acknowledged options: “’choice’ remains appropriate where it is evident that one could
choose or have chosen otherwise, even if one did not think of or give any weight to alternative options”
(NPS, 212). Where my account differs is in claiming that it is not emotional agents who do or do not “give
weight to alternative options,” but the already configured perceptual situation. We are moved by the
situation to take up one option, and inclined against the other options.
Emotional clichés and authentic passions 55

her. For instance, it may be that the patient lives with a habitual sense of herself as
contemptible, incapable of being good and worthwhile, and thus incapable of
gaining the acceptance of others if she reveals her true self. The option of telling the
truth is, as a result, not a live option: the situations that she encounters do not offer
truth telling as a familiar, enticing route for taking up and resolving the
indeterminate demands within that situation; she is not moved to tell the truth. On
the other hand, she may have established a certain competency at forming bonds
with others through expressions of helplessness and solicitations for help. As a
result, situations present themselves with this possibility for engagement at the
forefront; they present themselves to her in a way that inclines her to realize and
resolve the situation through endearing herself to others.29 If this is right, then the
patient is not actively choosing to evade responsibility and to manipulate the doctor
into consoling her, as if all possibilities were equally available to her, and she
decided upon this one; it is rather that assuming responsibility does not present itself
as a closely available possibility, whereas seeking consolation from the doctor does.
There is a significant degree of passivity at work here: she assents to that which
already inclines her.30
Consider again the case of the angry husband. Within his experience of sitting and
watching TV, his wife’s sighs solicit his attention and exert a vague and equivocal
pressure upon him. Reflection upon these sighs allows us to articulate several
judgments suggested within them: that the husband ought to answer to her concerns;
that real conversation is not possible between them so that she is relegated to implicit
nagging, gesturally poking and prodding at him rather than talking with him; that he
ought to feel guilty and sorry for creating this state of affairs; that she leads a
miserable life because of him, etc. But for the husband caught up in this emotional
situation, the meanings are not yet determinately present nor are they equally
available to him. Which meaning comes to be articulated and further defined by him
will depend upon the capacities that he has developed, his sense of the resources
within this relationship, and the routes that these capacities and resources make
manifest within the perceived situation.

29
De Sousa understands emotion as organizing our experiences in terms of “paradigm scenarios.” These
paradigm scenarios are past experiences that have given us a way of making sense of things, and that have
become habitual. Emotions organize experiences in terms of these scenarios by making certain aspects of
the situation salient, and leaving others in the background. My account is very close to de Sousa’s; one
potential difference lies, however, in my claim that there are already indeterminate meanings (some based
upon past experiences, but some intrinsic to the things themselves) that motivate and institute the
paradigm scenarios in the first place, and that call back up the paradigm scenarios in other circumstances.
De Sousa 1990, The Rationality of Emotion, esp. Ch.7.
30
Solomon, in his later work, acknowledges that our strategic emotional “choices” may be a function
more of our character or our habits than of any active choosing on our part: “Strategies may be the product
of habit or practice…. This compromises the strong voluntaristic language of ‘choice’ considerably, to be
sure….” (NPS, 229). He argues for a more indirect form of agency, though, by claiming that we at one
time actively cultivated our habits: “I am the agent of my emotion, and as Aristotle argued…we are
responsible for even those actions which are involuntary if we can be held responsible for the cultivation
of habits, perhaps from childhood.” On Merleau-Ponty’s account of habit, however, habits need not be
actively cultivated by us. Much like the discipline of which Foucault speaks, they can be instituted in us
by virtue of a convergence of contingent factors that allow us to realize a certain framework for making
sense of things without our ever having chosen between options, or worked to realize some particular goal.
See, for instance, Merleau-Ponty 1964b, “The Child’s Relations with Others” and L’Institution.
56 K. Maclaren

Were he someone who had already developed the capacity for recognizing and
reflecting upon interpersonal tensions, and if his relationship were one in which
practices of shared reflection and resolution had already been instituted, the situation
of his wife sighing might organize itself for him primarily in terms of the possibility
of addressing and trying to understand the tension; it might present itself above all as
a call for conversation. Were he instead someone who had a habitual sense of
himself as regularly ruining things through his own selfishness and blindness to
others, the vague accusation expressed by the sighs might be what is most salient to
and easily determinable by him and he might be moved primarily to take up this
vector within the situation and to grapple with the issue of his own guilt.
Furthermore, the particular routes offered by the situation for dealing with this guilt
would depend upon what kinds of resources were available within his relationship. If
he and his wife had practices of talking productively and compassionately about his
selfishness and sense of guilt, this might be a route sketched out for him. If, on the
other hand, his wife typically took up admissions of guilt as opportunities to further
berate him, then admitting guilt might not present itself as a viable route, and the
situation might incline him, instead, to find ways of locating guilt elsewhere. If,
finally, he were someone who had spent little time developing his capacities for self-
understanding and insight into interpersonal situations, and if his main competence
lay in overpowering that which threatens to thwart him, then his situation would
likely present itself primarily as a vague nagging pressure that must be thrown off.
The possibilities for engagement afforded by this situation would then sketch out
potential weak points and opportunities for asserting himself.
In fact, it seems that this husband has developed little capacity for insight into
interpersonal situations and so the situation presents itself to him in only the vaguest
of terms. There seems to be a general impetus felt within his experience to regain
mastery of the situation, combined with a vague sense that someone is to blame here.
When the issue of picking up dry-cleaning arises (and perhaps he brings up this issue
because he is inclined to look for something his wife has done wrong), this offers
him a way of locating the blame and asserting himself. He enacts the judgment that
she is guilty of not caring adequately for him, and thereby positions himself as the
righteous party who has no further duty in this situation. He throws off his wife’s
wheedling sighs and realizes a freedom from her.
In sum, then, on this account, the emotional response is a matter of taking up and
articulating a direction, a relatively indeterminate sens that already occupies the
situation. The manner in which the sens is articulated is a function not of an actively
devious choice or unconscious planning, but of the familiar routes and enticing
possibilities sketched out by the individual’s habits within the sensed situation. The
individual’s habits have, in other words, already configured the situation in ways that
incline him in one direction rather than another. His emotional response is a pursuit
and endorsement of that direction which further determines the situation, and
realizes a determinate meaning in it. By realizing a determinate meaning (e.g., ‘you
have neglected me’) the emotional response enacts a judgment. All this takes place
at a perceptual-motor level and not through inferential processes, conscious or
unconscious.
We have already seen that Solomon’s account of emotion can be revised to allow
for this element of passivity. The same is true of accounts given by Nussbaum and
Emotional clichés and authentic passions 57

Roberts. Roberts claims that emotions are perceptual construals or “seeing-as.”31 I

too have argued that emotions take place at the level of perceiving, rather than
thinking, and that they amount to construals: emotions determine a situation
perceptually. The source of those construals, however, is on my account located not
simply in an active subject, but in the manner in which the situation to be perceived
presents itself to a person and moves that person to take it up. The sensed situation is
already configured both by our habits and by meaningful vectors intrinsic to the
things themselves; these incline us, move us, perceptually to take them up, articulate
them, realize them along this route rather than that.
Nussbaum claims that emotion is an assent to appearances.32 On my account, too,
emotions involve assenting to directions, vectors, meaningful possibilities already
sketched out in the ways that the world appears. To Nussbaum’s account, however,
we must add a clarification that the appearances are not to be understood as merely
subjective representations; these appearances are located not merely in our own
minds, but in the world. They are how reality gives itself to us in the first place. I
propose furthermore that the assent to appearances is not an endorsement of what is
already clear, unambiguous, and determinate. Rather, this assent creatively
determines these appearances, settles what they are by allowing them to become
what they are, consolidates what was still relatively insecure, ambiguous, inchoate.

Emotional clichés

On the one hand, this paper is proposing that Solomon’s cognitive account of
emotion (and by extension other cognitive accounts of emotion) can make good
sense, so long as we give up a conception of the subject as simply actively
constituting meaning in the world and allow for a notion of subjectivity as
fundamentally embodied—as moved by an indeterminate sens immediately present
in the perceived world.
On the other hand, this paper proposes that, even revised in this way, cognitive
theories of emotion like Solomon’s can account only for a specific form of emotion—
namely, emotional clichés.
In his analysis of language and expression, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between
first- and second-order speech, or in other words authentic speech and already
constituted, sedimented speech.33 Second-order speech is speech that relies upon the
familiar, already established meanings of words; it expresses thoughts previously
constituted by ourselves and others and makes sense of the world in familiar, well-
worn ways. This is the realm of clichés or what Heidegger calls “they-speak.” First-
order or authentic speech, on the other hand, seeks to articulate a thought not yet
constituted, and draws upon the sedimented meanings of words in such a way as to
break them, transform them, find new meaning in them and thereby “inaugurate” as
Merleau-Ponty says a new dimension of experience, a new way of seeing.34 This is

31
Roberts 1988, “What an Emotion is.”
32
Nussbaum 2001, Upheavals of Thought, esp. ch.1.
33
PP, 207 ff.; Pdlp, 207 ff.; ILVS, 44ff.
34
Merleau-Ponty 1964a, ILVS, 52-53; Merleau-Ponty 2003, L’Institution, la passivité, 38.
58 K. Maclaren

poetic language, language that gives us “new organs”35 and reveals within the world
dimensions previously unknown.
A similar distinction can be drawn, I contend, between first and second order
emotions—between authentic passions and emotional clichés. Emotional clichés are,
I propose, emotional responses that draw upon already familiar, established routes
for making sense of things, and that reinstitute familiar ways of being. Authentic
passions, on the other hand, involve the realization of unforeseen meanings within
the world and new ways of becoming oneself.36 It is the former, and not the latter,
that the rehabilitated cognitive accounts are able to explain.37
Insofar as emotions are conceived as judgments, construals, or an assent to
appearances, I have argued that they must involve the bodily endorsement and
articulation of habitual ways in which our world appears to us. But this endorsement
just is a reinstitution of cliché ways of making sense. The emotional person’s
situation, informed by her habits, inclines her in a certain direction and she takes up
and further determines that direction. Her emotional response is, then, a reiteration
and reinscription of habitual ways of making sense of herself, others, the world. In
the case of the patient who cried instead of confessing, her crying was, I argued,
motivated by a habitual sense of herself as incapable of doing good things and
capable only of soliciting others’ help and consternation. In crying, however, she not
only manifests this lived sense of herself; she also further realizes it, consolidates it.
Her crying confirms that she is not capable of doing what is called for, and she needs
others’ help; it reaffirms and re-inscribes her already established, sedimented ways
of assuming herself in relation to others and the world.
Such emotional clichés are recalcitrant to change because, like verbal clichés,
they work for us. Verbal clichés serve as familiar routes for navigating and managing
social situations: he says “what’s up?”; I say “not much”; and all goes smoothly.
Similarly, emotional clichés are the grooves along which we roll, the standard routes
that we take, for navigating an interpersonal situation, making sense of the world
around us, or participating in society.
Consider Hollywood movies. Insofar as these movies affect us at an emotional
level, it is because they are attuned to and make use of widespread emotional clichés.
Writers, directors or editors configure a scene in a certain way because it will elicit a
standard emotional response from viewers. Similarly, the neighborhood gossip
capitalizes on common emotional clichés. He tells a story carved up in terms of
moral surprise and indignation, and if things go as they usually do, his interlocutor
responds with those very emotions, endorsing that familiar way of laying out the

35
ILVS, 52.
36
The distinction between emotional clichés and authentic passions is not absolute, for as we have already
seen, there is an element of creativity even in taking up situations in ways that follow our habits, and our
creative expressions always rely upon, and still carry forward, some previously sedimented directions of
meaning.
37
In other words, theories like Solomon’s cannot account for how new meanings are revealed to us
through emotional experience—they cannot account for how meanings that exceed (or have been
foreclosed by) our habitual ways of constituting the world might make themselves felt in emotion, thereby
challenging our habitual terms of reference. Solomon’s account is rationalist in this sense: since, as
emotional agents, we constitute the world in its meaningfulness for us, all we could ever learn from our
emotions is what we have already put there.
Emotional clichés and authentic passions 59

world, and the various commitments implied. Even in our relationships, emotional
clichés are embraced and perpetuated as navigational tools. A couple will work out,
implicitly, particular ways of positioning themselves in relation to each other,
particular terms in which they understand their situation, and habitual emotional
games follow from this.38 For example, Jo breaks down in tears, Sam walks away, Jo
gets angry and accuses Sam of not caring, Sam gets angry and accuses Jo of being
too demanding, Jo walks out… and this happens repeatedly. Though this habitual
dynamic involves tensions, it also brings with it a certain sense of safety. Each
person is confirmed in her habitual sense of who she is and who she takes the other
to be. Each finds her vision of the world reaffirmed. Each manages to avoid the
anxiety of being put fundamentally into question and potentially having to give up
what she knows and become someone new.
Emotional clichés, then, are a very real phenomenon. It is, I contend, this
phenomenon with which cognitive theorists of emotion are primarily concerned.
They do a relatively good job of making sense of these emotional clichés insofar as
they understand them as a construal of the situation, or an enacted judgment or claim
about the relative positioning of persons and things involved, about what is valuable
and how. But it must be understood that the construal is not a result simply of the
subject actively giving shape to the world perceived; rather, the subject’s habits
already shape the way that the world appears to her in its immediacy, and the subject
is moved by the meanings already at work within her perceptual field to take up the
situation and construe it so. She assents to a particular inclination of meaning in her
perceived world, rather than actively choosing to constitute the world in a specific
way.39

Authentic existential passions

Beyond emotional clichés, there remains, however, another form of emotional

experience—a form of experience that I will call authentic existential passion.40 A
consideration of such passion leads us, I propose, to a more radical conception of
passivity and its role in subjectivity.
Sometimes life presents us with a genuine question—a question for which we do
not have an answer prepared, a question that unsettles and deranges not only the
habitual network of meanings that structures our world, but our very sense of self, of

38
Cf. Berne 1996, Games People Play.
39
Once again, thus far, this account stands in solidarity with that of Ronald de Sousa, who shares the idea
that emotional meaning takes the form of a gestalt, and that this gestalt is put in place by our past rather
than by our active construal of things (De Sousa 1990, The Rationality of Emotion, ch.7). It is debatable,
however, whether de Sousa is able to give an account of what I will now go on to call authentic passions.
40
The “existential feelings” discussed in Ratcliffe’s 2008, Feelings of Being might be thought to be
similar to what I am calling authentic passions insofar as these existential feelings involve not an assent to
already articulated beliefs or propositions, but rather a more fundamental and pre-articulate structuring of
experience, of self in relation to world. But they are not exactly synonymous: insofar as these existential
feelings are settled background orientations that structure experience, they are more like the habitual sense
of self and self-in-relation-to-world that I claim underlies emotional clichés. Authentic passions, on my
account, involve the disruption or throwing into question of such habitual configurations of reality.
60 K. Maclaren

who we are and how to live. It is on these occasions, I propose, that we experience
genuine passions. These are emotions that take us over, entangle, consume, and
oppress us, emotions in which it is difficult to find our bearings; and thus emotions
in which there is a much deeper form of passivity than that involved in what I have
called second-order emotions, or emotional clichés.
Consider the grief felt not by the distant relative who attends a funeral, but by the
person for whom the deceased was the center of the world. His life was cast in terms
of this person; his future, his sense of possibility, his very sense of his place in the
world, and how he matters was entwined with her. Not only his big life projects, but
even his everyday routines had her as a condition of their meaningfulness. Eating
breakfast, going to bed at night, shopping at this market: with her around, it had been
self-evident how to do these things. They had done them so often together, and for
so long, that they rang with the same historical resonances, swelled with the same
thickness of meaning, settled into the same familiar routes for her as for him. But
without her there to do her part in the dance that awakened those meanings, carved
out those routes, and reminded him of his own place, now even breakfast seems
unmanageable. The person in question is therefore faced with a crumbling of his
world; it can no longer exist with the meanings that it had.41
At the same time, however, he is still alive, and life is carrying on. The
fundamental question that has him in its grips is, then, how to carry on meaningfully;
how can he live in this world from which the center has gone? How can he take up
the world in the absence of his beloved, in a way that moves forward, without
leaving her entirely behind? Who will he be, without her? In this kind of grief, we
can find not reiterations and recapitulations of old, sedimented meanings and ways
of seeing, but rather a genuine openness and vulnerability. The bereaved is not
simply asking an isolated question; his very life has become a question.
For this question to be answered, for grief to be genuinely transformed and
overcome, something creative must occur. The bereaved must become someone new,
and live in a transformed world. He must cultivate a new form of life in which he
might live meaningfully without either pretending that his beloved is still here, or
leaving her entirely behind. The artist Käthe Kollwitz, in her diaries, describes very
well this problem, and the agony of finding a creative answer to it.42 Such creation
can be slow and agonizing precisely because it calls for something genuinely new;
and until some meaningful answer is found, the question hangs heavily, oppresses,
consumes, is sometimes almost intolerable. Nor is it easy for the bereaved to get his
bearings and to articulate quite what is at issue here, for part of the issue is a
significant breakdown in the habitual routes for articulating and making sense of
things. The paradigm emotional situation for cognitive theorists, let us recall, is one
in which the emotion can be articulated in terms of beliefs or judgments that inform
it: “I’m angry because [I believe/judge that] he cheated on me.” In this case,
however, we are dealing with the kind of emotion that eludes such easy articulation.
I have proposed that this existential passion takes the form of a question. I would
like to think further, however, about what it means for experience to take the form of

41
Cf. Lear’s, 2006 discussion of the loss of one’s world in Radical Hope.
42
Kollwitz, 1989, Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz.
Emotional clichés and authentic passions 61

a question, and why the question that this passion is typically comes with a sense of
being entangled, consumed, and oppressed. What form must subjectivity take in
passion, for this to be so? R. G. Collingwood, in his discussion of artistic expression,
lends us some insight into this.
One of Collingwood’s central interests in his book The Principles of Art is in
explaining why the unexpressed oppresses us and why genuine, first order
expression, like that which we find in artistic production or in therapy, brings a
sense of liberation. His answer is, in short, that expression brings about a change in
the very structure of experience, in the very structure of our subjectivity.
Like Merleau-Ponty, Collingwood argues that first order expression is not a
function of first experiencing something internally, and then externalizing it in
language or art; rather expression is fundamentally creative: it is in expressing
oneself that one discovers one’s own thoughts or experiences. Articulating oneself in
language accomplishes thought, and the painter paints not what she has already seen,
but in order to see.43 The reason we wrongly suppose that language or artistic
expression translate an internal experience and that words are merely the vehicles for
thoughts already possessed is that, upon finding the “right” word or the right brush-
stroke to express ourselves, we have the sense that “this is what I meant all along.” It
seems to us, then, that the meaning was already present, already fully determinate,
already in our grips, and we needed only to match it up with the proper word. But in
fact, this is a retrospective illusion: the meaning comes into its determinacy in the
very finding of the word. Prior to that, the indeterminateness and amorphousness of
that meaning is precisely what motivates us to search for some way of expressing it,
some way of getting a handle on it.44
The experience that exists prior to expression is, then, one in which we are not yet
in possession of its meaning. We are, rather, dispossessed by it, caught up and
entangled in it. What this experience is, and correlatively, who we are in relation to
it, is not yet clear. Expression is liberating because it transforms the very structure of
this experience: it involves a circumscribing of what it is we are experiencing, and
thereby a gradual distinction of ourselves from the object of our experience. It turns
our experience from something that moved and overwhelmed us, that oppressed us
by putting us into question, into something that is “for us” or owned. To use
Collingwood’s phrase, expression domesticates experience. What, in its wild being,
initially bewildered us becomes an experience possessed by us.45
If this is right, then a discrete subject and object are not presupposed by
experience, but rather born out of experience; they are born in and through the

43
See, for instance, Merleau-Ponty, 2002, Phenomenology of Perception, 207 (Pdlp, 207): “Thus speech,
in the speaker, does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it”; and Collingwood 1958, The
Principles of Art, 303: “One paints a thing in order to see it.”
44
PP, 202-232; Pdlp, 203-230. Collingwood 1958, The Principles of Art. Ch. IX [this text hereafter
referred to as PA].
45
Interestingly, both Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty use the image of wildness in speaking of the form of
experience or entanglement with being that precedes artistic or first order linguistic expression. Merleau-Ponty
speaks of teeming, wild being and promiscuity which can come to be dominated and made manageable through
our artistic expressions (e.g., Merleau-Ponty 1964a, ILVS, 48-50, 53; Merleau-Ponty 1968, The Visible and
the Invisible Working note of October 22, 1959, pp. 212-3; Le visible et l’invisible, pp. 265-67.);
Collingwood 1958 speaks of the need to domesticate our experience (PA, ch. IX).
62 K. Maclaren

activity of expression. A new experience moves us, puts us into question, and
thereby requires that we find some way of reweaving the very fabric of our world, in
order to give it a stable place. Prior to such placing, when it is not yet clear what we
are dealing with, or how to make sense of it, it is also unclear who we are. For we
find ourselves and know ourselves in terms of how the world takes root around us.
Prior to the clear distinction of this subject and this object, then, there is a
subjectivity, an experience, characterized by indeterminacy, ambiguity, and flux.
This, I propose, is the kind of subjectivity that we must suppose if we are to make
proper sense of the genuine passion of grief. Such a passion is not merely a
“judgment,” a construal, an endorsement of habitual meanings offered up by a
situation. It consists rather in a breakdown of our habitual negotiation of the world.
The bereaved experienced a crumbling of his world; and as his world fell apart, so
too did his sense of how to live, and who he is. Where there was once breakfast time,
for instance, there is now only confusion, indeterminacy, a gaping openness. In grief
like this, things within one’s perceptual field no longer clearly call to one to do this
or to say that; and as a result, it is no longer clear who one is to be. This is what it
means, I propose, to be put fundamentally into question, to live as a question, and
thus to experience an existential passion. It is to be a subjectivity or an experiencing
in which subject and object are not yet fully realized, in which how things mean and
who one is are still in flux; it is to be an experiencing which calls not for a mere
endorsement of familiar meanings, but for self-overcoming, for some creative form of
expression in which a new grasp on the world is realized—however provisionally—and
one newly “becomes oneself” (at least until the next breakdown of meaning).
The creative expression through which one realizes both oneself and a coherent
configuration of the world is not merely the act of an agent who constitutes the
meaning of the world. Creation, rather, involves finding what was called for in the
multiple vectors at work in the upheaval of meaning in which one is caught; it is a
matter of being moved by these multiple sens, and of realizing and further
determining the sense that was already nascent in these indeterminate inclinations,
the sense that exceeds our old, habitual framing of things.46 This is why grief takes
time. One cannot merely will a new emotional orientation in the world, and
overcoming grief is not a matter of merely choosing to see things otherwise. For the
most part, one must wait for things to start to coalesce again, though one can also
facilitate this process, and encourage the revelation of new possible directions of
meaning by involving oneself with others and in activities that build new habits,
thereby disclosing new dimensions of reality and revealing new possibilities within
ourselves.
On this account, then, subjectivity is not inherently a matter of having clearly
circumscribed objects be for us, and of actively constituting their meaning. Such an
active mastery of things is achieved, rather than presupposed. And this achievement

46
A painter, before he paints, “germinates” with the landscape, and catching hold of its “motif” sets to
realizing its inner meaning through paint strokes that answer to it (Merleau-Ponty, 1993, “Cézanne’s
Doubt,” [henceforth CD] 67). The painting, then, is not a free creation on the painter’s part, but rather his
way of “freeing the meaning captive in things” (See CD, 71; ILVS, 44) with the result that the painter can
say “the landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness” (these are Cézanne’s words, quoted by
Merleau-Ponty, CD, 67).
Emotional clichés and authentic passions 63

is itself dependent upon the meaningful directions that we find already at work
within our world, and which move us before they are for us.

Conclusion

It is my contention that we need to distinguish emotional clichés from authentic

passions, and that it is typically the former towards which cognitivist accounts are
oriented. Once we acknowledge authentic existential passions, I have proposed that
we are also called upon to revise our understanding of subjectivity. The subject can
no longer be understood as a purely self-determining agent who constitutes the
meaningful world; the subject must rather be understood as achieved from out of a
dispossession by the world, and in part by being moved by meaningful directions
already at work within the world. Though the subject realizes itself, becomes itself,
through assuming and further determining these meaningful inclinations operative
within the sensed world, the subject cannot be understood as wholly active. We must
allow a fundamental dimension of passivity within subjectivity. We must allow that
we are meaningfully moved by the world that we inhabit.
It is common, when language of authenticity and clichés is used, to suppose that
there is a normative implication that we ought to strive to be authentic and to avoid
clichés. Since this is not, in my view, the normative conclusion to draw from my
essay, I will end with a brief note on this.
Authentic passions, on my account, happen to us, and cannot be chosen. And
because we are habitual beings, we will always and inevitably experience emotional
clichés. There can be no normative prescription, then, to seek to have authentic
passions, or to avoid emotional clichés. But a different normative suggestion does
follow, and it concerns what we do in the face of our emotional responses—our own
and others’.
On the one hand, Solomon is right to argue that we must take responsibility for
our emotions. Our emotional responses, insofar as they respond to meaningful
vectors intrinsic to the things themselves, may reveal something of the world. But
insofar as they are endorsements of the habitual ways in which the world presents
itself to us, they reveal primarily who we are, how we position ourselves in relation
to others, what we assume matters, and how we make sense of the world. If I get
angry with my partner for not picking up my shirts, this is not necessarily a
revelation of the truth of her guilt; it is much more likely a revelation of my habitual
ways of dealing with tensions that arise and assuming my place in relation to her. An
essential task, then, in dealing with our emotions is to ask what judgments they
enact, whether the situation could have been determined in other ways, and what the
particular route that we were compelled to take reveals about ourselves and our
relations with our environment. Through this kind of reflection, and through a
commitment to developing new habits of making sense of ourselves, others, and the
world, we can in fact transform ourselves and become people who are regularly
moved to take up the world in ways that better recognize and respect the reality of
our interpersonal situations and the people with whom we live. Though we may be
condemned to emotional clichés, we need not be condemned to constantly reiterating
ourselves and reinscribing the same problematic ways of being with others.
64 K. Maclaren

At the same time that we require a reflective and questioning attitude towards our
emotional responses, however, we ought also to require a compassionate attitude.
This is what is perhaps occluded by Solomon’s speaking of emotions as choices.
Consider first the issue of emotional clichés. While it is true that we need to take
responsibility for our emotions and the habitual forms of construal to which we
assent in being emotional, we ought also to note that the way in which the world is
habitually configured for us has its sources not only in our purposive choosing but
also—indeed, mostly—beyond us. From birth, our natural and built world and
other’s behaviors—especially those of our family members—shape what seems
available to us, possible for us, and who we can assume ourselves to be. Such
habitual configurations can, of course, be transformed. But they require opportuni-
ties in which the individual may become conscious of the fact that this configuration
is a function of history and not a necessary feature of reality; they require resources
and support for building different habits; and they require time for those habits to
take hold. While expecting ourselves and others to take responsibility for our
emotions, then, we ought also to understand, compassionately, how difficult and
time-consuming transforming them can be. One cannot simply choose to see things
otherwise.
In the case of authentic passions, too, we must understand that time, contingency,
and interpersonal support play an essential role. Given that such a passion is the
breakdown of sense, the overcoming of this passion will require the gradual building
of a new existential home, a new form of familiarity, a new way in which things will
announce themselves with self-evidence. For such a home in the world to be built,
the person entangled in the passion will have to happen upon situations that suggest
new directions for making sense of the world, oneself and others; she or he will need
an environment that allows those new directions to be developed and to take hold;
and time will be required for those new frameworks to settle into place and to order
the world again. Compassion—literally being with the other’s passion—is the
recognition of this.

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