III.

The Emotions: Outline of a

Theory
Philosophy 157
G. J. Mattey
2002
 Psychology: Just the Facts
Modern psychology is positivistic
It restricts itself to psychological facts
Psychological facts are either about bodily
behavior or about reflexive experience
The only dispute among the positivist
psychologists is over the relative priority of
the two kinds of facts (reduction or
elimination)
 Psychology and Anthropology
Anthropology attempts to define the essence of man
and the human condition
Psychology takes men to be creatures which are
sufficiently like other creatures
The self does not reveal ones essence, but is just one
psychological subject among many
A conception of the essence of man would only be a
tying-together of the facts accumulated by psychology
If used before hand, such a conception would only be
a kind of guiding wire, but not scientific
 The Limitations of Psychology
Psychology presents facts only in isolation
An illusion and an inferiority complex are not related
to one another, for example
Psychology gives up the pursuit of the essential in
favor of the accidental
The result is only a collection, which is of no interest
in itself
The idea of human reality (Dasein) is excluded from
psychology, which is not about a world, but only
about phenomena
 A Case in Point: the Emotions
In psychology, emotions are not related to
other psychological phenomena, such as
attention, memory, perception
Man is said to have emotions only because
they are discovered as facts
Emotions, therefore are only accidents
They are not to be shown possible on the
basis of the structure of human reality
 How Psychology Deals with the
Emotions
Facts about emotions are isolated, as if their
demarcation were obvious
To study them, psychologists either produce
them or study pathological cases
Bodily changes, behavior, states of
consciousness are studied
Different theories give priority to different
of these (intellectualistic, peripheric)
 Phenomenology
Phenomenology is a reaction to positivistic
psychology
Husserl recognized that one cannot get from facts
to essences, e.g. in mathematical calculation
Experiences of essences and values are primary
Essences are what allow us to classify and inspect
the facts
 Phenomenological Psychology
The essence of an emotion allows us to classify it
as a fact
Phenomenology directs us toward this essence
The essence, in turn is based on an a priori
essence of the human being
Psychological facts assume man and the world,
and these must be understood first
Phenomenological reduction allows us to get at
transcendental consciousness
 Husserls Phenomenology
Husserls phenomenology seeks essences in
consciousness by parenthesizing the world
Applied to emotion, this means a search for
the essence of types of emotion, without
examination of the particular cases
The relation to the world is lost
 Heideggerian Phenomenology
Heidegger recognized that inquiry about man is
inquiry about ourselves
To interrogate ourselves, we must already have an
understanding of what we are
We understand ourselves as an interrogating being
This leads to a conception of human reality
(Dasein) that can be the basis of an anthropology
The anthropology can serve as a basis of
psychology
 New Avenues of Investigation
A phenomenological investigation of
emotions relates it to human reality, rather
than treating them as isolated facts
Are emotions essential to the human being?
What must the structures of human reality
be like to make emotions possible
What is the significance of emotions?
 Signification
Signification is indication of another thing
For the psychologist, emotion signifies nothing
For the phenomenologist, emotion exists only
insofar as it signifies
It signifies the whole of consciousness
At the existential level, it signifies human reality
It is human reality in the form of emotion, an
organized form of human existence.
 An Experiment in
Phenomenology
Positivistic psychology understands man in a variety of
situations in the world
Phenomenology is first needed to understand man and
the world
It is a very immature field of study
But it will show human emotions to be something
other than facts about the body
It will abandon inductive introspection and observation
of external behavior
Can a phenomenology of the emotions be successful?
 Classical Theories of Emotion
James: emotion is projection of physiological
states into consciousness
Janet: emotion is a behavior of disadaptation,
resulting from a setback
Dembo: in anger, we transform ourselves into a
primitive being that is easily satisfied
But how can we account for transformation
without recognizing non-mechanical ends and
functions of emotion?
 The Psychoanalytic Theory of
Emotion
The finality of emotion could be explained by
splitting the mind into conscious and unconscious
A phobia could be explained by an earlier traumatic
experience
The signification of the phobia would be flight from
repeating that experience
But then there is a purely external bond between the
experience and the emotion
And we do not make ourselves what we are: our
emotions take us over despite our best efforts
 Outwardly Directed Emotion
Emotion is standardly treated as reflective: it appears
to us as a state of consciousness
We report that we feel angry or sad
But the primary case of emotion is not reflective; it is
directed at the object
I am afraid of something
Emotion does not retreat from the object to
consciousness, but constantly goes back to the object
Emotion is a certain way of apprehending the world
 An Example: Irritation
Someone works on a practical problem,
whose solution evades him
The action is directed at the world
The emotion of irritation is directed at the
world as well
No passage to self-conscousness is required
Though we can reflect on our actions, we
need not do so
 Unreflective Action
When I write, I may do so without reflecting on
my activity
My own writing is distinguished from my
observation of anothers
My actions are certain, in a sense, while the
others are merely probable
I feel the need for my next movement, but not for
that of the other
My self-consciousness in this case is non-thetic
 The Surrounding World
If we look at ourselves thetically, we can map out
a world that includes our needs, desires, actions
By a pragmatistic intuition, we see that this
world is deterministic, in the sense that only
certain actions will fulfill our needs
This world is difficult, and many of our desires
and needs cannot be attained through our actions
 Magic
When the paths to satisfying our ends are difficult
or blocked, we must still act
In order to act, we transform the surrounding
world so that our actions can be successful
This transformation is magical
It is not reflective
An example is the seeing as that takes place in a
game such as Wheres Waldo?
 Emotions
Emotions are magical conferrings of qualities on
objects
The objects lack the qualities, and the conferring is
ineffective
Example: my desire for grapes I cannot reach is
pacified by my decision that they are too young to be
sweet
Example: my fainting in the face of danger gets me as
close as I can to annihilating the danger.
This behavior is not rational
 Passive Sadness
There are various behavioral manifestations
When existing paths to realize our desires are cut
off, we transform the structure of the world to
make it neutral
We act on ourselves to make the world gloomy
(undifferentiated)
We also create refuge (a small differentiated space
to protect us from the universal gloom)
 Active Sadness
It takes many forms
Refusal denies the urgency of some
problems and substitutes others for them
It may involve abandoning responsibility by
magically exaggerating the difficulties of
the world
This is not the product of reflection
 Joy
Joy is a form of active emotion
Joy-emotion (as opposed to joy-feeling) is
characterized by impatience
We try to seize the total possession at once
by anticipating it
This substitutes for difficult, prudent
behavior
 The Nature of Emotion
The preceding remarks only give the
functional role of emotions: what they do
Emotions present themselves in infinite
variety, when understood this way
But emotion is not behavior or
consciousness of behavior
There are existentially false emotions,
where the behavior is mimicked
 Emotion and Belief
True emotion is accompanied by belief
The conferred qualities are taken as true
We must be spell-bound, flooded by our own
emotion
The emotion is serious, filled with matter, which
includes the behavior (which can be overcome)
One must be highly disturbed in order to believe
in magical behavior
 Degraded Consciousness
The body is an object in the world
The body is also lived by consciousness
An emotion transforms the world, in which
consciousness then lives
Consciousness thereby degrades itself
It transforms the body in which it can live among the
objects whose qualities it has conferred
The origin of emotion is a spontaneous and lived
degradation of consciousness in the face of the world
 Freedom
Consciousness makes itself captive in the
belief it generates
The emotion tends to perpetuate itself
Fleeing the magical object invokes an even
stronger magical reality
Freedom has to come from a purifying
reflection or a total disappearance of the
affecting situation
 A World of Emotion
Emotion is not directed against a single, specific
obstacle
A world is created, as with a dream-world
There is a synthesis of qualities conferred on objects
Horror of a thing, for example, spreads itself over the
future, so that we see things in an emotional light
An emotion transcends itself, and is intuition of the
absolute
 The Delicate Emotions
Delicate emotions must be distinguished
from weak emotions
They might be an attitude of unconcern
directed toward an apparently slight disaster
They diminish an impending disaster, of
which there is only an imperfect glimpse
We see through the emotion
 Abrupt Reaction
I feel horror or wonder at seeing a grinning face
pressed against the window
This is explained by an action reciprocal to
transformation of the world
The world presents itself existentially as magical
The man is given as acting at a distance, which
contradicts our rational, deterministic belief
Man is a wizard to man
If accompanied by an agreeable reaction, the emotion
is wonder; if disagreeable, horror
The Two Great Types of Emotion
We make the world a magical place or the world
presents itself as magical
Magic is not confined to human psyches
The two types of magic can be mixed and usually are
When we confer qualities on the world, we set up an
expectation of finding them
When we find magical qualities in the world, we can
complete them by extension to other objects or
concentration in one
 The Magical World
Magical response must alter the world totally
The instrumentality of things is altered by re-
interpretation
The face is framed by the window, not kept out by it
Such a non-deterministic world is required for the
emotion of horror
The world appears as a non-instrumental totality
Emotion is a way in which consciousness
understands its being-in-the-world
 Consciousness of the Emotions
We can direct our consciousness toward an emotion
It signifies something for our psychic life
It is not a pure an inexpressible quality
This can be perceived by the purifying reflection
of the phenomenological reduction
We explain the world through our emotions: the
world is hateful because I am angry
Such a reflection is rare: ordinarily, we think that
we are angry because the world is hateful
 Implications for Psychology
Emotion is not a lawless disorder, but has significance
The significance is understood in terms of the total
human reality
Emotion modifies being-in-the-world according to the
laws of magic
Ideally we would begin with a study of human reality
and progress toward the study of the emotions (pure
phenomenology)
But it is an empirical matter which emotions will fill
out human reality, which would block this