What is an Emotion?: Classic Readings in Philosophical Psychology 0195033043, 9780195033045

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Emotion? Classic Readings in Philosophical

P^hology

Edited by Cheshire Calhoun ♦ Robert C Solomon

WHAT IS AN EMOTION?

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What Is an Emotion? CLASSIC READINGS IN PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY

CHESHIRE CALHOUN ROBERT C. SOLOMON

New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1984

Copyright © 1984 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: What is an emotion? Bibliography: p. 1. Emotions—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Calhoun, Cheshire. II. Solomon, Robert C. BF531.W48 1984 152.4 82-24597 ISBN 0-19-503355-8 ISBN 0-19-503304-3 (pbk.)

Printing (last digit): 9 8 7 6 5 4 Printed in the United States of America

Preface

The nature of emotion is a subject common to a number of disci¬ plines, including philosophical psychology and the philosophy of mind, the psychology of motivation, learning theory and educational psychology, psychiatry, metapsychology, and theology. It also pre¬ sents us with a particularly illuminating, but often neglected aspect of the history of ideas. We can learn a great deal about the history and continuing par¬ adigms of philosophy and psychology by looking at what the great thinkers, otherwise employed in building “the great chain of being” and sharpening the faculties of human “reason,” had to say about the “affective” side of our psychology. Many neglected it altogether. Some treated the emotions with disdain, as the “lower” part of the soul. It was in reaction to such attitudes and the exclusive celebra¬ tion of reason that David Hume sounded the rebellion that still motivates much of the current controversies: “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions.” This book is an attempt to capture this rich history of theories and debates about emotion in a single text, appropriate for any course or study in which this history and the nature of emotion can play an important role. We have tried to present selections from many sources, from philosophy, psychology, and biology; from dis¬ tant history and contemporary debates; from a variety of philosoph¬ ical and psychological orientations. We begin, in Part I, with four classic readings, from Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume. In Part II, we then offer some rep¬ resentation of the classic theories from psychology and biology.

VI

PREFACE

where these fields were once a part of philosophy. (William James was both a philosopher and a psychologist; Charles Darwin quite rightly called himself a “natural philosopher.”) In Part III, we have included a sampling of the extensive work on emotion that has been developed in Europe over the past century, much of it unknown to theorists in America and England at the time. In some cases, we encountered a problem in the difficulty and accessibility of the key writings. For example, Martin Heidegger’s insightful but—to the novice—incomprehensible discussion of moods and emotions has been further closed off to the general public by his literary execu¬ tors. To compensate for both the extreme difficulty of his text and the impossibility of obtaining reprint permissions, we solicited the aid of Heidegger scholar Charles Guignon, who has admirably sum¬ marized both Heidegger’s theory and the difficult philosophy in which it is embedded. Finally, in Part IV, we have included a small sampling of the now extensive discussion of emotions among British and American philosophers. We have summarized the considerations bearing on the question, “What is an emotion?” in our introduction, and provided brief intro¬ ductions to each selection as well. At the end of the bbok, there is an extensive annotated bibliography. Our hope is that this text will serve not only as a collection of important historical documents but also as a source book for the continuing debate on the nature of emotion. Charleston, South Carolina Austin, Texas January, 1983

C. C. R. C. S.

Contents

Introduction

3

“What Is an Emotion?”

3

Five Models of Emotion

5

Ten Problems in the Analysis of Emotion

Part One

Aristotle

The Historical Background

41

42

From Rhetoric

44

From On the Soul

48

From Nicomachean Ethics Rene Descartes

50

53

From The Passions of the Soul Benedict Spinoza

From Ethics David Hume

55

71 73

93

From A Treatise of Human Nature

95

23

CONTENTS Part Two

The Meeting of Philosophy and Psychology

Charles Robert Darwin

113

114

From The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals

IIS 125

William James

From What Is an Emotion?

127

142

Walter B. Cannon

From Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage

143

John Dewey

152

From The Theory of Emotion

154

Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer

172

From Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State

173

184

Sigmund Freud

From The Unconscious Part Three

'

186

The Continental Tradition

201

203

Franz Brentano

From On the Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong 205 Max Scheler

215

From Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values

219

Martin Heidegger

229

Charles Guignon’s Moods in Heidegger’s Being and Time

230

CONTENTS

IX

244

Jean-Paul Sartre

From The Emotions: A Sketch of a Theory

Part Four

Conceptual Analysis and Emotion

Gilbert Ryle

252

From The Concept of Mind

254

264

Errol Bedford

From Emotions Anthony Kenny

265

279

From Action, Emotion and Will Irving Thalberg

291

From Emotion and Thought Robert C. Solomon

305

Emotions and Choice Cheshire Calhoun

343

305

327

Cognitive Emotions?

Bibliography

280

327

291

245

251

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