In Defense of Emotion

[first posted 09/14/13]

[Again, this note comes to you as an extracted note/comment, because I wanted to write a brief little essay (this hardly qualifies, but is enough for now of what I wanted to express) about some insights I had regarding emotion and it's role in understanding, particularly in response to the sentiment that reason and emotion are opposed forms of understanding with the latter often being false and unreliable; I attempt to challenge that sentiment with some insights (while agreeing that there are occurrences of illegitimate emotional consideration). The first paragraph is just a post that I'll include because it gives some context and leads into the following paragraph which is a comment that expounds some points I wanted to make]

A day or so ago I was thinking about the role of emotions in one's rational life, mostly as a response to the sentiment that intellectuals sometimes take on- a sense of putting reason above "irrational emotions", which I might agree with except that the sentiment seems to hold all emotional considerations as suspect, or, if not, would at least hold only the role of reason as valid for understanding. So I thought about writing a brief essay of thoughts on the topic, to title it "In Defense of Emotion" and include some of the insights that had come to mind as well as to develop some more upon consideration. But then I went to the thrift store, where I came across a copy of Martha C. Nussbaum's "Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions" and, yeah, the 700 pages and seemingly thoughtful writing at glance either has me thinking she did a fair enough job discussing the topic in that book, or that I dare not take on the task of bringing my thoughts on the subject that far- I have no idea perhaps how small a task her work may have begun as, and since I don't get paid to write that may just be a recipe for poverty. This is me thinking about it now; at the time my emotions went from a moderately delighted surprise at the topic to a slightly disconcerted daunting at the contents, and I suspect there was a degree of intelligence in that emotion.

Note: I want to emphasize that I sympathize with the concern over irrational emotional consideration; my point, though, would be that not all emotional considerations are necessarily this way, just like not all thoughts are valid (hence, it goes both ways). Part of the insight I have in mind is that emotions are feelings but not all feelings are emotions (it makes sense to talk about your emotions as feelings you're having, but doesn't always make sense to talk about your feelings as emotions- for example, you wouldn't say "I have a funny emotion in my arm"). This is because I think that emotions involve the mind, that they're partly psychological, and feelings not necessarily so- perhaps associated with your nervous system but not necessarily your mind/psychology, at least not in the way I have in mind; you could say that some feelings are reflexive, where as emotions are reflective (but not to say not also reflexive in some way).

And this gets to another point which Nussbaum discussed in the brief portion I looked over (although she handles it in a little bit of a different way)- that part of the problem in a poor perception of emotion is in viewing it merely physiologically- that someone's sadness is just a chemical in the brain causing such and such effect. Rather a more legitimate view of emotion is to see the way in which it is more than that. That's not, for me at least, to say that there is something of emotion entirely non-physical (in itself, not addressing whether it correlates to things non-physical) but that to attempt to make sense of emotion by merely looking at it's physical and physiological make up, is to not make sense of what emotion is in its correlation to the experience causing it. Since emotion (if you reduce it to its physiological make up) isn't its own autonomous occurrence (in regards to what I'm referring to, I'm not denying that there may be emotions which are primarily physically caused and then affect the mind rather than the other way around) and thus to discern whether emotion has a legitimate role in one's understanding it is helpful to understand the experience correlating to it (and I'm including ideas as part of the experience, so as not to reduce experience down to merely the aspects that don't have individual involvement).

And, to be brief, the experience would be a correlation of one's environment, their perception of it, and then their physical responding (reflexive) and mental processing (reflective) of it. And thus emotion isn't merely the chemistry and processes going on in your body, but is also the reflection of your sense of the quality of the thing you're emotionally responding to- which is a process that involves your ideas/beliefs/knowledge/reason/etc. And this is where I would argue that emotion isn't necessarily an invalid form of understanding- that it involves your reasoning to some degree and thus isn't merely some uncontrolled physiological mechanism that has nothing but merely accidental correlation to critical assessments of what is true. I do think that there is a good sense in which the validity of someone's thinking may correlate to the validity of their feeling, so I do think there are cases where one's emotions aren't valid assessments of what is deemed true of something by them; but I don't totally exclude the idea that the validity of each isn't necessarily directly tied to the other.

This is an expounded form of the insight I had that I wanted to elaborate in an essay- which I'm not sure would've been too much more than what I've just written.


*Regarding what I said- "And, to be brief, the experience would be a correlation of one's environment, their perception of it, and then their physical responding (reflexive) and mental processing (reflective) of it." I should correct this by saying this would be an example that shows an experience correlating to emotion, but that one's experience doesn't necessarily always include their reflection on their environment but may rather include their reflection on things abstract/non-physical, or internal reflection as well.