It is my relatively strong conviction that much of Western thought has been led down the wrong path in an attempt to give the right answers to the wrong questions which Descartes raised. Paradigmatic of such is the manner in which the mind and the perceptions which are “in” it have been radically separated not only from the body, but from the entire material world. While Descartes method of hyperbolic doubt was brilliant, it simply led him to create a mind/body problem when none would have existed otherwise. The Chinese as well as the Ancient Greeks made no distinction between the body and mind, the inner mind versus the outer world, and accordingly the idea that passions could be “in” the mind simply made no sense to them. It was not until Martin Heidegger that the West finally brought this philosophical crime to its just desserts. This post will consider the question of what it means for an emotion to be in or out of the mind. I will also argue for a public and social account of emotions.
Of course we cannot place all the blame upon the shoulders of Descartes, for his ideas concerning the separability of the world and the mind had significant precedence. The widespread axial model, we have seen, saw our true selves, which belong in some way to the other world, as underlying our natural selves with which we interact with this natural world. With the rise of Christianity, especially in the case of St. Augustine, the inner soul came to be seen as totally separable from the body. Descartes simply took this idea a bit further in claiming that the mind is something in which the outside world is experienced as opposed to being something which is actually out in the world.
Descartes’ view leads to the, at this point, inevitable conclusion that what was in the mind was known immediately and therefore better than any thing which was outside of the mind. The outside world, indeed if there is one at all, is only known by way of inference from our ideas, perceptions, impressions and sensations which seem, but may not originate from the outside world. According to Descartes as well as common sense, while our ideas about the outside world might be flawed on every account, thus leading to a strong skepticism, our knowledge regarding the contents of our own minds is immediate and indubitable. The emotion to expression of the emotion relation, under this view, is simply a way of what in inside our minds making its way into the outside world.
It is exactly at the point where Descartes claims that the contents which are in our minds are known indubitably that red flags go up. Surely we can be, and frequently are mistaken about what is going on “in” our minds, especially in the case of emotions. This was Freud’s third blow to the dignity of man (the first being dealt by Copernicus and the second by Darwin) to show that we are not in a privileged position to judge what is going on in our own minds. This is surely a sign that something had gone wrong in Descartes’ reason before this point.
There were others on the Continent which laid the way for Heidegger’s notion of being in the world. Kant, for starters, came to establish a separation between the world as we experience it and the world as it is in itself, a world which can never be known. Hegel, following in Kant’s foot steps, argued that it simply did not make any sense to speak of things in themselves independent of our experience of them. Finally, Husserl came to argue that everything mental, including all experience has intentionality, in that it always refers to something outside of our minds, out in the world. Accordingly, it doesn’t make sense to speak of the contents within our minds, for our minds always refer to that which is beyond them. This, it will be remembered, was exactly what has been argued to be the case for emotions as engagements in the world rather than in the mind.
Solomon’s notion of emotions as engagements with or in the world has as a very interesting predecessor Heidegger’s views about moods. Whereas Husserl held that each mental object refers to something in the world, Heidegger argued that moods, which are also mental objects, take the entire world as the object to which they refer. According to Heidegger, being in the world is not at all like being an object in a box, but should rather be seen as being in biology. The emphasis of this kind of being is upon the relationships which we have to the world rather than the act of simply being within a container of sorts. Thus, moods are seen as ways of being tuned into the world. They are relationships which exist between ourselves and the world which we are a part of. Heidegger’s main point is that we cannot meaningfully divide this relationship into isolated components as Descartes tried to do.
Sartre refined these ideas even more when he considers emotions to be actual acts of consciousness wherein we actively engage the particular objects of our emotions, according to Solomon, or the more general objects of our moods, according to Heidegger. We have already seen Sartre’s argument in this context against any physiological account of emotions, wherein he sees any physiological account as being far too passive and lacking in any kind of responsibility. James, remember, argued that emotions are the feelings which are the products of physiological mechanisms within the brain and are in turn possibly the cause of certain behaviors. Sartre argues that it is exactly the opposite, namely that emotion is about the world in terms of beliefs and desires and that these propositional attitudes cause the physiological responses which follow.
Sartre’s account differs from James’ in significant ways. While James’ account is a bottom-up approach to emotions wherein physiology causes the mental, Sartre’s is an account of top-down causation wherein the mental is able to cause physiological responses. If I had to choose between these two options, I would certainly side with Sartre, although I am nervous with the idea of the mental causing the physical as if the mental could exist without physical instantiation. This, however, is not what I take a modest claim on Sartre’s part to entail. Rather, it is the mental experience of an emotion, a process which is certainly instantiated at the physical level, which causes the specific physiological responses which we associate with that emotion.
Furthermore, I would argue that Sartre’s account is more in harmony with the phenomena of an infant coming to refine their biologically innate and rather crude emotions, such as rage and lust, into sophisticated emotions such as moral indignation and love by means of exposure to a culture and language. Culture shapes, structures and refines the emotional expression into acceptable as well as socially recognizable channels, a process which not only influences the expression of emotions, but the emotions themselves. This is certainly a case of entities which clearly only exist at the descriptive level of the mental influencing the physical.
Central to such an account is the inseparability of the emotion from its expression. Indeed, it is this same inseparability which prevents us from seeing emotions as merely feelings. It is also for this reason that I claim emotions to not exist at all at the physiological level, but only at the descriptive level, in a way which is analogous to the Turing machine and its machine table. Within the Turing machine there is nothing which is “about” the external world of the tape which is fed to and from it. It is only in the machine table that the one can find anything having to do with the world; indeed, the table necessarily carries information about the tape.
The use of the functionalist paradigm, however, does help to illustrate how emotions are and are not “in” the mind. In the case of the Turing machine, the tape is meant to be analogous to the world, the machine itself to the brain and the machine table to the mind, loosely speaking. Emotions, I have claimed, are supposed to only exist at the level of the table and not in the machine. Nevertheless, each table must be a table for some particular machine. Each mind must have a perspective to it, and this perspective is necessarily of the outside world. It is this perspective which gives each emotion its personal and private aspect to it.
However, it is the fact that this perspective is about the world and our relation to it, by way of both mind-to-world as well as world-to-mind intentionality, that emotions are social in their nature. It is the public intentionality of our emotions which makes them subject to refinement by way of social interactions. It is because the machine table describes not only what is happening in the Turing machine, but also what is happening out in the world that mental events such as emotions are simply not “in” any individual brain or individual mind, if such a concept even makes sense (and Husserl and Heidegger argue that it does not). Emotions are not merely about social interactions, but actually are social interactions to a significant degree and social interactions are public rather than private.
