In yesterday’s post, I concluded that not only can we be intelligent in our emotional experience, but our emotions are actually intelligent in that they are ways in which we use concepts to perceive, appraise, evaluate, in short make judgments about and engage the world. It is these aspects of our emotional experience which make it impossible to characterize it purely in terms of feelings. In order to understand our emotional experience we need to look out at the world as it appears to us rather than inward. We know we are angry at a person by the way which we look out at that person rather than in toward our “insides.” Of course the way which we see another person, be it in terms of anger or love, need not be and indeed usually is not a deliberative process at all. It is partially because such emotional judgments are pre-cognitive that they are considered to be antithetical to reason.
The important role which the intentional content of what is outside us plays in our emotional experience can be neatly illustrated by the experiment which Schachter and Singer performed at Columbia. In the experiment, subjects were given “vitamin shots” (adrenalin) in various situations and contexts. Surprisingly, from the perspective of emotions-as-feelings, the students described their emotions in varying ways based not upon physiological feelings but rather in terms of the situations in which they found themselves. What Schachter and Singer concluded was that people recognize their emotions, which they maintained were still feelings, in terms of the situation in which they found themselves. What, exactly this is supposed to mean is beyond me, for I follow Solomon’s view that the emotion can only described secondarily, at best, in terms of feelings and primarily in terms of the situation in which the person finds him or herself.
Solomon asks us to consider what difference can be drawn between the emotions of anger, irritation and indignation. Many attempt to use metaphors to describe these differences: irritation is an itch, anger is a pain and indignation is agony. It would seem from this that the difference between the three is simply one of intensity. Such, however, is simply wrong, for more how intensely I might be irritated, it never amounts to indignation of any kind. The difference between these emotions is one of type rather than degrees of intensity. The difference, according to Solomon, is one of principle: irritation is being bothered not offended, anger is being offended not bothered, and indignation is being infuriated in a morally significant manner.
The same sort of difference can be drawn, according to Solomon, between embarrassment, shame, guilt, remorse and regret. Embarrassment is being caught in an awkward situation with blame playing little if any role. Shame is the experience of self-blame. Shame is defined in terms of group behavior (letting somebody down or the violation of a custom) while guilt is experienced as an individual. Remorse is experienced when one has actively done something morally wrong, while regret is simply the wishing one had done something differently, whether what one actually did was wrong or simply not as good as one had hoped. The difference between these emotions is not one of degree at all, but rather is one of type, in particular the type of responsibility which is assigned in each situation.
Another difference which can be seen between some emotions is one regarding the status of those individuals with respect to us. For instance, contempt is a type of hostility aimed at those we see as beneath us in terms of status. Resentment is also a type of hostility aimed at those we see as being above us in terms of status. Hatred, on the other hand, is the experience of hostility on a relatively equal footing with the object in question.
There are other principles which distinguish our emotional experience beyond responsibility and status. Consider distance or proximity in the case of irritation versus anger or acquaintance versus friendship versus love. A difference can be seen in the activity or passivity of an emotion such as apathy versus dislike toward someone. We also saw the moral significance can tease apart emotions such as anger and indignation or sympathy and charity. Most obviously, the principle of approval also plays a part, for instance in like versus dislike. Each emotion can be a complex judgment with regard to a number of these principles. For instance, romantic love in modern Western society is approving, active, proximal and egalitarian at least. Irritation is largely distal, passive and disapproving.
In this we can see how essential of a role the conceptual repertoire and intelligence which we bring to our emotional experience really is. It also demonstrates of an adequate account of emotional experience at the biological level can never be given, for responsibility, status, approval and morality are things which simply do not exist at the biological level, nor do they need to exist for purely biological, non-cultural creatures. With the creation of culture, however, emerged the need for, if not the possibility of a more refined and diverse set of possible emotional experiences.
At this point one begins to appreciate how much it is that those extremely crude and biologically innate emotions which we are born with need to be refined by way of exposure to a language/culture. While we can imagine the principles of proximity/distance, passivity/activity and approve/disapprove being hardwired in us to one extent or another, it is only through exposure to culture that the relatively limited spectrum of biologically innate emotions can be refined into the wonderfully diverse emotional ensemble which we experience today.
