Taking Responsibility for our Emotions

In the last post concerning Schopenhauer’s remedies we considered a number of views concerning the relationship between reason and Will/passions. Is reason necessarily and inevitably the slave of the Will or of the passions as Schopenhauer or Hume would have us believe? Or is it possible for reason to rule as Kant and Plato would have it? While I do not intend to argue for one position or the other in this post, I do want to consider an issue which I see as being central to these positions, namely that of emotion and responsibility. I think the motivating force behind those who would like us to subdue our emotional experience to our reason is the idea that in the case of reason, we are in control, whereas in the case of passion/will/emotions, they are in control of us. The purpose of this post will be to argue that such a view is wrong.

Of course the idea of emotions being uncontrollable and controlling at the same time follows naturally from the concept of emotions as something which happens to us. Such would be the case in a theory of emotions as feelings or emotions as reactions to the world. Solomon’s theory of emotions as engagements with the world, which takes Sartre and Heidegger for inspiration, is very different in this aspect. Emotions, to some extent, are something which we do not only to ourselves but to the rest of the world, rather than something which the world does, or something which simply happens to us. Accordingly, he describes the emotion/reason relationship not as master/slave but rather as boss/employee. He views emotions as guiding reason without reason being merely a puppet dangling from emotional strings. Reason does have some autonomy which allows it to shape and control our emotions to a certain extent.

With such a view of emotions in mind Solomon attempts to untangle some of the ambiguity and misunderstanding in the word “passion.” First off, and most obviously, he rejects any account of passions or emotions which would equate them with sufferings as Aristotle did. Such an account is far too passive. Of course there are some emotional experiences, however, in which our emotions simply get out of hand or control and these could be classified as passions in this Aristotelian sense. These experience, however, are the exceptions rather than the rule. Instead, Solomon prefers the use of the word passion as it is used to describe one’s devotion to an activity, an active sense of continually renewed commitment. Just as athletes are very much responsible for the commitments, practices and especially habits which they engage themselves in, so to we are responsible for our emotional habits.

In what sense can we and can we not control our emotions? The first means by which our emotions are controlled, although I would not say that it is “us” that is controlling them, is by way of physiological and mechanistic regulations at the neurological and hormonal levels. A way in which we do not control our emotions, however, is by way of deliberate planning in any given situation. While we certainly can reflect upon our emotions, to suggest that we deliberate about how we will emotionally experience the world on a particular situation seems far too strong. Another way in which we do not control our emotions is by merely controlling the expression of our emotions. A say “merely” because, as William James would suggest, I do think that the control of our emotional expression can influence and thereby indirectly control our actual emotions, but this does not erase the difference which exists between the two.

If one simply considers these three ways in which we do not control our emotions, then it is not difficult to see how the idea of emotions as things which happen to us naturally falls out. Nevertheless, in the face of such problems religious traditions in both the East and West have emphasized the control of not only our emotional expression but of our actual emotions. Jesus counsels us not only to avoid calling our brother Raca, but to avoid even getting angry with him at all. Similar teachings can be found in the Buddhist tradition as well. With Solomon, I agree that these religious traditions are right in claiming that we do have more control over our emotional experience than we sometimes grant.

The problem with the passive view of emotions is that it divides activity/passivity into a dichotomy of sorts. According to such a view, either something is a deliberate, rational choice or it is not under our control at all. Nevertheless we have seen how beginning with Schopenhauer and reaching a high-water mark with Freud this dichotomy began to deteriorate. There are lots of things, indeed most all things we do on a day to day basis, which we do and control ourselves without any kind of rational deliberation. When I walk and chew gum at the same time, this is not some feat of incredibly quick thinking and genius in which I am constantly thinking “step, chew, step, chew.” but is instead something I just do and control without even thinking about it. It is more or less a habitual action which I actively perform similar to how professional baseball players internalize the various features of a perfect swing so as to not think of them at all.

Sartre called this vast middle ground of non-deliberative action in the case of our emotional experience “magical transformations of the world.” We pre-reflectively transform the world as we experience by way of our emotional engagement with it. Such a process, while certainly being active rather than passive, is largely, if not completely non-deliberative and perhaps even non-articulate.

Since emotions are something which we actively do, even though we do so in a fairly non-cognitive manner, they are something which we can, to some degree change and control, if only by way of cultivation. We do not learn to emotionally engage the world by way of listening to a teacher or reading a book and then going out to do it any more than a person learns to play baseball by reading a book on the perfect swing and then going out an hitting a homerun. Emotions are habits which need to be cultivated. While we cannot control any particular emotional experience any more than I can control how much I am able to bench press on a given day, we can control and take responsibility for the step we have taken to cultivate our emotional abilities and habits up to that point. While such a description of emotional control is not easy to find in the West, such a description of technique and strategies whereby one can control one’s emotional experience are not hard to come by in the East.

Thus, while a person may plead temporary insanity due to rage in a particular case, thereby isolating themselves from as much responsibility as possible for the action performed in such a state, they cannot dodge responsibility for their having cultivated the emotional habits which led up to that point. Similarly, the person who claims to have (inappropriately) fallen in love with a close family member through no fault of their own is simply mistaken. There were many points of controlled cultivation and decision which led up to the point at which they no longer felt in control of their emotions for the person. Love is not something which merely happens to us, regardless of what the chick-flicks may tell us. Love is something which we cultivate in a controlled manner over a period of time.

Thus, while we may not choose the particular emotions which we experience at any given time, we do control and cultivate our emotional habits which led to such particular emotions. Thus, while we may not be directly responsible for any particular emotion, we are certainly indirectly responsible, at least, for them, however helpless we may feel before them.