3 - Constituting import

Summary

In chapter 2, I offered a brief sketch of a theory of emotions as evaluative feelings: to feel an emotion is to feel the target of that emotion as having a certain kind of import – that is, to be pleased by things going well or pained by things going poorly. To describe emotions as feelings of this sort implies that emotions are passive with respect to import: in feeling an emotion, the import of one's situation impresses itself upon one, pleasing or paining one, and this implies that import has a kind of objectivity. Such a theory, I suggested, can overcome two of the major problems for cognitivist theories of emotions and provides hopes for overcoming the third. Thus, first, we can understand the emotionality of emotions in terms of the distinctive kind of evaluative feeling emotions are, as a way of being pleased or pained by the import of one's situation. Second, we can understand the kind of rational conflict that is possible between emotions and judgments in terms of a distinctively emotional kind of assent (being pleased or pained by things being thus and so) that falls short of full-blown judgment. Finally, insofar as this theory rejects the assumption of the cognitive–conative divide by understanding emotions, as pleasures and pains, to be unitary states of assent and motivation, it holds out promise for solving the problem of import by making sense of the dual objectivity and subjectivity of import.

This, of course, is a tall order for such a brief sketch of a theory. My aim in this chapter is to fill in the details so as to make good on these promises.