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False Emotions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2008

Tony Milligan
Tony Milligan
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen
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Abstract

This article sets out an account of false emotions and focuses upon the example of false grief. Widespread but short-lived mourning for well known public figures involves false grief on the part of at least some mourners. What is false about such grief is not any straightforward pretence but rather the inappropriate antecendents of the state in question and/or the desires that the relevant state involves. False grief, for example, often involves a desire for the experience itself, and this can be satisfied. By contrast, real grief is utterly without hope. (We cannot have the deceased back again.) However, because false emotions involve some desire, they can be motivating and may lead us to engage in actions and efforts of discernment that can result in the emergence of the real emotion that they mimic. For this reason, they are not always unwelcome.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 83 , Issue 2 , April 2008 , pp. 213 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2008

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References

1 Stuart Hampshire, ‘Sincerity and Singlemindedness’, in Freedom of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

2 David Pugmire, ‘Real Emotions’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54.1, (1994), 105–6.

3 D.W. Hamlyn, ‘False Emotions’, p. 280, and Ilham Dilman, ‘False Emotions’, p. 287 both in Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume LXIII, (1989).

4 Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame and Guilt, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 83, 140.

5 For normative hostility to false emotions, see Hamlyn (1989), 278–9; Dilman (1989), 290–291. For Dilman, false emotions are egocentric; they cut us off from others. For Gabriele Taylor, ‘the more often a person suffers from false shame, the more serious the threat to her integrity’, Taylor (1985), 133–4.

6 If we assume, with Hamlyn, that emotions resulting from transference are false emotions, then Freud also does not buy into the assumption that such states are undesirable, Hamlyn (1989), 275 ff. Freud allows that transference emotions (hence at least one class of false emotions) must be tolerated (but not encouraged) because they have a legitimate, even necessary role to play in the analysand's therapeutic progress towards self-knowledge, Sigmund Freud, ‘Observations on Transference-Love’ (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 162. However, it is far from obvious that transference emotions are false in the relevant sense. Dilman (1989), 293–295 disputes just this feature of Hamlyn's account.

7 For the sake of brevity, I will use ‘grief’ as shorthand for the grief involved in bereavement rather than grief of any other sort.

8 Dilman (1989), 291; Pugmire (1994), 118–119.

9 Pugmire (1994), 105–6.

10 Pugmire (1994), 120.

11 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, (London: Routledge Classics, 2001), 22. For Murdoch's reproduction of Simone Weil's contrast between attention and will see Margaret G. Holland, ‘Touching the Weights: Moral Perception and Attention’, International Philosophical Quarterly, 38.3 (1988).

12 Pugmire (1994), 118–122.

13 Martha Nussbaum, ‘The Discernment of Perception’ (1990) in her collection Love's Knowledge, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 74, 94, 96–7; Justin Oakley, Morality and the Emotions, (London: Routledge, 1992), 136–139.

14 Here, we might opt for one of two rival formulations: (1) x's false grief for y is an instance of real grief for z; or (2) x's grief for y is not false but it is grief for z. Against the first option we might consider Gabriele Taylor's appeal to false shame as a matter of evasion (in at least some instances): the substitution of a lesser fault for a greater one. In King Lear, Gloucester flaunts his shameful fathering of a bastard as a way of evading his behaviour towards the latter whose fortunes he now seems intent to advance. (Albeit a bit too late to defuse the plot.) Taylor (1985), 82–83. Taylor's point is that Lear's false shame is all about evading the appropriate but less bearable emotional response (even in a disguised form). While I am inclined to endorse formulation (1) an appeal to Taylor's example may be less than conclusive and with a little care, either formulation could perhaps be used to do much the same work.

15 Hamlyn (1989), 277.

16 David Pugmire, Sound Sentiments, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61.

17 Kendall Walton, ‘Fearing Fictions’, Journal of Philosophy, 75 (1978).

18 This is not to say that the distinction between real and false emotions can be made in terms of the impossibility/possibility of realising the desires that they involve. Impossible desires figure only in some emotions, such as grief.

19 Hamlyn writes about someone who intentionally and with luck ‘somehow brings about in himself’ the false emotion, Hamlyn (1989), 281. Dilman writes of a disguised ‘choice’, Dilman (1989), 289. I have reservations about the adequacy of choice as a way of capturing the phenomenology involved in being guided by unconscious desires. Instead, I use the formulation of opting in to try and avoid any suggestion that there is anything like a precise moment of decision.

20 Someone with a strong second-order desire for (a) might be called a sentimentalist. They will desire emotional thrills and also value being that sort of person. On the account given here, someone who experiences a false emotion could be a sentimentalist, but they need not be.

21 The opening chapter of Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) presents an illuminating and very personal account of the disappearance of her own residual hope as she raced to be at her mother's bedside after the death of the latter. Death is not in the fullest sense accepted, i.e. believed, until all hope is gone.

22 Although I will go on to argue that false emotions can be morally desirable, my use of the examples of mourning for Pope John Paul II and Diana are intended only to clarify the concept of false emotion. I make no claims about the desirability or otherwise of false emotions in these two cases.

23 Murdoch (2001), 16 ff.

24 Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976).

25 Thanks go to Christoph Jaeger, Anthony O'Hear and colleagues at the Universities of Aberdeen and Glasgow for improving comments on earlier drafts.