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Emotional Intentionality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2019

Matthew Ratcliffe
Matthew Ratcliffe*
Affiliation:
University of York
*
matthew.ratcliffe@york.ac.uk
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Abstract

This paper sketches an account of what distinguishes emotional intentionality from other forms of intentionality. I focus on the ‘two-sided’ structure of emotional experience. Emotions such as being afraid of something and being angry about something involve intentional states with specific contents. However, experiencing an entity, event, or situation in a distinctively emotional way also includes a wider-ranging disturbance of the experiential world within which the object of emotion is encountered. I consider the nature of this disturbance and its relationship to the localized content of an emotional experience.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 85: Passions and the Emotions , July 2019 , pp. 251 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2019 

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References

1 I am concerned with whether and how emotional intentionality differs from non-emotional forms of intentionality. I will not address the further issue of whether types of emotions can be distinguished from one another by appealing to one or another variant of emotional intentionality.

2 See, for example, Stocker, M. and Hegeman, E., Valuing Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Goldie, P., ‘Emotions, Feelings and Intentionality’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2002), 235–254CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Döring, S. A., ‘Seeing What to Do: Affective Perception and Rational Motivation’, Dialectica 61 (2007), 363–394CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slaby, J., ‘Affective Intentionality and the Feeling Body’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2008), 429–444CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Helm, B. W., ‘Emotions as Evaluative Feelings’, Emotion Review 1 (2009), 248–255CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Colombetti, G., The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deonna, J. A. and Teroni, F., ‘Emotions as Attitudes’, Dialectica 69 (2015), 293–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Furtak, R., Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See, for example, Ratcliffe, M., ‘The Feeling of Being’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 12: 8–10 (2005), 43–60Google Scholar; Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

4 For further discussion of this point, see Ratcliffe, M., ‘Grief and the Unity of Emotion’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41 (2017), 154–174CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Elsewhere, I have considered other types of affective experiences in detail, in particular those that I call ‘existential feelings’ (see my ‘The Feeling of Being’; Feelings of Being; Experiences of Depression). But what I have not done is address the standard emotion categories that philosophers and others more usually focus on. This paper is my preliminary attempt to plug the gap.

6 Although my focus throughout is on the nature of human emotional experience, some of the points I make could be translated into non-phenomenological talk of salience-detection or affordance and associated goals of the organism. In that form, they could also be applied to the emotional lives of non-human organisms.

7 See Helm, ‘Emotions as Evaluative Feelings’; ‘Love, Identification, and the Emotions’, American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2009), 39–59Google Scholar.

8 ‘Emotions as Evaluative Feelings’, 249.

9 ‘Emotions as Evaluative Feelings’, 251.

10 ‘Love, Identification, and the Emotions’, 48. For a discussion of holism, see also Helm, , Emotional Reason: Deliberation, Motivation, and the Nature of Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Others similarly endorse the view that emotional values are holistic. For instance, in The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis: Hackett, revised edition, 1976/1993)Google Scholar, Robert Solomon suggests that emotions involve not simply evaluative judgments but systems of judgments. Ronald De Sousa likewise endorses ‘axiological holism’ (‘Emotional Truth’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (2002), 247–263Google Scholar).

11 Frijda, N. H., The Laws of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2007/2013)Google Scholar; Roberts, R. C., ‘What an Emotion is: a Sketch’, Philosophical Review 97 (1988), 183–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Nussbaum, M., Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ben-Ze'ev, A., The Subtlety of Emotions (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Glas, G., ‘Dimensions of the Self in Emotion and Psychopathology: Consequences for Self-Management in Anxiety and Depression’, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 24 (2017), 143–155, 144CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Upheavals of Thought, 45. Solomon likewise places an emphasis on the dynamic quality of emotion. An emotion, he says, is not simply a judgment or system of judgments; it is a ‘purposive attempt to structure our world’ (The Passions, xvii). Later, he writes that emotions are ‘engagements with the world’, which are not evaluative presentations of concrete objects but ways of being ‘entangled’ in the world. See, for example, his ‘Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings: Emotions as Engagements with the World’, in Solomon, R. C. (ed.), Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 76–88Google Scholar. For an emphasis on emotions as temporally extended engagements with one's surroundings, see also Slaby, J. and Wüschner, P., ‘Emotion and Agency’, in Roeser, S. and Todd, C., (eds) Emotion and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 212–228Google Scholar.

15 See Goldie, P., The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ratcliffe, ‘Grief and the Unity of Emotion’.

16 I use the term ‘object’ to mean the ‘concrete object of an emotional experience’ - what the emotion is about. It thus encompasses entities, events, and situations – past, present, anticipated, and imagined.

17 Pugmire, D., Sound Sentiments: Integrity in the Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ben-Ze'ev, The Subtlety of Emotions, 33. In The Passions and elsewhere, Solomon also considers the relevant aspect of experience. However, he does not draw a clear distinction between the evaluation of something, the background to that evaluation, and the way in which the two interact, sometimes referring to all of them as ‘emotions’ and as ‘judgments’ or ‘systems of judgments’.

18 A Widow's Story (London: Fourth Estate, 2011), 65Google Scholar.

19 Upheavals of Thought, 80.

20 I take Ronald De Sousa to be addressing this aspect of emotion, or at least something like it, when he remarks: ‘That standard truth-bearers are digital representations helps to explain the grain of truth in the often expressed anxiety about the distortion of reality introduced by abstractions. Abstraction is, by definition, a process of pruning details, of ignoring certain distinctions and aspects of reality’ (‘Emotional Truth’, 262).

21 Maclaren, K., ‘Emotional Clichés and Authentic Passions: a Phenomenological Revision of a Cognitive Theory of Emotion’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10 (2011) 45–65, 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 One might think that the distinction between actual and anticipated disruptions tracks the distinction between factive and epistemic emotions, where the former are directed at what is the case and the latter at what is to come. For this distinction, see Gordon, R., The Structure of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. However, the phenomenological differences between the two are not so clear-cut. Emotional responses to events that have occurred implicate future possibilities in all sorts of ways, and emotional anticipation also involves a change in how one relates to an actual situation.

23 ‘What are Emotions? And How Can They Be Measured?’, Social Science Information 44 (2005) 695–729, 697, 701–2Google Scholar.

24 See Goldie, The Mess Inside.

25 Elsewhere, I have developed a different conception of affective depth, one that applies instead to what I call ‘existential feelings’ (Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression).

26 Sound Sentiments, 40.

27 In Sound Sentiments, Pugmire also identifies another type of case, which I will not address here, where an emotion is experienced as irrevocably inadequate to an object of emotion, as in certain religious experiences.

28 Some types of emotion are always deep (or at least ordinarily deep), as with grief, while some tokens of other types are deeper than others, as with the difference between being angry at someone who pushes past you on the street and being angry with someone who has just run over your dog for fun.

29 See, for example, Husserl, E., Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, trans. Churchill, J. S. and Ameriks, K. (London: Routledge, 1948/1973)Google Scholar; Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Steinbock, A. J. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001)Google Scholar.

30 For a discussion, see Rump, J., ‘The Epistemic Import of Affectivity: a Husserlian Account’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41 (2017), 82–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Hence Jesse Prinz gets something right when he suggests that an emotion can represent something without embodying the full content of what it represents, although the specifics of our accounts are in other respects quite different. See his Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

32 We can add that the actual negotiation-process may recruit a much wider range of cognitive abilities. For instance, narrative capacity can have an important role to play in comprehending and negotiating emotional ruptures. See Goldie, The Mess Inside; Higgins, K. M., ‘Love and Death’, in Deigh, J. (ed.), On Emotions: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 159–178CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Interactions with other people are also a very important consideration. When the way forward is unclear, one often turns to others for guidance.

33 For discussion, see, for example, Maclaren, ‘Emotional Clichés and Authentic Passions’; Milligan, T., ‘False Emotions’, Philosophy 83 (2008), 213–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Szanto, T., ‘Emotional Self-Alienation’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41 (2017), 260–286CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Another issue to address is how emotional responses to fiction might be accommodated, given that they do not ordinarily impact upon one's world but are not always appropriately labeled as shallow or otherwise deficient. To speculate, it could be argued that the same dynamic applies, but to a fictional world and its disruption. One can thus experience something of the relevant emotions in a safe environment – insulated from one's wider concerns.

* Ratcliffe, ‘The Feeling of Being’; Feelings of Being; Experiences of Depression.