For the past several years, I’ve been thinking about what role emotions play in our lives. Are they merely irrational bodily reactions to external stimuli? Can they be modified or changed? Can a person change their disposition to be angry at the slightest provocation? Do they just get in way of our rational deliberations? Or are emotions necessary for properly perceiving the world and our relation to it?
I believe emotions are vital for our practical deliberations and necessary for properly perceiving and acting in the world. In fact, without them, we would lose the ability to live a full human life. This belief is deeply informed by, and anchored in, the important works of Martha Nussbaum, particularly “The Fragility of Goodness,” “The Therapy of Desire,” “Love’s Knowledge,” and “Upheavals of Thought.” I’m not going to try to describe, develop and defend her position in this short post, but I want to talk about aspects of her theory that pertain to our everyday lives.
Emotions are not irrational impulses, but what Nussbaum calls “appraisals or value judgements, which ascribe to things and persons outside the person’s own control great importance for the person’s own flourishing” (Upheavals, pg. 4). This means that the beliefs we have about ourselves, our well-being, the world, and the objects or persons in world that we deem vital to our well-being are part and parcel of our emotions. Let’s take anger. Being angry involves beliefs about how someone has harmed you or someone/thing that you care about. Our anger can change if our beliefs change. Maybe we find out that the person we are angry with is not responsible, or the person we care about is not really hurt. Such beliefs are constitutive of being angry or not. So, anger is not just a bodily impulse, but is essentially cognitive and evaluative in nature. What follows from this is that emotions are not inherently irrational, but can be rational or irrational and true or false like any other beliefs (Therapy, 81-82). As Nussbaum points out, and describes in brilliant detail, this idea is not new, but goes back to Aristotle and Stoics (See Therapy).
If emotions are evaluative judgments, then they play a vital role in how we see and assess ourselves and the world around us. “The emotions are themselves modes of vision, or recognition. Their responses are part of what knowing, that is truly recognizing or acknowledging consists in” (Love’s Knowledge, 79). She explains:
“Good perception is a full recognition or acknowledgment of the nature of the practical situation; the whole personality sees it for what it is. The agent who discerns intellectually that a friend is in need or that a loved one has died, but who fails to respond to these facts with appropriate sympathy or grief…doesn’t really, or doesn’t fully, see what has happened, doesn’t recognize it in a full-blooded way or take it in” (Love’s Knowledge 79).
By dismissing our emotions out of hand and only “seeing” a morally charged situation theoretically, we might just miss the most important features of the situation and fail to act appropriately. Moreover, if we think of our lives and our well-being in abstraction, we might fail to see what we really value and what is important to us. When we hit upon something that brings our life joy and meaning, we don’t merely know it, we also feel it “in a full-blooded way.”
If emotions are evaluative judgements and essential for fully perceiving our lives, then we must actively cultivate them and make sure that they are rational, and most importantly, true.
Well, how do we do it? Actively use your emotions to properly perceive, assess, and respond to emotionally challenging situations. Exercise compassion at work so that you can fully “see” your coworkers and identify any potential issues that might be missed if you only see them through the lenses of “efficiency” and “productivity.” If you are angry, ask yourself why you are angry and try to unpack the beliefs that constitute your anger. You could discover false beliefs about yourself and your view of the world. So just as we keep our bodies fit through exercise, we need to keep our souls fit by exercising our emotions.
Philosophy and the arts can also exercise and fine tune our emotions. Philosophy can help us explore, examine and assess our emotions, and the arts can exercise our moral imagination, empathy and compassion. For example, a good poem can help us explore the texture, complexity, and richness of our feelings or open up new and exciting existential vistas for us. By cultivating our emotions, we get to fully experience what it is to be alive and what it means to live a good life. In the end, we can’t live without them.
Emotions and the Good Life by Philosophical Living is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.