A
friend of mine, studying philosophy at a prestigious British university; was
once set an examination paper including the question "What is an
emotion?" She remarked afterwards, somewhat acidly, that this was the sort
of question only philosophers could ask, and that it was clearly inappropriate
as an examination question, since any adequate answer would be incomprehensible
to philosophers, and any answer comprehensible to them would be inadequate to
its subject matter.

This
anecdote illustrates the sort of skepticism that many non-philosophers are
likely to display when told that a well-known philosopher has written a book on
the emotions. The popular image of philosophers as desiccated lifeless
creatures preoccupied with impersonal abstractions is at least one source of
this attitude. But, as Martha Nussbaum has argued over a number of years, this
picture relies on questionable assumptions about both the scope of philosophy,
and the nature of emotions.

As
Nussbaum has pointed out before there is a long philosophical tradition, dating
back at least as far as Plato, and extending as far as Hume, of discussing the
nature of the emotions and their role in ethical life. This tradition has only
fallen into abeyance in relatively recent times. In her latest book Nussbaum
argues that its neglect owes much to the uncritical acceptance of a view of
emotions as being more akin to bodily sensations than to any other kind of
mental state. According to this view emotions are likely to seem as impervious
to reason as itches and tickles

Much
of Nussbaum’s work has focussed on recovering and arguing for a more sophisticated account of the emotions
which she thinks can be found in the
work of Hellenistic philosophers such as the 
Stoics. In ‘Upheavals of Thought’ Nussbaum develops this line of
argument by defending a contemporary version of the Stoic view of emotions. Her
account is clear, engaging, accessible to the lay reader,and extremely
wide-ranging. Among the topics she discusses are experiments to induce learned
helplessness in animals, the political and juridical significance of the
emotion of compassion and the differing conceptions of love embodied in the
works of authors as different as Augustine and Joyce.

Many
philosophers in the ancient world argued that our emotional responses to the
world involve judgments about how things are in the world, and about what
things have value. For example someone grieving at the death of a spouse needs
to believe that their spouse is dead (a judgment about the world) and that this
is great loss to them (a judgment of value). The Stoics went further than this
and – at least on Nussbaum’s account – identified the emotion with the judgment
of value. This identification plays an important role in Stoic ethical thought,
which is based on the idea that we can master our emotions by coming to see
that the judgments of value which constitute our emotions are all false.

Nussbaum accepts one part of the Stoic account while
rejecting another. She agrees that emotions are constituted by judgments of
value, but resists the suggestion that these judgments are all false. She deals
well with some important objections to the identification of emotions with
judgments of value. For example, she claims that we do not need to follow the
Stoics in letting the claim that emotions are judgments lead us to the
unpalatable conclusion that animals and young children do not have emotions.
This is because we do not need to share the Stoics’ ungenerous estimate of
animals’ and children’s rational capacities.

Nussbaum also
deals well with another objection to the Stoic view. It is sometimes thought
that the Stoic account cannot accommodate cases where the judgment of value
that allegedly constitutes an emotion runs counter to the values sincerely
avowed by the speaker. Take the case of
a woman grieving at the death of a violent and abusive partner. On the Stoic
account, the grief is nothing over and above a particular belief – namely the
belief that she has suffered a great loss. But the woman may say – and indeed
believe – that all things considered she is better off now that her partner is
dead than she was before. This seems hard to reconcile with the idea that,
since she is grieving she must believe she has suffered a loss.

However,
as Nussbaum points out, the difficulty dissolves when we accept that people can
have contradictory beliefs, and that this is a particularly common situation
when some of those beliefs are very deeply rooted and have a long history that
associates them with important elements of our mental make-up. These are all
characteristics that, on her account, the beliefs that constitute emotions have.

Nussbaum does not draw any explicit morals about the
implications of her views for the treatment of mental disorders. Although she
discusses the work of writers in the psychoanalytic tradition as varied as
Freud, Winnnicott, Klein and Bollas with sympathy and insight, she says
explicitly that she is more interested in them for the contributions they can
make to what she calls ‘philosophical anthropology’ than their therapeutic
insights.

One
might worry that Nussbaum’s focus on the cognitive components of emotion might
lead to an over-simplistic approach to some kinds of mental illness. If
emotions are constituted by judgments of value, and these judgments fall within
the domain of reason, as Nussbaum repeatedly insists, then it might seem as
though emotions which threaten to disrupt the lives of those who experience
them could be mastered by the use of reason alone. Unfortunately of course
matters are not so simple – if they were, then dealing with the problems caused
by mental illness might be a lot easier both for the individuals who suffer
from such illnesses and for society as a whole.

However, this objection is not really fair to
Nussbaum. We have already seen that her account allows for conflicts between
the beliefs an individual sincerely lays claim to, and those that constitute
their emotions. In other words, in Nussbaum’s view, we cannot get rid of our
emotion-constituting beliefs just by acquiring beliefs that run counter to
them. Consequently we cannot hope to deal with disruptive emotions just by
reasoning with the individual who suffers from them. Indeed one strength of
Nussbaum’s account is that it helps us to see one reason why this will not
work: someone who has a set of emotion-constituting judgments which disrupt
their lives together with a set of beliefs that run counter to them may find it
harder to identify and deal with their emotions than someone who lacks the
contradictory beliefs.

This
is somewhat speculative, and it would be interesting to know what Nussbaum’s
own response to this line of thought might be. Indeed it would be interesting
to see Nussbaum’s thoughts on the implications of her views for mental health
issues developed at length. The range of topics with which she deals with
authoritatively in this fascinating book leads me to think that she could say a
great deal about this which was both important and interesting. Unfortunately,
she hasn’t said it yet.

© 2002 Bill Wringe

Bill
Wringe, Ph.D., Department of International Relations, Bilkent
University, Ankara, Turkey.

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics