The fifth volume
of the European Review of Philosophy investigates
the link between emotion and action, touching on related notions like
rationality, motivation, desire, akrasia and self-consciousness. It addresses
issues that have all too often been discussed separately in different areas (in
particular philosophy of action, philosophy of mind and psychology of emotion).
The argumentative methodology varies from paper to paper; conceptual analyses
prevail, but some authors also make reference to the psychological and
experimental literature.

The underlying
(and more or less explicit) theme linking all contributions together is that
emotion and action are conceptually related: it does not seem possible to
understand action without reference to emotion, nor to understand emotion
without grasping its intrinsic "action readiness" (to borrow Nico Frijda’s
expression). Each paper is an exploration of the implications of this theme.
Practical reasoning, the understanding of our desires, the notion of
rationality, the formation of self-awareness and even the appreciation of
musical expressiveness are all considered in the light of this tight link
between emotion and action.

David Pears explores akrasia (literally, the inability of being in control of
oneself) and – against e.g. Davidson – allows that outright, conscious akrasia
is possible (although not necessarily rational). Pears’ core idea is that
outright akrasia has to be understood and discussed as a matter of practical
rather than theoretical reasoning. Unlike the latter, practical reasoning does
not rule out all options once a decision is made – because practical reasoning
is not about truths or falsities. Discarded practical options thus continue to
exist as temptations that, if not silenced, can "muster enough
motivational power to produce an action against my better judgement, an
outright akratic action" (p.6).

The paper by the
psychologist Nico Frijda summarises his best-known views. In particular,
his idea that emotion should be understood in terms of action readiness,
i.e. that it is intrinsically related to action, plays an important role in Elisabeth
Pacherie‘s article. Pacherie criticises the classic
belief-desire causal theory of action, and proposes an alternative view where
emotions can count as reasons for action. Drawing on ecological
psychology and related approaches (e.g. Jannerod), she then sketches a model
where emotions are linked to action either (i) directly, via the affordances
provided by the environment (for example, the fear for an approaching bear is
the perception of a "bear-to-be-fled"), or (ii) less directly, via remembered
affordances and our capacity to link them to our goals.

Johannes Roessler argues that self-awareness develops out of self-evaluative emotions
(such as pride and shame), rather than vice versa. Drawing in part on
experimental evidence concerning 2-year-olds (e.g. Kagan), he stresses the
importance of shared affect and shared evaluations in the
development of self-awareness. Briefly put, the claim is that children learn
what ought and ought not to be done largely from adults’ emotional reactions
(evaluations) to their actions. Children’s capacity to share these emotional
reactions contributes to their acquisition of a notion of "reason for
action" (in the normative sense), which in turn allows the formation of
their self-awareness.

Pierre Livet also believes that emotions contribute to rational actions. He
introduces the notion of friction to characterise our condition in front
of different action possibilities. Some situations are "easy" in that
they do not imply radical changes in our priorities. Others may require more
extended revisions, and emotions can be seen as the index of friction in such
difficult cases (for instance, anxiety occurs when we realise the
complexity of the revision we need to undertake, but have no "guiding
strategy" for it). To the extent that our choices and actions turn out to
be rational, however, we are (post hoc) entitled to call those emotions "rational".

Stéphane Lemaire claims that our emotions reveal, by way of inference, our desires.
He first discusses the general question of how we access our mental states, and
then analyses the relations among pain, pleasure, emotion and desire. Some
emotions make us aware of our desires simply through their intrinsic
desirability or undesirability, i.e. their positive or negative valence; others
reveal our desires through their content. Ultimately, Lemaire argues, what
grounds our inferences is the fact that the concept of desire essentially makes
reference to emotion.

Jerrold
Levinson is interested in musical expressiveness.
He argues that one’s capacity to hear music as expressing emotions depends on
one’s capacity to form beliefs about where and how the music is produced (he
calls this "spatial imagination"). Thus musical gestures are
expressive qua spatial and embodied gestures (or, at least, qua reminiscent
of them). This may explain, for example, why electroacoustic music often sounds
more "elusive" than traditional instrumental music.

Finally, Christine
Tappolet presents a critical review of Peter Goldie’s book The Emotions (2000).
She sympathises with most of his views, and tries to integrate them when she
finds them incomplete. While Goldie – in her opinion – limits himself to saying
that emotion states cannot be reduced to "belief states + feeling" (a
negative statement), she suggests (more positively) that what makes the
difference between beliefs and emotions is the latter’s evaluative content.

In general, this is a welcome and
refreshing collection of novel inputs on a current and compelling topic. Most
papers are rather technical (some being, of course, clearer and more articulate
than others), but they do not presuppose specific knowledge of the domain
(apart possibly from the paper by Tappolet, which requires familiarity with
Goldie’s views). Although this volume is likely to be read mainly by
philosophers, it would also benefit cognitive and emotion scientists. Anyone
with an interest in theory of mind, self-consciousness, empathy and rationality
would be challenged to consider whether or not emotions play a role in the
understanding of those phenomena.

© 2003 Giovanna Colombetti

Giovanna Colombetti is a Postdoctoral Fellow
at the Department of Philosophy at York University (Toronto ), working within the program "Cognitive
Science and the Embodied Mind". Her main research interests are in emotion
theories, in particular dynamical and developmental models of cognition and
emotion.

Categories: Philosophical