Several
years ago David Pugmire produced a short and useful book entitled Rediscovering 
Emotions. Fine and successful though it was, it bore the hallmark of its
origin as a series of studies published in prominent philosophical journals.
His latest offering is more of an integrated text but it manages to achieve
this without sacrificing rigor.

As
in the earlier text, part of Pugmire’s strategy is an attempt to make sense of
real or ‘well-formed’ emotion by looking at the various ways in which an
emotion may fall short. Specifically, an emotion may be shallow, or mixed or it
may be narcissistic or sentimental. In these latter cases the emotion is not
really concerned with the object but with ourselves, or our self-image, or the
thrill of the experience itself. In the case of mixed emotions they may be
about the object but they are half-hearted, lacking a univocal judgment about
how things stand. Well-formed emotions are taken to be ‘simple’ in a sense that
is itself rather complex. (The influence here of Stuart Hampshire’s ‘Sincerity
and Single Mindedness’ is intermittently in evidence.)

Pugmire’s
successive treatments of these issues works well but what strengthens them is
his account of emotional depth. It sets the agenda for these subsequent
set-piece analyses and it is the most innovative section of the text. There are
surprisingly few notable philosophical discussions of the concept of depth and Pugmire’s
is one of the best.

For
an emotion to be deep, Pugmire argues that it has to satisfy the following
conditions. Firstly, emotions have to involve ‘settled judgments as to how
matters in fact stand’. (Here, the theme of settledness anticipates the latter
emphasis upon univocity.)

Secondly,
the judgment involved in the emotion must embedded in our way of
thinking about the world. Here, Pugmire draws upon Quine’s account of necessary
truth. For Quine, the necessity of a proposition is not a matter of its
always-and-forever unrevisability. The necessity of a proposition involves many
of our other truth-claims depending upon it. Analogously, Pugmire claims
that ‘the emotive gravity of a circumstance depends on how great a range of
one’s concerns it touches’.

But
this can take two forms. It can be a matter of the emotion involving a judgment
that is central to what we believe or involving a judgment that unsettles this
core. This poses a rather romantic (i.e. undesirable) contrast between
stability versus sudden upheaval, but this is more apparent than real. ‘An
emotion that is able to reconstitute its prevailing setting is, of course,
deep; but it must be deep in order to effect its transformation.
Therefore its depth must rest initially on something else. And this will turn
out to be embeddedness.’ An emotion that disrupts part of the core must draw
upon some other core belief(s). Dore dissonance is not tolerated. (Here we have
univocity or ‘simplicity’ again.)

To
illustrate the point Pugmire appeals to the case of Oedipus. His beliefs
concerning himself are shaken to the core but only because of other core
beliefs that he also has about incest, patricide and (perhaps) the dishonorable
nature of deludedness itself. (After all, he is the man who tricked fate, outwitted
the Sphinx, and won a kingdom by his wits. For him to err is no small matter.)
What is slightly worrying here is the way in which this leaves Pugmire’s third
precondition for depth vulnerable to criticism.

This
third criterion is an externalist constraint. The judgment involved in a
profound/deep emotion must be either true or in some way socially sanctioned.
Anne Frank’s fears could not have been deep had there been no threat, if they
had amounted to paranoia. Pugmire accepts that the relevant constraint cannot
quite be a full-blooded requirement of truth. After all, religious convictions
and feelings are one of our most familiar and instructive cases of depth but
they often involve falsehoods of one sort or another. Consequently, Pugmire
qualifies the externalist constraint to allow that emotional depth  need not
involve a true judgment just so long as it is does not merely involve personal
fantasy. It must be ‘more than an elaborate concoction and more than merely
imagined. It has an elaborate basis beyond the mind of the single believer’.

Although
Pugmire makes a good case for some kind of externalist constraint, my concern
is that his account remains slightly underdeveloped. Surely we will want to
rule out mere adherence to convention as a sufficient condition for emotional
depth? And if we are in the territory of discussing depth in relation to
Oedipus then we would presumably want to contrast his depth with the shallowness
of the Theban state functionary (and future king) Creon, the man who is guided
by a  thoroughly embedded and officious conventionalism. My concern is that Creon
would meet all of Pugmire’s criteria and that a plausible externalist
constraint will need to rule out such a possibility. His embedded beliefs
although flawed are certainly not personal (indeed they seek to exclude the
latter).

Having
stated this, if there really is a problem here, what is required to fix it looks
like a refinement of Pugmire’s externalist constraint and not its abandonment.
Nor is there any general failure on his part to balance out the three cognitive
criteria given so far with the affective component that any plausible account
of the emotions requires. Pugmire’s final criterion attempts to avoid the over
intellectualization of emotion by claiming that if I don’t feel in a way
that is commensurate with the value of the object then I don’t care
about it in the appropriate deep way.

With
minor quibbles (and concern about the formulation of the externalist
constraint) set aside, this book is a success. It works well in its own right
and also enacts its own movement into depth. By comparison with its useful
predecessor, it presents a considerably more rounded and connected-on-all-sides
account of well-formed emotion.

© 2006 Tony Milligan

Tony Milligan completed his
doctorate on Iris Murdoch at Glasgow University where he currently tutors in
philosophy. He also teaches philosophy with the Lifelong Learning Centre at the
University of Strathclyde.

Categories: Philosophical