This book sounds like it should be about the rationality of emotion. It isn’t. It says nothing about logic or rationality, and not much about affect or emotion either. Instead it tries to revive post-Kantian German idealism on the basis that it prefigured the anticognitivist trend now emerging in cognitive science. In fact, Redding argues that the post-Kantian idealists influenced this trend, via William James and Sigmund Freud. This bizarre enterprise would be of questionable value even if it were successful, which it isn’t. The argument is extremely selective, and it’s riddled with hermeneutical speculation.

The post-Kantian idealists said little about affect or emotion, so Redding’s argument trades on a variety of related concepts such as representation, feeling, nature, and consciousness. He somehow manages to tease out themes of nonrepresentationalism, biological naturalism and physiological control of the will from transcendental idealism, which deals exclusively with the mental. He uses James and Freud to bridge the gap to neuroscience. As we would expect, these theories really don’t hang together at all well.

The problems Redding faces in this endeavor are great. Firstly Fichte, Schelling and Hegel viewed mental life as ontologically and epistemically prior to the physical world (although Schelling and to a lesser extent Hegel recognised a role for ‘nature’). William James had it the other way around. Freud believed physiology was ontologically but not epistemically prior. Greater differences in conceptual schemes are hard to conceive. Some heavy reinterpretation and abstraction is required in order to make these voices consonant on a common topic. That’s what Redding thinks he has achieved.

First Redding outlines the representational debate in cognitive science, with a brief overview of current theories. The representationalist view is very poorly sketched, with passing references to Dennett, Tye, and Dretske, amongst others. Damasio (Descartes’ Error) and LeDoux (The Emotional Brain) are key figures in the enlightened opposition. These authors give a nod to William James as the precursor of their own views.

So Redding re-examines James’ theory of affect. The James-Lange theory, which based emotions on bodily rather than psychological processes, was roundly dismissed by cognitivists. Redding presents compelling textual evidence that James’ theory was sophisticated enough to withstand the cognitivist attack. James held the view that emotions are produced by innate or conditioned neural reflexes, which can be triggered by cognitive processing as much as by perception. Critics focused on the soundbites, and missed this important part of his theory.

Freud is next in line. He famously declared that the essence of an emotion is to be conscious. Redding uses a recent distinction between phenomenal and cognitive consciousness to argue that he didn’t really mean it, at least not as it sounds. What he really meant was that emotion is an automatic neural reflex. By drawing on Freud’s early neurophysiological work, Redding suggests that the primary processes of the Id are governed by physiological drives. This reinterpretation has a modicum of plausibility, but the argument is mostly reconstruction. The result is that Freud’s theory of affect coheres with James’, though neither pointed it out and nobody else has noticed. So far so good.

Then the argument takes an even stranger turn. Redding attempts to show that James and Freud owed a heavy debt to the post-Kantian idealists. Kant proposed that our knowledge of the world is transcendentally mediated by representations in the mind. Fichte removed the real world from this explanation entirely (although apparently he didn’t really mean to); this takes him about as far from modern science as it’s possible to get. However, Fichte also conceived feeling as a non-representational self-awareness, and Redding exploits this to attack the cognitivist paradigm.

By contrast with Fichte, Schelling viewed mind and nature as intertwined, and discussed the interdependency of the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious embodied some organizational principles of nature which reflected a kind of ‘intellectual intuition’. At a very general level, this theme is resurfacing in recent biological psychology as the adaptive intelligence embodied in the affect program. But the parallel is very shallow indeed. At best, this is footnote material.

Hegel–known as the Absolute Idealist–actually unpicked much of this, pursuing a radical phenomenological agenda. He did however make a few comments about the influence of physiology on the mind, which is grist to Redding’s mill. Redding substitutes Hegel’s vague allusions to nature with the philosophy of Sylvan Tomkins, and suddenly we’re back to cognitive science.

Redding then has to deal with the obvious criticism that this vague and abstract parallel is of no practical relevance whatsoever. Terrance Deacon’s update on Darwinian evolution of the language (in The Symbolic Species) is somehow equated with Hegelian conceptualization, to show that in fact German idealism is relevant to cutting-edge cognitive science. I can’t make enough sense of this argument to provide a summary. As Redding’s book amply shows, any valuable ideas from this era have been conceived in superior terms by other people. He might have had more success by focusing on Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, who are in their own way more consonant with the naturalist view. Even Descartes allowed the body to do a lot of reasoning on its own, via the passions-a point which Damasio missed.

Redding is a historian of German idealism, and this book is his attempt to counter the charge that the field has become irrelevant. The essence of his approach is selectivity. You can find abstract parallels in anything if you look hard enough, though you might have to work hard on a new interpretation which contradicts received opinion and much of the rest of the author’s work. This is not a new trick. Evangelists have been at it for years.

Note: Readers interested in the history of the debate about the rational basis of emotions should consult Richard Sorabji’s Emotion and Peace of Mind (2000) instead, which reviews the arguments about cognitive therapy in Stoic philosophy. It’s informed by recent neuroscience and is directly relevant to therapeutic practice.

Sam Brown is writing up a Ph.D. on the neuroscience of emotional intelligence. He has an MA in Philosophy and an M.Phil. in Cognitive Science from the University of Dundee. He has particular interest in neuroscience and naturalist philosophy, focusing on the pathology of emotional disorders and the epistemology of intuition. He works as an IT tutor and database consultant.

Categories: Philosophical