This pocket presentation of emotion includes Introduction, five chapters, Glossary, Bibliography, and Index. There are neither footnotes nor endnotes and to each chapter is appended a one-page Further Reading section.

In his Introduction Brady starts with a claim that human beings as not only rational but also emotional animals. Two questions are therefore of primary concern to him: what are emotions?, and: what do they do? Brady says that the response to the first is possible only if the second question is answered. This is so because the nature of emotion is determined by its functions. This statement is used to warn the reader that “[t]he full account of what emotions are will therefore only really be apparent at the end of the book, once we’ve examined the many and varied things that emotions enable us to do […]” (2). A second important claim put forward in the Introduction is that emotions are “extremely important” not only “for human beings” but also “for other animals” (2). Finally, Brady makes clear that his intention is “to convince […] that emotions have great importance precisely because they undermine or short-circuit our reasoning and reflection” (2).

In The nature of emotion (4-37) Brady states first that people (or almost all of them) have significant (perfect) knowledge of their emotions because they experience them. This first-person knowledge does not provide, however, knowledge about what emotions are in themselves, let alone understanding of the best way to deal with them. A better knowledge and understanding may be conveyed via a philosophical research, psychology and neurosciences though philosophical theories unlike those of psychology and neurosciences will be more general and concerned with the core aspects of human life. This, in turn, leads Brady to ask about the way philosophy (of emotion) is done. Generally speaking, philosophy of emotions should identify the principal features of emotions, that is such features that, on the one hand, all emotions have in common and, on the other, make them distinct from other mental phenomena. Brady lists six elements that are present in normal cases of emotion: (i) perception, (ii) evaluation, (iii) a bodily change and expression, (iv) a feeling, (v) a motivation to act, (vi) thinking and attending. As he calls them, “[t]hese seem to be part and parcel of paradigmatic emotional experience” (10). This is the most general approach while in practice philosophical theories differ in what they prioritize to be “truly essential to the emotion” (11). Brady also makes a remark about five obstacles to producing simple and straightforward judgments about the nature of emotions such as: (i) the term ’emotion’ refers to many things, (ii) those whose think about emotion have different backgrounds, methodologies, interests, and aims, (iii) to get a firm grasp of emotion a competence in many fields is required, (iv) terms for single emotions also refer to may things, (v) emotions have some features in common with other mental states. We are then given three most popular theories of emotions with their pros and cons. These are feeling, cognitive, and perceptual theory or, to be more precise, theories because each group is represented by variants. Because each of the three groups is problematic in explaining the nature of emotion appropriately, that is the nature of “all of the experiences we want to characterize as ’emotional'” (33), Brady suggests that in fact there are various kinds of emotions and each of the three groups is adequate for “a restricted domain of emotional experience” (36) only. (Note that already earlier Brady declared his endorsement of the sceptical view advanced by Griffiths that emotion does not form a natural kind.)

In Emotion, knowledge, and understanding (38-69) Brady pursues his investigation into the nature of emotion while taking for granted that the six components (or elements) of emotion identified in previous chapter are their essential elements. Brady does so by bringing to light the importance of emotion for knowledge and understanding. He claims that “certain emotions can be helpful […] for giving us knowledge and understanding” (38) and more particularly for our truth-seeing activities without however denying that emotions can obstruct clear thinking too. Expanding on curiosity (see 40-51), he says: “curiosity […] is an emotion, rather than some non-emotional motivational state of trait. This is because curiosity would seem to share many of the components that are standardly used to characterize emotions”. (43) (I wonder if it is self-evident to consider curiosity as an emotion. Why not an emotional motivational state, emotional attitude or desire? It is true that something similar under label SEEKING system is listed as one of seven primal emotions by Panksepp, recently reinterpreted by Ellis, The Moral Psychology of Internal Conflict (2018), but neither of them is mentioned by Brady.) Next Brady focuses on the relation between emotions and values. Alas, he doesn’t explain what accounts for the fact that while in some cases emotions help us discover values or present them to us correctly, in other cases they deform them or are simply blind to them. He just emphases the first alternative. In point of fact, we may like to agree with Brady that “emotions make things salient” (54), but nevertheless we want to ask him if they do this always appropriately; we agree with him that “emotion and attention are closely linked” (58), but we wonder if this linkage works always to our benefit; we concur with Brady that “[e]motions are, in a sense, self-correcting as a result of keeping attention fixed on our situation” (59), but we should remark that this is not always the case and therefore we wish to question Brady why. To be sure, Brady is aware of this state of affaires: “the fact that emotions can motivate reflections and lead to understanding clearly does not suggest that they always, or indeed mostly, do.” (61) 

In the next chapter, Emotion and action (70-99), Brady turns to the practical value of emotions and their essentiality for pursuing practical goals and ends. Again, he is well aware how much emotions can lead to biases in decision-making but – unless I have missed it – all he has to say about it is that “scepticism about the place of emotions in decision-making is unwarranted” (73). As I suppose, Brady probably understands scepticism not as contesting the prominent place of emotions but as playing down any positive role of emotions, for sceptics, as he identifies them, don’t deny the importance of emotions in the decision-making process but rather point to their permanent noxiousness and make, I would say, equally unwarranted and general claims that emotions contribute always to its detriment. In what follows Brady tries to dismantle the position of his opponents rather than to prove his own. He convincingly shows that severing decision-making from emotion makes no sense. True, he asserts that “[s]ometimes emotions can cause us to get subjective probabilities wrong” (76) and even admits that “as we have noted throughout, emotion has many deleterious effects on decision-making and judgement” (83) but he says nothing about why and when this is so. Instead he goes on to “highlight the great importance that emotion has when it comes to motivating action” (83), where the said importance stands for the beneficial role of emotion, which is to motivate us by involving “a desire to take an appropriate action” (86). In the final section Brady argues that knowledge when not loaded with emotion is motivationally ineffective because it may be easily ignored or rationalized. By contrast emotions – and especially pain (Brady’s example), which “is not itself an emotion, although it has an emotional aspect or flavour” (89) – since they are not easy to ignore or rationalize have a stronger effect. Other examples include remorse, anger, and disappointment which all make one’s attempts more effective than if they are lacking, other things being equal.

In Emotions and social groups (100-127) Brady insists on social value of emotions. A number of emotions are communicated through facial and bodily expressions and for this reason they are vital in interpersonal relationships. Here, drawing on Robert Frank’s work, Brady illustrates how paradoxically, commitment and love make a relationship more durable than when it is a matter of rationality and self-interest exclusively (this echoes the two speeches Socrates offers in the Phaedrus). I have said paradoxically because often this is not how things go and often love affairs are located among short- rather than long-term phenomena. But, I suppose, Brady would answer that in such cases these are not strong bonds of love nor genuinely loving feelings. I believe such would be his answer because he place love close to “moral emotions like honesty or compassion” (108), all of which are crucial for cooperation and interpersonal relationships. Brady continues with pride. He claims that it is a positive emotion insofar as it “involves a particular appraisal of the relationship between the proud person, and some object or event that they take to enhance their standing and esteem” (110). In this sense pride is an important emotion because, if I understood correctly, it makes people aware of the hierarchy of values. In the last section of this chapter Brady addresses group emotions which is “made up of individual emotions” and should be supported by “the right kind of relationships between individual emotions that have to be in place if a group emotion is to ’emerge'” (118). Group emotions lie at the basis of collective identity which make them indispensable in the shaping of societies.

With Emotion, morality, and art (128-155) Brady passes on to the role of emotions in activities which are typically human. As in the previous chapter, Brady acknowledges that in some cases emotions lead to vice and cause people to commit horrible acts. But again, as in previous chapters, he rebuts “a thoroughgoing scepticism about the moral worth of emotions” (129) by a simple claim that it is not warranted, and he shifts without further ado to examples which prove that emotions are morally valuable. Once again, the two may be true and the latter does not undermine the former. I think many will agree with Brady that a virtuous person experiences good emotions but there is a long way from this statement to the claim that emotions are good. It is rather the case that emotions may be appropriate and then they constitute good responses or be inappropriate and then they constitute bad responses. If this is correct it makes little sense to qualify some emotions as good and others as bad. Think about hatred (typically taken to be negative) towards what is bad (Brady’s example which is as old as Plato’s Republic, e.g. 402a, 485c). Since it is an appropriate response, hatred in such circumstances is positive. Brady’s recurrent focus mainly or solely on the positive role of emotions is best illustrated by his last big example: art. This is because, I think, here, the following principle is at work, though not without some provisos: the good emotions produce a significant works of art while bad emotions produce no art at all. As Brady confirms: “Mere intellectual edification isn’t enough, at least for very many human beings” (145). Yet less it is true of another claim of Brady, which is that “emotion helps us to understand literature and music” (150). Here once again, it all depends on the emotions and on the person. It seems conceivable to me that under some conditions emotions hinder rather than help the understanding a work of art.

I am sympathetic to the very final verdict of Brady that “[e]motions aren’t just necessary for us to flourish, therefore. They are necessary for us to be us” (155). But I am afraid that not much of his book demonstrates this. While reading it I have had an impression that the book is obliquely polemical (e.g. “emotion has a clear priority over reason” (144), see also: “emotions […] undermine or short-circuit our reasoning and reflection” (2)) rather than introductory, as it could be inferred from the character of the series it belongs to. Brady’s opponents are plausibly those who are unrestrictedly critical towards emotions. I am not sure if an unrestricted eulogy of emotion does any better. Sadly, there is no mention of emotion-reason linkage, be it at least by dint of a conceptual option.

This is a particularly fragile point if the book is supposed indeed to introduce “students approaching a subject for the first time […] students seeking to understand a subject area” (https://www.routledge.com/The-Basics/book-series/B). From the point of view of a beginner this book, it seems to me, may lead a reader unable to resist the one-sidedness of the picture astray. I am not sure either what effect on her may have the interlacement of Brady’s own views on emotions with a rather frequent overview of other authors’ works; a similar uncertainty concerns the number of excursuses going beyond the treated topic in such a short book.

Now, since the book exposes, to some extent at least, Brady’s views on emotion, a word should be said about it from the specialist’s point of view. Here three things come to the fore. The first problem is that at the end of the first chapter we are left with the view that there is no one-category emotion. There are three different categories with the corresponding three main groups of theories of emotions (“each is correct with respect to a limited range of emotions” (3)). It would be amazing that the number of theories determine the number of categories for it would require that the existing three groups cover an exhaustive manner the whole domain of emotions and we don’t know if this is the case. But more importantly if there is no emotion simpliciter but only emotion1, emotion2, and emotion3, Brady would do better to use such labels each time he speaks about emotion in order to specify which of the three categories he has in mind. This he sometimes does (rather implicitly than explicitly, for instance in 2.2, it seems, he means emotion2, while in 2.3.1 it seems to be emotion3). But maybe such approach is not accurate. After all, the three, emotion1, emotion2, and emotion3, may have a common denominator, at least a tiny one.

Second, when Brady speaks about building a full account of emotion from many and varied functions of emotion (see 2) is this not misleading? Should we not expect a full account to be obtained from all functions emotion presents? (Compare his slightly different phrasing: “we’ll only get a fuller picture of the nature of emotion once we answer the question about what emotions do” (36).)

Thirdly and most fundamentally, Brady is not precise enough about why emotions become helpful and under what kind of circumstances this occurs (or can occur). He constantly focuses on the fact they can be beneficial without spelling out why emotions are morally good in some circumstances while bad in others. No distinctive feature is indicated nor are we ever told whether this can depends on emotion itself, circumstances, personality or something else. And yet it is not a negligible issue why emotions also make “salient to us things that shouldn’t be salient” (61). It is only in the penultimate section of chapter 2 that there is something like a vague hint to Aristotelian answer. What makes the difference are “the right topics, in the right way, and for the right amount of time” (68; Aristotle’s famous relevant passage is quoted in ch. 5 (138)).

The above doesn’t mean that the book is not worth reading. This is a clearly written, provoking and inspiring work and as such it can without doubt provide food for thought for both civilians and specialists.

 

 

Robert Zaborowski, thymos2001@yahoo.fr, Institute for the History of Science, Polish Academy of Sciences

Categories: Psychology

Keywords: Emotions