In Emotional Reason Bennett Helm addresses two
major challenges to any philosophical theory of practical reason. The first
challenge is that it does not seem clear how the knowledge that we ought to
do something motivates us to act on that knowledge — what Helm calls the motivational
problem. The second challenge, the so-called deliberative problem, questions
how our values can conform to two very strong intuitions at the same time —
first, that our values are something that we create as autonomous choosers and
second, that they are something that we discover as rational cognizers. Helm
argues that both of these problems are insurmountable for practical philosophy
if we accept one standard assumption in the philosophical discourse: the idea
of a clear distinction between cognitive and conative states. Helm argues that
this assumption must be abandoned in order to give a coherent account of
practical reason.

Helm is not the first person to argue against the
divide. He builds on the work of John McDowell, David Wiggins and Charles
Taylor, all of whom have voiced similar doubts about the divide. What is
special about Helm’s book, however, is the detailed account he provides to
solve the problem. Especially for readers of Taylor, this is a welcome change
of tone from the often flowery and metaphorical hints on how such a practical
rationality could be conceived. Helm’s text doesn’t always make for light
reading, but is carefully crafted and provides a very stringent argument for a
practical rationality that bridges the cognitive/conative divide.

Central to the text is Helm’s use of emotions as
bridging entities between the cognitive and the conative dimensions. Emotions
can bridge the divide because they are subjective motivating entities on the
one hand, but are responsive to objective import on the other. His concept
therefore hinges on a plausible explanation for the notion of import.

According to Helm, import is what distinguishes mere
goal-directedness from real desire. To illustrate this claim he uses the
example of the difference between a chess-playing computer that can pursue
goals in a rational manner but does not care about its actions and a dog that
really desires to leave the house because it values the fresh air. For the dog,
but not for the computer, its actions have import, because the dog values them
and does not see them only as a means of achieving a preset goal. Helm believes
that it is the failure to recognize this important difference between
goal-directedness and true desire that is responsible for the failure of
philosophy of mind to understand the nature of practical rationality.

The suggestion that a better understanding of the
problems in the philosophy of mind could benefit practical philosophy is a very
promising one, but Helm does not really fulfill the expectations he raises in
this context. Even though he does mention the positions of Dennett, Churchland
and Davidson, there is no real argumentative penetration of their positions.
What is more, realists about intentional states, such as Fodor or Dretske, are
completely ignored. Helm obviously does have a point when he argues that the
absence of the notion of value makes it difficult for philosophy of mind to
describe some of the more important features of the human mind, but he does not
provide a great deal of argumentative substance to show precisely where
philosophy of mind goes wrong — and his exclusive focus on anti-realistic
positions on intentionality does not help the matter. Because of this lack of
argumentative depth, Helm’s excursions into the philosophy of mind seem more
like an arbitrary and superfluous addition to his argument, rather than an
integral part of it.

More positively, Helm’s argument is far stronger when
he begins to develop his positive account of the role of emotions. He rightly
points out that emotions are not just bodily sensations, but are essentially
evaluative feelings. Fear is not fear because of the cold sweat and the urge to
run associated with it, but because of an evaluation that the situation
is a fearful one, one that merits the feeling of fear. Nevertheless, emotions
differ from explicit judgments insofar as the evaluation implicit in them is
given in a passionate form. The difference between the dispassionate judgment
that a situation is dangerous and the actual fear of danger is that only the
latter is intrinsically associated with strong sensations. Emotions are, in
Helms words, felt evaluations.

The central feature of felt evaluations is the fact
that they both constitute and are constituted by import. Felt evaluations
constitute import insofar as something has import exactly if it is a worthy
object of one’s attention. They are constituted by import insofar as they are
essentially defined as responsiveness to import. Helm argues that there is no
vicious circularity here, because he does not claim that either is
ontologically prior to the other: Import and felt evaluation are one conceptual
package. On the subjective side, import is dependent on our evaluations, but on
the objective side, our single evaluations can go wrong if they are not
responsive to the import which is created by the pattern of our evaluations.

Felt evaluations bridge the cognitive/conative divide
because they make it possible to understand how an evaluation of the objective
import of a situation can be directly motivating to act upon it at the same
time. Nevertheless, the objectivity enabled by this conception on its own is
not sufficient to solve the motivational or the deliberative problem, because
it is not clear how felt evaluations could be sufficient to judge what should
have import for an agent. Emotions are sufficient to explain why we care
about the world, but for practical rationality we need as well the dimension of
explicit evaluative judgment. Once evaluative judgment is added however,
felt evaluations and judgments jointly can constitute practical rationality.

With these two items in place Helm then attempts to
solve his two problems. The motivational problem, he believes, can be solved if
we reject the cognitive/conative divide and accept that our motivations are
themselves responsive to our normative reasons. Motivations can be rationally
controlled via the active commitment to import in judgment and indirectly via
normative pressure on our desires because of our explicit evaluations. The
third and most complex way of control — what Helm calls ‘freedom of the heart’
— is needed in cases of fragmented evaluative perspectives where the other two
forms of control over our desires will not normally be successful. Freedom of
the heart control reflects our ability to slowly change the pattern of our felt
evaluations to recreate a single evaluative perspective.

After solving the motivational
problem Helm then turns to the deliberative problem. He believes this problem
can be solved, because the quest for a single evaluative perspective has both
the character of cognitive discovery, in which we better understand the
coherence of what has import for us, and the character of invention, because
the structure of our concepts is indeterminate and by choosing to frame an
evaluative problem in a certain way we create new import and the evaluative feelings
and judgments associated with it.

Overall, Helm’s solutions to the motivational and
deliberative problems are very neat, because they are prepared by his very
thorough account of his conceptual tools (felt evaluations, import, evaluative judgment,
single evaluative perspective, freedom of the will and the heart, etc.), but
some old worries remain.

First of all, it is not quite clear how the division
of labor between practical judgment and felt evaluations is supposed to work.
In his examples, Helm uses intuitively very plausible cases where either a
practical judgment via freedom of the heart slowly changes the architecture of
the felt evaluations, or where the pattern of the felt evaluations leads to a
reconsidering of a practical judgment. However, the impression that the real
work in the examples is done by intuitions and not by Helm’s own concepts is
inescapable, because in all his examples it is absolutely unclear why the
correction always shifts in the direction of an intuitively plausible result.
Using only the tools Helm makes available, it seems quite plausible that the
correction could just as well lead to a single evaluative perspective that is
intuitively very implausible.

Secondly, Helm sometimes promises more than he
actually delivers. One example is the promise to elucidate the relationship
between philosophy of mind and practical rationality mentioned earlier, another
one is his criticism of the attempts of those who try to solve the deliberative
problem with an unsuitable tool, i.e. coherence, which according to Helm cannot
satisfy our intuition of discovery. However, it is difficult to see why his
account provides a large step forward in this respect, because after all is
said and done, the only criterion for the correctness of a felt evaluation is
an import constituted by the coherence of the pattern of felt evaluations and judgments.
Taking the intermediate step of external import only weakly disguises the fact
that what does the work in terms of objectivity is nothing else but the
coherence argument of which Helm is so critical in the work of other authors.
Even given that Helm emphasizes the dynamic aspect of creating coherence, it
seems to me that this aspect is present as well in the authors he criticizes.

All in all Emotional Reason is well worth
reading. Even if Helm does not always successfully back up all the claims that
he stakes for himself, he still provides a tightly-argued innovative account of
practical reason with an interesting focus on the role of the emotions in
practical rationality.

 

© 2005
Tillmann Vierkant

 

Tillmann Vierkant, Ph.D. is a philosopher working at
the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. His area of specialization
is self, voluntary action, responsibility and consciousness.

Categories: Philosophical