“Emotional Metamorphoses: The Role of Others in Becoming-Oneself.”

2014

William James famously held that we “feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be” (1884, 190). We disagree, but not entirely. We suggest it would be more adequate to say that we are sad insofar we cry or otherwise mourn, angry insofar we strike or otherwise confront, fearful insofar we hide or run or otherwise evade, happy insofar we laugh, jump for joy, or smile. Emotions unfold in the act – they are not a succeeding felt feedback of distinct, previous reactions or activities nor a clearly separated causal entity or event prior to our actions, but acted-out engagements with the world. We outline a philosophical view of emotion that puts agency at the center. We will zoom in from a broad perspective of the socially engaged person into what one might call her active-affective ‘minimal self’, whose catastrophic erosion in conditions like severe depression lends phenomenological credibility to our proposal.

ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY SUPPLEMENT: 52, 2003

2013

Roy. Inst. Philos. Suppl., 2003

Roeser & Todd (eds), Emotion and Value (Oxford University Press), pp. 199-211, 2014

The thought that emotions play a central role in moral epistemology goes back at least to Aristotle. It is, of course, the centrepiece of various non-cognitivist theories, but has more recently been defended by cognitivists on the basis of cognitivist theories of emotion. I begin from the assumption that the passions are an important source of intuitions about reasons to act, feel, and desire in certain ways. But they can be misleading, and in ways that operate outside unawareness; they are lack transparency. One cause of this is the occurrence of defence mechanisms creating unconscious distortions in the agent’s understanding of what he feels and why. Such distortions in turn result in distortions in one's understanding of the situations to which one respond and the reasons which they furnish. Thus, moral enquiry may be aided by the deconstruction of defence mechanisms. I argue for the importance of close relationship and dialogue with others, together with specific forms of courage, self-acceptance, and compassion, as productive in this regard.

European Journal of Philosophy

Philosophy is witnessing an "Agential Turn," characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency––agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self-knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject's rational point of view on the world.

2006

This volume includes essays presented at the conference on Emotions and Rationality in Moral Philosophy held at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Bern in October 2005. The authors of this volume share the Humean insight that the ‘sentiments’ have a crucial role to play in elucidating the practice of morality. In a Humean fashion, they warn us against taking an intellectualist view of emotions and reject the rationalist account of morality.

Contemporary philosophical research on emotions has focused on their intentionality, in particular on the specific intentional work done by feeling (" feeling-towards " in Peter Goldie's positive phrasing, as opposed to a tendency to " over-intellectualize " emotions, explaining them in terms of beliefs and desires, or to reduce them to purely subjective states or qualia). But is there any satisfactory general theory of feeling, capable of putting some order into a stunning variety of affective phenomena, often piled up quite haphazardly? After discussing Goldie's approach, focusing on the relation between emotions and values, which is much discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy (§1), this paper, drawing on classic sources in phenomenological literature, provides three principles that define feeling's specific intentionality (§2). On the basis of these three principles, I attempt to outline a full-fledged phenomenology of feeling (§3), showing the crucial role played by emotional life in shaping personhood, personal identity and the foundations of practical reason. Finally, I suggest some answers to questions raised in the preceding sections, including the crucial one about the connection between two levels of affective sensibility that appear to be involved in value experience: one that is basically embodied, and one that is cognitively of a " higher " level, involved in a large variety of acts and behaviors characteristic of a rational and moral agent – such as a human being (§4).

The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency Edited By Christopher Erhard, Tobias Keiling, 2021

Phenomenology is experiencing a renaissance thanks to its powerful contributions to the embodied/enactive approach to consciousness and cognition, which has become a prominent paradigm in contemporary consciousness studies. The embodied-enactive perspective puts the perceiving subject back into the world, stressing the dynamic reciprocity between embodied agents and the environments with which they interact (Varela et al. 1991; Gallagher 2005; Hanna and Maiese 2009; Colombetti 2011; Bower and Gallagher 2013). Nevertheless, contemporary phenomenology still lacks a satisfactory overall account of normativity and rationality, up to the standards set by classic works in phenomenology (see this Handbook, Part A). This contribution aims to bridge the gap between work on the embodied mind and rational agency or personhood. The first part of the present contribution addresses the state of the art in contemporary debates. The second offers some relatively original developments toward a full-fledged phenomenology of rational agency. More specifically, the proposed theory of acts should be read as a genetic phenomenology of embodied and individualized personhood. For we are probably born to become rational agents, more or less reasonable, accountable, and morally sensible persons and we are definitely not born rational (or responsible) agents, capable of giving reasons for our actions. Still less are we born “pure” or disembodied moral agents.

The question of the nature of emotions has been a hotly debated topic since the Greeks, and its role, or lack of a role as some might put it, in our moral lives has been recognized throughout the history of ideas. From Aristotle to Hume, from William James to Alison Jaggar, and everyone in between, the desire to understand our emotions and how they affect our lives, and how they should affect our lives, remains a necessary part in our quest for not only ethics, but the nature of knowledge, social life, and consciousness. I will discuss these four areas in this paper, beginning with a look back at modern and contemporary theories of emotion, pulling especially from Alison Jaggar, then moving into my main argument about the nature of emotions as a synthesis of value-built passive attitudes and active judgments in the form of emotional experience, discussing the nature of objects of emotions, especially regarding other people, using Sara Ahmed’s concept of the “Other” to explicate my own position. Afterwards, I’ll be describing the important moral problem in human relationality of idealization, or the process by which an agent creates and lives by their idea of someone or something instead of what that person or thing is, and offer an approach to it using this definition of emotions as synthetic experience, so as to both better avoid and fight against the problem of idealization, especially through the potential of Ami Harbin’s concept of “disorientations” and Ahmed’s discussion of fear. Keywords: Emotions, Fear, Idealization, Positivism, Cognivitism, Social Constructionism, Attitudes, Judgments, Observations, Death