Emotions as Access to Religious Truths

Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers Volume 9 Issue 1 Article 5 1-1-1992 Emotions as Access to Religious Truths Robert C. Roberts Follow this and additional works at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy Recommended Citation Roberts, Robert C. (1992) "Emotions as Access to Religious Truths," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 9 : Iss. 1 , Article 5. Available at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy/vol9/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at ePLACE: preserving, learning, and creative exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers by an authorized editor of ePLACE: preserving, learning, and creative exchange. EMOTIONS AS ACCESS TO RELIGIOUS TRUTHS Robert C. Roberts Emotions such as joy, hope, contrition, and gratitude are especially fitting ways to grasp the central Christian truths. These truths claim not merely that certain states of affairs obtain (e.g. that God loves us and sent his Son to redeem us), but also that these states of affairs are important-that is, are ones it befits humans to care or be concerned about. Emotions are concernbased construals. A construal is a mental state in which an object comes into "focus," in some terms, with an immediacy like that of sense-perception (it is a "seeing-as"). Since these "terms" can be (indeed typically are, in part) propositional, emotions are propositional attitudes, ways in which propositions become part of a person's "vision." As concern-based construals, emotions are a kind of perception that incorporates concerns as one kind of term. The Christian emotions have a central and fundamental place in Christian knowledge because (a) they make essential use of the Christian propositions; (b) they are perceptions (yet without being sense perceptions), rather than mere beliefs or knowledge; and (c) they essentially embody the concerns that befit the Christian truths. No other type of mental state incorporates aJl these Christian epistemic virtues. 1. Introduction By Christian standards, what is the most fundamental or most perfect condition of mind in which to grasp such propositions as God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (II Cor. 5.19), and The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork (Psalm 19.1), and On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures (I Cor. 15.4)? One standard answer in the Christian community has been "belief." The crucial difference between Christian and nonChristian is that the former believes these truths, though it is usually added somewhere down the line that what we're really after is faith, and faith is not mere belief. A more ambitious answer is that the Christian is (ought to be) one who knows these propositions. Knowledge is a higher quality state of mind than belief; the difference is presumably that the knower of p has some warrant for p lacking to the mere believer of p. The second of the propositions above seems to resist the suggestion that mere belief might be the ideal condition of mind, because the proposition itself speaks of the heavens' declaring God's glory and the firmament show- FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY Vol. 9 No.1 January 1992 All rights reserved. 83 84 Faith and Philosophy ing his handiwork. A person who believes the heavens declare God's glory, but without ever hearing for herself that declaration from the heavens, would seem to be in an epistemically compromised position, like the color blind person who believes that the top and bottom lights on a traffic signal are in different colors but can't see that for himself. Perhaps part of what people are getting at when they make knowledge, rather than mere belief, the ideal state of mind in which to hold the Christian propositions, is something like this: the warrant they have in mind is some kind of perception of the state of affairs expressed in the proposition. The person who has heard the heavens' declaration of God's glory does not merely believe, but knows that the heavens declare the glory of God; just as the person who sees the color difference between the upper and lower lights knows that there is this difference. Of course, having seen the difference in color is not the only way a person might know that there is a difference in color. Color blind people usually know that traffic signals have different colored lights. And similarly a person might know, on authority from the saints of his community, that the heavens declare the glory of God. But still, such people are in an epistemically inferior position. It is more normal, at least in the normative sense of 'normal,' for the person who believes that the heavens declare the glory of God to hear or to have heard that declaration for himself. So it seems that neither mere belief nor even mere knowledge of the Christian propositions meets the Christian ideal. The Apostle Paul speaks of "having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which [God] has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe ..... (Ephesians 1.18-19a). He speaks as though our hearts have a mode of perception ("eyes") of their own, which gives them access to a knowledge of rich, glorious, and great things in their richness, glory, and greatness. That is, the richness, glory, and greatness are themselves perceived by the heart. Apart from such extraordinary religious experiences as visions and voices, what is Christian perception? What is it to "hear" the heavens declare the glory of God? What is it to "see" the handiwork of God in what is made? I propose that a very important and probably the central form of Christian experience is the Christian emotions: For the central truths of Christian faith, the most fundamental (normal, perfect) epistemic access· is such emotions as joy, gratitude, contrition, hope, and peace. These ground normal Christian knowledge, as contrasted with mere Christian knowledge. Just as the normal access to the proposition, "These leaves are green," is to see the leaves with one's own eyes, so the normal access to the proposition, "Jesus died for your sins," is to feel gratitude and peace and other emotions. I realize it may sound odd (to rationalist and romantic alike) to claim that EMOTIONS AS ACCESS TO RELIGIOUS TRUTHS 85 emotions are a fundamental and irreplaceable access to some truths. To empiricist rationalists, the experience of the senses is the normal access to truths; to the more Platonic, maturity of reflection is most basic; to the Kantian that most of us are, truths are accessed through a felicitous combination of theory and observation. But (it will be said) emotions belong in some other, completely non-epistemic category. A romantic (or perhaps charismatic or mystic) theorist puts great store by emotions, and might even speak of "truth" in this connection; but will fidget at my talk about "truths" and "propositions": The truths of ethics and religion and art are noncognitive, and that's the kind of "truth" that emotions can access. But I shall argue that our cardinal access to some propositions is the emotions. To make my case, I want to discuss the intentionality of emotion-how an emotion is "about" what it is about (if it succeeds in being about anything). II. The Intentionality of Emotion: Perceptual Content I'm feeling grateful to the neighbor man (A) for having covered my tomato plants on that cold night last week when I was away on business (c). On the construal account,2 this emotion consists of my construing A as having performed c benevolently-to-me-or-mine, where c produces a benefit for my tomato plants, and where one of the terms of my construal is a concern for the well being of my tomato plants and another is a desire or at least a Willingness to receive benefits from A.3 Alternatively, I construe myself as the recipient of A's benevolent performance of c, etc., or c as a benevolent performance of A for me or mine, etc. 4 Let's use the first version of this gratitude for our analysis. Th~ terms of the construal are set by 5 the following propositions: 1. A covered my tomato plants last night. 2. In covering them, A benefited my tomato plants (me). 3. In covering them, A benevolently intended to benefit the plants (me). 4. A is someone it is good for me to be indebted to. 5. The well being of the tomato plants A covered is important. These propositions set what Searle6 calls the conditions of satisfaction of the intentional state. Among the mental states for which Searle gives the intentionality in terms of conditions of satisfaction are beliefs, desires, and sense perceptions. If I believe that my tomato plants have been covered, then since belief is a truth-demanding intentional state, my belief will be "satisfied" only if this proposition is true (that is, only if the intentional state fits how things are). If I desire that my tomato plants be covered, then since desire is a fulfillment-demanding intentional state, my desire will be "satisfied" only if the covering of my plants occurs (that is, only if how things are fits the 86 Faith and Philosophy intentional state). If I see (with my eyes) that my tomato plants are covered, it is again a condition of satisfaction of the intentional state that the plants are covered. But in the case of visual perception the conditions of satisfaction are normally determined by a visual experience. Visual experiences can have different conditions of satisfaction than the subject's beliefs about what is seen. For example, when I see a stick in a pail of water, the condition of satisfaction of the visual experience is that the stick is bent; but at the same time I believe that the stick is not bent ("I don't believe my eyes"). On the construal account, a felt emotion has an intentional content analogous to that of a perceptual experience. I do not merely believe or judge to be true propositions 1-5, but these are synthesized in a construal of A, an experience of him. A comes into focus for me as having benevolently done something importantly good for me. It is a condition of satisfaction of an emotion that the "perceived" state of affairs obtains (that the propositions determining this state of affairs are true), but with a proviso analogous to the case of a sense-perception: I need not believe (all) the propositions in terms of which I construe the object or focus of my emotion. 7 Thus a person's emotions can conflict with his judgments. Often when this occurs the emotion is irrational, but it need not always be so. We do not think a person who sees a mirage is irrational; it is better, in this case, for his beliefs to conflict with his perception than it is for them to coincide. And having the visual experience characteristic of seeing a mirage does not indicate any malfunction of one's visual apparatus. Since emotions are characteristically spontaneous responses to situations, a similar non-irrational discrepancy between emotion and belief may also arise. The disposition to get angry at the misbehavior of children under the age of accountability seems to be just about as natural to human beings as the disposition to have of-water-like visual experiences in mirage-situations. Furthermore it can be defended as appropriate in terms of its importance to the moral development of children; for it is an ascription of responsibility that (in an otherwise proper setting of parent-child relationships) generates a responsibility that was not there. But the ascription of responsibility that is ingredient in anger8 is not true (let us suppose) when directed at a two-year old child. So the fully rational and virtuous parent is one who in appropriate circumstances of misbehavior feels anger at his child, while disbelieving at least one of the propositions in terms of which he construes his child when angry at her. Perhaps too there are cases of feeling Christian joy in which the subject does not (yet) properly speaking believe the operating Christian propositions. In any case, the intentionality of emotion is significantly different from that of judgments, and an important difference is that, like sense perceptions, felt 9 emotions have an experiential content that is capable of conflicting with the relevant judgments. Emotions differ from other construals in that among their conditions of EMOTIONS AS ACCESS TO RELIGIOUS TRUTHS 87 satisfaction is the condition that the state of affairs that is "perceived" has a certain value or import; for the emotion is a perception of it as having that import. Propositions 4 and 5 in the analysis of my gratitude to A claim not just the existence of a fact (that he rescued my young tomato plants from danger), but the value or weight of it (that this is an important thing to have done and that A is a good one to have done it). So if I am inordinately grateful to A for his act, because I ascribe more importance to the plants than they have, there is something "false" or unfitting about the emotion. It does not "fit reality." It fails to deliver truth. The emotion may be correct in perceiving that there was a plant rescue, but quite off base in perceiving its gravity or 'weight. On the other hand, if I fail to be grateful at all, it is probably not because I fail to notice that the neighbor has rescued my plants, but instead because I underrate (fail to care sufficiently about) the plants or his benevolence, or because I desire to avoid being indebted to him. And here again, if the plants do have a certain value or import, and A's benevolence is in fact worthy of regard, my failure to feel the emotion is a failure to "see" something about the situation. It is a case of missing truth. Let us return to our proposition, In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself. It can be a crucial term in a small variety of Christian emotions: joy, gratitude, hope, peace, compassion. Let us take peace as our example. A person will feel Christian peace when he perceives God, or himself, or the world,1O in the following terms: The world (I, we) was alienated from (in rebellion against, at war with) God 2 God has reconciled the world (me, us) to himself: we are no longer at war with him 3 The war was scandalous, despicable, miserable, wretched 4 The peace that God has established between us and himself is glorious, precious, splendid Again, sentences 3 and 4 are intended to express concerns: a negative concern or repugnance toward the alienation from God, and a positive concern or desire for the war's end. These concerns are as much terms of the construal as are the propositions asserting the existence and end of the war. Within the Christian framework it is clear that propositions 1 and 2 are not only true, but the states of affairs that obtain if they are true have the weight or importance ascribed to them in propositions 3 and 4. Since the importance of these states of affairs cannot be left out of an account of them, the truth of propositions ascribing this importance is essential to the truth of the propositions representing the states of affairs. If this is so, it would seem to follow that only a kind of perception that sees in terms of such a concern is a full grasping of such a Christian truth as that in Christ God was reconciling the world to 88 Faith and Philosophy himself. This is a truth that has to be seen with the eyes of the heart. As concern-based construals, emotions are perfectly tailored for such truthgrasping. III. Importance As an Object of Perception A standard objection is of course that states of affairs do not have importance in the way they have their other features. This difference can be stated crudely by saying that what a state of affairs is is determined solely by the state of affairs, while the importance of a state of affairs is always relative to a person or community. Importance is always importance to P, where P is a person or community. Thus what is important to one person or community may be unimportant to another; in each case what is of importance is whatever happens to be of concern to some human beings. Importance is entirely reducible to ascription of importance as embodied in the concern an individual or community has for something. Since all ascriptions of importance are thus trivially satisfied, it cannot be a condition of satisfaction of an emotion that some state of affairs has one or another importance. Emotions may be concern-based perceptions, but they do not make the kind of objective valueclaims that I say they do. I grant that importance is always importance to P, and that concerns and importances are conceptually connected. But they are not connected in the way the objection has it. It is not the case that whatever P is concerned about is actually important to P. What is important is what P ought to be concerned about, and proper concerns are about what is important. From the fact that P is concerned with x it follows only that x seems important to P, not that x is important to P. There are norms here. We criticize persons, and even societies,1I for being strongly concerned about what is relatively unimportant, and for being unconcerned about what is important. And this occurs not least in our evaluation of people's emotions: We may criticize an instance of anger not only for attributing responsibility where there is none, or offense where there is none, but also for exaggerating the importance of the offense-for being more concerned about it than its importance warrants. From the fact that the importance of something can only be fully appreciated by someone with an appropriate concern, or that improper concerns, just like proper ones, create an impression of something's importance, it does not follow that the concern is what gives importance to the thing. Further, the intentionality of most emotions makes the import of the object just as non-subject-relative as its more "factual" ascriptions. It is a condition of satisfaction of most anger that the perceived offense (itself) is important, just as it is a condition of satisfaction of the visual perception of a red apple that the apple (itself) is red. It is true that an angry person may construe the offense as important only relative to his own actual concerns. ("I know it's EMOTIONS AS ACCESS TO RELIGIOUS TRUTHS 89 of no real importance if somebody comments about the way I'm dressed, but I care about it anyway [that is, it seems important to me], and I'm mad!") But this is not universal, or even typical of anger. Typically the individual takes the offense to be important simpliciter (say, as an attack on her dignity). In some cases the offense, and thus its importance, is regarded as not even remotely connected with the angered person's private interests. If I am angry about injustices in South Africa, it is not a condition of satisfaction of my anger that this injustice is offensive to me l2 , but just that it is offensive. If somehow it turned out that importances were all relative to individuals and communities, we would have discovered in emotions a fundamentally deceiving function of the human mind. (To people who don't trust emotions anyway, this will of course come as no surprise.) Importances are of course relative, in the sense of specific, to individuals and communities as they find themselves in one or another role or circumstance. The husband of the adulterous wife is the one to whom her action is most important; it is fitting for him, and not the gossips down in the valley, to be concerned about it, and thus to experience the called-for emotions. It is the community whose high school is ravaged with cocaine that ought to be most concerned about this, because it is this community to which the issue is of present importance; to the extent that other communities are fittingly concerned with this community's problem, it is because they fittingly regard themselves as partially continuous with the first community. It is part of the analysis of importance as importance-to-P that importance is "relative" in this sense. But this fact does not at all call into question the claim that adultery and cocaine are matters of importance, quite independently of whether anybody is concerned about them. What is taken to be important will be relative to a system of beliefs (an ethic, a virtues-system, a worldview). For example, in one ethic adultery may be a very important offense, and thus warrant (or require, for proper perception) rather intense anger, while in another it may be hardly an offense at all. But this no more implies that there is no fact of the matter about the importance of adultery, than the fact that different cultures have different astronomical beliefs implies that there are no facts of the matter about astronomy. That it is important for children not to die, for people not to be gratuitously insulted, for people to have nutrition and opportunities to take up and exercise roles in the community, for certain people to create beautiful things and others to become very learned, for persons to give one another gifts and regard one another with benevolent feelings, for persons to worship their Maker and be granted forgiveness of their sins-these facts are established by the nature of the human organism and the universe in which it finds itself. Some virtuessystems may reflect a more or less distorted view of human nature, with consequent distortions in the concerns of those who assimilate it: lack of 90 Faith and Philosophy concern for some things that are important, and/or an exaggerated concern for some other things. (From a Christian point of view any system that neglects the human's status as creature will have to distort human nature to some extent, and to that extent the emotions generated in that virtues-system will be unreliable as perceptions of what is important.) A broadly Aristotelian project of investigating what it is for human beings to flourish as individuals and as communities may help decide what is (objectively) important. It will of course ascertain what is important for us as human beings, and is thus relativistic to that extent. 13 (Quite different things might be important to Martians.) But more objectivity than this we can hardly expect from "the humanities." As Christians we have another way of construing the objectivity of the important: What is important for us is what God regards as important for us. Just what this is may remain to some extent obscure to us, but at least we have a firm way of conceiving the basis of what is important (whatever in particular that is). (Some might think that this is a more solid basis for importance than mere human nature, but I think that for the Christian these really come to the same thing. God's opinions about what is important for us presumably reflect our nature, which God knows better than we do.) The Scriptures, intelligently read, provide a general guide to what is important-as it happens, a guide that ascribes great importance to some things the world takes to be unimportant (for example, love and obedience to God, and the well-being of "unimportant" people) and relatively little importance to things the world often takes to be very important (for example, wealth and personal power). As such, Christianity is a challenge and a tutor to the patterns of our emotional response. IV. The Intentionality of Emotion: Causal Condition So far I have suggested that, because an emotion is a kind of perception of whatever it is about, in terms of propositions, in which the import of those propositions is also perceived, Christian emotions are particularly well suited to playa fundamental role of access to the central Christian truths about God, the world, and ourselves. I have not stressed the role that emotions might play in justifying the Christian propositions. Instead, I've assumed that we know these propositions to be true, or at least are justified in taking them to be so. To put the point another way, I have argued that if the Christian propositions are true (and thus have the import they claim to have), emotions are the way in which that truth is perceived, and thus a crucial aspect of the highest quality knowledge of the propositions. I now raise the question of justification. Do emotions have justificatory epistemic force? Do they support, or provide grounds for, the propositions that form (part of) their terms? Does my anger at Ned for breaking my lawnmower have any tendency to show that EMOTIONS AS ACCESS TO RELIGIOUS TRUTHS 91 Ned broke my lawnmower, or that in doing so he was blameworthy, or that what he did was important to me? I hold that emotions are "perceptions," but in one way the intentionality of emotions seems to be more like that of beliefs than like that of sense perceptions. Sense perceptions have a causal condition of satisfaction: The conditions of satisfaction of my seeing a purple gerbil before me are not just that there is a purple gerbil before me, but also that that gerbil's being before me is causing me to have the visual experience I'm having. But if the gerbil's being before me is in fact causing me to have the visual experience, then there is a purple gerbil before me. Because of this causal aspect of the intentionality of sense-perception, my having a visual experience of a purple gerbil before me is prima facie grounding for the belief that there is a purple gerbil before me. This is of course not to deny that persons may have visual experiences of purple gerbils when no such thing is causing them to have the experience. I earlier urged that emotions resemble sense perceptions in having an experiential content that can be discrepant from the subject's beliefs. In the case of emotion, however, the experiential content is not a deliverance of any of the senses, and so cannot be directly ascribed to any impingement of the world on the subject's senses. Thus the causal avenue open for sense perceptions is not available here. It is not a condition of satisfaction of my belief that Ned broke my mower, that Ned's breaking my mower caused me to believe that he did. The belief is fully satisfied if in fact he did break it; the intentional content of the belief makes no claim about what caused the belief. I think that the intentionality of emotions in general is in this respect like that of beliefs: Like the conditions of satisfaction of a complex belief, those of an emotion are completely met if all the propositions which constitute its terms (including the ones about importances) are true. 14 This seems to me to be the case for the general run of emotions. Perhaps, however, some emotions do not belong to the general run, but have among their terms a proposition making a claim about the cause of the emotion. Christian doctrine does have something to say about the origin of the Christian emotions. For Christian joy, peace, contrition and gratitude are known as fruit of the Holy Spirit; the idea seems to be that God is in some especially immediate way their cause. This might, of course, be nothing but an after-the-fact explanation, and not embedded in the intentional content of the emotion. But given the intimacy, in the Christian context, between the experience of (say) joy or peace and that of the presence of God, it isn't at all implausible to suppose that in some particularly saintly instances of these emotions God's agency in causing the experiential content of the emotion is one of the things the emotion is an experience of. Such emotions will have the causally self-referential character that Searle ascribes to sense percep- 92 Faith and Philosophy tions. A brief of our example of Christian peace might now go something like this: The world (I, we) was alienated from (in rebellion against, at war with) God 2 God has reconciled the world (me, us) to himself: we are no longer at war with him 3 The war was scandalous, despicable, miserable, wretched 4 The peace that God has established between us and himself is glorious, precious, splendid 5 My experience of God (myself, us, the world) in terms of 1-4 is a result of God's present work in me Clearly, if we hold, as biblical Christians evidently do, that genuine Christian emotions are caused by God's present work in the person experiencing the emotion, then we must hold that any instance of a putatively Christian emotion would be prima facie justifying grounds for believing such other terms of the emotion as 1-4. This is not to say that every putatively Christian emotion is really one, any more than the claim that perceptions of x are in general caused by x implies that any particular putative perception of x is really caused by x. Another limitation of the analogy between emotions and sense perceptions is that the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit's work, with its embedment in persons' patterns of emotional response, is not shared by nonChristians. The belief that sense perceptual experiences are in general caused by what they are of seems to be, by contrast, a natural belief-producing mechanism in human beings, not requiring nurture, indoctrination, persuasion, or conversion. Consequently a testimony that x has been sense-perceived by a recognized honest witness tends to carry more weight with the skeptical than a testimony that God has caused someone (also a recognized honest witness) to see the world as reconciled to God. Thus the apologetic usefulness of the information accessed through the Christian emotions will be limited-though it may not be completely useless. So again we see, as we did in our discussion of importance, that while emotions may give us access to truths, they do so only within a conceptual framework. IS If emotional perceptions are to be in all respects correct, the framework supporting them must also be correct. 16 Wheaton College NOTES l. When I speak of emotions as "access" to truths, I do not have primarily in mind initial access, as though emotions are the normal way for persons to realize for the first time EMOTIONS AS ACCESS TO RELIGIOUS TRUTHS 93 what these sentences mean, or that they are true. I have in mind an ongoing access in the life of the believer. Believers can get out of touch, or have never been in touch, with the Christian truths, without failing to believe, or even know, the propositions in question. And I use the word 'access' rather than the more usual terms of epistemology such as 'warrant' or 'justification,' because I am not primarily concerned with the tendency of these experiences to support beliefs. Access to these truths both is something different from believing or knowing them, and has value in the life of the believer independently of its function of supporting belief. Emotions are states of personal being and forms of communion with God, and also with oneself, nature, and one's human fellows. However, at the end of the paper I do discuss briefly how emotions might function to warrant beliefs. 2. See my "What An Emotion Is: A Sketch," Philosophical Review, vo!' 97 (April 1988), pp: 183-209. 3. "I saw his action in terms of the benefit to my plants" or "I saw what he did as very important for me, as it was he who did it." 4. These different versions of the construal are just variants of focus, not of terms. Since an emotion-token is individuated by its terms, these are all versions of the same emotiontoken. (I take the type-token distinction to be relative; what is a token in one context may be a type in another. If one regards the distinction as absolute, then of course it doesn't make sense to speak of different versions of a token.) 5. If the construal is a construal of A (Le., A is the "object" or focus of the emotion), then every proposition that sets the terms of the construal must refer to A, at least implicitly, for each of them gives another "aspect" in terms of which A is construed. 6. Intentionality: All Essay ill the Philosophy of Milld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 7. For several years Robert Solomon has championed the thesis that emotions are judgments. I agree that many judgments are lurking in the neighborhood of virtually any emotion, but I insist on A) the distinction between the judgments and the perception (construal) that the judgments (if they be such) give rise to in the case of emotion, and B) the fact that a proposition can set up the terms of a construal without the proposition's being taken to be true-that is, without being the content of a judgment. In a recent article Solomon notes Aristotle's assertion, in the Rhetoric, that emotions are perceptions, but conflates this with his own view that emotions are judgments. "On Emotions as Judgments," American Philosophical Quarterly, vo!' 25 (April 1988), pp. 183-91. For more criticism of Solomon, see "What An Emotion Is." 8. I am, of course, assuming that one of the propositions in terms of which an angry person construes the "object" (0) he is angry at is something like o is morally responsible for x. The evidence for this is twofold. First, anger generates the desire to punish 0; angry behavior is punitive and among rational people, anyway, people are punished only for what they are morally responsible for. Second, a fully rational person who is angry can be, in the central cases, disabused of his anger by being shown that 0 is not morally responsible for x (of course 0 may be instrumentally responsible for x without being morally responsible for x). 9. Unconscious (unfelt) emotions can also conflict with our beliefs. This implies that 94 Faith and Philosophy they too have a "content" independent of our beliefs. Is there anything analogous in the case of sense-perception? Weiskrantz's subjects (see Searle, p. 47) had "blind sight," that is, through directing their eyes at objects they could characterize the objects, yet without a visual experience. Now it would seem plausible, since these patients used their eyes to perfonn this feat, to suppose that they were operating with some kind of visual "data," even though these data were not conscious. That is, it is implausible to think that nothing mental was mediating between the act of directing their eyes and their coming up with the characterization of the object. Whatever these "data" are would be the visual analog of the "data" involved in an unconscious emotion (construal). In neither the emotion case nor the sense perception case is the consciousness of the data essential to the possibility of their conflicting with the subject's beliefs. 10. Again, these are three possible foci for the same emotion. II. E.g., a "materialistic" America. 12. Nor only that it is offensive to some South Africans, either. 13. The only extended discussion of importance I know of is Jonathan Harrison's "The Importance of Being Important" (Midwest Studies ill Philosophy III [1978], pp. 221-39). His view is that "the importance of important things is dependent upon human needs and wants and concerns and interests" (p. 223), and he contrasts this with the view that "the importance of important things is roughly speaking part of the nature of things" (ibid.). Yet he does not admit that importance is always importance-to-P. Thus, when we human beings claim that something is important, we are taking it "for granted that human beings are the only intelligent sentient beings there are" (p. 239). My view places more emphasis on human needs (taken in a broad sense, certainly not limited to needs for survival) than on wants and concerns, and distinguishes actual concerns from humanly proper concerns. Thus it would not strike me as "disheartening" (p. 239) if, upon finding other and significantly different intelligent life in the universe, we had to quit saying of some things that they are simply important, and start saying that they are important to human beings. Also, there is no breach, on my view, between making importance depend on human needs, and making it part of the nature of things; the nature of human beings is, after all, part of the nature of things! 14. An emotion may have mood-creating terms that are very difficult to express in sentences. If these terms can, in principle (perhaps not in actuality) be expressed in sentences, then they can be true or false, and the above formula holds. On the other hand, if there are terms that are essentially nonpropositional, then they are also not true or false, and so that aspect of the construal will be non-intentional, which is to say that it will have no conditions of satisfaction. 15. Elsewhere I have called such a framework a virtues-system. For more on such systems, see my "Virtues and Rules," Philosophy alld Phenomenological Research, vol. 51 (June 1991), pp. 325-43. 16. This paper was read at the 1989 Wheaton College Philosophy Conference, and I would like to thank those who discussed it with me in that context, especially Steve Bilynskyj. Also, thank you to Amelie Rorty for discussing the paper with me.