On Emotions

First up, to even use the term 'emotion' is to perch barefoot and precarious upon a stalagmite that has beguiled philosophy for millennia. From Plato's Forms to Russell's Paradox about classes and to modern versions of 'qualia' that problem is about the idea that there is a thing, and then there is the idea of a thing. 'Emotion' is not itself an emotion. Modern philosophy continues to do good work on objects and ideas like 'table', 'The King of France', 'red', 'word', 'meaning', and even 'goat'; but emotion and words like 'happiness', 'regret' or 'impatience' have not received anywhere near the amount of serious attention as word relations and meanings like 'red', 'bat', or 'meaning'.

Emotions are different to things in two ways. Firstly, they are considered to be existentially different things to physical things. Secondly, they attract different judgements than do things.

But even regarding the first, there is considerable room for overlap about the way emotions and things are considered to be different things. For example, the emotion 'disgruntled' is not considered to exist in the same way as this computer, and that difference is largely to do with the perceived physicality of the different things. The computer is hard-sided and exists in space, while 'disgruntled' does not seem to have any edges, and exists not-in-space, and comes and goes, while the computer seems to obtain a certain permanency by its separate physical existence.

Yet actually the 'computer'-ness of this intricately arranged mess of plastic and wires is like an emotion I seep through the physicality of those bits and pieces that make up the computer in front of me. And the 'computer'-ness of these bits and pieces is transient. One day this computer will come apart and be a less usefully coherent tangle of wires and green boards. Being a 'computer' is the transient 'emotion' I impose on all those bits and pieces at the moment.

My 'disgruntle', while not apparently physically separate from me, has some advantages in existence not held by basic physical objects. It moves around with me. When I turn away from the computer I no longer see the computer, but my disgruntle is with me whichever way I turn. Not many physical objects have this ability to exist wherever I am, regardless of where I look (except my body itself). In this sense 'disgruntles's' existence could be more 'real' than the physical existence of the computer. Taking the analogy one step further, perhaps just as 'computer' is like the 'emotion' that defines and creates something out of the bits and pieces in front of me, perhaps the emotions I have running through the wobblier mass of my organic existence are just the same – a creating and defining set of characteristics that go toward me being. Disgruntled (or 'Human') does exist in space after all: it is to my flesh as computer is to the plastic bits in front of me. One day my body will cease to be in its current form and my disgruntled-ness will cease to happen to it, just as 'computer'-ness will cease to happen to the computer once it falls apart. After all, my body predates my consciousness and will continue to exist for some time once my consciousness ceases. I remember Joel Marks writing about this somewhere.

The point is that drawing a simple line between things and emotions and saying the difference is somehow in the existential differences between these two phenomena is problematic to say the least. Perhaps happiness happens to me in the same way as 'apple' happens to that roundish red thing over there.

But it is true that things and emotions attract judgements in different ways. We might say that table is 'bad', but what we really mean is that it does not conform with the way we wish the table to be. We don't mean the table is evil, or somehow morally delinquent. Nor do we call a table 'mopey' or 'bored'. Of the two things, we are more likely to make normative (in the ethics sense) judgements about emotions than about things. Strictly speaking, saying a table is bad is an understandable kind of non-ethical normative statement, but the crux here is that it is non-ethical. But once we understand the murkiness around the idea that emotions are non-things, as argued above, it can also seem sometimes uncomfortable to make ethically normative statements about emotions.

For example, most people would probably agree with a general statement like: 'Happiness is good'.

For me this is a pretty difficult statement to come to grips with. Firstly, there is no consensus about what 'happiness' actually means. And if we can't agree on what it is, we can hardly go adding normative descriptors to it and expecting agreement. Secondly, what does 'good' mean here? It could mean morally good, or it could just mean that it somehow feels good. Often there is a conflation of these two senses of good when it comes to feeling, well, good. Some are perhaps more comfortable with this conflation (see John Stuart Mill as an example) than others (see entire history of Catholicism as example). My point is that from an analytic point of view this conflation is probably epistemically unnecessary, even if it is morally twisty.

Of course one could theoretically necessitate 'good' with 'happiness' in a kind of Kripkean meaning-shackle, that is, define one as being necessary for the other's existence. But this would require us to either decouple normative ethical concerns from the term 'good', or else submerge all normative ethical concerns into the idea of happiness.

That is, we can either have meaningful statements like 'It's sometimes bad to be happy', or we can not. If we can that's cool, but we then have to reject the statement that 'It's good to be happy'. But if we can not have bad happiness, if we can only say 'It's good to be happy'; then (so long as we grant that sometimes people can feel good and happy about doing morally wrong things) we have to allow for there to be instances when good does not equal ethical righteousness, or else we have to define happiness as being in itself an ethically righteous thing to be, or define happy as being itself ethical righteousness, regardless of other conditions.

And that is just too slippery for me.

We know there is something that happens physically when someone says truthfully that they are happy. And if you were to concurrently ask that truthful person if they feel good, they will almost certainly answer in the affirmative. But I would posit that they are merely repeating themselves when they do so, and not taking into their sphere of current experience any ethically normative concern outside of the idea that it feels good to feel happy. They feel good, they feel happy. The person means the same thing, but they do not necessarily mean (intentionally or not) that it is good (ethically) to feel happy.

This is just an example, and it obviously revolves around the duplicitous nature of the word 'good'. But you will find that this problem occurs with many emotion words. The problem arises because we are treating emotion words, and emotions, as something other than objects. We seem to wish them a position on a ladder of meaning that we do not wish upon physical objects. We require that 'happiness' or 'boredom' have some non-physical ideal relation to a matrix of ethical or religious or philosophical ideology. This in effect treats emotions similarly to the way philosophers used to treat 'meanings', and yes I am thinking of early Wittgenstein here. It leads to similar contradictions, and yes I am thinking of Russell and of later Wittgenstein here.

Instead, we need to free emotions of their 'meanings'. It is neither 'good', nor 'bad', to feel happy. Or better: 'goodness' or 'badness' has nothing to do with 'happiness'. There is no necessary connection between good and happy, or sad and bad. Sometimes you will be happy. Sometimes you will be sad. These need no more than that in order to exist.

Thinking that they do, and saddling them and us with ideologically fraught value judgements merely confuses the issue of meaning, and causes all sorts of grief in many ways. And that's bad.