| Renovation Philosophy |
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A Theory of the Emotions
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| The Elements of Emotions An emotion is a physiological sensation [feeling] informed by a belief and expressed as a performance (which may include trying to suppress the admittance and/or overt expression of the emotion). Your emotions tell you something about the life-long ('permeate') project of being who you are in the world.1 What you are is just a fact with which you are landed, but who you are [you self] is being continually created and maintained by what you choose to do and not do with the possibilities presented to you by being in a world. What you do and don't do (your performances) is governed by your values. Your emotions, which are a way of being who you are in the world, are a fundamental way of letting the value of different facts and possibilities matter to you in different ways, and a symptom of how you are coping with having to be who you are in your circumstances. Where your health reveals how your body is coping with being in the world, your emotions reveal how your self is coping with being who you are in the world as what it is; they bring you before yourself as a person performing in the world. Emotions are not sensations that emerge from some lower irrational and 'appetitive' faculty of the soul, and lead rational adults astray from intellectual contemplation and deliberate conduct. They are a part of intellectual contemplation and deliberate conduct. All of your choices are informed by both your intelligence (which reveal facts and possibilities) and your emotions (which reveal the value of those facts and possibilities to who are being). Within this integrity, your emotions provide a frame of reference within which reasoning takes place. A person who feels good about being herself in the world will, for example, evaluate her possibilities in a way that is different from someone who feels unhappy or fearful. How well you cope with being what and who you are in the world does not emerge from your facts but from the value that your facts have for being who you are in the world (i.e., your situation). Your emotions are being-towards this value in a way that both reveal and express it. You enjoy valued states of affairs, treasure valued memories, and desire the actualisation of valued possibilities. You are bored with states of affairs that are not valued, you fear threats to you, and are ashamed of memories that have negative value for what you would like to believe about your own value as a person. You are always enacting some sort of emotional being-towards the reality of being who you are, and have been, in the world. You may, for instance, be powerless to change the past, but you still have to take some sort of attitude towards it: it pleases you, embarrasses you, bores you. This attitude shows (a) the value which you attach to various facts and (b) you how you are coping with the reality of the past that you are carrying with you towards the future. An emotion integrates:
There is a theory of ethics, called 'Emotivism,' which argues that ethics emerge from emotions. The emergence relation is actually the other way around. Being angry, indifferent, or pleased, emerge from, and express, your ethics because the beliefs from which emotions emerge always signify the value/relevance that a state of affairs has to who you are being in the world. For example, anger and anxiety emerge from a belief that a valued fact is under threat from a possibility; sorrow, grief and resentment emerge from a belief that a valued fact has been lost, joy from the belief that it has been or is being gained, desire from a belief that a fact is valuable, despair from the belief that a valued fact is unattainable and hope from the belief that it may yet be actualised.7 In all such cases, the value in question is to the emotional performer; you fear for the value of those objects - persons, animals, environments, states of affairs, etc - which matter to who you are being. These emotions do not found the values (as emotivists argue); they reveal and express them. Indeed, what you feel is probably the most telling measure of your actual values, so taking proper account of your emotions allows a greater role for reality in your personal ethics. An ethical system based solely on intellectual calculations can hide your actual values from you. Masking your emotions before others is easy, but asking yourself what you really feel, underneath your mask, can be a revealing ethical exercise. Each kind of emotion uncovers a way in which a situation can matter; sadness reveals that it is saddening, joy shows that it is joyful, boredom reveals that it is boring, and so on. More than this, however, our emotions let facts matter to us. This 'letting an emotion be' is integrated with the aspect of being a person which is concerned with objects as possible assets or obstacles to the project of being who you are in the world. Emotions don't make assets valuable but let them be valuable; the love you feel for a lover, for instance, doesn't make the lover valuable but lets her or him be valuable to you in a fully personal way. Similarly, the intellectual evaluation of a possibility as a threat is not enough, in itself, to let the threat be fearsome. It is the feeling of fear that not only reveals the fact to have the value of being fearsome but lets it be fearsome; the emotion lets the fact be a situation [an integrity of fact and value]. Evidence of this can be found in the way that folk so often feel embarrassed at the memory of how they performed when emotionally aroused. If you feel foolish at the way you performed when you were angry or in love or whatever then the feeling of foolishness reveals that you are no longer letting the object matter to you in the way that it did; if it still had the same value then you would still feel the same emotion. Emotions not only inform our reasoning, and show how we are faring in the world, many emotions are instrumentally valuable - sympathy for suffering, guilt at having done wrong, delight in beauty, love of kin, fear of dangerous situations, and so on. But there is more to emotion even than this ethical or aesthetic usefulness. Emotions are ways of being a person in the world which can both enrich our engagement and impoverish it. Fear, envy, or grief, can darken our world and blight our lives; anticipation, love, sympathy and hope, enrich our world. It is right to speak of these emotions as enriching 'the world' because they make facts real and alive, they make beauty possible, good better, and evil worse. Emotions, in other words, help make the impersonal universe into a world fit for persons to live in. Emotional Inauthenticity It is easy to misunderstand emotions because we normally contemplate them retrospectively and, in that case, we 'stand back' from them to focus on our memory of the physiological experience. If you do this then you will almost certainly mistake the experience for the emotion. This can lead you to overlook the fact that an emotion is a way of being who you are in the world. Desiring something, for example, is not a matter merely of feeling desire but of engaging your body and intellect with the object as desirable. Standing back from the desire, by contemplating it as a physiological sensation, dissociates you from this engagement; the 'thingish' appearance of the feeling covers up the 'performal' reality of the emotion (i.e., the fact that emotions are not things that happen to you but ways of being a person in the world).8 Often, in such cases, you can feel foolish about how you performed at a time precisely because the performal reality of the emotion, and thereby the value of the desired object, is absent from contemplation.9 The traditional assumption, that emotions are human feelings which happen to us, rather than a cultural/natural performance of persons, appears to receive support from discoveries about the rôle played in human behaviour by genetics, evolution, hormones and brain chemistry. But the belief that emotions emerge untutored from our human biology seriously underestimates the rôle that personhood cultures - in the form of moral, factual, religious, social, and political narratives - play in our emotions. Ignoring the cultural aspect of emotional arousal/depression is not only inadequate for any proper understanding of human emotion, it also has the effect of giving away responsibility both for what emotions we experience and for what we do under their influence. Responsibility-avoiding narratives are attractive to humans, but the fact remains that emotions are learned performances which are variously justified or not, variously rational, irrational, appropriate or inappropriate (see below). Human emotions are a complex integrity of evaluation, physiological events, and performances, which occur when the emotional performer - a person with a character, cultures and history - encounters an object of attention that is relevant to who he or she is being in the world. It is the performer's evaluation of the object which determines which feeling-and-performance set is likely to follow. In many cases, this evaluation is immediate, incomplete, and highly biassed by habit and/or expectation. Normally, which feelings and performances follow any particular evaluation is largely pre-established by cultural conditioning, habit, world view, and other beliefs. For example, it is almost certain that any human suddenly encountering an unfamiliar animal in an unfamiliar setting would evaluate the encounter as at least potentially dangerous. This evaluation would provide a reason-for-performing fearfully. This fear would immediately entail a series of physiological changes and reasons for performing; a series which amounts to a highly compressed packet of culturally informed responses to dangerous possibilities. That is why if the emotional object was a Cape Buffalo and the performer was an armed Big Game hunter then he would probably face the danger in hope of bagging a trophy. If the performer was an unarmed shopper in a suburban car park then he would most likely get back into his car double-quick. Both performers may, however, respond inappropriately; the hunter may 'freeze' with fear while the shopper may experience an admiration for the beast which stops or delays his attempted escape from danger. We have little authority over what we feel in such circumstances. We do have some authority over what we do with the feeling; neither hunter nor shopper has to stand or run away. But where we have most authority is over ∙ the habits by which we institute various associations of feeling and performance in response to various situations and ∙ the narratives and ideological assumptions which underwrite those associations as appropriate. It is by exercising our control over these narratives and habits that we make our emotions appropriate. The moment of actually facing a large wild animal is probably not the best time to address these issues but, at more opportune times, an armed hunter who froze, or an unarmed shopper who didn't experience fear, could challenge the assumptions and modify the habits making it normal for each to behave in inappropriate ways when confronted by certain kinds of object. If my analysis of being a person has been broadly accurate then authentic person would necessitate being aware that your self is not a genetic, social, or economic, given but a continually changing output of doing what you value and avoiding what you don't value. Most humans are inauthentic because we let facts dictate our choices and, therefore, the kinds of selves we are actualising; members of our community do thus so we do thus. This applies to our emotions; it is politically fashionable to like A, be offended at B, want C, and so on, so we like A, are offended at B, and want C. This is attractive because it hides us from the anxiety of being responsible for choosing who we are being-towards, but it is inauthentic because it treats personhood as thingish rather than performal. We can choose to live authentically if we are willing to think for ourselves and accept the responsibility from which we normally turn away by pretending that it is our facts, rather than our values, which dictates who we are. Part of being authentic is living by the understanding that we are not other-governed things but self-governing performers; we are, in other words, inescapably free. Part of authentic self-government would be integrating appropriate emotions with integrity-respecting reason and an understanding of the performal character of being a person. An appropriate emotion would be one that ∘ integrates the various components of an emotion identified above, and ∘ is integrated with both your self-story and your permeate project. Emotions that lack various kinds of integrity are those which are unfounded, mistaken, unreasonable, misdirected, irrational and/or ethically inappropriate. A particular emotion emerges from a belief that there does or will exist an object with a certain character at which the emotion is directed. It is not difficult to be mistaken about this belief. If so, the emotion in question may not be irrational but would be unfounded (if the object does not exist) or mistaken (if the object exists but you misperceive or misconceive its character). An emotion is unfounded if the emotional object is believed to exist when it does not exist in fact. Fear of racial or religious 'bogeymen,' or of political and/or economic conspiracies when no group of conspirators exist in the way imagined, are common examples of unfounded emotions. Unfounded emotions arise from political imaginings, illusions, delusions, hallucinations or drug-use, and religious or mystical engagements with non-existent gods, demons, angels, extraterrestrials, etc. Someone who experiences religious awe kneeling before a supposed representation of Moloch, for example, although not engaging with any real personage, is in a different position from someone suffering a perceptual delusion.10 Although genuine perceptual delusions are fairly rare among normal humans, a belief in the existence of objects which do not in fact exist are, and have always been, common. The majority of humans have, at one time or another, experienced strong emotions directed at various gods, monsters, malign or benign spirits, that do not exist out side of human imaginings. Many otherwise irreligious folk also experience strong emotions towards beings who, although they exist, do not possess the attributes which inform the emotions. Think of the adoration given to Princess Diana or Adolf Hitler; one superficial, one malignant, both manipulative, and both at one time objects of quite excessive and inappropriate emotions. I think of these emotions as mistaken rather than unfounded because the emotional object does exist but without the character attributed to it by the emotional performer. Mistaken emotions emerge not only when you misconceive an emotional object, as above, but also when you misperceive it in some significant way. While walking home in bad light, for example, you may mistake a bush for someone lurking in the shadows and experience a stab of fear. This fear is mistaken only because if the bush had been perceived more clearly then it would not have been an object of fear. The feeling is not unfounded because the bush exists. It is not irrational because there are certain shapes, spatial relations, arrangements of light and shade, and so on, in the bush, which justified you mistaking it for someone lying in wait. There was something 'there', its just that its real character gave rise to the false belief that it had a different character to that which it had in fact. It is the false belief that it has these latter attributes which is the immediate cause of your perceiving it with fear. There are cases when a belief is true, or at least well founded, but the emotional reaction is unreasonable: you may, for example, overreact to a correctly perceived minor threat or perceive that the danger is great but feel no or little fear. These, perhaps, are failures of concentration; in the first case you concentrate your thoughts on the object to an extent that is not warranted by the situation, in the second the degree of concentration falls short of what is warranted. In ordinary conversation, the term 'unreasonable' is normally applied to the first of these cases but not to the second. This might be because the second is fairly easy to confuse with bravery. But both come equally under the heading of 'unreasonable' emotions. A common character of unreasonable emotions is their use as a weapon. Folk who use indignation to promote violence or anger to inhibit dissent, for instance, are being unreasonable in the literal sense of using something other than reason to shore-up a political position. Also among the unreasonable emotions are those misdirected emotions which are being-towards the wrong object. It is, for example, a commonplace of our addiction to violation that we want to hit out at someone who hurts us. It is also a commonplace of our political structures that we cannot get at those 'above' us in hierarchy who are usually the main source of insult and injury. We therefore hit out at what we can - which is usually someone 'below' us on hierarchy. This trickle down effect is a common, and unreasonable, source of the contagion of violation.11 The anger we feel towards those we inappropriately lash out at is unreasonable through being misdirected. Other misdirected emotions occur when someone falls in love with a therapist, doctor or nurse, or when someone lavishes love on a pet, a possession, a doll, teddy bear, grave site, shrine or god, as a substitute for a love that she or he is afraid of, has lost, or otherwise maintains an irrational or painful relationship with. An emotion is irrational if ∙ someone's self-story clashes with her permeate project ∙ she is abnormally resistant to the kinds of considerations that would usually lead her to correct the belief or beliefs informing the emotion (a situation which usually means that a political consideration is at work somewhere), or ∙ correcting the belief fails to change the emotion appropriately (a situation which indicates a dis-integrity between the permeate project and self-story). So say, for example, that someone feels that he is repulsive to others because of a disfigurement. If the disfigurement is removed by cosmetic surgery, and he continues to feel repulsive, then his emotion is irrational. A less extreme example would be if someone covets a particular job opportunity as a way of finally proving that he is better than a sibling, but believes that he desires the job because it will better enable him to serve the community. This second belief may be entirely true; it's just that this belief is not, in fact, the one informing his feeling about the job. In this case it can be seen that the rationality or irrationality of an emotion emerges from the relation between its causes [the permeate project] and the beliefs that are taken to justify it [the self-story]. Irrational emotions can sometimes be appropriate to the situation in which they occur; an irrational paranoia can be accidentally appropriate if someone is conspiring to harm the paranoiac. An emotion can also be inappropriate when there is no irrationality; a rationally justified emotion may, for example, be stronger or weaker than is appropriate, or it may be out of harmony with other emotions that are appropriate. Misdirected anger (above) is an example of an emotion that is ethically inappropriate. Feelings of hatred or mistrust towards a despised moiety are also ethically inappropriate because, although they impact on actual persons, they are informed by narratives about a semi-mythical moiety rather than actual persons. Unreasonable emotions can also be ethically inappropriate either in kind or degree. The degree of anger that would be ethically appropriate towards someone who attacked one of your children, for example, might well be inappropriate to someone who stole a flower from one of your shrubs. It should be noticed that an emotion which is mistaken may nevertheless be ethically appropriate to its object as that object is misconceived or misperceived. If you mistakenly believe the wrong person to be the one who rescued your child from drowning then it is still ethically appropriate for you to react to that person with gratitude. Emotions and Politics. The reason that human persons are overwhelmingly inauthentic (and the same reason that we are given to violence), is our ancient and inherited addiction to the politics of hierarchy. Politics are all about social status, and the fact that humans are universally addicted to politics is evidenced by the way we all, and always, 'stack' relationships so that ∙ some persons, and objects, are more parent-like than others, ∙ parent-likeness in persons in measured by the power to violate, and ∙ parent-like things and person are valued more than less parent-like things and persons. If human ways of being persons in the world are political then we should expect that our emotional repertoire will reflect this. A typical example of a bad feeling turned vicious by politics is fear of failure. To fear failure is to fear the loss of a desired value which you are endeavouring to actualise. Because all human projects are being-useful-towards actualising a valued fact - a successful hunt or harvest, a promotion, a qualification, respect, love, wealth, the winning of a game, and so on - we normally fear failure to some extent. As translated within a parent/not-parent (P/not-P) politics, however, to fail in any project is further read as indicating a general failure to be a significant person. In a cultural environment where virtually your whole worth as a person is vested in being 'P' by some political calculus, this adds enormously to an otherwise ordinary and justified fear. A further fear, informed by a politically-conditioned fear of failure, is that of 'losing face'. In a hierarchy, popularity and rank are highly valued. To perceive ourselves as unpopular and without rank (not-P) are occasions for misery and unhappiness, while being rejected by a group altogether is felt to be one of life's disasters. Many human emotions and performances can be understood in terms of these facts. It explains, for example, why gaining rank is associated with elation (feeling good) while losing rank is associated with humiliation (a bad feeling). This, in turn, explains the kind of mania associated with winning trivial competitions, such as arguments, games, elections, or sports contests. When so much significance is loaded onto even trivial competition then our elation as not losing rank, even vicariously, can be expected to issue in our rejoicing just as if we had done something valuable or clever. Some emotions are almost entirely political - envy, being offended, or feeling insulted, for instance - but even otherwise prosaic emotions can turn vicious when over-defined by politics. If, for example, you are to maintain a sense of significance in political terms then you must avoid failure at any cost. You can do this either in fact or by making sure that any blame attached to failure is pointed away from you. Because you can never be sure of escaping failure in fact, you must be constantly engaged in making sure that you have a blame/excuse advantage in your relationships with other folk. Indeed, the most successful leaders, in virtually all human endeavours, are normally those who are or have been best able to take undeserved credit and avoid deserved blame. This constant political manoeuvring is being-useful-towards inauthenticity and the violation of integrity (lying, cheating, disparaging rivals, and so on), but most of us do it automatically and all the time without even being aware that we are doing so. The basic fear, that emerges from political notions of about what it is to be a significant or insignificant person, is that of being not-P (or at least of not being P). Part of our addiction to politics is neglecting the significance we already and necessarily have, just by being persons, in favour of being-towards a counterfeit significance defined for us by status. If significance is vested in being P then to be not-P is to be insignificant; a 'natural' and deserving victim. Being P is a belonging defined by ever-shifting rituals and tokens of belonging such as fashions in jargon, taste, clothing, possessions, and attitudes. To not keep up with the latest P fashions or jargon (to not be P) is all it takes for us to slide into be not-P - we are either in fashion, up-to-date and 'in the know', or we are nobodies. Being P is rewarded, being not-P is punished; being P feels good, being not-P feels bad. And we will go to a lot of trouble to turn away from feeling bad. Our fear of being not-P is a conditioned political fear which distorts all our other fears. It exacerbates the addict's normal fear of reality and of life. Other fears, conditioned on our fear of contingency by a political fear of being not-P, are a fear of dependency, a fear of fear, a fear of freedom, and of guilt. These fears overlap, and one reason for this is that all of these fears emerge from our fear of contingency under the same political commitment. Humans have, for example, survived and flourished by co-operation. But reliance on others, and their reliance on us, creates a dependency. Dependency is a child-like, rather than parent-like, state and, to the extent that you are political, the child-like state of dependency on others is a weakness, a vulnerability to be feared. If the popular theories of evolution were right then it could be expected that the significance of co-operation to our survival would have led to humans evolving reliability. In fact however, and as is normal for addicts, humans are chronically unreliable. It is not surprising therefore that fear of dependency haunts us. The traditional political mistrust of love, for instance (manifest in both patriarchal and feminist literature), emerges from the recognition that letting another inside our emotional 'armour' makes us vulnerable to uses of power by someone who is at least as addicted to violating integrity as we are. This fear extends even to fearing our own fears and weakness. Political narratives tend to repeat the same 'either P or not-P' violation of integrity at both social and personal levels. Social relationship implies a dependence on others; the unreliability of others is consequently a source of fear that is variously dealt with trying to control others while simultaneously trying not to rely on them too much. Personal self-reliance invokes a similar fear that our own needs, fears, desires, and weaknesses, could let us down. Being parent-like is valued by us, however we define it, because we are conditioned to believe that only the parent-like aspects of us determine our significance as a person. The parent-like self is threatened on all sides - not only by various rivals, and whatever reality escapes our control, but also by our own needs, fears, and uncertainties. Under the logic of dichotomy, all that is not P opposes P, so our non-parental aspects must be an enemy threatening us. Hence the fear-driven compulsion to overcome all that is not an aspect of the parental character. When our conditioned fear of being not-P meets with our addictive fear of responsibility then we exacerbate our normal fear of freedom. This fear is not only of our own freedom, and the addict's normal a fear of the responsibility which freedom entails, but also a fear of what others may do with their freedom, which, in turn, generates our fear of differences and our compulsion to both conform and compel conformity. Politics conditions us to fear differences as a threat to community. Politics also condition us to vest our significance in overcoming. This is why conformists and non-conformists alike are always trying to overcome difference with some kind of uniformity in order to politically secure our own values. Humans compulsively treat others as ethical children where possible or, if we have not the power to achieve that, we let ourselves be overcome by others as ethical parents. This cheats us of both difference and sameness as freely chosen vehicles of significance. Differences between ourselves and others - and/or between aspects of our own personhood such as emotion and intellect, fears and hopes, and so on - are real within a larger web [sameness] of relationships integrating character and community, hope and fear, emotion and intellect, and so on. Dichotomy violates these relationships, over-defining differences antagonistically, and replacing the links between them with gaps. Thus, under a political ethic, we try to 'overcome' our separation from others while, at the same time, hiding within a conceptual estrangement between ourselves and others that is created out of natural separation by the very politics we are using to overcome it. This estrangement makes our fear of others much worse and, basically, fear + politics = violence. As could be expected from parentocentric ideologies, our religious and political narratives exploit fear (and guilt) in a manner that actually makes us even more fearful. Our fear that chaos is the only alternative to parent-like control is part of this. The problem of human violation lies not in the mere fact of our being violent but in our conditioned compulsion to violate all integrity, including our own ethical and intellectual integrity, under the fear-driven and self-fulfilling illusion that violating integrity is the only way to be safe, strong and significant. It is this fear-driven compulsion to secure the ethical space for ourselves that drives our compulsion to impose our tastes, preferences and politics on others. Moreover, to the extent that we are ethically insecure, we are fearful enough of our own uncertainty only to violate others in an effort to secure our own need for significance. Parent-playing is a fear-driven attempt to secure political dominance as a way of suppressing our awful awareness that our values are uncertain. To the parent-player, uncertainty is not-P and must be overcome. This is being-useful-towards inauthentic self-government Emotional Suffering. Unpleasant emotions, although sometimes extremely unpleasant, are as much a normal part of being a person in the world as are pain or fear. A great many philosophies of life ∙ consider happiness to be the measure of a worthwhile life and ∙ invest happiness in turning away from bad feelings. I am not sure of this because the best way to be happy is to not be a person. Self-deception, self-righteousness, drug use, belonging, and various religious or 'mystical' techniques, are normal and enduring human ways of doing this. I am, however, deeply suspicious of any projects that invest living a worthwhile life, as a person thrown into a world, by trying not to live the life of a person thrown into the world. It is partly for this reason that I equate living a worthwhile life with being an authentic person in the real world. Although I don't like bad feelings, I am not convinced that I should equate living authentically with turning away from them. As with suffering, what seems to matter more is why I feel bad and what I do with my bad feelings. Guilt, grief, or anger, that is 'taken out' on innocent victims, for example, is irrational enough that an authentic person would probably want to do something about whatever politics is feeding the violation. Seriously disturbing bad feelings can also be symptoms of a dis-integrity in a person's way of life that needs to be addressed. But fear of the unknown, for instance, has been and is an important survival trait of human persons, especially given that curiosity is such a valuable and dangerous part of being in the world (given two equally inquisitive persons, the one made cautious by fear of the unknown is far more likely to survive and reproduce than is the other). Similarly, a fire fighter who remains appropriately fearful of fire, and performs his assigned tasks well in spite of that fear, is going to be of far less danger to his colleagues than is one who has become fearless through familiarity. Perhaps more to the point, you can be open to pleasant feelings, such as love or joy, only to the extent that you are open to unpleasant feelings such as grief or sorrow. The alternative to bad feelings is not good feelings but no feelings [apathy] - and that is a way of death rather than a way of life. Living authentically demands feeling; good and bad. In my present society apathy is thought of as an ethical and/or psychological failing but, if given the name 'serenity', the same kind of emotional indifference is admired as some kind of success. Serenity is a kind of 'upper class' (P) way of turning away from emotional discomfort that is much acclaimed as valuable by supposedly spiritual people. Because persons actualise their possibilities in a world which they inherit, performing authentically as a person entails being concerned with the world. Serenity is achieved precisely by not being concerned with the world. It is, rather, a calculated indifference; a kind of happy apathy (literally a-pathy or 'having no passions'). Serenity is therefore contrary to living the life of an authentic person in the real world. Emotional Self-government The common belief that emotions are non-rational reduces emotional self-government to 'overcoming' the feelings that threaten to your 'grown up' self-control and social restraint. This is the traditional, and still majority, view of the emotions and explains why, for instance, humans tend to think of someone who acts badly in a passion as less reprehensible than someone who performs the same way 'in cold blood'. However, the discovery that our emotions reveal what we believe about the relevance [value] of certain facts and possibilities to who we are being, reveals that we are governing our emotions to the extent that our emotionally-relevant beliefs emerge from the life-value of who we are choosing to be. Consider, by way of illustration, a common occasion for violating integrity. Members of a not-P moiety are not getting their own way because the political projects by which citizens access power in their society are slow and resistant to change. It is normal, in such situations, for frustration and anger to 'build up' (i.e., to be built up) until it erupts in various and serious violations of integrity. The perpetrators of these violations then disown their own violence by claiming that their opponents 'drove us to it' or 'left us no choice' so that it is 'their' fault that 'we' had to go to extremes, and so on and so on. It is, of course, normal for those addicted to violation to dress up projects of self-aggrandisement in moral clothing. But it is misleading to talk as if frustration or anger can somehow 'build up' and 'erupt' of their own accord when, in fact, they are cultivated and chosen by persons. No one 'has' to go to extremes; extremes are chosen. This is not to say that anger is never justified, but blaming your feelings for 'getting the better of me' is a way of turning away from responsibility for how you perform and is therefore a way of living inauthentically as a person. Anger, for example, is not a boiler that is made safer by 'letting off steam'. It, like all emotions, is a chosen way of being a person which becomes habitual if indulged. This matters because part of human normality is the life-long cultivation of emotional habits such as anger and 'righteous' indignation which make violation both seem justified and feel good. Unlike non-persons, humans always choose whether to react violently or not - and we always choose according to our values. Talking as if anger is some sort of external force that overcomes you, and/or justifies violation at the expense of those who 'made' you angry, is a dishonest device for not taking responsibility for the fact that you cultivate anger at certain situations for the value that being angry has for you in those situations.12 Your feelings not only express your beliefs and values but also reveal them. You feel love or fear or envy or hope only because you value some actual or possible state of affairs in terms of its significance to who you are choosing to be-towards. The emotion reveals that value. To the extent that you are being authentic, you can expect to experience emotions that fit with your both permeate project and self-story. If there is an inconsistency here then you may well be failing to integrate who you believe you are [your self-story] with who you are really being-towards [your permeate project]. In such a case what you feel is the more reliable revealer of what values you really hold. So if, for instance, you claim to be uninterested in status, but still feel insulted by certain remarks made to or about you, then your emotional discovery of who you are will be more reliable than any avowal to the contrary. Cultivating Emotional Authenticity. Our addiction to politics means that humans normally cultivate an enthusiasm for being offended. If someone is going to be offended because you don't applaud their prejudices then that is their problem. If, however, you assault, rob, or rape, someone then they are going to feel bad - and you know that before you act. Performing, in the knowledge that your performance is going to have an emotional outcome, makes you responsible for the outcome of that performance. So, although what other folk feel is still a function of their beliefs and values, the belief, that you bear no responsibility for what others feel, is not entirely true. Neither is the belief that you are not responsible for your own feelings. It is true that persons experience feelings as something that happens to us, but these emotions emerge from beliefs and values - and it is what they reveal about those beliefs and values that is issue for authenticity. Say, for example, that you experience an 'overwhelming' desire to possess someone else's house, land, and life style. It might be thought in such a case that this desire is a feeling that threatens your self-government. But the case is not as simple as that because what you feel is a measure of the ∙ values that you are choosing for yourself and ∙ cultural character that you have been cultivating for yourself. You are not a victim of desire but have chosen, and am cultivating, a covetous attitude towards someone else's property because doing so serves your chosen permeate project (which, in turn, emerges from your life-value). Values have to be, and are, chosen and, to the extent that you are responsible for your values, and are free to change them, you are ∙ responsible for the emotions that express and reveal those values, and ∙ able to change your feelings by re-cultivating who you are choosing to be-towards. It is not any fact about you that makes you covetous. Covetousness is a political emotion. If you are threatening your own self-government by cultivating a political emotion, and want to change that, you can cultivate a less threatening emotion in its place by modifying your life-value. If you don't want to modify your life-value then you affirm your chosen commitment to, and thereby responsibility for, the politics of covetousness. It takes little self-discovery to be aware that you are, in fact, conditioning yourself towards some life-value with every choice you make. You are, for example, becoming more or less kind just by performing more or less kindly every time you encounter a possibility for being more or less kind. Both kindness and unkindness are cultivated over time, and which you are cultivating is making a difference to the world. Because what you feel reveals which values you have built into who you are, to an authentically kind person kindness would be emotionally satisfying, and to an authentically honest person dishonesty would be emotionally distasteful. So, once again, what you feel is a reliable revealer of your cultural character and engagement with the world. Living the life of an authentic person is not about how you appear to others (a political consideration) but about how you are being yourself. Emotional displays are easily faked for the sake of others, but faking the emotions themselves is another matter. So if you want to actualise, say, a compassionate personhood then you can know that you are getting there when you begin to feel compassion in the appropriate circumstance. If you do not feel the appropriate emotions then you can justifiably assume that there is a cultural or natural dis-integrity somewhere in your permeate project and/or character; fooling others is easy, but the reality of what you feel makes it that much harder to fool yourself. Given how skilled at self-deception human persons have made themselves, this is precious. By compressing your evaluations into habitual responses, emotions provide a kind of inertial guidance system or inbuilt 'ethical compass'. What you are doing, as you cultivate various emotions, is 'tuning' your ethical compass. This is why it is important to take clashes between reason and feeling seriously - but it is also why you should not simply let your feelings be your guide. Because of your addiction to violation, and the influence of being-with other folk, your emotions are a compass that is substantially tuned by political inputs. Even in only moderately violent societies, emotions are cultivated in way that lend themselves to continuing the violence. In such cases, the emotional compass is in need to correction from careful and honest reasoning. Doing this always contributes to authenticity no matter what the output. It is true that you have little or no control over what you feel at the time of feeling it.13 You do, however, have editorial control over the narratives which inform your emotional repertoire. Human persons internalise all kinds of narratives long before we are aware that we have. These myths are typically political, fragmentary, internally inconsistent, and can be seriously at odds with living authentically. We cannot do much about what was fed us as children but, as adults, we do have the ability, and responsibility, to question our paradigm narratives - to challenge them, discard or re-narrate them according to reliable discoveries of the truth (truth being more valuable to authenticity than any falsehoods). Part of this editing process involves weeding out of your conditioned beliefs any which clash with more reliably justified beliefs. A harder part involves cultivating an honesty which discourages unreliable beliefs from flourishing in the first place. In some societies more than others, but in all societies to some degree, humans force-feed each other a cultural diet of politics, violence, and inauthenticity. If you are going to live authentically then you have to accept your responsibility for your cultural diet. It is easy to find parent-players [commentators, experts and the like] who will point out or impute ideological bias to TV programmes, movies, news media, and the like. All such commentators are themselves politically biassed and see or attribute only ideological competition; the racist will see the racism of other races in even the most innocuous events, Leftists will see Rightist propaganda everywhere, the homosexual will see 'gay bashing' by heterosexuals, and so on. No such political criticism of any cultural phenomenon will be anything but one more move in the same old game. So if You are going to live authentically as a person then you need to learn to trust your own cultural/natural integrity, to pay attention to what is being sold by the music you listen to, the books you read (or don't read), the schools you attend, entertainments you watch.14 Some emotions (e.g., feeling appreciated or unappreciated, pride, shame, envy, resentment) are plainly political. Others (e.g., anger, hate, indifference) have a political component. If, as I argue, political thinking helps keep humans inauthentic as persons then cultivating political emotions is inimical to living the authentic life of a person in the world. Because emotions are informed by values, emotional authenticity needs ethical insight. Emotionally sensitive folk do seem more likely than most to be aware of the ethical character of the various situations that they encounter (much as those who cultivate a sensitive palette are better able than others to perceive the various characters of food or wine). But emotional sensitivity in itself is not necessarily authentic. Many folk, for example, are emotionally moved by other people's suffering only to empty avowals of sorrow and/or turning away from what they perceive because it distresses them. This kind of dis-integrity sits ill with the kind of personhood that I associate with authenticity. Authentic persons would surely need to integrate their ethical evaluations with appropriate emotions and vice versa because, as always, it is cultivating an integrity of both, rather than either one at the expense of the other, that promises to increase authenticity.
NOTES 1. This life-long project is called 'permeate' because being-towards one kind of self or another permeates every choice you make for as long as you live. Because at least some choices are open to you for as long as you can function, your self [who you are] is never settled; you are never being some kind of self-thing but always being-towards who you will be after your next choice is made. 2. Some non-human animals appear to experience sensations and exhibit emotional behaviour. However, and because emotions involve beliefs about a fact, only animals capable of forming beliefs about facts - a skill which requires culture - can be in the world emotionally. So a cow, for example, will experience physiological stress (a sensation) when being attacked, but only persons can be anxious (an emotion) about the possibility of being attacked. 3. Every choice that persons make emerges from the value that they place on the possibilities actualised by that choice. All of the values that you put on your possibilities emerge from your life-value; that is, your basic choice of what kind of person you are being-towards. You may, for example, value both honesty and economic success (along with any number of other possibilities). If you normally sacrifice honesty to the possibility of economic success, when the two clash, then success is primary. The reason why you value economic success over honesty (i.e., why you value being-towards being a successful self rather than an honest self) will be your life-value. If you have any reason for preferring one value over another then that reason is not your life-value but points towards your life-value. Your life-value itself is freely chosen just because you ∙ must choose some value and ∙ are choosing this one. So if, for example, you value economic success because it makes you feel important, but you value being important because 'that's just the way it is' then feeling important (a very common value) is your life-value (i.e., the kind of value that you would call 'foundational' if being who you are had a foundation). 4. This integration can be dis-integrated in various ways. In some cases, for instance, being aware of the physiological affects of an emotion can dissociate us from the feeling; a scared person, for example, may deal with his fear by focussing on his heart rate and other physical symptoms. The feelings normally associated with an emotion can have non-emotional causes; a feeling of euphoria, for instance, can be induced pharmaceutically, or a feeling of irritability can result from a digestive disturbance or lack of sleep. In these cases, because there is no belief integrated with the feeling, we are dealing with a physiological sensation rather than an emotion as such. Physiological changes can also be brought about by drugs, injury and/or illness. These changes can invoke the sensations associated with emotions but, again, unless there is an emotional object and an emotion-informing belief there is no actual emotion. That is why feelings brought about by drug use or 'mystical' techniques that disturb our bodily chemistry, are not emotions but merely sensations. One reason why folk confuse induced physiological sensations with emotions is because emotions are normally informed by beliefs about an object, and we will go looking for, or even create, an emotional object if one is missing. So if someone is on a 'high' through drug use, fasting, Dionysian, Pentecostal or yogic techniques, then that person will tend to 'point' that high at some object - a loved one, 'spiritual union' or whatever. Similarly, if someone is experiencing the sensations normally associated with anxiety or fear, for purely physiological reasons, then that person will tend to look for and, if necessary, invent a plausible object and accompanying narrative to justify and explain the sensations. That is why one of the useful ways of treating mood disorders such as anxiety attacks, depression or paranoia, is for the sufferer to learn how to differentiate the symptoms of the disorder from ordinary belief-caused emotions. 5. Your cultural community probably determines the normal range of emotions which you experience. If, for example, you live in a typically politicised human community then 'losing face' can be emotionally devastating whereas, in an apolitical community - if such a thing existed - you would feel nothing. 6. This entails that the subjective experience of feeling certain emotions is itself part of an objective understanding of persons. This perhaps is a flaw in science. If what we feel about the value of a fact is part of being engaged with fact then scientific analysis, which is emotionally disengaged by being objective, is value-blind. That would disqualify both the real and social sciences from being an authority on value - they leave out what they cannot picture thingishly and therefore do not fully understand what they are analysing. 7. The relationship of emotions to value explains why we don't feel anxious or angry about a threat to valueless items but feel increasingly strongly about increasingly valuable items - I don't get angry at folk harming grass by mowing a lawn, I do get angry at them harming trees, more angry at them harming people, and most angry at them harming children. 8. Traditionally, humans have believed that the person aspect of being a human person was some kind of 'self-thing' (a soul, or mind or consciousness or whatever). In truth, however, being a person is not a matter of being what you are but of doing what you do and not doing what you don't do (i.e., of being-towards the actualisation of various possibilities). It is, in other words, a project spread over your entire life time. This project is constituted of performances; that is, an integrity of what you do and don't do towards the actualisation of a valued possibility. You 'surf' the internet, for example, only because you value the possibilities with which that performance presents you; while you are surfing the net you do not keep your eyes closed, paint your house, or rape the neighbour's cat, because such performances are not being-useful-towards actualising the possibilities presented to you by surfing the net. This combination, of doing some things and not others, constitutes a performance. Performances can take place only in a world. It is because being a person in the world is constituted of performances that being a human person is performal rather than thingish. 9. Emotions are ways of letting a fact be a situation; a way of letting the fearful be fearful, of letting the desirable be desirable, and so on. So if you feel foolish at the way you performed when emotionally aroused then the feeling of foolishness reveals that you are no longer letting the object matter to you in the way that it did. 10. The feelings of someone swept away by aesthetic awe, in the presence of a religious statue, are not unfounded if the object does have the culturally appropriate aesthetic character. This is because it is the statue (which does exist as a statue) that excites aesthetic awe whereas it is the god (which does not exist as a god) that excites religious awe. 11. This is especially so that, in order to justify an unjust mistreatment of another, we have to invent some flaw in them which justifies our mistreatment. This is why those who have harmed others for some reason so often come to hate the other they harmed. This is also why, if you ask someone about another person who they appear to have harmed unjustly, the harmer will describe their victim as an unlikeable and badly behaved person who thoroughly deserved the treatment they got. 12. Note that, although I use anger as a useful example for this logic, the same discovery applies to other political emotions such as frustration, sexual covetousness, and ambition - all of which are cultivated as instruments being-useful-towards actualising a valued cultural character. No one, for example, is 'driven' by ambition, there are only folk who drive themselves to reach a (usually political) goal for the (usually political) value that it has for who they are choosing to be-towards. 13. The intrusive aspect of emotions is valuable towards being authentic because how you feel confronts you with who you are regardless of what lies and half-truths you may have been feeding yourself to the contrary. 14. Note once again the difference between politics and morality. In politics certain P persons get to censor what narratives not-P persons are allowed access to. In authentic [moral] self-government you don't censor others but you do censor yourself. |
