Abstract
This paper argues for an understanding of emotion based upon Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of embodiment and passivity. Through a critical assessment of cognitive theories of emotion, and in particular Solomon's theory, it argues (1) that there is a sense in which emotions may be judgments, so long as we understand such judgments as bodily enactments of meaning, but (2) that even understood in this way, the notion of judgment (or construal) can only account for a subset of emotions which I call "emotional clichés," and not for authentic passions. In contrast with Solomon's account which conceives the subject as constituting, this account of emotion requires us to understand subjectivity as moved by meanings in the world, and as sometimes, in an authentic passion, dispossessed by those meanings.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Though Solomon claims to be “revising” his earlier work (Solomon 2007, Not Passion’s Slave [henceforth NPS], 185), in fact, his later theory seems to be more an elaboration or rehabilitation of his earlier theory. His early work claimed that the judgments that emotions are, are often unreflective judgments. His later work elaborates this by claiming that these unreflective judgments can be “bodily judgments,” and by clarifying that these bodily judgments may have an affective feel to them. He does acknowledge that his earlier use of “voluntary” and “choice” with respect to emotion might overstate the issue (e.g., NPS, 192), but this seems to be more a matter of settling for less polemical rhetoric now than of transforming his initial theory in any substantial way.
NPS, ch.11.
For arguments that James’ theory of emotion is more nuanced than this, see for example Redding 1999, The Logic of Affect.
Though there is great disagreement concerning the details of cognitive accounts of emotion (are the evaluations involved in emotions properly called judgments, construals or appraisals? In what sense are thoughts or beliefs involved? What is the nature of these thoughts? etc.), this can serve as a delineation of what cognitive theorists have in common, so long as we accept the terms used in a way that is open to further precision. Examples of cognitive theorists are: Bedford (1984), Kenny (1963), Lyons (1980), Solomon (1977), Neu (1977), Nussbaum (2001), Roberts (1988), Davidson (1973).
Solomon 1977 says: “[t]he passions, the bearers of values, constitute our world, our surreality.” (The Passions, 19).
See, for instance, The Passions, 241ff.; and “Emotions and Choice” [henceforth EC].
See, e.g., Calhoun 1984 “Cognitive Emotions?”
As Solomon often notes, there are some cases of emotion that follow upon a line of reasoning, and thus that seem to be emotions that we actively think our way into. We may, for instance, after thinking about a certain state of affairs, come to the realization that although it initially seemed benign, it actually has dangers built into it, and then start to fear. Here, it is true, we are not simply immediately confronted by the emotional meaning of the situation, and the emotion seems to be premised upon our line of thought. Nonetheless, it does not necessarily follow from this either that all emotions follow from a line of thought, or that this emotion is nothing other than the constitution of a certain meaning based upon our own line of reasoning.
See for example, Not Passion’s Slave, 213, 229.
Gibson 1986, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
Cf. Woolf 1921 “Kew Gardens.”
Bushnell and Boudreau 1993, “Motor development and the mind: The potential role of motor abilities as a determinant of aspects of perceptual development.”
Merleau-Ponty, World of Perception, 2004, 63-64.
See for instance the case of IW, considered by Gallagher and Cole 1995 in “Body Schema and Body Image in a Deafferented Subject."
In fact, the geometrical problem is even more complicated than this, since the driver would also have to take into consideration how the narrowness of the roadways constrains the curve that she can take with the tractor, and how the location of the fifth wheel on the tractor affects how the trailer is drawn along and pivoted on its back wheels.
The argument here is that perception is not separable from movement. This is a challenge to traditional notions which suppose that movement is a process set off by perception and inherently separate from perception. On Merleau-Ponty’s account, perception both is already shaped by one’s movements and itself lays out routes for further movement, soliciting those movements. See Barbaras 2000, “Perception and Movement.”
In the case of the truck driver: she encounters a situation which, by virtue of her habits, already sketches out in indeterminate ways a certain style of response. In taking up those solicitations, the truck driver disambiguates the sketch, crystallizes a definite form of response, and thus, in her very actions, determines retrospectively the meaning of the situation. Once she has acted, we can look back, analyze her actions and say because the situation is so, she had to move in these ways. But such retrospective analysis overlooks the fact that it is by virtue of moving in these ways that the situation comes to be just so; her actions clarify and articulate the situation. There are several ways in which to negotiate a right-hand turn, and a different orchestration of movements would have determined the situation in a different manner, would have realized it differently. Merleau-Ponty speaks of these different ways of realizing a certain goal (e.g., a right-hand turn) as different “systems of equivalences.” Though they each realize the same general goal, they involve different ways of organizing our bodily actions in terms of the world and the world in terms of our bodily actions. See, Merleau-Ponty 1964a e.g., Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence [henceforth ILVS] 54, 61.
Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s 2003 criticism of the constituting consciousness, and his substitution of the notion of institution in L’Institution.
Sartre does not give a full analysis of this example: he brings it up to illustrate what is right about Dembo’s understanding of emotion (Sketch for a Theory of Emotions, 46 [henceforth STE]). But drawing upon Sartre’s own theory of emotions, we can interpolate what his analysis of this emotion would have to be.
Solomon is focusing here on how emotions are “actions, aimed at changing the world” and thus “purposive” (262-3). He does not, in this example, explicitly spell out the judgment that is involved in this emotion. But based on his earlier argument that emotions are judgments (257), we can interpolate what kind of judgment is involved here, and how it works to “change the world” and to define its object (258).
Solomon recognizes that the “choice” being made in an emotional judgment need not be a choice between a set of acknowledged options: “’choice’ remains appropriate where it is evident that one could choose or have chosen otherwise, even if one did not think of or give any weight to alternative options” (NPS, 212). Where my account differs is in claiming that it is not emotional agents who do or do not “give weight to alternative options,” but the already configured perceptual situation. We are moved by the situation to take up one option, and inclined against the other options.
De Sousa understands emotion as organizing our experiences in terms of “paradigm scenarios.” These paradigm scenarios are past experiences that have given us a way of making sense of things, and that have become habitual. Emotions organize experiences in terms of these scenarios by making certain aspects of the situation salient, and leaving others in the background. My account is very close to de Sousa’s; one potential difference lies, however, in my claim that there are already indeterminate meanings (some based upon past experiences, but some intrinsic to the things themselves) that motivate and institute the paradigm scenarios in the first place, and that call back up the paradigm scenarios in other circumstances. De Sousa 1990, The Rationality of Emotion, esp. Ch.7.
Solomon, in his later work, acknowledges that our strategic emotional “choices” may be a function more of our character or our habits than of any active choosing on our part: “Strategies may be the product of habit or practice…. This compromises the strong voluntaristic language of ‘choice’ considerably, to be sure….” (NPS, 229). He argues for a more indirect form of agency, though, by claiming that we at one time actively cultivated our habits: “I am the agent of my emotion, and as Aristotle argued…we are responsible for even those actions which are involuntary if we can be held responsible for the cultivation of habits, perhaps from childhood.” On Merleau-Ponty’s account of habit, however, habits need not be actively cultivated by us. Much like the discipline of which Foucault speaks, they can be instituted in us by virtue of a convergence of contingent factors that allow us to realize a certain framework for making sense of things without our ever having chosen between options, or worked to realize some particular goal. See, for instance, Merleau-Ponty 1964b, “The Child’s Relations with Others” and L’Institution.
Roberts 1988, “What an Emotion is.”
Nussbaum 2001, Upheavals of Thought, esp. ch.1.
PP, 207 ff.; Pdlp, 207 ff.; ILVS, 44ff.
ILVS, 52.
The distinction between emotional clichés and authentic passions is not absolute, for as we have already seen, there is an element of creativity even in taking up situations in ways that follow our habits, and our creative expressions always rely upon, and still carry forward, some previously sedimented directions of meaning.
In other words, theories like Solomon’s cannot account for how new meanings are revealed to us through emotional experience—they cannot account for how meanings that exceed (or have been foreclosed by) our habitual ways of constituting the world might make themselves felt in emotion, thereby challenging our habitual terms of reference. Solomon’s account is rationalist in this sense: since, as emotional agents, we constitute the world in its meaningfulness for us, all we could ever learn from our emotions is what we have already put there.
Cf. Berne 1996, Games People Play.
Once again, thus far, this account stands in solidarity with that of Ronald de Sousa, who shares the idea that emotional meaning takes the form of a gestalt, and that this gestalt is put in place by our past rather than by our active construal of things (De Sousa 1990, The Rationality of Emotion, ch.7). It is debatable, however, whether de Sousa is able to give an account of what I will now go on to call authentic passions.
The “existential feelings” discussed in Ratcliffe’s 2008, Feelings of Being might be thought to be similar to what I am calling authentic passions insofar as these existential feelings involve not an assent to already articulated beliefs or propositions, but rather a more fundamental and pre-articulate structuring of experience, of self in relation to world. But they are not exactly synonymous: insofar as these existential feelings are settled background orientations that structure experience, they are more like the habitual sense of self and self-in-relation-to-world that I claim underlies emotional clichés. Authentic passions, on my account, involve the disruption or throwing into question of such habitual configurations of reality.
Cf. Lear’s, 2006 discussion of the loss of one’s world in Radical Hope.
Kollwitz, 1989, Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz.
PP, 202-232; Pdlp, 203-230. Collingwood 1958, The Principles of Art. Ch. IX [this text hereafter referred to as PA].
Interestingly, both Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty use the image of wildness in speaking of the form of experience or entanglement with being that precedes artistic or first order linguistic expression. Merleau-Ponty speaks of teeming, wild being and promiscuity which can come to be dominated and made manageable through our artistic expressions (e.g., Merleau-Ponty 1964a, ILVS, 48-50, 53; Merleau-Ponty 1968, The Visible and the Invisible Working note of October 22, 1959, pp. 212-3; Le visible et l’invisible, pp. 265-67.); Collingwood 1958 speaks of the need to domesticate our experience (PA, ch. IX).
A painter, before he paints, “germinates” with the landscape, and catching hold of its “motif” sets to realizing its inner meaning through paint strokes that answer to it (Merleau-Ponty, 1993, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” [henceforth CD] 67). The painting, then, is not a free creation on the painter’s part, but rather his way of “freeing the meaning captive in things” (See CD, 71; ILVS, 44) with the result that the painter can say “the landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness” (these are Cézanne’s words, quoted by Merleau-Ponty, CD, 67).
References
Barbaras, R. (2000). Perception and movement: the end of the metaphysical approach. In L. Lawlor & F. Evans (Eds.), Chiasms (pp. 77–88). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Bedford, E. (1984). Emotions. In C. Calhoun & R. Solomon (Eds.), What is an emotion? (pp. 265–278). New York: Oxford University Press.
Berne, E. (1996) Games people play: The basic handbook of transactional analysis. Ballantine Books.
Bushnell, E. W., & Boudreau, J. P. (1993). Motor development and the mind: the potential role of motor abilities as a determinant of aspects of perceptual development. Child Development, 64(4), 1005–1021.
Calhoun, C. (1984). Cognitive emotions? In C. Calhoun & R. Solomon (Eds.), What is an emotion? (pp. 327–342). New York: Oxford University Press.
Collingwood, R. G. (1958). The principles of art. New York: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, D. (1973). Hume’s cognitive theory of pride. The Journal of Philosophy 4 N, 76, 744–756.
De Sousa, R. (1990) The rationality of emotion. Bradford Books.
Deigh, J. (1994). Cognitivism in the theory of emotions. Ethics, 104, 824–854.
Elster, J. (2000). Alchemies of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gallagher, S., & Cole, J. (1995). Body schema and body image in a deafferented subject. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 16, 369–390.
Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Griffiths, P. (1997). What emotions really are. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and time. Albany: State University of New York Press. Translated by Joan Stambaugh.
Kenny, A. (1963). Action, emotion and will. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Kollwitz, K. (1989). Diary and letters of Kaethe Kollwitz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Lear, J. (2006). Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lyons, W. (1980). Emotion. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Saint Amand: Gallimard.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963) The Structure of Behavior. Translated by Alden Fisher. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964a) Indirect language and the voices of silence. In Signs, translated by Richard C. McCleary, 39-83. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964b). The child’s relations with others. In J. Edie (Ed.), The primacy of perception (pp. 96–158). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Translated by William Cobb.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964c). Le Visible et l’invisible. Saint-Amand: Gallimard. Posthumous text established by Claude Lefort.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). In C. Lefort (Ed.), The visible and the invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1972). La structure du comportement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1993). Cézanne’s Doubt. In G. A. Johnson (Ed.), The Merleau-Ponty aesthetics reader: Philosophy and painting (pp. 59–75). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge. Translated by Colin Smith.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2003). L’Institution, la passivité: notes de cours au Collège de France (1954-1955). Tours: Editions Belin.
Neu, J. (1977). Emotion, thought, and therapy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2001). Upheavals of thought: the intelligence of emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of being: phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Redding, P. (1999). The logic of affect. Cornell University Press.
Roberts, R. (1984). Solomon on the control of emotions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XLIV, 395–403.
Roberts, R. (1988). What an emotion is: a sketch. The Philosophical Review, XCVII, 183–209.
Robinson, J. (1983). Emotion, judgment, and desire. The Journal of Philosophy, 80, 731–741.
Robinson, J. (1995). Startle. Journal of Philosophy, 92, 53–74.
Sartre, J.-P. (1962). Sketch for a theory of the emotions. London: Methuen & Co.. Translated by Philip Mairet.
Solomon, R. C. (1977). The passions. Garden City: Anchor.
Solomon, R. C. (1980). Emotions and choice. In A. Rorty (Ed.), Explaining emotions (pp. 251–282). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Solomon, R.C. (2007). Not passion’s slave: emotions and choice. Oxford University Press.
Woolf, V. (1921). Kew Gardens. In Monday or Tuesday. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Maclaren, K. Emotional clichés and authentic passions: A phenomenological revision of a cognitive theory of emotion. Phenom Cogn Sci 10, 45–65 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9160-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9160-4