Abstract
The article proposes an analogue of conceptual change in the context of comprehensive or deep emotional change and growth, and explores some aspects of its logic in that context. This is not to reduce emotions to concepts, but to say that concepts express the sense that is already inherent in experience and reality. When emotional states change so thoroughly that their applicable concepts become completely different, they shift from one logical structure to another. At the moment or phase when one conceptual structure transforms into another, two logically incompatible descriptions both apply to the same state at the same time. As a result, the correct description of this moment and its development involves conceptual confusion, non sequitur, and logical contradiction. In these contexts, the sense itself of the emotional experience and process is partly characterized by what are otherwise violations of sense. Failure of sense is part of how these experiences make sense. The article explores some of the consequences of this paradox of sense for the nature and experience of deep emotional change and for the meaning of change itself in this context.
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Notes
Baltas (2007, p. 78).
I have discussed the logic of this kind of emotional transformation at length elsewhere in the context of psychotherapy and in particular psychoanalysis (Barris 2003). Here I want to explore its characteristics in its own right, independently of those frameworks.
In these examples and in the paper as a whole I shall be discussing emotional change in the context of our experience of the relevant emotions and on the basis of the nature of that experience. It is true, of course, that our emotions can also be affected externally by environmental and bodily changes; medication, for example, can alter our mood completely. It may seem that in that kind of case what accounts for the change has nothing to do with the content of the emotional experience, so that nothing follows for the logic of the change from the nature of our experience of it.
But if this were true, it would only be so in the extreme case—if this case were possible, and if it were ever found to occur—in which the external cause both produced its whole effect instantaneously and also affected our emotions unilaterally, that is, without itself being reciprocally constrained by the specifics of the emotional state. If, instead, the cause took time to produce its effects, our emotions would undergo a process of transformation in their own right, and the nature and intelligibility of this process, even if it played no additional causal role in the change, would then require an account involving the nature of its own content. And if the change was the result of reciprocal effects between our emotional states and the external cause, the nature of our emotions would partly dictate the specifics of how the external cause operated on them; as a result, the operation of this cause would be subject to the logical constraints belonging to the content of the emotional change. Consequently, in either case, the description and explanation of the changes would still present the logical puzzle for which I argue in the text.
Even if the extreme case were possible, then, the many less extreme cases, where the change is either more gradual or reciprocally caused or both, would still require an account of and based on the nature of our experience of emotional change, and in particular an account of the kind I offer.
This extreme case is, of course, a fiction. In fact, however, even if it were otherwise, in that case of instantaneous and unilaterally effected change the emotional state itself would not, strictly speaking, undergo change into another state at all, but would simply cease to exist and be replaced with a different emotional state. Consequently, this hypothesis of externally caused change really concerns a different topic from that of emotional change, or at least it concerns emotional change in a fundamentally different sense from the one I have taken as my topic. It is true that a common argument in this kind of context is that the correct conclusion is that there is in fact no such thing as emotional change in the sense I am discussing, and that the kind of understanding of it I propose is instead, for example, a “folk theory” expressed in “folk vocabulary” that has very little if anything to do with the truth of what is happening to the emotions. But since we all frequently undergo precisely this kind of emotional change in very palpable detail, often to the extent of struggling to cope with its overwhelming effects, surely the burden of proof falls on its deniers. Without, however, presupposing the exclusive truth of the causal explanations of the hard sciences, or defending that truth on the circular basis of those same sciences’ claims and standards for establishing truth, this is not a proof that is so far available or even, with any certainty, conceivable.
While there is disagreement as to whether the idea of this kind of contrast and shift between global sense frameworks can have any meaning (see, for example, Davidson 1984), the case for it has been argued in philosophy of science (e.g., Kuhn 1970; Feyerabend 1993, especially chapter 16), political philosophy (e.g., Lyotard 1988; MacIntyre 1988), and with respect to the relations between philosophical systems (e.g., Collingwood 1940; Hall 1960). See also the responses to Davidson by MacIntyre (1988, p. 374), Putnam (1990, p. 104) and Winch (1964, p. 318).
See, for example, Deleuze (1990), Heidegger (1994), Derrida (1996). My understanding of the logic of this paradox differs from that shared by these postmodern continental thinkers. In contrast with the position they share, I argue that this contradiction in the context of the foundations of sense is so fundamental that it ultimately eliminates even its own sense as a contradiction, with the result that it restores unqualified sense and unproblematic meaning (see especially Sects. 2, 4). I believe that Derrida is a (somewhat inconsistent) exception from other postmodern thinkers in this respect, and defends the same position that I do, but this is not the usual view of Derrida. I think Giorgio Agamben is an exception too, but I am less sure of my understanding of his thought. I discuss postmodern thought in this context at length in Barris (2015b), and Derrida in particular and at length in Barris (2003).
Peirce (1958, pp. 215–218).
Dewey (1938, pp. 105–106).
Ortega y Gasset (2002, p. 91).
For example, Paul (2015).
Giegerich (2007).
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Barris, J. The logic of comprehensive or deep emotional change. Cont Philos Rev 50, 429–452 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9397-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9397-x