Abstract
This paper shows the close relationship between morality and emotions, as emotions were defined and understood by classical Greek and Roman philosophers (specifically, Aristotle and the Roman Stoic Seneca). Particular attention is paid to the nature of anger, and also to the distinction between full-fledged emotions, which depend on rational judgments and which, accordingly, only human beings are capable of experiencing, and what the Stoics called “pre-emotions,” which were common to human beings and other animals.
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Notes
Thomas Hobbes, however, lists ambition among the “perturbations of the mind”; see De cive 3.26; Hobbes’ inventory here includes also “hope, fear, anger, covetousness, and vain glory ” (I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for calling this passage to my attention).
I do not mean to deny the importance of physiological accounts of emotion, whether by Aristotle himself (as in his treatise On the soul), or by his followers (as in the so-called Problems); see Scheiter 2012 for discussion.
Nussbaum 1978: 264 notes that only human beings have what Aristotle calls phantasia ek sullogismou, that is, impressions that are based on the practical syllogism, and therefore “animals’ desires have no results of deliberation to work with; the animal is ruled now by one desire (as the result of a particular activity of phantasia), now by another”. See also Crubellier 2004.
Krisanna Scheiter and Cristina Carillo pointed out to me that, although Aristotle distinguishes between certain specifically human emotions and those that are natural or instinctive (and hence shared with animals), he applies the label pathos to both types, in contrast to the Stoic position; his conception of “emotion” is in this respect broader than Seneca’s.
Florian Cova and Cristina Soriano made the interesting suggestion that Seneca’s pre-emotions can be expressed or defined in accord with the component process model developed by Klaus Scherer and his colleagues at the Swiss Center for the Affective Sciences (see Scherer 2007) as those emotions that lack one or more of the five basic components, whereas full emotions have all five.
Ur-emotions are defined as “intentional states” accompanied by a “mode of action readiness” (the list of such modes—eighteen in all—includes acceptance, attending, avoid, reject, desire, exuberance, domination, submission, tenseness, and inhibition). In speaking of these states as “emotions” rather than “pre-emotions,” Frijda and Parrott align themselves implicitly with Aristotle’s terminology rather than Seneca’s.
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Konstan, D. Emotions and Morality: The View from Classical Antiquity. Topoi 34, 401–407 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9229-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9229-0