Impulsiveness, weakness and knowing what you are doing

If people can’t be held accountable for their actions, then there’s really no such thing as ethics. If “good’ and “bad” are really purely relative, then obviously moral codes or legal codes would simply be arbitrary systems and we could do anthropology or sociology or political science to understand why different groups made the arbitrary choices they did.

What Aristotle has argued so far is that people indeed can be held accountable for their actions when they know what they are doing, even if they don’t necessarily see all the consequences of their choices right off. Now we need to build on this and see if there’s anything else interesting going on ethically.

We humans in fact sometimes do what we know we should not and fail to do what we know we should. And according to Plato and Aristotle, the reason for these failures is the pursuit of pleasure – the satisfaction of our desires. We don’t always choose to pursue pleasure rather than what we are supposed to do, sometimes it can be involuntary – but then again we often succumb to pleasure even after deliberation.

Aristotle says the reason we sometimes choose to go for what is pleasant as if it is good and we avoid pain as if it is bad, is that pleasure often appears to be good even when it isn’t. In a word, the promise of pleasure fools us.

Lack of Self Control: Impulsiveness or Weakness

Understanding how we get fooled by pleasure that is only apparently good requires us to understand what self control is and why it sometimes disappears. Doing this requires having a solid grasp of what the emotions are and how they work to strengthen or undermine our deliberation and resolve. This is so important that failure to do so leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of ethics.

Aristotle explains that there are two ways a person can lack self control: impulsiveness and weakness. Impulsive people have a sensitive temperament and are hasty, irritable, intense and act without deliberation. They have a strong natural inclination to follow perceptual appearances (as we do when we are walking around thinking of nothing in particular) rather than waiting for reason to do its work. In Plato’s terms, these people are ruled by their spirit. In Homer’s terms, the thymos of people like Achilles is calling the shots for them. These people tend to find themselves acting without knowing what they should do. Weak people on the other hand, act after deliberation so they do know what they should do, but fail to stick to their conclusions. In Plato’s terms, these people are mastered by their appetitive part. Aristotle says that weak people are held in greater disdain than impulsive ones because they lose self control from a much more manageable state of emotions.

So lets recap: humans can deliberate and therefore our actions can be voluntary. As long as we know what are doing we are acting voluntarily. So really, its largely up to us whether we are going to do what we believe to be the best thing to do in any given situation. But sometimes we don’t. We either get so riled up that we act without knowing what we are doing or we know what to do but chose not to do it because we think we’ll get more pleasure from doing something else. And if something is done unknowingly it is done counter-voluntarily.

But we still need to know whether emotionally based actions are voluntary or not. Aristotle says all emotional actions are done knowingly. So that would mean that they are always voluntary. But you might recall that if something is done knowingly, it can’t be done out of ignorance. This might ring some alarm bells for you because after all, we do talk of people being “blinded by rage” or “made dumb by fear”. Yet at the same time we do punish people for acts committed under the influence of intense emotion, even if we do often consider the outcome to be mitigated somewhat by the presence of strong emotion (killing someone in a fit of rage for attacking your child or sibling is likely to get you much less of a sentence than calmly killing that same person weeks after the incident.)

So there’s a tension there in the common sense, practical ways we think of and handle emotional action. Aristotle wants to capture this tension rather than hide it and explain whether and how it is that emotional actions can sometimes be voluntary yet lacking in reasoning, at other times completely calculated, and still other times be completely uncontrollable.

The way he captures the tension and explains the three tiers of emotional action is by distinguishing two ways of being ignorant: You can act by reason of ignorance or in ignorance of something. Acting by reason of ignorance means choosing to act based on the wrong reasons. Acting in ignorance means you are literally not in a position to use knowledge you may have or ought to have.  So if you had way to much to drink and then do something stupid, well your actions while so very drunk are done in ignorance of things you probably know. But if you choose to do something like buy a bunch of stuff you really can’t afford because “you deserve it” you know you shouldn’t but you are rationalizing it with a mountain of B.S., so you are acting by reason of ignorance.

Together Aristotle’s weakness/impulsiveness distinction and the two types of ignorance allow us to organically formulate a complicated, insightful distinction between emotions of greater and lesser strength and cognitive content. And thus Aristotle’s ethics has a well-grounded, intellectually legitimate, common-sense understanding of the emotions in ethics.

Taking all this together, we can see that Aristotle identifies for us two types of emotion:

1. Emotions that are rapid, strong and nearly impossible to overcome, those that get the best of us especially those of us who are quick tempered.
2.  Emotions that burn slowly, and are informed by reflection. A person should be able to either decline to follow them or bring their force in line with the conclusions of deliberation.

Aristotle knows that this is everyone’s basic stance since it is everyone’s general assumption that when issuing blame or praise, we ought to have more sympathy or at least understanding for those who do to emotional influence act unintentionally but voluntarily (voluntarily but w/o prior deliberation) and harm others than we do for those who harm others out of, e.g. drunk driving.

In the next post we’ll take on relativism and finalize the explanation for how we act good or bad with respect to the emotions.

Introducing Aristotle on the Emotions

Recap and Intro
Plato has given us a structure for thinking about what the emotions are, how they develop and how they relate to our overall thinking ability. Now we’ll turn to Plato’s famous student, Aristotle, to  really flesh out how the emotions create and color our thoughts and behaviors, as well as how they relate to good and bad people and actions.
Looking ahead, we’ll finish setting up the P-A-L theory by learning about  Lucretius’ take on the emotions. Once done we’ll see that the combined work of Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius form an internally coherent,  empirically friendly, pluralist approach to understanding the mind and emotions and how they relate to ethics. Thus we’ll have seen that there was such a thing  as a pluralist theory of the emotions with an attached ethical theory available before the cognitivist and visceral theories that began to be put forward in the 17th century.
Aristotle
You’ve probably heard of Aristotle before so just like with Plato, I’ll not spend too much time on introducing you to him. And the above hyper link should help anyone who doesn’t have a good idea of who he is. But I will say that I agree with most philosophers in placing him behind only Plato in the list of the greatest philosophers of all time.  Aristotle deserves all the fame that he has and his influence on Western society, like that of Plato’s, is  incalculable.

Aristotle with Alexander the Great

Aristotle thought long and hard about the nature of thinking and wrote what in my opinion is the single best book on ethics ever written, the Nicomachean Ethics (the title is supposedly from the name of his son, Nicomachus, but we can’t be sure.) Its one of my all-time favorite books and has had a major influence on my life.
In that book and in the nearly as valuable and famous Rhetoric, Aristotle gives us a thorough, practical account of the emotions and how they affect moral actions and choices, which is the core of the powerful ethical theory, friendly to empirical research without being wedded to bad science that is the P-A-L account.
Like Plato, Aristotle thinks there is a special, interactive and reciprocal communication between the body, the “mind” (or “cognition in general”) and the emotions, a process I will continue to refer to as “duplex communication”. However, he took Plato’s overarching theory and fleshed it in an even more empirically-friendly manner with ideas and observations that really appeal to common sense.
Aristotle goes on at length to explain how the feeling aspect of emotions stem from and relate to human cognitive capacity and how emotions, feelings and cognition (remember I’ve used this to mean thinking like we do when playing chess or doing algebra) work together.
At the very core of the theory of emotions he comes up with is the idea that there are two types of emotion-based actions that go along with two basic emotion types: 1) some emotionally charged actions are much more cognitive than others and therefore we can say these actions are voluntary; 2) some emotionally charged actions are so fast and intense that stopping them is virtually impossible and therefore these actions are counter-voluntary.  This fits in well with the Platonic framework we discussed before: Putting Aristotle’s thoughts into Plato’s words we can say that voluntary emotional acts are instantiated by the interplay between the psyche and thymos and involuntary acts are of the animalistic appetitive instinct.
The core ethical lesson can be grasped by an analogy: If you could have stopped or ignored a destructive appetite but didn’t, you’ve acted wrongly. And by the same token, if  you could have stopped and reconsidered a destructive emotion and doing so would have let you redirect it or it would have dissipated, but instead you failed to re-think it and it led to a bad result, you have acted wrongly.
Understanding how all this is true and how it works requires us to discuss a few concepts Plato and Homer didn’t bring up specifically: Deliberation,  Impulsiveness, Weakness, Voluntary Action and Counter Voluntary Action. Each of these builds up or explains some basic ethical premises and will help us answer myriad ethical problems. Let’s go ahead and get the first one done and in the next post we’ll take on the difference between Voluntary and Counter-voluntary action.

Deliberation

Aristotle notes that while other animals     seem merely to respond to natural desires such as for food or sex, humans are capable of deliberating about our actions. This ability to deliberate is what allows a being to originate their actions. Even if we often don’t deliberate before acting, we can do so and doing so makes us true agents.
This immediately brings to mind the questions of why it is that we sometimes do not, if we ever cannot, and why. When we do, we deliberate in order to achieve our goals. We do not deliberate about goals themselves  or about particular objects (e.g. that I must convert my dissertation into a blog), nor do we deliberate about “particular” things that our senses show us, (e.g. that I just ate Chinese food).
Deliberating is investigating,inquiring, calculating in relation to a specific end, a specific outcome that is not impossible to obtain. It is unimportant whether a thing tends to end up a certain way, if it could be different then we can deliberate about it. We get motivated to deliberate from our desire to accomplish our goal. When deliberation is done, a decision is made and the agent exercises their desire.
So, for example, take the existence of this blog. I didn’t deliberate about whether I should have a goal, or whether blogs exist or whether my dissertation was accepted by CUNY’s faculty, these are all facts. And I didn’t deliberate about whether or not my laptop is a laptop or whether the blog hosting site will save my work – I can see these things are true. But I had a desire to publicize and share my work. The question is how best to accomplish this goal. My mind immediately set upon the problem and I investigated blog sites, calculated how much time I could give to the project and roughly how long it would take to complete, and studied my work to see how I could change the language to make my findings more easily understood. I decided on a plan and I began to implement it.  Now I’ll begin deliberation on how to formulate the next post on voluntary and counter-voluntary actions.

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Moving on from Homer

Recapping up the discussion of Iladic people

Let’s recap on what the mental lives of the Iladic people were like. These people didn’t distinguish well at all between ‘thinking’ and ‘emoting’, and used the concept of the physical ‘thymos’ to characterize both. The thymos, you’ll recall, did the things we now take to be done by the brain and CNS; it was effectively the ‘mind’ and its various functions, and was literally thought to be a mixture of breath and blood located in the lungs (phrenes).

We also saw that based on this understanding of mind, Onians explained that learning was as literally “taking into the mind” and forgetting was literally “letting escape”. In addition, the state of a person’s thymos was thought to determine the “fierceness, energy and courage of a person” and the emotions were physical events or things that “enter into” the thymos as a liquid enters a cup.

Finally, let’s recall that we said that for Iladic people, perception or cognition was automatically associated with an emotion, and immediately followed by some degree of a tendency to action. By contrast, we today, and even Greeks of the classical era, exhibit the ability to seemingly “think in cold blood”. We’ve attained more discrimination about what’s going on in our minds, we’ve identified and defined various aspects and phases of mental activity rather than understanding mental activity as all of a piece.

To our credit, over the centuries we’ve managed to use language and abstract thinking, as well as philosophical and scientific examination, to slice and dice what our bodies do when we think and emote, and we’ve clearly become “outwardly more restrained” and even “inwardly calmer” in our actions than the Iladics are represented to have been. Much of this is to the good. Yet at the core of our advancement was a turning away from the core premise that all human mental life is physically based.

Quite some time ago we began forgetting, ignoring, or rejecting the basic starting point that emotions and thinking were coming from the same place, and in our efforts to locate more exactly what was the source of our mental lives, we made emoting and thinking functions of different parts of our anatomy, while at the same time coming to think of these different parts of our anatomy as fundamentally different. And even though most people today working on issues in and around cognition do accept that all thinking and emotional activity is physically based, you may be surprised to find out that old biases have calcified and we’re left with a big mess. At the core of the mess, as Joan Wynn Reeves put it, is the typical modern psychological view that there are “sharp distinctions between thought and feeling”.

More on that in the future, now let’s meet Plato.

Plato, or The Source

My argument is that if you look at Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius with a charitable, reasonable eye to what they were trying to address in psychology with the information on physiology they had, we can uncover a conception of mind and emotion that rivals any we have available today. This “P-A-L” account shows us that while a visceral view such as that of the Iladic people is useful, strict adherence to such a view is simply not robust enough. The account also provides a foundation on which to build a theory robust enough to handle the actual complexity of the relationships between mind, thought, emotion and morality. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long after Plato and Aristotle that theories about the emotions started off on two quite debilitating forks from this promising path.

I spent much of my discussion of Homer and the Iladic people focusing on thymos because that is overwhelmingly the concept their psychology depends on. However, there were other concepts and terms used for ‘mind’. The most recognizable of them is ‘psyche’, which you’ll recognize as the root of the English word ‘psychology’. In Homer, by and large it refers to “life-soul”, usually identified with spinal fluid or seminal fluid, which the ancients though literally gave life to a being. Through the ages between Homer and Plato the concept of thymos evolved and changed and distinctions were made that moved the “psyche” from this sort of spinal-seminal fluid to the immortal soul and the “seat of rationality”. For example, the poet Pindar (or II) is said to have developed the meaning of psyche into something “divine” and in some sense “concerned in the feelings of ordinary waking life” but at the same time “asleep when the limbs are active”. Plato, while he accepts the basic Iladic position that thinking and emotions come from the same physical system, significantly develops all of these concepts.

One thing I want to point out that is consistently overlooked is that Plato thinks the physicality of cognition is invaluable. People point to his theology (II) and metaphysics and overstate Plato’s wish for dissolution of the bonds between mind and body. As far as his psychology is concerned, it’s simply not important. We’ll see that what is crucially important is his creation of the conceptual space, the theoretical framework, for excluding some mental activity, sometimes, from the intrusive, inevitable and even overwhelming forces acting in and on the human body.

The Basics on Plato’s Adjustments

Plato starts from the view that in early childhood development (II), we are all like the Iladic people: everything takes a back seat to our immediate desires and our actions are based on the immediate information we have available. Our body is the conduit of information about both internal physical states (e.g. grumbling stomach, pain in leg) and external events that cause changes in our internal physical states (e.g. being hit by an object, a parent’s voice). Our responses to these states are limited to hardwired reactions. We slowly move beyond inborn or built-in responses to these states up to basic intelligence through experience and increasing body control.

Plato notes that we only perceive a limited amount of the information given us; some thing, some mechanism, filters the constant flow of stimuli. Its hard to overstate the importance of this move by Plato. It allows for a psychology that can distinguish between the center of registration and the center of perception. The center of registration is effectively the living body of any being and the center of perception, of consciousness, is a living body with a working psyche. The center of registration is the more basic system, it underlies all thinking and self consciousness.

After making this crucial move, Plato realized that if we could determine how the living body of a being registers stimuli, it would go a long way in understanding how the more intelligent system, the perceptive consciousness of a human, works, because they are causally connected. As I’ll highlight as we go along, this realization by Plato is of the utmost importance and the failure of later thinkers to make it is the cause of many problems for later theories of the emotions.

I’ll wrap it up for this post by noting that we only get more abstract thinking ability if we are properly educated. But once we begin learning to use abstract concepts we begin to develop judgment and our actions go from being more or less predictable or determined reactions, like an animal’s, to being actually willful (chosen, intended) acts.

Where We're Going and Where We Started

Sketch of the Ultimate Conclusion

It’s going to take some time to get there, so let me go ahead and tell you where I’m taking you. Pretty much any ethical theory you care to mention thinks of the emotions in one of two ways: the emotions are completely mental phenomena, by which I mean things like the sort of reasoning that goes on when you do algebra or when you’re playing a strategy game; Or they are purely physiological phenomena, nothing more than than the feeling of nausea you might get when going on a roller coaster, or the warmth in your chest you might feel when you’re watching a romantic film and the lovers finally get together, and nothing to do with “reasoning”. Lately, and I mean in the last 10-20 years or so, there have been some thinkers who’ve tried to explain how emotions really are mental and physiological phenomena. That’s the right idea, but unfortunately, we’ll see that nearly all these efforts really are little more than the same old cars with retreads, satellite radio and a new coat of paint. (I promise to defend that when we get to contemporary theories).

The thesis I’m going to take so long setting up maintains that emotions are properly understood by a “pluralistic’ theory that acknowledges them as both physiological phenomena and intimately involved in our decision making in moral situations. This is so in large part because research in neurophysiology and evolutionary psychology and biology show that any theory of the emotions that’s going to agree with the findings and provide insight into emotions’ role in ethics must accept (1) that there are two levels of emotions, (2) that ‘cognition’ and ‘emotion’ are intricately intertwined, and (3), that there is constant duplex communication, two-way feedback, between the ‘body’ and the ‘mind’. Such a theory can be derived out of the psychological and ethical theories of Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius and research from psychology, neurophysiology and evolutionary biology.

In the Beginning

Homer’s Iliad offers one of the best and most thorough depictions of the emotions in ancient literature that we can get our hands on. It is all the more important because Homer is at the core of the Greek culture that later spawned Western philosophy, and the work of Plato, Aristotle and even Lucretius on the workings of the mind, body and emotions grew out of Homer’s baseline. I’ll explain how.

Homer’s depiction of the people who lived during the time of the war for Helen of Troy (@1200 B.C.), people I call Iladics, gives us a picture of cognition that has reasoning thoroughly embedded in emotion and a picture of mind that is completely physical. I call this account the visceral theory because all the action is thought to go on in the viscera. The visceral theory holds that reasoning and emotion are physiologically largely undifferentiated (indistinguishable) responses to intense fleeting desires. To put it more clearly, the emotions, like all mental activity, are nothing but certain physiological changes and the behavior they cause. But as I say, in Homer it is as if there is really no difference between a person who is emoting and one who is thinking – there’s no distinction between “cold” or detached thought and “hot’ or emotion-laden mental activity.

The Homeric concept of mind holds that the work we take to be done by the brain was done by the lungs and a combination of breath and blood they called thymos, which was held to be found in the lungs. This idea of the chest, especially the lungs, being the center of a person, and the thymos as being in some sense you, your living essence, was present in some sense through even Roman times. I don’t know if you find that as fascinating as I do, but I think you’ve got to agree that it means that on this theory the basic, baseline conception of the mind is that it is a physical thing and not a ghost or spirit of some kind. And there’s more evidence for this when we look at the words they used to describe mind and mental activity.

Consider that while for us “to know” something (e.g. that I’m wearing gray slacks, or that Conan is funnier than Jay) means something like acquiring more or less abstract justification (evidence or reasons) for something we experience or for a claim we believe, for an Iladic person, knowing something was described by R.B. Onians as coming to a “stable and active feeling or sentiment”. It’s almost like when Stephen Colbert claims he “knows with his gut” and is therefore very assertive about his beliefs. And if such a person knows Conan is funnier than Jay, they might want to beat Jay senseless for getting back the Tonight Show.

When you read the Iliad with this in mind, its hard not to see how practically any time one of the people in the book perceives something, they automatically have an emotion about it and immediately are compelled to act. I guess in this way they are like your average 3 year old – but they are adults; kings and generals, even. Of course some things make this emotion and compulsion to act stronger than other things, but its very often overwhelming and long-lasting. Here’s a couple of brief passages describing what I mean:

“The man is raving – with all the murderous fury in his heart. He lacks the sense to see a day behind, a day ahead...”

“Achilles – he’s made his own proud spirit so wild in his chest, so savage, not a thought for his comrades’ love...”

It stands out even more when you look at literature from Greeks of the classical age. They exhibit a much greater detachment from the things they experience. Like us they clearly have the ability to think “in cold blood” and without immediately lashing out physically. Basically, since the time of the Iladic people, humanity has learned to make distinctions between different aspects of mental activity. Now consider the flip side of actively knowing something – forgetting.

When Iladic people forgot something, it wasn’t just that they stopped being immediately aware of something, they completely and immediately lost the feeling and compulsion to act. For example

“...a second grief this harsh will never touch my heart while I am still among the living...But now let us consent to the feasting that I loathe”

“Achilles placed the lock in his dear comrade’s hands and stirred in the men again a deep desire to grieve. And now the sunlight would have set upon their tears if Achilles had not turned to Agamemnon so quickly: ‘Atrides – you are the first the armies will obey. Even of sorrow men can have their fill’”

Its as if everything to you felt like an emergency, as if everything as as intense and important as finding yourself at the scene of a horrible accident. You see what is happening and constantly feel compelled to run in and get involved, but then suddenly you want to buy some donuts, so you stop what you were doing and just walk away, wondering whether the crullers were going to be fresh when you get to the store. I guess it makes sense that the word Homer used for ‘to forget’ literally means 'to let escape breath which can be breathed in our breathed out'.

Now I’ve forgotten a lot of stuff in my time, but that’s not how it is with me. I’ll pick up here in the next installment.