Introducing the Early Modern World: Major Progress in Science, Epic Failure on Emotions

Setting the table

So far we’ve discussed three theories of emotion: visceral – the theory implicit in Homer, pluralist – the theory traceable through Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius, and cognitivist – the Stoic and to an extent Epicurean views.

Now that we’ve laid all this ground work, its time to chart the fate of these competing camps in the Modern World. The 17^th century was a fascinating age in philosophy and science with luminaries such as Bacon,Galileo, Hobbes, Kepler, Leibniz, Locke, Newton, Pascal and Spinoza (just to name a few) all flourishing during the period. And none of them was more influential regarding theorizing on the emotions than René Descartes.

Like most of his contemporaries, Descartes was amazed by the advances in empirical research and he, like they, firmly believed that most if not all of the world could be explained in terms of mechanics and mechanisms, a view sometimes called the Mechanist or Mechanistic philosophy. But Descartes and his cohorts were more radical than they might sound today.

For example, Descartes claimed to commit himself to breaking from all previous theories of emotion and start thinking on the subject anew. But what he actually did was combine his ardent belief in a strict mind-body dualism, which we just saw in Stoicism with the mechanistic philosophy that dominated his times. There’s certainly novelty there, but it’s not nearly a complete break from the past.

The result of Descartes’ combination of mechanism and dualism was a severely flawed but highly influentialtheory of emotions. It – unintentionally – turns the mind into the equivalent of the scent that accompanies a cup of coffee, what we in philosophy call an epiphenomenon and makes the emotions and volition almost completelyvisceral ­– functions of the internal organs and muscles, and not of the brain.

The Cartesian theory of emotions was and remains immensely influential and reaction to it was and  is basically two-fold. People either agree with him that mind is some sort of non-physical, but real, thing and then try to fit it into what they know about physiology, or they say, sure that’s the best way to talk about ‘mind’, but it’s a hopelessly bad idea based on total B.S. so we shouldn’t talk about ‘mind’ (and often not emotions, either) as real things at all.

I believe, as I’ll explain in a few posts, that this pair of reactions to the Cartesian view were a major influence on the rise of sentimentalism in ethics: basically the idea that we ‘get’ right and wrong in the same way we ‘get’ smells and colors; through a special sense and not through reasoning. And thus they ignore the development of and benefits to the P-A-L view of things.

I’ll explain how it came to be that by the end of the 18^th Century David Hume, taking the second reaction to the Cartesian view puts forth a full-grown sentimentalist ethical theory in combination with a worked out theory of emotion and cognition that is related pretty closely to the visceral theory of Homer.

I’ll come right out and say what you probably already get – I find the Cartesian theory, and the responses to it, deeply troubling. The fundamental reason I have such a dislike for both Descartes’ and Hume’s theories is that they share a fundamental problem: the want to but cannot drop the cognitive element in emotions and remain coherent.

In the end, they slip the cognitive component of emotion back into the visceral account by means of ad hocconcepts and/or mechanisms, moves they are not entitled to, and which makes them at best internally inconsistent and at worst useless. That is, at best these theories have several claims that don’t agree with each other and it may even be that these and other problems make these theories incapable of offering us any positive guidance regarding the nature of thought, emotion, or right and wrong.

The Passions of the soul

Descartes wrote an entire book dedicated to the nature of the emotions, The Passions of the Soul. In the next few blog posts I’ll explain the theory he puts forth in the book and identify three serious problems for it. I call these “Cartesian Errors” (the phrase is my own, and chosen for obvious reasons, but what I call the ‘first’ error is also the error referred to by the title of the book Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio, though I explain and develop it much more than he did). The Cartesian errors not only make the theory untenable, but worse, Descartes should have known better, and worse still, they became embedded in thinking on the emotions and remain so to the present day. Let’s wrap up this post with a brief introduction to the three Cartesian errors.

The three errors

The first Cartesian error has as much to do with his way of solving problems as it does with his commitment to dualism and the mechanistic philosophy: the belief that ‘mind’ or ‘mental activity’ is pure cognition and that ‘body’ is an unthinking machine, responsive only to pleasure and pain, and having nothing to do with cognition.

The second Cartesian error is that his theory irreparably separates emotion from cognition and therefore is forced into an untenable ad hoc distinction between calm and violent passions in order to sneak intelligence into some emotions. As a result of this split, he can’t find much good to say about the emotions as far as ethics is concerned and so basically takes the position that emotions should be eliminated.

The third Cartesian error is that the theory cannot explain how the mind and body could have duplex communication, which the P-A-L theory gave an excellent argument for, and which I conclude is a fundamental aspect of the emotions backed up by contemporary research.

What Everyone Ought to Know about Stoic Thought on the Emotions pt IV of IV

Was I being too hard on the Stoics?

I have strongly criticized the Stoics, concluding that their assumptions about the fundamental difference between the mind and the body, coupled with the insistence that you really must choose to ignore anything most people would say is ‘bad’ lead to impossible recommendations for how to act among people. You might think I’ve been too harsh, but I saved the best for last.

At §20 Epictetus makes the utterly stoic claim that “foul word or blows” are only an outrage because you judge them to be. §29 makes sure you get the point is serious, warning the would-be stoic that there are real costs to choosing the stoic life: grueling hours, you will have to “abandon your own people” and suffer the social humiliation of being looked down on by slaves and “ridiculed by those who meet you”. In fact, according to Epictetus, a true stoic gets the worst of every type of social good such as honors and offices, and even justice. And the reward for losing out on everything social is “peace of mind, freedom and tranquility”. So they shouldn’t care in any way about social norms or insults etc and they shouldn’t ditch their ‘stained’ friends.

So you see the Stoic position is simply a lost cause when it comes to the emotions and socialization. The two go hand in hand. And as we’ll see below the ad hoc revisions later Stoics make are nice only in the context of their assumptions and are intellectually spurious when viewed from outside the theory.

Theoretical & methodological problems

So I’ve made a lot of hay by attacking the core Stoic idea that emotions are judgments, and by pointing out how difficult it is to hold on to other key Stoic principles while still trying to account for proper socialization. But in fact, it seems even the early Stoics were aware of the problem. They just didn’t do very much convincing theoretical work to address it.

Chrysippus, who I mentioned before, and the Roman Stoic Seneca, whom Dante, among others, thought very highly of, did try to patch up the Stoic issues with emotions. Sort of.

Chrysippus tried to change the view to the idea that each emotion involves two separate value judgments. The first that there is a good or bad at hand, and the second is that it is appropriate to react to it. What type of emotion you experience will be determined by whether the thing is thought to be good or bad. So, when you decide that someone smearing gunk on your shirt deserves punishment, you experience the emotion anger, even if you can’t or won’t actually act on it. Chrysippus thought that this showed that it’s the second judgment – that its appropriate to react – that is the very bad judgment. He does this, of course, because you tend to lose trust and interest when you argue that awful things such as your wife dying in childbirth, or genocide, aren’t “actually” bad. But this was the original Stoic position.

So since the Stoics started with the goal of convincing you emotions are bad – which they had to – they needsomething to be wrong about you being upset about the truly bad things that are happening to you. They separated the mind from the body in an irrevocable way by saying you can only control your mind and that you must control your mind. The orthodox Stoic view held that your emotions are functions of your reasoning power, your ability to figure out what to do in a given situation. To the extent the emotions look like bad thinking, they must be fixed. (And if the emotions had a physiological (body) component and were able to overcome your mind, well that’s just awful).

In philosophy we call changing your core theory for the sole purpose of saving it from a killer objection ad hoc reasoning. It’s considered very poor arguing and thinking to do so. If the new additions to the theory are true, or make the new theory true, that’s fine. But you shouldn’t go around trying to argue that your original theory was correct. And its very often the case that these theoretical refinements are simply made-up and have no supporting evidence, don’t fix the problem or are undone by other problems.

I think their ad hoc move fails and I’ll take a moment to explain why. First, let’s keep in mind that the Stoics lean heavily on the idea that human emotions are voluntary. Their best piece of evidence for that is that emotions are eradicable; they felt that because we can get rid of an emotion, this proves that emotions are by their nature voluntary.

Of course, this absolutely does not follow logically. Here’s an analogy: Imagine that for no reason that you had anything to do with you got selected as the winner of a prize. But you can get rid of the prize by refusing it or giving it away. Does that mean you chose to win it? It’s silly, but the Stoics need it to be true. So they insist it is.

Seneca

Plato, Seneca and Aristotle. I can understand why the artist made them look like twins.

Seneca, famous for his work on anger, gave a better argument for how Stoics should understand the emotions. He explained that the initial appearance (“first movements”) of anger or shocks of anger don’t have to lead to full anger because full emotion requires acts of assent and will. His idea is that since you can question appearances and not accept them, you don’t have to become angry. If it looks like someone is stealing your laptop you don’t automatically get angry, you can stop the process and see whether or not the person really is stealing it and then get angry for real or not. But if you let the initial ‘anger shock’ guide you to act out, it’s your own damn fault.

I kind of like this idea, but it’s far away from orthodox Stoicism. It seems to leave the possibility that some emotional action is justified. But it has the flaw of not realizing that in some cases this “initial” part of anger could be the difference between life and death. And it’s changing the concept of anger by somewhat arbitrarily cutting it up between the ‘initial’ shock and the rest of it; why isn’t the heat I feel in my chest when I’m bumped harshly on the subway steps ‘actually’ anger?

What I like best about Seneca’s kinda Stoic view is that it really comes close to agreement with P-A-L; that line of thinking says that time to reflect often enables us to halt our emotions too. But at the end of the day the Stoics want and need to say that emotions are voluntary judgments through and through if they really want to convince people that they can and should get rid of their emotions. But this “two-part judgment process” that equals one emotion isn’t very convincing – or practical.

Final thoughts on Stoicism

In the end, advocating that people lose all their sentiments, leave their family and give up any chance at a meaningful social life simply is absurd. It’s ridiculous to suppose that human beings ought to follow this plan in order to be happy. Humans, our minds and bodies, are social creatures. At the bottom, Stoics believe this, even if they overtly try to deny it. That’s why they are so inconsistent about whether social concepts such are reputation are truly good or bad. It’s as simple as realizing that if you really believe that when someone makes you angry it’s simply always “just you” who has angered yourself, you’ve created a hopeless situation. The extent to which stoic psychology denies that emotions exist at both hot and cold levels and that some emotions can and must be experienced and acted on, is the extent to which Stoicism is useless as an ethical theory.

In the next post I’ll discuss the rise of materialism and introduce you to the father of Modern Philosophy, René Descartes.

Materialist and Mechanistic philosophy created the modern world

What Everyone Ought to Know about Stoic Thought on the Emotions pt III of IV

Son, friend, American, New Yorker, white, Hispanic, employee, writer, volunteer, customer, fan

Last time we finished up with the example that if you get ‘angry’ about your mom complaining about your driving, the Stoic view would be that you are misunderstanding the situation. You are choosing to believe you were slighted or violated by your mom’s comments, even though in reality, given that moms are supposed to care deeply about their children’s safety, you should expect such comments. It’s part of the parent-child relationship. And if you understand that, then it should eliminate the idea that you’re somehow being hurt by the comments. So you can and should choose to stop being angry. And when you do so, you will cease to be angry.

Epictetus goes even further than that in §42 of Enchiridion when he recommends that when a person “treats you ill or speaks ill of you” we should be ‘mild in temper” and say to ourselves “it seemed so to him”. The idea being that their opinion of you can’t hurt you unless you decide it is really a hurt and that in cases where they really are wrong about you they are the ones who get hurt because they are deceived and it’s bad to believe false things.

This can probably be summed up by the later Christian idea of “turning the other cheek”. You won’t find recommendations like that from the line of thought extending through Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius (which I’ve been calling P-A-L).

In fact, in the very first chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle hits on a key problem with the idea of the weight of relationships in ethics. He advises that you can’t judge whether a person’s life was virtuous or happy until they have passed away because there is so much unpredictable stuff that can happen that could ruin the life or the person. Like a parent losing a child: A vivid example of this is in the classic movie Ordinary People.

The underlying idea here is that specifically because of the intimate, fundamentally important relationship you have with your family, your emotional well being is not totally in your hands. To form those types of bonds and gain all that they can give you requires being vulnerable to the possibility of ruin. And the kicker is, as the heading above indicates about me, we can all be described by quite a few different relationships, we all wear many hats. And each of them works to change our frame of reference.

The Stoics refuse to accept this, and to me this is unrealistic for all but the most terribly isolated people. It’s hard to imagine a world where you aren’t ever supposed to take it seriously when e.g., your lover, employer, a rival, etc, expresses a highly negative opinion of you or your behavior, or when a close friend dies.

Patience and control

§10 reinforces the point made in §1 that we must be clear on the difference between what is truly controllable and what is not. It explains that you must look to yourself and see what abilities you have that can deal with things that happen to you. So if you have to deal with someone being really vulgar, though you can’t control them, you do have the power to be patient. So you must train yourself to know that you always have a faculty to deal with that which is not directly in your power to control. Religious folk might note this sounds like the saying that “god never closes a door without opening a window”. This is good advice, but according to P-A-L they are neglecting the fact that emotions are just as effective a tool, and in many situations they are much better. As I’ve said, the Stoic starting point that what is in our control (our minds) matters greatly and what is out of our control (our bodies, others) does not matter is dangerous. And it’s hard to take. But Epictetus himself is inconsistent on it.

The only thing that matters is your mind, so do what’s right no matter what…sort of.

In §35 Epictetus asks rhetorically, “If you’re action is wrong, avoid doing it all together, but if it is right, why do you fear those who will rebuke you wrongly?” That’s honorable, and it’s consistent with the other major claims we’ve looked at. But it turns out that it’s really complicated to see what that means when you’re dealing with others. For example, at §33 Epictetus says we should “refuse the entertainment of strangers and the vulgar” because if you don’t you will “share the stain of any comrade” – even if you are both actually ‘clean’. On one hand this makes sense, people do judge you by the company you keep. But why should a Stoic care? Say that you are a Stoic spending time with someone with a bad reputation, or who is otherwise considered undesirable, but you are yourself faultless. Earlier the recommendation was to ignore people who say bad things about you. So why does it matter now that there is a social cost – getting a stain – for hanging out with people, even friends, who some people don’t like? Shouldn’t he say that it’s completely irrelevant whether you suffer socially for befriending ‘stained’ people? In the same section.

Then in §36 Epictetus says that “if you want to maintain social decencies, it is worthless to do things like taking the larger portion at a banquet, even though it is worthwhile for your body. You should remember to maintain your self-respect before your host”. I guess you could argue he’s not saying you should maintain social decencies. But the fact that it’s not a very long book and he still thought to include this advice says something. But where’s the virtue in starving rather than maybe seeming immodest to your host? After all in §30 he says that “every living creature has a natural tendency to avoid and shun what seems harmful and all that causes it, and to pursue and admire what is helpful and all that causes it”.

Supposedly, for a Stoic neither being punished nor being poorly thought of is ever a reason to do a bad action or to avoid a good action. So the only reason a Stoic could have for following the advice in §33 would be if there was reason to avoid a right action because of the impressions you might cause in other people. But that doesn’t make sense. Are Stoics expected to live their lives trying not to give strangers bad impressions by consciously avoiding friends who are stained – even wrongly stained?

He’s already insisted that anything that is not in our power does not matter at all. And I’m sorry but you can’t say with a straight face that we can control how a third party feels about our friends – or even ourselves. We can control how we present ourselves to people, but what goes on in other people’s heads, and by what measures and prejudices they judge us, are largely a mystery. Seriously trying to be inoffensive to strangers would lead to paralysis or obsequiousness (which many find offensive).

The principle of charity suggests that there’s a way to mesh A) “things that you don’t control don’t matter” with B) “always do what’s right no matter what”, C) “let it slide when people insult you”, D) “don’t bore people”, E) “don’t seem greedy to people” and F) “avoid social stain”. I just don’t see it. To me, you can’t get the social rules like C-F without dropping or editing A or B.

Emotions cause problems for Stoicism that they don’t for P-A-L 

So now we have a good understanding of the Stoic idea that emotions are judgments. And we see that they make it pretty clear that emotions are bad judgments that need to be eliminated. Now here’s the thing. The P-A-L account does not want to do away with emotions; it says that correct emotions are a big key to human happiness. And a fundamental support for that is this idea that humans are social animals, for whom interpersonal relationships matter deeply. Put simply, the P-A-L account says that emotions are a major faculty for social animals to coexist successfully, for individuals to properly relate to their groups. One explanation for the Stoic dismissal of emotions might be that Stoicism really is an ethical theory for ‘radical’ individuals. But that’s not it. Eight of the fifty-two sections of the Enchiridion discuss the social aspects of being a Stoic and analyzing these sections shows the real issue. Stoicism has a huge problem with properly explaining morality in social situations because their theory of emotions kills them.

We’ll have one more post on the Stoics and then it’s on to the modern world.

The Modern World: Brought to you in part by René Descartes