Kant's Theory of Emotion

Emotional Universalism

D. Williamson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137498106
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Williamson explains, defends, and applies Kant's theory of emotion. Looking primarily to the Anthropology and the Metaphysics of Morals, she situates Kant's theory of affect within his theory of feeling and focuses on the importance of moral feelings and the moral evaluation of our emotions.

1

Profiles of Emotionality

Emotions are simple—we are proud when we do something good, angry when others stand in our way—and yet, as humans we are infinitely complex in our ability to complicate them. While we all seem to have different approaches to emotion, there are, what we might call, common emotional types. We receive common messages about emotion from the media and our culture, so it makes sense that, in addition to normal emotional responses, we have similar approaches to emotionality itself. Psychologists might consider a list of emotion and mood disorders to be a list of emotional types, and, however true that may be, here we are looking for more general and common themes. For example, some people are very emotional and some people are unemotional. We shall see that each profile involves not only typical behaviors but also a set of beliefs about emotions and their value.

Here I depict three prototypical emotional comportments and speculate about their historical lineage, contemporary expressions, and natural consequences: (what I term) Stoicism, Romanticism, and Positive Psychology. Although you might, hopefully you will not see yourself in any of these types. The emotionality types we are discussing here are introductory caricatures. While I do discuss the real history of these movements, I am focusing on them as caricatures and not arguing that every person who identifies with these philosophies holds the beliefs I ascribe to them. I provide these caricatures as lenses through which to see the common messages we currently hear about emotions so that we can better evaluate them. I will provide contemporary examples of these types where I can, but it is likely the reader will be able to come up with some for herself. We can see that each of these types implies different assumptions about the value of emotion as well as the value of certain aspects of life. Illuminating these common psychological profiles will set the stage for a deeper consideration of the nature of emotion and its relationship to moral principles. The purpose here is to begin to think about what it means to have a general approach to emotion, uncovering our latent theories about emotion as well as our theories about value.

The point overall, perhaps, is that we should not have a general approach to emotion at all; different emotions are significantly different and each one requires understanding and evaluation. Furthermore, emotional evaluation cannot be simplistic. Evaluating our emotions requires a good deal of psychological acumen and moral deliberation, with which we will meet in the rest of the book. These three caricatured profiles of emotionality are all attractive, yet hazardous, shortcuts. While there is some discussion of Kant here, readers will not find rigorous philosophical analysis in this chapter, merely cultural observation. This chapter provides the jumping off point for the rest of the book by showing the relevance of and need for Kant’s philosophy in our everyday lives.

Stoicism

First, we will consider the stoic person: someone who does not have emotions, or, if he does, he does not want to let others in on that fact. This style of emotionality might be accompanied by the belief that emotions are stupid, as it has been historically.

Historically, the Stoics were one of the most, if not the most, influential schools of philosophy. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, began as a wandering and wayward soul. The philosophy of Socrates and his principal disciple, Plato, awed and unsettled the polytheism of the Mediterranean, and the world was ready for prophets. Zeno, before becoming the father of Stoicism, was attracted to Cynicism. This group of philosophers wanted to live in a way more in accord with nature. Diogenes of Sinope slept outside in a barrel and disdained all of society’s artificial customs. Hipparchia of Marnoeia, who wore a toga instead of a dress and refused to live according to the traditional rules for women and marriage, chose to live with Crates of Thebes, who had given away all of his fortune, and study philosophy. “We’re all just people,” we might imagine Diogenes preaching; “Why does it matter what city I come from or what clothes I wear?” And so, wanting to challenge society’s rules, the Cynics would go to the bathroom, have sex, and even masturbate in public; earning scorn and jeers, they were called “dogs”—kynikos is the Greek word for “dog-like”—a title with which they were perfectly happy. “After all,” they might point out, “Socrates did not care about his appearance or his popularity. He only cared about the highest truths of reason.”

Zeno, on the other hand, was not comfortable with the Cynic mode of behavior, and so Stoicism has been humorously described as “Cynicism for the shy.”¹ Still, he was attracted to Cynic metaphysics: everything is guided by unwavering, divine, and rational laws. True freedom, he agreed, can only be found in becoming one with and following the edicts of nature. Yet, he broke away from this group and founded his own school of thought. Following Socrates and Diogenes, he believed that a philosopher should be an educative presence within the city, but turning away from both of their confrontational styles, he spoke from a front porch to whomever came to engage him. “Stoicism” comes from the Greek word stoa, for “porch.” Following more faithfully on the insights from Cynic metaphysics, he argued that all ignorance and violence is also a part of nature; everything, good and bad, follows from Divine Reason. Therefore, it makes very little sense to try to make people change, as Diogenes had. Everything happens for a reason, and true peace can only be attained through understanding, acceptance, and detachment. The popular Christian serenity prayer—“God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference”—was plagiarized from the Stoics. According to the Stoic sage, the only thing we can change is our own thinking.

Stoicism survived through three phases of revival into the Roman Empire, and Marcus Aurelius, the second-century emperor of Rome, was well known for his Stoic thinking and writing. The Stoic repression of emotion was perhaps more at home among the warrior-ethos of Rome than it had been in Athens, with its more recent memory of democracy. We might even say that the birth of Stoicism marked the takeover of the ancient Greek culture by the Spartan and eventually Roman cultures.

With regard to ethics and emotion, the Stoics prescribed apathy. Caring too much about any worldly, material thing is a recipe for unhappiness. Everything dies, everything passes away; peace and virtue can only come from accepting this eternal truth and going with the flow. Seneca affirms the following aphorism: “[The good man] yields to destiny and consoles himself by knowing that he is carried along with the universe.”² Sherman accurately paraphrases the Stoic ethos as the injunction to “suck it up.”³ All emotions—happiness, sadness, anger—are the result of irrational, material attachments and false evaluations about the value of the transitory world as well as a failure to keep one’s mind fixed on the universe’s divine, eternal laws. Epictetus writes:

If you love an earthen vessel, say it is an earthen vessel that you love; for when it has been broken, you will not be disturbed. When you are kissing your wife or child, say that it is a human being that you are kissing, for when the wife or child dies, you will not be disturbed.⁴

Indeed, in their quest for calm, the Stoics characterized emotion as a disease, a bodily disturbance. While they held that emotions (passions) are brought about by false opinions, they differed on whether or not original emotional disturbance was entirely controllable and eradicable. Even if one could never free oneself from the impulse to anger, for example, they all held that one should not act on emotional impulses.⁵

While Stoicism equates God with logos (the rational laws of the universe) and not the personal God of Christianity, Christianity took up Stoic asceticism easily enough. The Christian notion of the transcendent and immortal soul shares much with the Stoic sage’s identification of the inner self as the true realm of freedom. Just as the Stoic asserts that even the prisoner can be free in his chains, orthodox Christians make ascetic sacrifices in order to purify the soul from the desires of the flesh. The fearless philosophy of Christian resignation—“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil” (Psalm 23:4 KJV)—might just as well be called Stoicism. The Christian adopts this Stoic stance because, believing in the immortality of the soul, the Christian should only care for eternal “treasures of heaven” and not “the works of the flesh” (Matthew 6:19–21 KJV; Galatians 5:19–21 KJV). Christian prayers and rituals remind their followers of the transience of the material world and the virtue of detachment. As they begin to purify themselves for their 40-day reenactment of Jesus’s crucifixion (through which, we might add, Jesus remained almost perfectly stoic) and resurrection, Christians remind themselves that they are (nothing but) dust and to dust they shall return (Genesis 3:19). Christian dualism (“That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit”—John 3:6 KJV) is perhaps even more compatible with asceticism and apathy than Stoic materialism, and, in any case, we should not think that the Stoics have any sort of monopoly on being stoic.

The Stoic influence on Christian dogma can be seen more directly from Marcus Aurelius, through St. Ambrose, and finally to St. Augustine, a canonical church father. Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius were prominent figures from Roman Stoicism in second-century AD. During this same time, the early Christian Church was forming. Augustine was heavily influenced by Seneca, citing him alongside the Bible in his Confessions. Moreover, Augustine’s work itself looks very much like a work of Stoicism, for example, with his rejection of grief at his mother’s death, calling the expression of such a worldly attachment sinful.

Although it was more likely the case that Zeno was influenced by early Buddhism rather than the other way around, we can also see overlap between Stoicism and Buddhism. The position that suffering comes from attachment to the material world and enlightenment comes from detachment, or apathy, is the same in both. Therefore, if we accept this overlap between Stoicism and Christianity and Buddhism, at least in terms of apathy and asceticism, it is then relatively easy for me to assert that Stoicism is and has been the most widely accepted philosophy of emotion in the history of the world.

Indeed, there are still many signs of Stoicism in our culture. Quite often social norms prohibit the expression of emotion. “Being emotional” is thought to be a bad thing. Emotions are thought to be anathema to scientific pursuits and business transactions. There are still Stoics among us, or at least people who live by Stoic principles for some portion of their lives. When boys are told to “Be a man,” they are being told not to express emotion. Indeed, Stoicism has always exalted masculinity for being rational and capable of enduring hardship. Femininity, on the other hand, is said to be emotional, and the female body is seen as more difficult to transcend. Stoicism prizes masculinity in all people—indeed, as we saw, masculinity itself is often defined in Stoic terms. Indeed, regardless of our depth of historical philosophical exegesis, the common English term “stoic” means “unemotional.”

This denial of the importance of emotion is well entrenched in our commonplace understanding of emotion. The first thing one often learns about anger management from many a well-respected therapeutic source is to get rid of anger, supposedly, by taking a deep breath and counting to ten. Many emotions are characterized as a part of the “fight or flight” response that supposedly serves some purpose for irrational animals but with which we are for some reason still saddled. According to some, this response is a part of the “reptilian” rather than the “human” brain, although, of course, no human brain could function with its lower two-thirds missing.⁶ For all of its technological successes, modern medicine knows very little about normal emotions, as it often relegates “mental health” to a separate, and all-too-often unrelated, field. Most of us imagine therapy as a place where people break down and cry, but just as often we understand therapy as the place where we can “get it out” and over with. For many of us, emotions are just a speed bump on the road of life.

Another example of the Stoic approach to emotions can be found in military culture.⁷ This overlap makes sense because Stoicism was the dominant philosophy of the bellicose Romans; it came about in an environment of warriors and military generals, of gladiators and loyalty suicides. The current advertising slogan of the American Marine Corps, “an army of one,” suggests Stoic elements: the Stoic warrior does not need emotional relationships. He has the sublime grasp of truth within, and this reliance on individual strength relieves those who do not accept the legitimacy of emotion. Boot camp and other hazing rituals are nothing if not Stoic training in ignoring feeling. You must become dead to your own pain—apathy is the goal—because you must see yourself as nothing but a soldier, a servant and messenger of the higher law. The body must become strong, clean, orderly, and uniform. All details about your personal feelings and attachments do not matter; everything is to be sacrificed to the higher ideal.

The Stoics often pointed to the deleterious social consequences of anger, and they promised a therapy that would help people live without their irrational passions. Nevertheless, Stoicism does not work: it itself often causes anger and irrational violence because the repression and denial of anger only leads to more intense anger.⁸ Studies have demonstrated that it is nearly impossible to suppress thoughts. Emotional repression and suppression—“repression” is typically taken to refer to the complete denial of a thought or feeling as opposed to mere avoidance—causes a “rebound effect,” which means that the thoughts and feelings actually become more frequent and intense. Similarly, thought suppression, such as Augustine’s refusal to attend to negative thoughts about his mother’s death, have also been shown to be associated with myriad psychological disorders, such as depression, anxiety disorders, borderline personality disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).⁹

Kantian Criticisms of Stoicism

Kant is often taken to be a Stoic, but this is an unfair characterization. He does write that virtue is characterized by apathy, but that is because he associates pathos entirely with selfish and short-sighted drives, not with feelings in general. While critical of moral sense theory, he does believe that there are important moral feelings that accompany virtue, and in agreement with Aristotle, he understands virtue as feeling the right feelings that follow from the right principles. That includes all types of feelings, righteous anger and noble sorrow, as well as justified pride and virtuous contentment. Most important, for Kant, is the feeling of respect, the respect for moral principles from which self-respect and the respect for all humanity is born. Respect might not seem like a feeling to many people, but more like a dry description of behaviors; on the contrary, it is a deep and profound feeling. Kant likens it to the feeling of the sublime, which is often accompanied by tears. Respect is a feeling of awe and amazement. It contains both joy and fear. It is the paradigmatic moral emotion, and, as such, it is the paradigmatic human emotion. If the stoic Marine Corps officer, for example, does not cry at a documentary about Martin Luther King, Jr., he has lost his humanity, for Kant, pure and simple. Although Kant often chastises desires for getting us into trouble (not acting on desires is not the same thing as repressing emotion), his philosophy prescribes worldly attachment: we have duties to ourselves and to other people, and these cannot be discharged without emotion.

Perhaps the most important point of difference between Kant and the Stoics is their theory of virtue: the Stoics held that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Kant, on the other hand, maintains a worldly and physical notion of happiness as the fulfillment of natural needs and desires. Similarly, he believes that this physical happiness is deserved by the virtuous person—it is the conjunction of these two ideas, virtue and happiness, that he calls the Idea of the Highest Good.¹⁰ Kant does not identify virtue with asceticism. According to Kant, we have a duty to promote the happiness of others; “happiness” in this sense refers to their physical and psychological well-being. A Kantian ethic could never be identified with resignation and violence.

There seems to be an easy confusion between moral motivation and asceticism. (We see this especially with the role of women and the emphasis on sexual mores in more orthodox religions.) To be sensitive to whether or not one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Profiles of Emotionality
• 2  Understanding the Nature of Emotion
• 3  Emotions, Decision Making, and Morality: Evaluating Emotions
• 4  Moral Feelings
• 5  Emotional Universalism and Emotional Egalitarianism
• 6  The Path of Vice
• 7  The Inner Life of Virtue: Moral Commitment, Perfectionism, Self-Scrutiny, Self-Respect, and Self-Esteem
• 8  A Morally Informed Theory of Emotional Intelligence
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index