Evaluating Emotions

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137389800
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How are emotions related to values? This book argues against a perceptual theory of emotions, which sees emotions as perception-like states that help us gain evaluative knowledge, and argues for a caring-based theory of emotions, which sees emotions as felt desires or desire satisfactions, both of which arise out of caring about something.

1

The Analogy between Emotions and Judgements

How are emotions related to values? In this first chapter I want to tackle this question from Franz Brentano’s point of view. Like many proponents of the perceptual theory of emotions today, Brentano claims that we gain evaluative knowledge by having correct emotions. Unlike today’s proponents of the perceptual theory of emotions, he accounts for this by an analogy between emotions and judgements. Perhaps, one might think, he should in this case be classed rather with those philosophers who take emotions to be value judgements, but this conclusion would be hasty, for Brentano does not think that emotions are judgments – they are like judgements in important respects. I think it is, however, correct to say that Brentano does not develop a perceptual theory of emotions, either. Rather, he takes both judgements and emotions to be affirming or rejecting reactions to objects that are presented to us perceptually. Furthermore, he takes it that just as correct judgements reveal what is true, correct emotions reveal what is good. Given that the latter claim is very close to central tenets of today’s proponents of the perceptual theory of emotions, and given that Brentano’s account of it does not seem to have received very much attention in the contemporary debate, I think it is a good starting point to our enquiry into the nature of the relation between emotions and values. The outcome of my analysis is perhaps not very satisfactory: I want to claim that Brentano’s analogy should be drawn along lines that are slightly different from the lines along which he draws it. Once we draw it properly, the result is surprising: goodness is not analogous to truth, on Brentano’s picture, but to existence. I will try to give some background to how Brentano generally understands existence, but end up claiming that, rather than being elucidating, the analogy between judgements and emotions ends up being rather dark. This, however, need not speak against it. Perhaps there is something to be said for an understanding of goodness as analogous to existence, but if there is, I dare not say it.

1.1 The analogy as it appears

In his lectures The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong Brentano develops an analogy between emotions¹ and judgements. His aim in these lectures is to show that we have moral knowledge. This knowledge, Brentano argues, is conveyed to us via our emotions. The emotion that conveys knowledge of goodness, for example, is ‘a higher love that is experienced as being correct’ (Brentano 1969, p. 22). According to Brentano this means that emotions work in a very similar way to judgements. For judgements are correct, that is amount to knowledge, when we experience them as evident. With both emotions and judgements we can be sure that knowledge has been conveyed when we have experienced them in a certain way. And because experiencing a judgement as evident is not a problem when accounting for the correctness conditions of judgements, an experience of a higher love should not be a problem when accounting for the correctness conditions of emotions either. In the following I will outline Brentano’s analogy in more detail. My focus will not be on the claim that we have moral knowledge, but rather on the more general claim that emotions can be compared to judgements. I will identify two central theses that Brentano draws from his analogy, the epistemological thesis and the ontological thesis, and try to show that the analogy does not in fact support them.

Brentano’s analogy should be understood against the background of his theory of mental states (cf. Brentano 1969, p. 15 f.). Mental states, for Brentano, are by definition intentional. Mental states have contents; they are about objects. There are three classes of mental states: presentations, judgements, and emotions. Presentations are the simplest form of mental states. They are about objects, but they only present them. That is to say, they do not present them in any special way – as existing, non-existing, good, or bad. That is the job of judgements and emotions. Judgements either affirm presented objects as existing or deny presented objects as non-existing. Emotions also affirm or deny presented objects, not as existing or non-existing, but as good or bad. As Brentano puts it, judgements and emotions both ‘involve an opposition of intentional relation’ (Brentano 1969, p. 17), by which he means the spectrum ranging from fully affirming to fully denying in both cases. Furthermore, judgements and emotions are similar in that they can be correct or incorrect. A judgement is true if a presented object is evidently affirmed or denied, and an emotion is correct if a presented object is affirmed or denied with ‘higher’ love or hatred.

Now, an emotion might be correct if the object of the emotion is affirmed or denied with ‘higher’ love or hatred, but how can we be really sure that this is the case? Brentano answers this question by once more pointing to the analogy (Brentano 1969, p. 19). How do we know when a judgement is true? Take the judgement that it is impossible that p and ~p. We know that this judgement is true, because we experience it as evident. Other examples of judgements experienced as evident include introspections (like ‘I am having a sensation of the colour red right now’) and apodictic judgements (like ‘2 + 2 = 4’). What these evident judgements have in common is not the fact that we are highly convinced of their truth. Degrees of conviction have nothing to do with whether or not we really know something. Instead, what they have in common is that they are judged with a clarity that does not allow for doubt – they are evident. A judgement that comes with this kind of clarity is true. Analogously, an emotion that is experienced in a ‘higher’ form will be correct. Brentano gives the example of our love of knowledge, which is ‘a pleasure in its highest form’ (Brentano 1969, p. 22). If we imagine, as Brentano invites us to, a species of people who hate knowledge and love falsities, we would clearly find this ‘perverse’ (ibid.). Hence, ‘higher’ emotions seem to be those that do not tolerate any opposition – just as evident judgements do not tolerate any contradiction. And just as we take evident judgements to be true, we take ‘higher’ emotions to be correct.

Still, the mere experience of clarity, or ‘higher’ love and hate, might strike one as not quite enough to establish the truth of a judgement, or the correctness of love. After all, once we have experienced a judgement as evident, might we not still ask: but is it really true? What makes it true? But Brentano believes that these further questions are not only unanswerable, but also that it is pointless to ask them:

Now if one were to raise the ... question [‘Why do you really believe that?’] in connection with a judgement that is immediately evident ... it would be impossible to refer to any grounds. But in this case the clarity of the judgement is such as to enable us to see that the question has no point; indeed, the question would be completely ridiculous. Everyone experiences the difference between the two classes of judgement. As in the case of every other concept, the ultimate explication consists only in a reference to this experience. (Brentano 1969, p. 20)

It is ‘ridiculous’ to keep asking for further proof for a judgement once we have experienced it as evident. If we experience a judgement as evident, then it is true, full stop. Similarly, if we experience an emotion in a ‘higher’ form, then its object is good, full stop.

I hope this short exposition of Brentano’s analogy suffices to give a picture of Brentano’s general idea. For what is to come, I believe it is helpful to distinguish between two theses that are at stake in Brentano’s analogy: the epistemological thesis (ET), and the ontological thesis (OT):

(ET): We know that a judgement is true when we experience it as evident – similarly, we know that an object is good when we experience the emotion that affirms it in a ‘higher’ form

(OT): The truth of a judgement consists in the experience of the judgement as evident – similarly, the goodness of an object consists in the experience of the affirming emotion in a ‘higher’ form

That Brentano holds ET follows partly from the previous quotation. Brentano claims that we know that we have judged correctly when we experience the judgement as evident – every further question into whether we really know is ridiculous. Similarly, in the case of emotions we know that something is good when we experience our love of it as a ‘higher’ love, or our pleasure in it as ‘higher’ pleasure – every further question into whether we really know is equally ridiculous. Furthermore, I believe that Brentano thinks that OT holds, because he compares goodness with truth (Brentano 1969, p. 18). And just as truth is in a way constituted by experiences of evident judgements, goodness may be claimed to be in some way constituted by experiences of ‘higher’ emotions. I will argue that neither ET nor OT is defensible because Brentano’s analogy is muddled: Brentano believes truth and goodness to be analogous while in fact they are not. In the following I will outline this muddle, try to set it right, and explain why a clear picture of the analogy supports neither ET nor OT.

1.2 The analogy as it should be

The muddle arises because Brentano often writes in a way that suggests that the analogous counterpart to ‘good’ is ‘true’. This, however, is not the case. The correct analogous counterpart to ‘good’ is ‘exists’, or ‘existing’. We know that something is good when it is affirmed by a correct emotion, and we know that something exists when it is affirmed by a correct judgement.

To see this, it might be helpful to go back to Brentano’s classification of mental states, which I briefly outlined earlier. Presentations are the simplest form of mental states: a presentation is the mere thought, or idea, of an object. Judgements are the next class: they affirm or reject presentations. That is to say, judgements affirm or reject the existence of the object presented. Brentano himself says as much:

Someone who contemplates the concept of the red or the round does not thereby form a judgement. But a judgement is formed by the person who combines them by pronouncing that there is something round which is red. (Brentano 1973a, p. 125, italics mine)

Merely contemplating concepts is just a form of entertaining presentations. We can entertain presentations by themselves or combine them in any possible way. But by merely combining the presentation ‘red’ with the presentation ‘round’ we have not yet made a judgement, Brentano says. We have made a judgement only when we pronounce the existence of something red that is also round.

In The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong Brentano then says that just as judgements affirm and reject, emotions also affirm and reject. As we have just seen in the case of judgements, affirming and rejecting has to do with the existence and non-existence of an object, and in the case of emotions, affirming and rejecting (loving and hating) has to do with the goodness and badness of an object. When I affirm something in a judging manner, I affirm it as existing, and when I affirm something in an emotional manner, I affirm it as good. Hence, existence and goodness are analogous. Furthermore, correctness in the sphere of judgement comes with an experience of the judgement as evident. Correctness in the sphere of emotions comes with an experience of the emotion in a ‘higher’ form. Hence, the experience of a judgement as evident and the experience of an emotion in a ‘higher’ form should be analogous. Finally, if a judgement is experienced as evident, we say it is true. If an emotion is experienced in a ‘higher’ form, we say the emotion is correct. Hence, truth and correctness should be analogous. The following table shows the analogous pairs:

If this interpretation is correct, then the following statements must be incorrect. In his interpretation of Brentano, Roderick Chisholm says, ‘Goodness and badness ... are analogous to truth and falsity’ (Chisholm 1982, p. 73). If my interpretation of the analogy is correct, then goodness is not analogous to truth, but to existence. Truth is analogous to emotional correctness. Yet more recent interpreters of Brentano, Wilhelm Baumgartner and Lynn Pasquerella, seem to have made the same mistake as Chisholm:

Brentano was convinced that just as the concept of truth can be derived from evident judgements which are experienced as correct, the concepts of the good and the beautiful can be derived from emotions which are experienced as correct. (Baumgartner and Pasquerella 2004, p. 227, my italics)

Again, if I am correct, then Baumgartner and Pasquerella’s use of the expression ‘just as’ must be mistaken. The concept of truth is derived in a manner that is different to the manner in which the concept of goodness is derived – what is similar to the way in which the concept of truth is derived is the way in which the concept of correctness is derived.

Table 1.1 Analogous pairs between judgements and emotions

But why would Chisholm as well as Baumgartner and Pasquerella make such a mistake? The reason is, I believe, that Brentano himself often expresses himself in a misleading manner. In The Origin of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong Brentano declares: ‘We call a thing true when the affirmation relating to it is correct. We call a thing good when the love relating to it is correct’ (Brentano 1969, p. 18). Here Brentano himself compares ‘true’ with ‘good’ – but he also talks of ‘a thing’. But then he tells us in the clarifying notes that this is a rather imprecise manner of speaking:

We use the expressions ‘true’ and ‘false’ in a number of quite different ways. Taking them in their strict and proper sense, we speak of true and false judgements; then (modifying the meaning somewhat) we also speak of true and false things, as when we speak of ‘a true friend’ or ‘false gold’. It is hardly necessary to observe that when I spoke in the lecture of things being true or false, I was using the terms in their derivative sense and not in their strict and proper sense. In this derivative use, we may say that the true is that which is, and the false that which is not. (Brentano 1969, p. 73)

I do not think that it is a very wise idea, especially when setting up an analogy to shed light on something, to start ‘modifying the meaning’ of one of the central terms ‘somewhat’ as well as using it in its ‘strict and proper sense’. It leads to confusion and, as I will explain in the following paragraphs, a rather significant confusion in this case – the entanglement of which has important consequences for Brentano’s overall account of emotions and values.

In the following I will show where exactly Brentano’s analogy gets muddled based on his double usage of the term ‘true’. For this purpose, I will first distinguish between the two meanings of ‘true’ on the basis of the previous quotation: there is the improper use of true – that is, true as it is applied to objects, and actually means ‘exists’: ‘the true is that which is’. Then there is the proper use of true – that is, true as it applies to judgements, and means ‘correct’: ‘we speak of true and false judgements’. I will call the former (‘true’ = ‘exists’) true₁, and the latter (‘true’ = ‘correct’) true₂. What happens in The Origin is that Brentano switches from using true₁ to true...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Analogy between Emotions and Judgements
• 2  The Analogy between Values and Secondary Qualities
• 3  Arguments from Best Explanation
• 4  The Functional Argument
• 5  Caring
• 6  Care-based Emotions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index