Emotions and cognition

In traditional philosophy the emotions are passions, i.e. passive states, as opposed to actions, which are behaviors. In life, action often seems to bubble out of strong emotion, but it can be resisted, which seems to indicate that emotion and will are separate but related sources of action. Action from a purely detached, "cold blooded," passionless decision is conceivable but perhaps rare, since any matter that engages the self sufficiently to fix one's attention, and intention, is likely to involve some emotion, however mild. The "cold blooded" killer seems, and is, more horrible than someone acting out of strong emotion. Such a person seems inhuman, just because of a sense that he is pathologically detached from human feeling and operating more like a mere mechanism. Emotional involvement implies that something means something to the person, and perhaps involves some suffering. The cold blooded killer thus acts as though he doesn't even care, one way or the other, neither suffering nor aware of suffering.

Emotions are feelings but not sensations. Sensations are localized in the body and tend to provide perceptual or physiological information. Sensations can simply be feelings of touch, or of pleasure, pain, hunger, thirst, satiety, sexual arousal, etc. Emotions are systemic and, while causing physiological reactions (and so sensations), are not localized - they are states of the self, not of the body, although immediately affecting and reflected in the body. Thus, one has a pain in the toe, or pleasure in the genitals, but happiness or sadness everywhere. At the same time, although pleasure is primarily a sensation, "taking pleasure" in doing something is an emotional state which can be connected to many kinds of activities. Similarly, although sexual arousal is a sensation, lustfulness can be an emotion existing with or without any actual arousal.

Since emotions are not acts of will, they are not freely chosen, but occur spontaneously, which is why a "crime of passion" is less severe than a crime of calculation, as less under control of the will - and it is, of course, acts of will that are morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. Cold blooded action, although simultaneously judged as inhuman, is ironically more open to moral sanction, which is exclusively human. Nevertheless, the occurrence of emotions is bound up with attitudes, situations, and knowledge, all of which can change quickly, altering the emotion just as quickly. Thus, discovering that a presumed enemy was actually acting as a friend can turn anger and hatred quickly into remorse, gratitude, and affection. Although emotions may accompany attitudes (pride), not all attitudes (alertness, stubbornness) are emotions. It is noteworthy that of the seven deadly sins some are vices, i.e. habits and attitudes, with emotional content (envy, wrath), some without (gluttony, sloth).

The cognitive and situational component of emotion means that emotions are as varied as the circumstances of life, which means that the range and variety of emotions is great and complex - as can be seen in the accompanying tables at left and right. It is unlikely that a system of emotions could do justice to the complexity, though in general emotions are thought of as positive or negative, good or bad. The valence may be due to either an inward or an outward circumstance:  A feeling of pride may be vicious, when a person is proud of something wrongful or shameful, while anger, often thought of as intrinsically negative, may nevertheless be properly directed at something wrongful, shameful, or evil. Fear and horror are bad, not because of anything in the self, but because of the danger posed by, or the evil represented by, some object. Wonder and awe similarly refer to objects, often to some sublimity or surprising complexity in them.

The metaphysical framework for the emotions can be provided by the theory of positive transcendence in The Origin of Value in a Transcendent Function. There it was concluded that sensation as such was transcendent (the positive content of transcendence) and that pleasure and pain were intuitive forms of sensation as value. Sensation, pleasure, and pain, however, are causally conditioned phenomena. Pure forms of objective value - right and wrong, good and evil, and the beautiful and the ugly - were then examples of "unconditioned" positive transcendence, purposive value, intrinsic to objects. Now it can be observed that the emotions fit in between these metaphysical extremes. They are, as noted, not sensations, and so are relatively detached from the body, but they are also in part causally conditioned and so undoubtedly in and of the body, unlike unconditioned value - as the heart may begin to beat heavily with strong emotion, emotion is often felt as seated in the breast. On the other hand, they are also, as also noted, responsive to and expressive of cognition, and so to purposive value that is recognized in the self or in objects. Emotions thus bridge the ontological and cognitive gap between sensation, or pleasure and pain, and purposive value. They combine and bridge the causal and the cognitive, the subjective and the objective, the immediacy of self and the mediacy of representation.