This is from the analysis given by Robert Solomon on his Great Sources series.
I'll probably get some details wrong, but I wanted to track through this debate as I think it's relevant to much of the way that I've been thinking about moral development at a personal level.
Emotions are difficult to 'verify' as we only have the subject's description of what they are feeling, combined with evidence of their physiology and behaviour. Now, of course, there are also brain scans - so we can see which parts of the brain 'light up'. There so seem to be circuits of areas that correlate with subjective feelings of fear, pleasure and so on. Nonetheless, this investigation remains somewhat hazy.
For the ancient Greeks, who did not have a conception of a soul or mind that was separate or distinct from the body (their view was possibly rather like the Chinese concept of 'heart-mind'), there's no real divide between what is experienced and what is. It's almost impossible for us to imagine a state in which external reality and the way that we experience it is unified to that extent. So much so that Nietzsche claimed that Aristotle could never have had 'an experience' - meaning that for Aristotle the inner sense of something just simply was the something. It's difficult even to express this clearly.
This starts to change with the Christian concept of the soul - and Augustine is well aware of the divide between inner and outer. Guilt as well as shame is made possible, really, through this transition. This can be seen to enrich our capacity to live in the world - we have this profound sense of our 'inner life' as well as the outer.
Descartes put a barricade between the two - we can only experience the world as mediated through our senses and by our thoughts and beliefs and expectations. Greenness is not something 'in the world' but the way in which we imagine the world. Emotions are 'in the mind', in the Cartesian view, rather than in the world. If we 'express' an emotion, we are, in this interpretation, pushing something from the mind into the world, through speech and behaviour.
Freud of course makes matters worse - as he points out that we can't know our minds indubitably either. We can be wrong about our emotions - it might take someone else to say, 'Why are you so angry?' before we realise that we are indeed angry. We might even deny it.
Kant didn't like this concept of dualism. So he proposed that the world as we experience it is phenomenal... this is complicated, but I think the point is that the way we experience the world is the only way that we can know it. That, I suppose, we experience it in terms that fulfill its meaning to us. That the world is the phenomena we experience.
Hegel too thought it didn't make sense to claim that immediate experience of the world is somehow 'inside' us and the external world is outside. So he suggested that the experience is both ours and of the world. That you can't pull the things apart. The phenomena as experienced are the world.
Husserl developed the concept and school of Phenomenology to describe our experience 'as it is' - it's not just something immediate to us, but also describes the world. There is this intricate relationship, in that experiences can only be 'of' the world. So, our experiences have 'intentionality' - they are about something (the world). His claim is that everything 'mental' has an object that is outside us and independent in the world, even if it's a fictional character or myth. The mind cannot be separated off from what's outside it. It always refers beyond itself to the world. That is what intentionality means.
Now, Solomon's claim is that emotions are like this. They are intentional in this sense: referring to something in the world and ways of engaging with the world. they are not just things that happen in the mind.
Heidegger also believed that the sense of some 'inner space' was just wrong. All experience is bound to being-in-the-world. He came up with the idea of 'moods'. Unlike emotions which have a straightforward intentionality directed at one object (I love him, I am angry with her, I am jealous of them), moods take as their object the world as a whole. Moods are a way of engaging with the world as a whole. Apparently Wittgenstein was something of a depressive and he said that a depressed man lives in a depressed world. This seems intuitively right. When one is in love, the world seems lovable; when one is joyful, the world sparkles; when one is depressed, nothing has any significance. Mood is what the whole world 'is about'. Again, the stress here is the intricate relationship between subject and world.
Sartre took this further, claiming that emotions are acts of consciousness in order to escape from difficult situations. He uses the sour grapes story - and I am wondering now if I was wrong in attributing that analysis to Nietzsche (though it was Nietzsche who said that resentment led to the rise of the Christian transvaluation of values). Anyway, Sartre's view is that through the conscious choice of the emotion of resentment, the powerless disvalue what they cannot achieve. It enables us to escape responsibility in a world that we cannot change, by changing the way that we behave toward it. We enact a 'magical transformation of the world'.
I have some problems with all of this because a) it seems that moods in the subject change, yes, our being-in-the-world, but through the inner experience... meaning that there is still an inner and an outer, though they feed into each other directly (they aren't cut off in the Cartesian way - though Descartes did think that thinking thing and physical thing communicated through the pituitary gland); b) because Sartre is also saying that an inner change effects outer change and c) isn't this what the Stoics were all about? In that changing thoughts about what we could control and what we couldn't could change how we felt?
So, it does all seem to be that all these people are just taking different ways of talking about things rather than really effecting any radical insight. But, maybe I just don't understand it well enough.
Anyway, this all gets to the point where we see emotions not just as passive feelings that we sense internally but as action potentials. Beyond that, they are routes to action. Directives of a certain sort of action. And that I do think is valid. I mean, at the very least it makes sense in terms of evolutionary biology. Feel curious in order to explore and discover better places to thrive; feel angry to defend yourself and your kin; feel care to look after infants and so on. Over time, our emotional repertoire gets richer and more complex - and here Solomon's claim that emotions are 'in a social space' rather than a private space also makes sense. Being in more complex and numerous relationships calls forth different emotions as we navigate our way through life. And, at a very basic level, it seems somewhat obvious that emotions are 'about' something. They don't take place in a vacuum. When we don't know why we feel as we do, the experience is somewhat perplexing. We tend to seek reasons and causes.
Solomon further claims that we learn to have, or to express, our emotions is a socially acceptable way. Only toddlers and those with certain conditions, will have a tantrum in a supermarket. It's also interesting that emotions which are not known in one culture might not be 'experienced' - or at least experienced so consciously and fully - until we learn about them from another society,consider schadenfreude or mudita (empathetic joy).
What all this does offer, though, is a way to see emotional education as having a role in moral development. It encourages us to feel more responsible for our feelings; to appreciate that we can come to 'feel differently' about issues and to recognise that emotions may be relevant messengers about the way in which we seek change in the world.
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