EMOTIONS, EDUCATION AND TIME
penultimate draft of a paper published in Metaphilosophy 21:434-446
(1990)
© Ronald
de Sousa
Philosophy,
University of Toronto
Education takes time, and should teach us to live in time. To elucidate our lives as temporal beings is one of philosophy’s irreducible tasks: for that reason, the philosophy of education is of the essence of philosophy. And the emotions, in turn, are at the core or education.
I shall focus, to instantiate that contention, on problems raised by the speculation that our emotions have their origins in paradigm scenarios. If so, then we cannot respond emotionally to present situations without being in a special relation to a certain privileged set of past experiences. By the same token the paradigm scenarios are liable to act as screens, (“transference”) concealing from us the reality of the particular present with the shadow of the past. A central problem for education, therefore, is to find a way in which we can achieve both flexibility and growth in our repertoire of paradigm scenarios.
I shall be arguing that these questions are important; but the answers I sketch are speculative and programmatic in the extreme. Support for the vague recipes I offer for the practice of education should come from empirical research. In our field, it is traditional to assume that absence of relevant knowledge is not a sufficient motive of silence. I shall argue that even philosophers need to mix psychology with their ethics and metaphysics with their psychology. For the moment, however, it is perhaps enough--for a philosopher--to draw attention to what other people ought urgently to find out.
Emotional Learning and Paradigm Scenarios
For many philosophers since Aristotle[1] it is a commonplace that moral education consists largely in the shaping of emotional responses. Even for unregenerate Kantians who believe that emotions play no relevant motivational part in morality, the emotions matter precisely because they must be controlled. Recently, moreoever, brain researchers have found that conscious material evoked by stimulation of the cortex leaves no traces either in short term or in long term memory unless there is some stimulation of the limbic system--that intermediate layer of the brain the circuits of which are involved in basic emotions.[2] This finding suggests that emotions are involved more directly than educationists have previously assumed in apparently purely cognitive activities.
Moreover, one aspect that is particularly striking about emotions in general is their level-ubiquity: emotions affect our experience and our performance at virtually every level of analysis. Rage can literally blind us; aesthetic emotions can arise in reaction to simple sensory input as well as to the apprehension of complex situations or conceptual structures. Emotions can interrupt intellectual activity as well as disrupt physiological functioning; conversely, emotions can play the role of higher mental functions interrupted by physiological demands, but they can also play the role of bodily states--sweating fear or raging lust--transcended by "rational will." Because of this level-ubiquity, no single level of analysis can do justice to the emotions.
For these reasons, the emotions should loom large in our attempts to understand ourselves: perhaps it is only a slight exaggeration to say that the philosophy of emotions is, or should be, at the core of philosophy and cognitive science. In the remainder of this paper, I shall be illustrating this contention in terms of some problems about emotional education and emotional change.
In The Rationality of Emotion (MIT 1987) I speculated, in a loosely Freudian vein, that our emotional repertoire has its origin in paradigm scenarios [3] But I found too little to say about what these were and how they functioned. In this paper I hope to make a little progress in the elucidation of a concept that I find indispensable, yet obscure.
The importance of paradigm scenarios stems from their function as mediating between the present and the past. They challenge us to perceive the present experience with its present singular object, even though the emotional vocabulary it has placed at our disposal is essentially rooted in the past. I shall argue that an important aspect of specifically human emotions rooted in paradigm scenarios is their capacity for loading for us some particular present object with its links to the past. In this way they endow emotional experience with significance beyond the present moment; they mediate not only between the present and the past, but also between the particular and the general. But such a mediating mission is an ambivalent one. For that additional significance may obfuscate the present reality as well as enrich it.
What, then, is a paradigm scenario? The following will do as a first approximation. The quality of every emotion is rooted in a dramatic, situation or episode type, associated with a characteristic feel (in the broad sense, not in some specific sense limited to bodily feelings), and characteristically also with components that can be identified as target, motivating aspect, and motivational aim. (What is in this sense aimed at is typically expressive behaviour; but in certain cases behaviour calculated to bring about more remote effects may also be involved.) The drama is played out by agents in certain roles, and the hypothesis that forms my starting point is that these paradigm scenarios, which can vary from one person to another, actually define the meaning for us of the emotions of which they constitute the prototypes. It is a consequence of this view that when I speak of full fledged human emotions, I do not refer to those simple reactions on the basis of which we attribute emotions to infants or animals--tears of rage, smiles of joy. Those are only the raw materials of full-fledged emotions. Nor do I refer to the “instincts” associated with the "Four Fs"--Fescape, Fcombat, Fnourishment, and Freproduction. Human emotions could not arise without innate predispositions to such reactions, but they are more complex structures, learned patterns of response to learned situational configurations, usually in a social context.
Four Problems about Paradigm Scenarios
This hypothesis raises a number of questions. I begin with four theoretical problems about paradigm scenarios, and then focus particularly on some ways in which they introduce temporality as an essential ingredient into the emotions. How Late can we Learn? The inspiration for the concept of paradigm scenarios obviously stems from psychoanalysis. From an orthodox psychoanalytic point of view, this would seem to imply that all our emotional dice are cast sometime in early childhood. (Indeed, Freud says somewhere that we are old at two.) Must we accept the consequence that nothing new can arise in our emotional life beyond early childhood? According to some modern views`[4] moral and emotional development stretches much later into childhood and even maturity.
To formulate this question is not to answer it: that empirical research still remains to be done. It is, however, a question the answer to which would make a crucial difference to education, not only at the practical but also at the philosophical level. One thing that rests upon it is the relation between our long-term emotional development and our cognitive development; another is the role of art and the aesthetic sense in the development of our sensibility. My own speculation is that emotional learning is indeed structurally like, as well as being affected by, aesthetic development. We learn to feel new emotions much as we learn to experience new art. By confronting existing patterns with small modifications, our expectation are nudged and shocked into change. When are situations similar? The suggestion just made presupposes that we understand, and at least sometimes can evaluate, the similarity between a present pattern and a past one. That, in turn, implies that we have some representation of the earlier paradigm, in the light of which the later is assessed. But what is the mode of representation involved, and what are the criteria for deciding whether a particular situation in life is or is not actually similar to some putative paradigm scenario?
The notions of representation and of similarity are notoriously difficult. Empirical studies of categorization have been concerned with the ways in which we classify simple stimuli, or objects; Eleanor Rosch, for example, has found a good deal of evidence for thinking that we categorize objects in terms of certain basic categories. When shown a picture of something, for example, we usually identify it as a chair in preference to both the more generic piece of furniture and the subcategory second empire armchair; or as a cat rather than either a mammal or a siamese.[5] In addition, different models forsimilarity measures are possible. Similarities can form a Euclidean quality space. Along any one dimension, or types of simple continuum, we perceive degrees of similarity. Overall similarity measures involve some sort of weighted sum of measures of raw similarity along a number of dimensions, after subtraction of a similarly weighted sum of the dissimilarities along other dimensions. Alternatively, we might assume that we perceive not dimensions of degree but features that are either present or absent. Measures of similarity can then be massaged out of data about the number of shared features and the number of features not shared. This model defines a family of similarity measures, defined by the weights attaching to the similarities and differences depending on importance, salience, context relevance, and so forth. Similarity is “the weighted difference of the measures of their common and distinctive features, thereby allowing for a variety of similarity relations over the same set of objects.”[6]
Whatever their intrinsic interest, however, similarity studies are unlikely to be of much relevance here. The pecularities of paradigm scenarios make it unlikely that standard solutions will be directly applicable to them. The main problem is that we are not categorizing stimuli, or things, or even responses, but situations, and, in effect, whole stories. That’s not to say that stories can’t be categorized: “narratology” is in just that business, and so are some studies of myths, tropes, and the like. But the principles involved in recent attempts on this problem are very different from those of categorization or prototype theory. Peter Brooks [7] cites the Russian Formalist Vladimir Propp, who claimed to find in Russian folk tales a limited number of “functions,” or types of actions. All folk tales, it turned out, were composed of sequences of subsets of these thirty-odd functions, always in constant sequence, performed by characters whose roles could be reduced to seven: Villain, Donor, Helper, Princess (and Father), Dispatcher, Hero, and False Hero. In a different vein, Northrop Frye has claimed to find beneath the variety of world literature a relatively small number of tropes [8]
Traditional psychoanalysis is another source of finite dictionaries of significant stories and tropes. Unfortunately, there is no very good reason to suppose that the basic story types of psychoanalysis have the universality claimed for them; in any case, even if they were right, the facts in question would stand in need of explanation: why do just those stories matter to us, or come to matter to us, in just that way? Freud’s attempt at an explanation of the genesis of the ego from an undifferentiated id points, perhaps, in the right direction, but needs to be brought into line with modern cognitive science.The problem of interpretation. Paradigm scenarios are dramas--stories played out by actors of memory or phantasy, up for imitation by the flesh and blood actors of our life. When we tell stories, there is always a possible question about interpretation: any story, including the story of my life, can bear an indefinite number of readings. Yet according to the way I have introduced paradigm scenarios, those are not so much stories up for interpretation as stories in terms of which other stories and situations are themselves interpreted. What then determines the privileged interpretation? There is an essential ambiguity--a potential multiplicity of meanings--as well as an essential ambivalence--a potential multiplicity of values--in paradigm scenarios.
One aspect of this question concerns the relative priority of the child’s and the adult’s interpretation of the stories that constitute the originating knot of a neurosis--or, for that matter, of a non neurotic configuration.[9] If we are interested in the relevance of some story to the present subject, then that relevance itself must be explained; and how else, given the general assumptions about the early origins of our emotional make-up, could it be explained than by taking seriously its original relevance to the child? On the other hand, if we mean: relevant to the child then, how much should we "lend" to the child, and what is the significance of such a loan? Here is Freud on the relative advantages of analyzing the child or the adult:
An analysis which is conducted upon a neurotic child itself must, as a matter of course, appear to be more trustworthy, but it cannot be very rich in material; too many words and thoughts have to be lent to the child, and even so the deepest strata may turn out to be impenetrable to consciousness. An analysis of a childhood disorder through the medium of recollection in an intellectually mature adult is free from these limitations; but it necessitates our taking into account the distortion and refurbishing to which a person’s own past is subjected when it is looked back upon from a later period. The first alternative perhaps gives the more convincing results; the second is by far the more instructive. (“From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” SE XVII, 9)
I can think of two moderately plausible candidates--both prominent in Freud’s approach to the problem--for the role of determinant of the Authorized Interpretation of our basic emotional scenarios. One is biology; the other consists in the norms of emotional education.
The first is a large subject, which for the purposes of this paper I shall abjure. I shall only reiterate my hunch that the appropriate way to understand the contribution of biology is atomistic [10] emotional complexes involving stimulus configuration, interpretation, and emotional reaction, are constructed on the basis of elementary instinctual responses. But to say this is not to give a recipe as to how it is to be done: indeed, it is simply to wave in the direction of one of the two most insistent problems in the philosophy of mind, the problem of the nature and genesis of intentionality. I here leave this problem as I find it [11] but I shall return below to a crucial aspect of it--the question of our capacity for relating to genuine particulars.The Role of Norms. How then might norms play a role in imposing on our paradigm scenarios a privileged interpretation?
Prima facie, there seem to be two kinds of learning: inductive and social. Inductive learning needs only an environment that reinforces certain expectations or responses and doesn’t reinforce others, but there is nothing about it that intrinsically requires the intervention of other people. Social learning may involve essentially the same psychological mechanisms, but it involves the intervention of a teacher who on occasion corrects the learner. That opens it to a possibility that doesn’t exist when “nature is our teacher”: the possibility of contestation. If I am learning something inductively from nature, I can think some experience misleading, but I can’t think of nature as having itself misinterpreted the facts. Most emotions (some more than others, to be sure, and with some probable exceptions such as frustration), are grounded in social fact; emotional learning is presumably mostly social learning. That means that on the occasions in which our paradigm scenarios are established, we may have been corrected, encouraged, or forbidden certain reactions, and those sanctions themselves may become part of the scenario.
An example can again be drawn from Freud’s Wolf Man. Freud relates that his patient seemed to have memories of sexual aggression, which actually turned out to be phantasies “meant to efface the memory of an event which later on seemed offensive to the patient’s masculine self-esteem, and they reached this end by putting an imaginary and desirable converse in the place of the historical truth.” (SE XVIII:20) We must allow, then, that the paradigm scenarios are not always direct products of scenes actually experienced, but sometimes inverted or in some other way transformed. But note that in this particular example, we are dealing with a transformation that itself is caused by some other paradigm scenarios, or by some sort of ideological shaper of shame.
The Wolf Man also illustrates a more (but not very) straightforward case of the genesis of a paradigm scenarios on top of a more basic one. Freud describes the Wolf Man as having had a sensual and affectionate tie with his sister, who had probably played with his genitals when they were both small children. In puberty, however, she rebuffed his approaches, and
Social learning therefore complicates the picture, not necessarily because it is acquiesced in but sometimes precisely because it is not. As our paradigm scenarios get more complex, moreover, social learning develops new tools. Beginning, presumably, in the simple polarity of pain and pleasure, approval and disapproval, it must have gradually expanded into the complex and many-dimensional world of adult emotion communication. Further social learning can then rest not only on approval and disapproval, but on more subtle signals: complicity, admiration, ridicule, anticipation of what’s expected of you given who we take you to be, and so forth.he at once turned away from her to a little peasant girl who was a servant in the house and had the same name as his sister. In doing so he was taking a step which had a determinant influence on his heterosexual choice of object, for all the girls with whom he subsequently fell in love--often with the clearest indications of compulsion--were also servants, whose education and intelligence were necessarily far inferior to his own. If all of these objects of his love were substitutes for the figure of the sister whom he had to forgo, then it could not be denied that an intention of debasing his sister and of putting an end to her intellectual superiority, which he had formerly found so oppressive, had obtained the decisive control over his object choice. (ibid., 22)
There is a further twist to social learning. We can’t assume that the only roles we learn in the paradigm scenarios of our childhood are learned only in the first person. We can’t assume we learn only our own parts. More likely we learn all the parts of a whole script. A woman who becomes a mother often enters directly into the exercise of a role she has never held before, but which is clearly derived from the script of her role-model, her own mother. But the simplicity of that role is liable to be troubled by some further considerations: the woman’s understanding of the role of mother is unlikely to be scripted literally from her mothers. However much I may wish to emulate Richard Burton as Hamlet, I have read the reviews, and will want to avoid some mistakes. The mother whose script derives from her own mother’s has not only read the reviews: she has written them. So here again, in yet another way, the normative enters irreducibly into the very fabric of the psychological, in the constituent phase of our emotional education.[12]
Paradigm Scenarios and Temporality
One norm--or ideal--that is frequently mentioned in connection with emotions is that they should be authentic, where this means at least in part that they should be directed towards the present particular. Particulars are essentially temporal. In three ways, the role of paradigm scenarios can help us to understand the essentially temporal structure of our emotional experience: they constitute (temporally organized) stories, they involve temporal aspect, and, most important, they are susceptible to the phenomenon of transference.
(i) Paradigm Scenarios as Stories. To every emotion in the full sense (henceforth, by ';emotion’ I shall mean only those) there is typically a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.[13] A conventional example: A child desires the gaze and touch of the mother; the mother’s attention is taken away by her turning to the other parent; there is screaming or whining behaviour: the whole is called jealousy. In this case, when its name becomes known, it will have already crystallized into a recognizable pattern and therefore will seem natural, not just in its parts, but as a whole: its name will seem the name for some real feeling quite independent of any social facts. In other cases such as guilt, if something like the Freudian story is right, the temporal structure is more elaborate. Guilt presupposes the introjection, as the superego, of a censorious parental figure; it therefore also presupposes a recognition of such a figure, in fact or phantasy, inspiring fear in direct proportion to the desires that it forbids. But that introjection may in turn rest on a more ancient need to control one’s own frightening impulses. Even anger, which seems much simpler, can only be distinguished from a reflex of rage in terms of a structured situation in which some other person violates some entitlement of my own. Here too, there is an implicit story, as well as a presupposition of already well articulated social concepts of rights, responsibilities, and separate selves. Love, too, has an essentially temporal structure, insofar as it is the result of a process of attachment and therefore distinct from merely immediate attraction. Love at first sight is a contradiction in terms.
Emotions are commonly said to involve desires as components.[14] The link of emotions with paradigm scenarios suggests a different way of looking at this familiar fact: one unobvious reason that emotions involve desire is that they are structured by stories, and all stories involve desire.[15] In fact, when we tell stories, desire is involved twice over: first, the story itself presupposes a tension between what is and what ought to be, which is either increased or resolved in the course of the story. Second, as a story is told, it plays on a desire on the part of the hearer or teller of the story to get to the end. But sometimes, if not always--at any rate, in more cases than we care to admit--having an emotion is indeed telling ourselves a story, and so the temporality of the story as such become important too. At both the object level and the ideological level (as we might call the level of our telling ourselves the story) the temporal dynamics of paradigm scenarios generate potential emotional variants.
(ii) Temporal Aspect. Our attitude to the unfolding of a story, like our attitude to the fulfilment of desire, admits of interesting variants in respect of aspect, in the grammatical sense of that term. Some emotions are attitudes to scenarios that are, in effect, told in specific temporal styles: the consummatory relates especially to the resolution or end of the scenarios concerned: its privileged grammatical aspect is the perfect, which relates to what is done, completed. The grammatical aspect of the contrasting story style is characteristically in the imperfect--the aspect of duration, in which time is savoured rather than spent. I call it the ludic, because its paradigm is child’s play, or perhaps the caress. The paradigm of the first is the male orgasm: viewed as the end of a sexual encounter in both the temporal and the teleological sense.[16] One corollary of this question is that there may be interesting differences of individual emotional style: some, for example, may be more interested in ludic, some in consummatory pleasure; or, for some, the early stages of emotional episodes may be the most interesting; for others, an emotional episode will become satisfactory only in the achievement of closure.
(iii) Transference. Another aspect of the temporality of emotions stressed in the notion of paradigm scenarios concerns the multifarious meaning of the presence--i.e. of the presentness, of the past: of the way that the past shapes present experience not just in the ordinary order of causality but through the medium of mental representation and categorization (including language, but not only language.) In psychoanalytic terms, this is the problem of transference, which is the name Freud gave to the (inappropriate) application to a present object of a schema formed on the basis of earlier experiences, and rationally applicable to those. How much does the weight of the past impede the authenticity of the apprehension of the present?
Attention to the Particular as an Educational Utopia
Transference is benign in the therapeutic process, because in that context the repetition involved allows the emotional structure to be examined, at least, and at best manipulated. For in therapy neither the patient’s reactions nor their inappropriateness to the present circumstances can do any harm. In analysis, “the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out ... and in the end we understand that this is his way of remembering.”[17]
In some analogous sense, all cognition is remembering--re-cognition. To know that there is tea in my cup, it is necessary to remember what tea is, what teacups are for, how they look, and so forth.[18]
But the dark side of this process of remembering is that one can feel something ostensibly for some present target, when the feeling is actually appropriate only to the original paradigm. When is emotional remembering an aid to cognition, and when is it a veil that conceals present reality? It is not strange that the same mechanism should be involved both in normal and in pathological cases, but one would like to know what the difference is between them. In some structural sense, there is no difference. Transference “consists of new editions of old traits and ... repeats infantile reactions. But this is the essential character of every state of being in love.”[19] Up to a point, what is more, the repetition of past attitudes in response to new stimuli is perfectly sound policy, so long as the present circumstances are relevantly similar to the old. Yet there is something deeply distressing about the feeling that one is being loved not “for oneself,” but because of someone else, in accordance to an ancient pattern. Why is this?
Here again, there is an ineliminable normative element in our conception of emotions. It relates to something that--at least in the light of a certain Western ideal--is peculiarly human: our capacity to relate to particulars, or individuals, as such.
This can be described at different theoretical levels: logico-semantic, epistemological, psychological, ethical, and metaphysical.
From the strictly logical standpoint, what is in question is our capacity for singular reference. Somehow, we are able to intend a reference to a particular, even though, from the epistemological point of view, it seems there can be no principled difference between making a reference to a particular and making a reference to a thing or person of a certain kind. [20] The drive to knowledge is always a generalizing one. But the point of seeking knowledge seems, at least sometimes, to know some present particular--to let present experience take precedence over the categories in terms of which we have learned to understand experience in general. That process is asymptotic, of course, if it is possible at all: I find it very hard to believe that there could be any kind of understanding that is not intrinsically general, in the sense that to understand something is to bring it under the intellectual aegis of a certain category.[21]
From the psychological point of view, the only difference that particularity as such can make is one that is rooted in history: if I love you, that does not mean I love your identical twin, even though he has all the qualities that first evoked my love for you.
Although the existence of a history is crucial to love, one doesn’t always want to get bogged down in the details of that history. A consciousness of history can degenerate into grudges and resentment. On the other hand, matters may be scarcely happier if what each remembers in of their common history is only how wonderful the other was, in the old days. For happy expectations can be no less tyrannical, in practice, than memories of past sins. Instead, what we want is emotional response adequate to the present reality, even if, or especially, if that reality involves a particular person with whom there is a shared history. That is the ethical dimension.
There is nothing wrong with apprehending new situations of in terms of old--assuming our innate paradigms, if any, have been used, applied, and perhaps modified since childhood. What causes problems is illegitimate assimilation of the present to the past, or perhaps we should say the immobility of the past in the present. Thus Freud speaks (ibid) of the ideal of “vanquishing the timelessness of the unconscious.
But why, after all, is it a problem? Because of our metaphysical assumption that what matters about human beings, what defines their identity, is their existence in time, the reality of change, and the essential singularity of the present moment. This is summed up in Iris Murdoch’s definition of love as “knowledge of the particular.”[22]
Seen in this light, the principal achievement of our emotional life is one which paradigm scenarios make possible, at the same time as they constitute an obstacle to its full realization. It is an ability to transcend emotional repetition, and achieve genuine emotional connection with the present.
Following this line of thinking, the education of emotions would be a matter of learning flexibility in relation to our paradigm scenarios, or more exactly to learn to use them. How can such flexibility be achieved? How can our emotions not be alienated from the very objects that ostensibly evoke them?
In the parallel case of language, the possibility of describing particulars rests on our having a general vocabulary that is as elaborate as possible.[23] Can we sketch an analogous prospect for the education of the emotions, in which the role of paradigm scenarios would be wholly benign? Clearly, on the analogy of language, the way in which different paradigm scenarios get combined would be crucial.
The discussion so far suggests at least three mechanisms that should be explored: the exploitation, in the service of emotional flexibility, of the story-like structure of our paradigm scenarios; the embedding of one scenario inside another; and the subversion of the ideology of emotions as natural.
(i) First, we should somehow be led from an early age to recognize that the stories that govern our lives are not all of a piece: that they have parts that might be recombined in different ways. That, surely, is what literature is all about; the studies of narratology cited earlier have merely formalized this articulation. But the role of social learning in our emotional education tends to repress rather than to encourage the view that our guiding stories might be reinterpreted, let alone rewritten.
(ii) A second way to cultivate emotional flexibility is to embed some scenarios inside others, to look at one scenario in the light of another which is made to contain it. In honour of the analogy of with language, this might be dubbed the cultivation of emotional polysemy; but its common name is irony: think of the novel light and depth of relief obtained in Don Quixote by the embedding of the chivalrous paradigm inside of one belonging to quite a different world. (And think of the further play on the same mechanism in Borges's story about Ménard, author of Don Quixote.)
The power of our paradigm scenarios over our lives is not reducible to their parts; nevertheless, they were put together from parts. For example, if we are to believe Daniel Stern[24], the infant’s social smile is put together in the first few months of life, as a piece of spontaneous operant behaviour gets attached to a scenario, however brief, in which it becomes a meaningful signal of social pleasure. Soon, that short scenario in turn gets embedded into attachment relations at various levels. Later, as we learn to dissemble and be polite, we learn to disassemble that scenario again, to separate the smile from its meaning. If we could understand and generalize the mechanisms that go into that process, we might stand a better chance of getting our children educated into flexibility.
(iii) The embedding of a paradigm scenario in some larger, ironic context may undermine the ideology of emotions as natural. Many people have remarked on the fact that when religion weakens it tends to be replaced by myths of nature--typically, by scientific myths, in which the inflexibility of nature is found as comforting as the omnipotence of God. But if we cease to think of our emotions as inevitable in just that way, we are also more likely to view them as open to modification, and to enlist them as instruments of freedom rather than tools of self-oppression.
[1]:. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II
[2]:. See Pierre Gloor, André
Olivier, Luis F. Quesney, Frederick Andermann, and Sandra Horowitz, “The
Role of the Limbic System in Experimental Phenomena of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,”
Annals
of Neurology 12 (1982):140. Cited in
[3]:. Similar ideas can be found in the writings of the “Social Constructivist” school. See e.g. James Averill, “Acquisition of Emotions in Adulthood,” in Rom Harré, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 100: “...emotions are transitory social roles--that is, institutionalized ways of interpreting and responding to particular classes of situations.”
[4]:. See, for example, discussions of
moral education in Kohlberg, Lawrence, Essays
on Moral Development.
[5]:.v. Eleanor Rosch,
“Principles of Categorization,” in E. Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd, eds.,
Cognition
and Categorization.
[6]:. V. Amos Tversky and Itamar Gati, “Studies of Similarity,” in Rosch and Lloyd, op. cit.; p 80-81.
[7]:. Peter Brooks (
[8]:. Northrop Frye, The
Anatomy of Criticism,
[9]:. In general, the question of normality is not directly relevant to the question of aetiology. In a famous footnote in the Three Essays, Freud points out that from the psychoanalytic point of view the explanation of an exclusive heterosexual choice “is as much in need of explanation” as an exclusive homosexual choice, given the original bisexuality of the human psyche. (See Freud, SE VII.)
[10]:. What exactly do I mean by atomistic? Not exactly that there is nothing in the whole that was not in the parts, for surely there is, unproblematically, emergence at various levels--but rather than when we have understood all the details that microso-psycho-sociological research is about to yield, there will be very little mystery left about emotional intuition.
[11]:. In ROE, ch. 4, I have made an attempt to distinguish levels of intentionality, the lower ones of which can be accounted for in terms of a wholly naturalistic account of teleology.
[12]:. Averill (art. cit) has stressed the importance of constitutive rules:
the view adumbrated by Elias Tomkins and many others... assumes that the rules of emotion are almost exclusively regulative, at least as far as fundamental emotions are concerned. However, if we admit that some of the rules of emotion are also constitutive, then the role of society becomes constructive as well as regulative.... the ferocity and bloodthirstiness extolled by the medieval knight are just as much social constructions as are the more benign emotions advocated by the most dedicated pacifist of today. (113)
[13]:. Peter Brooks has suggested that
we might have a kind of minimum daily requirement of myth, which our emotions
exploit and, perhaps, even sometimes replace; perhaps, he suggests,
the life histories of societies, institutions, and individuals assumed a new importance as the idea of a sacred masterplot lost its persuasive and cohesive force. For sometimes in the eighteenth century onward, the interpretation of human plots took on new urgency in response to a new centering of perspectives on the individual personality and a search for paterns in the individul existence and understanding of self that might recover some of the explanatory force lost with the decline of the collective myth. (Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 268).
[14]:. See e.g. Joel Marks, “A Theory
of Emotion,” Philosophical Studies, 42:227-242 (1982).
[15]:. See Peter Brooks, Reading for
the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.
[16]:. I have discussed the issue of temporal aspects in some length in ROE, ch 8. In the somewhat barbarous terms beloved of the narratologists, temporal aspects in our attitude to the unfolding of stories seem to be closely related to the distinction introduced by Roland Barthes between the pro[h]airetic--concerned with the development of action, and the hermeneutic, concerned with "the code of enigmas and answers"; (Brooks p. 18, citing Roland Barthes, S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970). When we are interested in enigmas and answers, we want to get to the end. When we are simply following the development of action, we may be content with the enjoyment of process.
[17]:. S. Freud, ";Remembering,
Repeating, and Working Through,” in SE XII
[18]:. In the now famous case of Stich’s
Mrs. T., one might describe her plight as not really understanding what
it means to say that McKinley was assasinated, because she can’t
remember that assassinations make you dead, that when you are dead you
are no longer alive, and so forth. See S. Stich, The Case Against Belief.
[19]:. Freud, “Observations on Transference
Love,”
[20]:. On the kind of intentionality that makes possible singular reference, see ROE, ch. 4.
[21]:. Cf. Heise, commentary on Ghiselin, BBS 1986, p.290: “There are probably two kinds of people in the world: one class cannot understand an individual without relying on some property or properties,.... the other class...think that they do understand what it is to recognise an individual without relying on some property or properties....”
[22]:. Iris Murdoch, The
Sovereignty of Good.
[23]:. When learning a language a person does not simply acquire specific responses--phonemes, words and whatever. Rather, the person learns the rules that make possible the production of an indefinite variety of meaningful utterances. (Averill, art. cit., 101)
[24]:. See Daniel Stern, The First Year of Life.
