ROBERT C.

SOLOMON

EMOTIONS, COGNITION, AFFECT: ON JERRY NEUS A TEAR IS AN INTELLECTUAL THING1

ABSTRACT. Jerome Neu has been one of the most prominent voices in the philosophy of emotions for more than twenty years, that is, before the eld was even a eld. His Emotions, Thought, and Therapy (1977) was one of its most original and ground-breaking books. Neu is an uncompromising defender of what has been called the cognitive theory of emotions (as am I). But the ambiguity, controversy, and confusion sown by the notion of a cognitive theory of emotion is what I would like to focus on here. In so doing I will indicate some of the ways in which my own theory has developed.

Jerome Neu has been one of the most prominent voices in the philosophy of emotions for more than twenty years, that is, before the eld was even a eld. His Emotions, Thought, and Therapy (1977) was one of its most original and ground-breaking books, displaying the added virtues of being solidly cross-disciplinary, being actually sympathetic to Freud, and bringing in empirical data to support his philosophical analyses all three venal if not deadly sins at the time in mainstream analytic philosophy. In the title essay of this his new book, A Tear is an Intellectual Thing, Neu takes on the whole eld of affective psychology and the very inuential work of Paul Ekman in particular. It is one of the few extensive pieces of substantial (as opposed to methodological) cross-disciplinary criticism before the previous decade. Thankfully such work is now becoming not only respectable but professionally obligatory. Neu is an uncompromising defender of what has been called the cognitive theory of emotions (as am I). The label is not his (nor is it mine). It has been imposed on us, transferred from psychology. I long fought it, not because it was wrong-headed but because cognition is so variously or ill-dened. In particular, I want to reject (as I am not always sure Jerry does) the overly committed conceptions of cognition as knowledge (and thus in some sense veridical) and such overly narrow and passionless conceptions as
Philosophical Studies 108: 133142, 2002. 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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involving information. There is also the confusion, which Jerry (as a Freudian) does not make, between cognition and consciousness. Cognition does not necessarily involve the higher modes of consciousness, self-consciousness, reection, articulation, and deliberation. But I thus want to reject his Blake-inspired title, A Tear is an Intellectual Thing, on the grounds that it is not the intellect that is typically engaged in emotion. But, then, the question is how we are to understand cognition and what exactly are the cognitive elements that are so crucial (I would say constitutive) of emotion? What continues to exercise me is the ambiguity, controversy, and confusion sown by the notion of a cognitive theory of emotion, and that is what I would like to focus on here. I am helped and encouraged by the fact that my co-symposiasts and chair have all written about the topic. In this brief comment, I want to examine one such cognitive theory of emotion, Neus view of emotion as thought, and face the question whether any such theory excludes affect or feeling. It has been argued that cognitive theories are pathologically dissociative insofar as they deny or neglect affective feelings (for instance, as put here by Michael Stocker and elsewhere by Peter Goldie)2 I argue that an adequate cognitive theory includes rather than excludes affect. In so doing I will indicate some of the ways in which my own theory has developed over the past quarter century. Neus book is a gold mine of ideas and insights, and what is especially valuable are his analyses of particular emotions, notably jealousy, the subject of his best-known essay to date and one of the topics that has inspired commentary here. Accordingly, let me begin with an example, something concrete instead of any general hand-waving about the nature of emotions, cognition, and affect as such.
A CASE OF JEALOUSY

Joshua sits in an agitated state of disbelief in the microbiology symposium as he realizes that this colleague of his, with whom he had worked for several months, had stolen his idea. Well, not actually stole, since they had pretty much come up with the idea simultaneously. But she had, now, presented it rst, received acclaim from his colleagues, and the paper was already scheduled

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for publication! His mind crowds with thoughts, some downright hostile (even homicidal) towards his colleague. He thinks about an appropriate response, what to say. He wonders how this could have happened, why he delayed and dawdled in putting together his own paper and presentation. He momentarily worries whether his career is effectively over. He nds himself thinking more extensively about other missteps in his edgling career, about his inability to do the complex mathematical analyses needed for some of his intended projects, about his comparative lack of presentational skills. His face feels as if it is on re, and he is sweating profusely. After the presentation, Joshua raises a provocative (not to say rude) challenge to the paper. He is ushed and agitated and his voice betrays his tension but he is still under control. Although he (obviously) agrees with the conclusion of the paper he raises several picky points about its presentation and its handling of the evidence. Other people in the room cool the increasingly heated situation by praising the paper and making some slightly overblown comments on its importance in the eld. Joshua becomes livid. His thoughts now include an unspeakable fantasy about releasing a lethal virus from the lab and destroying everyone in the room. He almost yells out, thats my hypothesis! but he nds himself speechless. He stomps out of the room, muttering to a horried friend as he goes, I just cant help myself. This is a case of jealousy, or more precisely, what we would call professional jealousy. It raises a number of important and interesting questions about the nature of emotion and about the nature of that green-eyd emotion in particular. Notice, rst, that the description of the emotion (and I have quite intentionally not tried to produce a rst-person phenomenological description) is lled with thoughts. It is Jerrys contention (and mine too) that no emotion, but in particular jealousy, is conceivable with out them. Second, in contrast to the usual romantic paradigm of jealousy, there is no question of loss of love, unless this term is stretched unmercifully to include collegial respect and career success. And, even then, it is evident that the loss is not the loss of affection from the putative object of the emotion (as the loss of affection or attention of the beloved is said to be the object of romantic jealousy). Indeed, is the object of jealousy the colleague, the thesis,

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the presentation, ones other colleagues? Thus jealousy emerges as a complex emotion with a complex object, indeed, not a single object (thing or person) at all. Third, notice the essential importance of the rival in this situation. Jealousy is a social emotion in that it involves not only one other person but minimally three (thus the classic triangle talk) and arguably four or more (there must be an audience, a community in which to be humiliated). In romantic jealousy this triangular (or quadrangular) structure is pretty straightforward. In the case of professional jealousy it is not. And, fourth, notice how impossible it would be to describe this as an emotional situation without frequent allusion to the physiological arousal and agitation that accompanies (or, perhaps, is an essential part of) the emotion. There are other questions about jealousy that I will not broach here, for instance, In what sense (if any) does the notion of rights enter into the case (perhaps something even akin to property rights)? What is the relation between jealousy and envy? Or jealousy and resentment? Jealousy and anger? Jealousy and shame? Thus the complex structure of jealousy is a subject that still invites much more scrutiny, but I am interested here in some much more general concerns about emotions. I am keenly aware that not all emotions are the same (they do not form a natural kind) but nevertheless, there is a wide range of phenomena that are generally understood as falling under the heading of emotion, including such primitive passions as panic and rage and such cerebral emotions as jealousy and moral indignation. Regarding jealousy, I would like to focus on the role of two key but seemingly opposed ingredients or components, thoughts (as cognitions), on the one hand, and feelings (or affects), on the other. Historically, and in my own work, an over-emphasis on one has led to the denigration or neglect of the other. I would like to correct this here.

WHAT IS A COGNITIVE THEORY OF THE EMOTIONS? NEUS THOUGHTS

What is a cognitive theory of emotions. I said that I want to reject Neus Blake-inspired title, A Tear is an Intellectual Thing, on the

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grounds that it is not the intellect that is essentially engaged in emotion, although, I would point out very quickly, by no means is the intellect essentially opposed to emotion and is often very much part of emotions. The common phrase, Intellectually I know that but emotionally . . . has a great many legitimate applications, most obviously in the case of phobias and other irrational fears and irrational emotions more generally, but it does not follow that intellect and emotions as such are opposed. In many social and moral emotions moral indignation, a sense of injustice, and jealousy, in particular it is hard to think of a case in which the intellect does not play an important role. Joshuas thoughts are surely a primary component and not just a symptom or manifestation of his emotion. But, nevertheless, as more and more evidence and neuropsychological theories emphasize the subcortical and in some sense subconscious aspects of emotional response, it is important for us philosophers to adjust our understanding of even the most sophisticated and culture-bound emotions with an eye to such claims and ndings.3 I would still argue that nothing can be an emotion if it does not involve experience, and nothing can be jealousy if it does not involve the recognition of a threat and a potential loss (and much else besides). Nevertheless, jealousy may well involve (and not just as cause) some more basic neurological and psychological processing. What is not clear to me is to what extent Neus Spinozistic thoughts are indeed intellectual and thus share in this intellectualization of emotion. He does not quite equate thought and emotion, but the relationship is intimate, and it is pretty clear that one cannot have most emotions (especially such emotions as jealousy) without certain types of thoughts. Emotions, simply stated, are thoughts, or dispositions to have thoughts, or dened by thoughts (I am not allowing here the very general Cartesian sense of cogitationes that would include virtually any mental process, state, or event). But I have always found the appropriately precise notion of a thought to be too episodic and (like intellect) too sophisticated for the analysis of most emotions. Even in jealousy, the recognition and the response need never be articulated. To be sure, a person with an emotion will have thoughts appropriate to the emotion and the context, shaped and constrained by language and culture. But I

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do not see any apt analogy with animals or infants (who are, I think, capable of jeaousy), and I think Neu is often a bit too quick with this. My dog Fritz gets jealous when I pet my other dog Lou, but I dont think that they dont have thoughts about this. Our immediate emotional responses often seem devoid of thoughts, although, to be sure, immediate emotional responses necessarily involve cognitions, if only the immediate recognition of a situation or a face as threatening or hurtful, for instance. There is room for rampant confusion here, thinking that the cognition involved in emotion is the reective recognition that one has an emotion rather than the recognition constitutive of the emotional response. Joseph le Doux has been particularly instrumental in foisting this confusion on the emotion research community with his argument that immediate emotion response precedes cognition by a signicant amount of time, and conscious feeling is only icing on the cake. But the argument does have merit regarding the thesis that thoughts are essential to (or themselves constitute) emotions. Thoughts are present in many emotions, but thoughts represent one particularly advanced form of cognition and not the basic form. Philosophers confuse the matter by taking the thought to be the proposition expressed by the thought, but the proposition alone (a logical construction) is never tantamount to a thought in the psychological sense, as an episodic phenomenon. Much less is a proposition (or a set of propositions) ever tantamount to an emotion. Thus the absurdity of Donald Davidsons much heralded analysis of emotion (following Humes example of pride) in terms of a syllogism of propositions in logical sequence.4 Philosophers also confuse the matter by conating thoughts and thinking, but although both might be involved in emotion (some emotions certainly get us thinking) it is having thoughts and having them without necessarily thinking that is most pronounced both as symptom and as constituent of emotion. When I have recurrent thoughts of violence or recurrent sexual fantasies a plausible hypothesis is that I have the appropriate (or rather, inappropriate) emotion. But insofar as thought is an aspect of emotion (rather than just a symptom or sign), it cannot merely be a proposition (or a set of propositions), and it must not be tied too tightly to the activity of thinking (although I would argue that it is again important not to

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insist that thinking cannot be an aspect of emotion but rather only an antecedent or consequence of emotion). To be sure, Neu distinguishes thoughts in the explanatory sense from thoughts the phenomenological sense. But insofar as an emotion is an experience which he also holds it is surely the phenomenological sense that is at stake here. Thoughts in the explanatory sense are often appropriate in the third-person case (even, speaking loosely, in describing animal behavior). They are occasionally appropriate in the rst-person case (and often, of course, in retrospective explanations of ones own behavior). But for thought to provide an account of emotional experience it is only the phenomenological sense that is ultimately relevant. I am not saying that one cannot have a thought without recognizing it as a thought. That is surely too strong a demand. Nor am I denying that we have thoughts that are not necessarily put into words. But for me to have such a thought I must in some sense be able to identify (label) my memory, Of course, a memory might spontaneously pop into my head, and I may not be able to identify it. (At my age, this is becoming more often the case.) But a ashback is not yet a thought. I must recognize it as a memory of something, and then this is phenomenologically sufcient to count as a thought (Peter Goldie interestingly distinguishes between thought and imagination, but I cannot go into this here). In short, thoughts may be present in many emotions and indispensable in adult human jealousy but thoughts are too articulate and too episodic to be adequate by way of a general account of emotional phenomena.

AFFECT: EMOTIONS, FEELINGS, AND THE BODY

What has increasingly concerned me, in the twenty-ve years since I rst argued my own cognitive theory, is the role of the body in emotion. In my original theory, it was by no means clear that the body had any essential role in emotion. I presumed, of course, that all emotional experience had as its causal substratum various processes in the brain, but this had little to do with the nature of emotion as such, as experienced. I suppose I would have defended a certain perspectivalism, anchored in the body, but as I described most emotions and their constitutive judgments, not even this was

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much in evidence. And as for the various physiological disturbances and disruptions that serve such a central purpose in William James analysis and in most accounts of emotion as arousal, I was as dismissive as could be, relegating all such phenomena to the causal margins of emotion, as merely accompaniments or secondary effects. It is therefore my own fault that I have long had to weather the objection that my cognitive theory is too intellectual, that what I call judgments are too cool and deliberative to be candidates for an emotions identity. This is the crux of Michael Stockers objection but it is also the target of a great many less sophisticated (and ultimately less sympathetic) critics. It is certainly aimed at Neu as well. has to do with the phenomenology of feeling in emotion. An emotional experience cannot be just cognitive. Thus Stocker charges that cognitive theories leave out (or sneak in) reference to affect and affective states. I agree that something has been left out, but I do not think that affect gives us anything very useful about what that might be. I also believe that cognition or judgment, properly construed does capture that missing ingredient. What has made me increasingly concerned about the role of the body in emotions is my realization that bodily sensations (and not just the visceral disturbances suggested by James) have much to do with the nature and role of feelings in emotion. To be sure, I had been as adamant about treating those feelings as I had been regarding their physiological causes, as secondary, again the exact opposite of James, who said, with all of the oomph that italics and caps can capture, that the sensation IS the emotion. But I now appreciate that accounting for the feelings (not just sensations) in emotion is not a secondary concern, and not independent of appreciating the role of the body in emotional experience. By this I do not mean anything having to do with the tricky mind-body relationship linked with Descartes and Cartesianism but rather the concern about the kinds of bodily experience that typify emotion. Some feelings, to be sure, are no more than the signs and symptoms of autonomic and various visceral responses. In Joshuas jealousy, the workings of the autonomic nervous system (quickened pulse, galvanic skin response, the release of hormones, sweating) have obvious phenomenological manifestations (feeling excited,

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tingly, feeling ushed). I used to say that these were only contingently related to emotion, but I am willing to ease up on that claim now. I am even willing to say that, in Peter Goldies apt phrase, they have borrowed intentionality and are thus more than merely associated with the judgments that constitute the jealousy. But more important, not all or even most of the feelings that seem to be part and parcel of this emotion are of this sort. Most of them are intentional and judgmental in a more direct way. For instance, Joshua takes on a great many bodily preparations and postures, many of them but not all of them within the realm of the voluntary, and these have phenomenological manifestations. These are, it seems to me, to be about the object of emotion in much the same way that inarticulate judgments are. Here the well-catalogued realm of facial expression in emotion (squinting, frowning, pursing ones lips) plays an important role as do other forms of bodily emotional expression in the constitution of emotional feeling (I sometimes wonder how having a tail that wags or ears that come to full alert add an interesting aspect of bodily feeling in animals). The category of action readiness defended by Nico Frijda and others seems to me to be particularly signicant here, not in terms of dispositional analysis of emotional behavior but rather as an account of emotional experience. Jealousy, notably, involves taking up a defensive posture. Many of the distinctive sensations of getting jealous are the often subtle and not explicitly noticed tensing of the various muscles of the body, particularly those involved in physical aggression. To put my current thinking in a nutshell, I think that a great deal of what is unhelpfully called affect and affectivity and is supposedly missing from cognitive accounts can be identied with the body, or what I will call (no doubt to howls of indignation) the judgments of the body. George Downing has put the matter quite beautifully in some of his recent work. He writes of bodily micro-practices and suggests that emotions are to a very extent constituted by these. This could, of course, be taken as just another attempt at behavioral reductionism, but Downing also insists that an emotion is essentially an experience. He also is quite happy to insist that cognitions (judgments) are also an essential part of any emotional experience. But he adds, and I have come to agree, that

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a good deal of cognition is radically pre-linguistic (misleadingly called pre-cognitive). Building on the work of Hubert Dreyfus and suggestions in Heidegger and Bourdieu, Downing insists that a good deal of emotional experience and even emotional knowledge can be identied in the development of these bodily micro-practices. Whether or not one learns to be jealous (a matter of considerable debate), one learns (through ones culture and through experience) to hone and shape ones jealousy as well as to choose its objects. That is still quite cognitive by way of knowing how as well as knowing that. It remains to be seen to what extent such an extended phenomenological analysis, combined with a further analysis of the various modes of cognition, can further clarify the cognitive theory of emotion.

NOTES
1

This essay was rst delivered as a talk at the American Philososophical Association meeting in San Francisco, March 2001. Co-symposiasts were Amelie Rorty, Michael Stocker, Jeffrey Murphy, and Jerry Neu. Neus book A Tear is an Intellectual Thing was published by Oxford University Press in 2000. 2 Stocker, in this symposium and at length in his Valuing Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999; Peter Goldie in his Emotions (Oxford University Press, 2000). 3 Notable controbutions to this literature are Jaap Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience (OUP, 2000), Joseph Le Doux, The Emotional Brain (Simon and Schuster, 1996). See, for a good summary of much of this material, Richard Lane and Lynn Nadel, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion (OUP). 4 Donald Davidson, Humes Cognitive Theory of Pride Journal of Philosophy, 1977. Davidsons view was taken very seriously by many philosophers who never showed any interest in emotion, much less in any cognitive theory of emotion. But what gets left out of Davidsons reconstruction as Hume himself clearly recognized was pride, that is, the emotion.

The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX, USA E-mail: rsolomon@mail.utexas.edu

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