Emotions are NOT feelings: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emotions

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From our everyday experiences, to mundane interactions, to massive life decisions, emotions spring up everywhere. If life is a play and all the men and women are actors, then emotions are something like the stage lights. They color our lives.

In the history of philosophy, “the passions” get a bad rap. Emotions are often contrasted with calculated reason, and reason is kind of philosophy’s whole thing.

Emotions rise in us due to the events of the outside world disturbing us, things we can’t control—hence, “affect.” The ancient Greek Stoics (and their modern bro-philosopher descendants) tend to suppress and lock up emotions for more agentive control over their lives. Some philosophers, like Descartes, relegate emotions to second-rate because we share them with animals.

Indeed, emotions seem to make us do stupid and immoral things. Murder is, after all, most often done in the heat of the moment. So is adultery. Lying? Emotional. Envy? Yep. We’re on our way to hitting all Ten!

For centuries in Western philosophy, emotions have not only been poo-pooed but also straight up neglected. In recent decades, this has started to flip. Emotions are now all the rage (no pun intended).

Let’s begin, then, with the nature of emotions. What makes them different from thoughts? What makes them different from pedantic feelings like upset stomachs? How do they relate to imagination and language? All these in due time.

Today’s essay will examine a position in the philosophy of emotions called the “evaluative” or “cognitive” view—the idea that emotions are surprisingly like beliefs or thoughts and have little to do with feelings. This view, ironically, gets its start in the Stoics, but I’ll focus on the modern conception.

The evaluativist view goes something like this: emotions are judgments of things going on that involve us and are (at least, presently) outside our control. Let’s unpack this definition.

Emotions are intentional, meaning they are about something in the world. Your frustration at the flight attendant is about the flight attendant and their behavior. Perhaps the target of the emotion is mixed up with frustration about or at the airline broadly as well. Regardless, your emotions tend to be about some event, person, or thing but might even be about states of affairs—for example, that the plane is late to land.

Now, judgments are basically claims about reality or truth. You probably judge that 2+2=4. Of course, that judgment doesn’t accompany an emotion (unless you’re Winston in 1984, in which case judging 2+2=4 may invoke fear of Big Brother and delight at such an evocative expression of disobedience to the totalitarian state). Anyway, judgments make claims to truth.

Evaluative judgments are truth claims of subjective meaning and value. These judgments have an irreducibly subjective element to them. Consider my friend, Johnny, who once collected abandoned signs. A “rare pull” for him on the side of the road is litter to others—other people’s literal trash is his treasure. So, his evaluative judgment of “abandoned yield sign” is relative or subjective in that it’s valuable to him.

I evaluate the completion of my master’s degree as highly valuable. My master’s degree is not particularly valuable to you, the one reading this essay. However, my claim is objective in the following sense: it probably strikes you as reasonable that my master’s is valuable to me.

However, if I were to say, “My master’s degree means absolutely nothing to me. It’s a worthless piece of paper.” You might judge my evaluative judgment as strange, misguided, or even somehow wrong until you hear more context. “Oh, the whole thing was a scam, I made no friends, and the institution didn’t support me,” etc. (Not the case at all, by the way.)

This might change your opinion about my evaluative judgment about my master’s degree to, “Yeah, that makes sense.”

This brings up two entirely different meanings of the word rational.

Rational (1): To be correct or have good reasons for believing something. Based on good evidence.

Irrational (1): To be incorrect or not have good reasons for believing something. Based on poor evidence.

Rational (2): To be aimed at truth and subject to the tests of truth or falsity.

Irrational (2): To not be aimed at truth and subject to the tests of truth or falsity.

For example, “Ba-da-ba-da-ba-be bop ba bodda bope // Bop ba bodda bope // Be bop ba bodda bope” is irrational (2), since the words are not subject to the tests of reason.

Notice, 2+2=5 is rational (2), in the sense that it is subject to truth, but it is irrational (1), in the sense that it is false and you can’t give good reasons for believing it.

So, evaluative judgments are rational (2) but often irrational (1). In other words, evaluative judgments are subject to the tests of rationality. Consider an example. A person might evaluate a notice of an investigation from the IRS as something to joke about; it’s of no importance to them. Well, this subjective evaluative judgment of the IRS letter would be wrong.

However, if I judged the tenth letter warning me to pay the TV license registration in the UK as something to joke about, I would be correct. (If you know, you know.)

Here’s the punchline. Some philosophers believe emotions just are evaluative judgments. You might have noticed in my master’s degree example that my evaluative judgment seems akin to pride, joy, gratefulness, confidence, and excitement. All these are emotions!

Some philosophers believe, then, that emotions are rational (2), in the sense that they are subject to the tests of reason, even if emotions are often irrational (1), in the sense that they often lead us to do dumb things, act wrongly, or are based on faulty evidence.

But this makes emotions like thoughts or beliefs, since feelings don’t seem to be rational (2).

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At this point, most people protest, loudly and emotionally, “Emotions aren’t like thoughts; they have heat. They get you going. They’re obviously feelings.” By feelings I mean something like sensation, or a phenomenological “what-it’s-like,” the subjective experiencing of the emotion as “hot,” “cold,” “raging,” “tempestuous,” “painful,” “light,” “heavy,” and more.

However, consider the following argument. It seems plausible that someone might feel hot, clammy, and spiked with adrenaline equally but be in three entirely distinct emotional states: fear, jealousy, or hatred. Therefore, what distinguishes between fear and jealousy is not the embodied feeling but the object and the evaluation of one’s spouse looking longingly at a shirtless Robert Pattinson while you value her monogamous love (jealousy) versus the evaluation that a vampire is currently stalking you and you value your life (fear).

I suspect most people are correct that feelings are necessary for emotions. But some philosophers put their foot down and say these are correlated but are neither necessary nor sufficient for emotions.

Martha Nussbaum defends this view in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. According to her, the identity of each emotion has to do with its object and its relationship to us. It has nothing essentially to do with the bodily feeling. Thus, she writes, “My fear’s very identity as fear depends on its having some such object [like a bear]: take that away and it becomes a mere trembling or heartleaping.”

Nussbaum summarizes the view well: “Emotions… involve judgments about important things, judgments in which, appraising an external object as salient for our own well-being, we acknowledge our own neediness and incompleteness before parts of the world that we do not fully control.”

Robert Solomon’s book, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, also argues for this evaluative view. He also argues that emotions, since they play the role of attaching value to the world for us, also play the role of giving our lives meaning. Without the richness of emotions, life literally becomes purposeless for creatures like us. This more limited view, that meaning derives from emotions, tracks with findings in neuroscience.

António Damásio, the neuroscientist and philosopher, shows in Descartes Error how certain patients, like the infamous Phineas Gage (and modern patients extensively tested), lacked an ability to infuse their life with value, but their logical ability remained 100 percent intact. But this inability to emotionally reason meant they struggled to make decisions of any kind, which we would normally attribute to reason.

One of Damásio’s patients with ventromedial prefrontal damage typifies this case. Damásio asked about his drive over, and he dispassionately said multiple cars in front of him had crashed due to not following rational procedures of dealing with ice. Such patients speak with a cold lack of care about stories involving their own happiness, danger, or harm.

At the end of the session, the patient was ready to schedule another meeting. There were two possible dates. The patient spent nearly 30 minutes coolly, rationally deliberating, in a monologue, between the two dates. He piled up extensive logical pros and cons but literally could never decide, even though it was really inconsequential. Finally, Damásio gently chose one date for him. He simply said, “That’s fine,” and left. As Damásio writes, “This behavior is a good example of the limits of pure reason.”

This is why folks like Phineas Gage, argues Damásio, struggled in life despite having perfectly functional logical capabilities; their emotional judgments about subjective value were damaged, and therefore, they cannot function rationally in life—despite testing perfectly in so-called “reasoning” and personality tests. They explain how to keep a job, but because the job does not matter to them, they cannot decide to go to work on time, even if it’s the reasonable thing to do.

To Damásio, emotions are necessarily intertwined with reason, sociality, and moral thinking. He incorporates bodily feelings in a kind of hybrid view, presenting evidence of the presence of “somatic markers” in the brain’s decision-making loop (basically, embodied gut reactions, like skin tingling or palms sweating). These somatic markers passively arise as an external object enters into a specific dynamic loop with higher-order decision-making. These somatic markers play a rational role in highlighting certain options for attention, decision, and action.

This affect research has existed for many decades. Martha Arnold helped lead the revolution against behaviorism in the ‘60s, showing that internal mental states are crucial for the human psyche. These states are not determinable by behavior or measurements of the body. She writes that emotions equate to the “felt tendency toward anything intuitively appraised as good (beneficial), or away from anything intuitively appraised as bad (harmful).”

I’ll delve into the hybrid and appraisal views more in later essays. For now, just note that many argue that bodily feelings play some role in building emotion, and the emotion plays a necessary role in building—constituting—the meaning of our lives.

Andrea Scarantino summarizes what Solomon, Nussbaum, and other evaluativists believe in the simple statement, “My anger at someone is the judgment that I have been wronged by that person.”

If you judge that someone has really wronged you, you will necessarily feel anger. If you judge that, in general, it’s not good to be angry at someone, these two competing judgments will fight it out in your head—but the decision will be rational judgments, not the stomach knotted up, or reddened, hot face, or sweaty palms.

So the cognitivist/evaluativist says.

At this point, I suspect something like judgments are necessary for emotions, but the idea that feelings are merely correlated to emotions seems a little outlandish. That emotions can be wrong seems almost indisputable, but I suspect both feelings and judgments, or at least intentionality (aboutness) of some kind, will be necessary for emotions. I’ve been reading Jesse Prinz’s Gut Reactions, which gives a “perceptual theory” and Goldie’s “feeling toward” theory, both of which seem plausible.

Come along on this journey to discover the meaning and nature of emotion with me.

Thanks for reading.

Soli Deo Gloria

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If you like this essay, you’ll probably like this one too:

Arnold, Magda. Emotion and Personality. Columbia University Press, 1960.

Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. Vintage, 2006.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Scarantino, Andrea, and Ronald de Sousa. “Emotion.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2021, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/emotion/.

Solomon, Robert C. The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Doubleday Anchor, 1976.