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The document discusses two perspectives on the value of emotions - an evolutionary perspective and a subjective perspective. It then introduces the topic of the paper, which is to examine how a sense of self can arise from having reliable expectations about one's normal emotional responses. The paper will do this by comparing clinical depression, which involves anhedonia or reduced emotional reactions, with Epicurean ataraxia, which aims to reduce emotional intensity through philosophical training. This comparison raises questions about when the diminishment of affect is seen as positive or negative.

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SYED NOUMAN
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12 views3 pages

10

The document discusses two perspectives on the value of emotions - an evolutionary perspective and a subjective perspective. It then introduces the topic of the paper, which is to examine how a sense of self can arise from having reliable expectations about one's normal emotional responses. The paper will do this by comparing clinical depression, which involves anhedonia or reduced emotional reactions, with Epicurean ataraxia, which aims to reduce emotional intensity through philosophical training. This comparison raises questions about when the diminishment of affect is seen as positive or negative.

Uploaded by

SYED NOUMAN
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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There is something it is like for me as I go about my day—not just sensorily,

but emotionally. When I walk into my sun-flooded kitchen in the morning, or


leave my child at the school gates, or grapple with a difficult problem at work, I
am not just phenomenally conscious of these worldly situations as I find
myself in them. I emote. All of the time. My mental life consists, in part, in an
ever-shifting kaleidoscope of felt affect accompanying the experienced events
that make up the course of my day. I am, I assume, not alone in this.

There are at least two standpoints from which we might reckon the value of
these dynamic affective reactions. The first is the objective-theoretical
standpoint of evolutionary advantage. Emotional reactions are far-reaching in
their possible effects on thought and behaviour. They have an intrinsic
motivational force that needn’t (and often doesn’t) wait for slower-paced
inferential capacities to kick in. They can be highly fine-tuned, and sensitive to
features of a situation that would be difficult to articulate or to take up into the
content of a propositional belief. It’s not hard to see the evolutionary
advantage of creatures so-equipped over their affective-zombie counterparts.

The second standpoint is the subjective experience of emotion. Emotions


infuse our perceptions, interactions, projects, and relationships with a sense of
meaning, and help us to track what matters to well-being. Indeed, from a first-
person perspective, they can be what makes life seem worth living. Individual
emotional states can, of course, be pleasurable—the feeling of being in love,
for instance, or succeeding in one’s projects. But their subjective value clearly
isn’t merely the value of pleasure. From the subjective standpoint no less than
the evolutionary standpoint, it can be just as valuable to experience
appropriate sadness, grief, or anger if that’s what the situation calls for.
Having a full range of properly calibrated affective responses to the situations
in which one finds oneself is plausibly part of the subjective experience of a
well-adjusted mental life.

Each of these two thumbnail sketches offers a story, about the value of
emotion, that focuses on what its presence does for us in our lives. An
alternative approach is to focus on dimensions of
emotional loss or absence as a way of bringing the value of its presence into
focus. That is the strategy of this paper. The central proposal is going to be
that having reliable expectations about one’s ‘normal-for-me’ affective
responses generates a sense of self, relative to which we feel a sense of
authenticity or self-affirmation when met—or, crucially, in cases in which those
expectations are disappointed, self-alienation and self-loss. In other
words, feeling like myself is a source of value in itself, and I will argue that
there are facts about the way in which we relate to our own affective lives that
provides at least one explanation of when and why we get to feel that way. We
will come to see this new source of value by looking to cases where it is
missing.
More specifically, my route to this proposal will be a side-by-side comparison
between two affective conditions that involve anhedonia, or a sustained
reduction in one’s emotional reactions. These two conditions are clinical
depression and Epicurean ataraxia. Setting them out will be the task of the
next two sections. Still, the first of these is likely to be more familiar to most
readers than the second, so let me briefly say what I mean by ataraxia. The
Greek term ataraxia is usually translated as ‘tranquillity’—denoting a kind of
freedom from disturbance in the mind. The ataraxic individual achieves this
tranquillity by a lifelong programme of philosophical training partly aimed at
reducing the intensity of her affective responses to worldly circumstance. The
juxtaposition of these two conditions raises a fresh question about the value of
affect: what is the relevant difference between them, such that the
diminishment of affect is so starkly positive in one case, and so starkly
negative in the other? I set out this question in full in section 4. In section 5 I
rule out an initially plausible response, and in section 6 I argue for my
favoured answer. It is here that I set out the above proposal. There is a
potentially worrying objection to that proposal, with which I deal in section 7.

Before beginning on this plan, two notes on terminology. First, both the
question that I am raising and the solution that I am offering cut across a
disagreement that organises much discussion in the philosophy of emotions—
of whether emotions should be thought of as a special kind of intentional
cognitive state, or as subjective (bodily) feelings that merely bear an
appropriate relationship to an associated cognitive state. Sometimes,
‘emotion’ is reserved for a cognitive affective state and ‘affect’ for the bodily
feeling of an emotion. I will use the two terms interchangeably, to mean a
state that is both the right sort of feeling-state (for instance, the physiological
feeling of delight), and either has intentional content itself, or doesn’t but has
the requisite connections with such a state (for instance, the judgment that the
sun is shining). I am neutral on how these issues are to be settled, but for
those who aren’t I invite them to read these terms in their preferred way.

Second, I will use the qualifier ‘ordinary’ as a shorthand for ‘non-ataraxic and


non-depressive’ (as in ‘ordinary affective responses’).

2. Depression

Flattened affect is a widely reported and clinically recognised feature of


depression. First-hand accounts repeatedly use language of ‘numbness’,
feeling ‘empty inside’, or finding it ‘hard to feel any emotions at all’
[Anon Citation2020a, Anon Citation2020b]. Andrew Solomon, in his book The
Noonday Demon, puts it as follows [Citation2002:19]:

The first thing that goes is happiness. You do not gain pleasure from anything.
That’s famously the cardinal symptom of major depression. But soon other
emotions follow happiness into oblivion: sadness as you had known it, the
sadness that seemed to have led you here; your sense of humour; your belief
in and capacity for love. Your mind is leeched until you seem dim-witted even
to yourself.
These ways of talking about depressive experiences are widespread and
easily found.

Importantly for our purposes, the experience captured by these ways of talking
is not the presence of a negatively valanced emotion like sadness; as another
sufferer explains, with unmistakeable frustration, ‘[i]t’s so typical to believe
depression is nothing more than being sad. Depression isn’t feeling sad; if it
were, it would be so much easier to deal with’ [Anon Citation2020c]. What
these subjects are describing is a felt absence of ordinary affective reactions
—a sort of emotional emptiness, flattening, or weighing down, rather than a
positively experienced sadness. (Indeed, notice that this is reflected in the
disorder’s name, which is not Major Sadness Disorder, but
Major Depressive Disorder, one’s ‘being pressed down’.) These suffers feel as
if their very capacity for emotions is suppressed.

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