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REPLY TO MY CRITICS

ABSTRACT. In response to critical discussion of my book, A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion, I clarify and develop various aspects of my analysis of jealousy in particular and affectivity in general. In relation to jealousy, I explore the nature of pathology, the role of fantasy and of the rival, and the place of examples and of evolutionary theory. In relation to affectivity, I emphasize the difference between distinguishing emotions from other psychological states and distinguishing among, within and between, particular emotions (where affectivity may not be central). In addition, I emphasize the dangers of a version of G.E. Moore’s error in demanding a nonreductive analysis of “good” in parallel demands for a nonreductive analysis of “affectivity.”

INTRODUCTION

I would like first of all to thank my critics, each of whom has himself made important and valuable contributions to our understanding of the emotions, for their very sympathetic reading of my work and the thoughtfulness with which they have today pressed me to clarify and develop that work.1 It is interesting that all three of my critics focus (to varying degrees) on jealousy. I think this says something about the significance of jealousy in our lives, a significance perhaps not surprising given that it is compounded, in important and complex ways, of fear and anger – two emotions that are, on anybody’s account, “basic” emotions. And jealousy is, I’ve argued, at least in relation to its erotic forms, importantly tied to love. Since jealousy operates in the space of fear, anger, and love, it is natural that it should assume a central place in discussions of emotion of the kind we are having today. In my original discussion of jealousy, I especially emphasized the constitutive role of thoughts, in particular thoughts involving fear of loss, more specifically, fear of alienation of affections (that is, loss of those affections to a rival), and more generally and more deeply, Philosophical Studies 108: 159–171, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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fear of annihilation. This was never meant to deny the importance of other components (if that is what they are) such as anger (which has been usefully emphasized by Solomon among others) and what Stocker calls “affectivity.” It is just that I believe that a focus on fearful thoughts enables us to see many important connections (for example with love) and distinctions (say from envy). The constituent thoughts and beliefs provide a way into understanding the psychological and social conditions and implications of the emotion – including issues about psychogenesis and about eliminability. I do not wish to rehearse all that here; let me focus instead on the specific interesting issues raised by my critics. MURPHY

I should first note that while I do indeed, as Jeffrie Murphy suggests, seek to normalize or “rehabilitate” jealousy, it is only in the sense of showing that it can be normal, can have appropriate objects and valuable connections. But the mere fact that jealousy may be connected with the development of self-identity rather than the possession of others is not by itself enough to ensure that either one’s identity or one’s jealousies will not be pathological.2 Examples Murphy expresses concern about “morbid dependency” and associated fears of literal “disintegration” and “annihilation” and points out cases of jealousy where such fears might be unrealistic. Murphy sees that my account of the thoughts and feelings in jealousy is psychogenetic, that in particular the place of identification in making jealousy both more and other than simple possessiveness (in the sense of ownership) is rooted in Freud’s understanding of the Oedipus complex and in Winnicott’s insights about development (having to do not only with transitional objects, but also with points in his discussions of the mother’s face as a mirror in which the infant can recognize himself, of the importance of being alone in the presence of another in relation to developing independence and the capacity to be truly alone, and finally of hatred’s constructive role in identity formation and the ability to love). I need here to emphasize, however, that my discussion of the role of fear of annihilation as a

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deeper or underlying fear behind or beneath the fear of loss involved in jealousy has to do with the level of fantasy (at least most of the time). At that level, especially at the level of unconscious fantasy, realistic calculations about probabilities are irrelevant, what matters are early experiences of and later associations with situations of loss, the sort of experiences and associations that can make minor neglect and temporary absence seem potential permanent abandonment. Certainly annihilation is not always in fact at stake, but I think it is always in the background and in weak, irrational, vulnerable moments it can provoke and magnify our responses. There are also the cases of unrequited love and of jealousy over a love one believes is already hopelessly lost. Murphy raises several such cases and also, helpfully, suggests various ways of fitting them into my account. I would add that in my original essay I suggested that such cases may sometimes be better understood in terms of envy or disappointment rather than jealousy. Not that it is incorrect to call them “jealousy,” our usages are very flexible in this area, but important connections may be more readily perceived if we preserve certain distinctions that ordinary language does not always insist upon. So the unrequited lover may be envious of the lover of his beloved (think of star-struck fans who consider themselves jealous over movie stars they may never have even met – fans I would generally prefer to describe as envious, though they might indeed sometimes have jealous fantasies) and the resigned lover may simply be a disappointed lover, or in many cases may be regarded as both disappointed and jealous in virtue of the importance of the rival and of the role of anger in his feelings. Jealousy is complex. I emphasize the fear component in my account, but there are anger components (which may be directed both at the rival and at the betraying beloved, as well as, it is worth remembering, at oneself). Such anger may come especially to the fore when loss feared becomes loss actually suffered. The place of vengeful anger in the case of Othello is, as Murphy suggests, particularly prominent. The rival is also indeed significant, and I have some things to say about that significance not just in my discussion of envy but in the discussion of what I call a fixed-quantity view of love and of zero-sum games in connection with love and jealousy at the end of my original essay. And picking up on the discussion of idealization and the

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role of others in identity-formation in my “Jealous Afterthoughts,” Murphy usefully and interestingly develops some aspects of rivalry in terms of shame – though I suspect that as the value of the loved object gets diminished and the opinions of third parties assume greater importance, the jealousy involved, if it is jealousy, may edge towards the pathological. (In Murphy’s own example, Achilles’s concern when Briseis is taken from him by Agamemnon is not over lost love, he does not care for the concubine or her affections in particular, but over lost face, lost honor. It is arguable that Achilles is not even jealous, at least not over the slave-girl prize – loss of her affection is not the issue, however considerable his rage at his “rival” Agamemnon.) I have some similar thoughts about Solomon’s case of professional jealousy. Of course that case does not involve the sort of erotic jealousy that is central to my discussion and also, I think, to jealousy itself. But of course it may properly be called jealousy. I think, however, that given certain of its features it might more illuminatingly be described as envy, precisely because the rivalry is not over someone’s love, is not erotic jealousy. The fact that the discoveries or ideas that lead to success in Solomon’s story were in some sense previously or simultaneously “owned” by the envious scientist, complicates my preferred way of looking at it. In envy the enviable object need not have been previously owned or even obtainable by the envier (think of envy over someone else’s beauty or intelligence). That feature usually provides a contrast between jealousy and envy in my account. (“Othello is jealous, Iago is envious. Jealousy is typically over what one possesses and fears to lose, while envy may be over something one has never possessed and may never hope to possess” [ATIAIT 47]). Was the lost object (is it “the idea itself,” “the claim of first discovery” or perhaps “fame and reputation”?) itself loved, or is the rival the crucial focus of concern? In envy, the object can drop out (it may not be independently valued), and the rival is typically the true focus of concern – the concern is comparative and positional. On certain readings, professional jealousy of the kind discussed in Solomon’s example is closer to Achilles’ vengeful rage over displaced honors than the romantic jealousy that is at the center of my concern. Much of this

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depends on the details, which I won’t pursue here because the point I want to make here is about the aim (or aims) of my project. I have never sought to give an exceptionless definition of jealousy (or of any other emotion for that matter) – of the sort often sought by analytic philosophers. Trying to capture the essence of ordinary language concepts too often presumes that they have a clear essence. An error Wittgenstein tried to warn us against. Instead, I have sought to bring out certain central features of jealousy and envy, the conceptual markings of which have revealing connections and implications of political significance. For example, if we maintain certain distinctions that ordinary language would indeed permit us to ignore, we may achieve an understanding of the instinctual and developmental roots of jealousy and envy that might otherwise elude us. And this may help us better understand the prospects for individual and social transformation. Some, like Paul Griffiths, think projects like mine are based on an antiquated theory of meaning and fail to appreciate the implications of the newer causal and externalist theories of meaning. That is not so, or at least I do not think it need be so – I for one accept the recent advances in philosophy of language. My views do not depend on an essentialism rooted in the dictates of ordinary language, though I am happy to look to ordinary language for clues. (Remember, I am a Spinozist, and he for one never hesitated to reform ordinary language for the sake of clearer understanding.) I am also happy to look elsewhere, especially to literature, psychoanalysis, and anthropology to learn what can be learned from those sources. And I also think there is much to be learned of interest about the emotions from the evolutionary biologists and the neuroscientists, but I should be clear that I do not believe that such scientific knowledge will displace the more ordinary notions that play vital roles in giving shape and meaning to our lives. Evolutionary Biology In this I am with Robert C. Roberts, who in a new book manuscript (entitled The Schooled Heart) offers a useful analogy between the role of the natural sciences in understanding the emotions and their role in understanding music, in particular the relation of the physics of sound to musicology and the appreciation of music. Much can be learned about sound waves and about acoustics, but that knowledge does not displace our distinctively musical categories.

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In relation to evolutionary biology, a word of caution should perhaps be added. I assume that there are plausible evolutionary stories to be told about the place of jealousy in human life, just as there are such stories to be told in relation to the central component emotions of jealousy: namely, fear and anger. Indeed, fear and anger, in some of their forms at least, fit reasonably well the sort of affect program model favored by Paul Ekman and other evolutionarily oriented biologists and psychologists. Fear and anger (I might add, unlike the more complex and social emotion of jealousy) have clear physiological syndromes, including stereotypical facial expressions, are reflex-like, pan-cultural, and phylogenetically ancient and do not require (indeed, may be modularly isolated from) higher cognitive processing. But even someone like Paul Griffiths, who puts perhaps inordinate faith in the ability of evolutionary biology to teach us “what emotions really are,” warns us that adaptationist just-so stories, unconstrained by cross-species homologies and the like, are just too easy to generate. Robert Frank’s sort of claims about possible evolutionary advantages for emotions such as jealousy, despite apparent irrationality and individual pain when experiencing the emotion, may in fact be correct, as may David Buss’s claims cited by Murphy, but telling a possible and even plausible story is not the same as confirming it.3 I should perhaps add a second caution. Even where an adaptationist story is known to be true, it does not follow, especially in a world where the environmental conditions to which biology seeks to adapt are subject to constant change, that the evolutionarily explainable (and so perhaps in some sense “justifiable”) feature of human nature is therefore something inevitable and unchangeable. Even the Texas paramour murder statute, the one that until surprisingly recently condoned the killing by cuckolded husbands of rivals caught in flagrante delicto, has been repealed.

STOCKER

Michael Stocker’s main concern is the apparent absence of what he calls “affectivity” from my account of jealousy and perhaps from almost all cognitive accounts of emotions, that is from accounts that emphasize the role of conceptual content in constituting emotions.

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The “Is” of Non-Identity First, an incidental point. Stocker says that the strength of a fear is not by itself enough to make it a phobia. He is right, but his partial quotation of a sentence from my essay on Freud’s case of Little Hans unfortunately omits the portion of the sentence and the passage in which I say roughly the same thing; that is, that there are multiple intertwining measures and criteria, physiological upset does not stand alone (ATIAIT 202). He similarly loses sight of the clarifying context when he quotes my equation of jealousy with certain thoughts and questions, and (in the subsequently omitted portion) certain doubts and fears (ATIAIT 46). Doubts and fears may well incorporate the affectivity that concerns Stocker, even if bare questions do not – after all, fear is an emotion, the central component emotion in jealousy on my account. Further, in my statement I was seeking to emphasize and reject a particular alternative possibility, namely the equation of jealousy or emotions in general with sensations like headaches, even ones with distinctive patterns of causation, like Humean impressions of reflection. My original statement was meant as a deliberate exaggeration to emphasize the importance of neglected features of the emotions – not a statement of necessary and sufficient conditions. (As I’ve indicated in responding to some of Murphy and Solomon’s potential counterexamples, such definitions have never been my goal in studying the emotions.) In any case, Stocker does acknowledge my later amplification, in “Jealous Afterthoughts,” that makes it clear, if it wasn’t already, that I believe that simple questions or bare thoughts need not amount to jealousy, that they need to be supplemented by something else.4 I there offer three specific possible supplements: affect or physiological tumult, behavior or dispositions to behavior, and the manner (as opposed to the content) of thought, e.g. obsessive thoughts (ATIAIT 79). Still, Stocker charges me and others with neglecting the distinctive role of affectivity in emotions. This seems to me problematical, quite apart from my particular views and interests and the three factors just mentioned and their potential roles in affectivity. For one thing, if affectivity is a kind of feeling, a subjectively experienced aspect of mental states, it surely is not necessary, at

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least not if one accepts – as Stocker does – the possibility of unconscious emotions.5 Even apart from psychoanalysis, being jealous (for example) does not require feeling jealous; individuals are often the last to recognize they are jealous. The crucial clues are typically behavioral. Affectivity and the “Open Question” Naturalistic Fallacy When Stocker says in his talk today, “I find it very difficult to accept accounts or understandings of affectivity in terms of bodily states, feelings, and doings” and when he goes on to speak of the “evanescence” of affectivity, it begins to sound to me like G. E. Moore’s notion of “good” as indefinable and unanalyzable. And his accusation against me and others of leaving something out whenever we try to analyze emotion in non-emotional terms begins to sound like Moore’s charges concerning the “naturalistic fallacy” in the form of his famous “open question” argument. Moore insisted that one cannot equate the “good” with the pleasant, or the desired, or the approved or anything else, because one can always make sense of the question whether the pleasant or the desired or the approved (or any other stand-in) is itself good.6 Stocker argues one cannot equate jealousy with certain thoughts or even thoughts supplemented by feelings (in the sense of sensations), and dispositions to behavior, and the like, because one can always ask whether the thoughts, etc. are had emotionally, or jealously, or with the specific “affectivity” (which is not to be equated with feelings understood as sensations) required. It turns out, after lengthy consideration in Stocker’s Valuing Emotions, that “affectivity” is irreducible. One is reminded once more of Moore’s conclusion that “good,” like “yellow,” is simple, indefinable, and unanalyzable. Perhaps we can only feel the affectivity in emotions as we can only intuit the goodness in states of affairs. Affectivity and normativity (and everything else for that matter) is what it is and not another thing. But I would argue that in neither case need analysis stop there. I discuss the meaning of good in the section on “The Good, the Bad, and the Boring” in my essay on boredom in A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing and also in the introductory essay on “Mill’s

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Pig.”7 Here I would only wish to remind you that my aim has never been strictly to define jealousy, or any other emotion. As suggested earlier, when I denied the ambition of providing necessary and sufficient conditions, I do not believe that jealousy is a natural kind. It is a concept that usefully organizes aspects of experience and has a shifting and culturally variable usage. The thing that I try to do is to learn from those usages and other sources of insight what is universal and what is local, what might be fixed and what might be variable in our experience – what are the conditions for our becoming who we are, for developing our moral identities, and what are the conditions and possibilities for change. William James My focus was and is on what makes a state of mind the state of mind it is, what distinguishes one emotion such as jealousy from another (closely allied) such as envy, and I wish to embed the conceptual conditions in more concrete contexts and situations. Even the concepts themselves are inevitably shaped by social conditions (hence my discussions of pride, of boredom, and so on), and these are especially crucial when one’s central question (as mine was in relation to jealousy) is about its “eliminability.” I wished to bring out what else might have to be given up or changed to bring that about. And human vulnerability and love seem to me firmly entrenched. The differences between jealousy and envy, which is again what most matters in this connection, are not in their “affectivity” – however we are to account for that. After mentioning my gloss on “are” in “Jealous Afterthoughts,” where I explicitly grant that there is more to an emotion than bare thoughts, Stocker confronts me with a gloss on William James that allows some place for thoughts in James’s visceral account of the emotions. Stocker himself does not wish to equate affectivity with bodily feelings, so he believes James too leaves something out. But in any case I think Stocker mislocates my disagreement with James. My central complaint about James is that even if feelings (whether bodily or psychic) differentiate between emotions and nonemotions, they do not differentiate among, within and between, emotional states. That is, the differences between regret, remorse, guilt and the like are largely conceptual and not (if I may be

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permitted the word) “sensational.” Thoughts are of greater importance than feelings (in the narrow sense of felt sensations) in the classification and discrimination of emotional states. The crucial view that Stocker and I, and I believe all of today’s panelists, share is that thought content helps constitute emotions. I would agree with Stocker that there is more to emotions than the thoughts I emphasize – he calls it affectivity, I think it may be a variety of things, and these include the manner (for example, obsessive) in which thoughts themselves may occur. SOLOMON

Robert Solomon understands all this very well, but in the case of jealousy, he thinks I pay insufficient attention to other differentiating features of jealousy, other than fearful thoughts, namely anger and rights. He also seems to think my use of “thoughts” may be insufficiently rigorous or at any rate potentially misleading. Thought Thoughts I think Solomon does a fine job of sorting out various dimensions of the issues concerning cognitive categories and his up-to-date thoughts on judgment and the role of the body (perhaps “judgments of the body” provide another kind of “body language”) are most welcome. Now, in self-defense: my usage of “thought” may seem “too episodic and sophisticated” to Solomon’s ears, but just as Solomon wishes to insist that his usage of “judgment” does not carry the perhaps usual deliberative baggage (itself a rather episodic and sophisticated kind of baggage, to my ears), the irksome features he points to are not part of my, admittedly loose, understanding of the notion of thought. In any case, I still find a loose notion of thought useful (perhaps precisely because of its looseness) – and, in defense of Blake, I would add that there are different types of intellectual things, certainly Blake did not think the intellect excluded the imagination (see ATIAIT 38). Despite Solomon’s concerns, I have no trouble attributing thoughts (e.g. highly affect-laden versions of “It’s mine,” “You can’t have it,” or even “I’m being robbed”) to territorial two-year olds and to jealous dogs. I don’t see why

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the anticipations, recognitions, and perceptions acknowledged by Solomon cannot be regarded as “thoughts.” Surely that term is at least as applicable to infants and to dogs as Solomon’s preferred term of “judgments.” Further, despite Solomon’s remark at one point, the phenomenological sense of thought is not (or at least not always) what is at stake in my analyses – it cannot be given the role I give to unconscious thoughts. Indeed, one of the significant advantages I would claim for the notion of thought is that it allows room for a distinction between phenomenological (typically self-conscious and articulate) and explanatory (typically not conscious and not explicit) senses of the term. As I explain in my essay on the case of Little Hans, that distinction does not depend on belief in the psychoanalytic unconscious, though it importantly leaves room for it (ATIAIT 213, see also 32). Jealousy, Anger, and Rights Here I will be (perhaps excessively) brief. I acknowledged in my original essay on “Jealous Thoughts” a place for anger alongside fear in jealousy (anger both towards the rival and towards the betraying beloved, as well as towards oneself). I had been persuaded by Solomon, and also by Rogers Albritton, way back then (as I acknowledged in a footnote at the time). But I do not believe that the notion of anger necessarily brings with it some notion of rights – certainly not property rights or ownership, which usually includes rights of transfer and the like. Still, notions of “belonging” and obligations arising out of a long-term relationship may well have place. The main point remains that while “affront” and “insult” may indeed depend on rights, in the minimalist sense of “legitimate expectations,” anger does not (though “self-righteous anger” might). Frustrated desire is enough. That is one of the reasons it makes sense to ascribe anger (ordinary anger) to even very young children. So the place of anger in jealousy does not necessarily import with it claims of right (ATIAIT 56–57). While Solomon does not press these issues today, I think their further exploration (as in his example of professional jealousy discussed earlier) is a part of the extended phenomenological analysis, and the further analysis of the various

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modes of cognition, that both he and I think hold greatest promise for enriching our understanding of emotions. NOTES 1

This paper is a shortened version of remarks presented at the Pacific APA session on A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing on March 30, 2001. The papers to which it is a response have also been shortened for this special issue of Philosophical Studies. (Some of my remarks may thus be responses to comments that do not appear in this issue.) Full video versions of all the papers (as well as a full text version of this one, including my “Introductory Remarks”) may be found on the internet (APA Online) at http://ethics.acusd.edu/video/apa/pacific/2001/ Neu/index.html 2 See ATIAIT 43, 60–63, and 68–80. The marks of pathology may include possessive ownership-type demands, lack of concern for the affection of the putative beloved (the desire to be desired, the need to be loved, is not central), and excessive intensity (including exaggerated concerns over annihilation). Other marks are discussed especially in the section on pathology in “Jealous Thoughts” (ATIAIT 60–63). Of course there are societies where what we might regard as “morbid dependency” is highly valued. Consider the Japanese attitude towards “amae.” 3 Paul E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Robert Frank, Passions Within Reason (New York: Norton, 1988). David Buss, The Dangerous Passion (New York: Free Press, 2000). 4 See, e.g. Part II, Sections 5 and 6 of Emotion, Thought, and Therapy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). It would be difficult to be more explicit than I am in the “Introduction” to that work, where I state: “It is no part of these arguments to deny the importance of affects or feelings or other elements constituting emotions, but rather to understand how these elements fit together and to bring out the special importance of thoughts in discriminating mental states one from another” (ibid., p. 1). 5 Actually, while Stocker explicitly allows for unconscious emotions in his book, Valuing Emotions (with Elizabeth Hegeman, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 22), it is not entirely clear to me what he takes the place of affectivity in such emotions to be. Without going into the details here, his position becomes especially puzzling when he asserts that it need not “even be allowed that we can be less than fully aware of our feelings” (ibid., p. 22). That seems to suggest that we always are, as a matter of fact, conscious of all our feelings and emotions. (See my discussion of James on unfelt feelings in ATIAIT 18–19.) 6 “Whatever definition be offered, it may be always asked, with significance, of the complex so defined, whether it is itself good” (G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, 1903, p. 15). 7 Aristotle was right that we do in fact understand the word “good,” at least in

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part, on the basis of empirical conditions which can be spelled out. The utilitarians were right that consequences in terms of human pleasure and happiness matter in appraising goodness. And Kant was right that justice and fairness too (he would have said “only”) matter in assessing moral worth. Surely taken together that is an analysis in some sense of analysis, even if it is not a conceptual reduction.

University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA E-mail: [email protected]