A Big Emotional Debate

In George Saunders’s fascinating story “Escape from Spiderhead,”1 Jeff is a criminal in a not-so-distant future who killed a friend in an act of sudden rage. His sentence is lightened through his agreement to live in a scientific research facility. The lead researcher, Abnesti, sits in the control center, guiding the prisoners through experiments in the various room-arms jutting off from the middle like a spider’s legs. Each prisoner has a “MobiPakTM” surgically inserted into his or her back that can, at the touch of Abnesti’s remote, inject assorted experimental drugs into their bloodstream. These drugs are at different stages of product development—some are known only by their research names (ED763; ED556), while others have already reached trademark status and become brands such as VerbaluceTM (a drug that enhances vocabulary and expressiveness by 80 percent) and DarkenfloxxTM (a chemical that causes unbearable sickness and pain). I won’t attempt to rehearse the plot of the narrative, and reader be warned: the story is not for the faint of heart or sensitive spirit. But suffice it to say that the characters experience an expansive range of deep emotions—attraction, love, lust, peace, ambivalence, despair—that are all driven by and controlled through the chemicals administered by their MobiPaksTM.

Saunders’s stories always function on many levels. The dubious situation of prisoners legally “agreeing” before each drug is tested on them is subtly explored. The classic ethical “trolley problem” makes an appearance. But central to the premise of the story is the idea that our scientific command over biochemistry could come to the point where we (or at least the governments and corporations in charge) could completely manipulate people’s emotional lives through precisely regulated drugs. Sexuality, aggression, purchasing interest—everything driven by emotions could be completely controllable through drugs.

divider

Emotions are a powerful and inescapable part of what it means to be human. Emotions are the mysterious energy that drives humans to love, kill, marry, divorce, buy things we can’t afford, drink too much, and worship invisible deities. But what are they? According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the French origins of our English word denoted civil unrest and public commotion coming from a mentally agitated state—“e” (out of) + “motion.”

Like all bits of language, this word construes reality in a particular way. Our word “emotion,” following the lead of the French origins, often occupies a semantic space that is negative and distinguished from rational thinking, as the OED goes on to define emotions: “strong feelings, passion; instinctive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge.”2

The residential experts on our emotions today are not linguists but psychologists, neurologists, and therapists. What do they say? These doyens offer two competing answers on what emotions are. Some experts describe emotions purely neurologically and physiologically, as a function of body chemicals, like the experimenters in Saunders’s story. What we describe as our emotions are really just perceived changes in our body, such as heart rate, breathing rate, and hormones that we then name with emotional terms.

Others, however, understand emotions psychologically, as a function of our mental expectations and outcomes. Happiness occurs when our experiences match our expectations, sadness when they do not. Anger comes when someone or something is perceived as blocking our desires and expectations. Emotions are a function of our mental state, our minds, not just our brains.

As theologian Kevin Vanhoozer astutely observes, theorists of emotions tend toward one kind of reductionism or the other, either reducing emotions upward (emotions are mental states) or downward (emotions are physical states).3

Who is right?

It’s complicated. Our word “emotions” has come to occupy a mental space that brings more confusion than clarity. It is “too big for its britches,” as my elderly mother would say. Or maybe better, “emotions” is too blunt of a tool to do the kind of exploratory surgery necessary to describe the human soul. Ancient philosophers and theologians made an important distinction—now lost—between “passions” (quasi-physical forces that move people) and “affections” (“thoughts of the heart” that affect the will).4 Our singular word “emotion” now attempts to function in both of these distinct conceptual spaces, but it does so ineffectually. This modern conflation and confusion of the distinction between “passions” and “affections” will prove to be a problem, as we will see.

divider

Human emotions existed and affected life long before Freud and Prozac. The question of what emotions are and how to handle them is in fact an ancient one. Who were the experts on emotions in the ancient world? Who helped people understand what emotions are and how to manage them before there were neurologists and psychotherapists?

The answer is the ancient philosophers. Philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, and Epictetus thought a lot about emotions and how to handle them. They recognized that our emotions drive what we do in life and underlie our actions, for good and for bad. Emotions were such a central part of the philosophers’ life-shaping work that Martha Nussbaum summed up her lengthy description of Hellenistic philosophy with the title The Therapy of Desire.5

But that’s not the whole story. These thoughtful philosophers also disagreed with one another on the fundamental question still debated today—What exactly are our emotions? The different ways the ancient philosophers answered that question were central to how they understood the world and were at the core of the whole-life philosophies they taught. All of this is relevant for our understanding of Jesus as the Great Philosopher.

divider

On one side of the emotions debate was Plato, who saw emotions (or “passions”) as impulses that come upon us as an uncontrollable force.6 Our souls have a rational and an irrational part, and the emotions come from the latter, illogical part. Plato famously describes the person as a charioteer who is driving two horses, one noble and good (reason) and the other badly bred and hard to control (passions).7

Plato’s philosophical abstraction continued into ancient medical doctors like Galen (AD 129–200). Galen followed the sophisticated Greek medical theory of humorism, which taught that the human body consists of four basic fluids, or humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. These four humors combined together differently in people to produce assorted temperaments (Latin for “mixtures”). Thus was born the first taxonomy of personality types—sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. People’s emotional lives were largely determined by various combinations of fluids in their makeup. According to this view, we have MobiPaksTM of four humors built right into us. Our emotions are not responsive to our minds and in fact battle against reason for domination. The methods of controlling emotions are not rational but aesthetic and bodily—reading poetry, listening to music, using rhythm.8

This noncognitive understanding of emotions continues on a long arc through history down to today. René Descartes (1596–1650) strengthened this conception by emphasizing that emotions or passions originate in the body, not the thinking soul (the mind). Echoing Plato, Descartes asserted that emotions are “animal spirits” in our blood that animate our bodies.9 William James, the nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist, modified Descartes’s rationalist philosophy into a physiological psychology. The body experiences sensations (such as crying or the instinct to flee), which we then come to describe after the fact as emotions. The commitment to an evolutionary-biological metaphysic is woven throughout all of this—emotions are understood as learned physiological mechanisms rooted in survival techniques.

Many twentieth-century scientists followed in this line of thought, adding to the idea experimental studies showing the relationship between the body and emotions. Some psychological researchers, like Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard, particularly emphasize the body’s influence on our perceived emotions. The use of our facial muscles, for example, affects our moods: Smiling produces greater happiness.10 With advances in our ability to track what is happening in the brain, the height of this physiological understanding of emotions can be found in the field of neuroscience with bestselling authors like David Eagleman. In his books, such as Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain and The Brain: The Story of You, we see a reductionistic Platonic understanding wedded to the high-powered world of fMRI brain imaging. What is love? Brain chemicals. What drives someone to be a serial killer? Brain chemicals.

Even if one doesn’t take an entirely chemical approach to emotions, today emotions are largely viewed as negative and the enemy of sound thinking. Pastor and author Marc Alan Schelske describes a little experiment he conducts with people in his seminars.11 What would be your reaction if someone said to you, “You seem very reasonable today.” Now how would you feel if someone said to you, “You seem very emotional today.” Almost certainly you would receive the first sentence positively and the second not so much. To be described as reasonable is seen as good, while being described as emotional is bad. This distinction reveals a massive set of cultural values based in an unconscious anthropology of “reason = good” and “emotions = bad and dangerous.”

And this is somewhat understandable. The uncontrolled passion of emotions can be a destructive force in our lives. A two-year-old’s throw-self-on-the-ground-flailing behavior is not pleasant but is to be expected because of the emotional immaturity of a toddler. If a twenty-two-year-old, thirty-two-year-old, or fifty-two-year-old acts the same way, this lack of emotional control is deeply troubling and likely a sign of a mental health problem. Also, we often tell ourselves and others “not to make an emotional decision,” meaning not to let emotions guide us more than reliable reason. Those of us who hold to certain ethical standards on marriage or money would rightly advise our teenagers that they need more than “It feels good” to justify their decisions about sex or stealing. This trains us to distrust and maybe even avoid emotions. When we take any or all of these negative experiences and add them to the reductionism of rationalism and brain-as-just-chemistry neuroscience, we have a recipe for a very negative evaluation of emotions.

divider

That’s one approach. But it’s not the only way to understand emotions today or in times past. An alternative conceptualization of emotions, what we can call a cognitive understanding, goes back to ancient philosophers as well. If Plato represents the emotions-as-noncognitive tradition, Aristotle stands as the progenitor of a different, integrated, cognitive approach.12 Like his former mentor Plato, Aristotle understood that the soul has a rational and an irrational part, but rather than being distinct, these form a unity that makes us human. Not two bridled powerful horses, but one complex engine. Emotions are an example of this unity: We feel emotion in our bodies and souls through cognition, through using our minds in dialogue with our bodies. Emotions are the result of beliefs and judgments that we make. They are a cognitive evaluation, even if that evaluation is not always conscious, and even if that cognitive evaluation is sometimes wrong.

Thus, it is through our cognition, occurring at the speed of neurons, that when we are hungry, a sizzling steak induces the emotion of desire while a brick does not. The difference in these emotional responses is based on the cognitive judgments we make concerning the value of the different objects—in this instance, steaks or bricks for eating. This cognitive view of emotions also explains why one person, say a passionate vegan, would not feel desire for the steak but instead feel intense repulsion that a slab of bloody flesh from an innocent animal has been cooked and served on a plate. (How do you feel about that description?) It is the judgment of the badness of meat that creates the very different emotional response.

And on the extreme end, we can imagine some odd psychological state where a person has become obsessed with eating bricks and subsequently does feel desire when sun-dried clay appears on a platter with accompanying cutlery of hammer and spoon. From a health perspective we would evaluate this cognitive judgment of the goodness of a brick diet as mistaken, but it is still a cognitive-emotional response. Pivoting in our reflections, if we were attempting to protect our windows against an approaching hurricane, being handed a pile of steaks would produce a very different emotion in us than if a pallet of bricks arrived. The emotions of elation, gratitude, and hope from obtaining bricks in that hurricane moment depend on the judgment or perception about what is needed. Emotions flow from and through our cognition.

Now it should be noted that Aristotle and subsequent thinkers understood that emotions can be irrational, based on faulty perceptions, and that mistaken emotions can cause self-deception and false judgments to be made. So the situation with our emotions is not simplistic and mechanistic, with appropriate emotions always following purely cognitive and rational processes. Additionally, our bodily sensations are involved as well. Different environments and activities—a quiet walk in the woods, the championship game of your city’s beloved soccer team, a light snowfall on Christmas morning—affect our emotions. Despite these complicating factors, the way emotions function is primarily a matter of cognition—judgments based on the perceived value, goodness, desirability, or harmfulness of some person, situation, or object.

divider

The Greek philosophical traditions in many ways find their most mature and influential form in what is called the Hellenistic period, which ranged from the late fourth century BC until about the time of Jesus. Thanks to the expansive military success of Alexander the Great (whose tutor was none other than Aristotle), Greek philosophy and culture spread widely and took deep roots throughout the Mediterranean basin and beyond. When the upstart Romans eventually conquered, possessed, and expanded beyond Alexander’s empire, much of the new Roman architecture and social structures were Latinized forms of their Greek predecessors. This included its philosophies. The great Roman philosophers like Seneca drew their inspiration from the Greek traditions that preceded them. The most popular and influential of these Hellenistic philosophies—Stoicism—promoted a cognitive view of emotions.

The Hellenistic philosophers, following the lead of their forebears Plato and Aristotle, cared very much about the flourishing of society, about promoting health and happiness. It was necessary, therefore, to teach people how to handle harmful emotions. Religion did not do this.

The problem with religion, the philosophers argued, was not so much the belief in gods per se, but the unbridled emphasis on emotion and passion that the belief in gods created. People lived in fear of the unpredictability of the gods, and the anger of the gods could be appeased only in noncognitive ways—through potions, spells, and mysterious rituals. Festivals associated with various deities were often debauched and uncontrolled events that were seen by the philosophers as harmful to society and to individuals.13

The philosophers’ goal was to teach their adherents a way of life that would enable them to live with ataraxia, a tranquility of soul in all circumstances. Religion could not help this. Ataraxia was only possible through cognitive means, through learning to philosophize, through learning to educate our emotions. Philosophy teaches people to judge the world rightly so as to experience appropriate and manageable emotions. The scholar Martha Nussbaum says it this way: “The Hellenistic thinkers see the goal of philosophy as a transformation of the inner world of belief and desire through the use of rational argument. And within the inner world they focus above all on the emotions—on anger, fear, grief, love, pity, gratitude, and their many relatives and subspecies. . . . Emotions are not blind animal forces, but intelligent and discriminating parts of the personality, closely related to beliefs of a sort, and therefore responsive to cognitive modifications.”14

The Epicureans (we’ll discuss them a bit more later) and Stoics both talked a lot about emotions, but it is the Stoics who had the most to say and have had the longest impact. While following the basic cognitive approach to emotions they found in Aristotle, they also broke with the older Aristotelian tradition by emphasizing the necessity of a studied detachment from the world, including its emotions.

Apatheia (from which our word “apathy” eventually comes) was the key—don’t let emotions control you at all. This is why we use the word “stoic” today to describe a nonemotional person. You may have seen the “Moods of Darth Vader” shirt where the same singular face of Lord Vader appears nine times, each with a different emotion listed under it—Excited, Angry, Sad, Frustrated, and so on. Someone could have made a killing selling a comparable “Moods of Seneca” toga in the first century.

While the Stoics’ actual philosophy was more nuanced than our popular usage (see further discussion in the next chapter), this representation is not entirely inaccurate. Today’s modern practitioners of Stoicism would be careful to point out that they aren’t completely nonemotional, only that they have learned to control their emotional responses. Fair enough.

Nonetheless, the Stoics, much more than Aristotle, were suspicious of emotions because they believed that the key to happiness was a complete self-sufficiency that depended on no one and no circumstances. One’s own cognitive-driven practice of virtue was sufficient for eudaimonia (happiness) according to the Stoics. By way of contrast, Aristotle maintained that eudaimonia depended on both virtue and fortune; circumstances do affect us.

fig093

Figure 6. Seneca the Younger (ca. 4 BC–AD 65) was a famous Stoic philosopher whose many letters and treatises are still influential today. [I, Calidius, CC BY-SA / Wikimedia Commons]

For the Stoics, the issue of managing emotions was very important. If we open ourselves to any emotions, even positive ones, we open ourselves to the negative passions as well. This means we are in danger of losing control. As Ludwig Edelstein describes it in his book The Meaning of Stoicism, “They are inclined to regard even the good passions as bad soldiers, bad allies in the fight of life, because one cannot rely on their leading us in the right direction.”15

New Testament scholar Matthew Elliott highlights this contrast between Aristotle and the later Stoics through examining the emotion of anger. For Aristotle, it is right and appropriate to experience anger when atrocities are committed and injustice is done. For the Stoic, however, “it is not possible to have righteous anger without opening yourself up to the anger of revenge.”16 Therefore, for the Stoics, ataraxia and eudaimonia depend on learning to relate to the world in a detached way. But whether in the Aristotelian or Stoic approach, to live well requires philosophical reflection—learning to identify and analyze our emotions so that we can learn to educate them.

Even as the noncognitive Platonic tradition weaves its way in and out of intellectual fashion over the subsequent centuries, so too does the cognitive approach to emotions. Most of today’s leading psychologists recognize the deep inner connection between our emotions, our cognition, and our bodies. Indeed, nearly every therapeutic counseling approach depends on the belief that behavior can at least partially be affected by cognitive processes—whether it be a classic Rogerian method or Emotion-Focused Therapy or, making it most explicit, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The best methods for psychological help will take into account the range of our complex lives—neurological, physiological, social, psychological, and relational. But all recognize that emotions can be educated.

divider

Philosophical reflection and psychological research have also shown that emotions are central to aspects of our lives that we may not immediately recognize—specifically, our ethics or morality. This was recognized in ancient philosophy and throughout premodern Christianity, but in the modern period it has largely been opposed or ignored. To state it most clearly: Emotions are central to our morality (1) in enabling us to determine what is right and wrong, and (2) as indicators of our moral character. Therefore, paying attention to and educating our emotions is crucial to the Good Life.

In the first instance, emotions play an important role in helping us determine what is moral and what is immoral. Feelings of justice, guilt, shame, and satisfaction at doing right are essential components that shape our ethics. As always with emotions, our feelings are not entirely trustworthy, because they can become distorted (for example, the false guilt or shame that victims of rape often feel; an absence of remorse in a serial killer). But emotions do represent judgments that we have about morality, even if those judgments are distorted. Thus, emotions (what we might call the mysterious conscience), when educated and formed well, are guides in helping us know what to do or not to do morally in a given situation. As Martha Nussbaum argues, it is not possible for us as humans to survey our moral choices in a detached, unemotional way: “In avoiding emotion, one avoids part of the truth.”17

One bit of disturbing evidence for this comes from various experiments that have shown that people with injuries affecting the emotional centers of the brain are often unable to make ethical decisions and/or show a lack of moral inhibitions.18 In his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, physician Antonio Damasio tells the story of his patient Elliot, whose whole life changed radically after successful brain surgery to remove a tumor.19 He was healthy and his logical and reasoning skills were still in place; he still had a very high IQ. But due to damage to his frontal lobe, he lost all emotional capacity. The unexpected result was that he could no longer make any decisions; he was paralyzed by weighing the pros and cons of even trivial decisions such as how to sort his files. Without his emotional capacities, he could not figure out how to prioritize or weigh decisions of any sort. As a result, as Damasio concludes, “The cold-bloodedness of Elliot’s reasoning prevented him from assigning different values to different options, and made his decision-making landscape hopelessly flat.”20

In the past we would have called these abilities “reason,” but an increasing number of studies show that reason only functions when it is paired with emotion. In their book The Feeling Brain: The Biology and Psychology of Emotions, Elizabeth Johnston and Leah Olson describe it this way: “Organisms are continually bombarded by a wealth of information—from outside and inside the body and brain—and emotions provide a way of evaluating and prioritizing what to respond to.”21

The second part of our observation is that emotions not only affect but also reveal our moral character. This understanding is found at least as far back as Aristotle. Emotions are a vital part of a person’s virtue or morality, because virtue requires an integration between all three parts of what makes us psychological humans—our reasoning, our emotions, and our behaviors. If any part of this triad is missing, virtue is lacking. To be virtuous, which is necessary for flourishing in the philosophical understanding, we must intentionally function as a whole (teleios) human. Only the wholeness between all the parts of our humanity enables life in its fullness—and this includes our emotions.

This means we cannot be virtuous accidentally. The virtue of courage is not at work, for example, if when fleeing a battle one drops his or her rifle and it discharges and kills the leader of the enemies. This behavior may result in a desired outcome, but no one would call this courage. Likewise, no one would describe a mean-spirited philanderer as having the virtues of justice, love, and mercy who writes a large donation check to a “Stop Human Trafficking” charity with money he has stolen. This lack of consistency between reasoning, actions, and emotions is the antithesis of virtue. And we would not describe a person as having the virtues of love and loyalty if their motives for kind deeds toward their spouse prove to be only for manipulative and self-serving reasons. Birthday flowers delivered from a wicked-hearted husband do not a virtue make. Motives, which are rooted in emotions (notice they come from the same root word), not merely thinking or behavior, play a crucial role in determining whether an action is virtuous.

We are just beginning to crack open an important way in which our emotional lives spread into the large realm of virtue and morality. In the modern period, in large part thanks to the ethical views of Immanuel Kant, emotions have been seen not as central to morality but as secondary and even problematic. Kant’s nonvirtue approach to ethics emphasizes that right and wrong are a set of rational principles that are in no way connected to the character of the moral agent. Emotions are incidental at best and likely need to be made subservient. The noncognitive approach to emotions makes another (and particularly problematic) appearance.

But consider for a moment what our experience shows us. Emotions are in fact rightly an indication of one’s moral character, and the agent’s emotions are inextricable from the question of the rightness or wrongness of an action. If someone has joy in the suffering of another creature, say a kitten or a baby, we rightly describe this as wrong. Even if the person is not the behavioral cause of the suffering, a positive emotion while someone else is suffering is sadistic, not virtuous. Or if someone has embezzled or been unfaithful sexually to their spouse, the guilty person’s emotional response—remorseful or indifferent—is a significant part of our evaluation of the person’s character, not only in our gut instinct but also in legal sentencing. Similarly, a remorseless killer rightly receives a harsher sentence than a repentant one, and the original motive and emotion of the crime can make the difference between a conviction of manslaughter versus first- or second-degree murder. Emotions are part of one’s character. This understanding of emotions was essential to ancient philosophers and to many modern philosophers as well.

divider

In sum, what we have seen about emotions is that they are not irrational impulses to be ignored or rejected. Rather, our emotions are deeply entwined with our cognition and our bodies. The best ancient philosophies and the best modern psychologies recognize this complex reality and advise us appropriately. Matthew Elliott describes the multifaceted and important role of our emotions this way: “Emotions are not primitive impulses to be controlled or ignored, but cognitive judgments or construals that tell us about ourselves and our world. In this understanding, destructive emotions can be changed, beneficial emotions can be cultivated, and emotions are a crucial part of morality.”22