“[Jude] steps back, still looking. In the painting, Willem's torso is directed toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in profile, and he is leaning towards something or someone and smiling. And because he knows Willem's smiles, he knows that Willem has been captured looking at something he loves, he knows Willem in that instant is happy. Willem's face and neck dominate the canvas and although the background is suggested rather than shown, he knows that Willem is at their table. He knows it from the way that JB has drawn the light and shadows on Willem's face. He has the sense that if he says Willem's name that the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and stroked the canvas he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem's hair, his fringe of eyelashes.

But he doesn't do this, of course, just looks up at last and sees JB smiling at him, sadly. "The title card's been mounted already," JB says, and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title - "Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, Greene Street"-and he feels his beneath abandon him; it feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet.”

****

“I’m lonely,” he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.

He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest. He cannot unlearn the feeling.”

― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

Philosophy has long been pre-occupied with the nature of the emotions: do they belong to the body, the mind, or both? Where do they begin? And do we have any control over them?

Much philosophical thinking has tended towards highlighting our experience of passivity in the face of our emotions—and this emphasis on passivity seems to get something right. In Hanya Yanagihara’s emotionally-charged novel, A Little Life, we find Yanagihara’s description of Jude’s grief as a bodily happening which occurs without warning, inundating and overpowering him: ‘and he feels his beneath abandoning him’, Yanagihara writes, ‘it feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet’. We all know what it feels like to experience such a paralysis in the face of our emotions. Further, the ways in which we speak about emotions tends to support a view of our passivity in the face of them.

The language in which we couch emotion-attributions portrays “us” as the patient and the emotion as the “agent” which acts upon us, thus: we fall in love, we are overwhelmed by grief, overcome with joy, swamped with fear or flooded with rage.

The history of philosophy, too, bears out this connection between the emotions and passivity in the language it uses to refer to the emotions. Whilst the modern term ‘emotion’ is relatively neutral, in the early modern period it was common to refer to the emotions as ‘passions’ or ‘affects’. Aristotle refers to the emotions using the Greek term pathos, the meaning of which includes a notion of being passively affected or ‘acted upon’ by something else.

Philosophers have found it natural to move from an understanding of the emotions as things by which we are passively affected, to claims about the superiority of ‘active’ reason or rationality. Reasoning, which such philosophers locate only in the mind, and for which alone we are fully responsible, is to be contrasted with the bodily nature of the emotions. Historically, of course, this discourse has also been highly gendered.

The dominance of the rational mind has been associated with the male and the dominance of the bodily, passive emotions with the female.

Given the assumption of the superiority of male rationality over female passivity, numerous philosophers have written about the emotions with the aim of either eliminating them or attempting to bring their unruly forces under control. For Descartes, for instance, the passions are themselves mental phenomena, but they begin as changes in the body which then act upon the passive mind, inflicting emotional experiences upon us. The mastery of the passions by the mind becomes the natural goal. As Descartes advises Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia: True philosophy teaches that even amid the saddest disasters and most bitter pains a man can always be content, provided that he knows how to use his reason.

Descartes’s approach to the emotions is not merely a historical curiosity—we often still think of emotions as, first and foremost, bodily experiences. The influence of his view was extended, in the 20th century, by William James, who proposed a similarly ‘body-first’ view of the emotions. According to the James-Lange theory of emotions, an emotion just is the feeling that we experience when changes take place in the body. That is, our feeling of bodily changes just is the emotion: ‘we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble’. Without the bodily experience, there is no emotion to feel.

Whilst such “body first” views of emotion might seem to get something right about the phenomenology of emotional experience—we do often experience our anger as present in our body, for instance—there are also many unappealing aspects to such a view of the emotions. As Martha Nussbaum writes, this is a view of emotions as non-reasoning movements, as:

... Unthinking energies that simply push the person around, without being hooked up to the ways in which she perceives or thinks about the world. Like gusts of wind or the currents of the seas, they move, and move the person, but obtusely ... in this sense, they are pushes rather than pulls

(Upheavals of Thought)

“Body-first” views of the emotions, with their emphasis on passivity, can make us feel helpless in the face of forces which are often disruptive and destructive, emotional pushes which can feel as if they go against our considered views. If we are passively affected by the state of our body, then we are likely to feel controlled by our emotional state, with little or no power to change it. As Nussbaum writes:

If emotions are just unthinking forces that have no connection with our thoughts, evaluations, or plans, then they really are just like the invading currents of some ocean. And they really are, in a sense, non self; and we really are passive before them

In Nussbaum’s view, however, we have many good reasons to reject the view that emotions are just this. That is, we need not view our emotions as unrelenting, alien forces which overwhelm us and are beyond our control. Instead, Nussbaum argues, a relocation of the emotions is in order, one which harks back to the early, Stoic views. We ought to understand emotions not as bodily phenomena, but as mental phenomena: emotions, she claims, are really judgments, or thoughts. So why, despite their initial plausibility, shouldn’t we believe views about the passions which construe them as natural bodily motions or energies which act upon the passive mind? In essence, it is because such a view cannot possibly account for the true complexity of emotional states. When one feels joy, grief or fear, such emotions are not object-less and indiscriminate feelings (sometimes they are, of course, and in such circumstances what we are dealing with are not emotions, but moods, an emotional phenomena which, philosophers tend to agree, require separate treatment). Instead, emotions have objects: that is, emotions are about something. Expanding upon her theory in the context of her grief at the loss of her mother, Nussbaum writes:

‘my fear, my hope, my ultimate grief, all are about my mother and directed at her and her life ... the aboutness [of the emotion] is more internal, and embodies a way of seeing’.

In other words, emotions are about things, and which emotion we feel is determined by the way in which we view those things. This latter aspect is crucial, for we can, of course, experience numerous different emotions towards the very same object: those closest to us, especially, are often the objects of numerous different ways of seeing. We can both hate and love, for instance, the same individual, depending on the way in which we see them, the aspects of them that we consider: ‘what distinguishes fear from hope, fear from grief, love from hate - is not so much the identity of the object, which might not change, but the way in which the object is seen’, or rather, the beliefs that we hold about that object (Nussbaum). The beliefs which are characteristic of emotions are also crucially concerned with value: ‘they see their object as invested with value or importance’. The kinds of things which we take as the objects of our emotions have a special sort of value that, Nussbaum argues, relates to our own flourishing: we see the objects of our emotions as playing an important role in our lives.

This feature of the judgements which constitute emotions is crucial and explains why our emotional responses to objects are tightly circumscribed: we can hold countless beliefs about a great diversity of objects without feeling emotionally affected by the inconstancy of their condition. We can, for instance, possess beliefs about the good qualities of various individuals, but if we do not also see their state as valuable or important for our own flourishing, then such beliefs will sit within us only dispassionately. This does not mean, however, that our emotions are only concerned with those things which instrumentally affect our own satisfaction, for we can value things in themselves, and for their own sake, whilst also considering the state of such things to have a significant impact upon our own flourishing. As Nussbaum writes:

[Emotions] insist on the real importance of their object, but they also embody the person’s own commitment to the object as part of her scheme of ends. This is why, in the negative cases, they are felt as tearing the self apart: because they have to do with me and my own, my plans and goals, what is important in my own conception (or more inchoate sense) of what it is for me to live well

In this way, Nussbaum’s account of the emotions as judgments, something which at first blush might seem obviously misguided, comes to seem not only plausible, but desirable. It is because the judgments that constitute emotions concern objects which are intimately intertwined with our conception of the nature and status of our own flourishing that these judgements play such a great role in our emotional landscape. From here, Nussbaum hopes that we share her view that the “body first” account of the emotions is decidedly flawed and distorted, for ‘emotions look at the world from the subject’s own viewpoint, mapping events not the subject’s own sense of personal importance or value’. An account of the emotions as judgments, Nussbaum claims, both accounts for this importance and for the sense of passivity we often find to be a part of our emotional experiences which was so crucial on the “body first” account: it is because the judgments which constitute emotions more often than not concern people and things external to us and out of control that we experience our emotions as passive. We are hostages to fortune in this sense, and emotions are ‘thus, in effect, acknowledgements of neediness and [our] lack of self-sufficiency’.

Nussbaum’s account of emotions as judgments, however well-articulated and defended, might appear just as implausible as the account of emotions as bodily states inflicted upon the passive mind does to Nussbaum. One reason for this, I think, might be the overly intellectual nature of Nussbaum’s account: surely, we might want to say, it is not the case that every time we experience an emotion we are also aware of accepting a judgment about the way the world is. Imagine the joyful feeling of swimming in the ocean for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, or the first time holding your baby: surely it is to over-intellectualise these moments to describe them as a cognitive exercise of affirming a judgment about an object’s value? Moreover, if emotions are understood in such a cognitive way, might Nussbaum not be at risk of denying emotions to those not in a position to make such judgments—animals and children, for instance?

These are complex problems. Nussbaum is well-aware of the temptation to reach for such criticisms against her account, and she dedicates many words in Upheavals of Thought attempting to resolve these issues. She does not intend her account to rule out the experience of emotions in either children or animals, nor that every emotional experience requires the conscious acceptance of a certain judgment.

However, instead of dwelling on the ways in which Nussbaum deals with these complexities, I want to focus instead on the positive aspects of Nussbaum’s cognitive account, compared with the “body first” view of emotions. As I suggested at the beginning, understandings of the emotions which see them as active bodily states which exert their influence on the mind as patient do a good job of accounting for the passivity we feel in many emotional experiences. The problem is that, perhaps, they do too good of a job: understanding our emotions in this way, I have suggested, along with Nussbaum, wrests from us all control over our emotional lives and leaves us with a feeling of impotence. They are external, alien-like forces which threaten our agency, removing the possibility of changing our emotional landscape, even when such a landscape causes us pain and suffering.

Nussbaum’s account of emotions, on the other hand, gives us the possibility of change. We feel passive in the face of many of our emotions, she claims, because our emotions tend to centre around other people and states of affairs over which we have little control. This we cannot alter— we cannot, and should not, hope to exert control over every area of our lives in order to manage our emotions. What Nussbaum’s account allows us to do, however, is to exert control over our emotional experiences by considering more carefully the kind of judgments we make; by reassessing our beliefs about other people and about the world more generally, we can cultivate a healthier emotional landscape. As beings with complex understandings of what constitutes our flourishing and a tendency to form quick judgments about things which occur around us, our beliefs do not always reflect reality. As Nussbaum notes, the judgments which constitute our emotions have a tendency to ‘entertain appearances’, to rush towards how things seem, assenting to them, saying yes this is how things really are. But, as is all too obvious, reality does not always correspond with the way things seem to us, and sometimes the beliefs we affirm based on appearances are false, and lead to emotional reactions which are unwarranted.

The upshot of Nussbaum’s account of the emotions is that we possess the power of rethinking the beliefs we hold about others and about the world more generally, thus imposing change, hopefully for the better, on our emotional landscape.

When we experience another’s treatment of us as, for instance, harmful in some way we form judgments about another and their actions which constitute anger. But such automatic beliefs are not always correct. While there is a place, Nussbaum is clear, for righteous anger, sometimes through careful reflection on the other’s actions and beliefs, through cultivating a deeper empathic understanding of their intentions, we can reformulate our beliefs about the other which led to our anger. Such a rethinking—though we should not underestimate its difficulty— is in theory possible for all our emotions. By emphasising the connection between emotions and thoughts, Nussbaum thus hands back to us a degree of agency over our emotions which we can see as empowering. Dissolving the dichotomy between reason and passion—and thus rejecting the distinction and hierarchy between rational man and emotional woman—her account suggests that our intellectual life, the set of beliefs we hold about the world, is reflected in the set of emotions that we experience, that there is an intimate link which not only produces the possibility of change, but also paints the emotions not as unruly and disruptive forces, but as the natural consequences of rightly ordered beliefs.