Aristotle Believed the Emotions Were Important Instruments of Knowing and Understanding

A contradiction? On the one hand, I believe deep in my heart that part of the human vocation on earth is to bring our minds and hearts in tune with reality. I can only believe that given that I believe reality (existence, being, ‘to be’) is at its core “good, very good,” even in the face of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” of “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” even of the pervasiveness of evil. On the other hand, I must acknowledge that such a belief cannot be reached by the intellect alone, uninformed by the heart. A belief in reality accessed through subjectivity, emotion? Is that not a contradiction?

       Indeed, I acknowledge such a belief becomes only intelligible to those who love or who have loved; to those who have therefore experienced grief or perhaps remorse; to those who have felt horror over evils that have become real to them (e.g., slavery, genocide, violence against women, etc.); to those who have been distraught over the greed-motivated destruction of natural beauty; above all, to those who have experienced moments of real joy (see below on joy). So I cannot make my belief intelligible to everyone, which would seem to be in tension with the notion that it is a belief about what is real and not just an expression of subjective emotion and wishful thinking. 

        The real, it will be thought, is objective, and what is objective the intellect can prove or support with evidence everyone would acknowledge to be evidence. And then there is the “fat, relentless ego,” the powerful, inborn narcissism that Freud bored in on – for him not the consequence of sin but nature as science understands it. Any emotion – joy, love, grief, remorse, horror – the fat, relentless ego can elicit as a counterfeit response to an idealized, constructed, falsified version of reality – the ego’s own, private Hollywood version of reality. If you cannot give objective evidence or rational proof, then it must be emotional, which is to say subjective, telling us nothing about reality but only the psyche of the person who experiences it. It can even seem a contradiction: I believe x to be real because of emotional experiences a, b, and c. And given that we all at some level know how fragile, and thus how ruthless our ego-consciousness is, we don’t trust it to reveal reality. Rightly. But in every person except for the most pathological narcissist, even in very flawed people as I am and perhaps most of us are, beats a human heart capable of the kinds of revelatory emotions I am talking about. 

        I know the reality of my children not only intellectually. Neither I nor anyone else could profoundly know them from the outside, with the intellect alone. I know them though loving them, even in the flawed way I do love them. Loving them is the conformity of reason in its fullest meaning with their reality; their reality molds the mind, or that part of their reality that can inform the mind does inform it. Without this love, my relationship to them would be like an android’s attempt to understand a poem – having all the information about the poem, being able to say all that might be intelligibly said about the poem, but actually not understanding the poem (from the inside) at all. My children are like the poems in that you can know them – access their reality – only as a whole human being, body and soul, heart and intellect. 

         I don’t claim to know them absolutely, as only God could. Admittedly, therefore, deeper understanding could change how I see them to some extent. But they are real to me, if only imperfectly so. Except for God, all understanding, all knowledge is partial, and so nothing is fully, absolutely real to us. That’s what it means to be finite, mortal. That creates space for unreality (fantasy in the Freudian sense) to colonize us. But I am engaged with the reality of my children themselves, not their mere appearances, not mere social constructs of them – unless I am sentimental or wholly consumed by my innate narcissism. Indeed, the largest wall between mortals and reality is not our finitude, our limited intellects, but our narcissism. (The one insight shared by Plato, the Buddha, Augustine, Freud, and Jesus.) The problem is not a divide between the intellect and the heart, but between a heart-intellect (i.e. reason) to some extent liberated from narcissism and its attendant sentimentality and a heart-intellect that is consumed by narcissism and its attendant sentimentality. The shadows of Plato’s cave come from the fat, relentless ego, not the wellsprings of our hearts. 

      If this subjective truth were only subjective and not truth – as it would be, were the love merely sentimental – then the love we bear our children, our grief, our remorse, our horror over evil done, our longing for justice, our joy and longings, and everything that allows us to see our lives as they really are, would be unintelligible. Life would resemble a stupid soap opera. All love, joy, grief, and horror would be sentimental lies. This is why the attempt to divide the intellect from the heart is an attempt to separate us from reality. How irrational. We would live in contradiction to ourselves. 

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Academic prose and reality. At the university people write plain academic treatises, prose designed to be propositional. A judgment that non-personal, scientific prose is the best vehicle to speak (and think) truly about reality lies behind this style, which is obviously patterned on the style of natural science. So as a student I would read poetry and then in a dry academic paper would try to say what it ‘really meant,’ which to me included saying what the poem implied was true about the world. I naturally thought: why couldn’t the poet just say that truth in plain prose; why the puzzle-solving of trying to figure out the claim in my academic paper? Why all the flowery ornamentation?  I cared nothing for ornaments; I only wanted to learn about the world, about my life. I had taken over the university's assumption that truth was most clearly and appropriately expressed in propositions – plain declarative statements with clear meanings. Poetry that purported to say something true or profound about the world was guilty of using an inappropriate form for its content. 

        As my previous section has implied, that is utterly wrong. Some aspects of reality can only be disclosed through a poetic form because they can only be disclosed to the emotional responses that academic prose deems irrelevant, even a hindrance to the truth. Academic prose is designed to kill emotions, which is appropriate only if the reality being searched for (e.g., gravity) can be found by killing the emotions. As a general principle, it assumes metaphysically that reality can only be disclosed by killing emotions. What I have suggested is that the most profound dimensions of reality can only be disclosed through particular emotional responses combined with thought. In that sense, academic writing puts blinders on students and scholars alike – as it did me. 

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Reality and emotion. Emotions play a different role in these two kinds of understanding. Strong emotions tell us what matters. A passionate activist feels strongly about climate change and its causes. He might get angry over the human beings behind it. He may feel desperation over the lack of action. Still, his passions can get in the way of his work as a scientist, or more positively can motivate him.  They are not part of the actual scientific conclusions. But if the same person, who is say Catholic, reads Genesis 1, he will probably understand it in a different way from an oil executive. Only in and through the concrete lives of the two men – and being men could also play a role – does the meaning of Genesis take shape. 

         This is not to say that each projects their values onto a blank page. I think the pre-judgments of man who loves the earth enable him to better understand the meaning of Creation as told in Genesis. But this is not an automatic outcome. His activism may be thoroughly sentimental while the oil executive may be torn between competing goods. In any case, emotions condition the understanding, for good or bad. Indeed, it is only through the emotion of love that the meaning of the Creation is intelligible – as pictured in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. In the former case, emotions are on the outside of the ‘cognitive content’ of the science work: like a drug, they can only stimulate or interfere. The activist may love the earth, but if he and a scientist who loves the oil companies are both good scientists, their different loves will play no role in their data and its explanation.

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Emotions as convictions (not beyond criticism) about what is real and good. Emotions tell us what we really think is important. We are raised to be part of a world where, among a vast multitude of such spiritual-cultural responses, we may react to pain with compassionate or cold hearts. We take on an attitude towards pain (toward other human beings or animals in pain) by being raised by parents and communities to whom we matter (or to whom we should matter, that being the normative expectation) – we would consider this a deprivation in instances where this doesn’t happen.

       Parents and others show that we matter, for example, when they take joy in us and show this joy – smiling at us, for example, or playing with us as children; also showing their concern when we hurt ourselves and are in pain. “Pity is the conviction that someone is in pain”: this sentence, unpacked, means that our language and culture of pain – our attitude towards pain – has been ingrained in us since birth. It is connected to a great variety of typical gestures, responses, and beliefs about pain – comforting behaviors, compassionate feelings, certain facial expressions, and so on – and can be escaped only with a most radical break from our lives as we know it; and even in the event of such a break in attitude, the new attitude is condition by the first as a response to it. It makes no sense, leaping into the epistemology language game, to say we ‘know we are in pain’ (that adds nothing to ‘I am in pain’; it does no meaning-work).

        The intelligible range of culturally transmitted and individually lived-through, largely emotion-laden responses to pain express convictions about pain impervious to doubt except through a most radical alienation of sense.  “Love is the conviction that the beloved person, belonging, or place is ‘good, very good’.” How one thinks about the Real, the Good, Nature, and so on – is radically different depending on whether one can think only within or only outside of the different forms of love. Emotion is at its best a kind of sonar for locating value outside the submarine-like self. And emotions get translated later into thought, philosophy, and ethics; not the other way around. 

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Grief and philosophy. Grief is the conviction that the beloved person who died was real and loveable. That love was a response to the reality of the loved one; that the loved one was lovable. Conviction, and not a conclusion to an argument or supported by the evidence. Conviction because it is not something we can sanely doubt. We cannot ground these convictions through science or philosophy. Without them, we would cease to be human. Reality transcends philosophy. This is what Wittgenstein believed. 

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‘True’ and ‘False’ emotions. When a friend does something kind for me, in the pure spirit of kindness and firmly grounded in needs I myself recognize as needs, and I respond with disdainful contempt (all things being equal), that would show either: 1) I did not understand what she did as kindness, a mistaken judgment expressed through my disdainful contempt; 2) There is something deficient in my character – I hear of people speak of emotional intelligence, implying such a thing as emotional stupidity, but I think the resentment could just be a sign that, as Dr. Suess wrote of the Grinch: ‘but I think the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small.’ An emotion is ‘true’ when it is attuned to the reality of which it is a response; ‘false’ when out of tune with said reality. An emotion that is out of tune with reality reveals something that needs to be changed in the person who responds in this way. A crucial part of upbringing: to lovingly do whatever you can, not only to bring your children to desire what is truly good for them but to feel about things in ways that are deeply in tune with those things. (e.g. learning to want to share and not feel selfish resentment)

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Emotions and Metaphysics. A couple witnesses an amazingly beautiful full moon. (Imagine I have god-like knowledge of their inner lives.) The boyfriend takes notice, and then resentfully fears he will hear some sentimental ramblings from his girlfriend about how beautiful the moon is, etc., all to underscore how aesthetically sensitive she is. His girlfriend, sensing his attitude, remains silent, but thinks to herself of this moon as a blessing; she would not want to imagine her life without the moon.

       Both emotional responses are connected to a metaphysical-religious philosophy: the man’s emotional response is intelligible against this background of belief: the universe is a meaningless collection of particles, forces, and energy; all meaning and beauty are thus necessarily sentimental human projections. The girlfriend’s response is grounded in this metaphysics: she is part of Creation; all things somehow embody the beauty and love of a Creator. Perhaps she doesn’t literally believe in a Creator, but the image is the only way she knows to express the beauty and wonder that has been sown into the very fabric of Being. Their emotional responses also embody an anthropology / psychology, a ‘fore-structure’ of possible understandings based on this. The man believes human beings are basically covetous machines prone to feel-good displays to mask this truth self and others. The girlfriend believes human beings have a capacity to love what is real and beautiful in the world, and that this is actually what makes us fully human. The emotional response also implies different ways of raising and educating children; different ways of organizing society; different ways of relating to nature economically and technologically. Etc. You can have a profound philosophy, but if you are emotionally deaf-and-dumb, that philosophy will be purely an intellectual house of cards. (The girlfriend wisely breaks up with that boyfriend the next day.) 

        Now do this on your own: imagine an animal lover and a meat-industrial contemplating a lamb about to be slaughtered; a loving mother and a woman intent on an abortion contemplating images of the life in their wombs; a native American of a people who lived on the plains in the 18th century and an agro-business of today; a strip miner and Wendell Berry on a river valley; a narcissist anxious to use the death of her dog for a kitschy pet funeral to attract attention and sympathy on Facebook and a person alone with her tears at the loss of her dog. Emotional responses imply a philosophy, and a philosophy conditions emotional responses. 

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True Emotions are windows that open out onto Being. A man never thinks of his wife. He never does anything for her. He is indifferent to her needs. He feels nothing when she dies. But he says ‘I loved her.’ I would have great trouble making sense of this. A pet dog dies. The pet’s owner or human companion suffers “inconsolable grief.” He buries the dog with its picture on an elaborate gravestone. He visits the grave once a month, bringing flowers. Every year he lights a candle and weeps on the day of the dog’s death. He posts all this on Facebook. I would have a hard time believing the man really loved the dog rather than using the dog’s death to put himself on display. I could only think of him as sentimental. But a man could really grieve for a dog, and that real grief partly reveals what a dog is as well as the man. Emotions like grief are judgments about reality and paths of understanding what something is. They can be counterfeit but they are essential to be able to understand many things.

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Purity of the heart and reality. ‘I love the earth’ said by a person who never gave a thought to how their patterns of consumption impacted the earth – empty words. Veganism is the expression of a love for animals, said by a person upon accepting an academy award, say, who in reality was more interested in presenting herself as an animal-lover and contrasting herself with a bad group of meat eaters  – I could only understand that as narcissistic grandstanding, virtue signaling to use the parlance of our time. 

     The reality of animals, the earth, or anything else can only be disclosed by certain, rather rare individuals in purer forms of love. The love discloses like this: it lets us see the animals in a different light; it allows us to really feel the belief that the animals loved can be creatures that really bring out this love, and are not merely brutes on whom sentimental people project their feelings and use for their own psychological purposes. We can only know this of animals when we experience them emotionally as non-sentimental recipients of love. Love is a kind of knowing. The heart can know things, and some realities can only be known by the heart.

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Emotional limits. Many of us can engage with the needs of what is close: our friends, our apartment, our neighbors. But the reduction of the world through the regime of Industrialism-Science-Technology – its genuine benefits justifying the reduction – boggles the ability of a human being seriously, emotionally, intellectually to respond to it. I want to care about all the destruction in the Appalachians, the blasphemous treatment of animals in the meat industry, the cruelty to human beings in sweatshops, and much more. I can’t, except in the most limited and superficial ways. It is too far away from my core – a critique of myself and this society. The most common expression of public emotional responses to all the destruction and injustice: giving narcissists and celebrities a platform to grandstand, which only adds to the impossibility of authentic response (‘if it were really serious, people would not grandstand’).

         And social media makes narcissists – not a moral critique but a description documented by sociologists of the dominant personality structure of people socialized by capitalism – and would-be celebrities out of the masses. The vast and depersonalized nature of the evils, the ways they are superficially represented in the media and exploited for cheap effect, and the ways we are all implicated in our daily lives make genuine emotional response difficult – or only possible for saints. This is a distinctive evil of mass society. It is increasingly difficult to authoritatively speak on these matters because many like myself cannot really speak from the heart. But that is the lesson: speaking with authority comes from living authentically, and living authentically is connected to how real our emotional responses are.  Social forms may help people with emotional depth or may churn out superficiality as though on an assembly line.