Aristotle, Rationality, and Emotion

I am currently working on a paper that explores the relationship between international politics and the emotions. This entails the difficult task of bridging two forms of social inquiry, scientific and subjective, each of which corresponds to different spheres of human activity. Scientific observations capture that which can be directly quantified and measured, like a state’s territory, population, and economy, while subjective ones aim to shed light on the amorphous realm of feeling, thinking, and perception. Examining the former usually means collecting and statistically comparing hard data. The latter is trickier but ultimately more intellectually rewarding because it includes the analysis of many kinds of texts, such as novels, media sources, and other platforms where humans communicate with one another.

A deep thinker

A research project of this character requires a demanding review of literature in order to identify whether, and how, one might make an original contribution. The literature that I must explore for this purpose runs the gamut from the classics of the ancient world to the latest research on neuroscience, and in this blog post I will share some of observations made while reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric. As the titles of those works suggest, Aristotle thought that the study of emotion was central to understanding ethical behaviour as well as the rhetorical flair necessary for public speaking. Some of his insights deserve to be mentioned and analyzed.

Unsurprisingly, he believed that emotions were opposed to, or logically independent from, rationality. Here we find the origin of much enlightenment thought which venerated reason because alternative forms of understanding, such as intuition, mysticism, and the emotions, were deemed to be backwards or superstitious. This mindset found expression in most Western social scientific scholarship of the 20^th century, and especially the discipline of economics, which pre-supposed rational agents in its models of human behaviour. Liberalism and realism, the dominant paradigms in my discipline (international relations), also assumed this highly stylized depiction of human behaviour. Of course, many economists and others now recognize what those in other disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology, have long known, namely, that human action is much, much messier than the rational actor model implies. Humans are subject to a range of influences when they make decisions, especially emotions, some of which arguably lead to more optimal outcomes than was previously believed. 

  

 In the contemporary debate among theorists of politics and emotions, one of the divides is between those who argue that emotions are primarily embodied, involuntary, evolutionary adaptations, and those who assert that emotions flow from cognitive appraisals (cognitivists). A core feature of this dispute is the temporal sequence of emotions and cognition: one camp assumes that the emotions precede thought and narration, while cognitivists assume the reverse. Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric show that this sets up a false dichotomy, since the proper answer to the debate is that both are right depending on the context and the emotions. Aristotle believed that some emotions, like anger and fear, are largely involuntary. Others, like envy and indignation, are the result of specific forms social comparisons and hence arguably voluntary. In this latter kind, Aristotle makes genuinely insightful observations that have stood the test of time. Emotions occur because humans have goals, and in the attainment of them we compare ourselves with others who have similar objectives. What is more, we compare ourselves mainly with those who are like us rather than with those who are not; when those in our own group category are doing much better or much worse than us, it evokes emotion.

It seems this goes some way in explaining the fact that the anger that people feel towards intra-group inequality is greater than the satisfaction that they feel for inter-group equality. For example, one of the trends in our own time is that inequality has increased domestically, while it has decreased internationally, largely because of the same macro-structural process of globalization. And yet the same actors who quickly condemn globalization for increasing inequality domestically are less likely to praise it for reducing inequality between the West and, say, India and China. Why? I think Aristotle’s observation above answers that question. Those in the domestic realm share a legal, territorial, linguistic, and national orientation, while the almost 1 billion Indians and Chinese who have escaped poverty in the past 25 years are, for most citizens, abstractions. A similar dynamic happens when there is an accident or other event that causes death. When a plane crashes that is full of citizens from our country, we feel it, while the same plane full of foreigners does not evoke the same emotions. Not all are this parochial, of course, but even if half or most are, it supports Aristotle’s theory and goes some way in shedding light on why people react emotionally to some and not others.

Scholars tend to divide emotions into positive and negative, the former usually referring to things like joy, pride, and love, the latter to anger, hatred, and fear. This taxonomy perhaps reflects the scientific impulse to categorize and simplify, which makes research projects more manageable. Aristotle’s work suggests that emotions are not that simple. One of the more interesting parts of his theory is the proposition that negative emotions are often pleasurable, raising questions about how negative they actually are. The pleasurable part of anger, for example, is revenge, while the pleasurable part of sadness is lamentation. My interpretation of these examples is that emotions have social functions or outcomes, and it is this element that produces pleasure. This is another insight that has stood the test of time. Self-righteous indignation, the kind that characterizes much debate during elections, can be pleasurable precisely because it has a social purpose, namely, the political goals of the actor. Here, negative emotions can be understood as part of the action that is necessary to attain these goals, which involves engagement with others: solidarity with those who one agrees with, and antipathy towards those on the other side. One is reminded of other activities that bring men pleasure, such as organized sports and other forms of controlled conflict. Aristotle was clearly on to something here.     

            

Although Aristotle mostly thought that emotions were irrational, he recognized that understanding them was useful for effective public speaking. That was certainly his purpose in Rhetoric, where he spends much more space theorizing emotions than in Nicomachean Ethics. In the process, he made genuinely insightful observations that remain relevant 24 centuries after he wrote. One overarching lesson is that emotions are messy and are not easily quantified. This should council humility to those in my discipline who aim to be rigorously scientific. The methods of modern science include concepts that are categorized into highly stylistic, distinct, and simplified units that can be directly statistically represented and measured. This process is essential for the next step of theory building and hypothesis testing, both of which are characterized with a clear demarcation between variables, as well as an unambiguous separation between independent (cause) variables and dependent (effect) ones. This mode of inquiry might work well in some forms of psychological testing and neuroscientific analysis, but it insufficient for a comprehensive study of emotions because, as Aristotle shows: 1) emotions are not necessarily distinct; they are composite and overlapping, 2) they depend on context, character, and type such that it makes little sense to ask what “causes” emotions. Rather, they have a variety of causes that depend on a variety of influences and on the type of emotions we are investigating. This implies that strictly scientific methods are inadequate for the study of emotion, and that other sources are needed to help us illuminate them.