Stumble it!Emotional Logic
posted in Philosophy by themaiden |Here is another one written for the environmental ethics class with Rolston. All of the references are to ‘Nature, Value, Duty: Life on Earth with Holmes Rolston, III’.
Emotions were a primary guide to human behavior long before we formalized reasoning. Long before we came to consider ourselves rational animals, fear told us what was dangerous and delight told us what was good. Sadness guided us away from some activities while happiness guided us toward others, and anger helped us to defend ourselves and our own.
If you believe the evolutionary narrative that we humans emerged generation by generation through ancestry ultimately stretching back to the single celled, and even to the chemical precursors to life itself, you are near compelled to believe that emotions exist for good reason, that they were needed enough to have become hard coded into our genes and that they get things right often enough to have survived in that gene set for millions of years despite the harsh watchfulness of natural selection. Emotion must have been born of the same process that produced fangs and claws, eyeballs and quick reflexes. Emotions, however disparaged by the intellects of the past few thousand years, must have been selected for, and to be selected for emotion must supply something valuable.Mark Wynn offers several possibilities of what that ’something valuable’ might be.
One possibility he draws from John Deigh. “‘Primitive’ emotions reveal the character of the world independently of the mediating influence of any discursive conceptualization” (Wynn, chapter 4, p. 46). The point is that emotions are not constructed from higher thoughts, not derivative or motivated by rational reflection, but are immediate– one might say ‘reflexive’– reactions. Just this kind of reflexive reaction is what one would expect evolution to produce as nervous systems improve and ever more complicated predators deal with ever more complicated prey and the other way around. Another option Wynn reports is that of Peter Goldie, who holds that emotion can ‘deepen’ understanding of an event or experience (Wynn, chapter 4, p. 47). This, like the previous option, is much what one would expect evolution to produce. If a strong emotion can make an experience ’stick’ it may be the difference between life and death the next time around, and besides, prior to complex rational thought emotion may have been the only way to make an emotion stick. Geoffrey Maddell’s proposal, and the final possibility Wynn offers, does not, however, fit well the evolutionary scheme. Maddell considers emotions to be indicative of intrinsic value– “feelings are capable of directing us towards an intentional content in their own right” (Wynn, chapter 4, p. 48). It is difficult to see how evolution could have produced something of that sort, unless he means something very much like Deigh’s proposal, or Goldie’s. Climate, predation, or any number of other factors can drive evolutionary change toward quicker reflexes, thicker fur, or fear of dark places, but what kind of factor could drive the evolution of a sense of ‘intrinsicness’? Additionally, Maddell seems to have thought and emotion in backward order. As Wynn explains, “feeling takes thought as an object” in Maddell’s conception, but it is reasonable to suppose that emotion came, chronologically, before complex thought. How then would feeling evolve to take thought as its object if in the early stages of that evolution thought simply hadn’t developed? Maddell could argue, of course, that the aspect of emotion he proposes developed late in the evolutionary sequence, as a kind of remodeling of the emotional systems, but in that case it seems his proposal would reduce to something much like Goldie’s.
Emotions, then, can be considered primary means of tapping into the natural world. The evolved, as did reason in fact, from the natural world, from experiences in the world, and were honed by that world and focused to that world over hundreds of millions of years. It would be foolish to abandon that heritage, like abandoning eyes because we’ve now got machines that give us higher resolution over a broader spectrum. Emotions, in other words, are a kind of fuzzy logic hard wired into animal nervous systems. They provide us with quick ‘best bet’ solutions to problems our ancestors repeatedly over countless generations.
Rolston, I think, understands the importance of emotions and does spend, as McShane complains, a fair amount of time “illustrating a particular way of looking at the world” (McShane email, Dec. 30, 2006). He is illustrating the neglected but primal access to nature afforded us by emotion. She can’t hear the music because she is tuned to a different channel. Rolston’s descriptions may never provide the rigid logic McShane may need, but if she is would accept an account of emotions similar to that told above, she may learn to accept his perspective, his music, as something more than merely feeling. If an evolutionary account of emotion is accepted emotions have to be considered as kinds of pre-cognitive calculation learned generation after generation over millions of years and hardwired, at least significantly, by natural selection into animal nervous systems. Rolston’s “compelling descriptions” (Cafaro, in exchange with McShane, January 1, 1007) must certainly hold more weight than she allows.
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