Uncertain guilt

Suppose there is a 75% chance that I have done a specific wrong thing yesterday. (Perhaps I have suffered from some memory loss.) What should be my attitude? Guilt isn’t quite right. For guilt to be appropriate, I should believe that I’ve done a wrong thing, and 75% is not high enough for belief.

Guilt does come in degrees, but those degrees correlate with the degrees of culpability and wrongness, not with the epistemic confidence that I actually did the deed.

If I am not sure that I’ve done something, then a conditional apology makes sense: “Due to memory loss, I don’t know if I did A. But if I did, I am really sorry.” Maybe there is some conditional guilt feeling that goes along with conditional apology. But I am not sure there is such a feeling.

However, even if there is such a thing as a conditional guilt feeling, it presumably makes just as much sense when the probability of wrongdoing is low as when it is high. But it seems that whatever feeling one has due to a probability p of having done the wrong thing should co-vary proportionately to p.

Here’s an interesting possibility. There is no feeling that corresponds to a case like this. Feelings represent certain states of the world. The feeling of guilt represents the state of one’s having done a wrong. But just as we have no perceptual state that represents ultraviolet light, we have no perceptual state that represents probably having done a wrong. Other emotions do exist that have probabilistic purport. For instance, fear represents a chance of harm, and the degree (and maybe type: compare ordinary fear with dread!) of fear varies with the probability of harm.

While we can have highly complex cognitive attitudes, our feelings have more in the way of limitations. Just as there are some birds that have perceptual states that represent ultraviolet light, there could be beings that represent a probability that one did wrong, a kind of uncertain-guilt. But perhaps we don’t have such a feeling.

We get around limitations in our perceptual skills by technological means and scientific inference. We cannot see ultraviolet, but we can infer its presence in other ways. Similarly, we may well have limitations in our emotional attitudes, and get around them in other ways, say cognitively.

It would be interesting to think what other kinds of feelings could make sense for beings like us but which we simply don’t have.

Emotions and naturalism

On occasion, I’ve heard undergraduates suggest that naturalism faces a problem with emotions. They feel that a mere computational system would not have emotional states.

One might take this to be a special case of the problem of qualia, and I think it has some plausibility there. It is indeed hard to see how an emotionless Mary would know what it’s like to be scared or in love. Is it harder than in the case of ordinary sensory qualia, like that of red? I don’t know.

But I think it’s more interesting to take it to be a special case of the problem of intentionality or content. Emotions are at least partly constituted by intentional (quasi?) perceptual states with normative content: to be scared involves perceiving reality as containing something potentially bad for one and being in love involves perceiving someone as wonderful in some respects.

The standard materialist story about the content of perceptual states is causal: a perception of red represents an object as reflecting or emitting light roughly of a certain wavelength range because the perception is typically triggered by objects doing this. But on standard naturalist stories do not have room for normative properties to play a causal role. Post-Aristotelian scientific explanations are thought not to invoke normative features.

There is, of course, nothing here to worry an Aristotelian naturalist who believes that objects have natures that are both normative and causally explanatory.

Over the past year, I’ve been coming to appreciate the explanatory power of the Aristotelian story on which the very same thing grounds normativity and provides a causal explanation.

Feeling bad about harms to our friends

Suppose something bad happens to my friend, and while I am properly motivated in the right degree to alleviate the bad, I just don’t feel bad about it (nor do I feel good about). Common sense says I am morally defective. But suppose, instead, something bad happens just to me, and I stoically (I am not making any claims about the Stoic movement by using this word, despite the etymology) bear up under it, without feeling bad, though being properly motivated to alleviate the harm. Common sense praises this rather than castigating it. Yet, aren’t friends supposed to be other selves?

So, we have a paradox generated by:

1. The attitudes we should have towards our friends are very much like those we should have towards ourselves.

2. It is wrong not to feel bad about harms to our friends even when we are properly motivated to fight those harms.

3. It is not wrong to feel bad about harms to ourselves when we are properly motivated to fight those harms.

As some terminological background, feeling bad about our friends’ losses is not exactly empathy. In empathy, we feel the other’s feelings as we see things from their point of view. So, feeling bad about harms to our friends will only be empathy if our friends are themselves feeling bad about these harms. There are at least two kinds of cases where we feel bad about harms to our friends when our friends themselves do not: (a) our friends are being stoical and (b) our friends are unaware of the harms (e.g., their reputation is being harmed by gossip we witness, or our friends are being harmed by acting viciously while thinking it’s virtuous). Moreover, even when our friends are feeling bad about the harms, our feeling bad about the harms will only be a case of empathy if we feel bad because they are feeling bad. If we feel bad because of the badness of the harms, that’s different.

In fact, we don’t actually have a good word in English for feeling bad on account of a friend’s being harmed. Sympathy is perhaps a bit closer than empathy, but it has connotations that aren’t quite right. Perhaps “compassion” in the OED’s obsolete sense 1 and sense 2a is close. The reason we don’t have a good word is that normally our friends themselves do feel bad about having been harmed, and our terminology fails to distinguish whether our feeling bad is an instance of sharing in their feeling or of emotionally sharing in the harm to them. (Think of how the “passion” in “compassion” could be either the other’s negative feeling or it could be the underlying harm.) And I think we also don’t have a word for feeling bad on account of our own being harmed, our “self compassion” (we do have “self pity”, but that’s generally seen as bad), though we do have thicker words for particular species of the phenomenon, such as shame or grief. So I’ll just stick to the clunky “feeling bad on account of harm”.

When we really are dealing with empathy, i.e., when we feel bad for our friend because our friend feels bad for it, the paradox is easier to resolve. We can add a disjunct to (1) and say:

4. The attitudes we should have towards our friends are very much like either those that we should have towards ourselves or those that our friends non-defectively have towards themselves.

This is a bit messy. I’m not happy with it. But it captures a lot of cases.

But what about the pure case of feeling bad for harms to a friend, not because the friend feels bad about it?—either because the friend doesn’t know about the harm, or the friend is being stoical, or our bad feeling is a direct reflection of the harms rather than indirectly via the other’s feeling of the harms. (Of course there will also be the special case where the feeling is the harm, as perhaps in the case of pains.) I am not sure.

I actually feel a pull to saying that especially when our friend doesn’t feel bad about the harm, we should, on their behalf. If our friend nobly does not feel the insult, we should feel it for them. And if our friend is being unjustly maligned, we should not only work to rescue their reputation, but we should feel bad.

But I am still given pause by the plausibility of (1) (even as modified to (4)) and (3). One solution would be to say that we should feel bad about harms to ourselves, that we should not be stoical about them. But I don’t want to say that the stoical attitude is always wrong. If our friends are being stoical about something, we don’t always want to criticize them for it, even mentally. Still there are cases where our friends are rightly criticizable for a stoical attitude. One case is where they should be grieving for the loss of someone they love. A more extreme case is where they should be feeling guilt for vicious action—in that case, we wouldn’t even use the fairly positive word “stoical”, but we would call their attitude “unfeeling” or something like that. In those cases, at least, it does seem like they should feel bad for the harm, and we should likewise feel bad on their behalf whether or not they do. (And, yes, this feeling may be in the neighborhood of a patronizing feeling in the case where they are not feeling the guilt they should—but the neighborhood of patronization has some places that sometimes need to be occupied.)

Still, I doubt that it is ever wrong not feel something. That would be like saying that it is wrong not to smell something. Emotions are perceptions of putative normative facts, I think. It can be defective not to smell an odor, either because one has lost one’s sense of smell or because one has failed to sniff when one should have. But the failure to smell an odor is not wrong, though it may be the consequence of doing something wrong, as when the repair person has neglected to sniff for a gas leak.

Instead, I think the thing to say is that there is a good in feeling bad about harms to a friend—or to ourselves. The good is the good of correct perception of the normative state of affairs. A good always generates reasons, and the good is to be pursued absent countervailing reasons. But there can be countervailing reasons. When I injure my shoulder, my pain is a correct perception of my body’s injured state. Nonetheless, because that pain is unpleasant (or fill in whatever the right story about why we rightly avoid pain), I take an ibuprofen. I have reason to feel the pain, namely because the pain is a correct way of seeing the world, but I also have reason not to feel the pain, namely because it hurts.

Similarly, if someone has insulted me, I have reason to feel bad, because feeling bad is a correct reflection of the normative state of affairs. But I also have reason not to feel bad, because feeling bad is unpleasant. So it can be reasonable not to feel bad. Loving my friend as myself does not require me to make greater sacrifices for my friend than I would make for myself, though it is sometimes supererogatory to do so (and sometimes foolish, as when the sacrifice is excessive given the goods gained). So if I don’t have an obligation to sacrifice my equanimity to in order to feel bad for the insult to me, it seems that I don’t have an obligation to sacrifice it in order to feel bad for the insult to my friend. But that sounds wrong, doesn’t it?

So where does the asymmetry come from? Here is a suggestion. In typical cases where our friend feels bad for the harm, our feeling does not actually match the intensity of our friend’s, and this is not a defect in friendship. So the unpleasantness of feeling bad for oneself is worse than in the case of feeling bad for one’s friend. Thus, more equanimity is sacrificed for the sake of our feelings correctly reflecting reality when it is our own case, and hence the argument that if I don’t have an obligation to make the sacrifice for myself, I don’t have an obligation to make the sacrifice for my friend is fallacious, as the sacrifices are not the same. Furthermore, to be honest, there is a pleasure in feeling bad for a friend. The OED entry for “compassion” cites this psychological insight from a sermon by Mozley (1876): “Compassion … gives the person who feels it pleasure even in the very act of ministering to and succouring pain.” I haven’t read the rest of the sermon, but I think this is not any perverse wallowing or the like. The “compassion” is an exercise of the virtue of friendship, and there is an Aristotelian pleasure in exercising a virtue. And this is much more present when it is one’s friend one is serving. Thus, once again, the sacrifice tends to be less when one feels bad for one’s friend than when one feels bad for oneself, and hence the reason that one has to feel bad for one’s friend is less often outbalanced by the reason not to than in one’s own case.

Nonetheless, the reason to feel bad for one’s friend can be outbalanced by reasons to the contrary. Correct perceptual reflection of reality is not the only good to be pursued—not even the only good in the friendship.

Optical and emotional illusions

It's a pleasant and innocent pastime to look at optical illusions, planning to be initially pulled to error but then to overcome. On the other hand, it's not innocent to invite certain kinds of emotional illusions, to pursue a line of thought that one plans to excite in oneself an unjust scorn for someone or a feeling of class superiority, even if one plans and reasonably expects to overcome these mistaken emotions afterwards. Similarly, it can be a valuable exercise to take what one knows to be a piece of pseudoscientific reasoning and put oneself in the shoes of the reasoner, try to feel the force of that reasoning from the inside, as long as one is confident that one won't be finally taken in. But to do this with faulty moral reasoning seems deeply problematic: it is a bad thing to read Mein Kampf or watch Birth of a Nation while putting oneself in the author's or director's shoes, trying to feel the force of the moral convictions from the inside, even if one is confident that in the end one won't be taken in.

Likewise, there need be nothing wrong with reading science fiction or fantasy that presents a world with laws of nature different from ours and to engage in the willing suspension of disbelief. It may even be fine when the world has a different mathematics from ours--to read, for instance, a story about a message encoded in π, a message that, we suppose, isn't there (at least not where the story says it is). But to engage in the willing suspension of disbelief when reading fiction that presents a morally different world--say a world where enslaving the weak is actually right (and not just seen as right)--is much more problematic.

Ever since I met it in Plato's Protagoras, I've been attracted to the idea that emotions are a kind of perception, akin to visual perception. But the above disanalogies need to be taken into account. I see two ways of doing this. The first is to say that emotion differs frmiom the senses qua perception. Perhaps, for instance, the senses present things as prima facie, something that needs to be weighed further by reason, while emotions present things as ultima facie. I doubt that that works, but maybe some approach along those lines works. The other is to say that the difference has to do with content. We might say, inspired by Robert Roberts, that emotions have as their subject matter evaluative matters of concern to one qua evaluate matters of concern to one. Maybe this makes the pursuit of emotional illusion problematic.

But is pursuit of all emotional illusion problematic? While it would be wrong to pursue a feeling of class superiority, would it be wrong to pursue a feeling of class inferiority, for instance to better feel compassion for people who have been socialized into such a feeling? I am inclined to think that even pursuit of a feeling of class inferiority is morally problematic. That's a feeling no one should have, and it is contrary to self-respect to feel it.

Emotions towards fictional characters

You're attending a performance of Wit. Vivian is dying of cancer. If you're human, you have compassion for her. You don't want her to die.

We say stuff like that. But is this really how we feel. Emotions have an essential motivational force. But are you motivated to stop Vivian from dying?

Maybe you are motivated, but there is nothing you can do to act on that motivation? Yet there is. You could run on stage, and threaten or bribe the actors to make sure that Vivian lives. Or you could pray that the playwright had put in a happy ending.

Or imagine that you are Margaret Edson's friend, and she's just written the first half of the play and let you read it. Maybe you could plead with her that Vivian live, even though you have a nagging suspicion that art may call for Vivian's death. Surely, if you really cared about Vivian, you would plead, or, if not that, at least you'd feel guilty to be sacrificing her on the altar of art. But there is no call for guilt here.

So, I don't think we really have compassion for Vivian. Rather, there is some kind of a shadow feeling. This shadow feeling has similar phenomenology to the real thing, but its motivational force is different. If I am right about this, this blunts St. Augustine's criticism of drama that it causes inappropriate feelings. For the shadow feelings are quite right.

Fear when watching a horror film, though, may be different... It might be real fear, not just a shadow. But that's because one fears for oneself rather than for a fictional character: one fears being startled by something particularly gruesome, say.

Fear and epistemic probability

If I resent your doing A and you didn't do A, then my resentment was perhaps justified (if I was justified in thinking you did A) but it was nonetheless misplaced. On the other hand, if I am crossing the road and I notice a car speeding towards me, and I fear it will run me over, but then the driver brakes and stops just barely in time, my fear was entirely appropriate and not at all misplaced.

The proper object of resentment, thus, is an event (or action) taken as actual (and wrongful), and when that action doesn't occur, the resentment is misplaced. But the proper object of fear is an event merely taken to be a serious chance. What kind of chance? An objective chance or a merely epistemic probability?

I will argue that it's an epistemic probability. Suppose that I fear that my investments will fail. I get into a time machine, travel to the future, and notice that my investments won't in fact fail. I go back in time and it would be appropriate for my fear to go away. Nonetheless, there is an objective chance of the investments failing: the chancy processes that make investments go up and down continue to run despite my knowledge. But there is no longer a serious epistemic probability. So it looks like epistemic probability is what is relevant. Moreover, I think it can be appropriate to have fears about things that are in fact necessarily false. For instance, if I have an answering a multiple choice exam in calculus, and I the question asks whether the definite integral of some function over some range range is 2, 3, 5, or π/2. I think it's probably 5, but there is something in my calculation that I am not confident of, and I realize that if I got that wrong the answer is π/2. My fear that the definite integral might be equal to π/2 is in fact appropriate, even if it is necessarily true that the answer is 5.

This makes fear very different from resentment: fear is made appropriate by epistemic probabilities--either the actual ones or the ones my evidence justifies (which one?), while resentment is made appropriate by what people have actually done.

I wonder if this focus on the epistemic dimension isn't partly responsible for the notorious way that fears resist rational thought. No matter how much I reflect on the very good statistics for indoor wall climbing injuries (the chance of injury during a session is about the same as that while driving 26 miles) and what I know about the stringency of Baylor's training of my belayer, when I look down from 50 feet up, I feel fear. This fear is misplaced: my epistemic probability for a fall is tiny (and justifiedly so given the evidence). Why? Because it looks dangerous. Now, in the absence of defeaters, appearances yield epistemic probabilities. Moreover, many times even though a defeater to an appearance of an impending bad is sufficient to defeat belief, a sufficient epistemic probability will remain (after all, we may be wrong about the defeater), and it could take quite a bit of time to evaluate whether the defeater is complete or only partial. Given that physical danger may require a quick response, and the examination of defeaters takes time, it makes sense for us to be wired in such a way that appearances have a strong tendency to directly drive fear. So in cases like my climbing case, while the fear is misplaced, inappropriate and unjustified, it is nonetheless understandable (unlike my pathological fear of dogs!).

(Well, when I reflect on the fact that an indoor climbing session has equal injury probabilities to a 26 mile drive, this actually makes me feel a bit afraid. For I do think driving (or being driven) by an average driver is genuinely dangerous. And so perhaps my fear is justified, just as I would be justified to be afraid of a 26 mile drive (even if in fact I don't always feel afraid). If so, then change the example, say to standing on a five inch thick glass floor above a precipice.)

Fear of the unknown

Aristotle (in the Rhetoric) understands fear as an attitude towards a possible but uncertain future bad. I wonder if fear of the unknown fits into this schema. At first sight, I think it's easy to fit it in: if something is unknown, it's unknown whether it's going to be good or bad, so there is a possible but uncertain future bad when we meet up with the unknown. But it seems to me that this doesn't quite capture the phenomenology of fear of the unknown. It conflates fear of the unknown with the fear that an unknown bad will happen, and those seem to me to be separate things. And it seems to me that one can have fear of the unknown even where there is no bad at all being feared, say as one contemplates the Cantor hierarchy or the night sky.

Maybe, though, in fear of the unknown the potential bad isn't so much the potential that the unknown will be bad, but the potential for facing something—good or bad—that one is unprepared to face. There is a kind of bad in facing what one is unprepared for (say, a potential for inadequacy).

If this is the story, then it also gives us a way to understand the Biblical idea of fear of the Lord. It's not so much that one is afraid that the Lord will smite us for our sins—though that definitely can be a component—but that one is afraid that as one meets the utterly Other, the ultimate Unknown, one will be inadequate, nothing. And so the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: it is a recognition that one is nothing, that one may be—indeed, probably or certainly is (here the "fear" verges into what—on at least one translation—Aristotle calls "dread", an expectation of a certain bad) utterly inadequate. But this fear is not the completion of wisdom, for that involves the Unknown reaching out to us, entering into a relationship of love with us, even living among us.

Note, though, that the kind of inadequacy here is not just sinfulness. It is the essential inadequacy of all creatures. Thus, strictly speaking, it's a lack but not a bad. A privation of something due is a bad, but a mere privation is not a bad, and our being creatures is a privation of divine infinity, but is not a bad. If that's right, then a central component of this fear of the Lord is something that isn't quite fear (or even dread) in the Aristotelian sense—it isn't an expectation of a bad, but of something similar to a bad, an innate shortcoming of sorts. We do not quite have a name for this.

Intensity of desire

Here are three things I would like:

1. Not to be kidnapped by aliens today for medical experiments.
2. To own the Hope Diamond.
3. To own a minivan.

My preferences go in this order. I'd choose not being kidnapped by aliens over the Hope Diamond and over a minivan, and I'd choose the Hope Diamond over the minivan, since I would sell the Hope Diamond and buy a minivan and many other nice things. But the intensity of my feelings goes in the other direction. I have a moderately intense feeling of desire to own a minivan. I have very little feeling of desire to own the Hope Diamond, and I find myself with even less in the way of feelings about being kidnapped by aliens, though imaginative exercises can shift these around.

So when we talk of the strength of a desire we are being ambiguous between talking of the intensity of the feeling and degree of preference. One might think of the degree of preference as something like a part of the content of the desire—the desire representing the degree to which one is to pursue something—while the intensity of the feeling is external to the content.

Those of us who think of emotions in a cognitive way, and who think there are many normative facts about what emotions one should have given one's situation, may be tempted to think that the intensity of the feeling should match the degree of preference. But that is mistaken. There are perfectly good reasons why my desire for the Hope Diamond and for not being kidnapped by aliens today should be less intensely felt than my desire for a minivan. The minivan is an appropriate object for my active pursuit, for instance, while I have little hope of getting the Hope Diamond and little fear of being kidnapped by aliens.

Maybe, then, the intensity of the desire should be proportional to the role that the desire should play in one's pursuits? That's an interesting hypothesis, but not clearly true. Let's say that you are told that you will be executed if and only if 2^9288389−1 is prime. At this point it seems quite right and proper to have an intense that this number not be a prime. But there is nothing you can do about it; barring Cartesian ideas about God and mathematics, there is no pursuit that you can engage in that can make it more or less likely that the number is a prime.

A better story would be that the intensity of the desire should be proportional to some kind of a salience. One way of the desire being salient is that it should play a heavy role in one's present pursuits. But there may be other ways for it to be salient.

There is, anyway, a spot of spiritual comfort in all this. Sometimes people worry that they do not desire God as much as they desire earthly things. But a distinction must be made. Preferring earthly things to God is clearly bad. But having a more intense desire for an earthly thing than for God may not always be a bad thing. For sometimes one must focus on an earthly task for God's sake, and a means can be more salient than the end.

Emotional perception

On Friday I was feeling somewhat poorly and in the interests of public health (not that I minded!) I opted out of participation in the PhD graduation dinner and Saturday's commencement. Sunday I felt somewhat worse, and today rather worse (nothing serious, just the usual "flu-like" symptoms, and both of our big kids had such in the preceding two weeks). But there is one piece of relief: It is good to have been right about the fact that I was getting sick.

It is not particularly bad to have suffered physically and similarly it is not particularly good to have enjoyed physical pleasure. But it is bad (or at least it feels bad--which is evidence for its being bad!) to have been wrong and similarly it is good to have been right. The value here isn't the value of being recognized by others as having been right or wrong. Nor is it the value of oneself presently recognizing oneself as right or wrong. For one hopes (though perhaps not simpliciter, if the prospect is particularly nasty) that one be right and that one not be wrong, not just that one recognize oneself or be recognized as right or wrong. The recognition is just the icing or mould on the top of a good or bad cake.

Eternalists have a difficulty with the fact that it doesn't seem bad to have suffered physically (bracketing any present suffering from painful memories, of course), even though past suffering is just as real as present suffering. Presentists have a difficulty with the fact that it seems to be bad to have been wrong and to be good to have been right.

I think eternalists can make a better go of it, though. Feelings like the pleasure of having been right or the pain of having been wrong are a kind of perception of normative features of the world. But not all truth is equally perceived. I am now visually aware that I have two hands, and properly so. But were I now visually aware that you have a head, my visual system would be malfunctioning. For although, dear reader, you do have a head, your head is not presently within my field of view. It is thus a part of the correct functioning of my visual apparatus that I be presently aware of my hands but not your head, even though all three parts (my two hands and your one head) are equally real.

Likewise, then, some goods and bads are appropriately within my emotional field of view--e.g., my having been right about getting sick--and some goods and bads are not appropriately within my emotional field of view--e.g., the unpleasantness of the last time I had a cavity filled. These goods and bads may be equally real (assuming that pain itself really is bad--there is room for discussion here, but it is at least extrinsically bad), but it could be (I am not sure about the first one, actually) that my having been right is appropriately within my emotional field of view while my having suffered (not at all severely--he really is an excellent dentist) at a past dental visit is not.

But we sometimes mistake absence of perception for perception of absence, like an infant who cries that the parent has left the room or the adult who sees no objection to an action and all too hastily concludes the action is permissible. Not emotionally seeing the past pain as bad--i.e., a not being pained by the past pain--is mistaken by us for seeing the past pain as not being bad.

The eternalist should thus say that the past physical pains and pleasures are bad or good, in the same way that present ones are, but we do not see their badness or goodness. Thus, the eternalist attributes to the agent a misinterpretation of absence of perception. The presentist, however, should say that having been right or wrong is not presently good or bad (though maybe it was good or bad), but we misperceive it as such. The eternalist thus attributes more correctness to our emotional perception, while attributing a well-known generalized cognitive error in explaining what went wrong. The presentist has to say our emotional perception is just wrong. I prefer the eternalist explanation.

A similar issue comes up for Christ's suffering on the cross. With a number of theologians, I take the center of our Savior's suffering not to be the horrific suffering of nails ripping through his flesh, but his deep emotional awareness of the horribleness of the totality of our sins (perhaps with the help of the hypostatic union or beatific vision bringing the particularities of all of humankind's sins to him). But this leads to a query: Why did Christ only have this awareness on the cross? We do not see him constantly and equally weighed down by this suffering earlier in life? Was he failing to have a correct emotional awareness? But now we can say: Not at all. It is the salient goods or bads that are within the field of view of correct emotional perception. And it is on the cross, at the high point of the sacrifice for our salvation from these sins (the high point: for all his life was such a sacrifice), that this became fully salient, in such a way that this perfect man--who is also true God--emotionally bore the full weight of our sin.

Note, too, that this is a story about Christ's sufferings that is difficult for the presentist to give. For it is difficult for the presentist to explain why earlier and later, and hence then-unreal, sins were bad at the time of Christ's crucifixion. Perhaps the presentist has to say that Christ's suffering came from an erroneous emotional perception of past and future sins as then-bad?

The recalcitrance of matter

When I work with material objects, I am sometimes annoyed at things just not working. The cord of the mower gets caught on a bush. The wood I am drilling into splits. The phenomenology of annoyance is no doubt complex, but I think the following is right: when one is annoyed at x doing A, one is (emotionally) treating x as if x were functioning improperly in doing A. Consider, then, the following argument:

1. (Premise) It is sometimes appropriate to be annoyed at matter failing to serve one in some way even when no human being designed the matter to serve us in this way.
2. (Premise) It is only appropriate to be annoyed at something insofar as it is functioning improperly.
3. Therefore, matter can be functioning improperly in failing to serve us in some way even when no human being designed the matter to serve us in this way. (1 and 2)
4. (Premise) If x functions improperly in failing to do A, then it is a function of x to do A.
5. Therefore, matter sometimes has the function of serving us in some way even though no human being designed it to do so. (3 and 4)

All of this coheres with, and suggests, the Christian story of the Fall: matter does have the function of serving us in all kinds of ways, but after the Fall it fails to do so.

But now this failure can be understood in two mutually non-exclusive ways: (a) the matter fails to do "its job" narrowly defined; and (b) we fail to make use of the matter in the way we should thereby making it impossible for the matter to do "its job" broadly defined (it can't serve us if we don't use it rightly). The argument above fits well with (a), but it may well be that (b) is the right story in a lot of cases, and maybe even in all of them. Now, if (b) but not (a) is the right story in a given case, then premise (1) will not exactly be true in that case: annoyance might be appropriate, but not annoyance at the matter. The annoyance should be directed at oneself, or at humankind, or at Adam and Eve. However, this objection presupposes that to be annoyed at x doing A entails being annoyed at x. But I do not know that this entailment holds. It may be that there is a difference between being annoyed at x doing A and being annoyed at x for doing A. If there is such a difference, then one can hold that (1) is compatible with (b) being the right story even in all cases. (Perhaps there is an argument similar to the above that can be formulated that fits with this. The conclusion will be that we are sometimes appropriately annoyed with ourselves for not having skills for working matter, skills that it is not our function to have unless some story about how we were given mastery over matter but then fell is true.)

Actually, theologically, I find both (a) and (b) plausible. The Fathers do think the Fall extends both to the human being and to the rest of nature. If so, then (1) is true, and the argument is probably sound, but of course to base the soundness of (1) on the theology of the Fathers would beg the question.

For a better justification of (1), I would note that I am drawn to the thesis that every basic distinct kind of emotion is sometimes appropriate, but I do not know how to make that precise, not knowing how to define "basic" and "distinct". If the thesis is true, and if there is a basic distinct kind of annoyance at "dumb matter" (i.e., at matter not designed by a human being for anything), then we will be able to have (1) be true.

In any case, the argument I gave strikes me as not very strong. It is very easy to deny (1) by saying that in the cases of annoyance at dumb matter, one has misplaced the proper object of annoyance. Nonetheless, that move is a sceptical move, and sceptical moves should be epistemically costly. So while one can get away with denying (1), this adds to the cost of any position that forces that denial.

The post is triggered by frustrations with converting the Coulter 13.1" telescope that I bought into a split tube (else it wouldn't fit in our Taurus, and would break my back). Or, more precisely, frustrations with reassembling it. Alas, I've learned that plywood splits and that cross dowels need to be pretty close to exactly at right angles to the bolt. Fortunately, there is always JB Weld, my favorite adhesive for projects where Duck tape just isn't good enough. Hopefully the scope will be ready for the Philosophy Department Star Night tonight, assuming the weather cooperates (oddly, though, I don't get annoyed at the weather in the way I get annoyed at objects).

Emotions and the spiritual life

To say that love is a feeling and the like is really an un-Christian conception. This is the esthetic definition of love and therefore fits the erotic and everything of that nature. But from the Christian point of view love is the work of love. Christ's love was not intense feeling, a full heart, etc.; it was rather the work of love, which is his life. - Soren Kierkegaard, Journal X.1 A 489 (1849)

If you make use of your reason, you are like one who eats substantial food; but if you are moved by the satisfaction of your will, you are like one who eats insipid fruit. - St. John of the Cross, Sayings of Light and Love, 46.

The view that feelings, emotions and desires are irrelevant to the moral life has fallen on hard times. Defenders of Kant go out of their way to argue that Kant held no such view (and are probably right to do so), as if holding such a view were a terrible disqualification. The idea that on some moral view it is better to visit a friend out of a consciousness of duty than out of friendly feeling is taken as a reductio of that view. Typical utilitarians ground the moral life in feelings, emotions and desires (happiness is taken to be pleasure or the satisfaction of desire). Aristotelians see the process of moral growth as in large part a process of making one's feelings, emotions and desires conform to moral reality--feeling to do virtuous deeds and all that.

On the other hand, there are significant strands of the Christian spiritual tradition that say that feelings, emotions and desires are irrelevant at least for those who are no longer beginners in the spiritual life (e.g., St. John of the Cross), or bad since they distract us from purely spiritual contemplation (e.g., many but not all the Desert Fathers). And much of the Christian spiritual tradition recognizes feelings, emotions and desires as often dangerous and distracting. It is tempting to dismiss these pronouncements as flowing out of a mistaken view of human nature, out of neo-Platonic intellectualism, and sometimes these pronouncements do indeed thus flow, but it is worth remembering that many of the spiritual writers are very empirical. They see in their own lives and the lives of others around them what works and what does not work in the task of submitting every deed and every thought to God, of doing everything out of love alone.

I do not dispute the claim that human perfection includes perfection of the emotions, feeling and desires, that it is good to feel compassion for the suffering, that it is good to desire what is good and to desire to avoid evil, that it is good to enjoy virtuous activity, and all that. But I think we need to be careful to hold on to the truths contained in the parts of the spiritual tradition that are much more cautious in approaching to the emotional life, especially in light of how empirically grounded the wisdom of this tradition is. The Desert Fathers were not theoreticians--they lived in the desert, they weaved baskets, they struggled with temptation, they guided and were guided.

In our fallen state, our feelings and desires do lead us astray. Making a habit of visiting friends out of the pleasure of their company, rather than out of the duty of friendship, may well make it more probably that we will not visit them when the visit is not pleasant. The six lesser deadly sins--lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath and envy--are all grounded in particular emotions. And at least some instances of pride are so as well. Now it is possible to fight these deadly sins by developing a more balanced emotional life, fighting gluttony with a deep emotional appreciation of moderation, fighting sloth by developing a balanced appreciation of good work, and so on, and indeed in the state of human perfection the virtues opposed to the deadly sins would have such emotional components, it is far from clear that this is the most effective way of fighting the deadly sins. It may be for some of them--thus, developing an appreciation of goods happening to others might be the best way to fight envy. But for others, something like the ideal of ataraxia, being unmoved by feelings and pleasures, might be rather more effective.

And then there is the wisdom of John of the Cross. Popular stereotype would not make one think of this passionate Spanish mystic as a defender of the centrality of reason to the Christian life. But in five separate Sayings of Light and Love, St. John indicates that what is most pleasing to God is that we act in accordance with reason, regardless of our feelings. And this is essential once one recognizes--as the lives of holy men and women like John of the Cross and Teresa of Calcutta abundantly show--that a dark night is a crucial part of spiritual maturation, a night in which most of the feelings that move the beginner in the spiritual life are absent. In the dark night, if one is to survive, one has no choice but to do what is right by reason, which reason is enlightened by the dark light of faith.

Feelings, emotions and desires are useful to the beginner in both the spiritual and the moral life. In the spiritual life, they make easy sacrifices that need to be made, which sacrifices one is not yet mature enough to make on the grounds of reasonable love alone. Love, of course, is not a feeling, emotion or desire--it is a committed determination of the will towards the good of and union with the beloved. There are emotions characteristic of love, but they are not always present with love. In the moral life, we may need moral feelings to help us come to the truth about things. Our repulsion at killing may help us come to accept that we ought not to commit murder. Altruistic helpfulness may help us to come to accept that we have duties towards neighbor. But once we have the truth about the moral life, this helpfulness is radically diminished, and the fallible emotions may in fact often be more harm than good, at least in this earthly life. (And, of course, if we have the Catholic faith, then we basically have the truth about the central aspects of our moral life, and we can derive many other truths from that.)

So I think that the Desert Fathers who embraced ataraxia--"affectlessness", we might translate it--as an ideal were wrong about human nature as it is ultimately meant to be, but it is far from clear that they were wrong, or at least far wrong, about the best way to proceed given what fallen nature is like.