Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 2 (VII)

We left off with Lear’s idea that emotions are proto-conceptual orientations towards the world that make sense of one’s situation — in however undeveloped or wrongheaded a manner. This idea will be familiar to readers of 20th century philosophy. (There are strains of it in pragmatism’s “know how” and Heidegger’s “moods,” to name just a couple examples.) This is how Lear, having returned to its original provenance in Aristotle, puts the idea:

“Emotions are, by their nature, attempts at a rational orientation toward the world. Even an archaic expression of emotion is an archaic attempt at rationality. It is the germ from which a rational orientation may grow” (51)

When I feel an emotion, I do not experience it “in a vacuum.” To feel anger, in the proper sense, just is to have some rudimentary grasp of “cause” and “purpose,” i.e. the basic furniture of any conceptual framework. I feel anger — if I do feel it — towards a specific object, because I have (I imagine) been wronged, unfairly or maliciously treated. Further, to feel anger is also to entertain, however obscurely, the general course of action responding to that understanding: it logically induces a desire to “make good” on the wrong.

[This use of the term “emotion” may seem tendentious. After all, people do commonly report experiences of a-conceptual emotion: say, that they feel “irritable” without knowing why — perhaps upon waking up. Lear might respond: precisely these exceptions prove the rule. They are evidence only of the occasional “neurotic” disconnect between an emotion bearing conceptual significance and a consciousness that is unable, because unwilling, to recognize its conceptuality.]

The “rationality” of emotions runs even deeper than this, though. “[A]n emotion does more than orient the individual to the world: it comes packaged with its own justification” (49). That is, to feel an emotion is not merely to have some intuitive understanding about its cause, its object, and the consequences one happens to desire in reaction; it is also to accept some warrant for the emotion. Emotions compel us. They implant a conviction regarding their appropriateness, which extends to the views and desires they reliably generate. To really feel anger is to have a title for that anger, to believe it is directed at the right object, for acceptable reasons, and that the reaction it inspires in me is merited by the facts of the situation.

In the midst of an emotional experience, of course, all of this is merely implicit, unarticulated; hence the expression, “proto-” conceptual. The causes, consequences, and justifications to which someone in the grip of emotion is implicitly committed may then be “elicited”: we may press the person to give discursive form to all the claims that underlie and shape that emotion — whereupon he or she may be struck precisely by the incoherence of the implicit framework. Perhaps “object” and “desire” do not fit neatly with one another; or perhaps there is a discrepancy between the intensity of the emotion, the magnitude of the stakes purportedly involved, and the features of the actual situation.

What matters is that, whatever the eventual fate of the framework, (which may indeed suffer conscious refutation), it nonetheless remains the origin of any conceptual orientation at all, and a continuing condition of possibility for it. To phrase this point now in the language we used in the last entries: emotions are not blind “quantities” upon which we externally impose a conceptual framework drawn from another, autonomous source. Rather, there is no conceptuality at all, except as a development, modification, and perhaps correction, of the “framework” originating, finally, in and as emotion. (As an extreme example of a dualistic account, consider Kant and the discrete “springs” of judgment in concepts and intuitions, in his theoretical system; or laws and interests, in his moral theory.)

The bearing of Lear’s alternative, Aristotelian view on our understanding of catharsis is perhaps already clear enough. If emotions carry with them justifications, a title to rationality, it plausibly follows that when they fail to provide these desiderata — upon inspection, that is, they do not seem justified, reasonable, motivated, and the like — it will be distressing. For in this situation, a proto-conceptual content pressing for conceptual form will find its development obstructed. I then feel emotions that do not seem to make sense: I cannot locate their objects and causes; they compel some beliefs that contradict other, important beliefs I hold; or I am puzzled by the “behaviors,” if any, toward which the emotions are driving me. The “relief” provided by catharsis, on this reconstruction, is irreducibly epistemic: the restoration of emotional-conceptual coherence to a psychic situation afflicted by incoherence.

According to this revised understanding, catharsis consists, not in the blind discharge of an emotion that is itself bereft of concepts, but rather in the “conscious unification of thought and feeling” (46). The qualifier “conscious” is crucial, it appears, in this new paradigm. After all, it is not as though the repressed “feeling” has no thought-like content at all; Lear’s whole point is that thought does not need to be imparted to emotion “from the outside,” because conceptuality belongs immanently to emotion, which only becomes “what it is” when it reaches explicit, discursive form. In other words: to say that catharsis occurs when thought and feeling are consciously united is not to say that the two were tidily separate before that catharsis — a dichotomy Lear deemed unintelligible. Rather, it is to suggest that the sort of unconscious unity between thought and feeling compellingly achieved by archaic mental functioning, which is consciously disavowed, must be allowed to reach its self-appointed “end” in an interpretation. Hence our question now is not, ‘How does consciousness establish a connection between two items that are by nature of different kinds?’ It is instead, ‘How can the mind be brought to recognize their inseparability in its own symptoms — the non-recognition of which, indeed, is the central cause of the symptoms’ persistence?’

But these reflections, especially the theme of “recognition,” bring us to the second area of Aristotle’s thought that interests Lear. From the idea of emotion-as-orientation — and catharsis as a “rectification” of an orientation that is logically out of sorts — there is a natural link to a more properly Aristotelian concept of Katharsis. What is definitive of the theater-goer’s experience, as Freud himself says, is a peculiar “sympathy at a distance.” One temporarily identifies with the bold, courageous, uninhibited exploits of a hero, secure in the knowledge that someone else suffers. The hysteric, in fact, is brought by analysis to the same “balance of proximity and distance (54) in her attitude, and this, too, constitutes his or her “catharsis.” Only the object of this attitude, of this sympathy at a distance, is not the character represented on the stage, but rather her own self — that is, her own, split-off emotional constellation.

The complexity introduced by this “reflexive” view makes it unwieldy, but it is consistent with the theory of emotions Lear has just recounted. If emotions are, generically, ways of “orienting” oneself, then what is at stake in mutative therapy, cathartic change, is one’s emotional orientation specifically towards oneself: towards, say, one’s disavowed desires, or ideas, or even “emotions” themselves. The implicit question is whether one’s attitude towards these contents — an attitude that formerly consisted in unyielding rejection, denial, “repression” — can be converted to one of recognition, understanding, compassion, even “forgiveness.” This is effectively to “take up a position of sympathy and distance reminiscent of the engaged spectator in the theater” (58) — “sympathy,” because the patient compassionately identifies with the traumatic experience, accepts that it was and is herself that suffered; “distance,” because the “re-experiencing” of the episode is undergone with the simultaneous awareness that it belongs to the past, and that she is in fact no longer the same person who suffered it.

Only some such re-orientation in one’s attitude toward the “terrible idea” (58), hitherto repressed, allows viable “access" to it. In this way, Lear specifies further the model of catharsis he proposed earlier, namely, the “conscious unification of thought and emotion.” For the precondition and substance of this unification now appears to be an emotional reorientation, through all the psychoanalytic “supports” (including environmental ones), that can allow such a rapprochement, “bringing the terrible idea into consciousness” (57) by gradually reforming the attitude that precluded its surfacing.