emotion as conceived by philosophers and psychologists, any of several general types of mental states, approximately those that had been called ‘passions’ by earlier philosophers, such as Descartes and Hume. Anger, e.g., is one emotion, fear a second, and joy a third. An emotion may also be a content-specific type, e.g., fear of an earthquake, or a token of an emotion type, e.g., Mary’s present fear that an earthquake is imminent. The various states typically classified as emotions appear to be linked together only by overlapping family resemblances rather than by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Thus an adequate philosophical or psychological ‘theory of emotion’ should probably be a family of theories. Even to label these states ’emotions’ wrongly suggests that they are all marked by emotion, in the older sense of mental agitation (a metaphorical extension of the original sense, agitated motion). A person who is, e.g., pleased or sad about something is not typically agitated. To speak of anger, fear, joy, sadness, etc., collectively as ‘the emotions’ fosters the assumption (which James said he took for granted) that these are just qualitatively distinct feelings of mental agitation. This exaggerates the importance of agitation and neglects the characteristic differences, noted by Aristotle, Spinoza, and others, in the types of situations that evoke the various emotions. One important feature of most emotions is captured by the older category of passions, in the sense of ‘ways of being acted upon’. In many languages nearly all emotion adjectives are derived from participles: e.g., the English words ‘amused’, ‘annoyed’, ‘ashamed’, ‘astonished’, ‘delighted’, ’embarrassed’, ‘excited’, ‘frightened’, ‘horrified’, ‘irritated’, ‘pleased’, ‘terrified’, ‘surprised’, ‘upset’, and ‘worried’. When we are, e.g., embarrassed, something acts on us, i.e., embarrasses us: typically, some situation or fact of which we are aware, such as our having on unmatched shoes. To call embarrassment a passion in the sense of a way of being acted upon does not imply that we are ‘passive’ with respect to it, i.e., have no control over whether a given situation embarrasses us and thus no responsibility for our embarrassment.
Not only situations and facts but also persons may ‘do’ something to us, as in love and hate, and mere possibilities may have an effect on us, as in fear and hope. The possibility emotions are sometimes characterized as ‘forward-looking,’ and emotions that are responses to actual situations or facts are said to be ‘backward-looking.’ These temporal characterizations are inaccurate and misleading. One may be fearful or hopeful that a certain event occurred in the past, provided one is not certain as to whether it occurred; and one may be, e.g., embarrassed about what is going to occur, provided one is certain it will occur.
In various passions the effect on us may include involuntary physiological changes, feelings of agitation due to arousal of the autonomic nervous system, characteristic facial expressions, and inclinations toward intentional action (or inaction) that arise independently of any rational warrant. Phenomenologically, however, these effects do not appear to us to be alien and non-rational, like muscular spasms. Rather they seem an integral part of our perception of the situation as, e.g., an embarrassing situation, or one that warrants our embarrassment.
See also JAMES-LANGE THEORY, PHILOSO- PHY OF MIN. R.M.G.