Emotion is not just a “raw feel”. It is intimately tied up with the way we understand meaning in life situations. More specifically, it closely tracks the kind of preconscious judgment that Kant associates with what he calls the figurative synthesis of imagination, which for him governs our apparently spontaneous beliefs and “immediate” apprehensions of things. Nussbaum’s work on Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers shows what a long prehistory this notion — which is so unlike the most common modern views of either consciousness or emotion — actually has.
The apprehension of meaning has a broader scope than “consciousness”. Large parts of it are preconscious. Our preconscious apprehensions explain why things just seem to be in the particular ways they seem to us, and not in some other ways.
It seems to me that the Aristotelian perspective on emotion that Nussbaum brings out provides important insight into the controversy about the so-called cognitivism of Habermas in his view of what he calls ideal speech situations. The term “cognitivism” has a narrow sound to it that I don’t like. Based on Nussbaum’s work, I want to say that if Habermas is a “cognitivist”, then so are all the Greek philosophers. The way that she explains the shared perspective of the Greek philosophers on emotion — as deeply and intrinsically involved with the apprehension of meaning in life situations — puts this in a much better light. To me this seems vastly better than arguments that effectively make emotion into a kind of brute force that is completely irrational, and can only be understood in causal terms.
This could perhaps provide a new underpinning for the notion of “emotional intelligence”. Emotional intelligence would be grounded in the character and agility of our preconscious apprehensions of meaning, especially in interactions with others.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 