“The Hellenistic thinkers see the goal of philosophy as a transformation of the inner world of belief and desire through the use of rational argument. And within the inner world they focus above all on the emotions — on anger, fear, grief, love, pity, gratitude, and their many relatives and subspecies. In Aristotle’s ethical thought we see, on the one hand, a view about the nature of the emotions that adumbrates many ingredients of the more fully developed Hellenistic views. Emotions are not blind animal forces, but intelligent and discriminating parts of the personality, closely related to beliefs of a certain sort, and therefore responsive to cognitive modification. On the other hand, we find a normative view about the role of the emotions inside the good human life that is sharply opposed to all the Hellenistic views, since it calls for cultivation of many emotions as valuable and necessary parts of virtuous agency” (Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 78).

“Why, then, does Aristotle adopt an analysis of emotion that resembles that of the Hellenistic thinkers, while at the same time advancing a very different normative view of their role?” (p. 79).

That is, Aristotle gives emotions a positive role in virtue, but his Hellenistic critics advocated both the possibility and the rightness of separating oneself from all emotion, root and branch.

“According to some influential modern views that have left a deep mark on popular stereotypes, emotions like grief, anger, and fear come from an animal irrational side of the personality that is to be sharply distinguished from its capacity for reasoning and for forming beliefs. Emotions are simply bodily reactions, whereas reasoning involves complex intentionality — directedness toward an object, a discriminating view of the object. Emotions are unlearned or innate, whereas beliefs are learned in society. Emotions are impervious to teaching and argument, beliefs can be modified by teaching” (ibid).

“This, however, was not the view of the emotions held by any major ancient Greek thinker. If we schematically lay out the common ground of their agreement, we will be in a better position to appreciate Aristotle’s specific analyses :

“1. Emotions are forms of intentional awareness: that is (since no ancient term corresponds precisely to these terms), they are forms of awareness directed at or about an object, in which the object figures as it is seen from the creature’s point of view. Anger, for example, is not, or not simply, a bodily reaction (such as a boiling of the blood). To give an adequate account of it, one must mention the object to which it is directed, what it is about and for. And when we do this, we characterize the object as it is seen by the person experiencing the emotion, whether that view is correct or not: my anger depends upon the way I view you and what you have done, not on the way you really are or what you really have done.
“2. Emotions have a very intimate relationship to beliefs, and can be modified by a modification of belief. My anger, for example, requires a belief that I have been deliberately wronged by someone in a more than trivial way. Should I decide that this belief was false (that the alleged wrong did not in fact take place, or was not in fact a wrong, or was not done by the person in question, or was not done deliberately) my anger will be removed, or shift its target….
“3. All this being so, emotions may appropriately be assessed as rational or irrational, and also (independently) as true or false, depending on the character of the beliefs that are their basis or ground. Thus, rather than having a simple dichotomy between the emotional and the (normatively) rational, we have a situation in which all emotions are to some degree ‘rational’ in a descriptive sense — all are to some degree cognitive and based upon belief — and they may then be assessed, as beliefs are assessed, for their normative status” (p. 80).

“Even the bodily appetites — hunger, thirst, sexual desire — are seen by Aristotle as forms of intentional awareness, containing a view of their object. For he consistently describes appetite as for, directed at, ‘the apparent good’. Appetite is one form of orexis, a ‘reaching out for’ an object; and all the forms of orexis see their object in a certain way, supplying the active animal with a ‘premise of the good’. In other words, when a dog goes across the room to get some meat, its behavior is explained not by some hydraulic mechanism of desire driving it from behind, but as a response to the way it sees the object. Aristotle also holds that appetite — unlike, for example, the animal’s digestive system — is responsive to reasoning and instruction. He is talking about human appetite here, but he recognizes much continuity between humans and other animals, with respect to the capacity for acting from a (modifiable) view of the good” (p. 81).

“Where specifically human appetite is concerned, the case for intentionality and cognitive responsiveness is clearer still. Aristotle’s account of the virtue of moderation, which is concerned with the proper management of the bodily appetites (the appetites, he frequently says, that humans share with other animals), shows that he believes suppression is not the only way to make appetite behave well. Indeed, suppression could produce at best self-control, and not virtue. The virtue requires psychological balance (sumphonein), so that the person does not characteristically long for the wrong food and drink, at the wrong time, in the wrong amount. But this is achieved by an intelligent process of moral education, which teaches the child to make appropriate distinctions, to take appropriate objects. The object of well-educated appetite, he holds, is the ‘fine’ [or beautiful, or morally noble] (kalon)” (ibid).

“[A] loud noise, or the appearance of enemy troops, may produce a startling effect, even on a brave person. The person’s heart may leap from fright or startling, without its being the case that the person is really afraid…. If the person is only startled and not afraid, it is clear that he will not run away: as the De Motu argues, only a part of the body will be moved, and not the entire body. The De Motu analysis suggests that we see in such cases the effect of phantasia, or ‘appearing’, without any concomitant orexis, reaching out, or desire. (Emotion is a subclass of orexis.) The question must now be, What would have to be added to this being startled, in order to turn it into real fear?

(Nussbaum’s translation and commentary Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium inspired my early brief note The Animal’s Leg Joint. That book of hers also contains a very down-to-earth elaboration of Aristotle’s notion of unmoved moving, using biological rather than astronomical examples.)

“The example resembles another one used by Aristotle in the sphere of perception, where he distinguishes simple phantasia, appearing, from belief or judgment. The sun, he says, appears a foot wide: it has that look. But at the same time, we believe that it is larger than the inhabited world” (p. 83).

Here she translates phantasia as appearance. Often it is rendered as “imagination”. When I write about imagination in Aristotle, it is phantasia. This is an important term for Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics as well, for whom it stands in between sensation and thought. For the Stoics, phantasia is a fundamental mode of presentation or representation in the soul that is also the object of a physical and physiological theory of image transmission that supports a kind of epistemological realism.

“Here it is clear that the something that needs to be added, in order to turn the mere appearing into the usual sort of basis for human action, would be an element of conviction or acceptance. It is in this that mere phantasia differs from belief. Although the contrast between phantasia and belief in Aristotle is sometimes depicted as one between non-propositional and propositional cognitive attitudes, it is clear that this cannot be quite the right story for our case. For the phantasia of the sun as a foot wide involves, at the very least, combination or predication. It is a little hard to see where to draw the line between this and the ‘propositional.’ The real difference
between phantasia and belief here seems to be just the difference that the Stoics will bring forward as the difference between phantasia and belief: in the former case, the sun strikes me as being a foot wide, but I don’t commit myself to that, I don’t accept or assent to it. In the latter case, I have a conviction, a view as to how things really are” (p. 84).

“Further pursuit of the question shows clearly, however, that no technical distinction between phantasia and believing is at issue in any of these analyses of emotion: phantasia is used, in the rare cases where it is used, simply as the verbal noun of phainesthai, ‘appear’. The passage contains no suggestion that phantasia is being distinguished from doxa, belief. And indeed Aristotle feels free to use belief-words such as dokein and oiesthai in connection with his analyses of emotions” (p. 85).

She turns to a discussion of particular emotions.

“In short: fear, as described in this chapter, is a peculiarly human experience with a rich intentional awareness of its object, resting on beliefs and judgments of many sorts, both general and concrete” (p. 86).

“[T]he distress and pain are not independent of the judgment, but result from it. Thus if the judgment changed, we could expect the feeling itself to change — as Aristotle himself insists, when he speaks of the conditions under which fear will be removed” (ibid).

“In short, these emotions have a rich cognitive structure. It is clear that they are not mindless surges of affect, but discerning ways of viewing objects; and beliefs of various types are their necessary conditions. But we can now say more. For we can see by looking at Aristotle’s accounts that the beliefs must be regarded as constituent parts of what the emotion is. Fear and pity are both painful emotions. Nowhere in his analyses does Aristotle even attempt to individuate emotions by describing different varieties of painful or (as the case may be) pleasant feeling. Emotions, instead, are individuated by reference to their characteristic beliefs. We cannot describe the pain that is peculiar to fear, or say how fear differs from grief or pity, without saying that it is pain at the thought of a certain sort of future event that is believed to be impending. But if the beliefs are an essential part of the definition of the emotion, then we have to say that their role is not merely that of external necessary condition. They must be seen as constituent parts of the emotion itself” (p. 88).

“And we can go further. It is not as if the emotion has (in each case) two separate constituents, each necessary for the full emotion, but each available independently of the other. For Aristotle makes it clear that the feeling of pain or pleasure itself depends on the belief-component, and will be removed by its removal. He uses two Greek prepositions, ek and epi, to describe the intimate relationship between belief and feeling: there is both a causal relationship (fear is pain and disturbance ‘out of’ — ek — the thought of impending evils), and also a relationship of intentionality or aboutness: pity is defined as ‘painful feeling directed at [epi] the appearance that someone is suffering . . .’ ). In fact, both relationships are present in both cases” (ibid).

“Anger is especially complex: for it has both a pleasant and a painful feeling component, these being associated with different, though closely related, sets of beliefs. It requires, on the one hand, the belief that one (or someone dear to one) has been slighted or wronged or insulted in some serious way, through someone else’s voluntary action; this, Aristotle insists, is a painful experience. (Once again, the pain is not a separate item directly caused by the world itself; it is caused by the belief that one has been slighted. If the belief is false, one will still feel that pain; and if one has been slighted without knowing it, one will not have it.) Once again, these beliefs
are necessary constituents in the emotion. Aristotle makes it clear that if the angry person should discover that the alleged slight did not take place at all, or that it was not deliberately performed, or that it was not performed by the person one thought, anger can be expected to go away. So too, if one judges that the item damaged by another is trivial rather than serious (peri mikron). But Aristotle holds that anger requires, as well, a wish for retaliation, the thought that it would be good for some punishment to come to the person who did the wrong — and the thought of this righting of the balance is pleasant” (pp. 89-90, Becker-number citations omitted).

“The subject of love is a highly complex one in Aristotle’s thought…. The general rubric under which Aristotle analyzes love is that of philia, which, strictly speaking, is not an emotion at all, but a relationship with emotional components…. The relation itself requires mutual affection, mutual well-wishing, mutual benefiting for the other’s own sake, and mutual awareness of all this…. Both in the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics, the cognitive content of philia‘s emotions is made overwhelmingly clear” (p. 90).

“On further inspection, the beliefs involved in the central cases of emotion have one general feature in common, as Socrates and Plato already observed. All, that is, involve the ascription of significant worth to items in the world outside of the agent, items that he or she does not fully control. Love, most obviously, is a profound attachment to another separate life, which must remain as a separate center of movement and choice, not being engulfed or fused, in order for the relationship of love to be possible at all. And in the loves Aristotle values most highly, the participants view one another as good characters, therefore as fully independent choosers of the good; if one controlled the other, even to the extent that a parent does a child, the love would apparently be less good as love” (p. 91).

“Loves of a more than casual sort require a belief in one’s own lack of self-sufficiency with respect to some of the most important things in life” (ibid).

“In pity and fear, we acknowledge our vulnerability before the circumstances of life; we have those emotions, he makes plain, only if we really do think that life can do something to us, and that this something matters. Anger is closely related: for in anger we acknowledge our vulnerability before the actions of other people. Again, if we judge that the slight is trivial, we do not become angry” (ibid).

“Unlike the Socrates of the Republic, Aristotle does not believe that the good person, the person of practical wisdom, is ‘sufficient unto himself’ for eudaimonia, and therefore impervious to grief and fear. According to him, it is right to grieve at the death of a friend, since that is an acknowledgment of the importance of the tie and the person” (p. 93).

“A courageous person will indeed feel fear and pain at the prospect of death, on account of the value that he rightly attaches to his own life” (ibid). “A person who is completely without fear does not strike Aristotle as virtuous (which would imply the possession of practical reason) but, rather, as unbalanced” (p. 94).

“In short, there are things in the world that it is right to care about: friends, family, one’s own life and health, the worldly conditions of virtuous action. These can sometimes be damaged by events not under one’s own control. For these reasons it is right to have some fear. The good person, rather than being a fearless person, is one who will have appropriate rather than inappropriate fears — and not be deterred by them from doing what is required and noble” (ibid).

“Anger is treated in a similar fashion. On the one hand, Aristotle clearly believes that many people get angry too much and for insufficient reasons. His choice of the name ‘mildness’ (praotes) for the appropriate virtuous disposition in this area reflects his conscious decision to pitch things rather toward the unangry than toward the angry end of the spectrum…. If anything, he errs in the direction of the deficiency ‘for the mild person is not given to revenge, but is inclined to be forgiving [sungnomonikos]’…. Reason, however, does tell this person that there are some very good reasons for getting angry, in connection with damages to things that it is really worth caring about…. [A]ssuming one has made deep commitments to people and things that can be damaged by another, not to defend those commitments is to lose one’s own integrity. Anger is said to be a necessary motivation for defending things that are beloved…. It is this conceptual connection between anger and the acknowledgment of importance that explains why Aristotle holds it to be necessary for defensive action — not because it plays some mindless hydraulic role…. The mild person is not especially given to revenge, as Aristotle has said. But in the case of the deepest commitments, not to take some action seems to show a lack of ‘perception’ ; and if one has those practical perceptions, then one seems bound to be angry. Anger, in these cases, is a recognition of the truth” (pp. 94-95).

“Emotions, in Aristotle’s view, are not always correct, any more than beliefs or actions are always correct. They need to be educated, and brought into harmony with a correct view of the good human life. But, so educated, they are not just essential as forces motivating to virtuous action, they are also, as I have suggested, recognitions of truth and value. And as such they are not just instruments of virtue, they are constituent parts of virtuous agency” (p. 96).

“All of this is a part of the equipment of the person of practical wisdom, part of what practical rationality is. Rationality recognizes truth; the recognition of some ethical truths is impossible without emotion; indeed, certain emotions centrally involve such recognitions” (ibid).

“This ethical theory is critical of much that Aristotle’s society teaches. People often value too many of these external things, or value them too highly, or not enough. Thus they have too much emotion in connection with money, possessions, and reputation, some times not enough in connection with the things that are truly worthwhile” (ibid).

“While depending on belief and judgment, the emotions may depend upon a type of belief and judgment that is less accessible to dialectical scrutiny than are most of the person’s other
beliefs” (p. 99).

“Aristotle’s students pursue not just their own eudaimonia but that of others: for they think about the design of political institutions, starting from the idea that the best political arrangement is the one ‘in accordance with which anyone whatsoever might do best and live a flourishing life'” (p. 100).

“In short: the apparent conservatism of Aristotle’s dialectical education of Nikidion [Nussbaum’s imaginary character] is only apparent. Radical change is excluded from the part of his educational scheme that deals with her as an individual. But that is not all that philosophy does. The individuals who do come to share in it partake in a task that is both radical and far-reaching: the design of a society in which money will not be valued as an end, in which honor will not be valued as an end, in which war and empire will not be valued as ends — a society in which the functioning of human individuals in accordance with their own choice and practical reason will be the ultimate end of institutions and choices” (ibid).

We still have along way to go toward that noble goal.