True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us

301 Pages·2006·1.23 MB·English

by  Robert C. Solomon

True to Our Feelings
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TRUE TO OUR FEELINGS
What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us
Robert C. Solomon
1
2007
1
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Copyright © 2007by Oxford University Press, Inc.
First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 2007
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First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2008
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Solomon, Robert C.
True to our feelings: what our emotions
are really telling us / Robert C. Solomon.
p. cm. Includes index.
ISBN978-0-19-536853-6(pbk.)
1. Emotions (Philosophy)
I. Title
B105.E46S6752006
128′.37—dc22
2006045300
3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Kathleen,
my love,
my spiritual mastermind,
my gentle but passionate companion,
my model of emotional integrity
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part I Emotional Strategies: An Existentialist Perspective
1. Anger as a Way of Engaging the World 13
2. Why It Is Good to Be Afraid 29
3. Varieties of Fear and Anger: Emotions and Moods 39
4. Lessons of Love (and Plato’s Symposium) 51
5. We Are Not Alone: Compassion and Sympathy 63
6. Extremes of Emotion: Grief, Laughter, and Happiness 72
7. Self-Reproach in Guilt, Shame, and Pride 90
8. Nasty Emotions: Envy, Spite, Jealousy, Resentment,
and Vengeance 101
Part II Toward a General Theory: Myths about Emotions
9. What an Emotion Theory Should Do 117
10. Myth 1: Emotions Are Ineffable 127
viii contents
11. Myth 2: Emotions Are Feelings 137
12. Myth 3: The Hydraulic Model 142
13. Myth 4: Emotions Are “in” the Mind 150
14. Myth 5: Emotions Are Stupid (They Have No Intelligence) 159
15. Myth 6: Two Flavors of Emotion, Positive and Negative 170
16. Myth 7: Emotions Are Irrational 180
17. Myth 8: Emotions Happen to Us (They Are “Passions”) 190
Part III The Ethics of Emotion: A Quest for
Emotional Integrity
18. Emotions as Evaluative Judgments 203
19. Emotions, Self, and Consciousness 218
20. Emotional Experience (“Feelings”) 232
21. The Universality of Emotions: Evolution and the
Human Condition 245
22. Emotions Across Cultures 252
23. Happiness, Spirituality, and Emotional Integrity 263
Annotated Bibliography 271
Index 281
Preface
I have always been fascinated by emotions: watching and dealing with
them in other people, coping with and often joy-riding with my own. To
be perfectly honest, I’ve also been terrified of them. As a child, I had a vile
(though rarely violent) temper. As a young man, I fell in love often, and
hard. As I matured, I learned to actually love, though perhaps more slowly
and awkwardly than I would like to admit. And all along, I found myself
brooding on, speculating about, luxuriating in, and terrified by my own
emotional dispositions, responses, and preferences. I was already (although
I did not know it at the time) a philosopher.
When I actually came into philosophy (from biology and medical
school, where I had developed an interest in psychoanalysis), I brought
with me that very personal fascination with the nature of the emotions,
now as a scientific question, to be sure, but much more as a practical philo-
sophical matter. What were my emotions, my passions, or—more
vaguely—my “feelings”? Did they, as it sometimes seemed, just happen to
me—“sweep me away”—or even possess me, “take over my personality”?
Or were they, as they also seemed to be, what was most me, most mine,
what best (or worst) defined me? Were my emotions good and good for
me, or were they bad and bad for me (as my less emotional friends would
continually caution me)? What did it mean—that sixties’ expression—to
be “in touch with one’s feelings”? What was it to be an “authentic” person?
(I had started reading and being captivated by Jean-Paul Sartre and the
existentialists.) What was it, in other words, to be true to one’s feelings?
Over the next thirty years, I explored those questions by way of philo-
sophy, psychology, anthropology, and biology. (I remained fascinated by