In the last decades, powerful efforts to prove the rationality of emotion have been made by philosophers whose accounts of emotion can generally be labelled cognitive. Contrary to the negative view of emotions as passive occurrences, interruptions or disturbances in rational thinking and deliberative action, emotions, here, are shown to be sensitive to reasoning and criticism. They are even shown to inform our reasoning, or to constitute a form of reasoning themselves. The analysis grounding these claims, is usually founded in a discussion of the intentionality of emotions.Footnote 1 The term, initially coined by the psychologist Franz BrentanoFootnote 2 addresses the sense in which emotions take objects. They are directed at or about something or someone, and are identified as the particular emotions they are by their formal object, such as fear by the thought, ‘It is dangerous’.
By revisiting the notion that emotions are intentional, as well as Wittgenstein's suggestion that we should distinguish the object of emotion from the cause,Footnote 3 I submit, in the first two sections, that we regard the relation between our expressions of emotions and our depictions of its object, primarily of our situation, as an internal one. Building on this idea, in the third section, I point out the need to consider, beside the rationality of someone's emotion and the question of its justification, the meaningfulness of attributing different emotions to another person. This has significant implications for the sense in which learning from another's emotions and one's own can be regarded as a moral task that involves both self-knowledge and a willingness to understand the differing perspectives of others. By using a scene of a marital quarrel taken from George Eliot's Middlemarch as a prism through which to discuss these issues, I argue that the difficulties that the spouses have in understanding each other run deeper than a mere difference in belief. Their difficulties centrally involve the capacity or failure of the two characters to approach each other forgivingly and lovingly. Although I remain largely sympathetic to the key thrusts of cognitive accounts of emotion throughout the discussion, I show the difficulty I highlight to be a feature of the couple's differences of mind that the emphasis on the cognitive content of emotion does not fully succeed in incorporating.
1. The Intentionality of Emotion
In an early attempt to articulate a cognitive account of emotion, Gabriele TaylorFootnote 4 lays out the intentionality of emotion in the following manner. The emotions that have an object, that someone or something at which the emotion is directed, or is about, involve certain beliefs about that object. Someone who is afraid of a bear believes the bear to be dangerous; it has this ‘determinable quality’.Footnote 5 He can substantiate his belief by referring to other beliefs, some ‘determinate qualities’Footnote 6 in the object that justify his fear, such as the sharp claws of the bear or its malicious temperament. These ‘determinate qualities’ in turn are limited by the ‘determinable quality’ of the object. The sharp claws and the malicious temperament are only reasons for believing the bear to be dangerous if it is possible for it to attack. Furthermore, certain wants and tendencies to react in relation to the object also figure in our emotions in connection with these beliefs, or as a consequence of them. Someone who meets a bear he believes is dangerous wants to run away from it because of that belief. For Taylor, these beliefs and wants are necessary conditions for feeling the emotion.Footnote 7
In this account, the kind of criticism that can be directed against a person's emotions receives a straightforward treatment. If emotions are beliefs, or judgements, as in other accounts,Footnote 8 about something being a particular way, then we can examine the accuracy of the beliefs a person holds about the object of her emotions by investigating its object. We are thereby enabled to judge whether a certain emotion is in place in a certain situation. If her beliefs about the object, such as that the bear is dangerous, are rational – the bear is indeed dangerous and is in a position to attack – she is ‘justified in experiencing an emotional reaction based on them’.Footnote 9 If this is not the case, the fear is irrational and unjustified.
The position Taylor sketches has been characterised as a more cognitivist account of the beliefs inherent in the expression of emotion. It has encountered two central forms of criticism. The first criticism reveals an ambiguity in how to understand the reference to the relation between beliefs and emotions in accounts that stress the propositional content of emotion words. More naturalistically inclined philosophers have assumed that Taylor and other philosophers are putting forward a hypothesised causal relation between different mental, or propositional, states (beliefs, feelings, desires, norms perceived as such states). In other words, they are taken to advance the hypothetical claim that affects are either a form of cognition, or are caused by cognition. Such accounts of emotion, often characterised as propositional attitude theories, are then claimed to have been falsified by empirical research, especially results in neurology.Footnote 10 These naturalist philosophers refer to research, primarily by Joseph LeDouxFootnote 11, that show the existence of subcortical circuits in the brain that do not pass the cortical circuits designated for higher cognitive processes, such as thoughts, and read these results as proof that affective appraisals are not dependent on higher forms of cognition.Footnote 12
This criticism ignores the fact that Taylor speaks of beliefs as necessary but not sufficient conditions for emotions, and thus is not merely speaking of a causal connection between different neurological states. She is rather elaborating a conceptual connection between two ways of making, not my internal states, but rather the state I am in intelligible to myself, and others. The cognitive accounts of emotion advanced in philosophy are in that way concerned with how certain statements are justified, rather than explained or caused.Footnote 13 In this sense, it is clear that the interests of different kinds of philosophers, as well as psychologists and neurologists diverge, and should be kept apart, although they to some extent use the same words to represent the results of their research. For that reason, this discussion is also not out to take a stand on the neurological background of emotions, and the possible connections between what in such contexts have been called affect and cognition. I rather want to emphasise the conceptual connections between different ways of expressing emotion and attributing it to others, as well as the moral implications of addressing such connections.
The second criticism towards cognitive accounts of emotion in philosophy, emerges among philosophers who agree that the reference to the object of an emotion, by contrast to its cause, serves to elucidate the essential features of the concept of emotion. They criticise more cognitive accounts for stipulating that having certain beliefs is a necessary condition for experiencing certain emotions. We do not, they claim, necessarily need to infer that a person who says he is afraid also has the belief that what he fears is dangerous. Writing in such a vein, D.W. Hamlyn remarks that although a person may be said to ‘have all the right beliefs about mice’,Footnote 14 such that they are ‘too small and too harmless in any direct way to be frightening’, it is possible that they still ‘cannot help seeing them as frightening little creatures’.Footnote 15 He rejects as misleading the idea that this should be seen simply as ‘a conflict of beliefs’.Footnote 16
How one sees things may be a function of one's beliefs in a variety of ways; it may, however, be a function of other things, and it is certainly not true that whenever someone sees something as such and such one has ipso facto a belief to that effect.Footnote 17
Rather than insisting that in every case in which we can meaningfully attribute an emotion to someone, it is also true that they hold a certain belief, Hamlyn and others have therefore emphasised the perceptual side of emotion. They have brought forward the sense in which emotions constitute more complex, embodied phenomena, involving a ‘seeing-as’,Footnote 18 or a way of taking the world as being in a certain way.Footnote 19
Although I am sympathetic to many of these more perceptual accounts, I do not purport to offer any further guidance to the sense in which emotions can be regarded as having a cognitive element. I will also not say anything about what is entailed in saying that emotions, beliefs, and so on, are intentional states. Is this, for example, to be understood as a classification of words or concepts, or as denoting something more substantial? Are such mental states propositional or representational by some other means? Are they reducible to physical states or processes? Are they conscious or unconscious? I refrain from entering such discussions because I suspect that much of the confusion concerning what it means for emotions to be directed at objects, as opposed to being caused, stems from ambiguities in how one speaks about mental states within different philosophical and scientific frameworks. Such ambiguities centrally involve questions about how robust one considers one's categorisations to be and how one understands the philosophical or scientific role of one's categorisations. Are they, for example, seen as methodological tools, or as theoretical constructions that in some way or other represent our reality?
By contrast to taking on such questions as to what emotion words represent, I see my proposal as more modest. Rather than inquiring into the relations between two mental states, I consider the internal relations between two kinds of utterances that cognitive accounts of emotion bring into view. The first is the expression of fear, ‘I am afraid’, and the second is the depiction of its object, ‘It is dangerous’. The surface grammarFootnote 20 of these sentences easily leads us to assume a difference in kind between them. The first, we may think, gives us information about the subject of the emotion: about me, and my inner emotional life. The other tells us something about the object of the emotion: aspects of the world. Despite their different focus, however, I argue that both utterances tell us something about the meaning of my situation, and that we can think of this meaning in such a way that avoids reinstating the kind of dualism between the subject and the object, or an inner and an outer world that shapes both causal and conceptual accounts of emotion.
When speaking about meaning here, I want to emphasise the use we make of these words within different practices and particularly within different relationships, rather than search for that something to which the words refer.Footnote 21 This brings me back to the interest philosophers such as Wittgenstein have in speaking about the object of emotion in distinction to its cause. His remark ‘Das Sprachspiel “Ich fürchte mich” enthält schon das Objekt’ (‘The language game “I am afraid” already contains the object’),Footnote 22 gestures at the close connection between fearing something (‘sich fürchten’) and regarding it as fearsome (‘fürchterlich’). This is seen not only in that both words contain fear (‘Furcht’) as a root, but in the sense that by saying I am frightened, I am also making a claim as to there being something that frightens me, and furthermore to the fact that this something is potentially frightening. Wittgenstein's further remarks, however, also point out the need to consider the contexts in which such words are uttered, the tone of voice, etc., that are necessary to determine what is being said.
In the following, I will discuss these issues in relation to a literary example. Here I will switch from discussing fear to discussing anger, as a more interpersonal instance of emotion. This switch of example is intentional, since it allows me to explore disagreements in the descriptions of what one's situation is to a greater extent than the case of fear. In particular, it allows me to consider in what ways such disagreements constitute moral disagreements.
2. The Internal Relation Between Expression and Description
Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy, henceforth referred to as Lydgate and Rosamond, enter their marriage with exaggerated fantasies and idealisations about what the marriage is to offer them. Rosamond envisages a meeting with a stranger, which takes her out of her usual surroundings. Lydgate finds her to be ‘grace itself … perfectly lovely and accomplished’, the kind of wife that would adorn his home with female charm.
When doctor Lydgate runs into economic problems, however, their hopes for an ideal marriage fall apart. He suggests to his wife that he sell their house. She is anything but willing to agree with him. Without his knowledge, she averts his plans and writes a letter asking for money to the uncle from whom he has estranged himself. When Lydgate reads the stinging reply of his uncle, the couple is caught up in an ‘I said’ ‘You said’.
He says:
“It will be impossible to endure life with you, if you will be always acting secretly – acting in opposition to me and hiding your actions.”Footnote 23
…
“Will you only say that you have been mistaken, and that I may depend on your not acting secretly in future?”Footnote 24
She is quick to perceive ‘the request in his tone’ and answers with ‘coolness.’
“I cannot possibly make admissions or promises in answer to such words as you have used towards me. I have not been accustomed to language of that kind. You have spoken of my ‘secret meddling,’ and my ‘interfering ignorance,’ and my ‘false assent.’ I have never expressed myself in that way to you, and I think that you ought to apologise. You spoke of its being impossible to live with me. Certainly you have not made my life pleasant to me of late. I think it was to be expected that I should try to avert some of the hardships which our marriage has brought on me.” Another tear fell as Rosamond ceased speaking, and she pressed it away as quietly as the first.
Lydgate flung himself into a chair, feeling checkmated. What place was there in her mind for a remonstrance to lodge in?Footnote 25
The scene Eliot depicts gives attentive detail to the state Lydgate is in. In particular, Eliot's depiction brings out the embodied expressions of his anger. We see how Lydgate's face turns white, how his nostrils and lips quiver, how he tosses the letter, restlessly walks about, sits down and jumps up, all the time grasping objects in his pockets. And we see Rosamond's passive aggression, how she speaks with coolness when she finds a weakness to attack, her pressed away tears, her ‘innocent-looking silence’Footnote 26 which awakens feelings of helplessness in her husband. These descriptions of how anger is instantiated in a concrete case bring out the feelings and behaviour characteristic of being angry and the significance of appreciating such descriptions for understanding what is at play in the situation. Where, however, does the belief or thought that she had wronged him, and he her, come into the description of their situation?Footnote 27
Suppose I say of Lydgate, ‘Realising what she had done made him angry’. This is as good a description of what happened as any. It even seems to imply some kind of causality. But what conclusions are we allowed to draw about the role of thoughts and beliefs in emotion based on it? Are we to think that the expressions of Lydgate's anger as they are so vividly described are causal effects of a belief that Rosamond had done him wrong, and that the description I offered is a hypothesis about the inner cause of his outward behaviour. (Here we are possibly considering a causal chain in four steps: an event giving rise to a thought (cognition), giving rise to a feeling (affect), giving rise to behavioural manifestations.) Or should we rather say that his behaviour allows us to make a logical inference to three different states: an inner cognitive state, a ‘belief’, and furthermore another state, affective this time, the angry ‘feeling’, and yet further a motivational state, in the ‘desire’ that she makes things right?
What speaks in favour of the latter approach is that there does not appear to be anything hypothetical in the attribution to Lydgate of the belief or thought that Rosamond had wronged him. Such an understanding drives a wedge between his thoughts, feelings and behaviour, treating these as separable entities. Yet, if we consider how such a description may be used in an actual case, it is not possible to clearly demarcate Lydgate's realisation that something is wrong from his feeling angry, neither to say that his realisation is what gives rise to his angry behaviour. There is, as it were, no room for a dualism, to sneak in between his angry thoughts, or feelings, and his behaviour. Rather these ways of making sense of what he says and does show the meaning it has to understand Lydgate as angry. Seeing what Rosamond did as wrong is expressive of anger in the sense that we have difficulty understanding what it would mean for someone to agree that Lydgate is angry but refuse to say that he also sees the situation in this way.
This becomes even more clear if we consider what Lydgate might say from a first-person perspective. Imagine that Lydgate says, ‘She went behind my back’, to give a reason, as opposed to a cause, for his anger. Or, as in the example, ‘She acted “secretly”, “in opposition to” me.’ These ways of talking about the situation are clearly not ‘mere’ descriptions of the situation, independent of his feelings in it. They are attempts at articulating his anger. Saying, ‘she went behind my back’ is itself a way of accusing her of doing something wrong.Footnote 28 Giving these reasons, then, is not so much explaining or describing why he has these feelings of anger as it is expressing what it is that he feels. This is what his anger is about. How Lydgate views the situation and what he feels, are thus two sides of his anger. His words ‘I am angry’ and ‘This was wrong’ strive to make sense both of his feelings and of what has happened.
This illuminates my suggestion that we see the relation between his expressions of emotion and his description of the situation as an internal relation. Yet, even so, we may question whether this allows us to infer that in every case it is meaningful to describe someone as angry, it is also true that he holds the belief, understood as an intellectual assessment of the situation, that this is wrong. Attributing to Lydgate the realisation that she has wronged him does not, in the particular case, have to consist in anything more than these ways of reacting, in what he says and might say, in his being ‘afraid of saying something irremediably cruel’.Footnote 29
This, of course, is not to say that these ways of acting, by contrast to a supposed mental state, are what his anger consists in. As in Rosamond's case, we may also describe someone as angry or perhaps rather as disappointed or disgusted, without her showing any outer signs of it. The point is rather that we do not have to stipulate some underlying belief, to say that someone sees, as in the earlier quote by Hamlyn, or understands a situation in a certain way. This in turn is also an expression of us understanding them as angry.
The impossibility of separating the expression of emotion from the description of the situation, also explains why we may not find a case of anger in which someone cannot be said to see the situation as in some way wrong. This is not because anger is always accompanied by such a thought of belief, or is based on it, but because we would not attribute anger to someone who did not regard the situation in this way. Also, at the point he stops responding to it as such, we no longer say that he is angry. The sense in which we may speak about anger in relation to him loses its foothold.
The words ‘I am angry’ may thus have the same role in conversation, or in a quarrel, as saying ‘It was wrong’—both sentences attempt to bring home the realisation that something needs to be done.Footnote 30 Nevertheless, whether a person self-ascribes anger or not may significantly change what is being said in a specific case. Recall Rosamond's reaction to Lydgate's outburst. Trying to keep her disappointment at bay, she refrains from expressing any anger. Her ‘innocent-looking silence’ and ‘meek victimised air’Footnote 31 questions the justice of her husband's reaction to her deeds. In giving voice to his anger, Lydgate had been speaking from a conviction of being right, but Rosamond's response, or lack of response, leads him to question whether it was. Her response even has him thinking that he acted unjustly since he acted out of anger, and in that sense ‘unbecomingly’Footnote 32 in her eyes, while she never did such a thing.Footnote 33 When she finally says something, she says it coolly, in the manner of, ‘I am not angry, but you have…’ Still, her words are full of disgust.
By focusing on what appears to be aspects of the situation, Rosamond keeps herself out of it. She even tries to persuade Lydgate to regard his response as an expression of his inconceivable cruelty and not as a meaningful reaction to anything she had done. ‘No matter what I feel, this was wrong!’ ‘It is not that I'm angry or anything, but…’ She portrays Lydgate's perspective on the situation as coloured by his emotions, his anger and his unfathomable unkindness, and wants him to accept her view on what had happened. She does not, however, acknowledge that her perspective is as expressive of an ‘emotional’ reaction as is his. By not acknowledging her disappointment and ‘disgust with her husband’,Footnote 34 or only doing it when Lydgate is already weakened in his position, she does not give him any opportunity to question whether her view of the situation is correct.
Not expressing, or even acknowledging, her feelings allows Rosamond not to take responsibility for what she feels. She can continue to feel unjustly treated even in a situation in which it can be rightly argued that this is not the case. She does not have to answer for her own disgust at her husband, neither for her failure to find in his response anything that could serve as a fair description of her. Compare this to Lydgate who, by clearly expressing his anger, and not coolly describing how he views the situation, draws attention to the part he himself plays in his perspective on their situation. He attempts to make Rosamond see that she has done something unjust, but by committing himself to that idea in his angry response, he also becomes responsible for spelling out why he thinks this is so. Of course, this does not mean that his anger is proven unjust because Rosamond opposes it. For that matter, it is not proven just because the reader agrees it is so. However, his claim to justice is open to challenge and criticism in another way than Rosamond's, because he has expressed his anger at her.
In these respects, the sense in which we may still want to retain a distinction between a person's subjective response and the objective features of the situation is moral in character. Rosamond's refusal to acknowledge her emotional engagement in the situation, and the way she made sense of it, showed itself as an attempt to evade responsibility. Her focus on describing the wrongness of Lydgate's reactions, similarly, blinded her to her own involvement in the situation. In other words, it blinded her to how her descriptions were expressive of her emotions. By contrast, if she had shown the readiness to reflect on her own emotional involvement in the situation, what she says, thinks and feels in it, there might have been significant lessons to be learnt both about the situation and about herself.
By engaging in such self-scrutiny, and it is important for this form of reflection that I engage in it in the first person, I may come to discern in my ways of understanding a situation a certain emotional attitude towards it: ‘It is not they or the situation that are irritating, I am the one who is irritated’. Such discrepancies in my reactions to what has happened over time, or the different possibilities in description that may present themselves in my responses, may at times incline me to speak of my emotions as caused. Rather than thinking that a situation presents me with adequate reasons for being angry, I consider my irritation the cause of my representing it as such. In such a case, my admission of feeling angry, as a way of psychologically registering certain reactions, may provide an opening for the possibility that these feelings negatively affect my judgement. The acknowledgement of being angry, however, in another case, may rather serve as a way of committing myself to and accepting responsibility for a certain perspective, my anger.
These distinctions between what I feel, as a subjective response, and what I cannot help but see, as objective features of the situation I am in, carry moral weight. I will continue to argue that it is only by attending to my relationships with others that we can do justice to the ethical significance of acknowledging and refusing to acknowledge different meaningful perspectives on myself, and my situation. It is, as it were predominantly, in my meetings with other people, and in confrontation with their different perspectives on what has happened that the sense in which I embody a perspective on the world, and am not one with it, becomes clear to me. I, who do not see myself in what I see,Footnote 35 see myself (mirrored) in your reactions.
3. On Meaningful Perspectives and the Possibility of Criticism
The introduction of the intentionality of emotion in cognitive accounts of emotion was driven by an effort to prove the rationality of emotions. As an outcome of this, important work was also made to loosen up the classical distinction between reason and emotion.Footnote 36 Nevertheless, it is noteworthy how little impact recognising the interrelations between emotions and other forms of reasoning have had on the philosophical picture of rationality that permeate many cognitive accounts of emotion. Rationality is still mainly related to our ability to hold correct beliefs or form correct judgements about a response-independent reality. The value of emotions is thus judged in accordance with (1) their ability to guide us to response-independent facts (or ‘objective’ values), and (2) with their ability to invoke an appropriate response to such facts. In this respect, the sharp distinction between rationality and emotionality, the ability to judge facts as opposed to the capacity to express values, is indeed not bridged, but rather upheld through the ways in which the discussion is framed.
The kind of examples of irrational emotions cognitive accounts favour, in this manner, relate to situations in which my reaction is not in line with what has happened or based on a mistaken assumption.Footnote 37 I am afraid although the situation is not dangerous,Footnote 38 or I am angry although I lack a reason to be. A central example is also when my emotional response is disproportionate to the danger or injustice of a situation. These cases presuppose a particular understanding of what the situation is like that is available both to those acting emotionally, and to those taking a rational stand on it. Here, I simply stand in need of more information if I am to change my mind about the meaning of a situation. I may, say, be angry at a colleague for not handing in her share of a plan at a settled date, regarding this as an aspect of her constant sloppiness. When she excuses herself to me and tells me that some family problems prevented her from doing it, I am struck by remorse at my previous anger, now finding it to be too harsh a response. Here, one might well say that my anger was not justified, or not justified to the extent in which I was angry.
In the case of Rosamond and Lydgate, however, it is not initially clear that we have such an understanding, nor that we can reach it through rational deliberation. Under one description of what had happened, there is no disagreement as to what their situation is. He had wanted to sell the house. She did not. She had written a letter to his uncle. He did not know. In these respects, Lydgate and Rosamond agree about the facts of their situation. Now, look at the meaningful descriptions they may both give of what this amounted to in their relation to each other. Imagine her saying, ‘He threatened my security. I tried to secure the standard of living that I thought marrying him had promised me.’ Envisage him explaining, ‘She did not see the severity of the situation. I tried to rescue it.’ Likewise, in their portrayals of their quarrel, she says, ‘He was acting unbecomingly.’ Whereas he says, ‘She went behind my back.’Footnote 39 By giving these two views into what had happened, Rosamond and Lydgate, do not in any simple sense, misunderstand or make mistakes about the facts of their situation. Neither do they merely attach different value to the same facts; Lydgate finding that ‘acting secretly… in opposition to him’ is a terrible thing to do, whereas Rosamond thinks it is perfectly acceptable.Footnote 40 It is better to say that their whole quarrel revolves around what it is that each of them had done, or under what description one should view their situation. They embody two meaningful perspectives on what their situation is.
This case reveals an important indeterminacy in what we can come to think of as the relevant features a situation, or as a situation in the first place, since what we will regard as relevant, and as the situation, is itself dependent on our ways of emotionally being engaged in it.Footnote 41 It is in the light of Lydgate's anger, and Rosamond's more withheld distaste for her husband that our understanding of contested claims of doing something wrong comes to life. Furthermore, it is only by considering the emotions of which their different descriptions are expressive that we can meaningfully speak of both spouses as angry. It is, then, crucial to my purposes to recognise that a situation may be understood under different descriptions,Footnote 42 as well as to recognise the emotional perspectives expressed in different meaningful descriptions of what in some ways can be seen as the same situation.
Two ways of thinking about reasons for emotion thus emerge out of this discussion. The rationality of emotions that cognitive accounts are concerned with showing primarily concerns the appropriateness of attributing emotions to a person. They attempt to show what objects, perceived as facts under the description of emotionally laden attributes, are appropriate objects of different emotions. What are the criteria for determining what we should be afraid of or angry about, and how afraid or angry should we be? My discussion, however, alerts us to the meaningfulness of attributing different emotions to ourselves and others. The question is not only or primarily what it takes to consider a particular emotional response as justified, but what it takes to understand something as a particular emotion in the first place.
My further claim is that such questions as to the meaningfulness of attributing an emotion to another person, rationality in the minimal sense of intelligibility,Footnote 43 are prior to questions about their rationality in the sense of appropriateness. The intelligibility of Rosamond and Lydgate's different perspectives on the situation, in terms of anger, worry, indignation, etc. as it were, can be investigated without raising a question of whether their understandings are rationally justified. The focal point here is how what they say hangs together with other things they might say, and other embodied reactions on their situation, the feelings to which they give or do not give expression, and what implications regarding the situation in that light has for them. The question whether their emotions can be rationally justified, is thereby secondary to the questions of how they can be meaningfully described.
This also has repercussions for how we are to perceive the kinds of criticism we may direct at someone's emotional response, as well as the kind of reasoning we may enter into about the meaning of someone's emotional response, or lack thereof. The upshot of my consideration of the internal relation between expressions such as ‘I am angry’ and descriptions such as ‘It was wrong’, was to alert us to the sense in which we are constitutively engaged in what our situation is. It serves to remind us that the attribution of emotion, and the description of situations expressive of emotion, have meaning in particular contexts in which we take part as emotional, embodied human beings who are capable of experiencing ‘anger’, ‘fear’ ‘joy’ or ‘love’, as well as responding to situations as ‘unjust’, ‘fearful’ ‘good’ or ‘wonderful’. A whole vocabulary of words such as ‘just’, ‘unjust’, ‘beautiful’, ‘terrible’, and a variety of practices, such as ‘blaming’, ‘accusing’ and ‘praising’, grows out of our emotional reactions and provides us with the means of articulating them. Without these forms of responses, the words would not have the meaning to us they now have.
There is in that sense no rational position from which to judge whether the emotions of Rosamond and Lydgate were in place or not, at least not as long as one imagines this position to be disengaged from emotions. Rather than searching for a disengaged position from which to assess their situation, it is therefore better to consider the character of their engagement in their situation, as the particular reader of their situation one is. This entails a consideration of the different meaningful descriptions one can provide of them, in order to explicate what forms of emotional responsiveness one sees as doing the most justice to what is happening in their quarrel, as well as in their marriage.
Turning to emotion in such a way, involves a move away from the primarily epistemological perspective from which cognitive accounts approach the question of how a judgement or belief is justified. Rather it points our attention to the ethical character of searching for the truth of their situation. It calls for reflection, in order to be able to discriminate in what respects a person's description of a situation is expressive of emotion, but also for self-reflection, in scrutinising how we ourselves are engaged in the situation, and what descriptions of it we are prone to find apt. Furthermore, to bring out my final point, it raises the question of how certain understandings of a situation allow us to engage in others, and thus confronts us with the task of scrutinising the ways in which different responses put us, or fail to put us, in contact with the understandings of others. This reveals a sense in which the question about whether or not certain descriptions of their situation are justified, cannot be pried apart from the question whether it is just, in the sense of it giving to them what they are owed, as other human beings, capable of forming their own perspectives of what is happening.
The kind of difficulty facing Rosamond and Lydgate, as it were, is not the difficulty of acknowledging a fact they had foregone in their previous reasoning. It is, on the whole, not a difficulty in understanding any one particular thing, in the sense of saying, ‘I don't understand this’. Their failure, rather, lies in them not understanding each other, in the sense captured by the moral desperation or outrage expressed in cries such as, ‘I don't get you’ or ‘You don't understand me!’ Here, it is meaningful to mark a significant contrast between being angry at something (the other has said or done) and being angry at someone, a contrast cognitive accounts mostly leave unnoticed.Footnote 44 Whereas the first sense points to their response to some object, the second points to the kind of relation they have with each other.
What is needed if their situation is to change is in this sense not more knowledge, in the sense of factual information, but forgiveness in their emotional attitude towards each other. The issue facing them is the acknowledgement that the other views things differently and in what ways. Their difficulty of coming to see the situation in the light of the other's understanding of it, and of accepting what regarding it in such a way could mean to them, is the difficulty of listening to the other and taking seriously the suggestion that he or she could give a meaningful description of what had happened. It is a failure to realise that the other's differing perspective is not only something for them to judge, but to learn from, and also be changed by. It is their lack of trust in each other, to open up to each other, to be there for each other, and allow the thoughts and feelings of the other to matter to their own. It is the difficulty of admitting that they too had done something wrong, the difficulty of abstaining from self-righteousness. Their difficulties of understanding each other, in these respects, as should be clear from the above descriptions, are revealing of their difficulties and failures to love each other.
The problem with suggesting that either of them is not getting the facts right, or that their differences could be resolved by attending to the complexities of their beliefs, then, is that it does not allow us to grasp the depth of their conflict. It does not capture the sense in which they can be said not only to have differing beliefs about the same world, but the sense in which, to put it somewhat melodramatically, they inhabit different worlds. This way of speaking is inspired by Wittgenstein's remark in the Tractatus, that ‘The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man’.Footnote 45 The point here is not that one of them is happy and the other is unhappy.Footnote 46 To be sure, they are both unhappy, as Wittgenstein sees it, in that what they take to be the case, although it may form a consistent whole, and in other ways be deemed rational, is expressive of an attitude to life that is to their peril. Attending to this aspect of their disagreement is also necessary to see what could help them bridge the gap between them, to be able to live in each other's worlds.
4. Concluding Remarks: On Sharing a World
Speaking of Rosamond and Lydgate as inhabiting different worlds has a tragic ring to it. It is important to account for this feature, since it has been part of my aim to show the moral character of offering that kind of description. This brings forth two ways of perceiving the world that have been underlying my discussion. The first is the sense in which the world is something for us to come to know by reason, to be captured in the recounting of facts about which we can entertain true and false beliefs. Through considering the interplay between expressions of emotion such as ‘I am angry’ and descriptions of our situation, such as ‘This is wrong’, and the sense in which they are internally related, I have shown how epistemologically this world cannot be made sense of with the aid of reason alone, as long as this sense of reason is understood as operating disengaged from emotion. Rather, I have shown the constitutive role emotions, in this more epistemological sense, have in the meaning a situation has for us, and in what we take our world to be. Yet, I have also shown how diverging perspectives may lead us to think that we are not sharing a world, and the kind of moral questions this raises about the character of our engagement in the world, and in the life we share with others. Here, the pertinent question is not whether our understanding, and sometimes our diverging understandings, of what a situation is, is expressive of emotion or not, but rather what emotions find expression in the meaning such situations have for us. The task of seeing clearly here, and doing justice to another's perspective, centrally involves our preparedness to acknowledge each other, as well as our potential differences, as emotionally responsive and morally responsible beings.
The tragedy in speaking about Rosamond and Lydgate as inhabiting worlds that do not meet, in one sense of ‘world’, then, is that they, in another sense of the word, clearly live in the same world. They are able to meet each other as well as to speak to each other. This presupposes a shared understanding of what it means to use certain words in certain contexts, agreement in what significance it has to make certain judgements in particular situations, and the kind of responsibilities called forth by certain descriptions of what they and the other had done. What they do not share, however, both in the case of the quarrel I have discussed, as well as in their marriage, is an understanding about what words are to be used to make meaning of their situation, and the kinds of responsibility involved in acknowledging each other's descriptions of their predicament.
