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Emotions and Concept of Self in Western Philosophy
Emotions and Concept of Self in Western Philosophy
WESTERN PHILOSOPHY
CONFUCIANISM
DAOISM
BUDDHISM
According to this view, emotions are blind forces that
sweep reason away and lead us into trouble.
the euthumia
advocated by the tranquillitas the ataraxia of the
Democritus of Seneca Epicureans, etc.
However, there have been dissenting voices over the centuries,
especially from:
1. IN UTERUS = JING
The Jing of the foetus is formed from the meeting of the Jing of parents.
Zhang Jing Yue does say that the meeting of the parents’ Jing forms the
foetus’s Shen: however, this is obviously a very primordial type of
Shen, more a potentiality than an actual Shen.
Needs: boundaries
Needs: feed his imagination, be left to play, do not try to develop Shen
too early
5. FROM 4-5 YEARS TO 7 YEARS = SHEN
This is the period of life when the Shen starts to mature and, because there is a
“perfect” symbiosis of Hun and Shen, I call these the “golden years”. The
Shen becomes more stable, the child does not cry so easily and one can reason
with them. The Hun is settled and integrated with the Shen. The child has not
developed Yi yet.
6. FROM 7 ONWARDS = YI
This period is marked by the maturation of the Yi, rationality and capacity to
study, concentrate, focus, In a way, this is the period that is in antithesis to the
period of the Hun: imagination and fantasy versus rationality, Eros vs Logos.
Steiner calls this time the “fall from Paradise” (that is why child should not
start school before 7). In China and Russia, children start proper school at 7.
(In England they start at 4.5).
fear motivates
escape from
dangerous situations.
The discussion of emotions and concepts of self in modern philosophy
will be carried out according to the following topics:
it is something that
reasons
the lower
appetites
anger and
domination
Plato described the
“tugging” between the
charioteer and the horses.
He says:
The first is through the amygdala and this is a fast route that
occurs even before the feeling enters consciousness.
After the amygdala has been alerted, it
takes about twice the time for the
cortical regions to be alerted.
Emotional Emotional
stimulus (fear) response
g) MIDDLE AGES AND CHRISTIANITY
According to Taylor:
among the
negative ones
If the objects are difficult to attain (or avoid), five other passions are
generated and this is called irascible appetite. The five passions are:
Spinoza’s greatest insight is that “mind and body are parallel and
mutually correlated processes, mimicking each other at every
crossroad, as two faces of the same thing.”
m) HUME
David Hume (1711-1776) wrote about
the passions in his work “Treatise of
Human Nature”.
John B. Watson
Watson's view that there are only three basic emotions has been
challenged frequently since he proposed it in 1919.
In 1927, the and his
American associate
physiologist Walter Philip Bard
B. Cannon
cingulate cortex
anterior thalamus
hypothalamus
3. THE JAMES-LANGE THEORY OF EMOTIONS
I shall discuss the James-Lange theory of emotions more in
depth as it presents interesting similarities to the Chinese
medicine’s view of emotions. The James-Lange theory refers
to a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions developed
independently by two 19th century doctors:
James and Lange proposed that emotions are feelings which come
about as a result of these physiological changes, rather than being
their cause. Lange even stated that the vasomotor changes occurring
when we have an emotion are the emotion.
The diagram below shows the traditional view of emotions as causes
of physiological changes on the top and the James-Lange view at the
bottom.
JAMES-LANGE
PSYCHIC PHYSIOLOGICAL
STIMULUS CHANGES EMOTION
William James described it thus:
anger or love
Fear feels
different
from:
Joseph Ledoux, The Emotional Brain, Simon and Shuster, NY, 1996, pp. 292-295.
AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM DIFFERENCES
AMONG EMOTIONS
Robert W. Levenson
University of California. Berkeley
Abstract—Following decades of controversy and uncertainty, there is
now sufficient empirical basis for asserting the existence of a limited
set of autonomic differences among emotions. Findings of autonomic
distinctions among emotions derived from the work of the author and
his colleagues using two methods of emotion elicitation are reviewed.
For five of these autonomic distinctions, convergent findings from the
work of other investigators using the same and other elicitation
methods are presented.
The question of specificity, or whether different emotions
are associated with different patterns of autonomic
nervous system (ANS) activity, has long captivated
emotion research, with the roots of the controversy
tracing to James (1884), who argued for specificity, and
Cannon (1927), who argued against.
Tomkins says:
SHEN
HUN
c) BOCKOVER’S THEORY OF EMOTIONS
Damasio also thinks that, far from being psychic factors that merely
cloud the mind, emotions are actually integral to the process of
reasoning and decision-making. Studies that have been conducted
on individuals with brain lesions in the limbic system confirm this.
Damasio says:
“These findings suggest that selective reduction of emotions is at
least as prejudicial for rationality as excessive emotions. It
certainly does not seem true that reason stands to gain from
operating without the leverage of emotions. On the contrary,
probably emotions assist reasoning especially when it comes to
personal and social matters involving risk and conflict.”
Indeed, Damasio says that:
He then says:
“In other words, emotions and core consciousness tend to go together in the
literal sense by being present together or absent together.”
Damasio says:
Damasio maintains that there are feelings we are conscious of and feelings
that we are not.
He says:
a) FREUD (1856-1939)
The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th
centuries saw the emergence of psychoanalysis and the
theory of the unconscious. Freud was the first to
introduce the concept of the unconscious mind.
i. The unconscious
The concept of the unconscious as proposed by
Freud was revolutionary in that he proposed that
awareness existed in layers and that some
thoughts occurred “below the surface”, i.e. in a
layer of the mind that we are not conscious of, the
unconscious.
Freud was led to the discovery of the unconscious by
the analysis of dreams and what we call “slips of the
tongue”. Freud believed that dreams are a symbolical
expression of unconscious desires or fears: as these
are by definition unconscious, they can surface only
in a symbolical way in dreams.
Dreams, which he called the “royal road to the
unconscious”, provided the best access to our
unconscious life and the best illustration of its “logic”,
which was different from the logic of conscious
thought. Freud developed his first topology of the
psyche in “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1899) in
which he proposed the argument that the unconscious
exists and described a method for gaining access to it.
by Sophocles
He used the Oedipus conflict to point out how much he believed that
people have incestuous desires and must repress them.
ii. The id, ego and super-ego
Freud believed that humans were driven by two conflicting central desires:
MAN
Conscious: Animus
(Shen-Yi) Unconscious:
Anima (Hun)
WOMAN
Conscious: Anima
(Hun) Unconscious:
Animus (Shen-Yi)
iv. Psychological types
Analytical psychology distinguishes several psychological types or
temperaments.
Mind (Shen)
Will-Power (Zhi)
Yi (Yi)
the sensing function a function of the
Po
Thus, far from being psychic factors that “disturb” our mind and
cloud our human nature (as Chinese medicine maintains especially
under the influence of a Confucian and Daoist view of the
emotions), emotions are an essential way in which our psyche
functions. Without emotional bonding, children simply die.
In the 1940s, the psychoanalyst Spitz reported on the fate of orphaned
children brought up in homes or institutions, as well as babies separated
from young mothers in prisons.
Bowlby theorized that human infants are born with a brain system
that promotes safety by establishing an instinctive behavioural bond
with their mothers. That bond leads to distress when the mother is
absent as well as the drive for the two to seek each other when the
child is frightened or in pain.
Although Bowlby’s ideas are now mainstream, they were
surprisingly revolutionary in the 1950s. For example, the founder of
the behaviourism school John Watson (1878-1958) wrote:
a) NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS
The neurobiological explanation of human emotion is that emotion
is a pleasant or unpleasant mental state organized in the limbic
system of the mammalian brain. Unlike reptiles, emotions are
mammalian elaborations of feelings in which neuro-transmitters
(e.g., dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down
the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures,
and postures.
Ventral striatum
Insula — The insular cortex is thought to play a critical role in the
bodily experience of emotion, as it is connected to other brain
structures that regulate the body’s autonomic functions (heart rate,
breathing, digestion, etc.).
“the induction and experience of sadness, anger, fear and happiness lead to
activation in several sites, but the pattern for each emotion is distinctive.
For instance, sadness activates the ventromedial prefrontal cortex,
hypothalamus and brain stem while anger or fear activate neither the
prefrontal cortex nor the hypothalamus. Brain-stem activation is shared by
all three emotions [sadness, anger, fear], but intense hypothalamic and
ventromedial prefrontal activation appears specific to sadness. The
amygdala is indispensable to recognizing fear in facial expressions, to
being conditioned to fear and even to express fear.”
An important new realization about the interaction between the
cortex and the limbic system has emerged in recent times. Until
recently, it was thought that the cortex is responsible for cognition
and the limbic system for emotions. However, as described also
below, the cortex depends on the limbic system for its early
development in babies.
Moreover, it has come recently to light
that the rostral parts of the basal ganglia,
far from being exclusively motor in
function, are actually innervated by the
limbic system (right).
The reptilian brain focuses on survival, and takes over when we are in
danger and we do not have time to think. In a world of survival of the
fittest, the reptilian brain is concerned with getting food and keeping it
from becoming food. The reptilian brain is fear driven, and takes over
when one feels threatened or endangered.
A second part of the brain is the limbic
system or Mammalian brain. The limbic
system is the root of emotions and feelings.
It affects moods and bodily Functions.
The brain stem is the oldest and smallest region in the evolving
human brain. It evolved hundreds of millions of years ago and is
more like the entire brain of present-day reptiles. For this reason, it
is often called the “reptilian brain”. Various clumps of cells in the
brain stem determine the brain’s general level of alertness and
regulate the vegetative processes of the body such as breathing and
heartbeat.
It is similar to the brain possessed by
the hardy reptiles that preceded
mammals, roughly 200 million years
ago. It is ‘preverbal’, but it controls
life functions such as autonomic
brain, breathing, heart rate and the
fight or flight mechanism.
Alertness
Arousal
Breathing
Blood pressure
Contains most of the cranial nerves
Digestion
Heart rate
Other autonomic functions
Relays information between the peripheral nerves
and spinal cord to the upper parts of the brain
In particular, the mesencephalon is responsible for the
following functions:
McLean further suggests that the origins of human language were most
likely in infant-mother interaction, babbling based on vowel-consonant
combinations beginning about 8 weeks after birth.
The left brain more linear, The right brain is more spatial,
rational, and verbal. abstract, musical and artistic.
7. SUMMARY
a) All philosophers in the West have discussed the emotions from the times
of Socrates and Plato right down to modern philosophers. What
emerges clearly from their discussions is that emotions are far more
than just causes of disease as Chinese medicine sees them. Not only do
emotions have a cognitive, judgmental value, they also play a vital role
in the development of the cortex.
b) Some of the Western philosophers hold the same view as the ancient
Confucianists, Buddhists and Daoists i.e. that emotions cloud reason.
c) However, many of the Western philosophers do not share the view
that emotions cloud human reason.
According to Damasio,
emotions are an integral
component of the machinery
of reasons.
d) The development of cortex relies partly on limbic system: thus,
from a neurophysiological point of view, far from being factors that
“cloud reason”, they play a vital role in coordinating our social life
with the cortex.