Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 What Is Happiness?
- 2 Happiness as Fulfillment
- 3 Aristotle's Ethics
- 4 Actualization: Psychological Views
- 5 Finding Potentials
- 6 The Things We Need to Be Happy: Goods, Intrinsic Motivation, and The Golden Mean
- 7 Introduction to Virtue
- 8 Some of the More Important Moral Virtues
- 9 Virtue and Emotion
- 10 Early Psychological Views of Virtue and Emotion
- 11 Virtue and Emotion: Recent Psychological Views
- 12 The Physiological Basis of Virtue
- 13 Emotional Intelligence
- 14 The Development of Virtue
- 15 Psychological Views of Virtue Development
- 16 The Polis
- 17 Contemplation: A Different Kind of Happiness
- References
- Index
- References
10 - Early Psychological Views of Virtue and Emotion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 What Is Happiness?
- 2 Happiness as Fulfillment
- 3 Aristotle's Ethics
- 4 Actualization: Psychological Views
- 5 Finding Potentials
- 6 The Things We Need to Be Happy: Goods, Intrinsic Motivation, and The Golden Mean
- 7 Introduction to Virtue
- 8 Some of the More Important Moral Virtues
- 9 Virtue and Emotion
- 10 Early Psychological Views of Virtue and Emotion
- 11 Virtue and Emotion: Recent Psychological Views
- 12 The Physiological Basis of Virtue
- 13 Emotional Intelligence
- 14 The Development of Virtue
- 15 Psychological Views of Virtue Development
- 16 The Polis
- 17 Contemplation: A Different Kind of Happiness
- References
- Index
- References
Summary
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.
William James (1900) Principles of PsychologyAristotle's view of emotion is actually the prototype of what psychologists now call the “cognitive theory of emotion.” There are currently several variations of this approach, some of which will be reviewed in the next chapter. However, the earlier classical approaches to emotion offered by Sigmund Freud and William James are still important and deserving of some discussion.
Terms like “moral virtue”, “practical wisdom,” “soul,” and the like, were dropped from all but philosophical discourse a long time ago. But the ideas to which these terms refer are still very much with us. “Virtue ethics” has always been a part of psychology. In the following pages I discuss emotion and virtue from a psychological point of view rather than in the terms of philosophy.
It seems appropriate to begin with the most famous of all psychologists, Sigmund Freud. Freud was a scholar of many disciplines and familiar with Ancient Greek thought. Greek terms like ego, Eros, and Oedipus are fundamental to his theory. One of Freud's most important contributions was his re-statement of Plato's analysis of soul. Two thousand years ago Plato divided the human soul into three parts: the appetitive, the spirited, and the rational. Of course, appetite refers to desire and needs. The spirited part of Plato's soul referred to the action/behavior of many living things symbolized by the spirited horse.
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- Information
- The Psychology of HappinessA Good Human Life, pp. 95 - 101Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009