The role of the emotions

Emotions enter human life in three ways. At their most intense they are the most important sources of happiness and misery, far overshadowing hedonic pleasures and physical pain. The radiant love of Anne Elliott at the end of Persuasion is unsurpassable happiness. A more reproducible if less exalted effect is that of watching Fred Astaire dancing. Conversely, the emotion of shame can be utterly devastating. Voltaire wrote, “To be an object of contempt to those with whom one lives is a thing that none has ever been, or ever will be, able to endure.”

Shame also illustrates the second way in which emotions matter, namely, in their impact on behavior. In Chapter 4, I cited several cases in which people killed themselves because of the overpowering emotion of shame. In this chapter I shall mainly discuss the action tendencies that are associated with the emotions. The extent to which these tendencies are translated into actual behavior will concern us in later chapters.

Third, emotions can matter because of their impact on other mental states – on motivations as well as on beliefs. When a desire for a certain state to obtain is supported by a strong emotion, the tendency to believe that it does obtain can be irresistible. As Stendhal says in On Love, “From the moment he falls in love even the wisest man no longer sees anything as it really is … He no longer admits an element of chance in things and loses his sense of the probable; judging by its effect on his happiness, whatever he imagines becomes reality.” In À la recherche du temps perdu Proust pursues the same theme over hundreds of pages, with more variations and twists than one might have thought possible.

Also, when an emotion triggers a negative meta-emotion, such as shame, the pressure to transmute it into a more acceptable emotion may be irresistible (see next chapter). This mechanism presupposes, of course, that the agent is aware of the emotion and identifies it correctly. Anger and love sometime creep up on us, without our being aware of them until they suddenly erupt into consciousness.