Introduction
Since classical times, humans have tried to explore and describe the mechanisms that regulate life both for particular individuals and societies. Among the essential issues are the origin of feelings and their role in decision-making; specifically, philosophers of all epochs sought to answer the question of whether emotions interfere or are compatible with rational behavior. Research on the history of philosophical thought shows that the interpretations may differ not solely from period to period, but also from one belief system to another, as various worldviews involve dissimilar interpretations of emotions. Simply stated how a certain thinker sees the nature of feelings as a phenomenon plays the leading role in his or her view of their combinability with rationalism. The opinions are possible to group into three fundamental philosophical traditions that utilize different approaches but indicate a positive correlation between emotions and rationality.
Defining Emotions
It is hardly possible to provide a perspective on the probable influence of emotions on human behavior without specifying what those are. This is challenging, however, as individuals may react differently to similar situations, have different values and desires, and regard certain occasions through different lenses, and others. Therefore, several attempts have been made to explain the nature of the emotional response that is from three leading perspectives, notably, feeling, evaluation, and motivation (Emotion para. 14). They define emotions as the product of conscious activity, assessments of particular circumstances, and states in which an individual has motivation for certain actions, respectively.
Rational Core of Emotions
Feeling Tradition
The cornerstone of this paradigm is how people experience emotions in comparison with the other types of sensory perceptions such as taste or smell. Thus, according to Descartes, “to understand the Passions of the soul we need to distinguish its functions from those of the body” (19). This means the need to differentiate between emotions as such and their manifestations, for instance, tears, scream, or laughter that are components of behavior. Realizing the difference, in turn, is the primary step to understanding how feelings determine actions.
Descartes presumably is among the first thinkers to doubt the existence of the soul as a driver of the body that made it move or radiate heat. Instead, he applies this term to the “thought within us,” which makes human beings different from other living creatures (20). His description of the basic bodily functions, notwithstanding its speculativeness, allows assuming that psychical impulses derive from the processes that occur in the organism, similar to their physical equivalents.
People, however, are the only species that can perceive and decipher such signals, turning them into feelings. Perception and thought are the main, if not the only, functions of the soul; the quality of fulfilling them determines the person’s cognitive abilities (Descartes 19-22). Such a perspective drives the conclusion that emotions and rational thinking have a common root, specifically, the soul, hence are inseparable technically in the feeling tradition.
Evaluation Tradition
The above paradigm remained dominant until the middle of the 20th century when the development of cognitive and behavioral approaches in psychotherapy offered new opinions on the origin of emotions. Thus, Bedford highlights that they are “not purely psychological: they presuppose concepts of social relationships and institutions,” among which such categories as moral, aesthetic, and legal (303-304). In other words, individuals assess each other’s actions not exclusively from their viewpoints, but also through the lens of what society considers normal or not.
The result of the assessment is a certain emotion. The word for which the person opts to label it, for instance, anger, can serve to relate the action to the background in which it happened for easier perception (Bedford 304). Simply stated, it is not necessarily sufficient to say that somebody is angry to describe his or her feelings; specifying what caused them may be substantially more informative.
A view of this kind presupposes that members of a particular society react to certain behavior in similar ways, which determines their cultural specificities. Following the currently accepted rules, in turn, is an example of rational behavior since it favors the sense of belonging that is important for humans as a biosocial species. Therefore, it is possible to assume that the evaluation theory synonymizes emotions with rationality, similar to the feeling tradition.
Motivational Tradition
Identifying the relation between feeling and action is on the list of the most illustrative ways to explain the nature of emotions, for which reason thinkers attempted to do this throughout history. One of the earliest well-formulated opinions in this area, however, belongs to Dewey, who highlights the difference between unconscious and conscious responses to a given stimulus. The former, according to him, is an “instinctive blind reaction” that cannot qualify as an emotion due to the lack of barriers between perception and activity (28). In other words, an instinct-based response, whose manifestation, for instance, is purring or growling, normally is immediate and gains full control over the animal’s behavior.
Human emotions, on the contrary, are possible to restrain and not transform into actions. This nuance allows describing them as motivations for certain behavior that, however, is optional. For instance, a dog wags its tail in response to a particular outer stimulus that makes it happy, and a human may whoop in a similar situation. The latter reaction is possible to hold back while the former is not. The fact that feelings do not have “complete possession” of human beings, according to Dewey, is the main difference between them and other living creatures (29). This view quite apparently presupposes the rational nature of human emotions that distinguishes them from instincts by definition.
Possible Objection and Response
A considerable counter-argument to the above is that not all people can hold back, especially in emergencies or unwanted situations. Thus, shock can paralyze the body, and severe stress may cause hysterics or, vice versa, apathy, which manifestations doubtlessly are not rational. This is worth admitting; responses to stressful or terrifying occasions differ from individual to individual. However, it is guessable from that dissimilarity that controls over emotions theoretically is possible, in other words, rationality can prevail, but presumably after training.
Conclusion
Although several perspectives on the nature of emotions exist, each of them hints that those constitute rationality rather than interfere with it. In the so-called feeling tradition, for instance, experiencing emotions and being rational have a common root; certain philosophers label it a soul. In the evaluative paradigm, emotions as responses to particular actions or occasions are intertwined with social norms, following which is rational from both psychological and biological viewpoints. Finally, the motivational theory rests on humans’ ability to control their feelings instead of acting and following them immediately, as animals do, which distinguishes emotions from instincts and falls under the definition of rationality.
Bibliography
Bedford, Errol. Emotions. The Aristotelian Society, 1957.
Descartes, Rene. The Passions of the Soul. Translated by Stephen Voss, Hackett Publishing Company, 1989.
Dewey, John. “The Theory of Emotion. (2) The Significance of Emotions”, Psychological Review, no. 2, 1895, pp. 13-32.
“Emotion.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018, Web.