Talia Morag - Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason

C. Bodily readiness

2. Accounting for the prevalence of emotion-fittingness and pathology

I thank David Macarthur for the many eye-opening conversations we have had throughout the writing and reworking of this book, which helped me to clarify crucial conceptual issues. I also thank him for his teachings of Wittgensteins metaphysical quietism and of pragmatist epistemology, and especially for introducing me to his Liberal Naturalism, which provided me with important methodological tools for the inquiry I conduct in this book. I also thank Paul Redding and Robert Dunn for their detailed comments on the first draft of this book. I would also like to acknowledge Russell Grigg for our stimulating and enriching correspondence about psychoanalysis before, during and after the writing of this book. I am also grateful to my PhD thesis examiners, who provided valuable comments for the first version of this book: Jim Hopkins, Ronald de Sousa, and especially Stephen White. Stephens remarks, in particular, have sharpened and broadened the ambitions of this book. I thank my students in the philosophy and psychoanalysis course I have taught at the University of Sydney since 2010, especially Jack Cassidy, whose questions pressed on particularly important matters. I wholeheartedly thank Noa Salamon for being an inspiring example of a psychotherapist. I thank my beloved husband David for his relentless help and support and my daughter Thea for being so patient and understanding, especially during the writing of the first version of this book. I am deeply grateful to my loving parents Varda and Michael Morag for their belief, encouragement and endless generosity. I especially thank my grandparents, Yona and Ben Abish, for their love and financial support, thanks to which I was able to pursue my university studies and my passion for philosophy. And finally I would also like to thank Badde Manors, Clipper Caf, and especially Sonoma Bakery Caf in Glebe, Sydney, for having me spend hours on end on the premises and for the great coffee.

What is an emotion? As with most contemporary philosophical engagements with this question, this book focuses on occurrent emotions, on emotional episodes, bouts of affect that strike us or come over us, which have a passionate, embodied, expressive, experiential aspect, an experience of a certain temporal duration. The first part of this book shows that existing philosophical accounts of emotions fail to fit the phenomenon, that is, that they fail to capture the emotionality of emotions. In a sense, the conception of emotional episodes proposed in the second part of this book emerges as a response to existing philosophical conceptions that do not have the resources to do justice to two crucial aspects of our ordinary experience of emotions.

(1) The very same situation or circumstances may arouse a certain emotion-type in one person and a different emotion-type in another person and leave yet another person emotionally indifferent. Imagine three friends waiting for another fourth friend, who is a bit late. One person may begin to feel angry that the friend is late. Another may worry that something might have happened to the late friend. And the third person may not feel anything at all. Indeed, the very same person may emotionally react in different ways or remain emotionally indifferent to the same circumstances on different occasions. Today the rude waiter pushed my buttons, as we say, and irritated me, yesterday I was amused by his rudeness, and tomorrow his rudeness may leave me completely indifferent. What changes from one day to the next? What makes me emote while you stay indifferent? I call this question the singularity question . The difference between my patterns of emotional reaction and your patterns is often spoken of in terms of difference in character. But saying that we have different characters is just another way to describe this question rather than answering it. And in any case, sometimes we emote out of character. And although peoples emotional patterns may be quite stable, these patterns are not written in stone. At least some of them can come and go or change over time.