The theory of emotions is a field of endeavor that concerns the causes of emotions, whether they are responses to physiological events, or are mediated by thoughts, or some combination of the two or is impacted by some other kind of factor offered for consideration. Are you anxious because you sweat or sweat because you are anxious or because you think there is a reason to be anxious? I want to suggest a different approach. Consider the nature of emotions rather than the cause of emotions. What are their basic characteristics? Identifying those is, first of all, possible and, second of all, result in non-obvious findings about emotions.
Here are four iron laws of emotions or, if one would prefer, four foundational ideas about the emotions. The first law is that emotions, such as anger and hate, and lust and compassion, are primitive terms in that they do not have synonyms, only something else which is associated with the term rather than defining the essence of the term. Hate is more than displeasure and people in disputes may not hate one another because disputes are a circumstance rather than an emotion. Anger is not an antipathy because you may also be squeamish about illness without hating the person who is sick. Emotions then are to be thought of as analogous to colors. You can combine shades from a color wheel but you cannot say what blue or yellow is as an experience except to invoke metaphors about which colors make you sad or glad. Yes, scientists can define a color as the wavelength of a particular part of the spectrum, but that in effect makes them, so to speak, colorless, no longer about the color, just as scientists speculate that there are parts of the brain that house one emotion rather than another but do not provide the feel of one or another of these emotions.
It may well be that it is in the nature of social things, as is indicated by the wisdom of language that gives no exact correspondence or synonym to an emotion, that emotions are “free” to be changed from one to another, people and some higher mammals also having the capacity to change without altering their shapes, just as rocks cannot and fish not apparently recognized as having moods, just as was acknowledged by anthropologists that human females could also alter their bodies in having cyclical menstrual flows, wounds that never healed but were nonetheless not leading to the termination of life, while stones were inflicted by “damage” outside themselves. In that case, the uniqueness of change is part of the first law, but if change is regarded as independent of that first claim, then we can propose as the second law of emotions that emotions change and are not only primary.
The significance of this second law is that emotions can be taken as uncaused causes. Rather than look for an original cause, to be identified with God, which causes all consequences, what can be observed is that there are any number of emotions that can become the causes of subsequent causes. An emotion makes something else happen without an explanation of why that particular emotion has arisen. A god can become jealous and start a war; God can get angry at or feel the situation in Sodom is unjust and can cause it to be destroyed. Indeed, it is difficult in primitive religion that there are any other causes of what happens other than the fact of some emotion and so trees and rocks have spirits, auras about them that cause them to do what they do, like catch fire or fall off the top of a cliff. What the world has done in the course of history is restrict the items which have emotions so that only people are such and objects such as rocks or space ships do not happen from an emotion but from a different thing, a law, that is inanimate and works because it is a description of what actually does happen and is nothing more than that and so is a new conceptual entity that is entered into the world through imagination. Even robots are taken as inanimate in that even if they appear to have emotions, they are in fact just the applications of physical technology, no different from seeing that sticks can be levered to unhinge rocks, people deciding what to do on their own emotions, or from their thought, which is a very complicated set of emotions that arises to a feeling of objectivity. An emotion can therefore be summarized as an impulse and so can impel a chain of consequences to take place.
There is a difficulty with emotions in that by locating them so narrowly, only for the field of humans and some levels of pre human forms of life, that the rest of the universe is caused by mechanisms or whatever other term is used to explain a predecessor event having changed the world to eventuate the subsequent event. Another problem of emotions is that the emotions themselves, now restricted to their field of operations, are themselves to be explained as to what emotions create other emotions or what circumstances allow emotions to arise. So Nietzsche, for example, thought that resentment arose from frustration.
A third law of emotions is that these primitive feelings are distinctive, however much they can fake or cover up one another. What they cannot do, as a matter of universal fact, is for emotions to gradually blur from one emotion to another as happens when colors do gradually change from being yellow into red, these clearly distinctive from one another but nonetheless a gradual continuum of the color wheel or, if one prefers, to the electromagnetic spectrum. But emotions do not have a spectrum, only a list of emotions and there is no Periodic Table of emotions as there is a Periodic Table with the chemical elements that lets them see similarities and differences based on atomic structure, even if Aristotle did tiy to arrange emotions so that some were more extreme than others, there still being a list of emotions that are irreducible. Georg Simmel showed that jealousy and envy are related because jealousy is the emotion created when an award or person is thwarted but might have been achieved, while envy is felt by a person or award who could not be obtained. You are envious of a guy who gets the girl who is clearly out of your league but is jealous of having just missed a scholarship award to someone else. These two feelings feel very differently and neither is different from the other as a matter of degree.
The fourth iron law is that emotions remain pretty stable throughout recorded history.And so how do you know the same word refers to the same emotion over the ages. This is a rather controversial proposition if we do not separate the levels of generalization under discussion. In his magisterial study of Greek emotions, “The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks”, David Konstan shows how a variety of emotions change over time and so the ancient word can refer to a different feeling in the modern world, even if the difference is subtle or, as he shows in his book about “Before Forgiveness” is profoundly different from what that means when Christianity arises. The combination of romantic and familial love does not even arise, I have argued, until the time of Jane Austen.
But consider how much about the emotions that have not changed in that the emotions that are recognizable in the present are also available in “Genesis'' and “The Iliad” even though emotions such as love are not present in “Gilgamesh” but does include friendship, suggesting that a robust family life had not yet arisen. We can see jealousy and bravery and other virtues for Achilles, and the humiliation of the dead Hector is a custom of the times because Priam had asked Achilles to do otherwise so as to perform a ritual that had been present but could have been declined, and modern soldiers have to be told not to engage on mortifying the dead bodies of their enemies. Emotions are strong and transcend particular feelings and usages. The difference between Konstan’s view and my own is that he is attending to cultural history while I am looking at what is or is not functional.
I will not offer a list of which emotions or categories of emotion are essential while others are local either in place or time, though feelings thought universal such as patriotism are not while feelings that are thought peculiar are in fact very basic in that even great apes seem to have affection with their mates and offspring. I will offer two analogies to show that there is something basic about a list of emotions. Consider words rather than as the set of emotions. People reflect on the fact that Eskimos have seven words for qualities of snow, or that some languages have more time cases than do others. But the overall basic fact is that all languages that are fully developed, and there are a great many of them, are up to the task of describing whatever they need to do so and will adapt to invent or incorporate new words to suit circumstances, as happened when Modern Hebrew invented many new words to allow Biblical Hebrew to be adapted for the modern world. What is available in Japanese is overwhelmingly interpretable into English and visa versa so that commerce and diplomacy can convese and mean something to one another even if some people can speculate that “honor” is a more deeply felt concept for the Japanese than it is for the Americans, though all that might mean is that disgraced people commit suicide in one place but not in the other. Those are customs rather than concepts. Similarly, people are able to use the language of emotions to get at one another, as apparently happens with Chinese children who do not use the word “love” to describe their parents but understand well enough that the generations within a family are deeply attached to one another and have some way to express that. There are distinctive concepts of family emotional allegiance, but on another, functional level, the two become equivalent or amount to the same thing. Language does not betray what is functional and only long experience will render terms and feelings obsolete, as may be happening in that races can no longer be treated as paternalistic or patronized while it is more difficult to do away with paternalism with regard to gender relations.
Here is another analogy that shows another general social or human phenomenon whereby emotions also alter slowly over time and are noteworthy when they do so, as happened in the early nineteenth century when the idea of freedom was associated with the idea of beijing free of slavery. It is also the case that there are character traits, and that these types evolve and change, while it also remains true that certain traits have remained with us for a very long time. Brave and ruthless soldiers and politicians have always been around. Milton’s pensive type is still around with us. But a new type developed with the idea of a nerd, someone who came into view in the Seventies as a maladroit person still savvy about some skills but lacking in social skills.
Simmel thought that a list or a concept of basic emotions or types would grow out of the possibility of interaction while those that were historically based could come and go and adapt but there is no need to ground either basic practices or emotions into the nature of people relating to one another when it is possible that emotions and character types are built into the emotions and types that are part of the biological inheritance, tracing back to when chimpanzees got nasty and great apes got phlegmatic. We have barely scratched the surface of evolutionary theory in that we focus on how the bones alter after long eons of times but have not been able to say what were the biochemical bases on which stand the particular range of emotions that are the complement of the human being, much less how the emotions of chimps evolved into being the emotions of humans.