In 1975, as Giles Pearson notes (p. ix), Fortenbaugh’s Aristotle on Emotion initiated a discussion of emotional response, arguing for Aristotle’s advance over the Platonic dialogues in the treatment of emotion, especially on the involvement of cognition in emotional response. The present book engages with much of the literature since Fortenbaugh which has tried to address Aristotle’s treatment of the connection of mental states with emotional response, as parts of emotion or as distinct from it. Pearson suggests that reason, phantasia, and perception “are envisaged [by Aristotle] to provide us with certain information” which is the content of an intentional state (22): one result is that, in rhetoric, it would be possible to disarm emotions such as anger, for example, by showing the angry individual that the offender admitted and regretted the offense (1380a13-15, cited by the author of this book at 242, though not quite to this effect). Thus, Aristotle’s improved treatment of emotion would have value in relation to action.
This volume is divided into an introduction, a preliminary chapter on terminology, and four parts with multiple chapters in each, along with the usual front and back matter supplemented by a catalogue of emotions and a diagram of emotions connected with doing well or badly.
In the introduction, the author reads Aristotle’s view of emotion from the standpoint of debates which have taken place in recent decades in philosophy departments, suggesting that, for Aristotle, emotions are “representational pleasures or distresses that are formed in response to other intentional states that apprehend their [intentional] objects” (1).
Chapter 1 addresses the language of these discussions, whose origins can be found in Franz Brentano, though Brentano and his motivations are not mentioned in this book. It is acknowledged that some may consider using a modern framework to investigate Aristotle’s analysis anachronistic, but the author expressly declines to defend this approach fully (20). The example of “a clear notion of an intentional object . . . in Met. E.4” (23) is translated from 1027b20-23, though readers may wonder about the foundation for “intentional object” in the Greek.[1] “Represents” appears where Aristotle has inflections of phainomenos in connection with anger, shame, and pity (27). It is proposed that “emotions essentially involve representing their objects evaluatively;” Anthony Kenny’s use of “formal object” is followed for this “evaluative aspect” (27), where the formal object differs from the material or particular object and has two aspects—the target and the focus (28). “Apprehension” here refers to cases in which “the [intentional] state specifies the object in the way in which we have the emotion about it, when we do” (32). It is argued that, for Aristotle, emotions are to be analyzed in terms of other intentional states (34). In this chapter, the intentional object is represented by attitude and content together.
On Chapter 2, which begins Part One, hinges the author’s thesis that emotions, or at least some of them, are “representational pleasures or distresses (hedonic states) that are formed in response to intentional states that apprehend their objects” (43). This position appears to require that, where Aristotle states that an emotion hepetai pleasure or pain (45), the usual sense of the verb (“follows”) be replaced with something like “occurs with” (48) or perhaps “implies” or “entails” (50). Here the author argues against the view that emotions for Aristotle are non-representational—a view he associates with Fortenbaugh, whom he quotes to the effect that Aristotle distinguishes “the cognition and the pain involved in emotions . . . The former is intentional; the latter is so only in a derivative way, i.e., through the judgment that is its cause” (52). Where Fortenbaugh “wishes to read Aristotle’s epi constructions as indicating a causal relation” (56), the author disagrees.
In Chapter 3, Pearson considers whether the pleasure or distress of emotion is a separate component which, along with the intentional state apprehending the object of the emotion, composes the emotion (65). The answer is that emotions are distinguished “by reference both to their formal objects and whether they are distresses or pleasures/joys” (81; italics in all quotations are original).
Chapter 4 argues that the emotions are pleasures or pains which arise in response to apprehensions of their objects. This arising or being formed is described as neither concurrence nor being caused by but rather as “an ‘in light of’ relation” (89). Here the author argues against Fortenbaugh and Nussbaum.
In Chapter 5, the argument turns to the question whether this treatment of emotion as a pleasure (or distress) is compatible with Aristotle’s discussions of pleasure elsewhere. On the assumption that, for Aristotle, pleasure is not an activity, the answer is that these two can be viewed as not incompatible in this respect (119).
Part 2, on emotions and desires, begins with a chapter on anger, which Aristotle defines in the Rhetoric as a desire. The author proposes to reconcile anger to this definition by arguing that it is “more than just an emotion” (137) and turns to four passages in the Topics for support; and while conceding that there may be no way “to extract an entirely consistent position that represents all aspects of these remarks” (139), goes on to argue that, “even on the view that anger is, strictly speaking, to be identified with the desire for revenge alone, the Top. passages do not eliminate the distress from the analysis” (140), so that distress is “an essential part of anger” (141), which is said to be Aristotle’s “considered view” (144). As for the pleasure that figures in Aristotle’s account of anger, this second emotion—pleasure at the prospect of getting revenge—“is only something it [anger] essentially leads to” (148). The conclusion is that, for Aristotle, “neither apprehending a slight as such, nor even being distressed at it (= the emotion) entail the desire of anger (for revenge). Rather, the reason anger (orgē) essentially involves a desire seems to stem from the conditions of applicability of the concept of the state, as Aristotle understands it” (153).
Chapter 7 continues the discussion of desires, addressing Aristotle’s language for desire. For example: “it cannot be taken as a given that anytime we read ‘pathos’ Aristotle simply means ‘emotion’; for he uses the term in a number of different ways” (158), and “Aristotle employs ‘undisturbed’ (atarachos) in different ways” (167). The argument is, in part, that, “while desires sometimes appear on Aristotle’s lists of emotions, emotions do not, more generally, appear on his lists of desires,” so that “Aristotle distinguishes between emotions and desires” (177).
Chapter 8 discusses the observation that epithumia appears in Aristotle’s lists of emotions elsewhere but not in Rhetoric II, suggesting that Aristotle “may have taken his discussion of epithumia to have already been provided” (183). The upshot is that “emotions can form part of states that incorporate desires,” instancing anger and “emotional epithumiai” (190).
Part 3, Chapter 9, begins with the claim that “Aristotle thinks that emotions just are representational pleasures or distresses” and proceeds to the qualification that “Aristotle does not think that emotions are just representational hedonic states” because he thinks that emotions are “also in some way material states” (195); but it argues against the position of David Charles on this subject at some length. The suggested resolution is that the different accounts of emotions in different works are “different specifications of the same underlying truths about emotions, ones that are more or less germane for different kinds of investigatory framework” (212).
Chapter 10 addresses charin echein and the opposites of items in Aristotle’s lists: “It seems, then, that rather than exclude the opposites as pathē, Aristotle wishes to extend the category of pathē of the soul to include privations of representational pleasures or distresses. . . . insofar as they involve quite specific lacks, which indicate an absence of a particular contrary” (247). The suggestion here is that Aristotle would be “broadening the class of emotions to include not just states which are in themselves (kath’ hauta) representational pleasures or distresses, but also other states which indicate, specify, or are otherwise essentially bound to such representational pleasures or distresses” (253).
Part 4, Chapter 11, comes back to recent philosophical debates about emotion, repeating that emotions play only a reactive or responsive role with respect to other intentional states. Chapter 12 continues this discussion by considering, approximately, “emotions that persist in the light of a conflicting judgement”—so-called “recalcitrant emotions” (275).
Readers who are familiar with Aristotle might be helped to understand the book’s argument by further clarification of the use of ‘intention’ and ‘representation’ and related expressions along with their heritage, especially since Brentano studied and wrote on Aristotle. They may wonder whether starting with the language of Brentano and his followers or of subsequent authors instead of with the language of Aristotle himself is likely to be more productive than the alternative. And, in light of the book’s qualification of its initial position on pathos in Aristotle, they may wonder whether a complete catalogue of Aristotle’s uses of pathos, at least in the Rhetoric, the De Anima, and the books on the things related to character, might shed more light on the subject. While the reader who studies this book and compares it carefully with Aristotle’s text will learn a great deal, the process would have been made easier by a number of editorial modifications, such as supplying missing words and numerals and observing the difference of gerunds from participles.
Notes
[1] τὸ μὲν γὰρ ἀληθὲς τὴν κατάφασιν ἐπὶ τῷ συγκειμένῳ ἔχει τὴν δ’ ἀπόφασιν ἐπὶ τῷ διῃρημένῳ, τὸ δὲ ψεῦδος τούτου τοῦ μερισμοῦ τὴν ἀντίφασιν (Ross).