In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER THREE Approaching Aquinas on the Emotions (I) ✦ To explore further how ways of being religious can affect the composition of emotional states, it is necessary to delve further into the structure of emotion . Even if we are not particularly interested in the impact that religion has on people’s emotions, it is important to understand how emotions are composed if we wish to become more articulate about our interior lives, more deliberate in shaping our emotions, and more discerning about the constraints that our “nature” imposes on this sort of ethical work. Aquinas offers a remarkable account of this structure. In outline, he argues that passio or an emotion is a motion of a soul-body composite.1 It is a motion that occurs with respect to the appetitive dimension of an embodied soul. In other words, it is a motion that occurs through the exercise of one’s appetitive powers.2 An emotion occurs, in particular, through the exercise of one’s sensory appetite. As such it has a material element. It is composed , in part, of patterned bodily changes that can be subtle, but are often noticeable in the form of felt bodily sensations. Yet an emotion is also intentional . It concerns some object—again, a thing, a person, a relationship, a situation—which one apprehends in a certain way, as bearing directly or indirectly on one’s well-being.An emotion is evoked and defined,more precisely , by sensory judgments,images,and impressions,which are basic forms of cognition. Yet a given emotion is ordinarily informed, in a human being, by higher forms of cognition as well, which allow one to interpret on different levels the significance of an object of concern—in ways that further determine one’s experience of emotion. Aquinas’s account is complex and subtle. To understand it, relevant details of the account and their most important implications must be encountered with patience, with the understanding that it is only after getting a ◆ 62 ◆ glimpse of the whole that one is in a good position to grasp any one of its parts. In this and the next chapter, I lay some groundwork for approaching Aquinas. Specifically, I introduce the idea that an emotion is a form of appetitive motion, and the idea that an emotion takes place within a soul-body composite. These are aspects of Aquinas’s account that I expect to be controversial , for various reasons. I treat them up front in the hope of clearing the path a bit—not so as to remove the controversy but to provide reasons for not getting hung up too quickly on these controversies such that one is unwilling to move forward with an investigation of Aquinas’s account. In chapters 5 and 6, I focus more specifically on the kind of embodied appetitive motion Aquinas intends, approaching the structure of emotion, as it were, from below, bringing into perspective the appetitive motions that characterize other sorts of things in the universe. In chapters 7 through 9, I approach the structure of emotion from the other direction, so to speak, from above, analyzing the relationship between acts of the intellect and the will, on the one hand,and emotions,on the other.The idea is to provide something like the photographic lighting (from both the front and the back) that is necessary to expose the dimension and detail of an object.In interpreting Aquinas,I seek to show that emotions can meaningfully be located along a continuum of appetitive motions within the human being, and that the appetitive motions of humans can meaningfully be thought of in relation to the appetitive motions of other sorts of entities,within the context of a cosmos that is governed by Love as the first and final principle of all appetitive motion. EMOTION AS A FORM OF THOUGHT: NUSSBAUM, REVISITED For Aquinas, emotions are appetitive motions that cannot be aroused or sustained apart from particular acts of cognition;yet emotions are not themselves forms of cognition.At least,Aquinas recommends that we not view them that way. Let us return briefly to Nussbaum’s cognitivist account of emotion in order to bring out some of what is distinctive in Aquinas’s account. Nussbaum constructs her theory of emotion in response to an “adversary .” Her adversary holds that “emotions are ‘non-reasoning movements,’ unthinking energies that simply push the person around, without being hooked up to the ways in which she perceives or thinks about the world.”3...

Share