PATHE · THE FEELINGS
On emotions as containing claims that can be true — and on the Stoic objection, which is still the live one.
Two people read the same piece of bad news. One is angry and one is not, and both are right about what happened.
Aristotle’s treatment of this is the first systematic account of the emotions anyone wrote. In the Rhetoric especially, he goes through them one at a time and defines each by its conditions: what the person must believe about the situation, who it must involve, and what it disposes them to do.
The consequence is that an emotion contains a claim. Anger contains the claim that a slight occurred and was undeserved. That claim can be accurate or inaccurate, which makes emotions assessable in a way that “manage your feelings” does not allow for.
One failure treats the feeling as the problem. The other treats it as beyond question.
The position Aristotle argued against and the Stoics developed after him: the emotion is the disturbance and the aim is not to have it. He thought this produced a diminished person rather than a well-functioning one.
The modern default. The feeling is treated as a fact about you rather than as containing a claim about the world, so it is either expressed or suppressed and never checked. The claim inside it is never stated, so it cannot be wrong.
Five parameters, and every one of them can be wrong independently. That is a considerably more demanding standard than either expressing the feeling or not having it.
It is also the doctrine of the mean applied to emotion, with the same virtue and the same flaw: it describes the target precisely and supplies no method for hitting it.
The most useful distinction in his treatment separates two feelings that present almost identically.
Envy is pain at another person’s good fortune as such. Indignation is pain at another person’s undeserved good fortune. Both feel like the same thing from inside, and they contain different claims.
The practical value is immediate. One of the two contains a claim that can be true, and if it is true the response is not emotional regulation — it is dealing with the thing that is unfair. The other contains no such claim and is information about you.
Richard Lazarus’ appraisal theory makes a structurally similar move, arrived at independently.4 Primary appraisal assesses whether a situation bears on what you care about; secondary appraisal assesses what can be done about it; and the emotion that results is a function of both rather than of the event.
Each emotion has a characteristic pattern — a core relational theme — which amounts to defining it by the judgment it contains rather than by how it feels. That is the same move, and the resemblance is not evidence for Aristotle: two careful observers of the same animal will converge on overlapping descriptions whether or not either has carved anything at its joints.
The evidence is good for the general framework and weaker for the fine-grained mapping. Appraisals and emotions are reliably related; whether each emotion has a unique appraisal signature is contested, and the causal direction runs both ways, since being angry also changes how you appraise the next thing.
The objection that has lasted is that “the right degree” has no scale.
The case against
Right person, right degree, right time, right purpose, right way. Nobody can say what right degree means, and in practice the judgment is made by the person in the grip of the feeling, which is the worst available instrument.
The Stoic position — that the disturbance is itself the problem and the aim is not to have it — at least has a clear criterion. The Aristotelian one requires practical wisdom to apply, which is a virtue possessed by the people who need it least.
What I would keep is the narrower, checkable half. An emotion contains a claim; the claim can be written as a sentence; the sentence can be tested. That is available to anyone and does not require anyone to judge a degree.
Take one strong feeling and write the claim it contains as a sentence that could be true or false. This was unfair. I am being excluded. This will not work.
Then check it. Not in the abstract — against what you would accept as evidence if somebody else said it.
And handle the true ones differently. If the claim is accurate, the response is not to regulate the feeling. It is to deal with the thing. A great deal of emotional regulation is applied to accurate perceptions, which is a way of managing somebody out of a correct assessment.
Use the envy/indignation sort as the template. Which of these two is this, and does the version with a claim in it hold up?
One feeling a day, one sentence, and then the test.
Aristotle went through the emotions one at a time, wrote down the conditions for each, and then argued with the people who wanted rid of them. Two and a half thousand years later the framework is recognizably the one appraisal theory uses.
The part that does not survive is the standard. Right degree, right time, right way is a target without a scale, and the Stoic objection to it has never really been answered.
The part that does survive is checkable. Every emotion contains a claim. Write the claim down and find out whether it is true, and then treat the true ones as information rather than as something to manage.
An emotion contains a claim that can be accurate or not. Envy and indignation feel identical and only one of them contains a claim that can be true.
The Stoic objection stands: “right degree” has no scale, and the judgment is made by the person in the grip of the feeling. Keep the checkable half — write the claim down and test it.
Quotations are from the Nicomachean Ethics unless noted, cited by book, chapter and Bekker number; renderings follow W. D. Ross (rev. Urmson), Terence Irwin or Roger Crisp, and a condensed line is marked “after Aristotle”. Modern research is cited by author and publication.