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The Emotions:A Philosophical Exploration

Feelings are an intimate and familiar part of emotional experience; without feelings, emotions would not be what they are. A common complaint levelled at over-intellectualizing, belief-desire accounts of the emotions is that they fail to do justice to this fact. It might be characterized as the Mr Spock complaint, named after the character from another planet in the first Star Trek series who is extremely rational yet has no emotions: for it does seem to be possible to have all the beliefs and desires which are typical of an emotional experience and yet, like Mr Spock, not have that emotion; so beliefs and desires are not sufficient for emotional experience.

A discussion of feelings, however, is notoriously difficult to conduct; it is hard both to describe feelings, and to capture their rightful place in the emotions and in explanation of how we act out of the emotions.

Because of these difficulties, there is the temptation, which I mentioned towards the end of Chapter 2 , to put feelings to one side for as long as possible, in the hope of giving as full an account of emotion as can be given without feelings, and in the hope of adequately explaining, or making sense of, action out of emotion just in terms of feelingless beliefs and desires, perhaps characterized impersonally.

Then, according to this view, feelings should emerge as a separate component to round off the account—an add-on—comprising perhaps just awareness of the physiological changes involved in emotion, and quite distinct from any intentional elements.

This approach does not do justice to the fundamental importance of feelings in emotional experience.