Christiana Werner is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Justus-Liebig-University of Gießen and member of Matthias Vogel and Gerson Reuter’s research group “Mind and Imagination” funded by the German Research Council. She is also member of the international AHRC/DFG-funded project called ‘How Does It Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective” hosted by the University of Liverpool and the University of Duisburg-Essen. Before joining the project, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Georg-August-University of Goettingen and head of the Junior Research Group “Language, Cognition, and Text”. Her research focuses on topics of philosophy of mind, aesthetics and epistemology.
This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s (eds.) recent book: Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran. Commentaries have been running the rest of the week; today’s is the last one.
Anja Berninger’s and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s volume “Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination” is divided into four parts. I will focus here on the last part, which is dedicated to a set of interesting and very challenging questions concerning the relationship between memory, imagination, and emotions. The first chapter is by one of the editors Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, followed by a chapter by the second editor Anja Berninger. The final chapter is by Fabrice Teroni. In the following I will give a brief summary of each of these three chapters and shed light on some interesting thoughts or arguments developed by each of them.
Let’s start with the first one: Íngrid Vendrell Ferran argues that imaginings of emotional experiences cannot be explained exclusively by referring to the imagining’s content. Instead, she argues, an answer to the question has to focus also on the mode of the imagining.
She starts by distinguishing between imagining having an emotion and experientially imagining feeling an emotion. This distinction is along the lines of the common distinction between on one hand (mere) propositional imaginings, such as imagining that one is afraid on one hand and on the other hand experientially imagining being afraid on the other hand. She argues convincingly that imaginings of what an emotion feels like have to be understood as a distinctive kind of experiential imagining alongside for example sensory imagination or motor imagination. However, she goes to claim that the content of an imagining cannot explain its emotional, i.e. experiential character. This is because the emotion, she argues, can be not only imagined, but could be the object of other mental states such as desires and beliefs. This is the part of the article that I want to have a closer look at.
Let’s take desire and belief for a start: Obviously, one can desire to feel joy. I can also believe that I feel joy. However, on the face of it, it looks like we have two examples of propositionally structured mental states. At least it is fairly uncontroversial that we can non-phenomenally and merely propositionally believe or desire that we feel joy. The fact that the proposition is about an emotion does not change the propositional content into a content with an experiential character. At this point we have to turn to the content of an experiential imagining. If the content of this state is a proposition, Vendrell Ferran is right to assume that states like desire and beliefs on one hand and experiential imaginings on the other hand have the same content. Indeed, it would be an obvious thought that the distinction between these states must then be in the nature of the attitude itself. The content of an experiential imagining is analysed in terms of emotions imagined as belonging to the imaginer. The mode of the experiential imagining, Vendrell Ferran argues, consists in imagining feeling the emotion. This imagining, so the idea goes, generates another imagining, namely an emotion-like imagining. The emotion’s phenomenology is then generated by processes or mechanisms of transportation, combination, and variation.
In the following, I would like to present very roughly a suggestion for how to maintain the idea that experiential imaginings can have propositional content but could nevertheless be distinguished from other forms of imaginings by reference to their content. The idea relies on so called phenomenal concepts. According to some philosophers, we gain phenomenal concepts by means of experiencing conscious states. We can deploy these concepts, for example, by means of imagining or remembering the experiential state. It is also possible to deploy a phenomenal concept in propositionally structured thoughts. One might think something like “I believe that joy feels like this __” where the blank space indicates that this is where we deploy the phenomenal concept of joy. If this is possible, it is indeed true that phenomenal concepts can be part of the propositional content of a belief or desire. It is then important to distinguish between merely propositional content and propositional content that contains phenomenal concepts. If this suggestion is on the right track, however, we could distinguish between experiential and non-experiential imagination by means of referring to the imagination’s content.
In the second chapter of this part of the volume, Anja Berninger focusses on the concept of nostalgia, arguing that it is best understood in terms of family resemblance. She starts by discussing Jesse Prinz’ approach to nostalgia, which she characterises as a “common core approach”. Prinz claims that there are three central components of nostalgia. The first component is a cognitive base, which is the base or trigger of an emotional reaction. Second, there has to be a relation to a past event. Finally, the subject reacts with mixed emotions, namely happiness and sadness. By referring to the experience of happiness and sadness at the same time, we can explain the bittersweet character that some people think of as characteristic for nostalgia. Berninger’s strategy is to work her way through many examples of nostalgia she finds in philosophical and psychological literature. Because she accepts the very different uses of the term “nostalgia” she finds there, it is straightforward to see family resemblance as the right way to analyse the concept of nostalgia. Some of the cases contain thoughts about the past; some thoughts about the future; some cases contain mixed emotions, such as sadness and happiness; others only negative or only positive emotions; some cases involve a simulation process; others are best described as judgments about an event. If we accept all these cases as cases of nostalgia, without distinguishing, for example, between core cases and borderline cases, a concept that works for all these cases has to be flexible. The family resemblance approach guarantees this flexibility.
I would, however, like to suggest two alternative ways of approaching nostalgia: first, it could be a fruitful alternative to follow a less inclusive approach. If we want to pick out more specific phenomena, the family resemblance theory seems not to be of great help. If cases of someone thinking about fictional or future events, or cases where a subject does not experience any positive response to the past event, all count as nostalgia, it seems that virtually any episode in which a subject thinks about an event with or without emotional reactions towards the event could also count.
Second, we could also look at phenomena that can be picked out by the common core idea, as argued for by Prinz. Whether or not there are other phenomena which could be called “nostalgia”, the common core idea picks out extremely interesting cases: for nostalgia, understood in this way, it is constitutive that the subject has two emotions at the same time. For example, in the context of new debates on concurrent emotions, it would be interesting to think about the question whether there are more phenomena besides nostalgia where this is the case.
I will come back to the topic of concurrent emotions in the context of the last of the three chapters, by Fabrice Teroni. He focusses on the relation between memory, emotions, and our sense of diachronic identity. On one hand there are recent approaches which highlight the role personality traits and character play for our sense of diachronic identity. Other approaches, in contrast, highlight the role of memory and mental time travel (MTT). Teroni’s idea is to bridge the gap between these two approaches. It comes as no surprise that Teroni sees a major role for emotions in this enterprise. Teroni argues very convincingly that the emotions play important roles in both personality and character traits on one hand, and on the other hand in memory and MTT. First, emotions come into the picture via an explanation what character and personality traits are. Teroni argues that both are best understood as multitrack dispositions which manifest in emotions. Thus, so the idea, emotions have an influence on the way a person sees her diachronic identity. Secondly, emotions structure conscious episodes. Emotions accordingly have an important function for the subject’s sense of identity in the stream of consciousness. Finally, Teroni shows the important role of emotions for the sense of continuity generated by MTT.
In Section Three of the chapter Teroni develops the idea that personality and character traits are multitrack dispositions and that their central manifestations are emotions. Teroni gives a brief sketch of the theory of the emotions he relies on: emotions are evaluative experiences. It is closely related to the evaluative character of the emotions that they influence or channel the subject’s attention and that the emotions go along with (or are even identical with) specific action tendencies. Claims concerning emotions’ evaluative character and their influence on attention and action tendencies are very common elements in many recent theories of the emotions. However, how these claims are spelled out in detail differs. For the case of fear, it is convincing that the occurrent emotion channels the attention and that the subject is in a bodily state of being prepared to act. It seems, however, to be a hidden premise of these theories that emotions occur distinctively and successively. In such a picture, according to which subjects are at any time only in a single, discrete emotional state, it is relatively easy to see that emotions channel the subject’s attention and go along with action tendencies. If different emotions can however occur concurrently, we have immediately a far more complicated scenario. Emotions that occur simultaneously can each be associated with very different action tendencies and channel the attention in very different respects. In cases of several concurrent emotions, a subject’s attention would be channelled in different ways at the same time. The subject would also be prepared to act in several different ways. If this were the case, it would be hard to see how attending to specific features of the world or being prepared to act in specific ways could be successfully implemented. It seems then that we need a further step that explains how concurrent emotions interact and how their influence on attention and action is explained in cases where a subject is in more than one emotional state at a time.
It is, however, important to note that the problem of concurrent emotions is not specific to Teroni’s theory of the emotions. But since emotion’s influence on attention has a central role in his approach to diachronic identity, it seems necessary to think about the interaction of concurrent emotions.