An experience of completely involuntary protection of his baby daughter when he saw a dog coming towards her out of the corner of his eye. No thought, just emotion. What was that? A thought? No. Emotion, yes. Good? Christian?
"We should beware of the misleading assumption that there is a single, orderly, naturla class of phenomena that is simply designated by different labels in different languages at different times. The language of 'passion' and 'emotion' has a history in which various feelings, desires, sentimaents, moods, attitudes and more explosive responses enter and from which they exit, depending not on arbitrary philosophical stipulation but on an extensive network of social, moral, cultural and psychological factors. R. C. Solomon.Evans and Griffiths:
- more innate: basic emotions (Evans); autonomic bodily reflexes (Griffiths)
- somewhat innate: higher cognitive emotions (Evans); strongly expressed personal concerns (Griffiths)
- less innate: culturally specific emotions (Evans); social performances (Griffiths)
Recent History
Now, all sciences seek to study emotions in their various connections.
But, previously, there was a Cartesian view that emotions were animal spirits running through your body.
Moved to a Freudian view of a hydraulic model of emotions as a strong force pushing up against a valve, reflected in words like repression, contain, etc... This model has some problems.
But then, James-Lange:
sdfaEmotions arrive from their physiological reactions. The mind responds to the body's reactions and interprets it as emotion.
Women who've had their eyebrows botoxed apparently feel less empathy, according to a study. :P
Behaviourism came next - F. Skinner "The 'emotions' are excellent examples of the fictional causes to which we commonly attribute behaviour."
'Evaluative judgements', but no less than a feeling - the cognitive view
We might resist emotions as simply cognitive, as just thoughts, yet thinking and feeling work together and each emotion is an evaluative judgement of the reality which we face. A cognitive theory.
Something about emotions are 'thinkable'. "I will kill that dog if it comes near my baby." Emotions have their own logic. Scripture seems to at some level assume this cognitive approach.
Matthew Elliott: "Rightly understood, our emotions are connected to what we focus on, what we know, what we value, and what we believe. What we think and how we feel work together to point us to the truth".
James 4:1-x as an example of emotions as involving cognition, the higher-level emotions articulated there.
You can have a commitment to a cognitive view of emotions and still see them as feelings.
Mistaken syllogism of many preachers:
A feeling can't be commanded.
But love is commanded.
Therefore love is not a feeling. (And I won't tell people to change their emotions or strive after certain emotions.)
So if you only give a fact, and then expect it to trickle down to emotions but don't push to help that happen, Elliott says that there's a problem there.
'Emotion', passion or affection
- a moral (and social) contextualisation of the passions and affections;
Passion - thought of as that which drives anti-social bahaviours
Affections - thought of as that which drives us toward others
Yet, we've moved toward 'amoral' emotions. Emotions aren't bad or good, they just are. We feel that that makes no sense. More the younger generation, while some of the older generation probably still hold to some of the hydraulic view.
Cameron is sympathetic to the passion and affection view, but the Bible has a more nuanced view again of how these things work. Virtues and vices are helpful categories with which to divide up our human experience.
Elliott's proposal
Much to recommend Elliott's work.
Cameron wants to say that we can have some, indirect, affect on how we feel about things.
Not so sure about this four-fold thing. Likes the fact that he says we are able to affect some indirect level of control. This is his four-fold toolbox.
- focus
- know
- value
- believe
Why do I think it's shaky? Because it looks past a deeper theological truth, that we can be helpless, and completely beyond the ability to pull ourselves out of certain emotions. (Psalm 88) (Romans 5:5) By the Spirit a new capacity to love and to change is brought upon us.
Does Elliott's strategem fall into the problem of his own critique of the 'trickle-down' approach in that it requires a level of thinking that would be beyond many?
Augustine vs the Stoics
For Augustine, our deepest longing is related to our telos. And our emotions are connected to what we love as a result. It is through the work of the Spirit that we are re-aligned to our proper telos.
Whether emotion is good or bad depends on how it is directed. It is used well when it aligns us toward our proper telos, and is harmful when it moves us away from our proper telos.
Hits the Stoics hard when they say that the emotions are all bad, even human compassion.
Emotions area good gift of creation, but they can be demonised depending on the love or telos that they are directed towards.
So, was Andrew's feeling to the dog good?
We'd have to know something of the telos of me, the dog and the baby. The stoic would say that you shouldn't have had the feeling, you lost your apatheia, your cool. The evolutionary biologist would have said that it's neither here nor their, you're engineered to pass on your genetics and the reality of what you felt, just is. No meaning.
Augustine would ask how that emotion was directed. The wrong thing would have been to feel nothing, and to let the dog hurt the baby.
Question time:
Q: Would you distinguish between instinct (the dog incident) and emotion?
A: We've got two roads, that serve us in different ways, a low and high road. Looking over from a distance, or diving in.
Q: How would we tweak Elliott's project?
A:
Q: Back to the two-tiered thing (instinct/emotion), are you suggesting that we can address both roads? The higher centres and the more basic emotions too?
A: A bit hard to know how to address the more basic ones, because of their nature, happening at such an instantaneous level. But we should talk about them, discuss them. Give us space to debrief.
Re-Q: Do you try to stir up some of those basic emotions within preaching itself? (Eg. Get a person angry when preaching about the right anger of God, etc.)
A: Yes, a good thing. There's been concern about doing it and whipping people up to a mob, but probably not a real danger of that in our context.
Then some more I missed, got a phone call...