What Is Emotion?

Quick Answer

An emotion is a complex psychological state that typically involves a felt experience, bodily changes, an evaluation of some object or situation, and a tendency toward action. Fear involves the feeling of fright, a racing heart, the judgment that danger is present, and the impulse to flee. Anger involves the feeling of heat, the judgment that one has been wronged, and the impulse to strike back.

Philosophy asks which of these elements is essential. The answer matters because it determines whether emotions can be rational, whether we can control them, and what role they should play in ethics and the good life.

What Is Emotion?

The word "emotion" covers a wide range of states: fear, anger, joy, grief, envy, compassion, shame, pride, and love. What they share is structure. Emotions are about something — they have objects. You are afraid of the storm, angry at the insult, grateful to the friend. This directedness is called intentionality.

Emotions also involve evaluations. To feel fear is to register something as dangerous; to feel grief is to register something as lost. Philosophers influenced by Aristotle and the Stoics argued long ago that emotions are not blind bodily forces but ways of perceiving and appraising the world. This is the foundation of the cognitive theory of emotion.

Historical Background

Ancient philosophy already debated the nature of emotion. Plato treated the passions as powerful drives needing the guidance of reason. Aristotle developed a richer view in the Rhetoric and Nicomachean Ethics: emotions are responses to situations that can be appropriate or inappropriate, and the virtues are dispositions to feel the right emotions at the right times.

The Stoics argued that emotions are judgments — false judgments about what is genuinely good or bad — and that the wise person therefore uproots them. The Hellenistic debate shaped later philosophy. Hume, in the eighteenth century, made sentiment central to morality, arguing that reason is the servant of the passions. Spinoza, in the Ethics, gave a geometric account of the emotions as modifications of the mind's power.

The nineteenth century added the distinction between emotion and feeling in the modern sense, and the twentieth century produced the contemporary debate between feeling theories, cognitive theories, and appraisal theories surveyed in the SEP entry on emotion.

Key Arguments

The feeling theory holds that emotions are essentially felt experiences. Its difficulty is explaining why we group very different feelings under one emotion name, and how emotions can be about anything. The cognitive theory holds that emotions are essentially judgments or appraisals: to fear is to judge that danger is present. Its difficulty is explaining the felt, bodily dimension and cases where emotion and judgment diverge — fearing the plane even when you judge it safe.

The appraisal theory, influential in psychology and philosophy, treats emotions as evaluations of events relative to one's concerns. On this view, emotions are intelligent responses that track what matters to us. They can be assessed as fitting or unfitting: grief is fitting when something genuinely important is lost, unfitting when it is not.

Contemporary Relevance

The philosophy of emotion feeds directly into ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. If emotions are appraisals, then moral education is partly emotional education, and emotional intelligence is a genuine kind of understanding. The debate also informs discussions of artificial intelligence: whether a machine could have emotions depends on what emotions are.

This page is educational and philosophical. It does not diagnose or treat emotional difficulties; readers who need clinical support should consult qualified professionals.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Emotion".
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Emotions in the 18th and 19th Century".
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Theories of Emotion".
• Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton University Press, 1994), Part III.

Related Topics

Emotion connects to the mind and to ethics. See What Is the Philosophy of Emotion? for the field's central questions, Are Emotions Rational? for the rationality debate, and Stoicism and Emotions for the ancient view that emotions are judgments. The Philosophy of Emotion hub gathers the tradition.