โ Scribed by Annette C. Baier
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
According to Rent Descartes, the passions or passive states of the soul that are emotions, evaluative reactions to what we take our state to be, cannot, as sense perceptions can, mislead us, since they are "so close and so internal to the soul that it cannot possibly feel them unless they are truly as it feels them to be (elles sont si proches et si int~rieures ~ notre ~me qu'il est impossible qu'elle les sente, sans qu'elles soient vdritablement telles qu'elle les sent"). 1 But according to Sigmund Freud, "Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to be", 2 and our consciousness of mental processes is likened by him to our fallible sense perception of the external world. Where Descartes draws a contrast between consciousness of external objects and consciousness of our own thoughts and emotions, Freud draws an analogy.
Do we know what we feel? Do we know something, but not everything, about our feelings, just in virtue of their being ours? What do we automatically know, what may we have to find out about our own feelings with or without the aid of Freudian analysis? Are feelings known in the same way thoughts are, or are there interesting differences? Are there differences between how we get in touch with the feelings of other persons, and how we get in touch with their "cognitive processes"? I shall turn to Descartes, Freud, and then Darwin to get some answers about our understanding of our own and others' feelings, as compared with our understanding of thoughts. In the course of this investigation the very contrast between emotional and cognitive processes will however come under suspicion. As we realize the pervasiveness of "hot cognition" and "frozen affect", we may come to doubt that these categories of cognition and affect are the most helpful ones for understanding ourselves. I shall, however, begin by trying to work within Descartes' conceptual system, in which some "ideas" or "perceptions" are "tanquam rerum imagines", and their acceptance or rejection is part of our search for truth, while other "passions of the soul", passive modes of the conscious
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