Ondrej Svec
Ondřej Švec, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Charles University in Prague. He is completing a book called The Pragmatic Turn in Phenomenology and working as the co-editor of Jan Patočka’s Complete Works at the Czech Academy of Sciences. His publications include various articles on the relation of action to thought, pragmatic dislosure of Life-world, historical conditions of objectivity in sciences and French historical epistemology. He is the author of a French monograph entitled La phénoménologie des émotions, Lille, Presses universitaires de Septentrion, 2013 and the co-editor of Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology (with J. Capek), New York, Routledge, 2017.
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Books by Ondrej Svec
https://www.routledge.com/Pragmatic-Perspectives-in-Phenomenology/Svec-Capek/p/book/9781138210974
In the first two chapters, I present a genealogical account of this cleavage, which consists in treating separately the cognitive and the bodily processes underlying our emotional lives. First, I analyze in detail Descartes’ hesitation between two accounts of emotions: on the one hand, Descartes explains emotions as psychological states having their reasons; on the other hand, he accounts for them by their physiological causes. His attempt to achieve a holistic understanding of emotions in terms of body-mind interaction fails because of the incommensurability of the bodily and mental forces. In Spinoza’s naturalistic approach, emotions are analyzed in monist ontological framework, which means that they are neither specifically mental, nor specifically material. But even though the problem of body-mind interaction is solved by Spinoza’s monist ontology, it reappears on the epistemic level: we can explain emotions in terms of bodily processes, or we can causally connect them with other mental states such as believes, desires and judgments. This tendency to treat separately the physiological and psychological aspects of emotions persists up until now and constitutes not only the principal motive, but also the impasse of the current debates between cognitive and somatic theories.
In the chapter III, I analyze James’s proposal to view emotions as perceptions of bodily arousals. According to my interpretation, the main achievement of James is to acknowledge that emotions are neither some pure, intellectual states or judgments, nor something that happens only in our brain, but essentially embodied and dynamic states insofar as they are felt through our body as a whole. James’ most promising insights could thus open a new path for investigating emotion as exemplary form of embodied consciousness. Unfortunately, the major part of contemporary somatic theories dwelling upon James’ legacy are proposing only a one-sided interpretation of his theory: if emotions consist in perceptions of bodily states, then they are caused by bodily changes that are to be identified by neurobiological research. According to these approaches, pioneered by neuroscientists such as A. Damasio, J. Le Doux or J. Panksepp, the emotion research has to focus mostly on the physiological responses of organism to the changes in our environment. Intentional content, conscious experience and evaluative judgments are thus marginalized as byproducts of bodily processes, as something secondary to the cerebral nature of emotion.
In order to resist the reductionist tendency of such approaches while addressing several objections to the contemporary “affective neuroscience”, I show that objective differences found on the physiological level cannot explain the qualitative discrepancy between mere sensations (e.g. headache or hunger) and emotions, since only the latter can be assessed according to their appropriateness or incorrectness. This is because emotions, unlike feelings, involve implicit judgments of the changes in one’s relationship to the environment, as it is claimed by R. Lazarus, M. Nussbaum, R. Solomon, N. Frijda and other proponents of cognitive approach. Even though these “appraisal theories” accommodate much better than neurobiological approaches the intentional character of our emotional life, I criticize their tendency to consider emotions as intellectual process that can be analyzed separately from our bodily orientation in the world. Thus, after surveying the debate between cognitive and somatic theories, I claim that we are in the need of holistic theory of emotions that would reconcile both the intentionality of emotions and the bodily conditions of the emotional arousal.
In the chapter IV and V, after critical assessment of the main phenomenological insights into the nature and intentionality of emotions proposed by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, I defend my own thesis whose aim is to bridge the explanatory gap between the psychological and physiological accounts of emotions. My approach consists in treating emotions as specific ways of behaving: instead of reducing emotions to the results of objective process happening in our brains and instead of classifying them among other mental states, I propose, following Sartre’s suggestion, to apprehend emotion as a specific type of conduct. I also follow up Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of “the prejudice which makes inner realities out of love, hate or anger, leaving them accessible to one single witness” in order to consider emotions as “styles of conduct which are visible from the outside”. According to this anti-mental approach, emotional gestures, facial expressions and behaviors are not to be considered as secondary events succeeding to some primary and already existing psychic fact or brain state, but they are part of the emotions itself: the flight is thus constitutive of my fear as well as aggressive behavior and gestures are constitutive of my anger.
The previous claim helps to differentiate among the various categories of our affective life: moods provide a pre-reflexive evaluative background that forms a necessary condition for emotions to arise; passions differ from emotional conducts in that they include a specific form of self-justification which leads to the perpetuation of the same behavior; finally, feelings (sentiments) are to be distinguished from emotions insofar as they do not necessarily lead to actions; while the true nature of emotions is always revealed in relation to a certain goal. Adapting Merleau-Ponty´s claim about the relation between thought and speech, I argue that emotion tends toward its expression as towards its completion. In such a way, I prepare the answer to the question raised in the last section of the book: are emotions passive states or can they be considered as actions sui generis? If one consider the overwhelming force with which emotions sometimes take over our personality, and our usual impression of passivity in front of them, the previous claim equating emotions with conducts can seem at first glance as unwarranted. In response to such objections emphasizing the passivity of emotions, I claim that this apparent passivity is mostly the result of the social conditioning during our emotional education. The experience of passivity in front of emotions has thus to be explained in terms of social norms, customs and their influence on the way we are conducting our lives. But since the social norms themselves can be changed or challenged, so can be the manner in which we are using emotions as strategies to achieve our goals or as means to get a grip on the world.
Papers by Ondrej Svec
Mots clés : Histoire des émotions, régimes émotionnels, généalogie de la subjectivité, la structure narrative des émotions, intelligence émotionnelle
https://www.routledge.com/Pragmatic-Perspectives-in-Phenomenology/Svec-Capek/p/book/9781138210974
In the first two chapters, I present a genealogical account of this cleavage, which consists in treating separately the cognitive and the bodily processes underlying our emotional lives. First, I analyze in detail Descartes’ hesitation between two accounts of emotions: on the one hand, Descartes explains emotions as psychological states having their reasons; on the other hand, he accounts for them by their physiological causes. His attempt to achieve a holistic understanding of emotions in terms of body-mind interaction fails because of the incommensurability of the bodily and mental forces. In Spinoza’s naturalistic approach, emotions are analyzed in monist ontological framework, which means that they are neither specifically mental, nor specifically material. But even though the problem of body-mind interaction is solved by Spinoza’s monist ontology, it reappears on the epistemic level: we can explain emotions in terms of bodily processes, or we can causally connect them with other mental states such as believes, desires and judgments. This tendency to treat separately the physiological and psychological aspects of emotions persists up until now and constitutes not only the principal motive, but also the impasse of the current debates between cognitive and somatic theories.
In the chapter III, I analyze James’s proposal to view emotions as perceptions of bodily arousals. According to my interpretation, the main achievement of James is to acknowledge that emotions are neither some pure, intellectual states or judgments, nor something that happens only in our brain, but essentially embodied and dynamic states insofar as they are felt through our body as a whole. James’ most promising insights could thus open a new path for investigating emotion as exemplary form of embodied consciousness. Unfortunately, the major part of contemporary somatic theories dwelling upon James’ legacy are proposing only a one-sided interpretation of his theory: if emotions consist in perceptions of bodily states, then they are caused by bodily changes that are to be identified by neurobiological research. According to these approaches, pioneered by neuroscientists such as A. Damasio, J. Le Doux or J. Panksepp, the emotion research has to focus mostly on the physiological responses of organism to the changes in our environment. Intentional content, conscious experience and evaluative judgments are thus marginalized as byproducts of bodily processes, as something secondary to the cerebral nature of emotion.
In order to resist the reductionist tendency of such approaches while addressing several objections to the contemporary “affective neuroscience”, I show that objective differences found on the physiological level cannot explain the qualitative discrepancy between mere sensations (e.g. headache or hunger) and emotions, since only the latter can be assessed according to their appropriateness or incorrectness. This is because emotions, unlike feelings, involve implicit judgments of the changes in one’s relationship to the environment, as it is claimed by R. Lazarus, M. Nussbaum, R. Solomon, N. Frijda and other proponents of cognitive approach. Even though these “appraisal theories” accommodate much better than neurobiological approaches the intentional character of our emotional life, I criticize their tendency to consider emotions as intellectual process that can be analyzed separately from our bodily orientation in the world. Thus, after surveying the debate between cognitive and somatic theories, I claim that we are in the need of holistic theory of emotions that would reconcile both the intentionality of emotions and the bodily conditions of the emotional arousal.
In the chapter IV and V, after critical assessment of the main phenomenological insights into the nature and intentionality of emotions proposed by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, I defend my own thesis whose aim is to bridge the explanatory gap between the psychological and physiological accounts of emotions. My approach consists in treating emotions as specific ways of behaving: instead of reducing emotions to the results of objective process happening in our brains and instead of classifying them among other mental states, I propose, following Sartre’s suggestion, to apprehend emotion as a specific type of conduct. I also follow up Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of “the prejudice which makes inner realities out of love, hate or anger, leaving them accessible to one single witness” in order to consider emotions as “styles of conduct which are visible from the outside”. According to this anti-mental approach, emotional gestures, facial expressions and behaviors are not to be considered as secondary events succeeding to some primary and already existing psychic fact or brain state, but they are part of the emotions itself: the flight is thus constitutive of my fear as well as aggressive behavior and gestures are constitutive of my anger.
The previous claim helps to differentiate among the various categories of our affective life: moods provide a pre-reflexive evaluative background that forms a necessary condition for emotions to arise; passions differ from emotional conducts in that they include a specific form of self-justification which leads to the perpetuation of the same behavior; finally, feelings (sentiments) are to be distinguished from emotions insofar as they do not necessarily lead to actions; while the true nature of emotions is always revealed in relation to a certain goal. Adapting Merleau-Ponty´s claim about the relation between thought and speech, I argue that emotion tends toward its expression as towards its completion. In such a way, I prepare the answer to the question raised in the last section of the book: are emotions passive states or can they be considered as actions sui generis? If one consider the overwhelming force with which emotions sometimes take over our personality, and our usual impression of passivity in front of them, the previous claim equating emotions with conducts can seem at first glance as unwarranted. In response to such objections emphasizing the passivity of emotions, I claim that this apparent passivity is mostly the result of the social conditioning during our emotional education. The experience of passivity in front of emotions has thus to be explained in terms of social norms, customs and their influence on the way we are conducting our lives. But since the social norms themselves can be changed or challenged, so can be the manner in which we are using emotions as strategies to achieve our goals or as means to get a grip on the world.
Mots clés : Histoire des émotions, régimes émotionnels, généalogie de la subjectivité, la structure narrative des émotions, intelligence émotionnelle
For more information, see the conference website:
https://identity.ff.cuni.cz/conferences/phenomenology-and-personal-identity-ii-november-2019/
For more information, see the conference website:
https://identity.ff.cuni.cz/conferences/phenomenology-and-personal-identity/
if this enduring period allows you spare some time for reading, you might want to give a look to the freely and fully accessible contents of „Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology” that we have edited with Jakub Čapek.
The free of charge access is available for six days. Then there is an opportunity to purchase the eBook for £10/$15. Here are the links to the offer:
https://tfstore.kortext.com/pragmatic-perspectives-in-phenomenology-225496 (EPUB version)
https://tfstore.kortext.com/pragmatic-perspectives-in-phenomenology-223022 (PDF version)
Take care and stay safe,
Ondřej Š.