Dewey's Rejection of the Emotion/Expression Distinction

Abstract

organism in nature, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy". 1 More specifically, Dewey appropriates Darwin's naturalistic portrayal of emotions as reflected in bodily habits, or still-developing habits, oriented toward some practical end. For Dewey-following Darwin-emotions are aspects of ongoing patterns of action through which an organism successfully negotiates its biosocial world. This is their adaptive utility. 2 Dewey argues further that this agentive characterization of emotions, as we might term it, helps clarify their intentional character. Emotions involve an orientation or attitude toward some object or state of affairs: "[T]he full emotional experience…is always "about" or "toward" something; it is "at" or "on account of" something, and this prepositional reference is an integral phase of the single pulse of emotion". 3 Their teleological mooring is what distinguishes emotions from free-floating affect. For Dewey, emotions are thus both directed toward, and responsive to, features of the environment. Accordingly, highlighting the agentive and intentional character of emotions, Dewey insists, helps account both for the rationality of the behaviors associated with them as well as their capacity to further individual and communal life (i.e., their evolutionary significance) (Cunningham 1995, 866). As Dewey puts it-again following Darwin-emotional behaviors have been selected in virtue of their usefulness not merely for expressing felt experiences but rather for their utility "qua acts-as serving life", that is, as acts that have proven useful in the larger struggle for survival. 4 Emotions are in this way part and parcel of our situated agency.Despite this positive appropriation, Dewey nevertheless rejects parts of Darwin's theory.Specifically, Dewey rejects Darwin's serial characterization of "the relation of emotion to organic peripheral action [i.e., expression], in that it assumes the former as prior and the latter as secondary". 5According to Darwin, the emotion itself-its affective core, its felt aspect-exists antecedently to and independently from its behavioral expression. While bodily habits and specific behaviors reflect emotions, they are not, strictly speaking, parts of the emotions they reflect. Accordingly, emotions are

A shared neural network for emotional expression and perception: an anatomical study in the macaque monkey

“…Together with our previous ICMS studies, we provide evidence for an alternative perspective in which the insula both processes incoming emotional cues and plays an active role in producing an appropriate emotional motor output. Our work offers data to substantiate a traditional account of emotion (Dewey, 1894 , 1895 ) while incorporating hypotheses put forward by recent theoretical studies proposing an embodied and enactive account of emotions (Caruana and Gallese, 2012 ; Krueger, 2014 ).…”

Reconciliatory Empathy Amidst Wild Emotions

“…of emotion that is being verified in current research. 6 Reconstructing work on emotions by Darwin, James, and Mead, Dewey rejects the notion that emotions can be understood as internal to individual agents. Instead, they are a complex hybrid of internal cognitive and physical processes that are also transactions with our surrounding environments.…”

“…For Dewey, "emotions are aspects of ongoing patterns of action through which an organism successfully negotiates its biosocial world." 7 Furthermore, emotions are intentional in that they are directed at something, and it is important to stress, they involve cognition: 8 "[T]he full emotional experience ... is always 'about' or 'toward' something; it is 'at' or 'on account of ' something, and this prepositional reference is an integral phase of the single pulse of emotion." 9 Dewey argues that we don't truly feel singular emotions, thus, "experience is emotional but there are no separate things called emotions in it."…”

“…… it must be given with an affective valence in order to explain how it is that we respond to it the way that we do." 15 For example, when people of Color express emotion or even counter-narratives to dominant understandings of race, they are often read by whites as angry and dangerous, and the white emotional reaction to people of Color is informed by the racial stories that whites inherit and bring into the encounter. of emotions, Sara Ahmed's discussion of disgust and its relationship to power and issues such as sexuality and race is spot on here: "Emotions are not simply something 'I' or 'we' have.…”