Emotions and the limits of reason : the role of the imagination in explaining pathological emotions

Abstract

The principal aim of this thesis is to inquire into what causes emotional reactions. In particular I ask whether, or to what extent, singular emotional reactions are causally explained by the reasons given for them. I am particularly interested in the limits of rational explanations that people provide when they try to justify their emotions once confronted with criticism that their emotional reaction does not fit the situation in which they occur. I explore the possibility of such rational approaches and the extent to which they succeed or fail to explain emotions. My methodology in this inquiry consists in bringing three relatively isolated domains of philosophy to bear on each other: the philosophy of emotion, the philosophy of practical rationality, and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. I argue that the philosophical explanations available in the literature, of both rationally fitting emotions and non-rational emotions, rely much too heavily on rational capacities. Indeed reason is seen as a panacea for all one's emotional ills. In my thesis I offer two novel departures from the standard accounts: in the first place I offer a causal explanation of emotions in terms of distinctive imaginative capacities that are independent of reason. Drawing on Freudian insights I propose that "imaginative associations" play a crucial role in explaining both non-rational and rational emotions; secondly, I argue that reason is often the cause of our emotional pathologies and that overcoming the subtle rationalism in the tradition is an important advance in self-understanding. The "associative explanation" I propose belongs to the realm of singular causation and to the hitherto ignored category of the empirical-non-scientific. This, in turn, helps to explain the hopelessness of the controversy surrounding the status of psychoanalytic explanations and therapy. As my thesis shows, the question "Science or philosophy?" misses the solution that it is neither of these.