¿Qué son las emociones? ¿Para qué sirven?

Emotion and Psyche

by Marc Jackson

Winchester, UK/Washington, USA: O-books, 2010

Reviewed by María G. Navarro

Emotion and Psyche is a really exciting book. In just 47 pages, Marc Jackson gets to define what is an emotion, what emotion categories can be established, when an action represents an emotional conflict, why some people tend to keep memories of certain events while others forget them, and so on. Emotion and Psyche is a reflection on the nature of emotions. But it is much more. The author does not only question the meaning of emotions in our affective life, he presents an audacious thesis that describes the intricate and complex relationship between emotional life, cognition, and psyche in a broad sense.

But there is another reason, more simple and immediate, why reading this book is a useful and positive experience since its first pages: emotions are presented as an exciting experience that we all have access to and that do not determine us.

We are not only passive subjects, but active ones when it has to do with our emotions. It is not only that we experience emotions, we can learn from them. Moreover, in all our learning process, while we memorize, in all the relationships we establish with the immediate or distant people, and even in the ones we have with objects, the emotional dimension is a constant we are not always aware of. “Experience shows that we experience everything with the emotions. Our knowledge, our daily lives, our interactions with things and people are conducted with what this work calls emotion” (p. 46).

Could we be happier, smarter, wiser or simply better people from the ethical point of view if we learned more about these vital signs in everyone’s life which we call ‘emotion’? The answer is ‘yes’.

In my opinion, one of the most interesting chapters is the one dedicated to Ethics (pp. 58-61). The most elementary definitions concerning the concepts of our emotional life lead to a transcendent matter: could we act better if we learned more about our emotions, about their dimension and limitations. Being these limitations the result of the fact that emotions are not easy to discern or distinguish one from another, as we usually do not experience any of them separately.

The author presents a clear ethics in relation with this: “This ethics is based on building up good emotions no matter what we do. Nor is ethics about motivating actions with goodness but about the amount of good emotion we have in us, not what it motivates us to do” (p. 61). Emotions such as Tranquillity, Self-Control, Non-Delusion or Passivity are critical from an ethical point of view, because they could help us to the task of discerning the morally and emotionally mature action much better.

Inevitably, emotions are present in our lives, and they always will, but they will not determine us. This means that political life, community life, have to be seen from the point of view of emotions (the individual and collective ones). In this sense, the book concludes with four Chapters dealing with political philosophy in the traditional sense of the term: last four Chapters deal with Solidarity, Freedom, Ethics, and Anarchist Communism respectively. These Chapters contain important insights but they should have been more developed. In my opinion it would be advisable to contrast Marc Jackson’s thesis with the great paradigms of political philosophy. The chapters devoted to analyzing emotions, human psychology and its influence of community life are, without no doubt, the better informed in this book.

The author explains that the emotional life of a person changes during his life. He states that the most common emotions (fear, anxiety, sadness, for example) do not necessarily determine the individual, even if they are experienced for a considerable period of time or even in traumatic circumstances. Throughout several chapters Jackson explains why we are not determined to reproduce the emotional life of our parents or that of the ones we have lived with for an important period of time (pp. 19-44).

In many cases the author acts as a friendly teacher who simply gives some lessons on life: “The emotion which is too strong to meditate away can thereby be controlled by reducing its triggers so that things do not stimulate it to that strong level” (p. 55).

The book is clearly written in a nearby, accessible, well-structured style. Chapters are short and answer specific questions. This leads to some basic definitions with which the author enriches the discourse of the book. In many cases the definitions and concepts the author refers to are related to our daily life or even with our moral aspirations as human beings.

The ability to connect with readers is a rare virtue, especially when it comes to writing about topics that we all have life experiences of. That connection is also a cognitive skill with an emotional effect: to empathize with a general reader, and unknown person, in order to finally introduce him in an authentic treatise on the nature of emotions. This fact reveals much about the psychology of human being, and it even represents an evidence about the emotional foundations of cognition.
María G. Navarro. Metapsychology Online Reviews, Aug 23rd 2011 (Volume 15, Issue 34)