The main thing which stroke me when I started working on the theory of emotions in Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta is that emotions can be useful and are not to be avoided. In other words, unlike some Sāṅkhya-Yoga philosophers, the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta authors do not think that one should aim at some form of ataraxìa. Why not? Because one needs emotions in order to start one’s path towards the good. Moreover, emotions are not just useful as preliminary steps, insofar as emotions are present also in the liberated state (again, unlike in the Sāṅkhya, Yoga and also Nyāya and Buddhist Theravāda schools).
This does not mean that all emotions are necessarily good. The emotions which are praised are, chronologically speaking, dejection and desperation and then confidence, love (ranging from friendship to passion and awe) and possibly compassion.
Dejection and the absolute desperation in one’s ability to improve one’s condition are absolutely needed at the start of one’s spiritual path. In fact, as long as one thinks to be able to achieve something, no matter how small, one is unconsciously doubting God’s omnipotence and locating oneself above Him. Paradoxically, one’s extreme dejection and the feeling that one will never be saved, since one is not even worthy of begging God for help, are therefore the preliminary step for God’s grace to take place. One’s feeling of extreme distance from God is therefore way closer to Him than the self-conscious confidence of a person who were to think that they are a good Vaiṣṇava.
Once God’s grace has touched one, one feels blissed and joyfully responds to God’s grace with an emotional overflow of confidence and of love. The hymns of the Āḻvārs, which have been recognised as being as authoritative as the Veda for Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, display a vast array of love. One can love God with maternal love (vātsalya), looking at Him as if he were the young Kṛṣṇa. One could also love God with admiration, looking at Him as the ideal king Rāma, and so on. This vast array is less variegated in the reflections of the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta philosophers, who rather focus on their feeling of reverence and awe for God. For instance, Tamil and Maṇipravāḷa texts insist on one’s being a slave (aṭiyēṉ) of God.
The interesting element here is that this feeling is not instrumental to the achievement of God’s favour. One does not present oneself as a slave in order to secure God’s favour and then be able to raise to a higher status. By contrast, one’s ideal condition, the liberated state one strives to reach is exactly permanent servitude (as described in Veṅkaṭanātha’s Rahasyatrayasāra).
“Are emotions proto-cognitive acts?” Is a good rhetorical question. The Principles of Neural Science, Fifth Edition (commonly referred to by neuroscientists and neurologists as “Kendell and Schwartz”) defines emotions as a valenced response by an organism that lasts in the time scale of up to hours, generally up to 4 in humans. The emotional responses can be measured by Sympathetic Skin Response, heart rate, respiratory rate, and epinephrine levels in the blood, to name a few. Reflexes are instantaneous responses in the timescale of less a few seconds or less and higher cognitive responses can occur over time scale of a lifetime. Emotions are distinguished from “feelings” which are the organism’s conscious perception of their emotional states. Using the terms Emotions and Feelings interchangeably creates confusion.
Emotions can by mapped as motivation towards approach or withdrawal on one axis or those which produce a positive or negative “feeling” on another axis. They can also be classified as basic or complex. When the emotions are in response to internal state of the self, these are referred to as basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, afraid, disgust, and surprise) and they generally have unique universal facial response which can be generally recognized across cultures and races. Complex emotions are in response to the calculated states of others in relation to the internal state of the self and this makes them difficult to read and predict Complex emotions are variable from culture to culture. All emotional responses can be modified by training.
From the perspective of evolutionary biology, emotions are there to engage the motivational system of an organism for survival. The decisions are made fast for “fight or flight”. Emotions are not underdeveloped in any sense. The misplaced response in the modern context occurs because a “mean boss” is mentally misrepresented as a “tiger”. Clearly an emotional state causes perturbation in the mind, and for a very good reason. According to this framework, the “self” cannot be disentangled from “emotion”. The “self” can to some extent be trained to observe (Feel) the basic “emotions” without reacting volitionally. Complex emotions, on the other hand, require the mental reconstruction of external minds (minds of others) in relation to the self-modal. Here the potential number of emotional-response permutations can be too numerous to pin down by any simple modal. This would explain the inability of Mimamsa to deal with complex emotions. It is very interesting to note that people actually thought about all of this more than 2 thousand years ago!
Thank you, Salil. A few thoughts:
1. Methodologically speaking, your answer sounds too self-confident, as if you were not describing a philosophical interpretation of neuro-scientific data, but telling the “plain truth”. William Seager and various others have worked on how consciousness still largely escapes the physicalist reductionism. This does not mean that you are not right, you probably are, but please let us not forget that scientific explanations are theories, not reality.
2. I am not sure whence you determine the Mīmāṃsā “inability to deal with complex emotions”. Could you elaborate on that?
3. For a South Asian discussion of basic emotions, one can look at the Nāṭyaśāstra, its commentary by Abhinavagupta and the various literature which followed these texts. There, too, nine basic emotions are recognised and connected to subordinate and mixed ones, to their bodily effects, to the elements provoking them etc.
Absolutely, there is a lot we do not know. My apologies for sounding confident about the scientific framework of emotions. They seem robust enough for me to discuss them with confidence. Thanks to the great work of all the neurophysiologists, neurosurgeons, and other contributors to the biological neurosciences.
There was an error on my part. I was simply expounding on your statement – “This vast array is less variegated in the reflections of the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta philosophers, who rather focus on their feeling of reverence and awe for God. For instance, Tamil and Maṇipravāḷa texts insist on one’s being a slave (aṭiyēṉ) of God.” I did not mean to write Mimamsa. This statement was made about any general attempt to pin down all (shades and varieties of) complex emotions. That is simply because complex emotions result from the mental interaction of two separate mental representations (1) self-representation of one’s own mind and (2) the mental representation of the external mind (God in your case of discussion). Basic emotions, unlike complex emotions, on the other hand require only a single representation (the self-representation).
Regarding number 3, I have described the distinction between complex and basic emotions on the basis of self-modal and modal of other-minds. When the mental state is restricted to only the self-modal, basic emotion arises. Whenever there is a time for self-modal plus another mental representation to evoke emotion, complex emotions can arises. When I confront a tiger in the open jungle, I am not representing it’s mental state. I do not have time to do that. I am simply activating my mental state of the potential of becoming “tiger-food”. I deploy the flight instinct out of fear. On the other hand, complex emotions arise within me when I see a caged tiger. Here I have the time to deploy complex emotions where I bring forth my mental representation as well as the mental representation of the caged-tiger’s mind. Facial expression of a person running away from a tiger is universal, cannot be mistaken, and is thus a result of simple emotion. On the other hand, it would be difficult to pin-down my emotions without engaging me in a conversation by asking “so how do you feel about the caged-tiger”? I hope that makes it clearer.