I am currently reading a masterful biography on Johann Wolfgang Goethe. I am continuously shocked at the level of insight into the human condition of many of Goethe's statements, poems, and novels. After sampling even a small portion of his works, readers often grasp much better this statement of one of Goethe's contemporaries: "Most people have only one soul. Goethe has a hundred." Recently, one episode from Goethe's life and his biographer's paraphrase of its philosophical import struck my own experience regarding the nature of emotion. I quote a section from the biography:
"With his sudden insight into what he had done to Friederike, and the hideous caricature of its moral implications being daily impressed on him, there began for Goethe what his autobiography calls a period of 'sombre remorse'; 'here for the first time I was guilty'. With the admission of a guilt that could not be remedied, or even alleviated, Goethe entered territory hitherto unknown to the moral sensibility of the rationalist enlightenment, for which sensual desires were but an obscure form of rational desires, disappointment an obscure form of fulfilment, and the only ultimate evil temporary misunderstanding. This was not how love affairs ended for the Swedish Countess or MIss Sara Sampson. On the other hand, Goethe had now consciously detached himself from the Christian Savior who atoned for irremediable guilt of helpless men. Goethe was now alone, and in the darkness he had to find his own way." (Boyle 106)
To put simply the thought I have had recently, which the above quote puts so well, is that emotion defies reason and rational explanation. By 'reason' I mean that which is understandable, demonstrable, balanced, and proportionate to the goal or end we have in mind. In context, this passage is referring to Goethe's realization that the emotion aroused by his negligent comportment towards a woman caused pain that could not be explained away. More generally, the desires he also felt in this period for women who could never be his, did not lend themselves to being understood or being soothed by rational thought. Emotion suddenly presented itself as maniacal and irrational to Goethe. In The Sorrows of the Young Werther--the book that transformed him into a literary superstar almost overnight and which is loosely autobiographical in nature--Goethe tells the tale of a young man whose overly sentimental nature leads him to kill himself when his desires for a woman cannot be fulfilled as she is betrothed to another man. Irrational seems to be the perfect word to describe an overpowering impulse that disregards one's own life, others, and the means to achieve the end.
On one hand, when we use the word emotion, we imply exactly that side of us which is not rational. My entry may thus seem a bit banal in that I simply point this fact out. But, as Enlightenment philosophy demonstrates, people often conceptualize emotion in exactly rational terms. Our notion of morality often rests on this idea. It is very common since the Enlightenment to think of emotion as something God or nature endows us with in order to achieve its ends. Our sex drive, hunger, thirst, sociability, drive to compete. We may tend to think that our emotions work in harmony with very rational ends. If this were true, we would find that our desires tailor themselves to our needs: when we have satisfied ourselves or come up against a situation that is impossible or against "nature" then it should follow that our desires let up a bit. This is often true, but often not. First, the intensity and amount of emotion is often not commensurate with what any rational standard of what might be need to satisfy the desire. I just read a story in Ovid's Metamorphoses where a young boy, Cyparissus, accidentally kills his beloved fawn, and then desires to die as his grief is so great. The God Phoebus counsels him that "his grief should be moderate, in proportion to its cause". I am sure that others can identify with this, but I often find that my emotions/desires seem to go far beyond what is seemingly justified.
Second, I feel that emotion deserves the title of "irrational" as it often seems to not follow the course that nature has set out for it. One of the major themes in classical literature such as Euripides and Ovid is the notion of "pathological love" i.e., love for someone you should not love (siblings, parents, same-sex attraction) or love that seems to be overpowering where no will is involved. We often try to come up with words such as "aberration", "defect", etc. to explain those desires that go against nature, but we would do well to simply accept the notion that "aberration" and boundless emotion are just as "natural" (if we mean what spontaneously occurs) as those desires that have clear, beneficial ends.
I have a lot more thoughts on this topic such as the role of rationality, the attitude we should take toward emotion, and some thoughts on what ultimately determines action, but I believe I will save that for another post as this one is getting long.
