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Dylan Evans (2019), Emotion: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edition, Oxford
University Press, xix + 116 pages, ISBN: 9780198834403, $11.95 (Paperback).
More than fifteen years have elapsed since the first edition of Dylan Evans’s
book, which was originally subtitled “The Science of Sentiment” before being
adopted into the “Oxford Very Short Introductions” series. As we shall see, the
original subtitle indicates an emphasis that the author pursues to the exclusion of other voices in interdisciplinary research on emotion, and he largely
fails to fulfill the promise of incorporating the “great deal” of “new developments” that have taken place in emotion research since this book’s first edition
was published (xv).
However, before saying anything else about its main shortcomings, we
should applaud the author’s good intentions. Evans aims to defend what he
calls a “positive view” of emotions, one that looks favorably on the epistemic
value of emotion: as he claims at one point, “Not only are there passions within reason, but there are reasons within passion” (96). Notice how this claim
identifies emotions themselves as potentially rational and insightful, capable
of revealing something that is the case. Accordingly, he argues: “If sadness is
about loss, the most painful losses involve people rather than things: the moment when a child leaves home, the betrayal of a friendship, the death of a
partner” (45). Sadness therefore has an intentional content, though Evans does
not phrase it this way. He adds that “if we walk down a dark alley late at night,
an anxious mood leads us to scan the shadows for signs of movement. In this
situation, anxiety is clearly a [helpful] thing” (64). What he seems to be arguing
here is that a generalized affective alertness to signs of danger, in what seems
like a potentially dangerous situation, is a valuable mode of cognitive awareness. He makes similar remarks about such emotions as anger, fear, and love.
Likewise, it is lucky that we have the capacity for disgust because it prevents us
from consuming rotten food or worse (38).
The way in which emotions can disclose meaningful features of the world,
and how we ought to conceptualize this disclosive ability—including its cognitive, perceptual, and embodied aspects—have been debated at length and
in intricate detail in philosophical psychology. Yet in Emotion: A Very Short
Introduction Evans, despite being trained in philosophy, omits reference to a
lion’s share of the foremost authors and texts in this field of inquiry. By using
chapter titles such as “The Head and the Heart,” he betrays a bias that would
elicit speechless stupefaction if it were presented to an audience up to date
on philosophical theories of emotion. Evans shows little or no knowledge of
either conceptual analysis or phenomenology, instead making appeals to “evolutionary theory and neuroscience” (21) time and time again.
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The thesis Dylan Evans most frequently defends, throughout the book, is
not that the emotions can be reasonable but that emotion and reason—
conceived of as separate—need to be balanced or mixed together in some unspecified manner. So he asserts that “the positive view of emotions does not
hold that emotions are always useful. Rather, it maintains that the best recipe
for success is a mixture of reason and emotion” (21). Take note of how usefulness
and success are upheld as ideals. Emotions are of merely instrumental value,
Evans maintains. Most troubling is the dichotomy that he postulates again
here: “I do not believe that emotions are fundamentally at odds with reason,
nor that we should always follow our hearts rather than our heads.” Instead,
Evans writes, “I believe that intelligent action results from a harmonious blend
of emotion and reason” (xvi). Sometimes, emotions can rescue “pure reason
from itself,” but at other times “the emotional biases of individuals” ought to
“cancel each other out” at the group level, “leaving pure reason to emerge as
the exclusive basis for judgment” (97, 73). As if reporting on a statistical survey,
he claims that his view remains “positive” because the latter instances are less
common than the former: of the “two distinct mental faculties,” it is “hot” emotion rather than “cool” reason that is more frequently insightful (96–98). Why
these two faculties ought to be categorically distinguished is never explained;
that they are discrete is unquestioned. Instead of learning from Stoicism that
emotions can be seen as cognitions, or judgments of value, Evans attributes
to the Stoics a version of his own view, that thought can influence emotion
and emotion influence thought (47). This is neither historically accurate nor
informed by a sophisticated acquaintance with current theories of emotion.
“Emotionally intelligent people,” on Evans’s account, are not those whose
emotions are intelligent but those who can strike “a balance between emotion and reason in which neither is completely in control” (36). Emotional
intelligence is therefore reduced to emotion regulation, just as the worth of
emotions is reduced to promoting behaviors that are conducive to survival.
That the value of emotions is thought of in instrumental terms concerning
the goal of biological survival is the normative assumption of the book, the
background against which the questions arise in the first place and according
to which the realm of possible answers is structured ahead of time. This might
explain, though not justify, Evans’s excessive reliance on empirical research
and the conviction that evolutionary biology and neuroscience provide nearly
all the solutions to the problems of emotion research. The question, “What
is an emotion?,” is equally treated as a solely empirical affair; the same goes
for the issue of whether a computer can have loving relationships. In order
to resolve these questions, Evans discusses psychological questionnaires and
self-reports and appeals to a few facts of neuroanatomy. When he discusses
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the reasons why guilt, love, and revenge evolved, he speculates on the basis of
results from some empirical researchers and speculations by an economist.
The reasons mentioned are all egoistic, serving the function of gaining profit
from situations. An illustration of how thin is the basis for many of Evans’s
claims is his citation of economist Robert Frank, who “argues that it is advantageous to have the capacity for guilt because people who are known to have
a conscience are more likely to be trusted by others” (29). Not only does this
presuppose a questionable mechanistic and egoistic concept of the human
being, it also lacks the due diligence that should be involved in quoting scientific work, as Evans cites only a summary of Frank’s views—from his 1988
book Passions within Reason—in a chapter of Steven Pinker’s popular book
from 1997.
In a similar manner, to approach the question, “How to be happy?,” Evans
discusses a database of psychologists with self-reports of what makes people
happy. The reader learns such trivialities as “there is more to a happy life than
simply avoiding pain and hunger” (43) or “losing a lot of money will make you
sad but losing a loved one will make you even sadder” (45). The text takes on
the character of a “how-to” manual and misses a serious engagement with the
phenomenon as well as the concept of happiness, its causes, its cultural basis,
and a critical assessment of the contingency of the objects we are presumably happy about. Once again, in the end, he assumes that anything can be
explained in terms of evolution: thus, “the reason that falling in love makes us
happy is that those of our ancestors who liked falling in love were more likely to
pass on their genes than those who preferred solitude” (45–46). When it comes
to happiness, it seems that the development of technology changed things.
Thus, Evans investigates certain so-called “technologies of mood” in their role
to “short-circuit the routes to happiness” (46). These include language, sensory input—in terms of color, sound and touch—as well as drugs, chemicals,
or food. How this topic is approached by Evans is made clear in the following passage: “Cottage cheese and chicken liver … both contain high levels of
tryptophan, which the brain uses to make a chemical called serotonin, which
in turn is associated with good moods” (57). The extensive recent literature
about the situatedness of emotions, and how the environment scaffolds affective phenomena so to allow certain emotions to be felt and others prevented, is
outright ignored. So too is philosophical research that draws on psychiatry for
the sake of comprehending mood. One of the new paragraphs of this revised
edition is a two-page account of film and its impact on emotions. Here again,
Evans demonstrates his blind faith in empirical research by claiming that if
we learn more about film as a “technology of mood” then we can help studios
to make better movies (61). Although he is aware of explicit propaganda films
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and the usage of a good knowledge of manipulation of emotions for morally
contestable purposes, he does not mention that by appealing to emotions in
very specific ways movies and the whole Hollywood industry per se produce
narratives that shape the sense-making activities of humans in general—and
in a deeper, more encompassing way than propaganda films. This rather naïve
approach to urgent contemporary problems concerning the place of emotions
in democratic societies is also reflected in his comment on the current political
climate. He notes that, “at the time of writing, at the end of the second decade
of the 21st century, intolerance and prejudice are on the rise” (78). He correctly
diagnoses a dangerous growth in nationalism and racism, and points out the
unbearable treatment of refugees. In the face of such serious issues, we find
it simplistic to make an appeal for more empathy, which allegedly “makes us
mindful of our commonality and connection with fellow humans the world
over” (78). While well-intended, this ignores the complex role of emotions, for
better and for worse, in the political realm. Added to the end of his chapter
as a brief afterthought, Evans’s comments completely fail to engage with the
relevant literature on political emotions.
In addition to some illuminating but all-too-brief references to Adam Smith,
and to Aristotle’s Poetics as interpreted by Martha Nussbaum (43–44, 49–52),
one of the few places where Evans explicitly discusses philosophical work is
in a criticism of the Chinese room thought experiment by John Searle as a
counterargument to the claim that robots can be conscious. He grants that,
“at the beginning of the 21st century, no one really has much of an idea about
what consciousness really is,” and points to “the lack of good ideas about consciousness” and “the lack of agreement about how to investigate it” (90). And
yet, on the following page Evans says that “the problem with these thoughtexperiments is that … there is too much thought and not enough experiment…. We would be better off proceeding more experimentally,” for “we will
only really know whether or not machines can be conscious by trying to build a
conscious machine” (91). Evans apparently cannot imagine that there are other
modes of argumentation and other paths to insight besides drawing on experimental studies carried out by the empirical sciences. The lack of a criterion for
what qualifies as consciousness does not bother him. We are tempted to invert
his assertion and maintain that his book contains too much experiment and
not enough thought. A quick look at any of the most prominent collections of
essays in the philosophy of emotion that have appeared over the past two decades will show how woefully unaware Evans is of almost everyone who is currently working in this area, which—to state the obvious—ought to be relevant
to a philosophically educated author writing about emotion.
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The job of a philosopher examining the emotions goes beyond reporting in
journalistic fashion on scientific findings and pseudo-scientific speculations,
for instance about the mating patterns of our distant ancestors or the prospect
of having terrific sex with robots one day (85–86). Our only reason for hesitating to claim that Evans’s book contains “too much experiment” is that his news
reports on scientific research are often out of date. He leans heavily on Joseph
LeDoux’s work from the nineties, neglecting LeDoux’s research from the past
two decades, all the while citing a 1973 Paul MacLean text about the brain that
Evans is quite alone in regarding as a “classic treatise” (27, 102). Moreover, he
cites none of the more than five books by brain scientist Edmund Rolls—all of
them critical of LeDoux—that have been published since the first edition of
Emotion. Nor does Evans note that, beginning with two 2014 articles in Cortex
and Emotion Review, LeDoux himself has significantly changed his own theory,
abandoning some of the views that are attributed to him in Evans’s revised
edition. According to the latest research, it is probably untrue that, “in many
mammals, fear is processed simultaneously by two neural pathways, one subcortical and the other largely cortical” (94; see also 12, 22), the former “quick
and dirty” and the latter “slow” (72). Evans’s habit of asserting such contested,
and arguably outmoded, theoretical positions as established facts is a serious
failing. It is not acceptable, in our judgment, for the second edition of a supposedly authoritative book to disregard research that has come into print since
the first edition. Just to mention one of numerous other missed opportunities
to revise, an erroneous use of the term “synaesthesia”—which bluntly clashes
with its dictionary definition, and dates its coinage to almost a century before the word’s first actual use—is preserved from the first edition (60–61).
Respecting the difficulty of the task of explaining the nature of emotion in a
hundred pages, we must nonetheless conclude that the author, and his editors,
have not adequately done their homework.
Some readers who are new to the topic of emotion may be prompted by the
volume under review to take a greater interest in this fascinating domain of
research. Those who are already immersed in the study of emotions are likely
to find some references made by Evans that they had not known about and
that are worth looking into further. Yet the main outcome of the book is to
exemplify and endorse biases that are widespread, although held more often
by the “man on the street” than by an emotion researcher such as Evans himself. From a series of introductory texts as prominent as the one in which this
book is included, we as readers have every reason to have high expectations:
against this background, Evans’s book is a letdown. We can only hope that the
revised edition of Emotion: A Very Short Introduction prompts someone else in
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the philosophy of emotion to create a better introductory text—which might
serve as an antidote to this one, and thus “technologically” leave us in a happier
mood. In all seriousness, though, if the perspective that Dylan Evans represents were just an anomaly, it would be easier to brush it aside. What his book
instructively indicates is how widespread materialistic biases continue to be,
even within philosophical psychology.
Imke von Maur
Osnabrück University, Institute of Cognitive Science, Germany
imke.von.maur@uni-osnabrueck.de
Rick Anthony Furtak
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Colorado College, CO, USA
rfurtak@coloradocollege.edu
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