Emotions And The Self
EMOTIONS AND THE SELF
Much of the perplexity that motivates modern discussion of the
nature of mind derives indirectly from the striking success of
physical explanation. Not only has physics itself advanced at a
remarkable pace in the last four centuries; every hope has been
held out that, in principle, all science can be understood and
ultimately studied in terms of mechanisms proper to physics.
Seeing all natural phenomena as explicable in terms appropriate to
physics, however, makes the mental seem to be a singularity in
nature. Chemistry and biology may well be reducible to physics,
but the same seems hardly possible for the mental. The gulf
between mind and physics seems too great to bridge, and the success
of physics guarantees its standing. The place of mind in nature is
thereby rendered problematic. This line of reasoning has tempted
thinkers since Descartes to see the mind as not only independent of
other natural phenomena, but as even somehow lying outside the
natural order itself.
A variety of particular problems about how the mental fits
with the rest of nature have been widely discussed in recent years.
Less often noticed, however, is that similar problems appear to
affect our understanding of the concept of the self in relation to
the natural order. For something to be, or have, a self, two
conditions seem intuitively necessary. There must be some sort of
unity in the mental life of that being. In addition, to have or be
a self, one must be distinguishable from other beings, and in
particular from other beings of the same or of a relevantly similar
sort. Intuitively, nothing can be a self unless it functions in
some suitably unified way and unless there is a reasonably clear
contrast between it, considered as a self, and other...
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