Why I am an [Emotional] Agnostic.

Academics who argue about the emotions tend to get, well, rather emotional about it. 

They attach themselves to an emotional paradigm formed from their intellectual cultures, with nothing more, as far as I can tell, than  a feeling that it is the right idea. ‘Emotions are biological and natural’ cry neuroscientists while they scratch their heads about why they keep getting conflicting results from the Amygdala, Insular Cortex and so on. ‘No it is clearly a sociocultural construction and nurtured’ shout the anthropologists, as they try to hide those elements of emotions that do seem to be universal at some level or other behind the tangled brambles of theory.

Deep within this, perhaps the last vestige of the nature/nurture civil war within the social and biological sciences, are two uncomfortable truths. 

1. Their epistemic choices are almost always based upon their commitment to their formal education more than they are critical thinking and   

2. (and I this I think backs-up 1). The argument is too far from a consensus to call.

Most of us know our Ekman’s from our Panksepp’s, our Mead’s from our Lutz’s, our Reddy’s from our Rosenwien’s, our Affective Neuroscience from our Core Affect and our Melancholia from our Depression, and it seems to be necessary that we choose a side. But is it really?

Studying emotions is at its core scientific, and I do not think it is desirable to make assumptions about the data when we do not yet have enough of it. Both the nature and nurture sides make compelling cases, and both sides have compelling, well researched and potentially falsifiable  evidence to back up their positions. This would suggest that any comprehensive understanding of emotions will involve all of this data, not just one set or another.

Emotions are complex brutes. They may well have an objective reality: an evolved task to perform that is, or was, essential to the wellbeing of our species and the transmitting of our genes. Indeed, it is rather obtuse to suggest that these, what I like to call ‘affects’, are otherwise for humans when few would argue the case for other animal species. It is clear that these sensations also have culturally based intersubjective elements tied to causes, expected behaviours, moral codes and social hierarchies. These intersubjective elements, which I like to call ‘emotions’, no less constitute the overall emotional structure than does affect, and to call them simply window-dressing is like calling a formula one driver just an add on to the car. Finally, there is a subjective element; the best word for these, I believe, is ‘feelings’. Some things I find disgusting you will not; some things I get excited about you will not.  

Beyond this, it is hard to say what is right. It is just as likely that Russell’s core affect model is right as it is Gray’s model of emotional systems or Smith and Ellsworth’s eight dimensional model. They all work; they all don’t work. 

For those of us engaged in the humanities,  there is good news: it doesn’t matter. We can review textual, visual and material expressions of affects, emotions and feelings without needing a final explanation. We don’t even need to get into the nature/nurture debate as the stomping ground for most of us is in the intersubjective, with the objective scarcely to be found in the sources directly and the subjective, well, far too subjective. As a result,  we can take a step back and focus on how emotions shape, and are shaped by, groups of people.

For me, until we have more data and are closer to a consensus, anything other than emotional agnosticism would be intellectually dishonest.