Emotions

Emotions are automatic responses to a person's stored value-judgments about what he is perceiving or contemplating. Objectivism holds that they are neither primaries nor a means of knowledge, but consequences of ideas the person already holds — which is why they are experienced as involuntary while still being, in the long run, within his control.

“An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions — provided he observes their proper relationship.”
   ~ Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist Ethics", The Virtue of Selfishness

How an emotion is produced

The Objectivist account has two steps, and both are needed.

1. Identification. Before a person can react to something, he must have some idea of what it is. This is the work of perception and reason.
2. Evaluation. Given the identification, a stored judgment fires: this is good for me, this threatens me, this is nothing to me. The emotion is the form in which that judgment is experienced, together with its physical accompaniment.

Consider three men watching a fourth sit in a room. One knows him as his brother and feels affection; one has never seen him and feels nothing; one knows him as his wife's killer and feels rage. The perceptual object is identical for all three. What differs is the knowledge each brings and the evaluation it supports. The emotion is doing no perceiving of its own.

The evaluation is normally not conscious at the moment. It has been made, sometimes years earlier and sometimes by default, and is applied instantly, which is why emotions feel like direct perceptions of value. See Value and Objectivity.

Why they cannot be a means of knowledge

If an emotion is the output of previously accepted premises, then consulting it tells a person what he has already concluded, not whether the conclusion is true. Treating a feeling as evidence is therefore circular: it returns the input.

This is not a dismissal. Objectivism holds emotions to be indispensable — they are the form in which a person experiences his own life, and happiness is the emotional state that accompanies achieving his values. What is denied is a specific epistemological role. Emotions report; they do not validate. See Reason-Emotion Dichotomy.

Two failure modes follow, and Objectivism rejects both:

• Emotionalism, acting on feeling as if it were knowledge, which Rand called whim-worship. See Subjectivism.
• Repression, treating emotions as an enemy to be suppressed, which does not remove the premises generating them and destroys a man's access to his own state.

The alternative to both is introspection: when an emotion seems unwarranted, identify the judgment producing it and check that judgment against the facts.

Changing them

Because emotions follow from premises, they can be changed by changing the premises — but not by decree, and not quickly. A man who has genuinely revised a conviction will find his reactions catching up over time, sometimes long after he has stopped believing the thing consciously. The lag is normal and is not evidence that the reasoning failed.

This is the sense in which Rand held that a man is "a being of self-made soul": his emotional makeup is the accumulated result of choices about what to think, not an inheritance. See Volition and Self-esteem.

Common misunderstandings

• That Objectivism tells people to suppress their feelings. It says the opposite. Repression is treated as a serious error, and the recommended response to an unexplained emotion is to examine it rather than to override it.
• That "emotions are not tools of cognition" means they are unimportant. The claim is about what emotions can prove, not about what they are worth. A life without them would be a life without any experience of one's own values.
• That a person can simply decide to feel differently. Direct volitional control over an emotion is exactly what the theory denies. What is under a person's control is his thinking, and the emotions follow it indirectly.
• That human emotions are the same thing as animal instinct. Objectivism holds that man has no instincts in the sense of innate knowledge, and that his emotional responses depend on conceptual judgments an animal cannot make. See Consciousness.

See also

• Value · Reason · Volition · Happiness
• Reason-Emotion Dichotomy · Mind-Body Dichotomy · Subjectivism
• Self-esteem · Pride · Sex
• Consciousness · Perception · Objectivity

Discussion

• Human emotions vs animal instinct
• Not caring what others think
• Internal monologues and visual memory
• Altering one's psycho-epistemology

References

• Rand, Ayn. "The Objectivist Ethics", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
• Rand, Ayn. "Philosophy and Sense of Life", The Romantic Manifesto.
• Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 5.

External links

• Emotions at the Ayn Rand Lexicon