Bertille De Vlieger

In this chapter I examine the relationship between the self and emotions. More specifically, I’m interested in personality and what may be called the emotional nature of a person. First, I argue that emotions are central and essential to self-knowledge, since they can reveal a person’s inclinations, dispositions, and ways of being, that is, personality. If we believe that a person’s personality determines the emotional responses they will have with respect to a given situation, then we can argue that identifying, observing and knowing that person’s emotions (or our own emotions) will give us some form of access to or knowledge of that person’s personality (or our own personality). Secondly, I explain how emotions can disrupt an individual’s general state and—following Haybron (The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)—in virtue of what some kind of affects (i.e., central affective states) may even alter an individual’s emotional nature which, I argue, is part of personality. Lastly, I demonstrate that intense and what may be called “standing” emotions are the best candidate to be central to personality and to alter it.

Antipathy is an affective phenomenon which has not received much attention by philosophers and psychologists, unlike its antonym, sympathy. However, antipathy is a phenomenon that contributes to and fuels many of the challenges related to our social behaviours and interpersonal relationships. Antipathy’s exact nature needs to be identified, if only because of the importance it has, for example, in political opposition, in loss of civility, but also in situations that cause poor psychological well-being. It would be then essential to be able to determine whether antipathy is a phenomenon that could be felt on a short term (an episode) or last in the long term (a disposition), since it would allow to study and measure more precisely the nature of the acts it gives rise to, the range of its intensity or/and its social consequences. Like sympathy, antipathy is most often understood as an affective phenomenon that lasts over time. Antipathy is often presented as an instinctive and irrational aversion to something or someone. Yet this common definition is too similar to the definition of other affective phenomena such as disgust or even fear. This article will therefore examine the nature of antipathy by differentiating it from other emotional phenomena that resemble it. But more importantly, the limited existing literature on antipathy mostly characterises it as an affective disposition. In this paper, I will rather argue that antipathy is a conscious emotion, i.e., an emotion that occurs consciously and has a phenomenology.

The Value of the Emotional Knowledge Emotional knowledge is a form of self-knowledge which holds great interest for ordinary individuals. It is not obtained by any obligation but rather because we think it is crucial to obtain. In this article it is a matter of demonstrating that emotional knowledge holds an instrumental and a prudential value. By arguing that it can allow a control over our emotions, I shall maintain that emotional knowledge affects individual marginalization or acceptance in society. In addition, this type of knowledge is revealing of our personality by allowing us to identify our affective identities. Finally, I shall defend the idea that emotional knowledge contributes to the conduct of a good life. As such, my hypothesis could be viewed as incompatible with widespread ideas, according to which the knowledge of our own emotions can trigger negative emotional states, e.g. mental rumination, anxiety, that do not contribute to our well-being.

In this paper, we argue that knowledge of emotions essentially depends on introspecting the phenomenology of emotional experiences, and that introspection of emotional experiences is a process by stages, where the most fundamental stage is a non-classificatory introspective state, i.e., one that does not depend on the subject’s classifying the introspected emotion as an instance of any experience type. We call such a non-classificatory kind of introspection primitive introspection. Our main goal is to show that, although not sufficient, primitive introspection is a necessary ground to acquire knowledge of emotions. Our main argument is phenomenological: by examining a variety of examples, we suggest that an accurate analysis of the introspective process through which one comes to know, or refines one’s knowledge of, one’s current emotion requires that one primitively introspects it.