Knowledge About Language and Emotion
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KNOWLEDGE ABOUT LANGUAGE AND EMOTION
INTRODUCTION
There can be no gainsaying the fact that emotions constitute an important and perhaps indispensable part of human experience. “Our passions,” writes one influential scholar, “constitute our lives.” (Solomon, 1993: xiv). Even a new-born babe is capable of expressing feelings of joy and pain, widely held to be the visible and physical manifestations of emotions. Indeed, one might even argue that emotions are of the very essence as far as human nature is concerned. Emotions affect us all and often in ways that no one else, but ourselves can grasp or fathom. When the Friar in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Act 3. Scene iii) tries to console the protagonist, who is faced with the prospect of impending banishment, by offering him “adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy”, he is told somewhat brusquely: Hang up philosophy! Unless philosophy can make a Juliet Philosophy or systematic reasoning is of no use to a pair of star-crossed lovers. Philosophy can at best rationalize things and help us see through our conceptual entanglements. “But,” as the Bard himself put it on another occasion, “love is blind, and lovers cannot see/The pretty follies that themselves commit” (The Merchant of Venice, Act 2. Scene vi). Theorists of emotion, or passion as it is sometimes called (Gaukroger, 1998), typically contrast it with reason. However, as is often the case with the dichotomies we postulate, the opposition between reason and emotion turns out, on closer inspection, to be actually hierarchical, with the former invariably occupying the privileged position. MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS
In Philosophy The relation between reason and passion is one of the oldest and most enduring questions in philosophy (Elster, 1999). Aristotle wrote in his Rhetoric: “We shall define an emotion,”, “as that which leads one’s condition to become so transformed that his judgment is affected, and which is accompanied by pleasure and pain.” (cf. Calhoun and Solomon, 1984, p. 44). In so viewing emotion, Aristotle inaugurated a trend in philosophy that has survived through the 2500 years since J. Cenoz and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 6: Knowledge about Language, 93–102. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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it was put forward and still shows tremendous vitality. Aristotle’s view contrasts with a view advanced centuries later by the American psychologist-cum-philosopher William James (1884), according to whom the emotions were essentially physical reactions and as such simply another way of referring to their sensory counterparts, the socalled “feelings.” What makes Aristotle’s view so refreshingly “novel” and indeed “modern” is that it puts emotion on an equal footing with reason, “as a more or less intelligent way of conceiving of a certain situation, dominated by a desire (e.g., in anger, the desire for revenge)” (Calhoun and Solomon, 1984, p. 3). But the fact remains that, by and large, philosophers have been of
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