(I say: ‘I would be happy to answer’… because I think there’s a gap which is slyly crossed but it need not matter between friends. I think the emotion is merely correlated with bodily sensations; it is not the sensations. This bodily accompaniment sometimes happens but need not. So the ‘it’ in the second question does not refer to the answer to the first. But it would be pedantry to say that more than once. I also accept that contingent indicators of an emotion can be helpful to identify it. I sometimes spot my irritation when tired late at night by subtle changes in my orientation to the world. I hear the snappiness in my voice before I realise that I am irritated. I can see that such indicators can include purely bodily sensations. Perhaps one is holding one’s shoulders tensely and one spots that before the underlying emotion. So I see the point of the question. I just deny that it must have an answer.)
Commenting on this later to friends Q and R, Q was quite surprised. Q, too, is a therapist so perhaps his surprise was not that surprising. But surely, he suggested, an emotion such as anger is directed at, or expressed or manifested in, some bodily response or action. If it were not, then it would not be being felt as an emotion. So it must be being felt somewhere?
More to my surprise, R wondered, if emotions were not experienced at locations, how they could determine a difference between a normative directedness at embracing another versus punching them? (She cleverly mimed reaching out indeterminately.)
I have heard this sort of argument from a colleague expressed directly at self knowledge or awareness of emotions. Unless one knows where an emotion is located in the body, then one cannot identify it and so one cannot be aware of how one is feeling. I can see this for bodily sensations such as tickles or aches. What would it be to say that one often experienced pains or tickle but seldom could begin to locate them? While I think this can happen - some pains seem to shift when one tries accurately to locate them - I don’t think that the grammar of tickles, pains and other sensations could start with these stranger cases. Bodily feelings are generally felt at bodily locations.
But it seems to beg the question to assume that the same must be true for emotions. (Transported across to emotions it perhaps suggests a kind of perceptual model of inner awareness. I think that emotions are generally - modulo the remarks about the sometimes usefulness of contingent signs above - self-intimating.) ‘Feel’ works in more than one way.
In fact, R’s question seemed very surprising because she seemed to suggest that an emotion needs a bodily location in order to have normative directedness at a caress rather than a punch. But once an emotion is identified as a free-standing state in bodily space, there will be a huge problem for explaining its normative directedness. This is just what is wrong with Cartesian pictures of the mind. Changing the free-standing state to one in bodily rather than mental space - ie a kind of ‘somatic Cartesianism’ - does not help at all. Better simply to assume its intentional or relational content from the start and note how the word ‘feel’ applies differently to tickles and to emotions.
In such conversations, I tend to dig out an analogy with belief. A central role of belief is that when combined with a desire it motivates bodily action. But in this case the somatic Cartesian does not generally insist that the belief must be experienced in a bodily location. Why not? But if not, then bodily location is not necessary for practical - bodily - expression (contra Q’s initial assumption). And hence my view of emotion, too.
I have found that a practical problem with discussing emotions with subscribers to somatic Cartesianism is that they take any denial of bodily location to imply a kind of alienation from the feeling. I suppose that if one assumes emotions must have bodily location, and someone denies that latter aspect, it must seem that that person cannot accommodate feeling emotions at all. They - that is, I - must have in mind merely some effete ersatz instead.
Later Q sent me a link to a short scene from the film Good Will Hunting in which the rather nasty Robin Williams character meanly harangues the young Matt Damon character (perhaps MD was mean to RW earlier but he is, as RW says, just a kid so RW’s response is altogether shabby). But this scene didn’t seem to say what Q wanted it to say at all. RW doesn’t say that MD’s experiences are insufficient because they are not properly located in his body. (It would, after all, be madness to say that!) He says that MD has never had those experiences directly at all but merely read about them or theorised about them. He has not had or felt them. RW says, for example, that, because he has never been there, MD has never smelled the Sistine Chapel. He does not say that he has never smelled it... in his foot.
It takes unquestioned commitment to somatic Cartesianism to assume that if one does not experience an emotion at a location then one cannot experience it at all and thus must merely be talking about it theoretically.
Obviously, I think there is all the difference in the world between wishing to caress someone out of love and punch them out of anger. Further, I think the anti-Cartesian can offer a better picture of how this can be experienced all the more directly because it is not inferred or read off some free-standing bodily state. Not: “I am feeling a slight tickle behind my left ear so (by induction from past cases?) I must really love you, my dear!”
