Emotional Complexity

Emotional states, as such, do not conflict

By ‘emotion’ we here intend to include a wide variety of responsive and reactive mental states that go by different names in different contexts: emotions, passions, attitudes, moods, and so forth. We think everything that we say here applies to all of them, mutatis mutandis.

One of the things that has often been associated with literature, both fictional and nonfictional, is its use as an exploration of emotional complexity. Indeed, one can argue that this goes back quite far. Odysseus is a ‘polytropic’ man, a subtle man of many twists; a recent translation of the Odyssey describes him as a ‘complicated man’, but arguably this underplays the richness suggested by the Greek description. Gilgamesh is a remarkably layered character in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In modern times, the novel has, if anything, put even greater emphasis on this. What is emotional complexity as we discover it in literature? It seems to be something along the lines of a unified multiplicity of distinguishable emotions. And the essential principle underlying it, for which we will provide some preliminary argument here, is this:

Emotions, as such, do not conflict, so can in principle be put together in almost any combination without any incoherence or inconsistency.

The primary reasons one would doubt this are that (1) we do think of some emotions as in some way contrary to each other; and (2) we do talk about emotional conflicts. We will argue with respect to (1) that the contrariety is not of a sort that makes the emotions themselves inconsistent with each other; and we will argue with respect to (2) that emotional conflicts are conflicts associated with emotional states and not conflicts of emotions themselves. But before we do this, let’s consider some kinds of cases in which we apparently do have contrary emotions together in a unified way, because they will give us some insight into the ways in which we unify multiple distinguishable emotions and get emotional complexity.

[1] Responses to distinct aspects of one thing at the same time.

We can combine contrary emotions reduplicatively: we can love something in one aspect and hate it in another, or approve something in one aspect while disapproving another.

[2] Responses to the whole and to some part or aspect at the same time.

For the same redupicative reason, we can love a thing itself but hate some aspect of it, or approve of something but disapprove of part of it.

[3] Responses to responses.

We have all come across the character we love to hate, or the character we hate to love; likewise we may disapprove of something and also disapprove of our disapproval. In these situations we have a response at one level and an apparently contrary response at a higher level, united together.

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel, we find an interesting passage relevant to our discussion here:

A little child, a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself,
A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
That always finds, and never seeks,
Makes such a vision to the sight
As fills a father's eyes with light;
And pleasures flow in so thick and fast
Upon his heart, that he at last
Must needs express his love's excess
With words of unmeant bitterness.

The poet then goes on to canvas a number of ways one might think of this, in which out of excess of love one responds harshly to someone. One is that we might experience a “sweet recoil” of love and pity from speaking harshly to someone we love. The poem doesn’t really expand on this, but we can imagine a situation along the following lines. The father in question experiences intense delight, affection, and love toward his child, so intense that it is painful. Such pain induces an emotional response against it, and toward the cause of it — irritation toward the irritant. Out of this irritation, he responds gruffly, perhaps much more gruffly than he intended. However, he has an emotional response to his child being subject to his own gruffness, Coleridge’s “sweet recoil of love and pity.” Perhaps he then hates himself for his response. Perhaps he then feels a negative response to his child being the reason why he is hating himself. We could continue this further, but you should be able to get the idea.

We get the same sort of issues when dealing with approval and disapproval. Suppose someone approves of something, but also disapproves of their own approval. There is no conflict here — we have a first-order approval and a second-order disapproval of that first-order approval, but there is nothing that prevents these from going together. And we do find famous cases of emotional complexity that build on layerings like this. One well known and often discussed one is Huckleberry Finn, in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn is running away with Jim, a slave. Because of how he was raised, Huckeberry Finn thinks he is doing something so wrong that it deserves hell. He considers at one point ratting out Jim, but he can’t bring himself to do so, because he keeps thinking of times when they helped each other out (Chapter XXXI):

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

Huck Finn doesn’t stop regarding what he is doing as awful and wicked; he just decides that the best thing for him to do is to be awful and wicked. There is an external irony here (we know that what Huck Finn thinks is awful and wicked is actually a generous and noble thing), but the unity of his friendship to Jim and his disapproval of what he is doing and his acceptance of and commitment to what he disapproves is a case of emotional complexity built on the unexpected layering of these emotions in a way that makes them unified.

[4] Blended or merged responses.

We would suggest, however, that we can have even more direct unifications of contrary passions. That is, we can, for distinct reasons, feel love and hate, or approval and disapproval with one dominating but nonetheless being tinged by the other. This is most obviously found in another set of contrary emotions — sorrow and joy. We can be sorrowing, for the death of a loved one, perhaps, but feel joy in the midst of it; this joy is not like joy on its own, because it is a joy permeated with sorrow. Likewise, we can feel joy, but have a twinge of sorrow in the midst of it, perhaps from someone else not being there to share in it; the sorrow itself may be in this way almost a peculiar modality of the joy.

What we want to say is that all of these kinds of cases are not cases of conflict, inconsistency, or incoherence, although there is some sort of contrariety going on. Rather, they are coherent unities of contraries. In some cases, they are like two beams holding each other in place because they push against each other. In others, they are like two different colored dots put together in a pointillist painting, to give the impression of another color. In yet others, they are more like two colored lenses overlaying each other so as to have a different color-effect than either alone.

We noted that there are two reasons why one would doubt our general principle that emotions can be had in almost any combination without conflict. The first was that we do in fact talk about emotions being contrary or opposite. Love is the opposite of hate, joy the opposite of grief, approval the opposite of diapproval, and so forth. However, not all opposition is exclusive opposition. It’s clear enough that even if conflict were possible that the reduplicative combinations given above ((1) and (2)) could avoid it for the same reason that reduplication can usually avoid conflict. Having higher-order and lower-order responses, (3) above, would avoid it for the same reason. But even in the case of (4), we don’t seem to have any conflict in the emotions themselves; rather, they affect each other in the way combinable contraries do. For instance, you can have two vectors with opposed directions, and this does not mean that they exclude each other, but just that you end up in a different place than you would with one alone. You can in fact have opposing vectors at the same time. And vectors seem a good analogy here. To say that we can have emotions in combination without conflict does not mean that they do not affect each other or the ultimate result. If you love someone but hate them when they are drunk, love and hate do in some sense oppose each other; but the bare opposition is not conflict. Rather, the hate modifies the love, and the love modifies the hate.

The second and more serious argument is that we do talk about emotional conflicts. But we most often talk about emotional conflicts in contexts of deliberation; we feel conflicted about what to do or about how to appraise things, or some such. That such conflicts can occur seems obvious. What they are not, however, is a conflict in the emotions themselves. They seem instead to arise from one of the following distinct conflicts:

(1) The beliefs that give rise or contribute to the emotions might be inconsistent. That is, we are conflicted because we are drawing conflicting conclusions or assuming conflicting assumptions.

(2) Our experience may suggest different and mutually exclusive kinds of action based on the different emotions. That is, we are conflicted because our normal ways of deciding things leave us unable to decide in this case.

(3) One or more of the emotions may conflict in some way with our broader goals. That is, we are conflicted because we cannot fit one or more of the emotions into the broader context of how we are living our lives.

When we sort out emotional conflicts that fall into these three groups, there doesn’t seem to be much left, if anything. And even these are not necessarily irreconcilable conflicts; e.g., the second, in which we are unable to decide what to do, may be resolved not by changing our emotions but by exercising ingenuity to come up with actions we would not otherwise do.

Thus the original principle,

Emotions, as such, do not conflict, so can in principle be put together in almost any combination without any incoherence or inconsistency,

seems to hold up quite well. And if it does, we have a solid foundation for explaining what is meant by ‘emotional complexity’ in literary and other contexts.

Jan Fyt, “Two Greyhounds, Leashed and Facing Opposite Directions” (1642), from the National Gallery of Art Open Access collection.