Análisis de la demanda

According to McTaggart, emotions are always experienced as having intentionality (i.e., are always directed towards an object), and they are always brought about by certain psychical and physical stimuli or causes. McTaggart classifies and describes a kind of emotion by identifying its “essence,” which he associates with the causes and objects that are necessary and unique to it. While there is always a phenomenological aspect (e.g., the qualia or what-it-is- likeness) of an emotional experience that is lost if we try to give a reductive analysis of an emotion merely in terms of its causes and/or intentional structures,60 _{this does not mean that}

we cannot communicate meaningfully about our emotions by appealing to these non-private features of our experience (their objects and causes). This is, in fact, the very approach that was used above to differentiate and describe the different kinds of conscious states in both the early and late periods, as described in the previous sections. So, in order to describe the nature of love, McTaggart will identify the object and causes that are necessarily involved in love and are unique to it.

The method of classifying and describing emotions by identifying objects and causes that are both necessary and unique to particular kinds of emotions had been used by philosophers in the past, but perhaps one of the most famous uses of this method occurs in David Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature. There is no doubt that McTaggart has Hume’s account of love in mind in his own formulation of love in the Nature of Existence, even though he never explicitly references Hume in it. Hume first introduces the distinction when describing the emotions of pride and shame and then re-introduces it in his discussion on love.61 _{His use of the distinction is the same for both emotions, so I will only consider his}

discussion of love and hate.62 _{Hume asserts that love and hate both share the same object:}

60 _{This non-reducibility into more basic components seems to be one way to understand what McTaggart,} Moore, and others during this time mean when they say emotions (or anything else) are “indefinable.” Something is definable only if it is a complex thing that can be fully described merely by listing its basic parts (each of which can be understood independently of all of the other parts and independent of being included in the whole). Simple things or organic wholes (complex things where the whole and the parts are changed in essential ways by inclusion or exclusion of any part from that whole), therefore, cannot be defined.

61 _{Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, (Eds. D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton, Oxford: Oxford University Press,} 2000), Book II, Parts 1 and 2.

62 _{”Since then the qualities that produce pride or humility, cause love or hatred; all the arguments that have} been employed to prove, that the causes of the former passions excite a pain or pleasure independent of the passion, will be applicable with equal evidence to the causes of the latter.” Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, SB332.

another person (pride and shame both share the same object as well: the person that is me). The problem that he faces is explaining how it is that two different emotions can both be directed at the same object; merely identifying an emotion’s object is clearly not sufficient to adequately describe and distinguish different emotions. Hume introduces his solution by stating that the philosopher must “make a distinction betwixt the cause and the object of these passions; betwixt the idea, which excites them, and that to which they direct their view, when excited.”63 _{Hume asserts that the cause of an emotion need not necessarily be the same}

as that towards which it is directed (and vice versa). Hume then looks towards the causes of love and hate and finds that for each the causes are different. In the case of love the cause is the idea of a quality that is both approved of (pleasing) and associated with the person that is the object of love; in the case of hate the cause is the idea of a quality that is both disapproved of (displeasing) and associated with the person that is the object of hate. If the idea of Bob is associated with the idea of “being a liar” we do not hate “being a liar;” instead we hate Bob. The quality of a person, on Hume’s account is not the target of love or hatred, and so the cause and object are distinct. Noting this distinction allows Hume to classify emotions according to both the object and the cause. If there were no such distinction, then it would be impossible to explain how it is that both love and hate can be directed at the same object.

The most notable difference between Hume’s use of the distinction and McTaggart’s use is that while Hume takes the object of love for granted (‘another person’) and uses the distinction to identify unique causes of each emotion, McTaggart uses the distinction to isolate the exact object of the emotion. Hume does not entertain the possibility that the exact nature of the object of love may not be immediately obvious; McTaggart, however, assumes that some people might legitimately question whether love is for ‘the person’ or merely ‘a person’s qualities,’ and so he goes beyond Hume’s use of the distinction and uses it to provide a series of arguments in defense of his claim that the proper object is ‘the person.’ While their approaches differ in this regard, their overall project remains the same. McTaggart’s argument (considered in detail in Chapter Two), can therefore be understood as an extension of Hume’s original attempt to classify and describe love according to its necessary and unique object and causes.