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Destructive emotions
Abstract
This paper discusses the problem of destructive emotions by comparing Eastern and Western assumptions about emotions. In the case of anger, for example, Eastern thinkers straightforwardly posit that it is entirely possible to cultivate attitudes in which anger is naturally absent. In the West, by contrast, it is generally assumed that anger is a “basic emotion that can be suppressed or managed, but not eliminated from one's basic emotional constitution. Thus, in the Eastern way of thinking, emotion is a force that more easily harmonizes with rational approaches to life and to the specific problems in life.
... Owen Flanagan has argued in his essay "Destructive Emotions" how self-transformation through structuring one's cognitions and affects, including transfiguring the emotions, is not only a basic characteristic of Eastern approaches to ethical life but of most varieties of moral wisdom. 12 Working through and eliminating negative emotions in cognitive-affective restructuring is not an alienation from unchangeable "natural" states. Receptively working with one's emotions belongs to the dynamic of moral wisdom itself. ...
Early Confucian “moral psychology” developed in the context of undoing reactive emotions in order to promote relationships of reciprocal recognition. Early Confucian texts diagnose the pervasiveness of reactive emotions under specific social conditions and respond with the ethical-psychological mandate to counter them in self-cultivation. Undoing negative affects is a basic element of becoming ethically noble, while the ignoble person is fixated on limited self-interested concerns and feelings of being unrecognized. Western ethical theory typically accepts equality and symmetry as conditions of disentangling resentment; yet this task requires the asymmetrical recognition of others. Confucian ethics integrates a nuanced and realistic moral psychology with the normatively oriented project of self-cultivation necessary for dismantling complex negative emotions in promoting a condition of humane benevolence that is oriented toward others and achieved through self-cultivation.
Now that we have in very great detail looked at the nature of emotions, different chapters will explore the emotion profiles of anger, fear/anxiety, grief, sadness/depression, compassion and joy.
I have been interested in developing a moral psychology of emotions in Buddhist perspective, as my next effort to write on ethics and emotions. As a preliminary background to this interest, I am restricting this chapter to the moral psychology of anger.
Managing Negative Emotions: The initial
challenge
in the use of mindfulness
is not to suppress or oppose destructive mental states but to see their emergence, the arising and passing away. The obstructions to this process are many and need reflective and deep contemplative insights. Recent research in neuroscience
has presented three kinds of contemplative experience: focussed attention on the in-and-out breathing cycle; open-monitoring meditation on a number of facets—sensations, internal bodily sensations, thoughts and emotions. This is the area related to the working framework of the present chapter; cultivation of benevolence, compassion
and kindness
and there will be some focus on the third area in different chapters.
I examine in this paper the experience of "resentment" in Chinese and European ethical thinking, particularly in early Confucian ethics and in Nietzsche's genealogy of ressentiment. Self-cultivation is articulated in the Analects in light of issues of recognition and resentment. In contrast to European discourses of recognition and resentment, the compilers of the Analects recognized the pervasiveness of resentment under certain social conditions and the ethical demand to counter it both within oneself and in relation to others. In early Confucian ethics, resentment is understood in a variety of senses. Overcoming resentment in oneself and in others is a primary element of becoming a genuinely exemplary or noble person in the ethical sense; the ignoble person by contrast is fixated on his or her own limited and self-interested concerns. Whereas contemporary Western ethical theory typically assumes that symmetry and equality are the primary means of overcoming resentment, I examine how the asymmetrical recognition of the priority of the other appears necessary for overcoming resentment in the Analects. Early Confucian ethics integrates a nuanced and realistic moral psychology of resentment and the ethical self-cultivation necessary for dismantling it in promoting a condition of humane benevolence. Benevolence is oriented toward others even as it is achieved in the care of the self and self-cultivation.
This chapter provides an overview of some of the empirical research that has been done on meditation with primary attention directed toward investigations identifying its physical and neurological manifestations and correlates, as well as to studies examining its impact on psychological and social functioning. The chapter explains general trends and salient findings to illustrate the potency of meditation across most recognized domains of human functioning. Meditation has been increasingly integrated into clinical interventions and at present there is a fairly extensive body of literature looking at the effects of meditation and/or meditative techniques incorporated into conventional therapies (e.g., mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapies) on both physical and psychological health and pathology with clinical samples.
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