Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior (Jean Nicod Lectures)
Jon Elster
Language: English
Pages: 266
ISBN: 0262550369
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Emotion and addiction lie on a continuum between simple visceral drives such as hunger, thirst, and sexual desire at one end and calm, rational decision making at the other. Although emotion and addiction involve visceral motivation, they are also closely linked to cognition and culture. They thus provide the ideal vehicle for Jon Elster's study of the interrelation between three explanatory approaches to behavior: neurobiology, culture, and choice.
The book is organized around parallel analyses of emotion and addiction in order to bring out similarities as well as differences. Elster's study sheds fresh light on the generation of human behavior, ultimately revealing how cognition, choice, and rationality are undermined by the physical processes that underlie strong emotions and cravings. This book will be of particular interest to those studying the variety of human motivations who are dissatisfied with the prevailing reductionisms.
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Xenophon's Spartan Constitution (Introduction. Text. Commentary)
These visceral states differ from emotions and addiction-related states in that they are less closely linked to cognition and culture. By and large, emotions are triggered by beliefs. Addictive cravings too can be triggered by the belief that a drug is available and be extinguished by the belief that it is unavailable. Also, emotions and cravings are powerfully shaped by the fact that they are culturally defined as emotions and cravings. By contrast, the acute thirst of the person who has been in
winnings. Make him, then, play for nothing; he will not become excited over it and will feel bored. It is, then, not the amusement alone that he seeks, a languid and passionless amusement will weary him. He must get excited over it and deceive himself by the fancy that he will be happy to win what he would not have as a gift on condition of not playing; and he must make himself an object of passion, and excite over it his desire, his anger, his fear, to obtain his imagined end, as children are
center. With cocaine, there is a stimulant effect on the central nervous system, an anesthetic effect on the mucous mem- 78 Chapter 3 branes of eyes, nose, and throat, and a negative effect on concentration and judgment. Many of the nonhedonic effects may be regarded as costs that addicts are willing to pay to get the hedonic benefit. In some cases, they are not aware of these effects, or only become aware of them when it is too late. Some of them, like the alertness effect of nicotine, can
can say virtually nothing: that passion which is portrayed as so powerful and violent has no hold on me.’’1 The manifest inadequacy of Hume’s 14 Chapter 2 treatment of the same emotion may also be due to lack of personal acquaintance with it.2 For another, the emotion might be so strong as to blot out cognitive analysis. Again I can cite Montaigne, who cites Petrarch to the effect that ‘‘He who can describe how his heart is ablaze is burning on a small pyre.’’3 We cannot observe our anger
emotions. Although Descartes used ‘‘indignation’’ to refer to A’s emotion when he sees B slighting C,14 ordinary language does not restrict the word to this special case, for which no separate term exists. To resolve such issues, we need a more theoretical characterization of the emotions. I discuss this issue in the following sections. For now I shall only offer a preanalytical survey of what seems uncontroversially to count as emotions, together with some comments on borderline cases. I shall