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IS ENTHUSIASM AN EMOTION?
Jon Elster
1. Introduction
I do not have an answer to the question in the title. I wrote this paper in the hope that the participants in this symposium for Olav Gjelsvik will help me resolve the puzzle one way or another. I shall not disguise the fact that I hope the answer will be positive, but a piece of the puzzle is missing.
In textbooks, handbooks, and scholarly articles dealing with emotions, enthusiasm is virtually never mentioned, let alone discussed at any length. Poggi (2007) is an isolated example; for reasons I need not consider here, her discussion is not very helpful. A specialist on the psychology of emotion, Jennifer Lerner (personal communication) confirmed my impression that the psychological literature has ignored the topic. (She also directed my attention to an article by two political scientists (Marcus and Mackuen 1993). Their idea of enthusiasm trivializes it, as one also observes in the near-obligatory use (in the United States) of “enthusiastic” in letters of recommendation.) The neglect of enthusiasm by emotion theorists could of course be, as the phrase goes, “a much-needed gap”. I cannot prove that it is not, but I shall at least try to make the beginning of a case.
Historically, enthusiasm has been an ambiguous idea. In the early modern period, it mainly connoted religious extravagance, fanaticism, and intolerant zeal. In his History of England, Hume has numerous references to enthusiasm, virtually all of them pejorative. In one of his essays he characterizes it as follows:
[In addition to superstition, the] mind of man is also subject to an unaccountable elevation and presumption, arising from prosperous success, from luxuriant health, from strong spirits, or from a bold and confident disposition. In such a state of mind, the imagination swells with great, but confused conceptions, to which no sublunary beauties or enjoyments can correspond. Every thing mortal and perishable vanishes as unworthy of attention. And a full range is given to the fancy in the invisible regions or world of spirits, where the soul is at liberty to indulge itself in every imagination, which may best suit its present taste and disposition. Hence arise raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy; and confidence and presumption still encreasing, these raptures, being altogether unaccountable, and seeming quite beyond the reach of our ordinary faculties, are attributed to the immediate inspiration of that Divine Being, who is the object of devotion. In a little time, the inspired person comes to regard himself as a distinguished favourite of the Divinity; and when this frenzy once takes place, which is the summit of enthusiasm, every whimsy is consecrated: Human reason, and even morality are rejected as fallacious guides: And the fanatic madman delivers himself over, blindly, and without reserve, to the supposed illapses of spirit, and to inspiration from above. Hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance, are, therefore, the true sources of ENTHUSIASM (Hume 1742).
In the first part of the passage, Hume seems to see enthusiasm as a form of sentimental rapture, or Schwärmerei. Although the further step from sentimentalism to fanaticism may not seem particularly plausible, I shall not pursue that question. Instead I shall cite some of Kant’s writings, in which he clearly distinguishes between Schwärmerei and Enthusiasmus. Whereas he dismisses the former as dangerous, he praises the latter. In his comments on the French revolution in The Conflict of the Faculties, he describes what one might call observer enthusiasm: “This revolution […] finds in the heart of all spectators (who are not engaged in the game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race” (Kant 1996, p. 302). Since the danger he refers to arose from expressing enthusiasm for the French Revolution in authoritarian Prussia, the emotion is not idling.
In other writings, Kant praises participant enthusiasm. In The Critique of Judgment, he wrote that “The idea of the good with affect is called enthusiasm. This state of mind seems to be sublime, so much so that it is commonly maintained that without it nothing great can be accomplished” (Kant 2000). In a pre-critical writing on the “maladies of the head” (Kant 1764, p. 267) he made the same statement, without the qualification “it is commonly maintained”. In this text he also distinguishes the enthusiast sharply from the “fanatic (visionary, Schwärmer)”, asserting that “human nature knows no more dangerous illusions” than those of the latter.
Yet Kant’s praise of enthusiasm is qualified. In The Critique of Judgment, he asserts that enthusiasm, like any other affect, is “blind, either in the choice of its end, or, if this is given by Reason, in its implementation; for it is that movement of the mind that makes it incapable of engaging in free consideration of principles” Kant 2000, p. 154). This statement is somewhat opaque, but I shall take it to mean that the enthusiast who is guided by reason chooses morally good ends but is incapable of choosing the best means to realize them. In her monograph Kant et la Schwärmerei, Béatrice Allouche-Pourcel (2010, p. 105) hits the nail on the head when she writes that enthusiasm illustrates the proverb that the best can be the enemy of the good.
Kant’s notion of reason is unfathomable, at least for me. I shall rely on a more transparent idea of reason as pursuit of the public good, transcending private interests. One could also stipulate, as I did in Elster (2009 a), that reason requires the rational pursuit of the public good. As the preceding paragraph implies, I shall not impose this requirement here. Reason (as I shall understand it here) is consistent with emotion-induced irrationality in the choice of means and in the assessment of facts. To the statement by La Bruyère (2007, p. 98) that “ Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason; its great triumph is to conquer interest”, one might add, as a corollary, that nothing is easier for interest to overcome reason except when reason allies itself with passion. This alliance is enthusiasm.
To conclude this Introduction, let me cite some dictionary definitions. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the principal current sense of the word is “Rapturous intensity of feeling in favor of a person, principle, cause, etc.; passionate eagerness in any pursuit, proceeding from an intense conviction of the worthiness of the object”. More succinctly, the French Grand Robert defines it as “Emotion intense qui pousse à l’action dans la joie”. According to the German Wikipedia, it “bezeichnet heute allgemein eine Begeisterung oder Schwärmerei [sic] für etwas, eine gesteigerte Freude an bestimmten Themen oder Handlungen, ein extremes Engagement für eine Sache oder ein mehr als durchschnittliches, intensives Interesse auf einem speziellen Gebiet”. Whereas the French and German definitions are morally neutral (one could be enthusiastic about soccer or bridge), the OED definition captures better the phenomena I shall discuss in the following.
I shall now proceed as follows. In Section II, I address the nature of emotion. This is obviously necessary to answer the question in the title, In Section III I survey the empirical material that led me to ask that question. In writings by historians and contemporaries on the American War of Independence, the making of the French constitution of 1791, and the making of the Norwegian constitution of 1814, I have constantly come across references to enthusiasm. I conclude in Section IV by laying out the puzzle.
II. The nature of emotion
There is probably a consensus among scholars that one can establish neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for an event to be an emotional episode. (I shall not consider emotional dispositions nor “standing” emotions such as hatred or contempt for categories of individuals.) In my discussion (drawing on Elster 1999, Elster 2009 b, Elster 2011, and Elster 2015, Ch. 8), I shall consider only some frequently occurring features of what, pre-analytically, we think of as emotions, notably fear, anger, hope, and – perhaps – enthusiasm.
Cognitive antecedents. The first and in some ways the most crucial feature to which I shall draw attention is the fact, first noticed by Aristotle, that emotions are caused by a cognitive antecedent. (For my purposes here, I can ignore cases in which the trigger is perceptual rather than cognitive.) Anger, for instance, is caused by a belief that another person deliberately and unjustly hurt me. If a person bumps into me on the subway, I do not get angry if I realize that it was due to the irregular movement of the train, but my anger is triggered if I am led to to believe he was elbowing his way through the wagon without caring about his fellow passengers. As always, there are exceptions: many episodes of anger are due to sheer wish frustration, as when car drivers get angry with bicyclists who are slowing them down. For some other examples, envy is caused by the belief that another person has something I want, in both senses of the term; guilt by the belief that I have performed a morally bad action; indignation by the belief that another person behaved badly towards a third party; and so on.
Impact of beliefs and preferences. In his formal definition of emotions, Aristotle (Rhetoric 1378a, 21-22) asserts that they are “those things through which, by undergoing change, people come to differ in their judgments”. In other words, he focuses on emotions as causes of beliefs rather than as effects of beliefs. In his discussion of specific emotions, however, he mainly discusses their cognitive antecedents. Although the tendency for emotions to shape or distort beliefs is less universal than their tendency to stem from beliefs, the former plays a very important role in mediating between emotion and action. In addition to the direct action tendencies of emotions that I consider later, they can influence action indirectly by shaping the beliefs that are used as premises for action. There are three main causal pathways. First, by the tendency of emotions to induce urgency, a preference for acting earlier rather than later (Elster 2009 b), they may cause suboptimal gathering of information (“marry in haste, repent at leisure”). Second, there is the “hot-cold empathy gap” (Loewenstein and Schkade 1999): when she is in an emotional state, a person may not realize that it will eventually subside, due to the short half-life of emotions (see below). Third, there is motivated belief formation: garden-variety wishful thinking as well as its less discussed opposite, counterwishful thinking (Thagard and Nussbaum 2014).
In addition to affecting beliefs in one of these ways, emotions can also affect preferences. For one thing, they can induce higher rates of time discounting – a preference for an early reward over a later reward (Tice, Braslavsky, and Baumeister 2001). In practice, this effect may be hard to disentangle from an induced tendency to prefer early action over later action, but in principle they are distinct. For another, emotions can modify the risk preferences of the agent. Thus fear makes people more risk-averse, while anger has the opposite effect (Lerner and Keltner 2001). At the same time, anger induces more optimistic risk assessments (a cognitive effect), whereas fear makes people more pessimistic (ibid.). In practice, when we observe people in an emotional state state taking higher risks than usual, it may be hard to disentangle the effect on risk preferences from the effect on risk assessments. Outside the laboratory, these distinctions easily get blurred.
Arousal. So far I have discussed the effect of emotions on the psychological state of the agent – her beliefs and preferences. In addition, many emotions affect her physiological state. In a shorthand formulation, emotions are what keeps us awake at night. Strong basic emotions such as fear and anger go together with arousal of the organism (Frijda 1986, Ch.3). Positive emotions, too, can have effects on the body, Romantic love can have some of the same effects as hypomania or amphetamines, reducing the need for food and sleep and inducing supernormal energy. Some scholars who hope they might be awarded a Nobel prize reportedly sleep badly the night before the committee in Stockholm announces its decision.
It is important to note the difference between visceral and prudential fear (Gordon 1987, p. 77). The latter, illustrated by taking an umbrella when one “fears” that it will rain, does not involve any emotion at all and does not have the effects on beliefs and preferences that I have discussed. Although in a given case it may be hard to identify which of the two varieties of fear we are dealing with, these effects will, if we can identify them, provide a tell-tale sign. A similar observation applies to the distinction between retaliating in anger and rational deterrence or incapacitation.
Short half-life. If a state of arousal is caused by a threat to the individual, it naturally tends to dissipate when the threat goes way. Even when no physical threat is involved, emotions tend to have what is often called a short half-life. I may get angry and want to take action if I hear that someone has been talking badly about me, but after a while the anger subsides, I shrug my shoulders, and get on with my life. The advice “count to ten” is based on this fact. As is the case for virtually any generalization about the emotions, there are exceptions. Anger and love can persist for years or decades if their action tendencies are thwarted. Also, as noted, the agent may believe that the emotion will persist.