Abstract

The polymorphous phenomenon of emotion exhibits an intelligible structure which is hierarchical in one aspect and multi-dimensional. Emotion and ethics, like emotion and reason, have been separated by a false dichotomy between absence of control in the former and presence of control in the latter. ;Emotions constitute our lives, and specifically our values. I explain emotion in terms of cognition, affect, ordered hierarchy, intentional objects, valued transformation, material substrate and interpretation. I reject as incomplete theories of emotion which classify emotions only on the basis of intensity or emotional object. ;Values and feelings are essentially interconnected. Values are learned, that is, constituted, from experiences which necessarily involve feeling, but may also include deliberation, willing, and acting. The development of values is relative to the development of their corresponding feelings. Feelings can be classified into a developmental hierarchy which ranges: from more to less localizable in space and time, from passive states to active ones, from less to more autonomous from physiology, from less to more conscious and reflective, from giving less to giving more objective access to their intentional objects, from less to more concerned with other persons, from primarily affective to primarily cognitive. ;Emotions have four causal aspects: 'material' aspect , initiating aspects , formal aspect , and teleological aspect . ;My antidote for relativism and subjectivism is hermeneutic. Values are constituted by a culture, which makes them trans-personal, but not universal. The valued world we know is largely the construct of interpretation. ;Humans are essentially emotional beings at least as much as they are essentially rational beings. An impoverished emotional life means a loss of a sense of morality, because moral behavior has its foundation in emotional intuitions