Reanimating the divided heart: a perceptual strategy to make sense of emotional ambivalence

Abstract

The idea that emotional ambivalence may form part of our ordinary psychological life is often regarded with suspicion. Philosophers of emotion have argued that the simultaneous experience of opposed emotions toward the same intentional object, be it a whole object or an aspect of it, is incompatible with rational consistency, such that emotional ambivalence could arise only as a form of rational breakdown. In this paper, I develop a new account of emotional ambivalence grounded in a perceptual theory of emotion and the claim that emotions possess non-conceptual content. On this view, the appearance of contradiction dissolves once one accepts assumptions commonly endorsed by proponents of perceptual theories. Drawing on recent work in emotion categorisation, I further explain why ambivalent emotions nevertheless strike us as contradictory. The resulting account presents emotional ambivalence as a puzzling but entirely compatible feature of our emotional life, rather than as evidence of irrationality.