Emotion and Responsibility

Solomon says that emotions are judgments that, like many judgments, are not necessarily deliberative, articulated, or reflective. If so, why do we feel that emotions “come on” us? Solomon explains that it’s because we focus “on the feelings and flushings that typically accompany our emotional upheavals in times of crisis.” He calls this a “strategic confusion of cause and effect” that reduces to “a vehicle of irresponsibility, a way of absolving oneself from blame for those fits of sensitivity and foolishness that constitute the most important moments of our lives.”

In a footnote, he elaborates with a contrast between Nietzsche and Christianity, taking an uncharacteristic stand against the former: “for once, we must violently disagree with [Nietzsche] and defend an insight of Christian psychology that has too long been lost under the metaphysics of its theology,” the insight concerning the “voluntariness of the emotions” and that “a man is responsible not only for what he does but for what he ‘feels’ as well.”