Imagine a zombie walks into my study and I bolt for the door. Suppose you described my behavior as fear and then asked me how it felt. Suppose I answered, “I don’t know. Nothing, except the immediate need to get out, and that’s what I did.” Would that answer describe an emotional response that justifies calling me afraid? Perhaps. But it is equally the answer of someone showing extraordinary competence in the face of a recognized danger: the firefighter who clears a burning room without a flicker, or the climber who steps back from a cracking ledge. The behavior and the report fit both descriptions.
Peter Ossorio, anticipated the problem. His analysis of emotional behavior has five parts: an appraisal of something taken as real, such as a danger; the motivation that the appraisal tautologically carries, here to escape; acting on that motivation; implementing it in a way responsive to the circumstances; and a learned tendency to act on the appraisal without deliberation (Ossorio, The Behavior of Persons, pp. 323, 326). Following Gosling (1962), he notes that without the last condition there would be no difference between fear and simply prudential behavior; fear is a kind of prudential behavior. The impulsivity condition describes a learned tendency, not a requirement that every instance be impulsive, and it can be overridden (p. 323). A person can also act on fear competently. My own account of emotional competence asks exactly that question: are there competent and incompetent ways of acting while afraid (Schwartz, 2019, p. 142)?
A test in Wittgenstein’s spirit helps here. A request to paint something a colorless red is not a difficult request; it is no request at all. Color belongs to the grammar of “red,” so if the color is removed, nothing remains to be painted. Run the same test on fear. “Afraid, but feeling nothing” is not nonsense in the same way. In a vignette of Ossorio’s, he is sitting alone in a lecture hall when a lion pushes through the door, and in a flash he is out the back. Asked afterward whether he felt afraid, he says not at all; he was too busy getting out. We have no trouble calling his flight fear. Felt states, then, are not to fear what color is to red. Ossorio goes further and concludes that “any corresponding subjective state is merely incidental” (p. 320). That, I think, goes too far.
The choice between necessary and incidental is too blunt. Ossorio’s own method, the Paradigm Case Formulation, defines a concept by its clearest case and the variations that still count as cases of it. It offers a third status, in which some features are paradigmatic. In the paradigm case of fear, a person appraises a danger, acts to escape without deliberating, and has some of the familiar felt states, such as the pounding heart, the dropped stomach, or the shaking once it is over. A case can lack one of these features and still be fear, but it moves away from the paradigm, and when enough features are missing the case becomes something else. Ossorio’s flight from the lion keeps the impulsive escape and loses only the feeling, and probably only for the moment. “Too busy getting out” suggests the feeling was postponed, not absent. It still reads as fear.
Contrast the general. At the Chosin Reservoir in December 1950, Major General Oliver P. Smith’s surrounded division fought its way out to the sea, and the press reported his reply as “Retreat, hell! We’re just attacking in another direction.” Smith later said the wording had been polished, but his point was exact. A surrounded force has no rear, so movement in any direction is an attack. Everything that looked like fear’s structure was present. There was a danger, recognized as such, and movement away from it. Yet almost no one would describe it as fear. Smith appraised the danger from his position as a commander, as a tactical problem to be solved rather than a threat to be fled. The withdrawal was deliberate rather than impulsive, it was described accurately as an attack, and no felt states are reported or implied. With impulsivity and feeling both low, the case has passed out of fear into prudence and command, perhaps into courage. My zombie answer sits on the border between the general and Ossorio fleeing the lion. Its immediacy points toward fear, and its absence of any feeling points away, which is why it seemed ambiguous.
Speaking of “some” felt states matters. Ray Bergner (2003) shows that no single felt quality defines an emotion or links all its varieties (Schwartz, 2019, pp. 138–139). That does not make feeling irrelevant. It means the felt side of fear is a family of states, in Wittgenstein’s sense, and the paradigm case includes some members of the family, not any particular one. I suspect, too, that the felt states are partly how the impulsivity condition shows itself. Arousal is the body’s readiness to act on an appraisal without stopping to deliberate. If so, feeling and impulsivity should rise and fall together with the significance of the danger. The more urgently a danger matters to me, the stronger both the felt arousal and the pull to act without deliberating; as its significance recedes, both recede. The general’s case fits. From a commander’s position the danger, though grave, did not take hold as fear does, and both the felt arousal and the pull to act without deliberating were low.
Something, however, is necessary. “Afraid, but of nothing taken as a danger” is a colorless red. Even irrational fear takes something as dangerous; that is what makes it fear and what makes it irrational. Remove the appraisal and its motivation, and no fear is left to describe. The relationship between fear and the appraisal of danger is necessary. The relationship between fear and its felt states is paradigmatic. And it is the learned tendency to act without deliberation that separates fear from its prudent cousin.
Is there, then, a necessary phenomenology of emotional behavior? If phenomenology means a particular felt quality without which there could be no fear, the answer is no. If it means how the world shows up for the person, the answer is yes. For me to be afraid, the zombie must show up to me as a danger, as something that matters to me and gives me reason to get out. That is appraisal, a matter of significance rather than sensation. To be afraid is to find oneself endangered and to see the danger. Between these two answers lie the accompanying feelings. They are not necessary, but they are paradigmatic, so their absence is a departure from the paradigm that typically calls for some explanation.
The clinical implication follows. People who report feeling nothing while their conduct shows fear, grief, or anger may still be afraid, grieving, or angry, but the absence of the felt states is not nothing. It marks the case as non-paradigmatic, and in the consulting room that departure is itself something to understand. Is the feeling postponed, not registered, or not owned?
References
Bergner, R. M. (2003). Emotions: A relational view and its clinical applications. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 57, 471–490.
Gosling, J. (1962). Mental causes and fear. Mind, 71, 289–306.
Ossorio, P. G. (2006/2013). The Behavior of Persons. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. (The lion vignette, pp. 314, 317; reality basis, p. 320; the impulsivity condition and Gosling, p. 323; the general picture of emotional behavior, p. 326.)
Schwartz, W. (2019). Descriptive Psychology and the Person Concept. London: Academic Press/Elsevier. (Sensations and emotion, pp. 138–139; Fear in Action, p. 140; emotional competence, p. 142.)
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