On the Temporality of Emotions An Essay on Grief, Anger, and Love

Many emotions attenuate more rapidly than the significance of the considerations that gives rise to them as we accommodate ourselves to what happens. Grief often diminishes quickly, even though the dead continue to matter to us; anger often evaporates, even though the injustice to which it responds remains undiminished. Nonetheless, such accommodation seems acceptable: it would be a mistake to be persistently grieving or to be relentlessly angry. But how could it be acceptable, if the reasons for grief and anger remain significant? Unlike grief and anger, whose diminution is puzzling, what seems puzzling in the case of love is its continuation. In its self-consciousness, love is endless; in loving someone, we foresee no end to our love. Yet we know that love can end: hearts are broken, lovers betrayed, and people grow apart. Does the self-consciousness of love involve a mistake? Or can we reasonably think of our love as lasting?

On the Temporality of Emotions argues that whereas grief and anger reasonably diminish, love can rationally be conceived as endless. Berislav Marušic draws on contemporary theories of the emotions, especially grief and love, as well as recent accounts of reasons. It puts forward an account of emotional self-consciousness as, at once, embodied and rational, and maintains that accommodation reveals an irreconcilable moment in our emotional life, a moment that philosophical reflection ought not seek to resolve, lest our emotions are conceived as too neat, and philosophy as too comforting.

Berislav Marušić, University of Edinburgh

Berislav Marušić is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He was formerly Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at Brandeis University (2007-2015, 2015-2020). He received his PhD from U.C. Berkeley in 2007 and his AB from Harvard University in 2001. His main
research interests are in philosophy of mind and action, ethics, epistemology, as well as in existentialism and the history of late modern philosophy. He is the author of Evidence and Agency: Norms of Belief for Promising and Resolving (Oxford, 2015).

Preface
Acknowledgements
Part I
1. The Puzzle of Accommodation
2. The Rationality of Emotion
3. In Defense of the Puzzle
4. Embodied Reason
Part II
5. Endless Love
Conclusion