Have you ever met someone who talked a great line, but never seemed to come through in terms of his or her actions?  Well, you may not have recognized it, but you have!  Many young women have recognized it.  Actually it’s a common human failing and no one gender corners the market on it.  Our street language certainly reflects this important difference in the saying, “He talks the talk, but does he walk the walk?”  One of the earliest snarls to social psychological researchers was the vast difference between what people said they would do and what they actually end up doing.  Significant literature exists on identifying the social factors that close this gap between word and deed.

In academia and especially among postmodernists, this commonsense distinction is blurred by the fact that moving one’s mouth is after all, a kind of action itself.  Thus to some, the distinction recognized by every day folks when we ask, but can he “walk the walk” is rendered passé`.  This has to be one of the intellectual’s biggest mistakes!  Talking about one’s undying love and actualizing that love in real behavioral commitments must be seen as separate things. Talking about how easily one can scale Mount Everest or excel academically, or “lay some one out,” and doing these things doesn’t necessarily mean a fact accomplished!  In the latter case in particular we are often quickly requested to put our actions where our mouths are.

The same important distinction holds for the difference between thinking and behavior.  Though thinking is not the very same as talking, both are very strongly correlated.  I assume that if I have made the case for the difference between mere talk and doing the walk, I have made it for the contrast between thinking and doing what we have merely thought.  We will have difficulty understanding the way emotion and cognition are distinct or better - can take turns dominating each other - and yet how tightly they are linked, unless we understand the difference in thinking about something and actually experiencing it.  Emotions may be particularly ours just like our thoughts, but emotions however inseparable from thoughts are not mere thoughts, they are more than that, or we do not call them emotions.

For one thing, emotions compel us in a way that thoughts do not.  In order to close the enlightenment gap between emotion and thought, we could say that emotions are the compelling part of thoughts.  However to properly distinguish the two varying phases of one common mentality, we must recognize with Aristotle that “mere understanding by itself moves nothing.”  We can take a number of positions and argue them out purely logically without necessarily believing any of them.  I remember in college my friends doing just that.  It can be a kind of practice or drill.  We have referred to this as the distanced promiscuity of emotions.  Lawyers will be particularly familiar with this as they practice “making cases for things.”  So too, will academicians trying to second-guess their opposition.  In our common understandings, however, actually taking a position is different than merely voicing it.  To actually hold a position means we believe it.  Beliefs fix us.  We are now committed in a way that mere thought does not.  To believe a thought to be true or to sincerely want it to be true, involves more of us than mere thought.  Belief, desire and faith, you will recognize, are more than mere thought.  They take a “hold on us”.  We don’t say, “Well, I don’t know, but maybe I hate that son of a bitch, I’m not quite sure.”  If we just think we hate him we don’t hate him.  To merely think such a thing is not what we mean by hate.  We mean more.  Just what this more is, becomes crucial in understanding the relationship between thought and emotions and why we need more than mere thought regardless of the pitfalls presented.

The strengths of thought, or what we refer to as cognition, are also its weakness.  The same is true for emotions.  Cognition is known for its fickleness, its promiscuity.  A word or name can be attached to anything.  The mere word love can apply to ice cream, country, sunsets or our lovers and pets.  This is not so with the actual emotion of a love or hate.  They attach to particular people...etc.  The power of cognition or the linguistic class applies equally to all particulars indiscriminately.  The term apple applies equally to all apples that ever were even before humans inhabited the earth and all apples that will be.  The term dollar attaches equally to all bills defined this way by the legitimated authorities.  One is as meaningful as the other is and they are thus, interchangeable.  The term pet applies to all animals we keep for company and are shocked at the thought of serving for dinner.

But it is in the socially agreed upon definition of pets that they are not interchangeable.  Why?  Because we become emotionally attached to them.  In law, an object is referred to as fungible, if according to the claimant, an object is replaceable by another like money.  If an article is non-fungible it is not replaceable by another of its general category.  I remember well when I was 12 years old finding my frozen dog one snowy morning when I was starting my paper route.  I think I cried the whole way through the route.  Soon after, I came in our house and my parents presented me with a little fox terrier.  I was totally insulted.  I couldn’t even begin to remember his name today.  I ached for Smoky and I found this replacement a bad joke.  It wasn’t long before we found the terrier a different and hopefully more appreciative owner.  Smoky was at that time non-replaceable.  In legal terminology, he was non-fungible to me.

The power of word-formed thought is not that it reflects a singular correct reality but that it so easily transcends the here and now.  In one grand swoop it allows consideration of all actual examples of its class – all that ever were and will be, but are not yet.  In this capacity we transcend limits of space and time as well as immediate tangibles.  In our minds we can go beyond the “here and now” of actuality to imagine possibilities.  If we can hold these images steady in our minds long enough, we can act in ways that make mere intangible ideas into material realities from stone axes to computers.  We have every reason to think that other animals think, but no other animal depends so much for their very existence on this uncanny ability to use thoughts to make mere ideas into actual things.  In doing so, we literally create our own environments to an extent that no other animal does – giving all due credit to Beavers, insects, birds and Apes.  The power of human thought is given through the fact that we can mentally create things that are not there.  But in allowing us to deliberately create realities, our minds have to be in some important sense creatively free from environmental determination.  That is, the world of the mind, in transcending actuality, immediacy and necessity, and allowing us to enter into a timeless world of possibility, also allows for great differences in how we think.  But we do more than just shove ideas around in different logical patterns.  We become emotionally invested in the objects to which the name refers.

Beliefs have a two-sided face.  Belief, like all positive emotion motivates us.  We need to believe, not just think that the possibility can become actuality or we will not maintain the necessary effort to think thoroughly and act effectively in the first place.  Not only must we be motivated by belief, but also in many cases, we must have some semblance of confidence to seriously entertain the thought.  Insofar as confidence has to do with believing you can do something, the two words are almost the same.  Emotion becomes critical then for sustained deliberate thinking.  We will have much more to say about this later.  Our everyday language recognizes how close thinking and belief is, when we say, “I think such and such.”  We mean more than the literal meaning of thinking used above, we mean that we believe it.

The flip side of the emotional component to thought is that by becoming attached to our thoughts through beliefs we sometimes resist beneficial change.  We form emotional attachments to the familiar just because it brings up fond memories and personal identities.  Our feelings of firmly felt selfhood are often lodged in familiar behavioral routines as well as ways of thinking.  If we were mere thinkers we could change with no trouble from conservative to liberal or to communists.  Present public figures aside, you do not find that always easy to do.  Our news hours would be very different indeed.  It is this “freedom” of human thought, or the arbitrariness of thought from nature’s point of view, that guarantees differences.  These very differences (that make us the most flexible and adaptable animal on earth) also make us an inherently contentious one within the species and without.  Insofar as belief commits us to an idea, it also narrows our focus.  This means we can see the positives of our beliefs very clearly but it prejudices us to the very possibility of the negatives.  It blinds us to equally plausible alternatives that typically become emotional negatives.  Emotion, in psychologically rooting us strongly and decisively in the world in a way that mere thought can not, can also narrow us into intolerance and inflexibility.

Alcmene’s Problem (as an illustration of non-fungibility and the fixity of emotion)

Alcmene was the faithful wife of Amphiteryon, whom Zeus was able to seduce only by taking the form of her husband.  Zeus, being after all, king of all the gods, had the ability to transform himself into any one thing he wanted.  In this case, he took on all of the properties of Amphiteryon.  Now this is a mysterious trick, but for a god not an impossible one.

However he did it, which will be forever beyond us, it leaves us with a logical/moral problem: When Alcmene and Amphiteryon find out, ought they mind?

The man she loved that night was qualitatively the same as her husband, though not the same numerically.  But wasn’t it for his qualities that she loved her husband?  Whatever she loved about her husband, Zeus had to have had that because the story has it – or we are led to believe - that things went well indeed that night.

If one is to take a logical and completely rational approach, there should be no logical/moral problem about this promiscuity.  She loved her husband for his qualities and Zeus had them all.  (It is left for the reader to conjecture that Zeus, being the king of gods, may have been a little better lover than Amphiteryon, but let’s let that slide.)

So, we end up with what is called Alcmene’s Paradox.  If her love is rational only if it relates to her husband’s qualities, then love must be either irrational or fickle.

This would mean that the husband, if he were purely rational, would not feel jealous that his wife had had such a good time with someone else.  This means that it’s rational to see yourself as replaceable?  No way!  Once one understands the fixity of emotion, i.e. the non-fungibility of emotion’s intentional objects, the problem is solved.  Zeus can not replace Amphiteryon.  God, he may be, but Zeus is Zeus and Amphiteryon is Amphiteryon.  Zeus is guilty of promiscuity and adultery.  I don’t think he lost any sleep over it though.