What is the Relation Between Emotion and Expressive Action? The Idea of Expressive Emotion

This paper is an attempt to give shape to the idea of an ‘expressive emotion.’ An emotion is expressive, I argue, if it is best explained by reference to an expressive action. An expressive action is an action that has expressive or symbolic properties that relate non-arbitrarily to the significance of a situation, and which non-instrumentally marks the situation as in some way significant. I argue for six main conclusions about expressive emotions and their relation to expressive action. First, their psychological role is the same as that of expressive actions, namely, to lift situations out of the mundane and mark them as in some way significant. Second, their phenomenology is best explained by reference to the symbolism of an expressive action. Third, they centrally involve an attitude to an expressive action as called for in the situation. Fourth, the conditions of fittingness specified by the emotion’s formal object are shared with the conditions of appropriateness of an expressive action. Fifth, they are given expression in the relevant expressive action; this is the action towards which the emotion has a motivational tendency. Sixth, they are emotions for which there can be non-instrumental reasons; and the nature of such reasons is best explained by reference to an expressive action. I argue that reference to expressive action helps to explain how emotions are to be individuated; in what their unity consists; and how there can be non-instrumental reasons for emotions. I do not claim that the expressive theory applies to everything that is called ‘emotion.’ Emotions that I am interested in include pride, shame, guilt, joy, disappointment, awe. In this paper I focus on the emotion of guilt, arguing that it is best understood in relation to the expressive action of dissociation (from wrongdoing).