On Being Interdisciplinary

The term “interdisciplinary” has gained a lot of popularity in academia in recent years. However, there seems to be very little discussion about what makes for good interdisciplinary work, or the conditions necessary for achieving good interdisciplinary work.

I became interested in the philosophy of emotions during a graduate seminar on the topic. As someone with a background interest in psychology, I also saw the philosophy of emotions as an opportunity to engage with both psychology and philosophy in interdisciplinary work. When I read the assigned articles for my seminar, I would think about how to apply the insights of the psychological literature that I was reading in my other classes. In particular, I was interested in the ways in which psychological accounts of emotion could address problems with philosophical accounts of emotion. When I would go to write papers, I would simply include the psychological literature alongside the philosophical or put them in conversation with one another.

But is it enough to simply combine work from different disciplines? In what follows, I critique my own simplistic, yet well-meaning, attempt to create interdisciplinary work. This view of interdisciplinarity as the mere combination of work from different disciplines is not only found in my own thinking, but is largely accepted as the dominant understanding of what it means to be interdisciplinary.

I utilize an example of how an interdisciplinary project might proceed, but ultimately fails, in order to illustrate a problem with this view of interdisciplinarity. At the very least, I hope to encourage thought and discussion about what it means for work to be interdisciplinary, and furthermore what it might mean for interdisciplinary work to be good.

In On the Temporality of Emotions: An Essay on Grief, Anger, and Love, Beri Marušić describes the “puzzle of accommodation.” Marušić’s puzzle is this: how could the diminution of grief over time be reasonable if our reasons for grieving do not change? If grief is reasons-responsive and responds to the fact that we valued the deceased individual, then our grief should reasonably continue as long as we value the deceased person. But we know from experience that it often does not. Grief necessarily diminishes over time. What are we to make of this?

Put simply, Marušić is interested in why grief diminishes over time if our reasons for grieving do not diminish over time. More specifically, however, Marušić is interested in why grief diminishes over time if our reasons for grieving do not diminish over time because we often feel as though we should continue grieving even when we do not. Even setting aside a social expectation about the length of one’s grief, we may have our own expectations about how long our own grief should last. It may nonetheless feel meaningful to us to grieve someone long after they have passed, especially if they were very important to us. Even when this is the case, however, all of us experience a natural diminution of the deep sadness or sense of loss that is characteristic of grief.

In other words, Marušić is interested in a phenomenological account of the diminution of grief. By “phenomenological,” I am referring to the way in which Marušić’s insights are first-person and based on his own lived experience of grief. It is, additionally, a reflection on the alienation that we feel from ourselves when we recognize that we have reasons to experience an emotion and yet do not.

In my reply to Marušić’s puzzle in my paper “The construction of emotion: a reply to Marušić’s ‘Puzzle of Accommodation’”, I pull from theories of emotion within psychology. I argue that we can explain the diminution of grief by utilizing a different understanding of emotion found in the psychological literature, specifically from the constructionist account of emotion.

According to constructionists such as James Russell, emotions can be separated into two main parts: core affect and judgment (Russell, 2003). We have a core affect (ex. a sinking feeling in our stomach) and then apply a judgment (ex. “I am nervous”), thereby constructing the emotion. Necessarily, the core affect is seen as physiological and automatic, outside of our conscious control, and thus subject to change. It is meaningless and “free floating” until we decide that it isn’t. Our evaluations, however, can shift or remain fixed depending on our own thinking and reasoning. This account of emotion renders the felt experience of emotions mostly if not entirely outside of the realm of reasons.

In my paper, I argue that this offers an explanation for the diminution of grief. In the constructionist picture, we might say that while the judgment component of grief stays fixed over time, the core affect component of grief necessarily diminishes in the same way that all physiological processes wax and wane outside of our conscious control. I therefore ultimately argue that the diminution of grief over time is not rational nor irrational, but arational altogether.

This is a straightforward example of interdisciplinary work, as it attempts to utilize the psychological in order to provide insight to the philosophical. It adheres to the simplistic view of interdisciplinarity in that it is a combination of philosophical and psychological perspectives.

I believe that the project suffers from a problem that simplistic interdisciplinary work can sometimes suffer from. The problem, I believe, is that Marušić and the constructionists embrace entirely different ways of examining the subject of “emotion,” and thus the work cannot straightforwardly be taken to bear on one another. In merely putting the two views in conversation with one another without deeply considering their unique perspectives, we fail to fully appreciate Marušić’s puzzle.

The constructionist account of emotion is ultimately descriptive. That is, instead of the first-person, it is from the third-person perspective. Furthermore, Russell’s stated project was to achieve “a synthesis of (a) James’s (1884) insight that emotion involves a self-perception of automatic processes with (b) modern evidence on the processes involved” (Russell, 2003, 146). Russell is also interested in the “integration of seemingly conflicting theories of emotion” (Russell, 2003, 146). It is not necessarily meant to accommodate or capture the lived experience of the emotions themselves. One might also note that psychology is, qua science, generally interested in examining topics using a descriptive lens and not appealing to first-person accounts of emotional experience.

Marušić’s account of emotions that is implied by the “puzzle of accommodation,” however, is founded on first-person accounts of emotion. Marušić’s project is inherently phenomenological and not focused on justifying an account of emotion that would serve as a suitable “scientific concept.” Marušić actually states in the introduction to the book: “I then seek to understand this experience neither by providing a theory of the emotions nor by studying emotions in an empirical or scientific way but rather by increasingly abstract and theoretical reflection on this experience” (Marušić, 2022). Thus, a solution to the “puzzle of accommodation” invoking a scientific notion of emotion fails to understand the puzzle or the force of the project in the first place. The problem is not that we can’t, theoretically, make sense of the diminution, but that we can’t make sense of it in the first-person experience of the emotion.

While examining the underlying assumptions of different views is important for any scholarly work, I believe that we should pay greater attention to this phenomenon within interdisciplinary scholarship specifically. Simply because two different disciplines are discussing the same subject does not mean that they will necessarily be able to bear on one another. We must first have a fuller understanding of each discipline’s aims in asking the questions in the first place.

References:

Marušić, Berislav. On the Temporality of Emotions an Essay on Grief, Anger, and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Russell, James A. “Core Affect and the Psychological Construction of Emotion.” Psychological Review 110, no. 1 (2003): 145–72.