Can Western philosophy really understand belief and rationality without emotion, or do we need the kind of “heart-mind” yin-and-yang framework that Michael Slote defends here?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Michael Slote is Professor Emeritus at the University of Miami, and his research focuses on ethics and mind, and especially on virtues, sentimentalism, and related topics.
2. Interview Summary
Michael Slote argues that the standard Western philosophical picture of the mind needs a “major course correction,” because it treats cognition as able (in principle) to operate independently of emotion and motivation—whereas East Asian traditions instead assume a ‘heart-mind’ in which these are inseparable. To motivate his alternative, he reconstructs ‘yin’/‘yang’ in a modernized way: the old “oppositional forces in nature” reading (often paired with bad pseudo-explanations and sexist associations) should be discarded, while a minority tradition treats ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ as necessary complements that accommodate each other. On Slote’s proposal, ‘yin’ is receptivity and ‘yang’ is directed purpose, and he uses curiosity as an intuitive case where openness to what’s happening already involves an active, selective focus.
From there, Slote presses the claim that emotion is not a “mere add-on” to belief and reasoning, but shows up inside their normal structure. One argument appeals to “epistemic feelings”: if confidence is commonly treated as a kind of strong belief and as something we feel, then belief belongs on the same scale and should involve feeling too (even if not the same kind as anger or love). He also argues that belief has a built-in motivational (‘yang’) side—partly by analogy with theoretical reasoning (to believe P is to be committed to using P in inference), and partly by criticizing the tradition (e.g., David Hume and Donald Davidson) that treats belief as “causally inert”: if belief is inert, it’s hard to explain everyday instrumental action like learning there’s no food at home and then going out to find food. Slote extends the same yin/yang lens to empathy, arguing that full empathy includes taking in the intentional object of another’s feeling, and that once you share distress at a pain, some motivation to relieve it comes along “analytically,” not contingently.
Finally, Slote draws out implications for value and for diagnosing dysfunction. Because receptivity and directed purpose are both things we admire (open-mindedness, curiosity, steadiness of purpose), their inseparable unity itself becomes something we value; and the contrast between compassionate people and psychopaths can be described as the presence vs. absence of this yin/yang structure, especially in empathic perception and the motivation to help. He also addresses a key worry about saying belief involves “favoring”: a person can ‘yin-favor’ a hypothesis (treat it as epistemically supported) while not ‘yang-favoring’ it (not preferring it in the practical, desirous sense)—illustrated by the example of a husband who comes to believe his wife was unfaithful despite strongly wishing it weren’t true. Across the interview, Slote presents this as a cross-cultural corrective: not just “different concepts,” but a case where Western philosophy has mis-theorized its own mental-life concepts, and where taking the resources of Chinese philosophy seriously could reshape how we think about mind, rationality, and agency.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:58 - Yin/yang of pervasive emotion
02:17 - Updating yin/yang
07:30 - Reception of the view
08:52 - Problems with the Western view of the mind
11:25 - Argument for belief involving emotion
13:04 - Feeling of a different sort?
14:33 - Mental theorizing too simple?
18:09 - Active element as not constitutive
35:50 - Criticism of Hume
37:08 - External connection?
38:12 - Examples
40:06 - Eastern philosophy in the West
43:37 - Yin-favoring vs. yang-favoring
49:47 - Irrationality and deplorable states
56:12 - Beliefs and desires as the same sort of state
59:32 - Wider applications
1:03:52 - Depression and cultivating yin/yang
1:10:06 - Future research
1:12:03 - Degrees of yin/yang
1:14:55 - Lessons from Eastern philosophy
1:18:21 - Skeptical concern
1:20:43 - Value of philosophy
1:24:31 - Conclusion
