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True to our feelings: What our emotions are really telling us.

Article Excerpt
Solomon, R. (2006). True to our feelings: What our emotions are really telling us. New York: Oxford University Press, 286 pp., ISBN, 0-19-530672-4, $28.00 (hardcover).

Robert Solomon wrote a book on emotions that brings together what is known about emotions from the perspectives of neurology, evolutionary psychology, psychology and philosophy. The result is a much larger and deeper understanding of emotions than is possible when viewed from any one of these disciplines. We are given a rich understanding of specific emotional experiences like anger, fear and happiness. In addition, a comprehensive view of emotions as essential to human nature, the good life and to well-functioning societies is provided. Not only does Solomon's philosophical perspective and writing style give the text depth and thoughtfulness, it also provides psychology, especially clinical psychology, with a means of deepening and broadening its questions and analyses. Philosophy can counterbalance psychology's tendency to ask only empirically testable questions and this is beneficial in the face of psychology's habit of losing sight of the fact that asking deep and thoughtful questions usually leads to the most fruitful testable hypotheses.

The book begins with the emotion, anger, to show how an emotion is a way of engaging the world. Anger tends to be seen as a negative emotion, even dangerous or sinful. Yet it has a place in our functioning effectively in the world--for example, it helps us in finding justice. When we are wronged unfairly, anger informs us that we are being treated unfairly and aids us in protecting ourselves. Anger aids us in lifting us from a one-down to a one-up position...

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