ABSTRACT
Emotions ubiquitously pervade, enrich, and color our mental life. They are complex, multi-layered, and variegated mental phenomena. For instance, suppose you are informed about a forthcoming event: Your friend will visit you in a couple of days, which makes you feel joy about that. Even a cursory look at this only apparently simple emotion unveils its fascinating and delicate complexity. To begin with, the joy acquires a determined position in your mental life: Perhaps you were in a somewhat depressive mood before realizing your friend’s visit, but now the emotion of joy helps you overcome that mood. Suddenly, you begin to live in the pleasant expectation of your friend’s visit. Also, the emotion enters a complicated network of relations with other experiences: You have been informed that your friend will come, and it is based on your awareness of that future event that you elicit joy. Not only are you aware of the forthcoming event, you can also become aware of feeling joy about the visit. However, if you pay too much attention to the joy you are living through—maybe because you want to find out why, precisely, the visit of your friend gives you joy—the emotion may vanish. But this also reveals that joy—just as many other emotions—is motivated: Generally, one has a motive for being joyful and this motive can be more or less transparent to the subject. But this suggests that the object of your joy (the visit of your friend), which the emotion is intentionally directed at, must be distinguished from its motive (the reason why the visit of your friend generates joy in you).
