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Séminaire Jeunes Chercheurs de Philosophie Argumentative | Philosophie de l'esprit

Publié le 17 février 2025 – Mis à jour le 12 mars 2025

Intervention d'Elodie BOISSARD (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, CNRS, IHPST) dans le cadre du séminaire Jeunes Chercheurs de Philosophie Argumentative. Rendez-vous vendredi 14 mars 2025 à 17h.

Séance 6 : Philosophie de l'esprit

Elodie Boissard (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, CNRS, IHPST) :

"L'humeur dépressive est-elle une forme de tristesse ?"


Abstract
A common claim is that moods are objectless emotions, i.e. emotions that are not directed at anything. This claim is generally accompanied by the thesis that it is possible to distinguish types of moods (a joyful mood, a sad mood, an irritable mood, an anxious mood, an elated mood, a depressed mood…) in the same way that we distinguish types of emotions (anger, sadness, joy, disgust…); it is also implicitly assumed that each type of mood would be constituted of objectless instances of the corresponding emotion type. In such a view, moods are conceived of as pure feelings qualitatively similar to distinctive phenomenologies of some emotions but not intentional (Nussbaum, 2003; Roberts, 2003). Other theories argue that moods are intentional but have a more general object than emotions (Goldie, 2000; Prinz, 2004; Solomon, 1976). Other theories conceive of moods as perceiving affective properties that are not instantiated by anything in particular (Mendelovici, 2013a, 2013b) or properties that could be instantiated by a situation or a state of affairs (Price, 2006; Tappolet, 2018).

Depressed mood raises an issue for the “objectless emotions” view: to which emotion would it correspond? A natural candidate is sadness. The definition of depression in psychiatry is partly built on that of melancholia, which was classified as a mental disease until the 1970s and was characterized since Hippocrate by “persistent feelings of sadness and fear” (Starobinski, 2012, p. 21‑22). Moreover, the version of melancholia that was closest to depression, “melancholia without delusion”, was defined by French alienists at the turn of the XX° century and was characterized by an intense sadness called “moral pain”(Haustgen, 2014; Haustgen & Masson, 2018). But depression is only partially the heiress of melancholia: the contemporary clinical picture of depression may differ from the one of melancholia. Its central affective symptom is called “depressed mood”; see for instance the DSM-5. Then does “depressed mood” refer to a kind of sadness? This very expression, instead of “sad mood”, suggests a difference between these two affective states. Patients seem to report feeling sad distinctively from feeling depressed (El-Khoury et al., 2022). Moreover, clinical phenomenology has helped distinguish the two. Ratcliffe defined the depressed mood as a distinctive bodily feeling state that is world-oriented even if not intentional (Ratcliffe, 2010, 2013, 2014). Fernandez suggested that there is strictly speaking no depressed mood since depression is rather the experience of not being attuned to the world through moods (Fernandez, 2014).

So is the depressed mood a specific kind of sadness or is it a different affective state? In this article, I shall argue that we should distinguish both so that the depressed mood is no kind of sadness.

In the first section, I shall characterize sadness and the depressed mood using examples from literature and cinema. I rely respectively mainly on Martha Nussbaum’s vivid narrative of her sadness at her mother’s death in Upheaval of thoughts (Nussbaum, 2003), and on Styron’s autobiographical narrative about his depression, namely Darkness visible (Styron, 2010). I characterize sadness and depressive mood according to five aspects: their phenomenology, their intentionality, their evaluative dimension, their typical physiological changes, and their expressive and motivational aspects.

In the second section I shall argue that a depressed mood is not a sad mood.

Firstly, I will show that “objectless sadness” is only one possible conception of what a sad mood is. Actually a sad mood could also be a feeling of loss that is directed at the whole world - which means at anything or nothing in particular since the whole world is the collection of all particular objects (Solomon, 1976), or at a general situation (Goldie, 2000; Prinz, 2004). It could also be the feeling that the subject is liable to lose something, while he didn’t lose anything so far (Price, 2006; Tappolet, 2018). It could also be the feeling that something is saddening while this thing remains fully undetermined (Mendelovici, 2013a, 2013b). So we may endorse an intentionalist view on the sad mood in which this mood is not “objectless sadness” but “generalized sadness” or “anticipatory sadness” or “uninstantiated sadness”.

Secondly, I will show that the depressed mood cannot be identified to the sad mood, either as objectless sadness or by endorsing an intentionalist view on moods, because it has neither the same phenomenology, nor the same physiology, and also not the same intentionality. I will highlight the differences between the respective phenomenologies of the depressed mood and the sad mood and also between their respective physiologies. This will allow me to reject the thesis that a depressed mood would be “objectless sadness”, so a sad mood when one endorses an unintentionalist view on moods, as well as the thesis that a depressed mood is “bodily diffuse sadness”, so a sad mood in a jamesian theory of moods. Then, I will show that in any intentionalist theory of moods, their intentionality cannot be disentangled either from the phenomenology of from the physiology: so having different phenomenologies and different physiologies, the depressed mood and the sad mood cannot have the same intentionality. If one wants to argue that the depressed mood is either “generalized sadness” or “anticipatory sadness” or “not-instantiated sadness”, one would have to show that they have either the same phenomenology or the same physiology, which I proved false. This will allow me to reject the claim that the depressed mood is a sad mood in any intentionalist theory of moods.

Having different phenomenologies, different physiologies and different intentionalities, the depressed mood and the sad mood should have different effects on mental states and behavior. However, if one could show that they have identical effects, one could cast a doubt on their being distinct; one could argue that they are identical from a functional point view so identical if one endorses a functionalist theory of moods. In a third subsection, I will reply to this functionalist objection by showing that a depressed mood and a sad mood have similar but not identical effects on mental states and behavior.
 
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