emotional truth

The Grouch Reads: about emotions.........

I've been reading Ronald deSousa's book, "Emotional Truth", and something occurs to me.

deSousa's Plato is a cardboard image derived from the work of Gregory Vlastos---or, so I surmise.  (If anyone really knows otherwise, feel free to tell me.)

(That is, if anyone has reason to think that deSousa's view is anything more than a reduplication of GV's, let me know.  I don't need someone to tell me the view is more than a cardboard image.  I recognize that is a provocative and controversial statement and I could not say it in a respectable professional context without extensive argument and textual analysis.  However, you see, this is a blog and not a refereed journal.  However, you find a brief gesture in the direction of more professional work below.)

So, for example, on this version of Plato, the weakness of the human intellect consists, more or less,
in our separation from a world of "perfect" objects.  (yccch)

However, a similar stress on the limits of our knowledge is itself present in deSousa's positive views.
deSousa thinks every individual has unique emotions and that emotions are infinitely multiple.

And deSousa (as I read him) likes or even enjoys the multiplicity of it all.  I want to comment: for me that is perfectly Platonic. 

On my reading of Plato, if deSousa thinks that our actual knowledge of emotions is dwarfed by the multiplicity of individual emotions, then that is much like  what Plato thought about our ability to understand reality---and there's no need to talk about "another world" (yccch).

(Quick pain of conscience:  how independent of human activities are deSousa's emotions?  To what extent are individual emotional histories constructed on deSousa's account? Doesn't he say that we can mistake our emotions? Is that enough?   Should I be satisfied?)

However, deSousa believes in a version of the multiplicity of values which allows that there are genuinely irreconcilable conflicts---no determinate answer to questions about what's good or bad.

(I might say 'right' or 'wrong'---but those are not my preferred terms.)

The question for me as I continue to read deSousa is this:  what sort of communication between individuals can exist if their emotional histories are so diverse as deSousa says.  And, a further subject of continual interest is how to reconcile a respectable sort of objectivity with facts about variation in culture and language.  (The latter a general question, here applied to this particular book.)

In conclusion,
The Grouch Must Read Further.............

NOTE
How is it that scientist put it?  Well, I've received no funding or any payment whatsoever to express my opinions.  Nonetheless, I feel I should confess up front that Terry Penner was my teacher, and he has argued at length for the inadequacy of the view of Plato's metaphysics which deSousa assumes.  (See, e.g. his "The Ascent from Nominalism".  A shorter (IMHO more accessible) essay about Plato's "Forms" appears in a recent volume of essays devoted to Plato's "Republic".)