Reflections on the Sociology of Emotions in "Turner's Question".

　　People are becoming more and more aware of the importance of emotions in the creation, maintenance and transformation of human social order, but why has classical sociology, which is based on "how is social order possible", not given emotion a "place"?

　　Jonathan Turner, a contemporary American theoretical sociologist best known for his book The Structure of Sociological Theory, is also known for his book The Structure of Sociological Theory, but we should not ignore the fact that he is also an accomplished sociologist of emotions. Since the publication of The Origins of Human Emotion: A Sociological Survey of the Evolution of Human Emotion in 2000, Turner has published a number of books on the sociology of emotion. As a sociologist of emotion, Turner has been "surprised" more than once by the academic vision of the long-term "absence" of emotions in classical sociological thought, and thus keenly problematized it, but did not delve into its reasoning. Following Turner's thoughts, the author further conceptualizes the "emotional absence" of classical sociology as "Turner's question", and places it in the broader context of the history of Western social thought.

　　The origin of "Turner's question".

　　In the "Preface" to the book Human Emotions: A Theory of Sociology, Turner admits that it is the "pinnacle" of his sociological research on emotions, which encapsulates all of his thinking about emotions since college. He proposed 17 sociological principles of emotion to explain: first, how different sociocultural conditions at the micro, meso, and macro levels lead to the occurrence of emotion; second, how emotions act on the self, others, and society; Third, how negative emotions are transformed by the defense mechanism, and how the emotions formed by the defense mechanism react to social and cultural conditions. Turner argues that his sociological theory of emotion, while not perfect, is "quite mature." Needless to say, his theory of the sociology of emotions is original and self-contained, and has made outstanding contributions to the development of the sociology of emotions, which is closely related to the encounter with emotions in his personal academic experience, and the "Turner's question" is also logically derived from it.

　　In the 1960s, Turner received his college education at the University of California, Riverside and Santa Barbara. During his time at Riverside, he majored in psychology and aspired to become a clinical psychologist. But after a year-long experiment with guinea pigs, Turner decided to transfer to Santa Barbara to study social psychology with Tamotsu Shibutani, choosing a course that focused on the relationship between emotions, social structures, and culture. It can be said that this is Turner's first encounter with emotion. During this time, he studied the works of Cooley, Mead, Freud and others, and later majored in social psychology at the Cornell Graduate School at the same university, where he devoted himself to the study of macrosociological theories, and gradually distanced himself from micro-level emotions. It wasn't until the 1980s, under the influence of Randall Collins, that Turner regained his emotions and began to study the sociology of emotions for more than 20 years. Although contemporary sociology of emotions has advanced since the emotional turn of the 1970s, scholars have turned a blind eye to the academic anomaly of "emotional absence" in classical sociological thought. In works such as The Sociology of Emotions and Human Emotions: A Theory of Sociology, Turner explicitly problematized it, and although he did not systematically discuss it, he brought the "Turner's question" to life. It should be pointed out that although classical sociologists have "missed" emotions without exception, there is still no lack of emotional insights scattered among classical sociological theories.

　　The path to the "Turner's question".

　　With the deepening of emotion research in philosophy, anthropology, history, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, and especially neuroscience, people are increasingly aware that the importance of emotions in the creation, maintenance and transformation of human social order is far greater than sociologists would rather recognize, whether at the individual level, the group or social level, or at the micro, meso, or macro levels. As neuroscientist Damasio points out, individuals cannot make any so-called rational or optimal decisions without the involvement of emotions. If emotions are so important, why doesn't classical sociology, which focuses on "how social order is possible?" It's really confusing. In order to uncover the mystery of "Turner's question", the author intends to explore the path of resolving doubts from the context of Western social and intellectual history.

　　First of all, the history of Western social thought originated in ancient Greece, so the historical limitations of the emotional outlook or emotional ontology of the ancient Greek philosophers are closely related to the "emotional absence" of classical sociology. Plato believed that emotions are the disturbances of the soul, and the soul is divided into the rational "Logos" soul, the irrational desire soul, and the passionate soul, the latter two will be disturbed to produce emotions, while the former is not. On this basis, Plato distinguishes between the will to pursue pleasure (boulesis), which is stimulated by the soul of desire and the soul of passion, and the eros (eros), which is inspired by the soul of "Logos" to pursue virtue or goodness, and uses the "death of Socrates" to exemplify the priority of eros over the will, that is, the subordination of emotions to reason, or the control of emotions by reason. As a student of Plato, Aristotle divided the soul into a nurturing soul, a sensual soul, and a rational soul, arguing that emotions arise only when the sensual soul is disturbed, but he advocated the use of rhetoric to achieve rational control of emotions for some instrumental purpose, unlike his teachers, who believed that this control was directed to a greater or higher level of good or love. In this sense, Aristotle's conception of emotions has a marked pragmatist tendency. But both Plato's moralistic view of emotions and Aristotle's pragmatist view of emotions emphasize the priority or control of emotions by reason. This shows that since the ancient Greek philosophers, the relationship between reason and emotion has been anchored as the relationship between domination and domination, and emotion is irrational and emotional. This idea of rationality and emotion has become the cornerstone of social and political development in the West for nearly two thousand years, believing that the social order is created, maintained and transformed by reason rather than emotion, or that the social order is the product of rationalization. Thus, this ontologically rejects the relationship between emotions and social order. In this way, this philosophical view of emotions has profoundly influenced the historical attitude of classical sociology, which takes the pursuit of social order as its own responsibility. In other words, the ontological philosophical view of emotions in ancient Greece severed the first vein between emotions and classical sociology.

　　Secondly, it is precisely under the influence of the philosophical thinking of the ancient Greek philosophers on emotion and reason that the human knowledge of emotion is full of cognitive biases or cultural prejudices, thus dwarfing the scientific nature of emotional knowledge, and the historical limitations of this emotional epistemology are also closely related to the "emotional absence" of classical sociology. Among them, the most well-known knowledge of emotions is the belief that "emotions are irrational". In fact, there is a serious but common epistemological error in the habitual thinking of equating emotion with irrationality and thus opposing reason. On closer examination, it is not difficult to find that the opposite of rationality should be irrationality or anti-rationality, not emotion. This is because reason and emotion belong to different dimensions of concepts and phenomena, rather than two endpoints on the same continuum lineage. Just as reason and emotion are intimately linked, so irrationality or anti-rationality and emotion are inextricably linked, but they are not the same thing after all. In other words, whether rational or irrational or anti-rational, they are all intertwined with emotions and yet different from each other. It is important to point out that in the English-speaking world, non-rationality literally translates to "irrational", but it refers to something outside the category of rationality, or something that does not directly involve rationality, rather than irrationality or anti-rationality. In this sense, the word "irrational", which is often used to describe emotions in the Chinese world, is closer to irrational or anti-rational, when in fact they are not the same. This epistemological misunderstanding has at least two important consequences: first, in people's cognitive world, after emotions are labeled as "irrational", they are naturally subjectively isolated from reason and have nothing to do with it, so it is difficult to form an ideological connection with the creation, maintenance and transformation of social order; Second, when the ancient Greek philosophers anchored the relationship between emotion and reason in an ontological sense, they actually started the process of stigmatizing emotion, and the subsequent emergence of many emotional cognitive biases or cultural prejudices continued to produce and reproduce the stigmatization of emotion itself. In other words, epistemological affective cognitive biases or cultural biases cut off the second vein between emotions and classical sociology. (Produced by the "Thought Workshop" of the social science newspaper, the full text can be found in the social science newspaper and its official website)