Reading this passage has given me a lot to think about, especially how emotions are reflected upon — Jack Cummins

I wonder if what we call 'emotion' is in some way equivalent to what was meant by 'the passions' in those sources. — Wayfarer

s Please be more precise: what is (your) philosophical question – perplexity – about "emotions"? — 180 Proof

Context — 180 Proof

I guess one way in which I could phrase a specific question would be what are emotions made of? — Jack Cummins

our emotions can alert us to danger, show us our attachments, and help focus on things that are important in life. But emotions, if allowed to run unchecked can lead to us to our own destruction. Pain can lead us to danger or loss, but it can also lead us to down the road to torment and despair. Love can set us free, but also lead to paranoia or anguish. Desire can awaken us to our potential, or it can lead to greed and obsession. Anger can spur us into action, but it can also lead us to death or destruction. Fear can show us obstacles and help us plan, or it can paralyze us into inaction. Emotions are good if they are useful or beneficial- after that the emotions are more of a distraction from happiness than anything else.' — Jack Cummins

You'd probably get a lot out of "How Emotions Are Made" by Lisa Feldman-Barrett — fdrake

You will know if you read Stoic literature, that 'the passions' are something to be subdued, and that 'subduing the passions' is one of the marks of wisdom. I don't think they're praising callousness or mere indifference to suffering, but the ability to rise above feelings, emotions and moods. 'Constancy of temperament' was a highly prized virtue in the classics (reflected in the name 'Constance').


I wonder if what we call 'emotion' is in some way equivalent to what was meant by 'the passions' in those sources. I did learn, from practicing mindfulness meditation, that emotions always pass, and that's an important thing to learn. Because when you're feeling down, when you're possessed by negative emotions, which happens to all of us, it seems, in that state, that everything seems grey, in all directions. But once you learn that it is an emotion that will pass, it makes it easier to deal with. — Wayfarer

people will reply:… Attunements-joy, contentment, bliss, sadness, melancholy, anger-are, after all, something psychological, or better, psychic; they are emotional states. We can ascertain such states in ourselves and in others. We can even record how long they last, how they rise and fall, the causes which evoke and impede them. Attunements or, as one also says, 'feelings', are events occurring in a subject. Psychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling. It is not by chance that it will always name feeling in the third, subordinate position. Feelings are the third class of lived experience. For naturally man is in the first place the rational living being. Initially, and in the first instance, this rational living being thinks and wills. Feelings are certainly also at hand. Yet are they not merely, as it were, the adornment of our thinking and willing, or something that obfuscates and inhibits these? After all, feelings and attunements constantly change. They have no fixed subsistence, they are that which is most inconstant. They are merely a radiance and shimmer, or else something gloomy, something hovering over emotional events. Attunements-are they not like the utterly fleeting and ungraspable shadows of clouds flitting across the landscape?”

“Attunements are the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Attunements are the 'how' [ Wie] according to which one is in such and such a way. Certainly we often take this 'one is in such and such a way'- for reasons we shall not go into now-as something indifferent, in contrast to what we intend to do, what we are occupied with, or what will happen to us. And yet this 'one is in such and such a way' is not-is never-simply a consequence or side-effect of our thinking, doing, and acting. It is-to put it crudely-the presupposition for such things, the 'medium' within which they first happen. And precisely those attunements to which we pay no heed at all, the attunements we least observe, those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement there at all, as though we were not attuned in any way at all-these attunements are the most powerful.

At first and for the most part we are affected only by particular attunements that tend toward 'extremes', like joy or grief. A faint apprehensiveness or a buoyant contentment are less noticeable. Apparently not there at all, and yet there, is precisely that lack of attunement in which we are neither out of sorts nor in a 'good' mood. Yet even in this 'neither/nor' we are never without an attunement. The reason we take lack of attunement as not being attuned at all, however, has grounds of a quite essential nature. When we say that a human being who is good-humoured brings a lively atmosphere with them, this means only that an elated or lively attunement is brought about. It does not mean, however, that there was no attunement there before. A lack of attunement prevailed there which is seemingly hard to grasp, which seems to be something apathetic and indifferent, yet is not like this at all. We can see once more that attunements never emerge in the empty space of the soul and then disappear again; rather, Dasein as Dasein is always already attuned in its very grounds. There is only ever a change of attunement.

We stated in a provisional and rough and ready manner that attunements are the 'presupposition' for, and 'medium' of thinking and acting. That means as much as to say that they reach more primordially back into our essence, that in them we first meet ourselves-as being-there, as a Da-sein. Precisely because the essence of attunement consists in its being no mere side-effect, precisely because it leads us back into the grounds of our Dasein, the essence of attunement remains concealed or hidden from us; for this reason we initially grasp the essence of attunement in terms of what confronts us at first, namely the extreme tendencies of attunement, those which irrupt then disappear. Because we take attunements in terms of their extreme manifestations, they seem to be one set of events among others, and we overlook this peculiar being attuned, the primordial, pervasive attunement of our whole Dasein as such.” (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)

I guess one way in which I could phrase a specific question would be what are emotions made of?
— Jack Cummins

They aren't made of anything. In the sense that walking isn't made of legs. — fdrake

I've noticed is that there is almost no reference to 'emotions' in classical texts, whereas there are very frequent references to 'the passions'. — Wayfarer

They aren't made of anything. In the sense that walking isn't made of legs. — fdrake

I find Matthew Ratcliffe’s work to be among the best of the current crop of writings on affectivity, mood and emotion. He combines the phenomenological work of Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger, the Pragmatism of James and Dewey and cognitive enactivist approaches like that of Evan Thompson. — Joshs

Is it to be expected that there will be much, or anything, common to all emotions?

It does seem to me that I discover my emotional condition from outside. When someone says "I feel angry", they might do so with sadness, or with surprise as often as they say it angrily. The tone of the discussion is thus far neutral to the point almost of indifference, as if emotion is too near, even for the most myopic self observer to bring into focus. Rather as one has to take off one's spectacles to see whether they are rose tinted or some other colour. — unenlightened

As the old joke has it, when two psychologists meet on the the street one says to the other, "How am I?" - "You're fine, how am I?" That's not much of a bridge over troubled water, is it?

Is it even possible - and this is a heresy - but has philosophy any business to have a view at all? Might one not be just slightly inclined to tell Sophia to butt out of one's sensibilities and mind her own business? — unenlightened

Matthew Ratcliffe — Joshs

I am wondering how the nature of emotions may be considered philosophically. It may lead to questions of phenomenology as well as the role of consciousness in thinking and its interpretation. I see this as an important area of philosophy, and for anyone else who sees its value, what do you think about emotion and its significance? — Jack Cummins

Matthew Ratcliffe
— Joshs

I'll be reading Rethinking Commonsense Psychology the next couple of months. I may rant about it at you. — fdrake

I find Matthew Ratcliffe’s work to be among the best of the current crop of writings on affectivity, mood and emotion. He combines the phenomenological work of Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger, the Pragmatism of James and Dewey and cognitive enactivist approaches like that of Evan Thompson.
— Joshs

Interesting! Thanks. :up: I hadn’t heard of him. Any suggestions for a starting point in his writing?
This book looks like an interesting combo of philosophy and psychology. — 0 thru 9