Thoughts are cognitive states: believing, doubting, questioning, reasoning, guessing, comparing, etc.
Emotions (e.g. fear, joy, anger, disgust, surprise) are occurring sudden and spontaneous (non-deliberate) bodily/physiological reactions to what happens — neomac

Heidegger writes:

“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?”

In opposition to these assumptions, Heidegger says:

“…all understanding is essentially related to an affective self-finding which belongs to understanding itself. To be
affectively self-finding is the formal structure of what we call mood, passion, affect, and the like, which are constitutive for all comportment toward beings…”

“moods “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)

Here's Pliny the Younger, witnessing the sudden, violent destruction of Pompeii:

“In the darkness you could hear the crying of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. Some prayed for help. Others wished for death. But still more imagined that there were no Gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness.” — Joshua Jones

Strange as it may sound, there are those who secretly relish apocalyptic fantasies, who want to hear nothing but tragic news (one could call it ‘doom porn’) . The motives for such thinking are varied, but one cannot rule out a secret desire to bring down the high and mighty in order to exact revenge.

When worlds end, worldviews go with them - doubtless, in no small part due to the images burning in the minds of those who saw things they never wish to tell, but cannot unsee. So, while it's day, shouldn't we be collecting, testing, and distilling durable meaning, instead of arguing over whether or not we believe it will ever get dark? — Joshua Jones

Here’s some durable meaning from Nietzsche that may or may not be apropos here.

“ The beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a tri­umphant saying ‘yes’ to itself, slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’, ‘non-self ’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed. This reversal of the evaluating glance – this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself – is a feature of ressentiment: in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all, – its action is basically a reaction.”

“ The blessed in the heavenly kingdom will see the torment of the damned so that they may even more thoroughly enjoy their blessedness.” Thomas Aquinas

“But there are yet other spectacles: that final and everlasting day of judgement, that day that was not expected and was even laughed at by the nations, when the whole old world and all it gave birth to are consumed in one fire. What an ample breadth of sights there will be then! At which one shall I gaze in wonder? At which shall I laugh? At which rejoice? At which exult, when I see so many great kings who were proclaimed to have been taken up into heaven, groaning in the deepest darkness together with those who claimed to have wit­nessed their apotheosis and with Jove himself. And when I see those [provincial] governors, persecutors of the Lord’s name, melting in flames more savage than those with which they insolently raged against Christians! When I see those wise philosophers who persuaded their disciples that nothing was of any concern to God and who affirmed to them either
that we have no souls or that our souls will not return to their original bodies! Now they are ashamed before those disciples, as they are burned together with them. Also the poets trembling before the tribunal not of Minos or of Radamanthus, but of the unexpected Christ! Then the tragic actors will be easier to hear because they will be in better voice [i.e. screaming even louder] in their own tragedy. Then the actors of pantomime will be easy to recognize, being much more nimble than usual because of the fire. Then the charioteer will be on view, all red in a wheel of flame and the athletes, thrown not in the gymnasia but into the fire. Unless even then I don’t want to see them [alive +], preferring to cast an insatiable gaze on those who raged against the Lord.”(Tertullian)

↪Ciceronianus
I think some of the style comes from growing up in a dour religious household — Paine

Would you have preferred he write in a different style?

Don’t you think that if a writer is astute enough to distill the spirit of their time and put it under critique, that they would be as deliberate and insightful in choosing their style of attack?

...for Wittgenstein it cannot be profoundly different for each of us because experience is profoundly relational.
— Joshs

Sure, the box might be the same, but the beetle? — Banno

If the beetle is an important part of my life, then this will be because it is an important part of my social life.

What if it were profoundly different for each of us?
— Joshs

...then enlightenment is enriched by not being limited.... — Banno

But for Wittgenstein it cannot be profoundly different for each of us because experience is profoundly relational. That insight was his enlightenment, showing the fly the way out of the bottle.

Why should enlightenment be the same for each of us? — Banno

What if it were profoundly different for each of us? What would that suggest about the limits of intersubjective harmonization of personal viewpoints and experiences? That sounds like an awfully impoverished notion of enlightenment.

It seems that in Nietzsche's view, there should exist a series of selves; one overcoming the other.
Whereas in some ideologies, enlightenment has to do with stopping the process of selfing altogether. — baker

Reminds me of Varela and Thompson’s account of the zen buddhist Nishitani’s critique of Nietzsche.

“Nishitami deeply admires Nietzsche's attempt but claims that it actually perpetuates the nihilistic predicament by not letting go of the grasping mind that lies at the souce of both objectivism and nihlism. Nishitani's argument is that nihilism cannot be overcome by assimilating groundlessness to a notion of the will-no matter how decentered and impersonal. Nishitani's diagnosis is even more radical than Nietzsche's, for he claims that the real problem with Western nihilism is that it is halfhearted: it does not consistently follow through its own inner logic and motivation and so stops short of transforming its partial realization of groundlessness into the philosophical and experiential possiblities of sunyata.”

I think what Nishitami failed to grasp was that will to
nothingness is still willing. Self for Nietzsche isnt an entity but a vector of change.

To preface, it appears that these comments might be filled with pseudo-intellectuals that are want of confidence - seeing that many fail to engage with the question, and resort to condescension. It is a shame, and we may take pity on them. — Sean Staton

We can all be grateful then that you didn’t stoop to
condescension. Btw, I’m wagering your attempt at engaging with the question gets the thumbs down from Joshua.

I know my thinking is conventional but I wonder why be different if it isn't in some greater sense, better? What is the impetus for transformation - is it being who you really are, which may not be an improvement? — Tom Storm

We have no choice , because whether we like it or not, whatever valuative framework we choose will eventually collapse and be transformed from within its own resources( the best becomes the worst, good becomes evil) .This is the meaning of will to power as self-overcoming. We are driven to embrace schemes of meaning and then to exhaust ourselves within them and move beyond them.

Surely Nietzsche would have said that "being who you really are" is preferable to not being who you really are. It seem to me this is where the existentialist notion of authenticity comes into play. — Janus

But Nietzsche did not believe that the self is a fixed identity. That is one reason he is embraced by postmodern philosophers like Foucault and Deleuze , who see the self as socially constructed.

“To indulge the fable of ‘unity,’ ‘soul,’ ‘person,’ this we have forbidden: with such hypotheses one only covers up the problem” ( Nietzsche)

He describes the soul as “subjective multiplicity”, and “social structure of the drives and affects”.

Stanford Encyclopedia suggests that “Nietzsche’s psychology treats the self as something that has to be achieved or constructed, rather than as something fundamentally given as part of the basic metaphysical equipment with which a person enters the world.”

[

You don't understand it as an idea of flourishing, but simply of change, whether for the better or worse? — Janus

I think the route to flourishing for Nietzsche was maintaining continuous movement, embracing transformation, and allowing oneself to get held captive (ascetic ideal) by any particular valuative concept of flourishing.

Does anyone have comments on Nietzsche's ideas of self-overcoming?
— Tom Storm

Someone once told me that it has to do with "being better than you were before". — baker

↪baker I think this is on the right track. Nietzsche conceived of the fundamental aim of all life to be, not merely survival, but power; by which I take him to mean, not power over others or physical strength, but power over oneself, over one's own desire for comfort, ease and distraction at the expense of flourishing and becoming the best you can be. — Janus

I read Nietzsche’s self-overcoming ( will to power) as being different than you were before, not better in the sense of some kind of cumulative progress or organic growth.

“… The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost, – instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations.”

For me, the fundamental question is: How does anything ever feel anything at all? — GrahamJ

We only ask that question thanks to centuries of established Western philosophical and scientific dogma which presume a split between mind and matter, subject and object, feeling and thinking. The question should be ‘ How did we get to the point where we became convinced that experience consisted of an opposition between an inside and an outside?’ Chalmers assumes the split with his pan-psychism, while Dennett tries to pretend one side of the binary doesn’t exist , which just makes the problem more striking.

this wasn't intended to be a thread convincing people it was the end of the world. People come to a fire because they want heat, light and company - not to be convinced that they are cold, in the dark and lonely. — Joshua Jones

And one hopes they come to a philosophy forum prepared to have their assumptions challenged instead of just hoping to solicit confirmation of what they think they already know.

I am inspired by many thinkers who found themselves really tormented by the Fall of their Empires - Augustine, Boethius, Milton, DeLillo - there are countless others. And taking their thoughts as “dead trees of life” that we can chop into firewood - practical, applied insights - for heat and light in these times. — Joshua Jones

Im all for examining philosophical writings on end times and apocalyptic themes. They may be the best way to demonstrate that every era has its doomsayers, and that what they mark out are swings of the historical pendulum, low points within the cyclical structure of cultural change, disastrous mountains which often turn out to be molehills in historical hindsight.

I think many of us are feeling like we are falling to pieces in both the singular and collective sense. — Joshua Jones

It would help if you would share in detail why you think these are ‘end times’. Dont assume everyone understands your sentiments and shares them, you first need to give an argument for what you mean and why you mean it.

it seems that eudemonic pursuits such as purposefulness and desire originating in a greater desire for happiness is a primary motivator in most types of rationally guided behavior, primarily through associative memory of moments associated with peak experiences that stand out from the rest. — Shawn

If desire for happiness motivates rationality , how is happiness generated? Through sensory reinforcement?

in prediction-based approaches affectivity is bound up with the relationship one senses between anticipation and realization.
— Joshs

In this case isn’t affect hedonic (relating to or considered in terms of pleasant or unpleasant interoception)? — praxis

The way embodied models work, influenced by Damasio and other neuropsychologists, affective aspects are so complexly interwoven with cognitive that what one ends up with is a more nuanced motivational picture than that evoked by pleasure vs pain.
For instance , a dog may salivate , recalling the memory of pleasurable food , or it may direct its attention toward something in its environment without necessarily feeling overt pleasure. Rather, it may be drawn to something that arouses its curiosity or interest.
Matthew Ratcliffe studies disorders of affect such as depression and schizophrenia, focusing on the ways that affect makes objects salient, enticing and alluring. We don’t feel such enticements as overt pleasure, but as a basic background level of interest that we barely notice. At its core, affectivity serves more of an orienting or alerting function than as hedonic. What we think of as emotional pain and pleasure may have much more to do with cognitive appraisal than with bodily sensation.

So much of our affective comportment toward the world has the nuanced character of mattering to us in myriad ways. We can be bored, enthused, reflective, intrigued, apathetic, confused , etc.

In severe depression , such significance is missing from our world , and as a result , we feel not so much negative affect, but the lack of affect. The world ceases to matter to us at all , whether as unpleasant or pleasant.

If you could put it into simple straightforward language that would be appreciated. Thanks — Ross

Unfortunately I’m utterly incapable of putting anything into simple straightforward language.

what about Aristotle's ethics or virtue ethics, neither are not a rigid system of rules or codes to live by. They emphasis the importance of developing a good character , that's their end goal and they do not include a prescription of what one most do or believe in. — Ross

Nietzsche determines the good as the effect of an ‘instinct’ of assimilation and control. Thus the good , and ‘good character’ is closely linked to conformity to particular value systems. Our sense of morality, righteousness , ‘character’ and goodness cannot escape this association with incorporation and control.

“ The commanding element (whatever it is) that is generally called “spirit” wants to dominate itself and its surroundings, and to feel its domination: it wills simplicity out of multiplicity, it is a binding, subduing, domineering, and truly masterful will. Its needs and abilities are the same ones that physiologists have established for everything that lives, grows, and propagates. The power of spirit to appropriate foreign elements manifests itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to disregard or push aside utter inconsistencies: just as it will arbitrarily select certain aspects or outlines of the foreign, of any piece of the “external world,” for stronger emphasis, stress, or falsification in its own interest. Its intention here is to incorporate new “experiences,” to classify new things into old classes, – which is to say: it aims at growth, or, more particularly, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increasing strength.”(Beyond Good and Evil)

Thus we must move past the good vs evil
binary , which always privileges the good and depicts evil as a lack, an absence , a negation, and recognize that what opposes the good is not only necessary but fecund.

Is it rather the case that many of these philosophical systems of ethics and morality whether it's Aristotle's or Plato's ethics or Kant's moral theory that they are a goal or set of ideas for humanity to aspire to. An attempt to construct a framework of values by which a society or even an individual can live by without any such framework it would be almost anarchical. Isn't Aristotle correct that human beings are fundamentally social beings and therefore in the matter of ethics and values that it's important to see them in a SOCIAL context, to provide a some kind of guide to how human beings can flourish not only as individuals but also crucially to live together with a common set of moral values. But Nietzsche attacks all forms of moralizing altogether. Is he correct here or is it being unrealistic? — Ross

Nietzsche isn’t denying that people need value systems in order to function. He is saying that to claim any one value system as privileged over all the others is to deny modem, because it is to deny change by desiring the freezing into place of one value. The purpose of values is to provide a sense of order and control. Being always ensconced withi. one state or other, we will always have a measure of structure and order, but order becomes disorder when it is ossified into ‘truth’.

How is affect somehow not hedonic? — praxis

It depends on how you define hedonic. Hedonism in S-R and classic cognitivism makes reinforcement a value property attributed to an event( a stimulus is associated with pleasure or pain), whereas in prediction-based approaches affectivity is bound up with the relationship one senses between anticipation and realization. The same event can be reinforcing or aversive depending on our success or failure at anticipating it and thus making sense of it within our system of anticipations.

Consistency is about truth. If you don't care about the truth, and you don't need to, consistency be damned! That's in classical logic though. If you're interested in not just the truth but about how our minds work, you should abandon a zero tolerance attitude towards inconsistency. — TheMadFool

I would argue that truth and how our minds work are not separate issues. Rather than consistency being about truth, truth is the way we have of talking about experiences of consistency and inferential compatibility. ‘Truth’ is our idealizing abstraction of valuative normativity.

If our minds rejected inconsistencies i.e. if it were incapable of cognitive dissonance, how would that impact/affect our lives — TheMadFool

I dont think striving for consistency is the result of an arbitrary evolutionary adaptation. There is no
other way for a living system to be. All living forms
are by definition self-organizing, which means that they maintain an ongoing self-consistency of functioning in the face of a changing world.

We dont strive for perfect consistency , which would be nothing other than the unchanging self-identity of a rock. We aim for a relative consistency, for recognizable
patterns in the chaos.

On the most basic level, studies show that without reward (pleasure) and punishment (pain) we really wouldn’t be motivated to do much of anything. — praxis

In recent years, psychology has moved away from hedonic models of human motivation, in favor of anticipation-prediction based theories.

Psychologist Prescott Lecky posited self-consistency as the primary motivator of human behavior.

“… all of an individual's values are organized into a single system the preservation of whose integrity is essential.The nucleus of the system, around which the rest of the system revolves, is the individual's valuation of himself. The individual sees the world from his own viewpoint, with himself as the center. Any value entering the system which is inconsistent with the individual's valuation of himself cannot be assimilated; it meets with resistance and is likely, unless a general reorganization occurs, to be rejected. This resistance is a natural phenomenon; it is essential for the maintenance of individuality. The various so-called emotional states cannot be treated independently, but must be regarded as different aspects of a single motive, the striving for unity.“

knowledge can only be grounded in what can be experienced by the senses
— Wayfarer
Considering that it would be impossible to know anything without such a grounding it’s really not that unreasonable. — praxis

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a more fundamental grounding than the senses, understood in empirical terms.

Much the same thing was developed at the same time by Russel, Wittgenstein et al. but without the metaphysical nonsense. — Banno

Russell and Frege leave us mired in a Kantian metaphysical thicket, which Wittgenstein realized and rejected in favor of his later phenomenological approach.

Frege’s logic forms a simple language of predicates, allowing us to see the supposition of attributing predicates to individuals at the base of language.

But unfortunately this insight here fell into the fog of phenomenology, which tries to found existence on sensations rather than on language, and ends up confusing being with time and failing to clarify much of anything. — Banno

What Frege lacked was insight into the basis of the subject-predicate structure. Husserl led the way here by founding predication not on sensation but on intentional synthesis. It took Heidegger, and later on Derrida, to arrive at a notion of the origin of both formal language and logic in signification.

↪TheMadFool I was just explaining what Josh posted, which would make no sense whatsoever if you didn’t know the German idiom Heidegger refers to. No, the point is not to study grammar to understand being. — Srap Tasmaner

But one needs to be aware that our handed-down grammar biases us toward a certain way of thinking about subjects and objects that Heidegger rightly points out is ‘impersonal’.

In ‘Logic as the Question Concerning The Essence of Language' Heidegger tells us he wants, 'in a confrontation with the tradition', to rethink logic, to "revolutionarily shake up the notion of logic" from the ground up, but that he can only provisionally point to his notion of the primordial ground of language as the basis of this new grounding of logic. Traditionally, language is thought as a tool of thinking, as secondary to thinking, as grounded on grammar, which in turn is grounded on logic. Heidegger says “the first thing we need is a real revolution in our relation to language.”

“Aren't we allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate and object? Shouldn't philosophers rise above the belief in grammar?”(Nietzsche, Will to Power)

Why does this happen? What's distinct/unique about Being that requires us to be, well, expert linguists with in-depth knowledge of, curiously, not semantics but syntax. :chin: The objective was to go into meaning (of Being) and instead we're neck-deep in grammar. — TheMadFool

It’s not just Being. Every significant change in philosophical outlook will be reflected in at least a subtle shift in the use of grammar. Why is this? Because grammar is more than just syntax. It expresses historically ingrained habits of thinking about object and subjects and their relationship. Subject-predicate structure disposes us toward construing is a certain way.

“If I say "the floor is hard," I employ a language system in which the subject-predicate relationship inheres in the subject itself. It is the floor which is hard, and that is its nature, regardless of who says so. The statement stands, not because the speaker said it, but because the floor happened to be what it is. The sentence's validity stems from the floor and not from the speaker.”(George Kelly)

Every time Being is analyzed, it takes a distinct form, a linguistic one - necessary language concepts for such examinations/studies being verb, predicate, verbal nouns, pseudo-objects, to name but a few. — TheMadFool

Heidegger agrees with you.

“… are we puzzled now only because we have allowed ourselves to be led astray by language or, more precisely, by the grammatical interpretation of language; staring at an It that is supposed to give, but that itself is precisely not there. When we say "It gives Being," “It gives time," we are speaking sentences.
Grammatically, a sen­tence consists of a subject and a predicate. The subject of a sentence is not necessarily a subject in the sense of an ego or a person. Grammar and logic, accordingly, construe it-sentences as imper­sonal, subject-less sentences.”(On Time and Being)

People want efficient public transit — not cars. — Xtrix

I live in Chicago. There is an El station two blocks away, a bus stop across the street from my building , a regular train line a few miles from me, and rental scooters and bicycles every few blocks.
And yet I pay $180 a month to park my car in my building’s garage, plus license, sticker and maintenance fees. Why? Because having my own car is a bit more convenient that using public transportation. If I were poor it might be a different story. Am I typical? I know Chicagoans who don’t own cars, but they’re in the minority. Most feel the way I do about the convenience of a car even in a city with good public transportation. I’m not saying I’m proud of my choice , just being honest.

Change is the effect of a Cause. — Gnomon

Is everything we need to know about an effect already present in the cause?

It's the brain talking to itself about its environment. I am not you, because you're in my environment. — Kenosha Kid

Unless you happen to be schizophrenic, in which case the I and you inhabit the same ‘person’. In this case, agency or lack thereof may be a better articulation of the ‘I’ than self vs environment.

Good questions. There are not surprisingly many views on this subject in philosophy. In modern times, Hume was among the first to present the issue in a skeptical
context.

“ For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.”

Some argue that ‘I’ is synonymous with self, and self is constructed as a new self in every new moment of experience. Others go even further in a relativist direction, claiming that the ‘we’ comes before the self , which is socially constructed. Others suggest that consciousness always implies self-consciousness, and self-consciousness rests on a self that is immutable and accompanies all experiences of the world as a feeling, the feeling of what it’s like to be the unique self that one is. All animals that can be said to be conscious are self-conscious.

For my part, I believe the self is a comparison between my past and my present. The ‘I’ is not a persisting identity but an ongoing self-similarity. But there are different sorts of selves in different contexts. The notion of self that implies a distinction between individuals will arise only in those contexts where an awareness of others is prominent. In other situations, this sense of self will not be present. Instead, a sedimented background of habits and goals will mark the ‘self’ that maintains itself as an ongoing style or theme.

That there are multiple points of entry for the sensory data and that they are at some point processed into a single experience doesn't seem to offer support for the direct realist position. — Hanover

No, it certainly doesn’t. Is that what he was arguing for?

I don’t know if any of this factors into it, but for me the locus of perception is the entire organism
— NOS4A2

That's just scientifically incorrect. My nose doesn't see things, nor does my pancreas. — Hanover

In a way, he’s right. We construct body schemes that participate in interpretating all of our perceptions.

The following article give a sense of how
“sensory and motor information, body representations, and perceptions (of the body and the world) are interdependent”.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00819/full

I intuit a certain object if I already know what the word I heard represents, or I do not intuit a certain object, — Mww

.........I have now extracted the meaning of the word iff I already know the object to which it relates. — Mww

Your view of feeling and cognition as separable entities
rests on your model of thinking in general in classically cognitivist representationalist terms, inspired by the workings of a computer. On this model, what we already know is a stored representation that sits there as what it is , waiting to be accessed for a particular purpose. The semantic content therefore is protected from contextual change implied by situational use.

In enactivist models, by contrast, there are no inner representations of an outer world , but a constantly changing integrated mesh of brain, body and environmental interactions. From their vantage words do not represent meanings which can be extracted from storage intact. What was remembered whenever we use a word has already been altered by the context of its use. So we are not simply playing around with and rearranging the order and relationships between pre-existing semantic items when we think or communicate with others. We are instead altering the mesh. Use is not the applying of an extant meaning, it is a change in the prior sense of meaning of a concept. This is the essence of affectivity.

Wittgenstein says that we only ever actually experience a word in its contextual use.
— Joshs

I don’t think so. To experience a word is to treat it as a mere object, by which we first perceive it, then subject the word to the cognitive process, resulting in the experience of it. Better to say we only ever understand a word in its contextual use. — Mww

For Wittgenstein it doesn’t make sense to say that a semantic meaning of a word is stored and then used. This is the picture theory of language that he critiques. We can’t say that a word first exists and then we understand it. Words do not name things or correspond to objects. Words are not relational at all, whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'

“There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”( Phil Hutchinson)

he would be motivated by reason generally, but being void of emotion, he would have no use for pure practical reason. In effect, it could be said he was void of pure practical reason and that’s why he had no emotions. There was nothing to inform him of what his emotions should be. Or it could just as well be that he had no emotion so there was nothing on which practical reason could exert itself. — Mww

Keeping my additional comments from the edit in mind , let’s analyze this hypothetical ‘person without feelings’.
How does a reason motivate if that reason is not a value, and how can it be a value if it is not based on an affectively felt sense? What motivates an ought, a desire, a goal of reason? What makes reason reasonable? What makes one care about being reasonable? I saw affectivity and feeling in every moment of Mr Spock’s behavior, his intricate adjustment of orientation to constantly changing contexts of meaning indicating not a single pre-programmed frame of logical norms but an ever shifting basis for logical rules. This is the affective dimension, the unpre-determined re-framing of logical frames as a function of contextual change.

This edit may not have come through before you wrote your last reply.

↪Mww
Emotions serve our aesthetic judgements, having to do only with the condition of the thinking subject, whether a thing feels right/wrong or feels good/bad, whether or not it is right or good or not, but not that to which the subject attends, the thing that must be either right/wrong or good/bad.

Feelings/cognitions are nothing but another inescapable duality intrinsic to the human condition. Even if humans operate under the influence of both, that is not to say they are inseparable from each other.
— Mww


You say that to which the subject attends is separate from emotion. Let’s remove emotion from the equation for a moment , since it’s connotation as florid and intense response is not what I want to focus on. Rather , I want to focus on feeling as not just simple sensation but as intrinsic to the aesthetic judgments you described above. So you are arguing that we can extract the meaning of a word concept that is independent of all feelings that may accompany our experience of that word.
Wittgenstein says that we only ever actually experience a word in its contextual use. That means it is always a different sense of the meaning of that word which we experience in any given situation. What this further implies is that the use of the word isnt something additional to its pre-assigned intrinsic meaning. For Wittgenstein there is no intrinsic meaning to a word apart from its sense ( usage). So how and why it matters to us is the very essence of its meaning. If you are claiming that this pragmatic mattering and relevance is the province of feeling, and feeling can be separated from cognition, then you would seem to be disagreeing with Wittgenstein about the separability of mattering-use from the intrinsic meaning of word concepts — Joshs

Emotions serve our aesthetic judgements, having to do only with the condition of the thinking subject, whether a thing feels right/wrong or feels good/bad, whether or not it is right or good or not, but not that to which the subject attends, the thing that must be either right/wrong or good/bad.

Feelings/cognitions are nothing but another inescapable duality intrinsic to the human condition. Even if humans operate under the influence of both, that is not to say they are inseparable from each other. — Mww

Does this separation between emotion and cognition mean that one can imagine a person in whom emotions are absent, who is still able to function cognitively, still able to reason? Would this person be like Mr Spock or Data? Would they make rational , non-emotional judgements? Would they be motivated purely by reason?

You say that to which the subject attends is separate from emotion. Let’s remove emotion from the equation for a moment , since it’s connotation as florid and intense response is not what I want to focus on. Rather , I want to focus on feeling as not just simple sensation but as intrinsic to the aesthetic judgments you described above. So you are arguing that we can extract the meaning of a word concept that is independent of all feelings that may accompany our experience of that word.
Wittgenstein says that we only ever actually experience a word in its contextual use. That means it is always a different sense of the meaning of that word which we experience in any given situation. What this means is that the use of the word isnt something additional to its
own intrinsic meaning.He means ther is no intrinsic meaning to a word apart from its sense ( usage). So how and why it matters to us is the very essence of its meaning. If you are claiming that this pragmatic mattering and relevance is the province of feeling, and feeling can be separated from cognition, then you would seem to be disagreed with Wittgenstein about the relation between mattering-use and the intrinsic meaning of word concepts.