On the Nature of Emotions: the Linguistic Deconstruction of Emotional Realism

If it hurts is real? Can't lies hurt? Aren't our dearest truths, still a fiction of language?

Synchronic language is not an exclusive construction of atemporal discourse (pragmatism, mathematics, etc.). It can be realized by the iteration of diachronic gestures –as in Bourdieu's concept of the Habitus–. Moreover, the interplay is not restricted to the extreme categories of time and no-time as suggested by the dichotomy synchronic/diachronic; it also involves intermediate structures in social space-time (aka temporality, etc.). Think on time scales such as weeks, decades, generations, intergenerations, etc. And despite Heidegger's emphasis on time, just as important, scales on social space: bacterial colonies, individuals, families, communities, nations, etc. 

In particular there is a realization of synchronic language (and as language being prior to emotions, these will lead to synchronic emotions: feelings) through the diachronic language of social relations (friends, couples, etc.). This is slightly different to the Habitus whose emphasis is on the local perpetuation of institutions [1]. The realm I want to point out (also targeted in the post: On the Nature of Emotions: Vanity Within) is that of emotions in literary realism. The personal experience of the social in its synchronic stance. But an intimate social, the relation with the family, friends, neighbors, etc. How this synchronic stance induces a form of emotional realism in which our inability to deconstruct it often leads to existential thoughts. Sartre's nothingness more than a claim on the condition of the real is a claim about the broadness of language. 

So the idea to take home from this note is that our relation with language mediates the interpretation of our feelings, and even of our emotions. Moreover, it also invents and upholds those feelings, their physical existence. It is a double feedback. Our linguistic condition is not only an intellectual condition but a social one.

Podata: Difference between emotions and feelings (a citation to Jung).

On the Nature of Emotions: Vanity Within

Consider emotions as comprised of internal (feelings) and external  (facial expressions, etc.) activities. I propose as an hypothesis that some emotions (or at least a subset of them such as "happiness" and "sadness") are elements of communication and barely anything else. This reasoning has verifiable implications. One is that a subject of emotions (e.g. a person) which is isolated from other receptors (e.g. other persons), will tend to diminish not only its external but also its internal emotional activity e.g. the solitary person will be neither happy or sad, on the long run. Mood would be understood as a social invention, as sophisticated as any other element of language. Moreover, if we push this interpretation a bit further as to say that  the internal experience of emotions is subsidiary to the external activity –after all, communication is up to semantics, an external process– then we will find a radically different perspective to understand emotions: the novice does not sings to uplift her melancholic mood; her mood is to uplift the song.

From this perspective is not crazy to say that the development of abstract language, in particular the decreasing role of analogic languages, will tend to diminish the necessity of internal emotional activity. Interestingly, we also see a realization of the analogic from the digital as a manifestation of the asynchrony, the tension, the anxiety between the pace of the format and that of the language in its wider, emotionally comprised, sense. The music may be seen as its epitome; in those societies where formal language has been largely cleaned of its analogical content, music becomes increasingly analogical. And so we can see that the refinement of the written language is paralleled by the birth of classical music. Or rap music, whose high amount of digital content (percussion, beat, prose, etc.) is paralleled by an outburst of slang, an epigenesis of emphasis which points to a revival of analogism in language. On could say that formal language and music, play at its best –or perhaps at its worst– a dialectical relation, an equilibrium of opposites [1].

 A possible experiment is to expose an emotional subject into a social environment but blockade the externalization of its emotions. Under suitable adjustment periods, this hypothesis would suggest that the subject will start to diminish its internal emotional activity given that it has become a useless burden. This experiment is not easy, many behavioral responses will get between the initial conditions and the suitable adjustment periods. To realize it we need to understand that the suitable adjustment periods can comprise weeks (hormonal relaxation) or even generations subjected to the evolutionary constraint (genetic relaxation). One of the intermediate responses is the well known self-harm driven by frustration. Within our hypothesis this could be understood as a response similar to that of a person that tries to speak louder as his voice fades. The body will tend to amplify emotions –even by self-harm– expecting to get a greater, hopefully, visible effect on its receptors. Again, by suitable adjustment periods we should be able to take the subject from this first self-strategic-response to the desired self-strategic-response associated to the "letting aside the burden of emotion". This is similar to the responses of a brain to amputation of an arm. The body will drive the regions of the brain controlling the former organ, to work in other activities or perhaps will simply switch off such regions –under suitable adjustment periods–. 

Even emotional manifestations like our expression when something is very cold or hot have a largely symbolic and therefore social nature; it is useful to show others that something is hot or cold, specially when language hasn't been developed yet or if developed, not as accurate as to transmit the relatively analogical measure of temperature perception. The whole of internal emotions as a response to extreme temperatures though, seems hard to be reduced to a social feature. It seems to comprise also a form of communication within the parts of the body –which is "social" but in another level–.

[1] This is just hypotetical (or perhaps hypo-poetical). Similar thoughts has been explored by George Steiner.

PD. It seems that "suitable adjustment periods" is the carpet to sweep the dirt under. But hopefully not totally, after all it is similar to the challenge of driving a physical system to a state of global minimal energy in the presence of local minimas.

PD2. The dialectics of internal versus external within the realm of emotions is slightly different than the dialectic of emotions versus feelings. Nevertheless, both influence each another.

Huxley's taste on the form for critical thought

Excerpt from: Aldous Huxley, The Art of Fiction No. 24, Interviewed by Raymond Fraser, George Wickes.

INTERVIEWER

Then, even though you have been writing fewer novels in recent years, you don’t think less highly of the art of fiction than you used to?

HUXLEY

Oh, no, no, no. I think fiction, and biography and history, are the forms. I think one can say much more about general abstract ideas in terms of concrete characters and situations, whether fictional or real, than one can in abstract terms. Several of the books I like best of what I’ve written are historical and biographical things: Grey Eminence, and The Devils of Loudun, and the biography of Maine de Biran, the “Variations on a Philosopher.” These are all discussions of what are to me important general ideas in terms of specific lives and incidents. And I must say I think that probably all philosophy ought to be written in this form; it would be much more profound and much more edifying. It’s awfully easy to write abstractly, without attaching much meaning to the big words. But the moment you have to express ideas in the light of a particular context, in a particular set of circumstances, although it’s a limitation in some ways, it’s also an invitation to go much further and much deeper. I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas. My goodness, Dostoyevsky is six times as profound as Kierkegaard, because he writes fiction. In Kierkegaard you have this Abstract Man going on and on—like Coleridge—why, it’s nothingcompared with the really profound Fictional Man, who has always to keep these tremendous ideas alive in a concrete form. In fiction you have the reconciliation of the absolute and the relative, so to speak, the expression of the general in the particular. And this, it seems to me, is the exciting thing—both in life and in art.

Ideología y fenomenología: unidos por el azar

Mi Ideología? Eso es para el vulgo, demagogia. Los problemas de un gobierno y de un estado no responden a soluciones retóricas. Aunque pensándolo más detenidamente, si bien la ideología tiene poco que decir sobre problemas aislados sí tiene algo que decir sobre el acumulado de estos los cuales exigen un conjunto de soluciones en sinergía y ajustadas a un ideal de sociedad. Curiosamente, problemas que en principio eran aislados ahora tienen soluciones correlacionadas por la simple razón de sus implicaciones ideológicas v.g. republicanos y demócratas tienen diferentes opiniones sobre la solución del tráfico vehicular. Luego la filosofía política (subconjunto este dentro del conjunto de vertientes políticas) no solo responde a la necesidad de solucionar problemas correlacionados sino también termina por correlacionar soluciones a problemas otrora aislados. Se puede decir que la ideología y su praxis tienen como fin dar significado al universo epifenoménico. La naturaleza abierta y por ende absurda del tributo es el mejor ejemplo de esto: cuando el ministro de Hacienda británico Gladstone interrogó a Faraday sobre la utilidad práctica de la energía eléctrica este contestó "Sir, un día podrá usted gravarla con impuestos".

Does all beauty calls for intervention?

If romanticism was a champion of contemplative beauty, modernity and in particular materialism provided its criticism. It showed that it often hides power relations as in the contemplation of god mediated by ecclesiastic rituals. Indeed, the geography of production and consumption, even for beauty, is a geography of power. But are all of these relations preceded by asymmetric power? Does romantic attraction resembles pollen flowers or, instead, carnivorous plants? Biological relations are open to interpretation and evolution; consumption is yet another form of production. If the imperative of materialism is to become god –the ultimate producer–, even god gave away his power over our will in order to contemplate its creation. What is the meaning of production? isn't contemplation? In order to contemplate you have to give away, you have to jump into the pit, you have to give your life or part of it to the others. If all beauty calls for intervention, what is then the intervention for which the dawn is calling upon us? for the mythological believer is god, for the materialist perhaps an hegemonic narrative. But beyond gods and will for power? Does other animals feel contemplative beauty? Is contemplative beauty a recent evolutionary feature? Perhaps contemplative beauty is very tied to the emergence of what we call conscience. Contemplative beauty and contemplative memory (not self-critical memory which is an intervention) might share a common evolutionary origin. They both share this seemingly mysterious absence of intervention call. Let me just give an hypothetical and poetical answer. I believe the call is upon life; to survive to see another dawn, to compensate alienated struggle with epic memories. In the end alienation is the key word, nature has provided us with absurd beauty in order for us to accept an alienated life. It is absurd because it has to be open to the unreachable will and challenges of those systems which produce beauty and consume power.

PD. A bit delusional.

Revisiting faith from cyberspace

We are close to the time when the access to internet will be installed in our brain with no interface at sight. To some extent this is just a superficial step but it illustrates the relation between the virtual and the self. Indeed, we can revisit the notion of faith from the perspective of virtual reality. Faith could be understood as the ability of your brain to access that virtual reality created by mythology. And mythology can now be seen as something as real as the net. Religious battles can be compared to battles between social networks.

Promiscuous positivism

There is not such a thing as symbolic causation. This is important because it poses a hard limitation on Freud's  theory of the psyche. Indeed, the domain of symbols, the realm of culture has its own effective phenomenology just as classical physics with regards to quantum mechanics. Perhaps back In Freud's time, symbolic causation seemed to be the right step to introduce positivism into psychology. But know we know better. The failure was not the use of causalism nor the use of symbolism but their combination. They belong to different realms. Together, both are diminished; symbols are reduced to predictable objects while causalism becomes rhetorics. It is true that the cognitive dualism limits the metaphysical (self)conception of the mind (the psyche and eventually the culture) but the kind of causation which is implied by the physical side of this dualism is not of a symbolic nature. Symbols only belong to the mind; the substantiality of physics know no symbols.