I have often called this the Age of Feeling in contrast to the Age of Reason. I fear I may have been in error. I was recently introduced to the idea that emotions and reason are not in opposition as is so deeply ingrained in our culture and began pondering this notion and its implications.
Once you reject the false dichotomy of reason vs emotion you have to start thinking differently. What distinguishes the so-called rational man from the emotional one is not about feeling or not feeling. It has to do with the nature and quality of the thoughts inexorably attached to the emotions.
So what are thoughts? They are a mental representation of an individual’s perceptions and reconfigurations of reality. For example, we may make a mental representation of an existent tree or a mental reconfiguration drawn from our library of mental representations to imagine Obama wearing only boxer shorts and playing the tuba while sitting on the back of a pink unicorn. Representations of the real and the unreal continuously flow through our minds in what writers call “the stream consciousness”.
You might say that thought in its most elemental form is the very definition of subjective, but part of being human is communicating those thoughts to others. This requires language. We label our thoughts with words to define and delineate one mental representation from another. Language gives structure to thought.
This allows for thoughts to become the building blocks of more complex ideas and concepts which build into even higher abstractions. Thus does the edifice rise from the primordial foundational thoughts of the hidden unconscious, to that semi-awareness of the twilight trance state, to the light of consciousness, and continue to rise into the heights of complexity. At these soaring heights it is easy to forget that in their most basic form these abstractions championed by reason began as ill-defined thoughts indistinguishable from emotions.
Emotions are a response to thought, and thoughts respond to the emotions. We may choose to make a distinction between emotion and thought but even if that be the case their interactions are so fast and so interwoven that they might as well be considered one flesh. This symbiosis of emotion and thought is the psycho-emotional make-up, or more poetically we may call it “the soul”. So what then is the distinction that people choose to make when they pit emotion against reason?
When we describe someone as being emotional, what are we really describing? To put a positive slant on it, when we say someone is emotional we might also call this person “in touch with their feelings” implying positive feelings like sympathy and compassion – a so-called sensitive person. The negative implication of someone being too emotional is that they are being irrational, morose, or hyper-sensitive taking things too hard or too personally.
We are not describing the passion of a mathematician transfixed by a complex equation that he is resolving or the obsession of the inventor. So what types of thoughts distinguish between the emotions of the mathematician and those of the positive and negative implications of being emotional?
Emotions are a response to thoughts and all thoughts are internal, but some are reactions to our perception of external phenomenon and others to internal phenomenon, like memories and other imaginings. This divides emotions into two types; there are those focused internally and those focused externally.
The intensity of the emotion is in relation to the thought’s value and the most valuable are typically the really really deep primordial unconscious ones. In this rolling subterranean sea the thoughts have not even been given labels, remaining unknown and unclassified, but creatures do emerge from these depths to make their presence known in the conscious mind. These are the most basic emotions of happiness, desire, sorrow, and fear.
Happiness is the gaining of a value and desire is the imagined gaining of a value. Sorrow is the loss of a value and fear is the imagined loss of a value. So we see here examples of emotional responses to either the real or the imagined. Whenever we call something “a value” it is important to determine who the valuer is. In this case, it is the primordial semi-conscious self usually called the ego. When it comes to these four basic emotions the valuer is at the centre and the key value is the ego itself. It is positive when it gains or might gain for itself and it is negative when it loses or might lose what it perceives to have.
Going back to my skyscraper metaphor, think of this primordial unconscious place as the foundations or point zero. From here we move straight up in increments from total black, through shades of grey, and eventually into the white penthouse suite at the top, and the view is spectacular.
The penthouse is all about the view. The Morlocks in the basement are constantly looking inward to check the well-being of their ego as it balances its fear and desire. They are self-conscious, self-obsessed, and solipsistic. But the penthouse is all about the view. This is the point of self-awareness and is constantly looking outward. The focus is not on the ego but on the world outside your window.
Up here the emotions are much less turbulent so the connections between Reason and Emotion seem severed. Emotions, or being emotional, are associated with the basement level while being at the top is considered cold and rational. We see this played out in society where the lower classes are commonly perceived as emotional and the upper classes as “uptight” with the middle-class as a mixed balance of the too. But this is a false divide.
Just as the thoughts in my conceit become more complex from bottom to top, then so too do the emotions transcend from the basics of happiness, desire, sorrow, and fear into emotions like passion, bravery, and love. The emotions begin to resemble something more akin to virtues.
I feel the need to pop in a disclaimer here because of the nature of this metaphor. I am not suggesting that people who are more capable with dealing with higher abstract concepts or who have a higher social status are somehow enlightened beings. The rich and intelligent can be Morlocks too, the difference is that they hide it better because of social demands. Likewise, you can have the simple, down-to-earth type folks living in the penthouse.
What I am illustrating here as my central thesis is that the rift between reason and emotion is an illusion. The true spit is between our base thought/emotion level characterised by the ego and our higher and more complex thought/emotion level characterised by self-awareness. The true conflict is not Reason vs Emotion. It is about the Ego vs the Self. The Ego is its own highest value and therefore anything that feeds it or deprives it elicits strong emotions. The Self finds value outside of itself in people, places, ideas, experiences, and yes, even in self-understanding; the difference is that it is not the life and death struggle between fear and desire that we see in the ego, rather it is an understanding and acceptance of the self.
I’m compelled to comment on sentimentality. Just as the Self looks outside itself for values, the Ego can pull a trick where it confuses what is with what is imagined. It works like this. When you have a dream about a person you are not dreaming about them, but rather your idea of them. They are a symbolic representation of your thoughts.
I watched a documentary that covered a tribe of Indians in Washington State whose culture revolved around whale hunting. They stopped this practice in the 1920’s because of environmental concerns. In recent decades the species of whale they hunted was taken off the endangered list and the Indians resumed whaling. The program showed this activist sobbing in hysterical tears crying for the poor whales and at her perceived betrayal by the Indians. This is an example of sentimentality.
The activist was not crying for the whales, rather her idea and associate feelings for the whales. The betrayal by the Indians was based not on their actions but on her assumption that they were the clichéd stereotype of a people “one with nature”. She was crying for her own collapsed worldview.
Sentimentality is when we feel emotions regarding our ideas of reality rather than through a direct experience of reality. If the activist had worked at an aquarium and raised a whale from a calf and formed a bond with the animal, then the tears would be valid. If she knew the Indians personally and they claimed to be environmentalists and then killed her whale, then the tears would be valid. However, in this instance she was not crying over the whales or the Indians but rather her personal mental constructs of them – she was crying for herself, her ego. The tragic thing is that she cannot see this. She thinks that evil was done in the world rather than the truth that this is all about the symbolic representations of her thoughts and her ego.
Just to clarify, yes, all emotions are a reaction to our thoughts. The difference is that when I have an emotional reaction to my cat these are a response to thoughts derived from direct experience. If I were to have an emotional reaction to starving children in Africa of whom I have no direct experience, then this is sentimentality. I am reacting to an idea without an experiential anchor in reality.
I fear that it is incredibly common for people to think that they are living in the world, looking outside themselves, being compassionate and sympathetic, or fighting for just causes but in truth all these things are just masks for the ego. They may appear on the surface to be living in the penthouse of enlightenment, but are really just Morlocks in pretty clothes. The best way to deceive others is to deceive yourself first.
“Stick and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me”. If you ever find yourself hurt by the political or ideological views of others, or offended by politically incorrect language or opinions, or even if someone says something that just plain hurts your feelings, then chances are that the ego is involved. The source of your pain in this instance is simply another person’s thoughts being contrary to your mental construct of reality and nothing more. Perhaps they might see you as not having as much value to them as you wish they did or they may speak unpleasant truths that you resist.
This is why the concept “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” is so important. It is not a disregard for objective truth nor is it a license to act without ethics. It is an acceptance of the fact that the mental constructs that you call truth are merely a collection of your thoughts/feelings, just as the truths of others are the same to them. To embrace this maxim is to escape the tyranny of the ego and live life in the real and present.
When we say someone is too sensitive or overly emotional we are mislabelling the phenomenon. It is not an excess of emotion, rather an excess of ego that is to blame. Likewise, someone who has learned to manage, control, and even transcend ego is often perceived as being cold, unemotional, or too rational. This is because their emotional responses have become so complex as to no longer resemble anything that an egotistical person can even conceive as being emotions.
So we are not living in the Age of Feeling, though I may insist on calling it that. We are living in the Age of Ego where perception and base feeling is more important than reality. We live in a world where to offend another person is a punishable crime regardless of whether real harm was done. The ego is sacred and must be preserved against the thoughts of others at the expense of truth. For example, in Britain a man who calls his fat wife fat is technically guilty of domestic abuse.
The list of such ego-preserving legislation on both sides of the Atlantic goes on and on. When what a man thinks is deemed a crime because of how someone might choose to respond to those thoughts, then how long before such thought crimes are more thoroughly prosecuted to insane levels? The irony is that every major religion and philosophy has some concept to describe the transcendence of ego, and yet in the name of morality society seeks to preserve, promote, and feed the ego. One product of the ego is arrogance. Contrary to the phrase, it is not pride that precedes a fall but arrogance.
The film Equilibrium depicts a world where emotion is seen as the cause for man’s self-destruction, therefore all emotions, emotional displays, and anything that might evoke emotion is banned. The true danger is not the emotions. It is the ego.
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