An analysis of emotion
Quoting Mongrel
Context.
The dispute above is speedily resolved with a simple proviso: "It depends what emotion."
1. Vileness results from a failure, or absence of empathy wrt another.
One cannot say that an absence actually causes anything, so strictly speaking, as it is gravity that causes the table to fall rather than the absence of legs, so it is...
2. Greed, anger, and jealousy are the (main) emotions that lead to harming another.
I must note here, lest empathy become seen as the cure-all, that one can empathise with another who is greedy, angry, or jealous, or who 'has every right to be'. So empathy with the abused child, can lead me to de-empathise with her abuser, and allow my 'righteous anger' to fuel my own vileness.
I will focus on anger at this point, as the major component that is the antagonist to empathy.
3. Anger is a secondary emotion. It is a defensive reaction to emotional pain.
In the case of 'righteous anger', it is empathetic pain, and in other cases it is usually a bruised ego. Pain is momentarily felt, and almost immediately projected outwards to the 'source'. One automatically de-empahises with the perceived source of one's pain. You call me an idiot, it bruises my ego, and my immediate reaction to the hurt is to call you an idiot in turn. I de-empathise, and thereby salve my hurt, because I care less what you think.
4. Secondary emotions are reactions to primary emotions, and are therefore always inadequate responses to the situation.
My anger is a response to my own feeling of hurt, rather than to your calling me an idiot, and is unlikely to change your mind.
5. It's secondary emotional responses to crime that generate harmful actions that make us all worse off. - andrewk modified.
6. It takes a (secondary) hardening of the heart to be able to chop somebody's head off. The vileness actually starts with a lack of primary emotion. - Mongrel modified.
(I expect to have to do a deal of backtracking, modification and clarification to this, and andrewk and Mongrel are in no way responsible for my use/abuse of their comments.)
It's emotional responses to crime that generate harmful actions that make us all worse off.
— andrewk
Emotional responses are the problem? Um.. no. It takes a hardening of the heart to be able to chop somebody's head off. The vileness actually starts with a lack of natural emotion.
Context.
The dispute above is speedily resolved with a simple proviso: "It depends what emotion."
1. Vileness results from a failure, or absence of empathy wrt another.
One cannot say that an absence actually causes anything, so strictly speaking, as it is gravity that causes the table to fall rather than the absence of legs, so it is...
2. Greed, anger, and jealousy are the (main) emotions that lead to harming another.
I must note here, lest empathy become seen as the cure-all, that one can empathise with another who is greedy, angry, or jealous, or who 'has every right to be'. So empathy with the abused child, can lead me to de-empathise with her abuser, and allow my 'righteous anger' to fuel my own vileness.
I will focus on anger at this point, as the major component that is the antagonist to empathy.
3. Anger is a secondary emotion. It is a defensive reaction to emotional pain.
In the case of 'righteous anger', it is empathetic pain, and in other cases it is usually a bruised ego. Pain is momentarily felt, and almost immediately projected outwards to the 'source'. One automatically de-empahises with the perceived source of one's pain. You call me an idiot, it bruises my ego, and my immediate reaction to the hurt is to call you an idiot in turn. I de-empathise, and thereby salve my hurt, because I care less what you think.
4. Secondary emotions are reactions to primary emotions, and are therefore always inadequate responses to the situation.
My anger is a response to my own feeling of hurt, rather than to your calling me an idiot, and is unlikely to change your mind.
5. It's secondary emotional responses to crime that generate harmful actions that make us all worse off. - andrewk modified.
6. It takes a (secondary) hardening of the heart to be able to chop somebody's head off. The vileness actually starts with a lack of primary emotion. - Mongrel modified.
(I expect to have to do a deal of backtracking, modification and clarification to this, and andrewk and Mongrel are in no way responsible for my use/abuse of their comments.)
Comments (76)
He didn't say that, he said, "emotional responses to crime," and I would assume that he meant, "reactionary responses to crime where the responses are emotional-only."
- Partially Examined Life Part 1
- Partially examined life part 2, incl interview with Nussbaum
- Partially examined life part 3
- The philosopher's zone
Nussbaum is influenced by the Stoics but distances herself from them to some extent by wanting emotion to have a bigger role than she believes the Stoics wanted. It's all a question of, as un points out, what emotion.
Nussbaum is pretty strongly anti-anger, although she concedes that in certain rare and narrow circumstances it can have a useful instrumental role.
The references to bruised ego are apparently (according to Nussbaum) used by Aristotle in his analysis of anger. She says he identifies anger as generally arising because somebody else disrespects either you or somebody or something that you care about. Aristotle calls this (some Greek equivalent of) 'down-ranking' and connects the desire for retribution with a wish to down-rank the culprit and thereby relatively restore one's own ranking.
Nussbaum doesn't agree with Aristotle that all anger is of that type.
Secondary vs primary emotions is a new concept for me. I need to get my head around it before I can comment.
Well it is my own terminology, and there is a certain inevitable arbitrariness but it ties in closely with this from a review you referenced:
"... (Nussbaum) argues that despite anger’s long cultural history of being seen as morally justifiable and as a useful signal that wrongdoing has taken place, it is a normatively faulty response that masks deeper, more difficult emotions and stands in the way of resolving them."
But here is her position in her own nutshell.
[quote=Nussbaum]I argue that anger includes, conceptually, not only the idea of a serious wrong done to someone or something of significance, but also the idea that it would be a good thing if the wrongdoer suffered some bad consequences somehow. Each of these thoughts must be qualified in complex ways, but that?s the essence of the analysis. I then argue that anger, so understood, is always normatively problematic in one or the other of two possible ways.
One way, which I call the road of payback, makes the mistake of thinking that the suffering of the wrongdoer somehow restores, or contributes to restore, the important thing that was damaged. That road is normatively problematic because the beliefs involved are false and incoherent, ubiquitous though they are. They derive from deep-rooted but misleading ideas of cosmic balance, and from people?s attempt to recover control in situations of helplessness. But the wrongdoer?s suffering does not bring back the person or valued item that was damaged. At most it may deter future offending and incapacitate the offender: but this is not all that the person taking the road of payback believes and seeks.
There is one case, however, in which the beliefs involved in anger make a lot of sense, indeed all too much sense. That is the case that I shall call the road of status. If the victim sees the injury as about relative status and only about that – seeing it as a “down-ranking” of the victim?s self, as Aristotle put it – then indeed it does turn out to be the case that payback of some sort can be really efficacious. Lowering the status of the wrongdoer by pain or humiliation does indeed put me relatively up. But then there is a different problem: it is normatively problematic to focus exclusively on relative status, and that type of obsessive narrowness, thought common enough, is something we ought to discourage in both self and others.[/quote]
Now to my mind, this is far too cerebral, and makes a distinction between loss of 'the important thing that was damaged' and loss of status that does not look very fruitful. "...the wrongdoer?s suffering does not bring back the person or valued item that was damaged." It is as if there were a calculation to be made that might make sense of the anger, but the anger comes before the wrongdoer's suffering, which cannot therefore motivate the anger. Rather, anger itself must have animmediate psychological benefit that is expressed in retribution. And I think this is the reduction or masking of pain, specifically the psychological pain of damage to the self-image. This can include any identifications - status, but also the loss of a loved one (note that it is my loss that operates here not the loved one's), or the loss of my stuff, which again is part of my psyche.
The sense that anger makes is thus nothing to do with justice or normativity in the first place, but has an internal defensive role. That is why it is an inappropriate response, because it projects outwards a response to an internal condition. Everyone thinks, including Nussbaum, that anger is a response to the world, but it is not.
This is an interesting concept I'd hope anyone could entertain.
Well, let's say one has been brought up in a harsh environment, with harsh not much loving parents also due to their own upbringing with all their fragmented and dissociated psyche's. A situation that is quite common even to this day...
One then becomes desensitized to their own feelings and sometimes empathy flies out the window too, given this occurs fairly early when one is impressionable, one does not even recognize the difference in himself and others if his (predominantly) or her intelligence is average.
However, in the case where one even has an above average intelligence (in the most notable cases), they might be able to recognize this trait in themselves; but, here is the crux, they more often than not exploit this facet of their personality and see it as a strength (comparative evolutionary advantage within game theoretic bounds) given therapy is a much more arduous, alienating, and astigmatic path to take which is further compounded by the fact that such individuals are desensitized to the process of learning via emotional reasoning. Coming to terms with being the way they are is often more off putting than accepting themselves and integrating with the rest of people. Often narcissism makes the task more difficult.
The common (calculative and analytical) mindset for such a person is to view people as objects interacting with each other to maximize their own utility. Now, if one feels compelled-given a desire to have children, as I doubt even such non-empathetic people are incapable of love albeit in a different manner, then they feel compelled to pass on what strengths they have found in themselves to their offspring and disguise their love in anger, frustration, indifference and all the other resultant emotions from a lack of being able to feel adequately or empathize.
Now, the whole thing becomes pathological if the offspring have a predisposition to such non-empathetic traits, although sociopaths are said to be a product of nurture, and the circle closes.
What constitutes the response if not the internal condition? Perhaps I misunderstand, but I'd say anger is the internal condition expressed. It can be a response to other internal conditions or external events, or instantiate/emerge without being about anything in particular.
I don't know if anger is a secondary emotion (but there may be something like hard and soft emotions, some more intensive some less intensive), it may be a reaction to emotional pain, but the source of that pain is not always entirely clearly evident. People get in a mood, they become angry for no apparent reason. Anger is an affect, and I think it is associated with anxiety, and sadness as sort of a combined affects feeding off each other.
It is interesting that there are no unexpressed emotions, no unconscious emotions, the idea does not seem to make sense. There are however experiences that we do repress, traumas that we have experienced but that we have blocked out of psyche, yet these blocked experiences still effect our lives.
Freud suggested that affects such as anger are (in part) the result of what we have repressed. Repressed traumas do not directly reemerge, rather my current anger is based on my current situation and consciousness. He thought that current affects such as anger arise because there is a miss match between what we are aware of and our biological, psychological response to what is being experienced. Anger in this sense is due to the miss match or disconnection between repressed experiences and their current evocation in experience.
Quoting Question
I don't think this is going to work (in so far as I understand it at least). Anger can be expressed, suppressed or repressed (using the passive voice or as an object) as in "Anger was expressed (or suppressed or repressed) by her", "She expressed (or suppressed or repressed) her anger". Or anger can express or oppress, or be an expression or an oppression (using the active voice, or as a subject / object, or in an attributive / identifying relation) as in "His anger expresses who he is", "His anger oppressed his opponents (or expressed his beliefs) / He used his anger to oppress his opponents (or to express his beliefs)", "His anger is oppressive (or expressive) / his anger is a form of oppression (or expression)".
Or anger can both express and / or oppress and simultaneously suppress / repress in the sense described by un:
[quote=un]"Rather, anger itself must have an immediate psychological benefit that is expressed in retribution. And I think this is the reduction or masking of pain, specifically the psychological pain of damage to the self-image."[/quote]
The expression is the anger; what is suppressed / repressed is the pain. The primary identity of the anger is found in the expression (to the degree it is expressed*) though its underlying function (and secondary identity or type) is revealed in the suppression / repression.
So, it may be that anger as expression is sometimes caused by a feeling of love or empathy as outlined by un previously in his point about "righteous anger", but it cannot be itself an identity with love (as the two emotions are antithetical) in either a primary or a secondary sense. So, you my get an expressive or oppressive or suppressive or repressive anger, or some combination thereof but not a "loving" anger. Or even love "disguised in anger" as you suggest.
*(Of course anger when suppressed (to whatever degree) finds its identity (in the corresponding degree) in the unexpressed feeling rather than the expressed feeling / associated action (and when repressed seems to find identity only in its potential for expression) but here too it would seem to odd to propose an identify, to call one feeling a disguised form of another (though its precursor may have been another, making it a transformed form of another)).
Just some quick thoughts anyhow, which I may very well back-track on and revise too. It's an interesting subject worth exploring and I've also listened to some of Nussbaum's PEL talks on this
Hmm. I need to be a linguistic dictator here. Anger is an emotion, and so an internal motivation. The expression of anger we can call violence to distinguish it. This can take the form of a harsh word, a sharp slap, or whatever, but feeling and action are not the same thing. Perhaps I should say that they become distinct in the process of masking which is the loss of authenticity. If one's primary emotion expressed itself unmodified, when hurt one would cry, and there would not be a need to distinguish the feeling hurt from the crying.
I don't want to go into this yet really, but one can have a response to one's own anger, of fear, or guilt, perhaps, which would be a tertiary emotion that inhibits the secondary feeling of anger that is masking the original pain. And then one can mask that again with a blanket of numbness that becomes depression.
I'm not sure if I'm following you, but certainly I agree that anger is felt and thought of as a strength, and that is how it functions, in the psyche, as a way of resisting pain, and in the world as a way of resisting others. But I'm not seeing the connection to love you mentioned before.
Yes, I'm not even hoping to capture the complexity of emotional life in a few easy concepts. For sure there is what I can call 'emotional weather' with its origins in childhood, or yesterday's unexpressed feelings or whatever. So in some moods, a small irritation can provoke a huge outburst, and in other moods a deal of provocation can be shrugged off.
There are layers and cycles of feeling that are so habitually denied, sublimated, repressed and projected that one often has no idea what one actually feels, or what one is feeling something about. But let's try and consider the simple case first.
This is rather difficult. There are no unexpressed emotions - but sometimes one bites one's tongue. I think I would say that there are indeed unexpressed emotions, in the sense that biting one's tongue does not express the anger but the unwillingness to express the anger. It is at the centre of what I have been saying that the hurt is felt momentarily, but the expression is not made, (because big boys don't cry?), instead it is masked, diverted, assuaged, ameliorated by anger. And this happens so fast, that if one is not attending to oneself, one is not conscious of having been hurt.
But I agree that blocked experiences find expression of some sort; they have their effect - bitten tongues or stress illnesses, or confused masked inexplicable 'other' feelings and sensations.
To think of emotions as existing in categories is a folly in my understanding. For example, a father might feel happy and sad (cognitive dissonance) about working to provide for his family and being a 'man', but not spending time with them, eventually leading him to chose which comes first and at what expense and so on. So too it is a folly to search for happiness as an idealized state of mind, which the Buddhists can lecture about.
Actually I think one cannot assume that. Rather one has to assume that we are talking about the same emotions that folks can have more or less of. Otherwise, we will be talking at cross purposes and without communication. So I do not agree that one can express love with anger, indifference hostility or malice. If you want to use words that way, then I'm afraid I cannot discuss with you meaningfully.
I can see that anger can mask pain, but it seems to me that it replaces it with something worse. To me anger seems to be pain+blame rather than pain pure and simple. I find it easier to cope with just pain.
I find myself surprised at how widely varying people's feelings are about this. Last night we discussed which of the following we would find it harder to cope with:
- seventy people being killed by a tornado; vs
- seventy people being deliberately killed by a person, like Anders Bering Breivik.
To me the second is far more disturbing, because of the anger it evokes, but not everybody felt that way.
There may well be an evolutionary benefit in anger masking pain, in that it motivates the injured animal to fight, thereby making it more likely to end up in a position in which it can propagate its genes. But that is a gene-propagation benefit rather than a psychological benefit. I feel that that is only rarely a benefit in today's society, and far more often a curse. I find myself agreeing with Nussbaum on that score. I find her characterisation of it as a primitive wish for payback quite compelling.
Anger is an affect, it arises between the body and thought. Affects are manifestations of drives, basic instinctual physical responses to certain stimuli. Affects are not emotions, emotions are in the words, the gestures we learn. What we instinctively want things such as food, sex, safety get transformed into the words we use. (a recent study suggests that hunger is the strongest instinct, probably our first) Speech is a mode of conveyance of expression, either verbal or gestural. We learn to associate our current state from others through use of language. We learn what it means to sad, glad, mad, and bad. We learn that others react to us depending on the words we use. The young child denied of TV tries to hurt the parent..."I hate you", they learn that words hurt. They come to understand that the way they feel can be communicated to others by words, phrases, & discourse and words.
Freud thought that anxiety is the key, the master mode that connects the physical stimulus with the felt emotion. Our instinctual drives are dynamic, qualitative and quantitative intensities where anxiety represents an unbalanced state that seeks balance. What we desire is balance, if our demand is not met then we respond in frustration, sadness, or anger depending on the intensities of our feeling.
The line gets easily blurred. So when talking about anger, we might try to restrict it to limbic responses - the fight/flight reaction. Or we might then talk about various social scripts that put different slants on the cultural propriety of the raw feeling.
So we might talk about anger as bravery - socially approved fighting. Or we might talk about it as aggressiveness - socially disapproved combativeness.
There is a basic palette of wired responses. And then we can overlay that with an unlimited variety of socially framed views of how some situation ought to rightfully make us feel and act.
This is of course standard psychology. As told here in a list of the seven basic responses as revealed by coordinated reflexive actions.
http://www.humintell.com/2010/06/the-seven-basic-emotions-do-you-know-them/
But where it gets interesting is the human capacity for more social feelings like shame, guilt, empathy, dominance and submission.
These likely have a stronger biological base given we are highly evolved as social creatures.
Here's the thing; when you say that anger is worse, or more disturbing, you are naming the (tertiary) feeling that you have about the feeling of anger. The notion of coping with one's feelings is rather odd, when you think about it.
Suppose I said that the 70 people do not care one way or the other, that they have no feelings on the matter - suppose I said that the people being deliberately killed is preferable and easier to cope with because a gun makes far less mess than a tornado. These are somehow the wrong considerations, I appear callous, oddly, for not focusing on my own feelings.
I can imagine John Cleese indulging his justified anger by giving the tornado a damn good thrashing. So if you feel bad about feeling angry then anger is hard to cope with, but if you feel bad about feeling helpless, anger is preferable. And from that side, it is hard to comprehend that character that enjoys the expression of anger.
X has an image of himself as a calm and measured but sensitive person. So he is disturbed by the angry feelings that Breivik evokes in him, that threaten his self image. There is a positive feedback going on, such that the threat makes him more angry which disturbs him more. He finds it much more comfortable to endure the sadness of the tornado's effect.
Y has an image of himself as an active and responsive person who can live with his own feelings because they are always appropriate. He is unthreatened by his anger at Breivik, but probably more so at his anger at a tornado which looks ridiculously inappropriate, which threatens his self image and makes him more angry in a similar feedback.
I might have a go at Z later on, who has a negative selfi-mage...
“Angry? Mmmmmmm,” Loach says so quietly it barely registers. He talks about the people he and his regular writer Paul Laverty met while doing their research: the young lad with nothing in his fridge who hadn’t eaten properly for three days; the woman ashamed of attending food banks; the man told to queue for a casual shift at 5.30am, then sent home an hour later because he wasn’t needed. “That constant humiliation to survive. If you’re not angry about it, what kind of person are you?”
Here is a little challenge that helps me clarify my thinking. Ken is extolling the virtue of empathic anger. But what is this feeling that he expresses so quietly? We see the empathic hurt, and then we see the response, to make film. Ken's films are "hard hitting" Is that violence? Is that anger?
I want to say that to be hurt and upset, and to respond with vigour and determination is not necessarily to be angry, at least in the sense in which I have been using the word. I would rather say that Ken responds to the primary empathic hurt, which he does not cover with a secondary anger. I say this because for me anger consists of the urge to hurt or harm, and there seems to be none.
I'm not sure if this is a sustainable distinction in terms of a judgement of another's actions, but on a personal level, I think it works. There is a clear difference in motivation between wanting to support the underdog, and wanting to cut the overlord down to size, although the action may sometimes be the same.
Just as, though we talk about 'fighting cancer', the motivation is to help the patient, not to hurt the cancer.
Psychologically, I would say that this happens on a small scale all the time. I like to think I'm a decent chap who wishes harm to no one, so my anger is unacceptable to me. So I deny it, suppress the immediate response, and rationalise to an action that expresses my anger covertly. And this tertiary response to my own anger has the semblance to me and to another of being a positive response to empathic hurt.
Just some initial thoughts here:
Anger, I think, is not the easier case. Jealousy, as a source of evil at least, would make more sense to me to focus on because I find it hard to think of a case where the motivation of jealousy is a good thing, even when the effects are good (say, donating to a charity out of jealousy because of a vain desire to appear better than someone else) ((although, then again, perhaps we don't need to mention the effects at all here -- because the conversation is already primarily focused on motivation, rather than the effects of our actions, as a locus of evil... or at least wrongdoing, if evil seems too strong a word)). But anger has so many layers to it that I find it hard to make sense of it in such declarative terms. Anger is a proper response in some cases, and in some ways, and not so in other cases or other ways. It's the way anger is expressed, I'd wager, that makes it bad or good. (indeed, I would hazard to say that unexpressed anger is itself not a good thing, though it makes sense to wait for the right context in which to express it)
For instance, I think there is a kind of anger that is harmful to the angry person. It doesn't matter if the anger is acted on or not, but it is a kind of consuming anger which causes harm to the person who is angry -- and if it is acted upon, harm to what that person directs their anger against.
But then there is justified anger. I agree with you in that it's not the state of the world which causes this anger, but I'm not sure I could say that it is a response to emotional pain. Couldn't anger just be emotional pain, for instance? Say I am attached to some thing in the world and I lose it -- loss and anger accompany this attachment. That is emotional pain.
Though (and this might be tangential -- depending on how much you were wanting to focus on the relationship between good motivation and good actions) I might be a bit at odds with the initial thoughts on goodness and badness, too, since harm to another is not something I would say is wrong, tout court. That isn't to say I endorse revenge -- revenge, I would agree, is a poor motivation. But I'm not so certain that harm is morally forbidden. Or, at least, that it both is and isn't -- there's a sense in which I would say harming another is always a shame, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done, in such and such a circumstance. (as in, a better world is one without harm to others, but in this world, harm in this case was the better option)
I'm not so sure jealousy is simpler. One could say that jealousy is the motivator of competition, and competition is the motivator of excellence. It seems to be concerned again with self image, and may or may not involve a component of anger. But whether it is felt to be good or bad, that feeling comes after the jealousy itself, and does not affect the complexity of the source of the feeling.
Quoting Moliere
I'm concerned to emphasise that whether anger is proper or improper, good or bad, harmful or not, is a feeling one has about one's anger (or about another's). The phrase 'consuming anger' is interesting; when one is consumed by anger, it has taken over, to the extent that in the moment, there is no judgement - no feeling about anger - one is anger itself, completely. To get carried away is to be for a moment undivided, single minded, and this is a wonderful state of no (internal) conflict. Afterwards, one may judge one's condition to have been proper or improper in the usual divided and conflicted way. This is part of the attraction of anger, that it liberates one from conflict.
Quoting Moliere
I want to hold clear the distinction between the feeling - anger, and the action - harming. So, although it is not always used quite this way, I define anger as the feeling that motivates harm. Now one can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, but breaking eggs isn't normally the motive. So to endorse harm is not necessarily to endorse anger. I support taxing the rich, not to damage them, but to help the poor. I can imagine not hating Hitler, but loving Jews enough to assassinate him.
As in the Nussbaum quote about anger being the source of payback or wanting to see someone get their comeuppance really sounds more like vengeance. The purpose of law is to exclude emotion from the equation and to offer fairness, which might equate to payback in some form. We consider a good judge to be a tempered one, not one that is fiery and spewing venom. In fact, we'd exclude a potential juror from hearing a case if he expressed hostility. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the sociopathic who can with a calm heart and cold blood commit all sorts of heinous acts, not motivated at all by anger, but simply carrying out their will.
And I'd think that anger is a very good thing in certain contexts, not leading to vengeance, but leading to something productive. The anger over injustice has led plenty to pass laws and start humanitarian organizations for example. Passions can be channeled to good or bad, whether the passion be love, hate, anger or whatever.
It just seems that Nussbaum is criticizing vengeance, which is hardly controversial, although to what extent this tramples on Kant's just desserts is another issue. That is to say, if the justification for giving you your just dessert is out of a respect for your autonomy and choice, then we've arrived at an alternative explanation than simply saying that we're punishing you because we're good and pissed off about it.
I see emotion as just that which moves you to action, thus the root "motion" within it. If we were emotionless we'd be as computers waiting for someone to offer a use for us. And so I'd submit that if anger over injustice moves us to feed the hungry, then it is a good thing, and if love of our country moves us to open fire into a crowd, it is a bad thing.
Catagories schmatagories.
I agree with your definition of emotion, but it seems to entail that a tempered judge is not an emotionless judge. You seem to be clear enough on the distinction between fiery and tempered, but you dismiss my analysis. Perhaps you could explain your own schmatagories?
Anger is a component of PTSD and typical grief. Why? Don't know. A naturalistic answer is easy: anger is a source of energy for fight/flight. Having worked in neonatal intensive care, my assessment is that anger is there long before there is any sense of identity to reinforce.
Its there prior to mastery of language and during the development of that mastery. One point I'd make is this: that's a person you're analyzing. Take a moment to become aware of your own motives for doing psychoanalysis. Check out Thomas Moore's Dark Eros for a full check list of possibilities.
Toddler rants at violated property rights. Family thinks it's funny:
Well the person I'm mostly interested in analysing is myself. Understanding my own understanding is just what I am interested in. Sometimes it looks like psychoanalysis, and sometimes it looks more like philosophical analysis.
Quoting Mongrel
So I am suggesting a reason. Whether it is true for another is for them to find out for themselves or not as they wish. Your health warning will no doubt be heeded by some, but for those that like to think too hard about such things, I plan to continue to dispense my rather vague psychobabble.
Personally, I think the toddler deserves to be taken seriously and offered an apology and compensation. I don't find the anger of the powerless that funny.
Cool.
Quoting unenlightened
My warning comes from learning the hard way that pain, anger, and other difficult emotions are sometimes messengers I'd like to shoot. Analysis can be loaded gun for that purpose. I see you aren't having that kind of issue.
My two cents worth: in the same way a baby lion instinctively tries out its claws and jaws, that toddler is flexing muscles that have to do with her potential for social magic (as Confucius put it). She's learning how to get what she wants. The fact that the family is laughing makes me suspect that they already know that this kind of thing runs in their family: a tendency to react to stress with anger.
In some worlds, a human like that will become a military leader. People will tend to ally themselves with her because she does get what she wants. In other worlds, this little girl would lead a short life as the people around her seek to declaw her, cripple her, and finally either directly or indirectly kill her.
I think that the sense of self you spoke of is not necessarily there prior to the outburst of anger, but can instead be a product of it. Likewise groups of people can experience an invigoration of identity through collective abiding wrath. Fascism is a desperate attempt to gain that strength artificially.
The young one seems to be rehearsing the form of an argument rather than delivering content. Imitation within an argumentative family perhaps?
On another thread, I participated in a discussion about anger, jealousy and envy, where someone claimed that envy was a always a source of evil, whereas anger and jealousy were not always sources of evil, and were sometimes sources of good. I agreed with this in regard to anger, but argued that envy and jealousy are closely linked and that jealousy, like envy is always negative. The other claimed that jealousy is righteous, that is just, anger over someone taking what is rightfully yours. I disagreed and said that I think jealousy is actually pre-emptively envying the other (even if it is only a general or imaginary 'other') for having what you want.
I thought about all this some more and came to think that envy is wanting what the other has, whereas jealousy is not wanting the other to have what you have.
So, for what it's worth, there's my little bit of analysis of emotion.
I'll have to listen again, more closely.
Yeah, I think you're probably right. Maybe mommy is argumentative and Daddy is passive aggressive (" I don't think I like your tone")?
There was a time when I would have been all nurture about that sort of thing. In fact, I point blank told a friend who reported that there was an anger-gene in his family that it wasn't so. Actually witnessing the two-year old who had been identified as carrying it changed my mind.
I do agree that individuals are born with more or less passive or aggressive natures.
Yes, but just take the example of the cold father that masks his love. Certainly, this isn't an uncommon practice by many fathers to do so.
So, too can someone else mask his or her emotion including love being masked by anger. Although, this would be something that happens at a semi-conscious level as I can't imagine someone simultaneously feeling love and anger at the same time.
Yes, the child's moods are like fast-moving clouds over the face of the sun, she is angry then she runs over and hides behind mommy's legs, and then she becomes kind of coy and says softly "Yes", and then she erupts again.
I totally agree with you it's not good to suppress that. Suppression becomes repression and repression can become neurosis, even psychosis; the breeding grounds of monsters.
This is the way children learn how to use words, what strategies work, how to align oneself in a arguments, and eventually how to act in social interactions.
At the end, the mother tries to mollify the child, bring her in line by suggesting solidarity with the dad. "Go Hawks!" probably a familiar family cry watching sports on TV.
I think all emotions are embodied, the question is (and maybe it works both ways) whether you tremble because you are afraid or are you afraid because you realize you are trembling.
Yep. As I told John, there was a time when I would have strongly supported this view. Witnessing first hand that kids aren't blank slates changed my mind. Notice that when she says "You know what? Listen to me." She's easy to understand. That is mimicry. When it's hard to understand her, she's struggling to construct English sentences. "Daddy never gave my soda back!" is not mimicry. That is something pretty freakin' astonishing and as far as we know, only found in humans.
Isn't that what we do sometimes, don't we get into a role, playing a part. Some of our roles give rise to hard emotions, which can consume normal consciousness even if only briefly. Normally we repent or make up. When we don't make up or repent, aren't we left with guilt, vengeance a sense of injustice. That's not to say that people don't have inherited dispositions, or that contextual situations don't have their part in our actions.
Arguments about who needs to do what are common. Sometimes civilized discussion, but not always, sometimes protagonists become angry, get upset by what is said, respond in similar terms to what is said, they play a role, which may be particular to them, but it is still a role.
Religions also ask us to perform ritualized behaviours, to assume a role as a member of the religion community. Some of these roles may be self-destructive, and some monstrously destructive to others...you know the Spanish Inquisition, which no one ever expects, happened. The jihadist beheading the non-believer, sets their soul free, saves them (as I understand it).
We can stay focused on anger then.
Quoting unenlightened
My focusing on goodness and badness is that it seemed to me that anger is (generally) bad, in your characterization of anger. That's what gives me hesitancy.
But actually rereading your post -- anger is a secondary emotion to primary pain, either empathetic or egoistic.
What, then, are the primary emotions?
Also, I gather we're thinking about anger in a different way. I don't think of anger as egoistic. I agree with your approach that it is a result of an internal configuration, but I'm less prone to think of anger as attached to identity. I'm more prone, in general now and not just with anger, to think in terms of attachment. And this may just be a way of restating what you're getting at, but it's the verbal pattern I'm accustomed to.
I become (and, in some sense, am) attached to the world in various ways. This "I" is not an identity, but is that which identifies with an identity -- one might say becomes attached to an identity. But it is this attachment which usually results in anxiety and anger. Possibilities take on a kind of reality (may stop what I have become attached to), hence resulting in anxiety, or reality interferes with this attachment, hence causing anger.
But were I not attached in the first place -- or were I to detach ahead of time -- anxiety and anger would go away. (at least when it comes to things I have no control over, which will inevitably come and go, causing excitement and disappointment)
Which isn't to say one should always detach. While I do think anger is a nullity on compassion, I'm less certain about saying compassion is something we should always have.
Quoting unenlightened
Well, I think what I was getting at is a little different from what you're stating here. All consuming anger, as I meant to refer at least, is not something which is momentary or which you can't have divided internal conflicts about. It is all consuming precisely in the way that even if you have divided feelings you continue to feel the anger. It is an anger in the long-term, and is all consuming in that it centers your awareness of the world. Akin to hatred, but different too -- because it is easy to hate, but it is hard to hold anger. It is the sort of anger one desires revenge out of, because of the harm you are causing yourself.
Ah, I see what you are saying now. Yes, the whole thread is about how one feeling can mask another. We Brits are famous for our stiff upper lips, and my own family is like that; "not bad" is our highest accolade. So the man that disguises his affection as a punch on the arm, or the woman that covers her affection with nagging are certainly familiar.
"I hate you for making me feel vulnerable."
I think this expresses clearly a feeling about a feeling that I have been talking about in another form. A great many of the comments here focus on feelings about feelings - is this feeling always good or bad?
So to love is to be vulnerable to rejection or ridicule, one is afraid of this, so one becomes angry.
So if one is in such a state, and following this thread, one will find that looking at one's anger and asking not 'what about?', but 'why?', one is in great danger, as Mongrel pointed out, of uncovering the masked feeling that one had rejected. So, before one starts, one needs to suspend judgement about feelings; one needs a mental space that is dispassionate, and compassionate, and insatiably curious with regard to oneself.
Who is this person? >:) >:O
I was wondering when this would become an explicit question. It has been given answers in various comments that I have avoided responding to, and has hovered in the background of the discussion of the toddler video. One might look at infants or animals, one might look to evolutionary psychology. But I don't want to answer, because I don't want to start from there, I want to start from here.
So my only answer is that the primary feeling is the feeling I have before I make a judgement or have a feeling about my feeling. It may well be that such feelings do not even have a name of their own, because they are so universally masked. Or maybe it is some list - fear, disgust, curiosity, affection, or whatever. I don't want to preempt what anyone might uncover, or force feelings into categories.
Quoting Moliere
This is difficult to tease out; we may need to go into it again, but for the moment let's hope it is just a matter of terminology.
Quoting Moliere
Can I say that to be attached is to be vulnerable to hurt? This immediately prompts one to see the benefit of detachment. But to me, detachment is a curse, it is a state of unreality in which my relationship to the world is denied. There is no feeling more destructive of the person and the other than indifference.
Quoting Moliere
Right, that is something different. I imagine that somehow anger becomes integrated into the self-image, so that one is constantly evoking anger with a circle of thoughts, rather as a plumber constantly evokes his identity as plumber by going to work and joining pipes every day. But I confess I have little experience of this.
Does it matter? (L)
Yes, I think the psychological concept of over-determination deserves a mention here. We tend to identify with the way we feel and that in turn causes a cascade of events to happen in the mind. One does wonder though, can one dissociate from the way they feel, for example being depressed over being depressed ad nausium. Or if dissociating oneself from their emotions is even a healthy thing to do and what does that in turn lead to...
I think the prominence of recognizing 'emotional reasoning' to borrow a term from CBT is important here along with some mindful awareness in getting a better 'feel' for some problematic situation; but, I'm not sure if you recognize that this also can be some sort of mental masturbation if emotions truly reign supreme.
I think in order to identify with the way one feels, one has first to dissociate from it.
I don't know if that is clear? I am not depressing, but I have got depression which I am trying to escape or cure by pressing it down. So I would say that to reason about one's feeling, or to act on it to change it is to have dissociated from it - the reasoner is dealing with a feeling separate from the reasoner, and then identified with the reasoner. It's always 'I have a problem', and not 'I am a problem'.
In English we identify with feelings. In other languages feelings may be owned (as if stored in an internal suitcase) or they may be upon one as if sadness falls like rain. Since a form of dissociation is managed by the autonomic nervous system, it may be dubious to ask about how healthy that is. .
In Spanish, one apologizes by saying "Lo siento", which literally translates as "I feel it." It can be taken as a verbal signal that one is experiencing the results of empathy. IOW... imagine that empathy is always there like radio waves. You become aware of the feelings of another by tuning your radio to that frequency.
This is a handy way to think of it for me because like other people I've known, I had issues in my younger days with being unable to control the radio. I wouldn't try too hard to explain unity of consciousness or the communal nature of emotion to someone who doesn't experience it that way. People can be incredibly strong in the conviction that we're all the same. The result is that we can't listen to one another... all we can do is preach.
And.. a person may say "Lo siento" without meaning it. Sometimes wording is just a matter of custom.
I have been told many times that I have no ego, this is perhaps due to some event in my childhood that stunted its growth; but, that's another story. Obviously, it would be impossible for me to not have an ego entirely as I am no Buddha or Wittgenstein although I strive to be the latter, as in later, former Wittgenstein.
Quoting unenlightened
This is tricky because one's self does not want to be in contradiction with itself in perceiving the problem as its own or simply take responsibility for it. This is classically portrayed in the prisoners situation where one will continue to electrocute an inmate at ever higher 'doses' as long as they aren't directly responsible for the welfare of the poor bastard being electrocuted in such a psychotic experiment. The problem as I see it is that we aren't solipsist beings and the necessary demarcation between 'being a problem' and 'having a problem' is very hard to delineate; but, obviously the bias will be towards saying that one 'has a problem' as opposed to 'being a problem'... But, then again to whom is this person a problem to? Is it to others or oneself?
I agree with your intuition. Perhaps I should emphasise the role of time in this. Suppose you say something that hurts me, intentionally or not. So first I feel hurt. Quick as a flash, I defend against my hurt by getting angry. Then, I feel my anger. Then there is a thought, 'I mustn't be angry'.
So here, in the space of maybe a second, is dissociation happening; there is a hurt me, an angry me, and a controlling me. Now these fragments are operating as if they are independent, and in particular controlling me is operating on angry me as if it (controlling me) is not angry. But this is a fiction; controlling me is still hurt, and still angry.
Now the obvious question at this point is, who is saying this: "But this is a fiction; controlling me is still hurt, and still angry."? And there are two possible answers. It might be the controller of the controller, another dissociation, another fragment. Let's call him 'the analyst'. Or it might be simply an expression of my feeling.
And this is the end point of my whole thread and analysis, and it is what is strongly resisted by the controller and the analyst; that they are unnecessary fictions. Rather, it is possible to feel one's feelings and not try to operate on them to control or defend, and in fully feeling as one feels, there is no dissociation, no contradiction, and no stress.
Or maybe the controller and analyst aren't fictional people. They're aspects of your psyche which have a history of doing a fabulous job of protecting you and keeping you functional. They aren't going to come into view as "unnecessary fictions" until they aren't needed anymore. Then they can be taken off the way a cast is taken off a broken limb.
There's no benefit at all from trying to force a broken leg to support you. But a cast on a healthy limb is crippling you.
As the Buddha said, just like the moon and the sun, the truth never remains long hidden. Why are you stuck in paralyzes? Because you think that something is wrong with you, that's why you won't stop thinking. You're constantly being attacked, and you can't figure out why, and that's your response to it.
But maybe they're wrong? The idea is to find a good balance between things, not to not give a shit what people think, but to just absorb it, digest it, and the truth will be revealed, and trust those instincts.
If you find yourself at one end of a spectrum try inverting it, and doing the opposite, the middle will then become more obvious.
Maybe. 'Fictional' is probably misleading, but my suggestion is that the situation is more like putting a broken cast on a broken leg, which doesn't do a fabulous job - not in the sense you mean. The controller of anger is angry, so he functions to sustain anger and does not protect against it.
The executioner I mentioned just doesn't feel anything. He or she is good at looking at people as if they're meat. All emotion is deadened. A lot of us in this world have ancestors who were like that. I think it was a survival strategy.
Cool.
Quoting unenlightened
Well, I will say that I came to this terminology from Buddhists. Not that I am a Buddhist, but when hearing them speak it just made a lot of sense. This is important because the state of detachment isn't one of indifference, but rather a state of compassion. So detachment isn't to turn oneself into an emotional rock, but rather to calm the mind into a state of loving-kindness, as the terminology has it.
Of course there is an objective in such a phrasing -- it's not what I would consider something purely scientific, per se. But then, I don't mind that. I'm not sure if such a thing is possible anyways.
But, to directly answer your question -- I think you could say that, but that's not exactly what I mean. Attachment causes pain, but as I see it it is unnecessary pain. The sort of pain that you cause to yourself.
But then not all anger is like that, either. So perhaps there's more to it than that. Perhaps we could just say "being vulnerable" is something different from this way of talking.
You'll always be delusional at the cost of any protective strategies about people's true natures otherwise, in my view.
But, masking one's emotions is natural and real. My dreams are just as real as I experience reality. So too are emotions as real as the one's being masked. In other words, let's the ego/super-ego do it's job in masking the primitive aspect of one's psychology.
Is your solution to feel more or feel more adequately? How does one measure this all with the qualitative facets of emotions and their 'unreasonableness'?
Quoting Moliere
I wonder if we are saying the same thing or not. I suppose compassion comes from empathy, whereas attachment comes from self image. So are you saying that my compassion for my daughter's suffering is necessary, but the extra 'weight' of pain that comes from my attachment is unnecessary and self inflicted? I'm not terribly happy with that analysis.
Quoting Wosret
This is much more where I find myself. And it leads me to a great suspicion of the current fads for 'mindfulness' in schools, and 'time out' in the home. Children especially need to attach, and these processes of detachment imposed upon them lead them to feel abandoned and turn to each other and to material things as inappropriate attachments.
For sure, anger is very real; one has only to look at the world. I should emphasise that I am not suggesting in this thread that one should let it all hang out. I need to reemphasise the distinction between feeling and expression.
So it is quite normal to get angry from time to time, (though it may not be necessary) and it is to be recommended that one bite one's tongue, and restrain one's fist. All I am saying is that one should not try to change one's feelings, but simply to understand them. Certainly the measuring of one's feelings is out of the question on this view, that one cannot separate oneself from them. It would be like a ruler trying to measure itself; the whole thing is that it takes another ruler to do that. So to the extent that one manages it, one has created a division in oneself.
I almost never express my anger. I keep it locked up inside and let it show in my passive aggressive behavior. If things don't go my way then to hell with it all, I'll lay in bed or be a pessimist about it all and deny anyone else the right to happiness in my behavior and world view. I resort to Stoicism to help me put a knot down in my belly that makes me lean towards Cynicism and eventually Nietzsche in my lack of power and resigned responsibility to others.
Is that healthy? It might be in my own disposition; but, to others I doubt so.
In all this, I see Nel Noddings ethics of 'care' as a solution to this problem. Unreciprocated (that is, a state of mind that does not require reciprocation to be maintained, something akin to being enlightened or love/compassion/desire in its purest form - without any material desire in return) 'care' or love or compassion without strings attached seems to be the ideal here.
As for the measurement of one's emotions. Perhaps school and other public institutions are apt in dealing with this. I have gone through both (school and military) and can't say I've learned much emotionally about myself or the world for the matter. Just where I stand and nothing more.
My guess is that we aren't, just to judge from similar conversations. :D I tend to think that we run parallel in some ways but there's a divergence somewhere in our thinking about emotion -- which, as you noted before to Mongrel, may just be a matter of what we feel we need to focus on for our own better living. (I certainly am not proposing a scientific theory here -- though something more universal than unique to myself, I'd guess)
I wouldn't say necessary -- since compassion isn't necessary -- but that you can also cause unnecessary pain to yourself depending on your relationship to said suffering, or that you can relate to the suffering of others in such a way that you are not responding compassionately, but from a role or identity you hold dear (I really think that compassion runs contrary to identity, though I could be wrong on that). So, for instance, I think of myself as a loving father, and a loving father expresses outrage in these situations, so I then express outrage in such-and-such a manner to satisfy my self-image of a loving father vs. approaching the suffering of your daughter with an ear towards their suffering.
Also, I think I would flip your causal chain there in saying that empathy comes from compassion. Compassion is a state of mind in and through which which empathy (to feel as others feel) can grow.
Though "pain" here, I believe -- and generally I think this about pain -- is a bit of a weasel word. It seems comprehensive, but on the whole I tend to think that it's just a collection of similar experiences. Loss and anger feel different from one another, but are easily classified as "pain", just to elucidate where I'm going with that.
I think I'd disagree with @Wosret's characterization of "attachment is good, and pain is necessary" Attachment causes suffering, and I hazard it's unnecessary suffering. I can agree up to a point, if I understand at least. There's a sense in which emotions just are. You just feel what you feel, and there's no amount of storytelling to yourself which can change that. You can't really run from them or hide them or change them. But you can habituate your behaviors -- including mental behaviors -- so that you are happy more often than not. Pain doesn't go away magically, but the pain you cause yourself does.
Some pains only go away with death. So in some cases I would agree that pain is necessary. But I wouldn't say that this pain is the result of attachment, but is just a fact of life. (In which case -- why try altering it in the first place if it is necessary?)
Some pain isn't necessary. It's learned.
I agree, this happens. And in such a case one is performing, and conforming to the image. So it is the image one is attached to, and the image that is harmed, and it really has nothing to do with the daughter at all. But I think - am I deceiving myself? - that it is possible to form an attachment to one's daughter, not just to an image of oneself being attached.
There is a fairly respectable thread in psychology going back to Bowlby that holds attachment to be a crucial feature of the development of the child. Now such an attachment will be asymmetric; dependence on the child's part, and dependability on the parent's. Here is Gabor Mate talking about it, (and mentioning Buddhism). It takes a while to get to attachment.
Because the image of a loving father must have a real source, surely?
Dramas pervasively shape the way people interact.
An example is that little Johnny is forced to eat broccoli by his father. An unfinished drama is set up as a result. Through his life, Johnny is basically telling everybody around him "NO!" He doesn't know why.. they don't know why.. and none of them realize that the whole sentence Johnny is trying to express is "NO. I don't want the broccoli." The father needs to say "OK. I'm sorry and I was wrong to make you eat that." But until the little Johnny down inside the big Johnny can hear that, the drama will continue to play out like a broken record.
That's overly simplistic, obviously. A real psyche is full of harmonies and resonant frequencies so that nothing is really pure. But the point is that people go around recruiting other people to play roles in their dramas. A father may not see his daughter beyond the role he's cast her in.
So I think it's not that attachment to others and the world is formed. It's always there. Nobody is an island. Stuff covers over attachment (which is apt to be experienced as love.)
There's a Buddhist thing that helped me. A fair portion of it results in detachment from the drama. I mean.. as opposed to trying to dig down and find the origin of the drama, just pop free of what binds one to a drama: fear and anger. I let myself be free of anger and fear, and I let others be free also. Now I'm letting you be whatever you are. I don't need to squash you into a role.
Interestingly, that stuff is preceded by immersing oneself in emotion. Some old Buddhist would imagine a woman standing by a river and her baby was carried away by the current. And then recognize that this love and grief is what everybody feels sometimes. That's similar to what the dude who taught me massage therapy said: drop down out of your head and out of your identity to be free of the drama. But that state is too amorphous to navigate a busy life. It has to be protected in a sanctuary.. maybe not necessarily a physical sanctuary. Sometimes I think that's what people are doing with prayer: making a little mobile sanctuary.
I just know myself well enough that I can discern what feelings and thoughts aren't and are mine.
A painting of it would be a blue world with darker blue people running around.. each one free of history and expectation.
Usually my memories or thoughts have no visual or structural content whatsoever, I think mainly audio and touch. Not awesome on tastes or smells either.
I'm posting it as food for thought, as I just read it.
Quoting unenlightened
I don't think this is a deception. And after watching the video I think that we're actually talking about two different concepts with the same word (or two different experiences, perhaps).
Attachment here I would term "relationship" or "connection". I don't think it's a deception to say that we can form connections with others without being attached to an image.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to deny that. Sorry for the delay. I just wanted to make time to listen to the talk before responding.
This is a bit off the cuff -- but perhaps the difference between these two kinds of attachment can be understood in terms of craving(or desire, though that could be too general too), and need. In the former I become angry, anxious, or fearful because I crave this or that but don't have, might not have it, or don't feel safe without it (respectively). In the latter we need attachment to others, and children need attachment to adults, to give us a sense of belonging and to give us a safe place to be vulnerable and develop (respectively).
"Attached anger sometimes lasts for three hours, sometimes three days, and does not quickly return to love-mind. When you were crying, you had reflected anger; it did not last long. Soon you returned to your mind that loves your son, and you knew what to do to help him… After more hard training, your reflected anger will change to perceived anger. You will feel anger but not show it; you will be able to control your mind. Finally, you will have only loving anger, ager only on the outside to hep other people — “You must do this!” — but no anger on the inside. This is true love-mind."
It is not altogether clear to me, so perhaps I am missing something, but it looks as though we have the same two distinctions, between inner and outer ( feeling and behaviour), and primary and secondary. There is the typical zen paradox of training to be spontaneous, but I don't think I can go further without all the details of both letters.
But I'll say something about how one feels feelings, provoked by the term 'perceived anger'. I think it makes sense to say that one has to become angry first, before one can become cognisant thereof. There is a rush of blood to the head, and then one notices the rush. So, on the face of it, it is an angry person that notices his anger. And yet one is not, in the first instance angry about one's anger. One might become so, calling myself an idiot for becoming angry, but that is later again.
So there is a perception of anger that is not separate from being angry, and yet is not itself angry. Does this make any sense? That there is always a calm at the centre of the storm of feeling. Now if one can start to notice that, perhaps it will grow. Perhaps one can live from that, and not from one's periphery.
Yes, that makes sense to me. From the brief description I don't find myself able to really grasp what he means by love-anger, myself -- but the other three seemed to make sense to me (at least, in a concrete sense -- abstractly it makes sense, but I don't think I know what it is like). I don't think I would even classify anger solely along his lines, but there was some sense to it too.
To perceive anger we must be angry -- that makes sense too. At least, to perceive ourselves as angry.
I like the notion you put forward of "growing", because that fits in with my experience of anger. Starting with just noticing that you're angry and accepting you're angry is a starting point from which you begin to notice another place, another way to accepting -- or perhaps even "expressing" anger, even though the end steps are in a sense a redirection of anger, and not expressing in the traditional sense.