Edmund Blackadder
"This will be the greatest
moment in art since Mona
Lisa walked into the
studio and said, I'm
feeling a little odd today."
Feelings, emotion and intuition
By the end of these 2 lessons you will have:
•a definition of emotion
•developed a critical view of the value of it
What are emotions?
 Pleasure, anger, sorrow, joy, love,
hate, desire.
T’oegye
(Korean philosopher 1501-70)
 Fondness, dislike, delight, anger,
sadness, joy.
Hsun Tzu (Chinese philosopher 3 century BC)
rd
Any thoughts? Responses? Overlaps? Additions?
Generate your own list of feelings
 One emotion or feeling per card
 Sort them (in categories)
 Order them (on a continuum)
 Compare and Contrast them
(Venn diagram? Grid? Axes? )
Problems with this activity
as a means of
gaining definitions or an understanding of what emotions are.
 What about vertigo?
or angst? or ennui? or being in flow?
What about other feelings or emotions you’ve
had, but that don’t have a name?
 What about love? How many definitions are there?
 What if you said “I feel…” and finished the
phrase with one of your words, would it make
sense?
 Does this mean that every emotion is a
feeling?
How do we distinguish between
feelings, moods and emotions?
 Try sorting the emotions and feelings
cards onto this grid:
 Instinctive and social at polar ends.
(anger/love
- guilt/shame)
 Inward & outward looking at either
edge. (fear - wonder))
 What questions does this activity raise?
 Are there any better classifications?
the received (Western) idea is that:
Emotions are hot,
urgent, irrational
forces that sway
us like the tides…
Reason is the cool
reflective analysis that
comes from education
and civilisation…
And that reason should control the emotions!
Think of examples where emotions mean a loss of
control, a take-over or are seen as a dark force.
 How accurate is this ‘tidal’ paradigm?
 How much choice is there is emotion?
 When might you go into a frenzy of rage?
 When might you feel relaxed?
 And when not?
… when its reasonable to do so
So our emotions do not work without elements
of reason and knowledge.
The James-Lange theory
 The emotions are essentially physical in
nature.
 Bodily changes come before, and therefore
cause, emotions.
 If you remove the physical symptoms, then
the emotions disappear. You are left with
“a cold and neutral state of intellectual
perception”- William James, 1884.
 If you mimic the physical expression, then
you will feel the emotion.
How could you test or support this idea?
Crunch time:
define emotion
 Are feelings emotions?
 Or are emotions feelings?
 Are feelings thoughts.
 Or are thoughts feelings?
 What is the opposite of emotion?
 Did it help to ask that question?
 How does your definition compare?
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=RNWE,RNWE:200637,RNWE:en&q=define%3a+emotion
Other definitions
 Derived from the latin word movere,
meaning ‘to move’
 Edward O Wilson defined emotion as
“the modification of neural activity that
animates and focuses mental activity”.
Are these definitions enough?
Blaise Pascal
“The heart has its
reasons whereof reason
knows nothing”
David Hume
“Reason is, and ought
only to be the slave of
the passions, and can
never pretend to any
other office than to serve
and obey them”
Douglas Yates
“People who are sensible
about love are not
capable of it”
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
“To understand via the
heart is not to
understand”
Jonatan Mårtensson
“Feelings are much like
waves, we can't stop
them from coming but we
can choose which one to
surf.”
Mark Twain
“Any emotion, if it is
sincere, is involuntary.”
Arnold Bennett
 “There can be no knowledge
without emotion. We may be
aware of a truth, yet until we
have felt its force, it is not
ours. To the cognition of the
brain must be added the
experience of the soul.”
What emotion do dying
people feel?