What is an emotion?

Image: AI generated by Gabriel Ganiarov

What is an emotion? 

Pain...this is how the ancients understood it, as a kind of divine possession where the person was the object of an ''induced'' alienation resulting from the presence of the deity. Only through the evolution of Western philosophical thought have we been able to glimpse an acceptable explanation of the phenomenology of emotions. By their own intrinsic, subjective nature, these are difficult to interpret for exogenous discursivity. It is as Kant affirmed ¨an unconditioned self, something simple and undivided''. Reason and emotion were the first thoughts of thinkers of the stature of Plato and Aristotle, who, opening a breach in the theological meaning of their historical context, tried to expose through rationality a theorization, attributing to the soul, the residence of emotions, and subdividing it into a trilogy of reason, appetite, and spirit, corresponding to concrete areas of the soul divided into three levels, cognitive, affective and appetitive. 

This theory of Plato is opposed to the Aristotelian one, which gives preponderance to the living being in its reactions to situations, whether favorable or unfavorable, reactions that are expressed through pain or pleasure. In short, they move away from the theocentric interpretation in favor of an anthropocentric one. 

We will have to wait until Kant glimpses a coherent explanation of rationality in opposition to emotionality and its bidirectional relations, reason being understood as passion for the absolute, Kant says "In seeking the rationality of the world and believing itself to be the I of things, reason is pure passion, we say pure because it is the basis of all possible knowledge or experience, of all suffering or real, living passion". 

 It is the bases of modern psychology that give a coherent structure when trying to explain emotions with two aspects, the physiological and the cognitive, where the manifestation of emotion is understood from its inner birth, excited by the external stimulus and conditioned by the internal content, of the ontological being-in-itself versus the gnoseological being-in-itself. 

The deepening of these interpretations has derived in the vision of emotions as a multifactorial causality, understanding them as a whole, since it has been possible to discern between passions and emotions, differentiating them by their subjectivity load. 

 The classification has obeyed an identification in five approaches: the sensitive, the physiological, the behavioral, the evaluative, and the cognitive. The sensitive and physiological define emotion as an intrinsic feeling, the perception that is ephemeral as a stimulus in time and that makes the individual lose objectivity and manifests itself in different parts of the body, affecting the behavioral process and the cognitive process. 

 However, despite this, the individual must be able to know and witness the condition or physiological situation for a full identification of the emotion, these are of eruptive character, The previous experience marks a positioning and its reaction to the presence of the emotion, and its valuation will depend on the time of duration of the stimulus and the situation in which it develops, and this is essential for the valuation of the causes and consequences of the given emotion. The theory of emotions postulates internal processes as opposed to learned behaviors, where the innate has relevance based on behavioral observation. What is postulated is that the idea that is manifested to us about an object is what generates the emotion. However, there is a break in this position, because if we were able to discern internally and have full knowledge and mastery of emotions, no one would be wrong, and everyone could identify what they feel without being subject to misjudgment. 

 Other currents have been sustained where the value judgments constitute the vertex to determine the origin and effect of the emotions, others mention the perceptions linked to the senses, where the preponderant thing is the aesthetics, the values, the religion, as conscious forms of interpretation of the environment, however, they lack rational substantiation, ergo, they are not reliable. 

The important thing is to be able to understand that for the individual to have a cohesive interpretation of the world and his immediate environment, it is necessary to make a projection of his own mind. Emotions are an immediate response to any exogenous situation processed and stratified by reason, the process of identification and knowledge between the gnoseological object and the ontological entity goes through this stratification, namely, without no cognitive act, there is no emotion present in the act.