As a person very much raised with heavy upper-class British influence (one side of my family comes from nobility, and while I'm American, I maintain very strong cultural, philosophical, and even linguistic ties to Britain), I'm gonna take this top comment spot to hang on a caution: this way of thinking can be really really bad for you in sufficient quantities.
It turns experiences into thoughts. It separates you from your emotions by changing your priority from experiencing, processing, and accepting your feelings to trying to analyze them. And if you, like me, are prone to mental illness, this can be devastating - because emotions often do not have a reason, especially if your brain has strong natural tendencies.
When you're depressed or anxious, sadness or anxiety form of their own accord. You can feel terrible even when things around you are good, or scared even when there is no danger. And it is very easy to get into the habit of trying to justify these feelings after the fact. When you feel sad and the world around you provides you no reason to, the justification you can give - if you're trying to rationalize your emotions - is that the problem is you, and that is an abyss you can easily find yourself trapped in.
Worse, this habit leads to you being "on the side of" those tendencies. When someone tries to help you to understand that your view of the world is skewed, your habit of justifying and rationalizing makes that feel like an attack on your reason or intelligence. You're not depressed, see, because there's this logical reason you came up with for why you feel bad. And there is always a reason you can give, a justification for why you feel bad, because life always has problems that can be invoked to explain emotions that exist in their own right. But they're not why you're miserable, they're just the reasons you give for why being miserable is rational and right. Healing from that kind of illness requires recognizing your reason and your feelings are different things with different roles, and that to try to rationalize emotion is to make a category error.
Introspection can be good, but introspection must pair with experience, not replace it. You may like such a person because her voice puts you in mind of your mother's, but that origin or association is usually not what is important - the fact that you like them is. You may like the walk because you had a lovely day on it once, but what matters is that the walk brings you joy. The analysis is useful largely when your emotions misguide you ("I keep getting into bad relationships because they draw from X emotional weakness", for example), but even then, you want to feel your feelings even if you do not let them guide your beliefs. When I'm in a depressive episode, I can't not feel bad, but what I can do is recognize that my negative feelings are not truths about the world, so that they do not poison me into a factual belief that things can never improve. When I'm anxious, I can't not feel the fear, but I can recognize that it's not a sign of real danger and that I may need to endure it to make some personal progress. These things aren't about rational understanding of my emotions, they're about a recognition that I do not and cannot control them, only how I respond to them.
I tend to think this sort of thing is a pretty big "original sin" of Anglo-American (or perhaps more generally Protestant?) culture. It arises in a kind of guilt-based virtue ethics, one that I think was originally religious, that tells us that our moral value comes from our impulses and drives, not from what we choose to do with them. It told me, in particular, that my inability to force myself to be more motivated or calm was a personal failing, not a piece of me fundamentally separate from my reason or my virtue. It tells us, as a culture, not to listen to ourselves, not to accept half of what we are, in favor of suppression and repression and self-judgement, and it leaves us as half-people as a result.
I find your comment fascinating and also I don’t understand it at all.
> You may like such a person because her voice puts you in mind of your mother’s, but that origin or association is usually not what is important—the fact that you like them is.
Are feelings a black box? That seems like a sensible way to see anxiety and depression, which are bad feelings that happen for no (good) reason. But then how should we analyze art, which is what TFA is about, IIUC? Should we stop analyzing art because our enjoyment of it is as inscrutable as depression? That doesn’t seem right (to me) either.
Maybe art can only be understood in the context of groups of people, whose cerebral machinery and personal experiences will vary, but whose cultural context won’t? Maybe your personal feelings about art can only say a tiny amount about the art, but can say a lot about you, to yourself. I guess, if nothing else, knowing that you like a particular kind of art is good in that it gives you a way to make yourself happier.
I’m very curious for your thoughts if you happen to come back to this thread! Thanks!!
In the sense of "has internal workings that are not directly observable [at least in practice]", yes, emotions are a black box (or may be usefully treated as one, at least). But you can learn to predict the behavior of a black box, given particular inputs, even without understanding of its internals.
I don't perceive much difference between the dysfunctional feelings produced by mental illnesses and the feelings produced by everyday experiences, except that one is unpleasant and interferes with function to an unusual degree. But if a loved one of yours died tomorrow, those feelings would be unpleasant and interfere with function, too - it's only the normality of that unpleasantness and interference that separates the feelings of normal grief from those of depression.
When you say "feelings that happen for no good reason" in reference specifically to mental-illness-related feelings, I think you're sort of missing the point - no feeling happens for "a good reason" except perhaps in some broader evolutionary sense. Feeling and reason are wholly separate and incommensurable categories. If you say "I'm sad because my friend died", you are making a category error: you are sad, period, end of sentence. That is why, among other things, you become less sad as time passes after your friend dies - regulatory processes in your emotions are returning you to an emotional set-point, even though none of the "reasons" to be sad have changed (your friend is still dead, you still miss them, you still have things you can't do with them, etc).
It's not that being sad after your friend dies isn't a predictable emotional response, it's that the apparent logic and the response are separate, in the same way that the movement of a hurricane is predictable but carries no logic or intent. A hurricane doesn't weaken or strengthen, turn or move straight, because it's logical to - it just does so according to the particular dynamics that drive it. And while those dynamics may be analyzed by reason, they are not, themselves, driven by it, nor do they carry it. And so it is with emotions: any logic they carry is in our external understanding of the patterns of the black box, not something contained within it, and the fact that a black box may or may not happen to behave similarly to other peoples' black boxes is incidental.
I'm not arguing that you shouldn't or can't try to understand emotions from the rational side of yourself. I'm arguing that reasoned understanding of emotions is always "from the outside", while experience of emotions is "from the inside", and that the two are fundamentally different things. And I mean this more as a practical claim for living as a being with qualia than as any sort of philosophical claim - it's a way to understand and approach your emotions, not some claim about the Universe.
It turns experiences into thoughts. It separates you from your emotions by changing your priority from experiencing, processing, and accepting your feelings to trying to analyze them. And if you, like me, are prone to mental illness, this can be devastating - because emotions often do not have a reason, especially if your brain has strong natural tendencies.
When you're depressed or anxious, sadness or anxiety form of their own accord. You can feel terrible even when things around you are good, or scared even when there is no danger. And it is very easy to get into the habit of trying to justify these feelings after the fact. When you feel sad and the world around you provides you no reason to, the justification you can give - if you're trying to rationalize your emotions - is that the problem is you, and that is an abyss you can easily find yourself trapped in.
Worse, this habit leads to you being "on the side of" those tendencies. When someone tries to help you to understand that your view of the world is skewed, your habit of justifying and rationalizing makes that feel like an attack on your reason or intelligence. You're not depressed, see, because there's this logical reason you came up with for why you feel bad. And there is always a reason you can give, a justification for why you feel bad, because life always has problems that can be invoked to explain emotions that exist in their own right. But they're not why you're miserable, they're just the reasons you give for why being miserable is rational and right. Healing from that kind of illness requires recognizing your reason and your feelings are different things with different roles, and that to try to rationalize emotion is to make a category error.
Introspection can be good, but introspection must pair with experience, not replace it. You may like such a person because her voice puts you in mind of your mother's, but that origin or association is usually not what is important - the fact that you like them is. You may like the walk because you had a lovely day on it once, but what matters is that the walk brings you joy. The analysis is useful largely when your emotions misguide you ("I keep getting into bad relationships because they draw from X emotional weakness", for example), but even then, you want to feel your feelings even if you do not let them guide your beliefs. When I'm in a depressive episode, I can't not feel bad, but what I can do is recognize that my negative feelings are not truths about the world, so that they do not poison me into a factual belief that things can never improve. When I'm anxious, I can't not feel the fear, but I can recognize that it's not a sign of real danger and that I may need to endure it to make some personal progress. These things aren't about rational understanding of my emotions, they're about a recognition that I do not and cannot control them, only how I respond to them.
I tend to think this sort of thing is a pretty big "original sin" of Anglo-American (or perhaps more generally Protestant?) culture. It arises in a kind of guilt-based virtue ethics, one that I think was originally religious, that tells us that our moral value comes from our impulses and drives, not from what we choose to do with them. It told me, in particular, that my inability to force myself to be more motivated or calm was a personal failing, not a piece of me fundamentally separate from my reason or my virtue. It tells us, as a culture, not to listen to ourselves, not to accept half of what we are, in favor of suppression and repression and self-judgement, and it leaves us as half-people as a result.