What role does emotion play in our everyday lives? How does emotion affect our experience and
being? These are questions addressed by
some of the finest minds of our era.
For Piaget, emotion is the motivating force of action
emanating from outside the individual in the form of sensations emitted by
objects. His view is rooted in the
Newtonian conception of a universe comprised in isolated objects requiring an
emotive force to initiate a series of mechanistic interactions between
objects. Piaget reduces all conscious
human experience to a cognitive formulation of these causal relations. His abstract concept of emotion as force
fails to explain the relationship between bodily feelings, emotions, and higher
forms of consciousness in human beings.
Alfred North Whitehead indicates the factors in human nature
which go to make up the particular emotions, arise from our apprehension of
these permanent features of order in the world. His concrete concept of emotion
gives insight into the experience of bodily feelings and their relationship to
the growth and learning of human beings.
He explains the emotions are the crucial mediating factors between the
welter of awareness of these feelings in higher organisms. “We perceive other things which are in the world
of actualities in the same sense as we are.
So our emotions are directed toward other things, including of course,
our bodily organs . . . the world for me is nothing else than how the
functioning of my body present it for my experience.”
Jean Paul Sartre sees it differently in his book, The Emotions, Outline of a Theory. He sees our emotion as an “abrupt drop of
consciousness into the magical.” He
believes: “emotion is not accidental
modification of a subject which would otherwise be plunged into an unchanged
world. It is easy to see that every
emotional apprehension of an object which frightens, irritates, sadness, etc.,
can be made only on the basis of a total alteration of the world. In order that an object may in reality appear
terrible, it must realize itself as an immediate and magical presence face to
face with consciousness.“ In other
words, we modify our experience with emotion to make it more comfortable,
according to our own nature. We emote
sadness, anger or gloom because “lacking the power and will to accomplish the
acts which we have been planning, we behave in such a way that the universe no
longer requires anything of us.”
What do YOU think?
Artwork by Beth Nash. Many thanks.
Posts
