All animal species beyond the simplest . . . have participated in an evolutionary trade-off in which they have freed themselves from the tyranny of their immediate surroundings but have thereby given up the comfort of being nourished in place . . . for any organism that moves around in some sort of directed fashion, the things that it is after can legitimately be called “goals.”
— Eric KlingerEmotions are first and foremost reactions to the fate of active goals in everyday encounters of living and in our lives overall.
— Richard LazarusEmotions are said to distort reality; I argue that they are responsible for it.
— Robert C. Solomon
One day I walked: the periodic pavement of residential sidewalk beneath my feet, the thick-barked branches of urban Minnesota oaks and catalpa overhead. The sky was gray and mottled. It threatened rain. The air was warm around my face, and the breeze was stiff, but pleasant. I was really in my element—I’m the rare bird that loves to be buffeted by the wind. It suits me to be blown a bit off course. So I meandered, directed by the breeze, the same route I’d meandered so many times before. Familiar avenues but different footsteps, not unfocused, but ambivalent towards the particulars. As long as eventually I arrived home, there was no need for hurry.
Though my body navigated nearly autonomously through the world of sidewalks and wind, my mind’s wandering progress through the emotions of the day proved laborious. Contemplating each emotion in kind, it seemed as though the surface of meaning were slippery and ill-defined; that for each step I took on concrete I made only provisional progress towards the things that mattered to me. For every action a reaction in the world of birds and trees, for every action a stumble and slide in the world of goals and value. The prospect of navigating such a place seemed daunting. What follows is an attempt to understand how we make sense of our world of goals, meanings, and values. Hopefully, by the end, our footing feels more sure.
***
We tend to think in terms of “our” emotions—expressions that happen through us, because of us, because of some stimulus from the outside world, or because of some memory recalled from within. These emotions, invoked within, help define the vessel that is “us.” We’re invested in myriad physicalisms to remind us of this vessel and the hydraulic pressures within it. Sometimes we are a boiler that needs to “vent” or “blow off steam.” Other times we are an automaton with forces in delicate balance that can become “unhinged,” “unbalanced,” or sit in “tension” or “relaxation.” Yet other times the emotions are “sludge” or “gunk” that gum up our gears, slides, and channels. Oftentimes, in a more new-age-y way, they feel more like energies or forces. I attempted to write down my frustration with the available metaphors last year:
Assuming that the mind is of leather straps or metal catches, it follows that the straps must be released and the catches undone for free movement to occur. Assuming that the mind is a pressurized pipe, or maybe some other vessel, it follows that we must occasionally “vent” or “blow off steam.” Assuming that the mind balances upon a single point, it follows that occasionally things fall “out of balance” or are “unbalanced.” A mind of rope may be in “tension” or “relaxation.” A mind of doors may become “unhinged.” But where does the pressure go? What straps are released? What direction does the brain tip to become unbalanced?
If emotions are any of the physicalisms above they confine and define us. We alternatingly identify with them, hate them, deny their existence, and exist exclusively through them.
We hate emotions and we fail to identify with them as friends. We think emotions obscure some truth, but emotions tell us something true, the best that they know. Are they always correct? No. But if we seek to eradicate our emotions because we believe that they distort our judgment we are rejecting our view of what is actually important. Emotions do not “blind” us as much as they may “insist” on something that is simply not true.
Emotion may feel “backed up,” like there is a surplus that must be processed quickly, but there is no such warehouse or assembly line. This “backed-upness” may feel like “blockages,” or “clogs” (Chapman 2012), and it may even be useful to think of it that way, occasionally, but the surface of emotion is many-dimensional and wide, a “blockage” is not as final as in a sewer system. Emotion may contain pits and traps, but navigating our way out is a matter of time and skill, escape ladder, or breakthrough.
If we reject our emotions we also reject the places where emotions live in the banality of everyday life. We are never not feeling something! The currents and flows of our desires change the way we perceive the world. No matter what or where we are doing, emotions are the instrument of navigation. No matter how weak or strong the currents of our desires, emotions are more like a rudder or astrolabe than an additional eddy. As Martha Nussbaum says in the introduction of Upheavals of Thought, “Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself” (2001, 3).
Still, when we identify with our emotions completely they lose their “outsideness” and we may fail to listen to them or work with them effectively. Emotions feel like (and are) “us” while we experience them, but this is not the only view. When we exist exclusively through emotions we cannot see desire’s influence on the texture of life, we do not realize that the landscape is distorted and surreal because of it. Emotions actually change the steepness of hills when we are sad and the height of glasses of water when we are thirsty (Zadra and Clore 2011). This is adaptive—it shows us what’s important—but it’s also misleading—it obscures an objective truth. Studies from the lab of Donald Hoffman seem to bear this out. They write: “The ubiquity in nature of phenomena such as supernormal stimuli and releasing stimuli suggest that . . . organisms have been shaped by natural selection not to see truth but instead to have perceptions that guide behavior that is adaptive in the relevant niche. In short, perception seems to be tuned to fitness rather than truth” (Hoffman, Singh, and Mark 2013). It is my contention that our interface with the world is different from “reality” in major part because the shapes of our emotion embed our values into it.
***
Though my wandering mind turned once again to problems of emotion, salience, and meaning, my personal contemplation of these problems began years earlier as a vision in the twilight of sleep, an active brain as the body slowly turned itself off. In this state I found myself exploiting the hazy psychedelic space where finally my inner vision produced the pictures that I always wished it did during the day. This particular evening my brain produced static and darkness, great gulfs of anxious light separating the cool darkness of mind pressing back against it. Soon afterwards I typed to a friend:
I have occasionally conceived of this universe as a great frenetic brightness. Light stringing across the fabric of time and space and pressing into every crevice, overwhelming everything except that which wills to press back. I think we are all floating across this sea of light in search of other dark spots. Alike souls with wills that push as strong as our own. Only a few times have I felt this staggering intuition that someone else is so clearly a spot of calm in the roaring ocean of experience. I wish only to get closer, to shield my strained eyes from the light, and to share in the soothing, cool darkness with another.
The anxious, thrashing light, the cool, dark consciousness—opposite of the way we mostly view the world. What of the void? The empty space? The beginnings of some Camusian Absurdity? If the world is pressing in and we are pressing out, what are we? What is the world? These are hypothetical questions, but what is the world? What was I shielding my eyes from? Confusion has a certain sort of energy, chaos is hot before it is void. Millions of golden threads, all laid out before me, un-sorted, un-prioritized, un-narrativized—the barest twinges of stories, tiny glows of desires, tugs of addiction, guidance of love, web of value.
One year later I had another crepuscular vision—a vision of planets and tiny ships, of piebald men and Perelandra, our free will caught in the balance between the gravity of our desires. Great celestial spheres, turbulent marbles of blue, orange, and tan, mechanical in my mind as though connected by rods and gears of brass.
These wanderers across the sky were transformed at once into the gravities of our desire—for others, for self, for pleasure, for virtue. Planets for everything that pulled us through life. Planets for drugs, for responsibility to others, for vocation, and for relaxation—an n-body problem of disorienting proportions.
Yet, I imagined stable loci in the system, something like LaGrange points, where the free will might remain unperturbed as desires swirled around it. I imagined that, perhaps, the function of the contemplative traditions was to move us towards these points—that we only ever have so much delta-v, so we might as well be efficient about it.
In the metaphor of gravity I was in good company. I stood with strange attractors, with Eros and the metaphysics of love (Stein 2018), the miraculousness (Schmachtenberger 2016) that there is some fundamental property of the universe that allows things to bind and assemble up the ladder of life into more and more complex arrangements.
Gravity is unit and undifferentiable
Gravity is comprehensive
inclusively embracing and permeative
is nonfocusable and shadowless,
and is omni-integrative
all of which characteristics of love.
Love is metaphysical gravity.
— Buckminster Fuller
But, weeks later, a final vision. A new metaphor, less of strings and lights and less of celestial bodies. Instead, a landscape emerged, rich in forms familiar to us, founded in our fundamental drives and desires, the value of everything at every scale embedded into matter through our relationships to it. Our own sense of this landscape is one of the fine textures of emotion, the subtle combinations of ups downs arounds revealed through happiness, sadness, anger, and anxiety.
This is meaning, our own estimation of it in the world.
Like Popper’s (1978) third world, the world of psychic objects, but also like Popper’s second world, the world of psychic processes, the landscape contains “real” things that we are situated in relationship to. This is a world that Robert Solomon calls our “surreality.” The world not of facts or fictions but of our relatedness and commitment to them. He says, “[Emotions] are not concerned with the world but with my world. They are not concerned with ‘what is really the case’ with ‘the facts,’ but rather with what is important” (Solomon 1993, 19).
Like the world responds to our hands and voices, so too does this world, this new world, respond to our planning and execution. The world of passion is the world of goals, after all (Finzel, 2017). This internal externality in the nature of emotion is recognized by Solomon later in The Passions, “The passions are not occurrences but activities; they are not “inside” our minds but rather the structures we place in our world” (108).
This is a critical move. Once our world of desire is outside us, a system of structures that we place out of us and in our world, how much of it can be said to remain ours?
In the sections that follow I will continue to be quite liberal with my use of spatial metaphor. The “landscape” is just that, as far as I am concerned. It has regions (existential moods), features (desires), and appearances (emotions). It has dimensions and changes with time. It is outside of us, and so can be acted upon by us or by others.
***
There’s a patch of concrete where commercial zoning meets residential zoning and the air always changes. Today was no exception. The wind roared up behind me, no longer buffeting from side to side, instead ushering me forward into the face of a new realization.
I was pushed down the sidewalk, legs barely exerting at all. A plastic bag floated by and I swiped at it, hoping to stuff it into somebody’s garbage can with the flip lid. The municipal ones all have open tops. Stupid.
I walked and thought and soon the tears began to stream down my face. I had contemplated to a logical conclusion. What part of my own desires can be said to be mine? We (sometimes with the help of trained professionals) push deeper and deeper to get some glimpse of our desires, to pull the sheet off the elephant and see what’s really there. But most of the time we can’t. The deeper we push the clearer it becomes that explain as we might, we can’t say anything definitive. This is partly by design (Simler and Hanson 2018) and partly because our desires hang in a complex web—they exist in our relationship with the outside world that we can’t change, the outside world that we can, the inside world that we can’t change, and the inside world that we can.
Our emotions are our only view of this world of desire, a place that seems chaotic, mysterious, and out of our control. Even at a small scale, such as when we turn an object over in our minds or hands, the sense of how the object ultimately relates to our desires and values is supplied by our emotions. The anarchy of this situation seems to follow directly from the precepts of its theory. “A relational view of emotion runs into the possibility that there are as many emotions as there are specific ways in which one can be harmed or benefited. At first blush these possibilities seem unlimited and an invitation to chaos” (Lazarus 1991, 117).
And maybe it is chaos—but more likely it’s a true incarnation of nebulosity. Nebulosity, hand in hand with pattern, two fundamentals of our interaction with the world. Nebulosity, a term popularized by David Chapman, “refers to the intangible, transient, amorphous, non-separable, ambiguous nature of meaningness,” and this is exactly true of our surreality. Chapman also says that “meanings are also more or less patterned: reliable, distinct, enduring, clear, and definite.” And this is also true. Surreality is the world of our meaning, and as such it is interpretable by us.
***
My mind began to wander off topic. The formative emotional memories. A father moved to spare the rod because the blows would otherwise be too cruel. A hot and tumultuous teenagehood. Heartbreak. Deceit. Manipulation. I hardly remember where my feet wandered as my mind did. It must have been the right way.
***
Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives. Like the “geological upheavals” a traveler might discover in a landscape where recently only a flat plane could be seen, they mark our lives as uneven, uncertain, and prone to reversal.
— Martha Nussbaum
So, I’ll make the reversal. This may be where I step away from the greats, the neo-Stoics—Solomon, Lazarus, Nussbaum. Goals, desires, passions cross the boundary between inner and outer world, notable since the sense impressions of seeing, hearing, and tasting do the same thing. It is because of this parallelism that I feel so strongly that emotions are best modeled as a sort of sense impression, the sense of what is at-hand, and what is not-at-hand, the sense of what pieces of the world around us require coping, versus that which flows forth freely.
If my emotions are a sense, a perceptual faculty, then it’s clear that lack of an emotional reaction is still emotion. There is no “no emotion,” and there is no escape from “surreality.” Just like “there is seeing” and “there is hearing” (Snyder 2019), I can choose to dis-identify with the perceptual faculty, but I cannot stop it—not without complete cessation. Cotton in my ears or hands over my eyes do not prevent me from hearing or seeing, even though what I hear and see becomes muddled and dark. Even before the geological upheaval the seismometer is still there, sensing, and once we sense we can do things with the information, shape and mold our surreality like the world of stone and clay.
As an extended exploration of this way of seeing the world, I would like to inspect sadness in detail. A similar analysis could be done for any emotion, but sadness is poignant, accessible, and stands out from the static of the everyday.
What is sadness? What use is it to “hold back tears” or to “just let it out”? What am I actually doing when I cry? Am I releasing endorphins? Self-soothing? Dissipating energy?
Some of those sound correct, but miss a recognition of emotions as both related-to and situated-in the world. Sure, it is my emotion, my energy, my endorphin, but we put emotions out in the world because they affect the world. We don’t cry for ourselves we cry for ourselves in relation to the world, and because of our relationships with the world. Sadness is an end to our relationship with a particular value, a re-orientation to the world, a call forward into new territory. This is affirmed by Lazarus,
When a relationship is no longer serviceable, we must engage in an active coping struggle, akin to grief, to disengage from it so that the psychological pain or distress of disappointment no longer has the power to generate anger, anxiety, sadness, guilt, shame, or jealousy, just as it also no longer generates positive emotions such as happiness and pride. Live relationships are potentially emotional ones, both positive and negative, whereas dead relationships can no longer engage our emotions one way or the other. (1991, 124)
Sadness is the signal that there has been an “irrevocable loss” (Lazarus) of an object of value and commitment from our landscape of desire. It is because of this loss that grief can become depression—the repeated loss of our values and goals can leave us in a place that is featureless and barren, without the ability to move to more fertile ground, and without the ability to discern in which direction fertile ground lies in the first place. You can’t clear-cut the trees and expect the dirt itself to fend off the encroaching desert.
At this point we wouldn’t know for sure what sort of depression it is, though. There might be an issue with the sensory instruments (we might call this a mood disorder, or perhaps unhealed trauma), that could be solved with chemicals or re-calibration through learning new cognitive tools, but for every issue with the sensors there is a corresponding issue of navigation, wherein we’ve found ourselves in a region of our surreality that is barren, harsh, or unforgiving. And for every one of those navigation problems we might find that it’s a lack of attunement and attendance to the world around us that creates depression, since our attention is not only how we attend to the properties of the physical world, but also how we attend to the properties of our relationships to it.
But, the focus here is on sadness, not depression. If sadness is the emotion, then crying is the active sort of coping struggle, to disengage from a relationship that is no longer serviceable.
Given this framing I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that crying provides us with (at least)
1. a new headspace from which to deal with loss (endorphins) and
2. visibility in which others may see our loss and provide alternatives.
Which is to say that crying is an action that we do in the world, that accomplishes some goals, and that can move us through our world of desire to new, fertile realms. Sadness notably serves the meta-goal of having actionable goals in the first place. It makes sense, then, that re-imagining the loss of the past and allowing oneself to weep can be an important part of healing and moving forward. It also makes sense that for coping with loss on a day-to-day or year-to-year basis, crying is a powerful tool. Personally, I find myself weeping over all the deadlines I’ve missed, opportunities I’ve turned down, and relationships that have atrophied without my attention . . . quarterly. Or so.
Unfortunately, I’m not so certain that people are “sad” as often as they imagine, and I can’t say that a desire to cry is a reliable signal that someone is sad. It seems likely that most people, most of the time, when they think that they want to cry, are frustrated.
To explain frustration, I must first explain anger. Within this framework, anger is an indication that a goal or desire is being thwarted by the world, and additionally that there is some agent (person, animal, even personified nature) that can be addressed or acted upon to recover (at least part of) the desire. Often the desire in question is another meta-goal: to maintain an ego-identity that is capable of making meaningful progress in the world.
Frustration, in my estimation, is a mixed (and confusing) reading from our sense of sadness and anger. Think of a hospital waiting room. Is my family member lost? Can advocacy get them better care? Is it totally beyond my control? Is someone to blame?
Or think of a soccer pitch. Did the other team score because of me? A teammate? Do we still have time to win? Is this a total loss? Did I do enough to keep my spot on the team?
The flux and flow of many goals, many desires, many threats, many ego-defenses, this becomes frustration. We don’t know if we’ve suffered an irrevocable loss, and we don’t know if there’s a way to get any of it back another way.
So, I’m overwhelmed. Maybe I cry. Crying facilitates letting go. But is it time to let go? Crying also let’s other people know that they can help. But can they? Can they actually be helpful?
When we see a goal move barely out of reach we see both its recession into the distance and the speed at which we must move in order to keep up. Sadness wells up—maybe all is lost? But anger rains down—this obstacle shall too be overcome. The masculine admonition in this moment is to push into the anger and arousal, to work harder and move towards our goal, rather than to let sadness tell us that we can’t continue. Often we forget that when all is lost we must fully feel sadness to let it go.
Here’s a conjecture: The classic admonitions of masculinity not to cry have never applied to sadness, only to frustration. Classic accounts of tragedy do not spare a man weeping—even the Stoics wept, “unmoved” by the emotion, but weeping nonetheless. As Virgil said, “The mind remains unmoved, the tears all useless flow” (Montaigne 1958, 31).
Where sadness is the signal to let go, that requires a soul’s cooperation to release something into the world, frustration is an emotion that could be served by action that acts in the world, rather than just on the inside. If someone else will work on your behalf, then perhaps tears can be a form of communication with those around you to provoke effective affective action, but if you must do the work yourself then perhaps your frustration is better served by clear eyes and a plan to move forward. Crying may even be seen as a somewhat pitiable misjudgment of the possibilities that are available to you (best case) or a coercive coopting of limited help resources (worst case).
Is it taboo to cry? to wail? Or is it taboo to ask so much of our communities, our society, our family? Even in most bullish accounts of emotional work, authors tend to suggest that crying is something to do while removed from the frictions of reality (e.g., in a room alone), or with a couple trusted compatriots or facilitators who won’t feel burdened or confused. There are many such problems that stem from the communication that exteriorized emotions do, and often these problems depend on the intent of the emotion.
So which emotion is it? Why does it exist?
Maybe it seems silly to harp on the distinction, but I think sadness and frustration are the razors edge upon which personal meaning and self-worth often sit. If I’m feeling “sad” I can ask, “Did I lose someone or something? Who or what? Am I feeling something for the present? Or something for the past?” and in those questions I can determine what was important. What was meaningful.
If I haven’t actually lost something, or the object of my loss is many-faceted and obscured from me, then I know that I am frustrated, and there are other questions. “What information am I missing? What would be my loss? Who or what is thwarting my progress? Is it myself? How do I move forward? Will projecting anger into the world achieve something for me? What about projecting sadness?” Questions about not only what was important, but what is important, and what actions are appropriate for the world.
***
Part of being a skillful navigator of the world is developing and adapting a sensibility towards the types of obstacles that are likely to present themselves on the paths to our passions. Expertise in a domain means that fewer obstacles are as threatening to either progress or ego. In software, for example, certain types of bugs are infinitely resolvable and don’t require anger or anxiety to cope. They are almost still part of that which is at hand rather than part of any explicit coping process (a note: I don’t think it’s an accident that Heidegger and Lazarus both discuss something like “cope.” It seems to me an explicit recognition by Lazarus that the psychological processes that he is trying to formalize have their parallels in the theory of Heidegger). He reminds us here:
More than one goal is apt to be involved in each encounter, and these are apt to change in primacy and salience. The study of coping should never be divorced from motivation, though it has been in recent research and theory, including my own. This injunction is a consequence of the insight that emotions are complex configurations of cognition, motivation, and relational patterns of adaptation that empower the coping process. (Lazarus 1991, 115)
“My desires are not my own,” a seeming abdication of free will, is actually a call forward into sensemaking and navigation.
Although I can’t choose the landscape of my desires, I can choose how to work within it. Recognition that my desires are outside me does not free me of my responsibility, it foregrounds the types of activities that are likely to influence and work within the realm of our surrealities, and those which are not. I can take actions (like weeping or displaying anger) that release my desires or strengthen them.
Although we do not choose the way that our emotions show us these desires, we might still choose how to navigate the world through them. Like a marksman sighting a rifle and compensating for the fact that the gun favors right, and gravity favors down. Like driving with the check-engine light, knowing you can get maybe two thousand more miles out of that oil change. Like knowing that even though your tweet didn’t “do numbers” it still represents something true. Like knowing your bathroom scale is off by five pounds or your bedroom clock is eleven minutes fast.
I didn’t need to weep for my desires being taken away from me. I needed to find my affordances within them.
Oh, home, at last.
References
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———. 2012. “Unclogging.” Vividness. July 3. Accessed February 3, 2020. https://vividness.live/2012/07/03/unclogging/.
Finzel, Raymond L. 2017. “Goal Plane.” Raymond Finzel (personal website). October 19. Accessed February 3, 2020. https://rfinz.me/attempts/2017/10/19/goal-plane.html.
———. 2019. “Sensations for Emotional Reasoning.” Raymond Finzel (personal website). June 24. Accessed February 3, 2020. https://rfinz.me/attempts/2019/06/24/sensations-for-emotional-reasoning.html.
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