emotions respond to forms; the forms of an imminent danger, an crying infant, a brilliant work of art, an attractive individual or the presence of our mates/lovers are some simple examples where exposure to a phenomenon or sensory/stimuli form generates an emotional reaction. emotional reactions are ancient hardwired bio-chemical systems in the human brain, and are reactions which facilitate our attachment or avoidance to certain stimuli. the subtle range of human emotion likely evolved over time along with the deepening and broadening of social systems and the increasingly complex social and interpersonal cues/rules we needed to operate by.
one thing that emotions do not respond to is code; data, numbers, derivatives. emotions exist in that they are a molecular chemical-biological cascade reaction that occurs when certain things are perceived by the brain’s perceptual apparatuses. sensations are converted from informational data into forms-based constructs or artifacts via perception, which is an interpretive process. emotions exist within and at the conclusion of this interpretive process. emotions respond to the identified constructs as forms, such as i mentioned above. think about the emotional reactions youve had recently, and you will see that they were caused because of exposure to a formal sensation, to a grouping of data or stimuli comprising a certain type (this excludes drug-based emotional responses).
philosophical thought involves a fundamentally deconstructionist approach to cognition and perception. it is the taking-apart, the differentiating into groups and subgroups, the objective or quantifying analysis of concepts and ideas and beliefs and constructs within our minds. philosophical thought (broadly defined) involves this deconstruction in that it seeks to look beyond the superficial, beyond the mere form or appearance of phenomena and into their essence or structure or causes. philosophical thought is not satisfied with simple or common/apparent explanations, and in seeking to ground or justify or explain these things it has to take them apart, analyse them from various perspectives and destructure them into their component parts, via linguistic analysis, critical theory, logic testing, introspective recategorization and relational extension/extrapolation, etc.
such philosophical thought, in seeking deeper understandings via finding the essences or quantifiable elements of mental concepts/constructs, creates new concepts and analyses which do not trigger emotional reactions because they are not forms in the traditional sense. normally emotions are triggered automatically and somewhat instinctively/without conscious intent upon exposure to certain PREscripted and PREdetermined groupings of sensory stimuli; yet it is precisely such prescripted and predetermined sensory and conceptual forms which are absent from philosophical analyses. the knowledge and concepts/ideas/beliefs generated from philosophical thought (once again, broadly defined) are fundamentally quantitative, numerical, logical or data-structural/extra-relational models. as if seeing a painting only as its pixels, or as primarily only a set of different individual paint spots rather than the whole, philosophical thought undermines the conditons which would trigger the emotional reaction. even if we still “see the painting itself” it is now alongside or through the alternative lens of ‘deeper’ philosophical analysis. we are exposed to the painting, but feel nothing, as we see only the individual threads or the pixels or paint smears (or the historical/psychological/social/representational/theoretical analyses/etc behind the genre or the painter or the image painted or the intent of the painter or of whatever deeper dimension of analyses we wish to go to), and not the unified and apparent form itself.
in this manner philosophical thought, essentially critical or deconstructionist, takes apart current concepts and replaces them with newer, “updated” and more “accurate” models of relational analyses and quantitative derivatives, explanatory theories and interconceptual perspectives which go both beneath and exterior to the original form itself. emotions no longer trigger. they remain in stasis lacking exposure to the form to which they have been previously conditioned (genetically, socially, archetypally) to respond.
over time, philosophical thinking of this sort will tend to undermine all emotions, as the networks in the brain are rewired with new concepts and models, ones that no longer resemble the “outdated” forms of simple perception. love, sexual desire, happiness, sadness, pride, guilt, wonder, uncertainty, expectation, all of these sorts of emotional reactions become detached from the new content that has taken the place of old perceptual/conceptual forms (e.g. new metaanalyses which take the place of older unified perceptions, such as of a smile from one’s significant other, an attractive woman, a beautiful sunset, realizing a friend is in need, ownership or accomplishment of a goal, knowing you hurt another person’s feelings, a clear night sky of countless stars, starting a new job, an upcoming long weekend of fun activities). these sorts of events or phenomenon, essentially groupings of stimuli into formal elements and formal relations (relations of forms) (in that they correspond to prior experienced and emotional content) now are composed of different internal mental energies and information sets. as a consequence of philosophical thought, the brain naturally and automatically begins to overanalyse and break apart simple mental structures such as these into component parts and analyses and metaanalyses; new connections are created and old ones severed. the mind races instinctively to deconstruct and “interpret” or introspect every stimuli (external or internal) which occupies the conscious field. this leads to the inability to simply experience directly these stimuli as basic forms, and replaces this with a schizophrenic-type or dissectional model of experience, one that is always looking for underlying reasons, hidden connections or causes or structures, explanations, justifications, rationalizations, etc.
deep philosophical thought therefore leads to an operational type of thinking and experiencing which atrophies the emotions. at first they are activated less often and less intensely, and eventually hardly at all and only with regard to extreme or completely novel experiences… but as these are eventually analysed and quantified, as the individual becomes desensitized to these new experiences as well, the emotions stop responding to experience at all. a sort of dead, flat affect (in the psychological usage) replaces the wide range of colorful/diverse emotional reactions to various life situations. in part this occurs naturally as children age into adulthood, and forms become naturally more rational and interconnected/quantified, but “normal” or nonphilosophical thought still operates on a forms-based system, in that it just replaces immediate irreducible and unique forms with values-based categorization. this tends to limit the intensity of emotional reactions, but does not eliminate or significantly undermine them.
but philosophical thought goes even further and turns this meta-analysis type thinking, this continuously quantifying/rationalizing/explaining/deconstructing-type process into first the primary and then the only type of thinking that occurs. all experience becomes de and recoded. the old archetypal and preestablished forms perish. and along with them, the emotions which responded to these instinctive and conditioned forms perish as well.
