Rational and Arational Emotions

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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I notice that I can choose to feel or not to feel certain emotions. Call these “rational emotions”, where one can decide how one feels as a consequence of a chain of reasoning. To be clear, I do not mean suppressing or denying an emotion, such that it broils under the surface, but igniting or extinguishing the emotion as an act will.

Other emotions, I don’t feel that I can control in that way (even if I can control my actions in response to them). I can’t summon them or turn them off, even with great effort. Call these “arational emotions”, because they are not subject to reason – “arational” as distinct from “irrational”, because they may be aligned or opposed to reason in a given context, but their existence is not subject to reason.

The division isn’t always clean: sometimes both types come together and are labelled by the same word, but may have aspects or facets that are subject to will; some emotions will be only weakly rational, so that they can be made less intense but not less present. The point is that there is an area of emotional life over which one has direct, rational control.

I notice this most acutely in the context of the love I feel for my children, which is the most arational emotion I’ve ever experienced. It stands out starkly relative to the mostly-rational emotional atmosphere of my adult life. It’s brought to mind frequently when I consider their lives, how they will be shaped by society, and how my choices about them affect society. Generally, I find that rational conclusions about how my actions affect society rather easily change the emotions driving those actions. But when it comes to my children, I don’t find that to be the case. Even when I know an action is socially harmful, if the action relates to my children’s health or safety or happiness, the emotion is unaffected. This isn’t just a matter of priority, it applies to feelings that are rationally mistaken, e.g. the fear of an act as dangerous when logically it’s clear that it’s both safe and in fact makes them more safe by increasing their long term resilience. I cannot choose not to love my kids, nor many (though not all) of the other attendant emotions of parenting.

By contrast, my love for my wife, which is deep and strong and true, is nonetheless a rational love. I choose every day to love her, because she’s a good person who deserves love, she’s good for me (and this choice was rational even before the arational consideration that she is good for our kids). Both selfishly and altruistically, it’s rational for me to love her, and I choose to easily. There was a time when that wasn’t the case, over our decades together my love for her has changed: it was initially largely arational – lust is perhaps the paradigm of arational emotion – but over time the choice to love came to dominate, and love of life-partnership became a more important motivation. In many ways those two types of love feel very similar, she still lights up the room when she walks in, but I feel free in that emotion, not seized by it as I initially did.

I know I could choose not to love my wife, it just wouldn’t make any sense. I don’t think I could choose not to love my children, and not because it wouldn’t make sense either. One possibility is that I am just more open to the possibility of not loving my wife: I’ve been in other relationships and I know what it feels like to no longer love someone I once loved in a way somewhat like the way I love my wife. The same can’t be said of my love for my kids, I can’t imagine what it would mean to no longer love them, I expect them to be among the most important people in my life no matter what course my life takes from here. One might conjecture that it’s only a failure of imagination and a stronger preference to continue loving my kids than my wife. But the ancillary emotions that attend my love them are an effective disproof of that: because a love my kids, I’d prefer to switch off unhelpful emotions like fear, but because my fear derives from my love, and my love is arational, it persists despite my preference.

Another possibility is that my love for my wife, and other emotions I call rational, are merely emotions I’m familiar with and have a handle on: they feel like choices because I’ve had time to acclimate to them, they align with my rational desires. I cannot provide as strong a disproof, other than to say that I’ve changed my emotions in contexts less well explained by that hypothesis, choosing to love or hate or be angry or calm or happy or sad. My love for my wife feels more like those, I can feel myself renew it by choice.

Is this distinction true for everyone? I generally have a reduced emotional affect relative to others, so it may be that I am generalizing from insufficient evidence. But I only learned that some of my emotions were subject to deliberate choice in my early 20s through deliberate meditative practice, before that I thought that I had to feel them and choose to act rationally in spite of them. So I suspect it is more common and that many never learn it about themselves. Which emotions are subject to choice, and to what degree, likely differs significantly between people. Others may never feel arational emotion, despite having basically normal emotional lives in which they choose to feel socially and situationally appropriate emotions (they are, after all, presumptively adaptive). These differences are likely culturally mediated, as different cultures will consider different emotions to be sacred or profane in ways that make engaging with them rationally more or less accessible.

But I also suspect that the distinction is nearly universal, subject to training and exposure to the idea. And yet, I have never seen it said.

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One thing I learned in my class with Dr. Snyder is that we can acknowledge an emotion… or, actually it’s considered a feeling (basic affect) before we have acknowledged it & and interpreted/framed it as a particular emotion… We can honor/acknowledge it (a sort of unconditional positive regard)…Then we can apply reason to it and process it before deciding how we are going to frame or interpret it and plan how we are going to behave with reference to it.

The more we do this, the more it turns into a habit that we do like riding a bike. We can know how to interpret without even having to slow down and think about it.

But sometimes we have to slow ourselves down when we realize that our habit is not suitable for whatever the circumstance may be.

It’s just like when you’re learning a new language — at first you read/interpret very slowly (you may have to ask people to speak slowly), and the more experience you have at the language, the faster you can read/interpret.

So if someone is new at paying attention to their feelings (and framing/interpreting), and they are dealing with someone who is an old pro, the old pro needs to have patience.

For example, you don’t need a new word (like “glimmer”) for “trigger” in order to express that a trigger can trigger either positive or negative (& not just negative) emotions (interpretations of feeling/trigger). But, it is helpful to honor the fact that some triggers bring conflicting feelings/emotions, and that’s OK. You can consider these things separately and not get all tangled up about it. There is never going to be a 100% bad memory. Or a person who only triggers 100% bad memories (without even trying). This is something you have to really acknowledge if you are ever going to be able to let go in a healthy way. Emotional damage can heal a lot slower (or faster) than physical damage, because it requires tools we are aware of… the body heals beyond awareness (though we can use medicine…we are not conscious of what it is doing while it is doing it).

[Sometimes there is negative affect that can be fixed with a pill, like a bad mood on the same level of a headache—it goes away with sodium naproxen. That would be an arational feeling, but without an interpretation (a knowing why), it is not yet an emotion. All you know is that you don’t feel good. It could just be the headache - even if you’re in a good mood otherwise (a state of well-being, or of okayness). You have two different moods, perhaps to honor that you are in pain, but also to honor that you are otherwise well, and the pain won’t last. That mood/interpretation is not arational. It did something extra to the basic affect.]

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_
Apathy… it finds us all, after a certain amount of time of being on this planet.

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On the other hand, you postulate emotions as if they were lights, to which one either has a switch or not, but that appear fully lit or get turned off, or even dimmed, by a trigger.

But emotions are a way of relating to reality. Reason is, too. It’s not a light that turns on or off, a product one buys or not. They are an imprint that reality leaves, or that you leave with respect to reality, like notes to self.

One could postulate, for example, that what you truly feel towards your wife is loyalty, or belonging, or even ease, and that these are not lights either which you can turn off.

Maybe if some event separated the both of you, you would find that the emotions were stronger and less optional than you imagined, like an AC you didn’t realize was making noise until it turned off. Then again, specially to the extent that they don’t jive with your conscious, egoic, rational thought, your emotions might exist somewhere that you don’t see.

Emotions have their own mechanisms, separate from the mechanisms of reason. That one can rationally study emotions doesn’t change this, neither do emotions that a rational thought may elicit.

I guess the problem I see here is that, by convincing yourself that emotions and reason can be at times the same mechanism, you allow yourself to convince yourself that an emotional reaction is rational, or that emotion can be a perfectly good way to address a rational problem. Emotions operate in the subconscious, a place where things are not directly seen, and dropping the distinction, even if only at times, leaves you vulnerable to interpreting emotional data as reason.

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A gut feeling that is not conditioned is like a habit of emotion (framed/interpreted feeling) on the level of animal (“pre”-encoded) language—whether or not it is genetically encoded. I imagine it is hard to distinguish or suss out whether the encoding & decoding happens at the genetic level, or another one(s) (or both/some/all). By that I mean heuristic (“pre”-encoded/-decoded), algorithmic (internal source), or communicated (external source).

Imagine if you were apprehending without requiring an apprehension because it is already there… so there is no necessity to (en)code or decode … there is no hiding/revealing.

It is an understanding…but it is a standing. A standing together.

Words are stupid.

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habit=pattern

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@Ichthus77, I appreciate the feeling/emotion distinction, it helps make my claims clearer. I think the feeling → process → emotion path maps somewhat to what I’m calling “rational emotions”, with three quibbles:

  1. In my experience it can be a full-on emotion and still be subject to reframing/reinterpreting, rather than just the tickle of an emotion that I picture when you say “feeling”,
  2. Reframing/reinterpreting can create, extinguish, or modify both the emotion and the feeling, and
  3. The habit does not generalize equally to all felling → emotion pathways, i.e. arational emotions sneak past a well-ingrained habit.

@PZR, I wonder how you might restate your position in light of the feeling/emotion distinction Ichthus introduces. It seems like you are less willing to separate them, such that processing can intervene between the subconscious feeling and the conscious emotion.

In any case, I think that they are more subject to reason than you suggest. I agree that they can be subconscious and unnoticed, and I am familiar with the AC-in-the-background sensation of emotion. But they don’t have to be unnoticed: if one tunes in one can hear the AC.

And I also think there’s a feedback effect. Taking feeling/emotion distinction as given, I would describe feelings as physiological reactions to the world, and emotion as a higher-order reaction to those reactions. An emotional reaction to the physiological reaction can alter the physiological reaction. For example, fear and excitement are physiologically similar, and the same stimulus can provoke either. But a key point is that the emotional reaction can also cause physiological reactions, which provoke further emotional reactions. It’s a feedback loop, and it can spin up to panic attack or down to post-arousal calm.

Reason is a yet higher-order influence on this process, sometimes, for some emotions, it can intervene to push the emotion and the feeling one way or another. So no, not a light switch, but a suppressive feedback loop with much the same effect.

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@Carleas I agree with your 1-3. :slight_smile: I ran across a quote from Confucius today that says it is only the very wise and the very stupid who cannot change. The most wise (the Virtuoso) doesn’t need to incorporate new experienced feelings into their reframing—nothing sneaks past, because they don’t even need to reframe, because they already have the correct frame (others may still think the wise need to change because they—the other-than-wise—do not have the correct frame), whereas the stupidest (perhaps wise in their own eyes, but unwise in reality) don’t even see they need to change. The stupidest may consider progress what the wisest consider a (futile attempt at) destroying what ought be conserved/chosen…flowed/vibed with.

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I think our problem with what we feel is that we struggle to understand what is happening in us. We can experience different emotions, and sometimes, they seem reasonable, and sometimes not. However, as Viktor Frankl noticed in four different concentration camps, including Auschwitz, during World War II, we can control our reaction to circumstances. His were extreme conditions, but he reckoned that it was possible in less dramatic situations if he could do it there. Buddhists also call this equanimity – a frame of mind that enables us to behave appropriately in any circumstance.

We must distinguish between rational and reasonable, which in German at least is differentiated as “rational” and “vernünftig.” In this sense, rationality refers to rational, purposeful thinking and acting that is calculating, deliberative, analytical and logical. Being reasonable, on the other hand, means acting based on reason and in accordance with what is considered appropriate and well-founded. While rationality is often associated with logical thinking and actions, reason refers more to a decision’s expediency and economic efficiency. In philosophy, rational thinking has been highly valued since the Enlightenment, with the opposite of rationality being emotion or intuition.

Besides being reasonable, your love for your children reflects a bond with them and a feeling of responsibility. I think love is essentially a sense of affinity or a bond with other human beings, which only differs in intensity. Our love for our partners is an intimate bond that is built on sexual attraction and normally produces children, whereas brotherly or neighbourly love has to do with the affinity towards other human beings as having common characteristics, whether familial or communal, but can be extended to include interests and agendas and much more.

I think that the explanation you offer here is summed up by Erich Fromm in “The Art of Loving”:

I regard my love for my wife as a decision or a promise we formulated before we married 47 years ago. It was obviously also built on sexual attraction and affinity, but because it had to do with whether I would want to live in Britain or Germany, it was a rational decision as well. At the time, many people thought our declared aim – to grow old together – premature and rash. “How can you know?” was something we heard quite often.

I think our bonding with a partner, as a carefully considered decision, judgment, or promise, grows more intensive with time, and we become two persons in one. Not that we give up our personality, but we learn to bounce thoughts off each other and consider the appropriate course ahead by consensus. After a while, you notice your partner voicing thoughts you just had or vice versa. With age, you also mellow and realise that some things are not worth fighting over.

As you can see, I can identify with much of what you have said. I may be older, and perhaps have a different perspective in some things, or it could be because of the pond between us. But largely, I feel we are on the same page.

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Carleas, I guess I would put it this way:

You are talking about emotion and reason as if they were somewhat equivalent and mutually sensitive mechanisms. You seem to understand some programming, so I will illustrate it like this: emotions are an entire desktop, from operating system to daemons to basically every single thing. Reason is a note pad program within that desktop. Really fucking absolutely tiny. To even suggest that you can change, much less determine, the entire rest of the desktop from a note pad instance is hilarious. I mean theoretically you can use it to write code and maybe indirectly that way hope somehow to consciously affect, much like psychotherapy does, but anything but simple or direct it is.

Now, emotions can definitely with ease alter both the underlying software of notepad and what happens in a given instance. In that direction, affectance and even absolute determination is easy. The only advantage note pad has is that its output is traceable and interpretable within a discreet logic. It’s tidy, everything it does is right there on the surface and fully coherent. You can even use it to write a log of your account of what you understand the rest of the system to be doing, or parts of it. But, no, you cannot actually alter it. The notepad prints characters, that’s all it does.

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What I meant by the light switch, more than the actual switching, is that I see you as presenting emotions as kind of prefabricated, discrete and complete units, to be accepted rejected or directed, unless a block exists for either of these options.

In reality, however, emotions are the results of and themselves incremental processes the extent of which is not realistically reverse engineereable.

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To further play with the analogy, conscious thought, the ego, would be the entire UI, wherein reason is that notepad program.

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On the other hand, things that are intangible are immaterial, unseen, and not easily quantified. For example, my level of confidence or my honesty. Can you measure those? What about their integrity, discipline, knowledge, and love? The sky, air, and heaven. Can you think of a way to get a precise reading on those things? . . . Like me, you had no luck. The good thing is that though these are not easily measured, they can be easily developed. And we get a sense for when someone has or does not have some of these characteristics.