Emotions Say Things
Lean in, and you can hear them.
This is part 2 in a series on the question of what is an emotion. I explain the main answers from philosophy, and I consider their upshots for strategies of emotional regulation.
Emotions matter. It’s hard to live well if you’re tormented on the inside.
But what exactly is an emotion?
What are these things that influence us so much, nag at us throughout the day, and seem to appear out of nowhere?
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In the last post, I considered the thesis that emotions are bodily sensations. Your sadness is identical to the weight in your stomach. Your anger is the tightness in your chest. Your anxiety is the shortness of your breath.
Is the thesis true?
I gave one objection to it. You can have the very same bodily sensations without any emotion at all.
My own negative emotions live in my gut. I feel sadness and anxiety as aches in my stomach. But now there is that same ache, and I am not at all sad or anxious. I just missed lunch, or I drank too much coffee. In these cases, there is nothing emotional going on with those feelings. I can have the same feeling that sometimes is associated with an emotion without the experience of an emotion. So, the two cannot be identical.
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How might a defender of the thesis respond?
Here’s one way: Stop lying! The feelings are never actually the same. Look closer, and you’ll find some subtle difference in their tone or shape. Stomachache caused by missing lunch never feels the exact same as stomachache caused by sadness.
Hmm. What to do now?
We are now at a standoff. Philosophy is full of standoffs: a claim, a counterclaim, and then nowhere to go. One side might start to make their point more loudly, gesticulating more forcefully, but really there’s nothing more to be said. The standoff leads to a standstill.
What do you do at a standstill?
You take another path.
Let’s do that now.
Here’s a more decisive objection to the thesis that emotions are bodily sensations.
Emotions have objects. Bodily sensations do not.
Simple! But what does it mean?
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To say that an emotion has an object means that it’s about something.
There’s nothing difficult here. It always makes sense to ask of an emotion what it is about. Your excitement is about the trip. Your fear is of the shark. Your amusement is directed towards the joke.
In contrast, it never makes sense to ask of a bodily sensation what it is about. This is because bodily sensations are not about anything at all. They don’t work like that.
The feeling of warmth on your skin is caused by the sun, but it is not about or of or directed towards anything. It doesn’t reach out towards something in the way that your excitement reaches out towards your upcoming trip to Copenhagen.
In philosophy, we call the thing that a mental attitude is about its particular object. So far, then, the claim is that emotions have particular objects, and bodily sensations do not.
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In fact, emotions have a second type of object. This gets a bit technical, so stay with me.
Imagine that you and a friend are about to go skydiving. She’s excited. You’re afraid.
Type of emotion Particular object
excitement skydiving
fear skydiving
Both emotions are about the same thing. So, what makes them different?
Not the particular object, and not even necessarily the feeling. Excitement and fear can feel identical in the body.
The difference is in how each person sees the particular object of the emotion.
When your friend is excited, she sees skydiving as exciting.
When you’re afraid, you see skydiving as dangerous.
That’s the key. It also introduces a second type of object – a formal object. The formal object of an emotion is basically how you see the thing that your emotion is about. More precisely, it is the evaluative property that is ascribed to the particular object of the emotion.
Type of emotion Particular object Formal object
excitement skydiving exciting
fear skydiving dangerous
We don’t simply have emotion about things. We have types of emotions about things, and what distinguishes each type of emotion is the evaluative property that is ascribed to the particular object whenever that is the type of emotion that you are feeling.
When you are scared, dangerous is the evaluative property that you ascribe to the thing that you are afraid of.
When you are excited, exciting is that evaluative property.
We can now advance a new objection against the thesis that emotions are bodily sensations. The new objection is that, in addition to not having particular objects, bodily sensations also do not have formal objects. The feeling of the sun’s warmth on your skin is not capable of evaluating anything as dangerous or exciting or shameful or delightful or blissful or anything else. It’s just a feeling.
Often in philosophy a technical point can be phrased casually. In fact, it’s always good practice to challenge yourself to think of the casual way to phrase some point. It’s a way of ensuring that you keep in touch with reality.
So, let’s switch now to casual phrasing.
Emotions say things.
Your fear says that something is dangerous.
Your delight says that something is delightful.
Your grief says that something you loved is now gone.
In technical terms, an emotion says that a particular object has a certain evaluative property.
But bodily sensations do not say things.
Feel the ground under your feet, the sun on your skin, or the soreness in your muscles. Now lean in and listen closely. Hear anything?
But when you listen to an emotion, it will speak – sometimes quietly, and sometimes with force.
Stay away from that.
This will be fun!
You shouldn’t have done that.
That’s awesome.
There’s no standstill here. Emotions talk, and mere feelings don’t.
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It turns out that this feature of emotions – emotions say things – helps us to make further progress identifying exactly what an emotion is.
Your excitement says that the trip is exciting.
Your fear says that the shark is dangerous.
What else in the mind can do that? What else in the mind can say those things?
Beliefs.
I can believe that the trip is exciting.
I can believe that the shark is dangerous.
Wow! Beliefs can say the very same things that emotions say.
Maybe that is because an emotion is a belief.
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I don’t know what your reaction is upon reading that. Maybe you think it’s confusing or strange. Maybe it’s intuitive to you.
An emotion is a belief.
As it happens, this is the thesis of ancient Stoicism. It is also foundational to cognitive behavioral therapy. Both ancient Stoicism and CBT try to bring about changes in your emotions by getting you to change your beliefs.
Why would that strategy make any sense at all?
It would make sense if emotions were beliefs. In that case, changing your beliefs would obviously change your emotions – the two are the very same thing.
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Want to feel different? Change your beliefs.
So tidy! So simple!
And so wrong.
It is obvious, when you look at it from the right angle, that emotions are definitely not beliefs.
They do not even require beliefs.
The entire Stoic approach to emotion is built on a false understanding of what an emotion is. Lots of CBT, too. Use it as a guide, and you’ll go off course.
We will get there. In the next post, I’ll start to explain the Stoic theory of the emotions.
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Jacob Stump teaches philosophy for a living at Northeastern University.
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