But at least it seems to be fairly clear that most people the world over do anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. Some people regard these as the basic emotions, combinations of which give us all the rest, rather like combining the base vectors of a vector space. Some people try to get computers to recognise these basic emotions in other people – and, indeed, animals – by looking at their faces, an enterprise kicked off by Darwin as long ago as 1872.
Something else that one can do with emotions is to qualify them with prepositional phrases. One is sad about the death of the cat. One is happy about this year’s apple harvest. Such phrases often identify the cause of the emotion. Or, less often, the location: one has a pain in one’s left foot. Or, more complicated, one is angry with Jennifer about the extravagant claim form she submitted last week. Alternatively, one is just angry, without being terribly clear why. And while might be thirsty for blood, one might just be thirsty.
This naming and qualifying make it much easier to talk about these things, to deal with them or to share them. If someone talks about being angry, I have some sense of what that someone might be feeling.
Some people do this with music, thought by many to have direct access to the emotions part of the brain. So back in 1936 or so, Kate Hevner came up with near 70 descriptors which can be associated with music; descriptors like sad, triumphant, playful and tender. But in my case, while I often (perhaps more often as I get older) get emotional about music, perhaps to the point of being close to tears, the emotion does not have a name. I am not sad or happy, I am just being emotional. I have been moved by the music, but without a label of that sort being appropriate.
I associate here to the notion that one of the functions of tears is to offload psychoactive substances which have accumulated in the brain and which need to be got rid of.
I leave aside the complication that I might judge the music to be, for example, sad, without it making me feel sad. Or that whatever I feel is more to do with my perception or knowledge of the performer or the composer than with what has been composed. Or that my feeling is more a product of my own mood at the time than of the music.
Sometimes, in the case of music, the emotion is so intense that I have to switch off – not to the extent of holding my hands over my ears, but certainly removing my attention from the music by an act of will. From where I associate to the rather theatrical sounding performances of Mme. Verdurin at the (fictional) musical soirées described by Proust. In her case, sublime music triggered neuralgia, a seriously unpleasant complaint which for present purposes might be thought of as a relative of migraine. Which performances, I am able to say with a little help from google, are all explained on and around page 218 of volume 2 of the Random House edition of 1932 of the Scott Moncrieff translation of ‘À la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ (thought by some to be superior to the original).
The word theatrical being significant because there are serious people who believe that some part, possibly a large part, of our emotional experience is the result of a computation; of computing, for example, that this or that situation is sad, and so we feel sad. Perhaps even that in this or that situation we ought to feel sad, and so we feel sad. Giving a name to the experience is important, is an important part of the experience. There are core affects, a basis if you will, grounded in physiology, in the need to maintain homeostasis (loosely, the myriad & delicate chemical balances needed to maintain mammalian life), but what we mostly feel is a confection of some of those core affects, a confection engineered by learning, language and belief. What we feel, the subjective experience, is not just a product of our brain and body at a particular time and place, it is also a product of the past, expressed in memories of one sort or another. A product also of the human liking for classifications and categories, for choice small ones that are easy to work with. Human brains seem to like to work with classifications, seem to like rules like ‘if A is a B then C’ or ‘if A is a B then do C’.
One of these core affects might be nothing more complicated than a number; positive for pleasure, negative for displeasure, or perhaps unpleasure, a term used by psychoanalysts, a mere mathematical negative of pleasure. Another might be arousal – and I have seen a diagram which maps all the commonly named emotions onto a two dimensional plot with these two quantities for axes.
Which brings me back to my point that the feeling with which I started out does not have a name. It resists classification, even placement on the pleasure/unpleasure axis, although I can go for a high value for arousal. I have not assimilated this sort of feeling to one of the common names for such things - which failure does not seem to fit with the idea that a feeling is as much a construct of the ego as a product of the id, that one only feels an emotion when one knows that one is: how can one possibly know anything much about something with no name?
I should add that I also have feelings when listening to music which can be named, when one feels that naming is appropriate. But I am concerned here with the case where it is not, which certainly happens to me quite often.
But one can certainly know something. I am reasonably sure that one can know a good deal about, for example, tigers before one gets around to giving them a name. What is a lot harder, in the absence of words, is sharing that knowledge with someone else.
One can say that one had this feeling at such and such a time at such and such a place. One might be able to tie it down, to give a fictitious example, to the entry of the second violin at bar 46 of the third movement of Op.130. One might attempt to describe the feeling to someone else who had been there and one might feel that there was some sharing, that the two of you were, to some extent at least, feeling the same thing, feeling in the same way. And if one was musical one might talk about the cunning beats, tones and intervals which precipitated the feeling. But one has still not named the feeling - although Aldous Huxley writes somewhere of such talk being useful for pick-up purposes at concerts, at least back in the 20’s of the last century.
For me, such feelings can come on quite suddenly, triggered by something like the entry of the second violin. Only triggered, note, in the context of the piece as a whole; just doing the highlights does not work nearly as well, if at all – and I imagine much the same can be said of highlights in football matches: take the highlights from the lowlights and the magic is lost. But, in the case of recorded music at least, one can do the whole thing over again, and the feelings can be repeated – with the catch that the feelings usually fade with repetition. Sometimes they get back their original strength if one puts the music aside for a while, perhaps a few months.
Thinking of the way that different cultures have words for different emotions, rather in the way that different cultures have different ways of doing colour, perhaps one could name this emotion or feeling in a useful way. It is just a question of whether enough people are interested in this particular sort of feeling to be worth giving it a name? Or is it more whether most people are simply content to assimilate it to some pre-existing category?
I dare say that any such naming would change the experience so named over time. Not that that would be a good thing or a bad thing, but there would be change.
I dare say also that one could write a similar story about any activity on which one was keen – say watching football or playing golf. Even coarse fishing. Even work. Certainly the archery mentioned at reference 3. Anything which one takes seriously enough to be emotionally engaging or arousing.
PS: I associate now to my favourite classification effort, that of occupation and with the result in the UK in the late 1960’s called CODOT. Mentioned in blog from time to time and illustrated above. Thinking as I type, what could one say about the interaction between the naming of an occupation and the occupation itself? There often would have been such interaction, if only in employment agencies, employment regulations and training arrangements. I close with the observation that the penultimate entry of volume 3 of the CODOT manual, on page 494, is that runt of the theatrical litter called a stage hand (CODOT code 991.30). Aka flyman. With the ultimate entry being for anything else not thought of in the 1,000 or so pages that had gone before. I don’t think the shrinks are ever going to match it.
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Dependence. A source for amae.
Reference 2: Music, Language and the Brain - Aniruddh Patel – OUP 2008. My source for Kate Hevner.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/a-quandary.html.
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