Why and how emotions, feelings and desires arise

Emotions and feelings

Emotions are short-term internal energy impulses (experiences), while feelings are more stable and long-term.

The energetic (vibrational) nature of emotions and feelings is the same, and within the framework of this article they are used as synonyms.

Feeling sad

The weakest emotion (from the point of view of causing desires) is sadness . Sadness is essentially a passive emotion, it is the contemplation of being separated from the Divine (ideal). In sadness there is already the thought of separation “I am far from ideal,” but the motivating thought “I want to go back” is still weakly expressed, that is, the desire is still weakly expressed.

Feeling of fear

Next comes fear . Fear is a more active emotion than sadness and leads to stronger desires. We realize that separation has made us vulnerable and something “bad” could happen to us, something we don’t want. Fear is the thought “I don’t want” rather than “I want.” Of course, any thought “I don’t want” contains the thought “I want”, but in a rather weak inactive form.

Feelings of envy

Envy is even more active than fear. The word “envy” in our language has such a negative connotation that it is even difficult to think of envy as something positive. However, envy (which might be more correctly called competitiveness or ambition, but it is difficult to find the exact word in the language) for the first time clearly forms the thought “I want.” We compare ourselves with others, we see that we lack something that others have and that we want to get it. If it is difficult to realize your desires with the help of sadness and fear, then envy is the first emotion that makes it possible to achieve your goals.

Read more about the feeling of envy here

Feeling angry (anger)

Anger is one of the most active emotions. With it, “I want” turns into “I WANT”. I don’t just want to get it anymore, I’m angry at everything that prevents me from getting it. Many people in our lives get what they want through envy (ambition) and anger.

Feeling of love

Love is the most complex emotion. The path from sadness to anger is the path of growth in the strength of our desire and, in a sense, the growth of our egoism. We learn to get what we need through the emotions of sadness, fear, envy and anger. Love changes the direction of desire. Like all previous emotions, love is aimed at overcoming separation, but the object of desire is no longer us, but they, others. Love expands our field of vision. The basic thought is still the same “I want,” but the object of this thought is another part, “not us.”

However, we can only give something to others if we already have it. The emotion of complete love is only possible when we have no doubt that we always have what we need. In other words, a full-fledged emotion of love is possible when there is no feeling of lack. This is the thought “I have this.”

Let's consider the basic thoughts of all these emotions in relation to some object:

• sadness: “I don’t have this”
• fear: “I have this, I don’t want to lose it”
• envy: “I have this, others have it, others have it better, I want what they have, I want to get it”
• anger: “it’s wrong (unfair) that I don’t have this, I want to get it”
• love: “I have this, I want others to have it”

All emotions in their pure form are natural, but this pure form, alas, is not so often present in our lives and in our thoughts. When emotions become distorted in our minds, they become like spoiled medicine . Usually we distort emotions in two ways: either by belittling their value, or, on the contrary, exaggerating them to the point of grotesqueness.

How to learn to control your thoughts and feelings

The ability to think is the main difference between a human subject and an animal. Nature itself gave people this precious gift. However, it can also periodically cause serious trouble. Because if an individual often has negative thoughts and systematically dramatizes various life events, then he has a good chance of becoming a “slave” of his own thoughts. Therefore, it is important to learn to control your thoughts and feelings.

First of all, it should be clearly understood that thoughts are not accidentally generated by the brain. To some extent, all a person’s thoughts are the result of many interconnected circumstances in which a person finds himself at the moment or has found himself before. Since the thought processes of any individual are quite strongly influenced by his environment, life conditions and events. Simply put, “bad” thoughts are almost always a consequence of negative external influences, from which you can and even need to protect yourself.

So how can you control your thoughts and feelings?

First rule. It is necessary to come to terms with your own imperfection, because ideal representatives of the human species do not exist. Each subject, in his own way, is imperfect in some way. Therefore, having come to terms with this axiom, a person will stop engaging in self-criticism and worrying in vain, and will begin to love his own person for who she really is.

The second rule says that there are simply no urgent matters, everything can wait. Therefore, there is no need to set strict limits for yourself and carry out the planned tasks in strict accordance with the list. Do something better at will. This will make life much easier and save time. After all, work done with pleasure is done much faster. A person’s first place should always be caring for loved ones, and then everything else.

The next rule is to ignore bad thoughts. If negativity arises in your head, then you don’t need to dwell on it. You need to try to distract yourself and think about pleasant things, family, upcoming purchases or vacations. You need to understand that situations without a way out simply do not exist. Therefore, one should not program development towards the negative. It is better to postpone solving a problematic issue for a while if bad thoughts are overwhelming. A ready-made solution that satisfies the needs of the subject will come on its own. A life filled with positive thoughts becomes much happier, brighter and more colorful.

Rule four speaks of the need to learn to perceive problematic situations philosophically. That is, any troubles are an experience. You need to remember this. Therefore, any even the most serious problem needs to be analyzed, and not fall into despair from its apparent intractability.

The fifth rule is to enjoy life. After all, it is not the path to happiness; on the contrary, happiness is the road to life. A happy subject has a wonderful existence. And besides this, only kind and positive people will be attracted to such an individual. That is why a positive attitude in life will allow life to transform for the better.

The sixth rule is that you must give yourself some slack. After all, life is not an army that obeys a strict schedule. Although even in the army dismissals are allowed. No subject is able to do everything to the highest standard. This is simply impossible. Therefore, you need to forgive yourself for minor mistakes and not get hung up on trifles. In addition, you sometimes need to allow yourself some liberties and deviations from your intended life strategy.

The seventh rule says that more does not mean better. You need to learn to be content with little, to enjoy simple phenomena, for example, from the fact that the sun is shining brightly or from the endless starry sky above your head. Without satisfaction with small things there will never be big things.

The next rule is based on kindness to others. Strangers and even close people do not always need to know their true opinion about themselves. Moreover, truth is an elastic concept. One subject may consider arrogance a vice, while another may consider it a vital necessity and admire this trait. You cannot insult a person as an individual, and your own opinion about an individual must be communicated only when the individual is interested in it. And even in this case you need to be restrained and correct. Only with such an attitude towards the surrounding society will a person be respected and valued, and there will be correspondingly fewer reasons to fill the brain with negative thoughts.

The ninth rule states that the more simply a subject treats current events, the more success he can achieve. After all, negative thoughts arise as a result of constant worries, worries and an unrealistic desire to get everything at once. You need to understand that everything has its time. If something is missing, it means that the time has simply not come yet to get what you want.

Live one day at a time - that's what the tenth rule says. There is no need to guess your own future. After all, it may not yet be defined. With the help of positive thinking, you can create a new, happy future. You should enjoy existing here and now, because no one knows what will happen in five minutes. You need to understand that since every individual has a negative experience in the past, periodically “bad” thoughts associated with it will appear in the head, thereby programming future events. In other words, if an individual is constantly haunted by negative thoughts about past experiences, then the future will be burdened with problematic moments. It is necessary to learn to forgive and let go of the grievances of the past. A person who controls his thoughts is able to reach unprecedented heights.

There are several methods that help you take control of your own thoughts. The first method is the ability to distract attention. If you catch yourself thinking negative thoughts, you should immediately remember a pleasant incident or think about something good. You need to push out all the bad things from your own head.

Concentration training also helps you gain control over your thoughts. Systematic concentration of attention on positively colored phenomena and events gradually leads to a significant reduction in negative thoughts, up to their complete disappearance.

You need to learn to say goodbye to any “bad” thoughts in a timely manner. After all, they constitute ballast, an unnecessary burden that only burdens life. At the same time, you cannot rudely eradicate negative thoughts from your head. You should live in harmony with your own “I”. Getting rid of “bad” thoughts can be represented in the form of a unique formula: a negative mental image has appeared in the head, it is necessary to analyze it, rethink it and say goodbye to it with a light heart. To prevent such an image from appearing in your head again, you must not perform the actions that led to its appearance. That is, timely elimination of the cause leads to the non-occurrence of its consequences.

Every “bad” thought needs to be fueled by emotions. Thinking about negative images of consciousness and analyzing them provide a strong emotional boost, which leads to “burnout” of the negative thought.

Self-doubt also creates a lot of negative emotions in the head. Therefore, you need to develop self-confidence. It is also recommended to criticize yourself less, smile more and enjoy even the smallest moments.

In addition, you can do yoga or meditation related to breathing control. After all, as you know, when we control our breathing, we control our thoughts.

Suppression of emotions

The belittling of an emotion comes either through the suppression of the emotion , or through the devaluation of the desire that it causes. The basis of any such belittlement is the fear that we will not be able to realize our desire, which emotions cause. As a result, we become unemotional. Sadness turns into insensitivity (the thought - “I don’t have this, and it doesn’t mean anything to me”), fear into ostentatious fearlessness (“I’m not sorry to lose this”), envy in the absence of any ambition (“I don’t need this”) , we lose the ability to show anger, and love becomes indifference.

Exaggeration of emotions can be seen in examples: sadness turns into grief, fear into panic, envy into jealousy, anger into uncontrollable anger, and love into possessiveness.

Vibration frequency

Emotions have strength (intensity) and energy - and these are different concepts. If we consider an emotion as energy, then the energy is determined by the vibrational frequency - the higher it is, the higher the energy of the emotion. Energy does not depend on the strength (intensity) of emotions.

A good analogy is the phenomenon of the photoelectric effect, explained by Einstein in the early 20th century. The photoelectric effect is the knocking out of electrons from a substance by incident light. As you know, colors also differ in frequency and are located in a certain frequency order. Of visible light, the lowest frequency is red, and the highest frequency is violet. So, the photoelectric effect was observed for light with high frequencies even at very low intensity, and was not observed for red low-frequency light even at very high intensity.

Einstein suggested (he later received a Nobel Prize for this assumption) that for light energy intensity does not matter, only frequency matters . Therefore, the energy of red color is not enough, no matter how intense it is.

This means that low energy (low vibration levels = low frequency) emotions, such as sadness or fear, can be just as strong (intense) as higher frequency emotions, but their energy is dramatically less. Since their energy is radically less, their ability to induce desires is also radically less . In this sense they are “weak” even at high intensity.

Accordingly, in order to evoke the right desires, it is advisable for us to choose emotions of a higher frequency - the likelihood of their occurrence will be much higher.

In addition to the mystery of the photoelectric effect, Einstein’s theory also solved another paradox of the physics of those years. Shortly before this, Edison invented the incandescent light bulb. Thermal energy was converted into light, and the light bulb first glowed red, and as the temperature increased, it turned orange and then yellow. But further increase in temperature (power) did not lead to the appearance of other colors of higher frequencies, for example, blue.

The answer is the same. The higher the frequency of light radiation, the higher the power (temperature) should be. To obtain blue light, a temperature of about 9,000 degrees is required, and violet - 18,0000 degrees, which the spiral material of those years could not allow (for comparison, yellow color at a temperature of 2,500 degrees). In other words, the higher the frequency, the more energy is required to produce it.

Types of feelings, their manifestations and classification

Due to the fact that the very concept of feelings and their derivatives still remains open, there are different categories and types of them. The most frequently used classification today is the reflection of feelings as the social essence of a person, which divides all psycho-emotional experiences into 3 groups.

Feelings in psychology are divided into 3 groups: moral, intellectual and ethical.

They are:

• moral;
• intellectual;
• ethical.

There are also subcategories such as social, practical, legal and professional feelings, which overlap with the three above.

Moral or ethical feelings

Moral feelings are the basis of every society. They have historical and cultural roots, determined by norms of behavior that have been formed over centuries. Their existence is determined by the need for each person to feel involved in the team.

Moral feelings presuppose the optimal behavior of people in order to be understood, and they also form the basis of collective and individual consciousness.

By adhering to the principles of moral behavior, a person, as a social being, feels satisfaction and acceptance of himself by others. Moral feelings form a sense of attachment, community and collective idea with which all members of society are identified.

The basis for understanding moral feelings was first described by the English philosopher Adam Smith in the 18th century. He gave his own classification of their importance, but the peculiarity of moral feelings is their changeable nature, therefore, today, the importance and value of moral norms has changed significantly.

Also, not all moral sentiments have the same importance and may vary in a given society, depending on what cultural and social goals are considered to be a priority.

The most common and universal moral feelings today are:

Thus, moral feelings are fundamental to the formation of harmony in interpersonal existence, regardless of the presence of common interests with other people or not.

On the opposite side, there are antisocial feelings that have a destructive effect on relationships between people.

These include feelings:

• anger;
• anger;
• hatred;
• antipathies;
• contempt;
• enmity;
• envy;
• ill will.

Intellectual feelings

Unlike moral feelings, which give a person a sense of community, intellectual feelings are associated with cognitive activity.

Thus, intellectual feelings are not only the psychological component of each person, but also form his worldview and thought processes, contributing to mental education and the development of creative thinking.

The emergence of intellectual feelings in every person, according to psychologists, is based on the physiological premise of an orienting reflex associated with the need to explain all the processes around oneself, which everyone perceives with the help of the senses.

Unlike moral feelings, which are unconsciously copied from other members of society, intellectual feelings develop purposefully during the learning process. They are the basis for a person’s professional growth, and also form an important part of his self-confidence.

The most important examples of intellectual feelings include:

Thus, intellectual feelings are the main source of acquiring new knowledge and developing one’s own creative abilities.

All skills gained through the development of intellectual abilities related to problem solving and the formation of one's own independent thinking.

Aesthetic or higher feelings

Aesthetic feelings are the most ambiguous among all human experiences. Despite constant attempts to create an objective understanding of their criteria and properties, aesthetic feelings remain subjective.

If moral feelings are perceived by a person through unconscious living in society, and intellectual feelings are learned, then aesthetic feelings are the maximum manifestation of individuality and are developed intuitively by each person.

Therefore, the most important features of an aesthetic worldview are individualism and historical context.

The main goal of aesthetic feelings is not the feeling of unity or the search for truth, but the pursuit of perfection, beauty, harmony and understanding of all processes. A distinctive feature of aesthetic feelings is the search for quality.

The level of aesthetic pleasure is manifested not in functionality and practicality, but in an attempt to create and materialize in artistic images the reality that a person contemplates as a source of inspiration.

Therefore, aesthetic feelings describe a person’s attempt to find the beautiful, the sublime, to determine the essence of the comic and tragic.

It is assumed that the manifestation of these feelings is very diverse and can be found everywhere: from the contemplation of nature (the blueness of the sky or the shine of the stars), architecture, painting, poetry and music to the actions of people and the search for pleasure in daily work.

A special feature of aesthetics is that the longer a person searches for the beautiful and sublime, the more he finds and understands it in different manifestations.

This process is characterized by the identification of factors, characteristics, connections and awareness of the emotional experience of the individual towards the interested subject, which she has endowed with special interest.

Aesthetic feelings are always subjective and specific; they are formed by a person in order not only to realize the actual importance of an object or phenomenon for society, but also to endow it with a special meaning.

The main elements that form aesthetic feelings are:

Feelings in psychology, such as aesthetic, moral and intellectual, are the highest cognitive properties of every person.

By developing certain elements of higher feelings, a person not only realizes his place in society and feels part of the collective consciousness, he is also able to develop individual needs and the desire to implement his ideas.

The emergence of emotions

Returning to emotions, this means that we need much, much more energy in order to produce an emotion of a higher frequency. What emotion arises depends not only on the external event, but also on the level of our energy . A low level of energy simply cannot produce a high-frequency emotion.

And one more thing - as the temperature (power) increases, in the case of an incandescent lamp, the color changes automatically. It is impossible to increase the power to that corresponding to, say, yellow and still get red. As the power (energy) increases, the colors automatically transform into each other.

A completely direct analogy is not possible here. The main difference is that an incandescent lamp has no memory. If you apply a higher power, there will be one color, if you apply a lower power, there will be a different color. But we have memory. We remember the emotions we felt before, perhaps when we had much less energy . We have a belief (thought, our idea) about what emotions we usually produce. And we automatically repeat what happened before. It takes a strong-willed effort to switch to a new energy level.

However, with an increase in energy level, such a transition from lower to higher emotions will be much easier. The transition here is a transfer of attention , i.e. we have the opportunity to produce any of those emotions that our energy is capable of.

In addition, we can generate several emotions simultaneously so that they add up to a certain palette. For example, we may experience admiration and fear or admiration and envy at the same time. Or all three together - admiration, fear and envy.

By the way, ordinary incandescent lamps and all bodies in general, when heated, emit not waves of one frequency, but a whole spectrum of waves. This leads, for example, to the fact that we perceive the light of the sun in space as white, and not as green. In fact, the maximum color there is green, but other colors are also present, and together they give white.

Functions of the senses

Feelings in psychology are an integral part of every person’s life.

They help you form your own understanding of the world, evaluate priorities, and effectively communicate with other people.

Motivational

The motivational function of feelings plays a fundamental role in stimulating a person to action and maintaining his activity.

Mobilizing all experiences and goals, the feeling of desire is an important motivating factor for any action:

• concentration on the task;
• planning;
• formation of the necessary psycho-emotional mood;
• rapid recovery from stress or anxiety.

Signal

The signaling function is a person’s ability to respond to various signals from the environment and his own internal state.

Thanks to this function, a person perceives any information (emotions, feelings, non-verbal communication), and his brain can identify and give significance to certain signals, on the basis of which a value judgment and response is formed.

Estimated

The main task of a person’s evaluative function is to understand what is happening around, to interpret any perception of information (verbal and non-verbal) from a subjective point of view as a desirable or harmful effect on one’s own state.

The evaluative function is formed on the basis of life experience and unconsciously attaches some significance to an object or situation in a positive or negative way.

A function that synthesizes the basics of an image

Feelings in psychology are many different sensory stimuli that perceive information in different ways.

Therefore, the goal of the synthesizing function is to create a holistic and understandable picture of perception from different pieces of information (for example, a holistic perception of a cake with its shape, smell, taste and aesthetics). This function creates the possibility of the harmonious existence of thoughts, feelings and emotions.

Expressive function

The expressive function of feelings is an important part of every person’s communication. It helps not only to perceive non-verbal information while communicating with others, but also provides one's own synchronous expression of feelings and thoughts in order to create a more complete picture of expression.

Emotions and Beliefs

Emotions in themselves are neither (morally) negative nor positive , and only become so in the context of a specific experience. However, in our language and thinking, emotions have a clearly defined moral connotation. For example, we perceive love or joy as positive emotions, and fear as negative. However, there can be joy at the sight of someone else’s grief, and love for torture. And fear for your child, or fear of losing contact with the Divine. In other words, there may be situations where, despite the fact that we experience fear, we stand much higher energetically than when we experience love.

How can this be? After all, the emotion of fear is energetically lower than the emotion of love. The fact is that emotions only show where we are in relation to the ideal , but they do not tell us anything about the ideal itself. The ideal, i.e. our beliefs about who we are and who we want to be represent another fundamentally more energetically powerful band (more precisely, even several different bands). Therefore, the energy of emotion is only a small part of our overall energy system.

An analogy in physics (albeit incomplete) is the emission of electromagnetic waves, for example, by the sun. The Sun consists of different zones, starting with the core - the deepest and energetically powerful zone, which emits ultra-high frequency waves, such as gamma rays. The temperature in the core reaches millions of degrees. As you move toward the surface, the temperature and energy drop, and the more superficial layers emit waves of lower frequency and less energy, such as visible waves and radio waves. Thus, the sun emits waves entirely over the entire range.

Human emotions correspond to fairly superficial radiation with weak energy , which is far from the core. Closer to the core are our beliefs and ideas about ourselves and the world. Even closer is that part of us that is directly part of the Higher World, and which contains our higher idea of ​​who We really are.

In the example above, the person who rejoices at someone else's grief is experiencing a high-level emotion, but his self-image is at a low energy level.

The incompleteness of the analogy lies in the fact that in a person different zones (different energy bands) influence each other. So, emotions, on the one hand, depend on our belief system, on the other hand, they change it. But perhaps the Sun also has its own emotions and its own ideas about itself and its place in the Universe.

And that means the Sun is intelligent.

About philosophical feelings (text and video)

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The sensitive heart is a rich source of ideas...

Nikolay Karamzin

There are people who create their hearts with their minds, others who create their minds with their hearts: the latter succeed more than the former, because there is much more reason in feeling than in the mind of feelings.

Petr Chaadaev

Philosophy is not just thinking

We are accustomed to identifying philosophy with thinking. The phrase “philosophical thought” seems self-evident, almost tautological: philosophy is thought in its highest development. Not a single dictionary definition of philosophy - and there are dozens and hundreds of them - contains any mention of philosophical feelings, emotions, or experiences. On the English-language Internet, the phrase “philosophical thought” is found a hundred times more often than the phrase “philosophical feeling” - 651,000 and 5,600, respectively, and in RuNet - fifty times, 332,000 and 6,500. This indicates a huge disproportion between the rational and emotional components of philosophy in generally accepted views on its nature.

It seems to me that not only thoughts, but also feelings are philosophical. Among the variety of feelings, one can single out those that are addressed to the world as a whole, to the laws of existence, to human nature and, due to their universality, rise to the rank of philosophical. And in general, why should philosophy, like the love of wisdom, manifest itself only in thoughts, and not in feelings? After all, love is a feeling, and wisdom is not only a thought, but rather a feeling of thought, a fusion of both: the ability to emotionally fill thoughts and intellectually fill feelings.

In “The Proverbs of Solomon,” Wisdom speaks about herself and about God: “...I was an artist with Him, and I was joy every day, rejoicing in His face at all times, rejoicing in His earthly circle, and my joy was with the sons of men. (Proverbs of Solomon, 8:30, 31). Here Wisdom is represented first of all in the fullness of her feelings, as joy and gladness in the face of God, and she shares this joy with those who love her.

So what right does the love of wisdom have to dry itself up to rational categories and propositions, to empty itself emotionally into analytical judgments? Thought in itself does not yet form Sophia’s integrity.

How do philosophical feelings differ from non-philosophical feelings?

Philosophical thought differs from non-philosophical thought in that it embraces the laws of the universe as a whole. “Vanya is a fool” is not a philosophical thought, but “the human race is stupid” is already philosophical. In the same way, resentment towards a rude, annoying neighbor is not included in the range of philosophical feelings, but bitterness from the imperfection of the universe is.

For a philosophically sensitive person, the relationship to the world turns into an emotional drama. He is tormented, delighted, shocked not by individual phenomena, but by the universe as a whole. “Ecclesiastes” is a book of philosophical feelings and experiences. “And I hated life, because the things that were done under the sun became disgusting to me; for all is vanity and vexation of spirit!” [Eccl 2:17] Is it a thought or a feeling? Obviously, the feeling, since it is expressed by the words “hated”, “became disgusted.” But the subject of this feeling is not individual persons and events, but “life” as such and “all the things that are done under the sun.” And this feeling is resolved with a general thought: “everything is vanity and vexation of spirit!” Thought and feeling transform into each other, so we can talk about a philosophical state of mind or a philosophical thought-feeling.

The subject of philosophical feelings is being as such and universals: unity and plurality, freedom and necessity, life and reason, space and time, chance and law. The feeling of wasted time due to not having time to complete what you set out to do is just a feeling. But the melancholy of universal frailty and doom, the inexorable course of things that destroys everything familiar, is a philosophical feeling.

In Pushkin's tragedy, Salieri experiences not everyday, but philosophical envy of Mozart: the envy of algebra for harmony, a feeling of the greatest injustice, reaching the point of philosophical indignation. The world is not structured correctly if an idle reveler gets the genius that is denied to a great worker. “There is no truth on earth... But there is no higher truth!”

Pain and sorrow can be philosophical if they are experienced for all of humanity. “I looked around me - my soul became wounded by the suffering of mankind.” This beginning of Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” became the beginning of all Russian philosophy, which is implicated in the feeling of suffering and compassion, in Karamazov’s question about the justification of a child’s tear.

Another important philosophical feeling is surprise, which Aristotle considered the ancestor of philosophy as such, and of knowledge in general. “For now and in the past, wonder prompts people to philosophize, and at first they were surprised at what immediately caused bewilderment, and then, little by little moving further in this way, they wondered about more significant things, for example, about the change in the position of the Moon, the Sun and the stars, and also about the origin of the Universe. But he who is perplexed and surprised considers himself ignorant...” [Aristotle 1975, 69]. Aristotle shows how everyday wonder turns into philosophical as it extends to “more significant things,” to the foundations of being, to the origin of the Universe, etc. Surprise - the emotion of encountering the strange, unknown, incomprehensible - encourages us to ask questions about the nature of familiar things, and thereby delve into their causes and further into the causes of causes, to the deepest foundations of all things, which are studied by metaphysics.

If surprise is the beginning of philosophy, then it, in unity with a feeling of reverence, is its result, as is clear from the confession of Immanuel Kant: “Two things fill the soul with constantly new and growing surprise and reverence, and the more often and more carefully one deals with them. reflection: the starry sky is above me and the moral law is within me” [Kant]. Consequently, not only does surprise lead to reflection (Aristotle), but reflection also leads to even greater surprise (Kant). Actually, the goal of philosophy is not to definitively explain this or that subject, but to lead into the depths of the unknown and unknowable, from mystery to mystery, from superficial feelings to increasingly deeper ones.

The range of philosophical feelings is extremely wide:

Philosophical contempt is contempt for those small circumstances, particulars, and vanity of life that distract from the main thing, from the search for the meaning of life, from fulfilling one’s highest purpose.

Philosophical anger is anger against the unjust world order, which gives everything to some and nothing to others, torments the righteous and pleases the wicked. Philosophical anxiety is anxiety about the elusive meaning of the whole, about the fact that the world lies in ruins and thought cannot piece it together.

Philosophical fear is fear of being, because it is unknowable, or of non-existence, because it is devastating, fear for one’s small “I”, incommensurable with the infinity of the universe.

Philosophical sadness is sadness that everything passes, there is nothing eternal under the Sun, even great deeds and people are doomed to oblivion and a living dog is better than a dead lion.

Philosophical torment is described in Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot”: “What tormented him was that he was a complete stranger to all this. What kind of feast is this, what is this constant great holiday, which has no end and to which he has been drawn for a long time, always, since childhood, and to which he cannot stick to. Every morning the same bright sun rises... every grass grows and is happy! And everything has its own path, and everything knows its path, it departs with a song and comes with a song; he alone knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people, nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a miscarriage. Oh, he, of course, could not speak then in these words and express his question; he suffered deaf and dumb..."

Philosophical tenderness. Let’s say I feel tenderness when I see how a small tree stubbornly resists the wind, bends under its gusts, but then straightens up. At the same time, I begin to empathize with everything that is weak and admire its inner strength, perseverance and inflexibility of these little ones. It is this kind of feeling that lies at the basis of the books of Taoism, Chinese wisdom, which claims that the flexible and pliable are stronger than the hard and rigid.

Any feeling that reaches universality can become philosophical. In general, a philosophically significant boundary passes not between thoughts and feelings, but between everyday, empirical and existential, universal thoughts and feelings. And here we need to raise the question about the nature of the universals themselves that make up the field of philosophy. A universal is understood as a general concept, a common feature of many phenomena, for example, “house”, “number”, “mind”, “animal”, “man”, “heavy”, “yellow”. But a universal can be “joyful” and “sad,” “amazing” and “touching,” “scary” and “boring,” if it evokes the corresponding feelings in most people. The point is not that a feeling can become the subject of philosophical reflection, but that a feeling, gaining universality, itself becomes philosophical. It is philosophical not only to think about joy, but also to experience joy, if this joy is directed not to specific events or situations, but to many things, to the construction of the universe as a whole, to the laws of existence. One might call such universal feelings or philosophical sentiments “unisentimentals.”

Vocation of philosophy

I believe that the calling of philosophy is to shape not only our thoughts, but also our feelings, to contribute to their development and deepening. Not only to explain the world intellectually, but to make us sensible citizens of the universe, i.e. to ascend from individual, situational, everyday feelings to world-encompassing ones. This task can be described in the poems of William Blake, replacing “see” with “smell” (in the sense of “feel”): In one moment to smell eternity, A vast world in a grain of sand, In a single handful - infinity And the sky - in a flower’s cup .

A feeling is more connected with a holistic personality and takes possession of it in a more existential and eventful way than an abstract thought. Philosophy, which is limited only to thoughts, judgments, syllogisms, and analysis of concepts, does not reach the level of wisdom, i.e. does not fulfill its disciplinary purpose. The great philosophers: Plato, Kant, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Solovyov, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Berdyaev - are imbued with philosophical feelings and passions, which determined the scale of their thought. Without experience, thought is shallow and tautological. The feeling embedded in concepts, but not logically deduced from them, distinguishes synthetic judgments from analytical ones.

Let us compare the analytical judgment: “All bachelors are unmarried,” and the synthetic (a posteriori) judgment: “all bachelors are unhappy.” In the first, the connection of concepts is based on logical analysis, in the second - on emotional experience. When Pascal writes about a person: “a thinking reed,” he puts into this philosophical statement both compassion for man and admiration for him. “In relation to space, the universe embraces and absorbs me like a point; with my thoughts I embrace her. <…> Thought, therefore, by its nature is something amazing and incomparable” [Pascal] Analytical philosophy is devoid of great philosophical feelings, and on the contrary, the synthetism of philosophical judgment can be based on their “ups” and “changes.”

Some philosophies tend more towards thought, others towards feeling. For example, Hegelian philosophy is speculative, speculative and closer to logic (it is no coincidence that its core is the “Science of Logic”), while Nietzschean philosophy is a “gay science”, and not a science at all, but rather morality, and an immoral one. It seethes with passions, not always virtuous: there is anger, resentment, suffering, delight, revenge, disgust, love, and anger. In Nietzsche, feelings sometimes overwhelm thought, suppress it, make it overly irritable and ecstatic.

Vasily Rozanov suffers even more from this emotional incontinence: he often extrapolates his feelings beyond thoughts that remain small or trivial: “So, my mother and I will die and the children, having grieved, will live. Nothing will change in the world: a terrible change will come only for us. "End", "finished". This “is over” not in relation to the details, but the whole, the whole thing—terribly” [Rozanov]

Here there is a feeling: “terrible,” but all that remains from the thought is the banal statement that everything ends for the dead, but the world remains unchanged. In general, Anglo-American analytical philosophy and continental existential philosophy (including Russian) are two extreme limits, beyond which thinking and feeling sometimes tend to free themselves from each other. How to reunite them?

The calling of philosophy is precisely to expand the realm of feelings with thoughts, to give them universality, and to expand the realm of thoughts with feelings, to give them effectiveness. Philosophy needs to undergo a course of sentimental education in order to acquire the ability, as the hesychasts put it, to “immerse the mind in the heart,” to experience what it thinks. The cultivation of extremely capacious feelings related to the world and to man is the most important part of philosophical education. Philosophical faculties study various schools, systems, ideas, but it is important not only to comprehend the categories of thought, i.e. to form your mind, but also to develop philosophical feelings, ways of experiencing the world, to be surprised by the great in the small, to suffer from the insoluble contradictions of existence, to be inspired by dialectics, etc.

Without understanding philosophical feelings, we will not understand the course of history, those greatest events that occur under their influence. Marx wrote that when ideas take hold of the masses, they become a material force. But the masses are seized not just by ideas, but by ideas-emotions, all-encompassing feelings that are equal in volume and power to ideas, relate not to private, but to collective experience, and extend to the life of society or all of humanity. Historical processes, no less than individual behavior, are dictated by emotions, only on a different scale. The revolution is carried out by the philosophical emotion of the injustice of the world order, anger at the existing order of things. Scientific discoveries are driven by wonder at the mysteries of the universe. At the heart of artistic works and technical inventions is the joy of gaining freedom, which allows one to overcome the resistance of inert matter and creatively transform the world.

Lyrical philosophy: sing with your mind

What to do? I will begin to pray with the spirit, I will also pray with the mind; I will sing with my spirit, I will sing with my mind. 1 Corinthians 14:15

There are states of mind when he truly begins to sing. The thought is filled with musical rhythm and the delight of self-expression - but at the same time it remains precisely a thought, lined up in a series of concepts, premises, conclusions, like F. Nietzsche in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”:

“Look, I teach you about the superman! The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: let the superman be the meaning of the earth! I conjure you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who tell you about supermundane hopes! They are poisoners, it doesn’t matter whether they know it or not... I love those who do not know how to live except to perish, for they are walking across the bridge. I love great haters, for they are great admirers and arrows of longing for the other shore” [Nietzsche 1990, 8,10].

What is this - philosophical lyrics? Or is it philosophy, but only lyrical, requiring the presence of the lyrical “I” and expressing in the first person direct acts of will addressed to “you”: “I teach”, “I conjure”, “let your will...”, “don’t believe those ..."

Nietzschean lyricism can be compared with poetic, for example, in A. Pushkin:

“But, my friends, I don’t want to die. I want to live so that I can think and suffer.”

or:

“A vain gift, a random gift, Life, why were you given to me? Or why are you condemned to execution by a secret fate?”

The difference is that Pushkin does not define or systematize the concepts of “thought,” “suffering,” “accident,” “fate,” etc. It is focused on the lyrical “I”, through which various impulses and experiences pass, including those addressed to higher values, to the meaning of life. Nietzsche, on the contrary, focuses precisely on the concept of “superman” and systematically develops it throughout the entire “treatise-poem”, but develops it precisely in a lyrical way, as the direct will of the thinking “I”, seeking the transition from man to superman. This is lyrical philosophy, lyrosophy, where lyricism serves philosophy, in contrast to philosophical lyricism, where philosophy serves lyricism.

Meanwhile, what philosophical lyrics are is clear to everyone: Omar Khayyam, J. Donne, I.V. Goethe, F. Tyutchev, R.M. Rilke, N. Zabolotsky... But for lyrical philosophy there has not yet been a place in the system of concepts. Even if you look on Google: on the Russian-language Internet, the first phrase is found on one and a half million sites, and the second - only 3,630, i.e. in a ratio of 416:1. On the English-language Internet the ratio is 2:1, but it should be noted that the expression “metaphysical poetry” is much more popular here, which is found 27 times more often than “poetic metaphysics”, respectively 209 000 and 7,800. Meanwhile, it is obvious that in philosophy there is a place for lyricism no less than in lyricism there is a place for philosophism. A. Augustine, M. Montaigne, S. Kierkegaard, F. Nietzsche, R. Emerson, V. Rozanov, G. Marcel - this is, to a large extent, lyrical philosophy, i.e. a set of philosophical judgments in the first person, direct self-expression of a thinking subject. And yet, in the catalogs of even the largest libraries, which contain the most exotic headings, from “philosophy of sports” to “Juche philosophy,” there is no heading “lyrical philosophy.”

At the same time, lyricism as a kind of philosophy cannot be identified with any of its directions. Existential philosophy can be lyrical, like Kierkegaard's, or it can be epic, like Heidegger's in Being and Time. In the same way, idealism can be lyrical (for example, in P. Florensky in “The Pillar and Ground of Truth”) or non-lyrical (Vl. Solovyov). Even though materialism seems unlyrical, one can find examples of lyrical Marxism in L. Trotsky and W. Benjamin. One can, obviously, talk about lyrical theology, for example, in the Confessions of Aurelius Augustine - in contrast to the epic theology of Thomas Aquinas.

When discussing different philosophical trends and conceptual systems, we often forget that philosophy, like any literature, is divided into types and genres that partly overlap with literary ones. Lyrical philosophy deserves consideration as a special, little-studied kind of philosophical literature that reveals the volitional acts and intentions of the thinking “I” in the process of its self-awareness.

We know from Kant that the subject cannot be eliminated from the acts of his judgment about the world. Usually philosophy is embarrassed by its lyricism and hides it behind claims to cognitive objectivity, “scientificness.” Lyrical philosophy does not hide its rootedness in the thinking subject and expresses it systematically. At the same time, subjecthood, as a source of philosophical feelings and a way of self-expression of a transcendental (in the Kantian sense) subject, should be distinguished from purely personal subjectivity inherent in an empirical individual with all his personal inclinations and experiences. That is why the lyrical image of the philosophizing “I” must be distinguished from the biographical “I” of the author; the lyrical hero of philosophy often appears under a heteronym, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra or Kierkegaard's conceptual personas.

In every act of self-knowledge we go beyond ourselves as an object of knowledge, i.e. we become “superman” in relation to ourselves. Gödel's incompleteness theorem speaks of the impossibility of a complete self-description of a system within the framework of its own axioms, which leads to the dynamics of the system itself, its transition to a new level of existence. The lyricism of philosophy is a sign of the superiority of the subject of self-knowledge over himself as an object, a way of his self-transcendence.

Thus, in a broader sense, we can talk not only about the lyrical kind of philosophy, but also about the lyricism of philosophy as such. Perhaps the main question of philosophy is what is philosophy itself, what is its place in the world? Since philosophy, unlike more particular sciences, does not have its own separate, “positive” subject, it is constantly occupied with the conditions of its own possibility and/or necessity. Therefore, all the major philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle - through Kant and Hegel - to Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida, put at the center of their teachings the question of what philosophy is and why it is in their thinking that it receives the most complete justification. Philosophy is completely self-reflexive, directed toward itself, and in this regard it is commensurate with man, who, unlike other creatures, does not have a predetermined place (“eco-niche”) in existence and is busy searching for and justifying it, first of all, again through philosophy. If man is an animal searching for himself, then philosophy is a discipline searching for itself, engaged in self-determination.

Hence the inescapable, “tribal” lyricism of philosophy, since the subject’s turning towards himself is the essence of lyricism. Philosophy is lyrical in the sense that it constantly talks and thinks about itself, about its tasks, possibilities, boundaries, about what it means to be a philosopher and why the world needs philosophy. According to Aristotle, metaphysics is the only science whose goal is itself. “And just as we call free the person who lives for himself and not for another, in the same way this science is the only free one, for it alone exists for its own sake” [Aristotle 1975, 69]. This turning of philosophy towards itself determines the deep lyricism not only of individual thinkers, like Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, but also of philosophy as such. In this sense, Hegel’s philosophy, outwardly scientific and “objectivist,” is in fact, in general, as a project and method of thinking, deeply lyrical, since it considers the entire history of the universe as a prologue to itself, as self-knowledge of the absolute Idea and its self-reflection in all mirrors of nature and society. That is why the theme of lyricism in philosophy seems to me not accidental, not “one of,” but central to philosophy as the experience of self-founding and self-contemplating thought.

Managing Emotions

We are accustomed to thinking that emotions are generated by external situations, events, and influences. In fact, emotions are generated by our thoughts . And thoughts arise on the basis of beliefs - our ideas about ourselves, the world, and other people.

Sometimes an emotion arises immediately, bypassing our thoughts. For example, fear of heights, which occurs when looking into an abyss. Such situations are built into our consciousness from birth, they are necessary for survival.

But such situations are relatively few.

We perceive everything that happens to us in the world through the filter of our beliefs. This perception is what causes emotions.

Consider, for example, the emergence of the emotion of fear.

Fear is a natural emotion. She tells us that something threatens us.

We usually believe that the emotion of fear is caused by some external threat . However, some people may become afraid when this threat arises, while others may not. The severity of the fear will vary from person to person.

And even the same person can experience fear on one day, but not be afraid on another. As Leo Tolstoy wrote: “No one should be called a coward, since the one who was afraid on Wednesday may turn out to be brave on Friday.”

There may be a few short moments in the beginning when we have not yet decided how to perceive this threat. Will we be able to deal with it? How important is what she threatens? These still unclear thoughts correspond to a surge of emotional energy. This emotional energy has not yet crystallized into a specific emotion; it is waiting for our thoughts to gain clarity.

If you listen to yourself, you can feel the moment when emotional energy has already appeared, but has not yet become a specific emotion (or specific emotions). It's like an orchestra warming up before a performance - the music is already playing, but there is no melody yet. The orchestra is waiting for the conductor - the conductor came and the melody began to sound.

Our beliefs are such a conductor - they transfer energy into one or another specific emotion (or spectrum of emotions).

Our beliefs are influenced by our experiences with similar situations in the past. The entire process of the emergence of specific emotions can take a fraction of a second .

If we could control our thoughts, then in these split seconds we could choose any emotion to express our experiences - from fear to love.

How many senses does a person have?

Despite the fact that feelings are one of the ways a person understands the world, the question of their full understanding and categorization is still open.

Feelings underlie most human needs and actions and develop in complex interdependence with a person's cultural and social environment. The first attempts to describe the importance and purposefulness of feelings belong to Aristotle.

He substantiated the presence of 5 human senses that contribute to human cognition:

• vision;
• hearing;
• sense of smell;
• touch;
• taste.

Later philosophers also included the sense of intuition, or the incomprehensible, and this set of human feelings was considered complete for centuries. But modern neurologists far from agree with this classification. Feelings began to be examined in more detail and individual aspects of their manifestations were highlighted.

For example, the sense of taste, as a perception, includes the feeling of sweet, salty, sour or bitter. Based on different scientific approaches and classifications, there are from 3 to 21 feelings characteristic of humans.

Modern science identifies 3 minimal categories of feelings, such as:

• chemical senses (smell and taste);
• mechanical (hearing and touch);
• light (vision).

A more expanded list of human feelings includes other sensations and perceptions:

• joint-muscular feeling;
• vibration sensitivity;
• vestibular apparatus (sense of balance or equibrioception and sense of acceleration);
• pain sensitivity or nociception;
• temperature sensitivity or thermoception;
• proprioception or the sense of body awareness (if we exclude a person’s perception of the world around him with 5 senses, he is still aware of where and how his hand lies);
• sense of time;
• visceral (intuitive) feeling.

The main approach that is characteristic of this classification is that all these feelings can be consciously recognized by a person. Psychologists offer a slightly different approach to understanding feelings. Feelings in psychology are a set of experiences characteristic of every person.

It is believed that two forms of feelings are primary - satisfaction and suffering, and the number of their derivatives increases and becomes more complex with age.

Therefore, based on the interdependence of life experience, mood, emotions and thinking, psychologists describe 5 basic feelings and their varieties that every person experiences.

Namely:

• anger (rage, hatred, irritation, resentment, jealousy, discontent);
• fear (horror, fright, numbness, guilt, shame, confusion, remorse);
• sadness (bitterness, melancholy, laziness, stinging helplessness, loneliness);
• joy (happiness, delight, peace, hope, curiosity, faith, confidence);
• love (tenderness, sympathy, kindness, admiration, sincerity, naturalness).

Thus, human feelings are the basis of psychological literacy, which ensures the sustainable formation of larval development and cognition.

Summary

• The purpose of emotions is to reconnect with the Divine
• Emotions strive to achieve this by creating desires in us.
• Five basic emotions (in order of increasing desire strength): sadness, fear, envy, anger, love
• Each emotion has its own basic thought (disclosed in the text).
• Emotional distortions are associated with the suppression of emotions or the suppression of the desire they cause.
• Emotions are energy. Each emotion has its own vibrational frequency. An analogue in physics is the photoelectric effect
• What emotion we have depends not so much on external circumstances, but on the level of our energy. A person with low energy levels cannot experience high energy emotions
• Emotions are only part of our energy - important, but not decisive. Thus, our beliefs (partially forming the ideal) are a more important part of energy.
• The art of managing emotions is determined by the art of managing thoughts (beliefs)