Weekly Blogpost #19

Thursday, December 19th, 2013

The Knowledge of Emotions

I wonder how much emotions are part of personal knowledge, and how much is part of shared knowledge...

I know, I am always mentioning emotions when it comes talking about knowledge. But emotions intrigue me the most. It seems to be the way of knowing I am the most familiar with, yet at the same time it is one that is difficult to define and is covered in ambiguity.

Emotions are felt and expressed by individuals, no doubt on that. If I feel anger, I alone feel and express the anger. The people around me, though they may share the emotion of anger, express it in their own unique ways, apart from my mine. Already, there is the question of "shared" and "personal". Is anger shared in the sense that the group of people are feeling the same emotion at the same time for a mutual reason? Or is anger personal because it is distinctly felt for each individual? 

If we keep on, I may have particular intentions behind the way that I convey my emotions, to transmit my emotions in a certain way. But then, the way that the people receive my anger is distinct for each person. This process of personal to shared to personal is similar to a phone game. The message being transmitted goes through so many intermediaries that the content of its message may be much altered and distorted by the time it reaches destination. 

And then, people may learn to feel or express themselves in certain ways from different people. Learning to feel... Isn't weird to think of it that way? Learning to be angry, learning to be sad, learning to be happy, learning to love. I wonder how one would feel without the possibility of emotions, either feeling or expressing. How would life be when one loses a way to communicate to the world, to show what one feels?