- Feelings cannot be conveyed in anyway. For example, unless I tell you I am happy or sad you the reader have no idea what I am feeling. Even if I tell you I am happy or sad, you would have no idea how happy I am, what kind of happy I am whether I am euphoric or just plain feeling good. Plus, what is happiness cannot be put into word. We just assume that the feeling you associate with the word happiness is the same feeling I am associating with happiness; however, there is no way to independently check if we are correct. In addition, happiness is not one feelings but as we have experienced already, happiness can be of various kinds and degrees. One form of happiness when we get a job promotion, another when we have a new born and many more. Therefore, we have to take the help of empathy which is just take a leap of faith and assume that others associate the same feeling we do to happiness. The same is true with for all the feelings.
- Humans are nothing but a amalgamation of self aware feelings, also called consciousness. The most basic entity of being human is feeling. Take feelings out, and you are left with the body as in the case of a dead body. If you or any human have feelings but you are not aware of them, then those feelings are as good as not being there.
- Here we are presented with dichotomy, feelings are the most essential part of us being human yet we cannot convey our feelings. The most we can do is be at the mercy of empathy to help us convey feelings to whatever that might be.
- Yet we have discourse about feelings. So what exactly are we doing when we are talking about feelings? We have to go back to how we learn about feelings and to have discourse about them if we want to answer that question. We basically learn to have discourse about feelings through emotions the outward or physical response of feelings. For instance, laugh when we are happy, tears when we are sad and so forth. We learn to tell others that we prefer laugh over tears while others seem to convey the same opinion that they prefer laugh over tears. Yet, we both know that we are not looking for the outward reactions in the form of emotions rather we are looking for feelings that produce these emotions or the inside state of being our consciousness. After all, we can fake tears or laugh yet its not the same thing unless its accompanied with a feeling. Therefore, we can have discourse about feelings only to the extend of emotions; if we feel something that is not accompanied by its own unique emotion or if we feel something new and its accompanied by its own unique emotion not seen before by anyone else, your feelings are bound to be misunderstood. Unless, others come up with the same emotion spontaneously, even then there would be no independent way of checking if the feeling produced is the same as yours.
- Therefore, words will always be inadequate as explaining feelings.
- When we talk about feelings we are actually talking about emotions the outward physical appearance of feelings.
- Independent way of verifying if my and your feelings are the same other than using words to explain them, will always put us into trouble. We can also conclude language can only be used to convey actions or physical things or the relation between the two.
- We can only be sure about our own feelings and never about other person's feelings.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
exploring feelings
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