07-13-2019, 03:16 PM
(06-07-2017, 07:45 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: June distinguished "emotion" from "feeling." The latter includes love and caring, which are identified with F-feeling on many test questions of MBTI. People with strong F are those who care about relationships and people. Emotion, Jung said, was more reactive; an automatic physical expression. But IF emotion is taken to mean something like care or love, then Bob's physics enters territory compatible with existential and essentialist philosophy and with mystical awareness, in which the universe may be uncertain and spontaneous, but not "random," because there is intention within it.
Feeling is something more than emotion. There are only a few basic emotions, according to Paul Ekman who studied facial expression of people from around the globe there are seven: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and contempt. They are the same in everybody and we share them with other mammals, like dogs.
But feeling is infinite. One can have a "childhood nostalgia" feeling, when something reminds one of the way one experienced the world as a child. I had such a feeling yesterday when reading William Blake's poems. Winter is a monster that usually sleeps in the caves of Iceland but sometimes visits Britain and dusk happens because God draws back the blue curtains of day. I thought, I would believe these explanations when I was 5 year old. Don't get me wrong. I don't bash Blake at all, I think it requires a lot of skill to evoke this way of seeing in a man in his 30s. And I can have a feeling of "2005 nostalgia", or nostalgia for the period before the negative changes of my 20s. It's a different feeling from the childhood nostalgia one.
Or take fear. CS Lewis distinguished between ordinary fear of (say) a tiger, and more spiritual fear he called dread. You are afraid of a tiger because he can eat you, but a demon is scary because he's a demon, not because of something he can do. If instead of demon I said psychopath, there would be a different shade of dread. Horror movies wouldn't exist if we felt only primal animal fear, always the same.