Idea No. 1801: Emotions as Ways of Relating
Short Essay
According to a new “Relating theory”, emotions are better viewed as a special way of relating and the body/mind dynamics that facilitate it. They could also be described as relational methods, techniques, capacities, skills, or orientations with particular body/mind configurations. Emotions provide us with extremely powerful but highly flexible and customized relational capabilities, enabling us to relate, commit, or interact with individual elements beyond relating generically or indistinctly to categories or groups of items. Thus, we can relate in a unique manner to each of thousands of different elements and change these quickly as needed. They function as a crucial part of our “domestic and foreign policy,” and act as a unique and critical aspect of our interface with our complex physical, social, and conceptual environment. Emotions are analogous to the foreign policies or positions countries take vis-a-vis other countries and issues, including the preparation behind them in times of peace or military tension. Emotions should not be seen as part of, nor in opposition to cognition. Cognition, is analogous to the processes which analyze, design, and manage these policies (for example, government and bureaucracy), as it also does for most of our other activities.
Emotions are better not viewed as cognitive processes (e.g. appraisals), feeling, or a simple combination of those. They also do not merely influence or are affected by relationships; but instead can be viewed as an actual portion, category or type of relationships.
In a sense, emotions are felt relationships or a manner of relating which we sense or experience. We literally feel how we perceive and relate, sense these special relationships and configurations, and experience our position vis-a-vis various elements! They are not something we “have,” but something we are, or a mode of being and relating. This is why we are angry or in love, and don’t just have angry thoughts or a perception of love.
At least four groups of special qualities differentiate emotions from purely cognitive functions and other ways of relating: interdependence, motivational force, specificity, and feeling.
By contrast, we relate in a non-emotional “utilitarian” manner when we perceive an easily exchangeable element (no specificity) like a supermarket cashier, food animal, or a common screwdriver.
Like a nation with levels of alert and emergency, we practice multiple emotional relationships in calm times, and narrow those when intensity rises. Though frequently of lower intensity, long-term emotions are not necessarily less strong as our relationships with our children or country prove. Emotions don’t disappear in calm times, but keep on shaping the biases of our universe, including our unique perceptions, preferences, and goals.
Emotions are the way we relate to elements to advance our drives and values and express their execution. They tend to reflect more of what we actually want and believe in, rather than what we want to believe in.
Emotions represent our end goals and are neither rational nor irrational thoughts or judgments. Is being sad about a lover irrational? However, while our conceptual universe is always biased by emotions, intense ones “toughen” the practice of socially acceptable objectivity or rationality. Nevertheless, people can be comparatively more objective in contexts where they are less emotionally involved or aroused. Rationality and objectivity do not operate without or despite emotions, but within a personal or collective universe shaped by them.
This view of emotions also helps ease the tension among differing views of the Self such as the Freudian Ego, the Cognitive Behavioral Theory sense of self, and the Buddhist idea of no self.
These insights could apply to the development of machines and Artificial Intelligence. For instance, we need to develop the machines’ ability to form and change endless specific ways of relating to numerous elements based on scenarios of interdependence. We will also have to formulate their values, drives, and particular preferences which their emotions are supposed to express and enhance.
Though our emotional system is highly sophisticated and flexible, its complexity often leads to more pathology which is harder to understand, fix, or balance, as evident by our emotional difficulties and search for happiness. In addition, at the same time that emotions have made morality, empathy and love possible, they have also enhanced hatred, aggression, envy, sorrow, and anxiety.
Non-emotional styles of relating might be easier to amend but lead to a growing detachment, alienation, and indifference when people are increasingly treated instrumentally with indifference as generic consumers, workers, citizens, or tools in an exploding population with larger governments and companies utilizing computerized services.
This view opens new possibilities for social change. If love is a way of relating and if emotions express values, a change of values could bring more loving or sympathetic relationships instead of competitive, aggressive ones, and thus lesser personal aggression and wars.
We are able and tend to form emotional connections with communal concepts such as family, company, institution, and country, as well as with abstract concepts as moral principles, political ideas, and spiritual entities like God. However, this also implies that communal or institutional values and emotions often overpower our personal ones (my job requires for me to hurt you regardless of my personal emotions) and dominate our global behavior and emotional composition.
Complex emotions constitute a major difference between the more decentralized, adaptable societies of “more-cognitive brained” organisms like human beings from less flexible, more centralized “less-cognitive brained” societies like those of social insects. Unfortunately, enormous, concentrated human populations combined with larger, centralized, homogeneous, and more overpowering institutions, probably only lower this diversity, individuality, and adaptability.
Viewing emotions as a relational method leads to a fundamental change in our perceptions, attention, research, and culture. It shifts our attention beyond cognitive issues and the autonomous self to more relational questions, theories, and practices. It also changes our view of cognition, rationality, objectivity, and even global emotional problems and aggression. As in Einstein’s theory, we must accept that our space is permanently “curved” by emotions and learn to navigate within it.
It confirms, strangely enough, that we are personally affected by the way we perceive, treat, and relate to other people and objects. Just as “we are what we eat,” we can now say “we feel how we relate” or “we are how we relate.” This is not a religious conviction or a moral teaching. It is rather a recognition of how important relational choices and practices are to us, and how we actually prepare for them, are affected by them, and sense them all.