What is man after all? He is intelligent being endowed with mental capacity. Many often refer to man as social animal; that is philosophical definition. On the contrary, to the writer, man is a social being capable of living with fellow humans peacefully and possibly cooperating in every way he or she can to enhance joyful life free of misunderstanding and confusion.
Nevertheless, when two or more people are together, there occurs some kind of a stir up that needs to be roused from lethargy. In times of sleepiness or lacking energy caused by bad relationship, emotion surfaces in the form of anger or hatred. Anger in its highest level definitely triggers emotion, which unless addressed and ironed out in time, can cause problem between people, the spring board for a conflict.
There are also times when the relationship is good, the mind positively gets excited and the end result becomes love. Love is a positively tuned binding factor that cannot be broken easily; it sustains the relationship for any length of time. In this excited state of mind or emotion, people draw together even better and thereby enjoy their untainted friendship. Great thinkers view emotion in their own ways. Thus, emotions are of various types. For instance, Aristotle thinks of emotions as feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure.
As aforementioned, man in his day-to-day activities, while dealing with people, experiences anger when the situation is unaccepted and happy if things work out well between him and the individual he happens to be with. All emotions are not of the same type; there are those which are heterogeneous category with wide variety of psychological phenomena. Some are very specific, so far as they concern a particular person, object or situation, they entail strong feeling of some kind be it love, joy, hate, fear, or grief.
In its specific form, emotion greatly impacts human life. It is, in fact, heterogeneous category that encompasses a wide variety of important psychological phenomena. Some emotions are very specific, insofar as they concern a particular person, object, or situation. Others, such as distress, cause of great pain due to want of money or other necessary things; deep pleasure or great gladness; or depression which makes man be in the state of low spirit, are very general. Some emotions are very brief and barely conscious, such as a sudden flush of embarrassment that causes perplexity or a burst of anger. Others, such as long-
lasting love or simmering resentment, are protracted, lasting for hours, months, or even years (in which case they can become a durable feature of an individual’s personality). An emotion may have pronounced physical accompaniments, such as a facial expression, or it may be invisible to observers. An emotion may involve conscious experience and reflection, as when one wallows or rolls about in it, or it may pass virtually unnoticed and unacknowledged by the subject.
An emotion may be profound, in the sense that it is essential to one’s physical survival or mental health; as a person often feels jovial his body faculties positively respond making the person feel healthy and strong and mentally alert and peaceful. On the other hand, it may be trivial or dysfunctional, having little impact on the person. An emotion may be socially appropriate or inappropriate. It may even be socially obligatory- for example feeling remorse after committing a crime or feeling grief at a funeral.
Accordingly, there is an enormous range of emotions, and even within the same “emotion families” there is considerable variation. Panic and fear, for example, are often thought to be kindred or related emotions. But there is a significant difference between the panic that is manifested in an irrational fear or a phobia and an intelligent fear such as, let’s say, the fear of nuclear war, which requires a good deal of information and analysis.
Terror and horror, two other kindred emotions, are nevertheless distinct forms of fear. Or consider the huge family of hostile emotions akin to anger, rage, fury, hatred, resentment, contempt, loathing, and scorn, to name just a few. All of these emotions are interestingly different in their structure and in their appropriate contexts, as are members of the self-critical family which includes shame, embarrassment, guilt, remorse, and regret. The great variety and abundance of emotions suggest that the category of emotion may not be a single class of psychological phenomena but a large family of loosely-related mental states and processes.
For the sake of simplicity, researchers and laypeople alike often divide the emotions into those that are “positive” and those that are “negative.” Positive ones, for sure, do not leave room for doubt and as such creating circumstances for people to act trustfully, one caring for the other. The negative ones stop or hinder good responses, particularly when it is the relation between persons. Yet, the complexity of emotions renders such oppositions suspect.
Although love and hate, for example, are often conceived of as polar opposites. It is worth noting (as the plots of so many novels and dramas have made clear) that they frequently coexist not as opposites but as complements. Moreover, love is often painful and destructive. And hatred, sometimes, can be positive because it can check unforeseen consequences. To the writer, hatred of evil cannot be negative emotion rather it is positive.
But an emotion like unfounded anger can be considered as negative emotion. Some say that this shows the futility of such a classification. Anger is indeed a negative feeling, if not a hostile one, directed toward another person. But it can be edifying for the person who is angry, and, in the appropriate context—a context in which one ought to be angry.
It can have beneficial effects on a situation or a relationship. Thus, the feminist movement, for example, took a major step forward when women realized that they had a right to be angry and much to be angry about. It may be, as Aristotle noted, that emotions are accompanied by pleasure or pain (often both), but they are too complex and often too subtle to be classified on that basis alone.
The study of emotions for long has been the province of ethics. Emotions were central to Aristotle’s ethics of virtue and part and parcel of the medieval Scholastics’ concern with vices, virtues, and sin. For Aristotle, having the right amount of the right emotion in the right circumstances is the key to virtuous behavior.
St. Thomas Aquinas distinguished between “higher” and “lower” emotions, the former exemplified by faith and love, the latter by anger and envy. Although moral thinking about emotions has always been concerned with emotional extremes and malformations, as in psychopathology and madness, those phenomena have never been the primary reasons for interest in the emotions. As the medieval moralists understood quite well that emotions are essential to a healthy human existence, and it is for that reason that their malfunction is so serious.
With the same impetus, analogically expressing the situation, there is similarly social pressure positively and negatively impacting the existence of the society. An individual needs to conform to those of influencing group by changing his attitude, value, or behavior. Similar to that of the dysfunction of the body due to lack of nutrients, oxygen, blood cells and the like, a person who is not well-fed, or ill mentored or others, causes negative social pressure by being misfit and thereby taking away the peace of the society.
On the contrary, people with all the necessary qualities, positively impact the social pressure. The growth and the economic development of the society with such persons are easily achieved and satisfactorily possible. To sum it up, human life is the playground for emotion and man is director of the play.
BY JOSEPH SOBOKA
The Ethiopian Herald May 6/2021
