How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (5 page)

Not every emotion seems to be a judgment, although most of them are. Everybody has had the experience of being melancholic all day long without actually knowing why. It is in these experiences that we realize that emotions and cognition are two different things. Some emotions seem to be rational and appropriate reactions to a situation, but we should not reduce emotion to cognition because a lot of our emotions are just stupid.

However, cognitivists have a strong point when they argue against somaticists that emotions have something of the mind and are not just bodily feelings. But is that completely true? Don't cognitivists deny the fact that our emotions also have a bodily aspect?

Body or Mind?

After half a century of discussion about whether an emotion is a bodily or a mental thing, emotion theorists got the idea that maybe it's both. Contemporary philosopher Jesse Prinz, for instance, calls an emotion an “embodied appraisal,” meaning that an emotion is an appraisal, a mental act, but it's embedded in the body.

To understand the very nature of emotion, we must include both body and mind. Emotions are both bodily and cognitive. When we're angry, we're angry at someone for a reason, but at the same time, our heartbeat increases and our adrenaline production skyrockets. Some emotions we can understand cognitively, while others seem to overcome us beyond our control, in the way that feeling ravenous can preclude a feeding frenzy. An emotion is a complex episode which includes both mind and body.

If we agree on this concept of emotion, is Barney still right when he says that he can simply stop being sad, or is he just deceiving himself? If we see emotion as something both bodily and cognitive, it becomes hard to just “be awesome instead.” If we want to be happy, do we have to
act
as if we're happy and at the same time choose to
judge
reality as fun? Or is this a naive idea?

I say that we can influence our emotions more than we're often inclined to think. Understanding an emotion as an embodied appraisal leaves open the possibility that we may be able to control our emotions. We have to understand an emotion as something we do, rather than something that overcomes us. We have the creative power to transform our emotions. This contemporary understanding of emotion can also give us a philosophical explanation of how to stop being sad and start being awesome instead.

Emotions Are Processes

Emotions are not mere bodily sensations. But they are not mere judgments either. They are complex processes which can include both. An emotion is not a singular thing. In experiencing an emotion we do a lot of stuff: we perceive a situation in a certain way, our body reacts to the situation, we judge the situation, we remember things, we try to make sense of what we feel, we feel the urge to act in some way, and we express our emotions. And in doing all this, we evoke even more emotions.

We have to think of emotions as processes. They are not entities that just sit there in our brain without changing our movements. Emotions consist of different actions we take. That's right, emotions are things we
do
. They don't overcome us, but we do them or make them. It is not a ‘doing' like playing baseball is a doing because you don't start from nothing. An emotion is a reaction to a situation, and this reaction is something we do.

Let's take the emotion of jealousy for example and try to determine its process. When someone catches his girlfriend cheating on him with another guy, he immediately feels a bodily arousal. He feels angry, disappointed, and sad. Then he'll start to think things like: “Who is this guy?” and “Why is he better than me?” and “What have I done wrong?”

These thoughts will make him feel dizzy and unsettled. He'll get angry with his girlfriend or with himself, and he'll try to find out who is responsible or guilty. Memories will pop up in his head. The story of their relationship will flash before his eyes, while the relationship is breaking apart. The situation doesn't seem to fit in the relationship story. He'll try to place the fact that he was betrayed within the story, but it doesn't seem to fit, and that makes him angry. Has she cheated on him before? Did she ever love him? He recalls his intense feelings of love for her. Then he feels that she destroyed his trust in this bond and replaced him with someone else.

The intimacy that they have shared is now shared with the other person. A strong pain in the chest may occur—the physical equivalent of a broken heart. He might start to yell at his girlfriend, he might cry or feel a complete inability to react. For a long time, he'll keep thinking about it, replaying the scenario in his mind. All these thoughts and feelings will pop up every now and then like ghosts haunting him. He'll try to cope with it by finding a reason for it. He'll look for what he has done wrong and try to justify why she did it. And he'll probably tell his story to his friends quite often.

Certainly Ted is good at this. Every time he has a date he over-analyzes everything the girl says, and he tries to understand what he feels for her. And in doing so, he talks a lot. Both Ted's way of dealing with his dates and the example I gave about jealousy are extreme cases. Most emotions don't have this intensity, but every emotion works in a similar way.

Let's see if we can find a pattern that defines this emotional process. Psychological research has proved that the emotional process consists of two episodes: direct appraisal and cognitive monitoring.

An emotion starts off with a direct appraisal. That's the first part of the process: a direct sensation of arousal. In the jealousy example, the person directly feels something when he is confronted with his girlfriend cheating on him. This feeling is also an appraisal because it is a reaction to a situation. We feel something, and we also feel it in our body, that is why we call it a gut feeling. It is a
direct
appraisal since it is not the result of a thinking process. The starting point of an emotion is not a thought or something like that. It is a primal reaction to a situation, which is to be found much deeper than in our abilities to reason. Psychologists have shown that this initial emotional state is enabled by the most primal functions of our brain. Our more advanced cognitive functions of the brain are triggered in the second stage of the emotional process.
¹

The second part of the emotional process is the cognitive monitoring of the direct appraisal. Immediately after we have experienced a direct reaction to the situation, we use our high-tech cognition to shape this emotion. This is the sequence of thoughts and events described in my example of jealousy. We over-think the direct appraisal and try to make sense of what we feel. This cognitive monitoring can take the shape of putting the appraisal into a
narrative
.

We're constantly creating narratives in order to understand ourselves and our emotions. We are constantly writing our autobiography. Current events are related to past events. We give emotions meaning by relating them to our life story. This is what Ted is doing when he talks about his dates. He does the same thing when tells his children how he met their mother.

It's this cognitive monitoring that we can partly control. Still, most of our emotions feel like they happen to us, even the
cognitive monitoring seems to come out of nothing. Well, it doesn't really come out of nothing, since the narratives that we create around it are based on narratives we have already heard. It is our past, our memories, and the people who are important to us who made us who we are. They did this by teaching us the paradigms by which we create our narratives.

Yet, we have some control over this cognitive part of the emotion process. Expression, for instance, is also part of this cognitive monitoring. In the way we give expression to our bodily sensations, we can slightly influence which directions our emotions go in. That is what Barney is doing when he says, “When I feel sad, I just stop being sad and be awesome instead.” He is using his creative power to control his emotions. He tries to take grasp of his emotions by turning the narrative of his emotions into a narrative of awesomeness.

Self-Deception

Isn't awesomizing yourself a form of self-deception? Isn't telling yourself that you're awesome in order to have the illusion of being awesome, just a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Emotions consist of narratives, and if we're able to change our narratives, we can change our emotions. So if the fact that we can control our emotions implies that those manipulated emotions are illusions, then every emotion would be an illusion. Since we partly create every emotion that we have by making a narrative, we create every emotion.

However, this argument does not hold since we could still make a distinction between the emotions we unconsciously create and those we have consciously manipulated. The creation of a narrative is not fully dependent on our free will. Narratives are influenced by a number of factors, such as interaction with significant others, childhood experiences, and other values inherent in our culture and the narratives we have encountered during our lives. So a large part of the origin of our narratives, and therefore of our emotions, finds inspiration in the environment we live in. The narratives we create are mostly based on other stories we've heard.

But true creative people like Barney create their own narratives. They're like artistic geniuses who don't imitate other paintings, models, and stories. They shape their own stories.
That's why Barney changes from being a loser into being awesome. He used to be a soft-hearted hippie and wanted to join the Peace Corps with his long-time girlfriend, Shannon. When she dumps him for a womanizer, Barney becomes another person. He chooses to be awesome instead of sad. Was this action one of self-manipulation? Yes. Do his feelings have the negative connotation of being illusions? Probably. But isn't it more important to be awesome than to be sincere? Why not manipulate your own emotions?

A good, but also slightly controversial, example is love. Can we decide to fall in love? The emotion of love is based on a narrative, which is heavily influenced by the narratives we have encountered during our lives. Some examples of these paradigmatic narratives are our parents' relationship, our own experiences; cultural values, and most importantly, Disney movies. Our high and unreachable ideals of love are mostly based on Disney movies. Disney is the direct cause of many unhappy people who have realized that their spouse is not quite like the prince or princess they had imagined.

So much about general narratives of love. But what about specific episodes of love? Can you just choose to fall in love with somebody? One thing for sure is that falling in love is something you do. Yet this is not the same as saying that it is a matter of choice. You fall in love based on who you are and based on the narratives you consist of. They don't only originate from your narratives of love, but also from the narratives of your personality and your life goals.

Falling in love with someone is putting a person into your own love narrative. So love is something we do. I have made the distinction between an ‘unconsciously done action' type of emotion and a ‘conscious action' emotion. I have argued that the conscious sort is a manipulation. But this isn't a bad thing—on the contrary, it's far more creative and courageous to manipulate your emotions.

If we apply this reasoning to love, though, this claim seems rather weird. If you consciously manipulate yourself to fall in love with someone, you will never manage to convince yourself that you actually love this person. You ‘fall' in love, you don't choose your love. So no matter how hard you try, manipulating yourself won't get you to love someone. The best you can do is to create an illusion instead of feeling a genuine emotion.

When I said that controlling your emotions is a courageous and creative thing to do, I didn't mean that you can choose to feel whatever you want. We cannot control our judgments or appraisals, as I have said. Falling in love is not a matter of choice. Yet, we can place our appraisals in a different kind of narrative. For instance, at the end of Ted's first date with Robin, he tells her that he loves her. He shows that he places his positive feelings in a totally different narrative than Robin does. She shares the same positive feelings (appraisals) about their date, yet she doesn't place them in an ‘I love you' narrative.

In the same way, we can experience a negative appraisal. We can give different expressions to this appraisal. You can say, “I have a cold, ugh, my life is worthless. I'm a complete loser. Now I have a cold and nothing is going to make me feel better.” Or you can say, as Barney would, “When I feel sick, I stop being sick and be awesome instead.”

It takes a lot of courage to awesomize yourself, because you need to fight against your routine narratives. But it is possible. Everybody can be awesome.

Awesome People and Not-So-Awesome People

We could divide humanity into two groups of people: those who are awesome, and those who are not. Not-so-awesome people block themselves. They find all kinds of excuses for not being awesome. “I don't look good,” or “I simply don't have the right social capabilities,” or—and this one is extreme—“Because of my traumatizing childhood, I will always have this low self-esteem.” These people are skilled with the abominable talent of finding reasons for why they shouldn't put energy into self-enhancement.

Still, we all carry the burden of the past with us. Some of us are less fortunate and have bad experiences which have lowered our self-esteem. Sometimes it is really difficult to overcome these issues.