The Nuance Of Emotion

The intensities of emotion are experienced by many people, including those who allow emotional appeal to guide them to arbitrary or untrue worldviews or costly practical mistakes.  What of the nuances of emotion?  Feelings can be complex to the point of conflicting with each other.  This, too, is not unfamiliar to many people who are at least focused to the minimal extent necessary to not just passively experience the many facets of the human heart, but also intentionally recognize and understand them.  Still, there is more to the nuances of emotion than even this.  It would be difficult to go even a few years and not realize or focus on this at least a handful of times unless one is intentionally fleeing from introspective knowledge of the self.  Emotion can be complex in the sense of having many variables that impact the specific feelings a person has at a specific time.

There are all sorts of "filters" that can amplify, diminish, or interconnect emotions, or maybe emphasize one emotion over the other.  Everything from one's emotional feelings towards the season of the year, one's career standing, the status of one's various relationships, one's worldview, one's natural personality, and one's perceived physical body can all come together, creating a highly nuanced, personal set of emotions interlocking in each very moment.  Emotional reactions to external events can alter the precise way one feels emotions that would or could have naturally arisen within one's consciousness even if those outer events had never happened.  When someone realizes the inherently true nature of logic and aligns their beliefs with it, they can savor emotions even down to the subtle details of how they all intersect for them as an individual, all without ever letting emotion drive them to make assumptions or pretend like emotion shapes or reveals anything about reality other than itself.

Our minds with all of their immaterial components, after all, are still part of reality, and so a rationalist who realizes that the existence of their own consciousness is absolutely certain, incapable of not being true, could explore their own mind without descending into emotionalism and find persistent awe and gratefulness over the depths of their emotions.  The numerous ways that a vast spectrum of emotional variables could come together to make a person feel certain things at a given time is just one penetrating, core truth about emotion.  Indeed, reason is a set of necessary truths that everyone (in an epistemological sense) and everything (in a metaphysical sense) is already dependent on without any possible exceptions, and emotion does not stop people from grasping this.  If it was not logically possible, there could be no such thing as emotion--not only would there not be such a thing, but there also could not be.

Rationalists have nothing to fear in thorough emotional introspection because understanding reason is not exclusive with understanding emotion, and reason is needed to understand emotion or anything else.  The depths of emotion are, once again, part of reality, as is how different individuals experience them with different filters.  This personal nature of emotion is what makes it so deeply vital for a sense of motivation, pleasure, and individual wholeness.  Even if every person could see into other minds only to find that someone else somehow has their exact same emotional states, this would not actually detract from the uniqueness or existentiality of a person's emotional variables joining together at specific moments in time as they do.  The deeper, more substantial aspect here is that this is the way their emotions are, whether or not anyone else had the same emotional states adjusted with the same emotional and situational filters.  Authenticity and understanding and accepting reality as it is, including the logical truths that one's mind exists, that it can be known with absolute certainty, and that it contains various possible emotions would still be unique because each person has to grasp all of this themselves to know it and live in light of it.

The person who is aware of the crevices, nuances, and other metaphysical aspects of their own conscious selves knows more of reality than someone who does not.  Moreover, the former kind of person is in a position to enjoy life so much more thoroughly and passionately than anyone else all without ever leaping into errors.  The nuances of emotion are so deeply personal, empowering, and even humbling at their strongest that if anyone knew what they were truly longing for, perhaps not a single soul would ever desire to be devoid of emotion even in their darkest times.  Instead, they would mourn the tragedies of choosing to embrace emotionalism over the necessary truths of reason, all while forever remaining thankful that they are not confined to an emotionless existence that lacks all the feelings that would let them savor the depths of reality, of which their own consciousness and its contents are a part.