"Judging by Feeling"

Brian Lynch

We came to an understanding that only by taking a detailed emotional inventory, - an inventory of our anger, fear, distress, disgust, and shame and by assessing what we are really interested in and what really makes us happy- will we truly be able to change our actions.     Twelve Steps to Emotional Health, Brian Lynch, M.D

We call the above-named feelings “negative” feelings but it is important to see them as useful feelings. The psychologist Silvan Tomkins claims that we are born with innate feelings. The reason we are born with them is so that we can survive an environment that is at once dangerous but at the same time affords multiple opportunities to achieve moments of joy and long periods of interest. The “negative” feelings are, at the core, “positive” if they can be appreciated quickly and assessed as quickly as possible. Martha Nussbaum talks of our emotions as having a judgmental quality. 

We do have our interests. Tomkins was the first to point out that interest was a primary emotion and probably the most primary emotion for indeed what would we did not have our interests? 

One of the immediate dynamics of note is what happens when our interest is interfered with. I will not speak about the most common instance of that but what happens when we are involved in very common “medium” levels of interest. For example when we are interested in our work but become angry at our landlord and distressed at the state of the stock market.

A simple thought is that at once the distress and anger are in direct opposition to getting my work done but on the other hand they are in their interest. I have an interest in the stock market and in my issue with the landlord. So my anger is a type of “interest.” It augments the interest I have in my landlord, to a point. It can on the other hand also hinder it depending, of course, on the intensity of the anger. We all know if the anger becomes a wild rage it will probably only cause me more problems. Low-level anger just might, however, get someone’s attention where I was previously ignored. It, therefore, augments my interest. Here we get the “judgmental” quality that Nussbaum talks about.

Where this judgmental quality comes from is how each emotion has been associated with our life history. How we have recorded in memory each important time we were angry, or distressed, or terrified. We then now “judge” the present situation based on a synthesis of the past. This is not presented as an explanation of what Nussbaum thinks “judgment” means.