Baby Don't Hurt Me, Don't Hurt Me No More.

"Emotions play out in the theater of the body. Feelings play out in the theater of the mind. As we shall see, emotions and the host of related reaction that underlie them are part of the basic mechanisms of life regulation; feelings also contribute to life regulation, but at a higher level. Emotions and related reactions seem to precede feelings in the history of life. Emotions and related phenommena are the foundation for feelings, the mental events that form the bedrock of our minds and whose nature we wish to elucidate." Antonio Damasio in Of Appetites and Emotions

"On the other side of a mirror there’s an inverse world, where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love.

     And in the evening the sun is just rising.

      Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them of their pleasure.

      In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy . . .   " Antimatter by Russell Edson

       This little snippet of a fascinating article, by Demasio, sums the entire paper. It tells of the bio-psychological occurrences that are associated with humans at various levels of cognition, both conscious and not. He says that there should be a distinction between "Emotions" and "Feelings." While this is fine, he makes a distinction that is not normal to conventional thinking. This thought that the outward emotions are the cause of feeling rather than the result is different yet ingenious. In this view, feelings are a reflective process that allows one to reason actions/emotions and influence personality and future actions. With this view, the above poem becomes a story that makes sense in more than just a metaphorical way. The poem on first glance is about opposites becoming the natural order of a parallel world. But after reading the article the last few lines really stand out. "Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them of their pleasure. In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy . . ." This line becomes much more interesting with the edition of emotions preceding feelings. Their feelings of joy and sadness are different because their world is different and because emotions exhibited are different. Lovers cry because this emotion of sorrow is then reflected on the loss of time of maturity. All in all this mirror world is one that is wholly not unlike our own, but the details seem askew.

        However my one concern with this article is the lack of definition of the cause of emotions. It is mentioned that emotion is biological and that we do not need to learn how to exhibit them but why we exibit them changes. I questions this drive to show emotion and why it is undefined. This drive to exhibit an emotion is not classified by the Spinoza Appetites or Desires. I would just like to know the classifications of this state otherwise known as the emotional development. For example, anger is sometimes grown from annoyance but this is then developed from an unknown "feeling" or another appropriate word.