Thermal death of feelings

The cult of emotional coldness leads to limiting freedom, weakening will and denial of values

The fact that emotions are integral from a full life, it would seem, an obvious fact. At the same time, like other manifestations of the “human”, they receive different reflections and an ambiguous assessment in culture. Without even delving into cultural archeology, we can say that sensuality, sexuality, and bodily caused a different attitude in the era of antiquity, in the Middle Ages, in the New Time, in postmodern.

Moreover, it is difficult to talk about the attitude to “sensuality” and “sexuality” in the ancient world, already because these phenomena themselves fall into the focus of cultural reflection only in Christian culture. The same is with emotionality:

It is obvious that the worldview rationalism of education, the era of sentimentalism, European romanticism and psychoanalysis in different ways determine their place in a person’s life, and differently correlate with the knowledge and image of an ideal social type.

It is important to understand that all historically formed approaches to the ratio of “Reason - Feeling, Body - Soul” are a product of social design in response to an objective historical request. In other words, the absence of a specific concept or articulated value does not mean the lack of a phenomenon in reality corresponding to them. The public mind highlights in the stream of direct existence only that which meets the requirements of historical development.

Feelings and emotions are a consequence of human evolution

Speaking of value, it is also necessary not to lose sight that active usage in public discourse, by historical standards, began not so long ago, and this is also a reflection of certain changes that took place with society at a certain stage. Society as a whole, like an individual, “ripens” to a value attitude to the world.

Indeed, the design of value knowledge, the transition to thinking in categories of value becomes a significant step forward in the development of not only philosophical theory, but also culture.

A distinctive feature of value thinking is a pluralistic view of the world in accordance with the pyramid of values in which there is a place for ethical, aesthetic, and true values. The class of emotional values is still not allocated.

What makes us say about the need to articulate “emotional value” and why, in the conditions of the humanitarian crisis, whose witnesses we are for more than a decade, the importance of the conceptual unification of “value” and “emotions” is manifested?

The answer to this question is quite obvious. Interpreting reality, fixing our ideas about how it should be, we control it. In this sense, to consolidate the concept of “emotional value” in the public consciousness means to begin to cultivate it.

Emotional value and "successful person"

Meanwhile, the very lack of “emotional value” in public discourses, and in the humanitarian science of such a term as the “value of the emotional series”, is very indicative.

Economic totalitarianism, combined with technocracy, gives rise to very unilateral expectations regarding the image of a socially successful person. This trend did not arise today, and if there was such a goal before us, I would have to deepen into the process of rebirth of the Renaissance ideals of the “free creator” into the cult of an egoist with a calculator in his head, which, in fact, becomes a European authorized by Protestantism, in the era of developed capitalism. Supported by the successes of science and technology, this type remains to this day outside of competition: it is a hero of our time.

From the German romance of Hoffmann to the Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov, the “thinking class” casts doubt on the equalization of a “socially successful person” with an insensitive automatic machine or rational businessman. In the twentieth century, in the book “Eight Deadly Sins of Civilized Humanity”, Konrad Lorenz, continuing this line, writes about “Thermal Death of Feeling”:

The modern European, from his point of view, is so pampered that he is afraid of any strong feelings and eventually loses the ability to vivid emotions as such. A stereotype is fixed in society: emotional - it means that vulnerable, passionate - is not capable of acting rationally.

However, emotional reactions mean for us the moment of the personal significance of what is happening. As a result, it is necessary to admit: by drawing the ideal of the Buddhist “non -involvement”, we “promote” the emotional inaccessibility of others as a social norm, and at the same time their actual absence “here and now”, including socially determined communication.

Emotions and freedom

It is significant that all the ancient ethical systems that orient man towards equanimity, up to apathy and detachment, implied "flight from the world." In the archaic - equally catastrophic - the world, this could really be the only way of self -preservation. However, in this case, we are talking about the relatively prosperous part of the globe at the turn of the century.

If we turn to the origins of the formation of ideas about the ratio of bodily and mental, we will see that here at different times, depending on the level of development of science, things were different. Antiquity was more characteristic of the Aristotelian interpretation of the soul as an entelchy of the body, for the Christian theologian it is something more relevant from the outside, for the French materialists the “soul” - a product of physiology.

Today, we have the right to consider all these ideas outdated. Science operates with such concepts as “higher mental abilities”, without separating them from the biology of the brain. Nevertheless, we feel our mental life as a state of varying degrees of biological conditionality.

A person, of course, is determined by his own physiology, the characteristics of his own psyche, but it can overcome this determination - in situations where we are able to make a free moral choice contrary to our own nature, for example, in the acts of altruism.

The connection between moral choice and freedom in such an angle was most consistently substantiated by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and this, on the one hand, was a great theoretical achievement. On the other hand, in what arguments Kant used for this, in fact, this was a step towards the schematization of moral life and simplifying the relationship in a person of sensuality, his mental and moral life.

Emotions and duty

Kant's logic was like that. The cause of immoral acts is selfishness, rooted in sensual, animal (which for Kant is one and the same) personality nature. The sense of pleasure-fiction, produced by the activities of the sensory organs, sensuality, for this reason Kant connects with egoism, contrasting it with a rational beginning. Such a reasonable tool for regulating relations between people in its ethics becomes an artificially constructed principle - “categorical imperative”, the rule that the individual’s moral duty is strictly following.

According to Kant, it turns out that a marker of moral content in the act is his “tastelessness”: actions are not in a tendency do not cause pleasure. And there is a reason in this. Civil relations are thus higher than blood kinship, sensual drives and emotional attachments, which in theory should lead to the formation of a fair society, and the most ethical norm to give the status of something absolute, irrevocable.

With the ethics of Kant, you can argue for various occasions, but in this context it makes sense to pay attention, first of all, to Kant’s one -sided gaze to the sensuality, with which he actually summarizes the entire emotional sphere.

We can experience remorse and flour of conscience, this does not contradict the principles of the ethics of duty, but to rejoice in our own ability to act correctly, morally - it turns out, unethical. The picture arises extremely inhumane.

Contrasting the mind and animal, the beginning manifested in egoism, Kant was undoubtedly right. However, he lost one circumstance: that sensuality itself, like consciousness, is a product of long evolution, including cultural. The very full formation of a cognitive apparatus is a socially determined process. Human feelings, in other words, are not primitively biological, but a socioprodic phenomenon. We learn to feel humanly in the process of education, education and cultural formation.

The boundary that lies between the sensations that we receive thanks to the senses, and the emotional states that they give is very mobile. After all, conscious activity is a complex ensemble of states, whose beauty and wealth are determined at all in no way related to sensuality, in its primitive form, intelligence underlying self -reflection.

So, value is realized in crisis moments. Accordingly, to raise the question of the value sense of various phenomena related to emotions, we are pushed by the obvious degradation of emotional culture.

Degradation of feelings

The meaning of emotional culture for society can be considered in two aspects: how it is associated with artistic art and what are the specific social effects of its degradation.

As for the artistic sphere, the significance of emotional life for it today does not raise questions. Ideas are especially interesting, probably unknown to the general public, poets T.S. Eliot and Mikhail Kuzmin, in their essays, independently of each other, who described the process close to what is called “emotional creativity” today.

It is possible to interpret these ideas, having associated them with the essence of artistic activity. The stronger the consciousness is expressed, the more intense the experience. Artistic natures, for which concentration on themselves is associated with the need for deep processing of experience into a source of creativity (and not at all with the need to escape from the world), consciously exist at two poles (synchronism or diachrony does not matter here) - physiologically bodily and spiritually intellectually, as if stretching the world of possible experiences.

Merab Mamardashvili in one of his interviews, it is not by chance that he associates poetry with a sense of his own existence.

Self -observation, which inevitably affects the area of imagination, acts as an optical lens that seals the reality of the experienced impressions, and gives them the property of hyperreal, affecting the spiritual system of a person more than the perception of a real object. In other words, the tendency to self -contemplation does not proceed from sluggish avoidance of intense contacts with the world, but, on the contrary, from the need for strong feelings. In unforgettable experiences, they turn into a special gift of soul.

The brightness of external reality is the product of our own sensuality, aggravated by the activity of intelligence. Once having survived an unusual emotion, a thinking creature learns to dig in his senses into his feelings, like a bee into a bud, look into all eyes, listen, listen and hear.

This need is especially acute after a forced or voluntary “post” that requires the concentration of will and attention on the goals achieved, first of all, with the help of logical intelligence. Unconsciously, we take revenge, turning into an animal for some time-not in the depreciating sense with which the sensuality of Platonism correlates, but in the sense that without feelings-we are nothing.

It is the sense of smell, vision, taste and touch that introduce us into the field of unity with nature and, together with this contact recording with conscious attention, make us happy.

As for the specifically social effects generated by the “thermal death of feelings” and the depreciation of emotions, they can be associated with social atomizations, establishing control over protest emotions and value indifference.

Displaced narratives in the field of psychology of relations indicate how a modern person has impoverished in his intimate sphere, always former for a European (again due to cultural prerequisites) a source of the most powerful emotions. Of modern public discourses, not only “genius” and “genius” disappeared, but also such verbal formulas as “great love”, “eternal love”, “love to the coffin”. In one of her letters Lady Hamilton, the national hero of the British Horatio Nelson wrote the following: "My love for you goes beyond the boundaries of this world."

The very idea of ecstasy implies a way out of itself. In love ecstasy, this is an exit to another, which is existential only as an emotional act. But nothing worries today's Zumer as a violation of his “personal boundaries”. As they say, one of the two: either you love, or you retain personal boundaries. The third is not given, and Zumer prefers the latter.

I don’t need these feelings!

According to the observations of psychologists, “love to the coffin”, Zumers prefer Chilleshnship - relations without drama, on the principle of “together, while in high.” The main thing in them is functionality and pleasure without obligation.

It seems viable to the Zumers that a model of relations that cannot be called a couple in the classical sense. Lack of illusions protects from disappointments; The lack of "excessive responsibility" - from conflicts and unjustified expectations. A person who understands the moral meaning of monogamy, from such a “philosophy of love”, perhaps an unpleasant motive will remain and a line from the Soviet classic will come to mind: “Born to crawl, cannot fly.” The essence of monogamy as a project of long -term relationships is obviously not just in sexual self -restraint, but to become an emotionally mature person and learn to cope with contradictions that are inevitable in the event of a life together two different people. Not to mention the fact that the scale of the personality is measured - in one of the aspects - the level of responsibility that it is able to take.

Emotional coldness, a synonym for egoism, thus, the psychological reason for the atomization of society.

And all this is a logical continuation of the popularization of large and small insanity of “positive psychology”, apparently heading to the peoples with the aim of their most effective contacting biomass. Turning for the rejection of “negative emotions”, in fact, she turns a person into an emotional moron. Healthy emotionality is a complex dynamic process that requires not the abolition of certain natural states, but their transformation into positive quality. If a person is mentally healthy, specific negative emotions can become a springboard for his personal triumph. And in this sense they are value.

Substitution of the traditional aesthetic category of “tragic” “traumatic” is a notable result of the spread of “truths” of positive psychology. The inhabitants of the world of pink ponies are injured even by genuine art, focused on the inclusion of cathartic emotions, the final therapeutic effect of which is the more, the more traumatic in the moment.

But the point is not only this. Emotions are closely related to the will, which means with action.

Feelings and will

Emotional involvement and personal faith is the basis of successful activity. In his treatise “Personal Knowledge”, Michael Polani reasonably claims that even a scientific research scientist leads “personal passion”. In this sense, the image of the “achieveor” of “successful success” as an unemotional person contains a fundamental contradiction. Our emotions, both positive and negative, are fuel for our personal growth, for achievements, both purely spiritual and in the outside world.

When in society the course is taken to suppress emotions as a condition for “self -control”, it is worth considering. Perhaps this is how a “subcutaneous injection” is carried out against protest emotions and expressions of any protest, as a result, any manifestation of subjectivity. After all, nothing is so connected with the "life nucleus" of the personality as her feelings. The presence of a formed “value self”, in particular, implies an unheard of emotional load, because developed emotionality is a condition for value knowledge. Such is the nature of values that are not such without being personally assigned.

You can summarize. The cult of emotional coldness, the depreciation of emotions, thus, leads to a value indifference, destructive to culture.