The Theory of Emotion: The Vicious Circle
Darwin's theory of emotions, illustrated by his famous quote "Free expression of an emotion through outward signs intensifies it."
Consciousness between the inner and the outer, between feeling and its expression. In short, this theme comes up again and again in hundreds of cultures, religions, communities...
"The Feedback Loop from Hell"
This reciprocal relationship between expression and emotion reveals to us potentially virtuous or vicious cycles, as Mark Manson illustrates with his concept of the "Infernal Vicious Feedback Loop."
Our perception of causality evolves significantly over the course of our development—from a simplistic childlike view to an adult understanding often overburdened with complex and shifting narratives. Suggesting that this lost simplicity may contain valuable wisdom. Intersubjectivity in our emotional experience and elsewhere is complex and contrasting in our inter-relational relationships.
Continuing our exploration of emotions and their expression, Jean-Charles Terrassier's work on dyssynchrony in gifted children offers a fascinating perspective. This theory of dyssynchrony echoes Darwin's emotional feedback loop, but within a complex developmental context.
In gifted children, the expression of emotions is often complicated by the gap between their advanced intellectual development and the emotional maturity more typical of their age. This gap creates a gap between their intellect and their ability to socialize. Emotional expression is not simply intensified by its outward manifestation, as Darwin suggested, but is also shaped by the various developmental rates specific to each individual, creating complex interactions between cognition, emotion, and expression. Taking different forms and difficult to interpret without making generalizations.
Language is not enough at all
This is why a psychologist quickly becomes a philosopher, because despite the richness of French, words are never enough to fully express the nuances.
In this exploration of human cognitive and emotional limits, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's work on uncertainty and fragility provides a crucial first link with our subject.
His concept of the "black swan" perfectly illustrates a fundamental flaw in the human mind: our tendency to construct simplified narratives after the fact to explain unpredictable events, creating an illusion of understanding and control. This cognitive flaw directly intersects with Terrassier's dyssynchrony and Darwinian theory of emotions—we develop rational explanations for our emotional reactions that are often far more complex and unpredictable than we recognize. Rescher's epistemic humility, then, becomes essential for accepting the limits of our understanding of emotional mechanisms.
A second connection emerges with Taleb's analysis of fragility and antifragility. The human mind, particularly in its emotional dimension, exhibits a paradoxical tendency: it can be both extremely fragile in the face of certain stressors and remarkably antifragile in other contexts, strengthening itself through adversity.
This duality precisely reflects the tension Rescher expressed between the need to recognize our cognitive limits and the importance of continuing to explore beyond these limits.
My conclusion
To finalize this exploration, I would like to weave a common thread through these concepts by highlighting how, despite their philosophical richness, these traditions continually fall into extremes that neglect the essential nuance of human experience.
Darwin's theory of emotional expression, Terrassier's dyssynchrony, Manson's feedback loops, and Taleb's concepts of uncertainty converge on a fundamental reality: our human tendency to oscillate between extremes while struggling to inhabit the nuanced space between them.
In every tradition—whether it's breath as the link between material and spiritual in Hinduism, blood movement as a reflection of Qi in Taoism, or the many philosophical dualities—we find this same tension of extremes... But don't we often talk about the over-categorization and fluidity of existence?
Perhaps true wisdom lies in our ability to recognize the limitations of all these explanatory systems. To cultivate a consciousness that, like breathing itself, moves freely between categories without being locked into them—recognizing that the expression of our emotions and our understanding of the world are part of a dance infinitely more nuanced than our philosophies, however sophisticated, suggest.
In conclusion, Gödel's incompleteness theorems provide a powerful metaphor for our exploration of human emotions. Just as Gödel demonstrated that no sufficiently complex mathematical system can be both complete and consistent—that there will always be unprovable truths within the system itself—our understanding of emotions faces a similar fundamental limitation.
Experienced emotion always partially escapes its own description and formalization, creating an irreducible space between experience and its conceptualization. This incompleteness is not a failure, but rather an invitation to humility.
