The Emotions, Thought and Self-realisation

Abstract

The emotions are essential mediators between ourselves and the world. They point our thoughts and social systems in a particular direction and supply the moving principle. The positive emotions—love, trust, bliss, etc.—are grounded in the absolute, which is immanent and unconditional, rather than a mere regulative ideal, faith in which keeps us going, as in Kant. They are accordingly unconditional, and they underpin the conditionality of exchange relations in capitalist modernity. It is argued that the negative emotions—hate, fear, greed, jealousy, etc.—exist only in virtue of the absence or incompleteness of love; are parasitic upon love; and dissipate or block the energy of the ground state. Hence they must be cleared for self-realisation to occur. In capitalist modernity, the ideologies of rationalisation and disenchantment are driven by the negative emotions that are necessary for rationalisation to occur; reason is their slave. That was Hume’s false official position, but being a great philosopher, he also indicated the truth that this need not be so. Techniques for mobilising and expanding the creative power of thought to promote freedom are then discussed, including dialectic as a device for clearing the mind of fixated systems of thought, and Vedic and Zen practices for countering the Western obsession with the discursive intellect.