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Cesar asked:
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What is the difference between an emotion and a feeling? What are the common or basic emotions?
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I don't know of any philosophers who have distinguished between feelings and emotions. However, it
would make sense to say emotions are focused feelings, and that all emotions are feelings, but not all
feelings are emotions. A few feelings which I would suggest are not emotions because they are not
focused are those of calm, anxiety and general happiness or sadness.
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Aristotle thought that to be in an emotional state is to be in a certain "frame of mind", e.g. "People
who are afflicted by sickness or poverty or love or thirst or any other unsatisfied desires are prone to
anger and easily roused". There must also be a cause of the emotion, such as being "slighted" in the
case of anger, and each emotion is related to feelings of pleasure and pain. Emotions also guide our
thoughts: In the case of anger, Aristotle points out that we are led to thoughts of retaliation.
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Aristotle didn't distinguish between feelings and emotions and so analysed feelings such as calm and
friendship as emotions. He characterised calm, as a cooling down after anger, which is to continue to
respond to an external cause because you calm down in relation to the person who made you angry.
However, a person can simply be calm which is a condition rather than an emotion, or simply feel
calm for no particular reason, and calmness in these senses would not fall within Aristotle's definition
of an emotion.
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If we accept that emotions are focused (actually, or as the content of thought) on particular states of
affairs outside the body, then feelings can be characterised as unfocused internal states. A paradigm
for feeling is the physical feeling of pain. This has a cause inside rather than outside the body. To be
calm or happy in this sense, where there is no external cause, can be taken as a feeling and
contrasted with emotions. On this distinction, friendship, as directed at another person would be an
emotion.
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On this analysis, I suppose that the most common emotion is friendship. It is not really possible to talk
of common emotions in general, since many emotions, such as jealousy and anger, depend upon
one's being of a personality type.
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Rachel Browne
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