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Posted by Anne B ·

Thoughts vs feelings

curi wrote:

Feelings and thoughts are different things.

Commonly, "I think X" is a way to claim X, while "I feel X" isn't. E.g. if I say "I think rats are scary", that's a claim about the nature of rats. Whereas if I say "I feel scared by rats", then I'm talking about me rather than making an objective claim about rats.

But people often use "feel" as a synonym for "think", or are dishonest about thoughts vs. feelings, which confuses matters. E.g. they say "I feel that rats are scary." which is confusing because "rats are scary" is a thought not a feeling. "I feel" is clearer if followed by an emotion word like "happy" rather than by a thought.

So the following are more clear than "I feel that rats are scary."
  • "I feel scared when I see a rat."
  • "I feel scared of rats."
  • "I feel worried when I see a rat."
  • "I feel nervous around rats."
They all have a feeling word in them. The feeling word describes the speaker.


Comments & Events

Anne B Anne B
How about “I feel like rats are scary”? I think it’s like “I think that rats are scary”. It's not about a feeling; it's about a tentative thought or an intuitive thought or something.
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deroj deroj
“I feel like rats are scary”

How would one feel that?

I think it’s more like “I believe that rats are scary but I haven’t really thought about it or know why I believe that.”
Is something like that what you mean by:

it's about a tentative thought or an intuitive thought or something.
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Anne B Anne B
Yes, that's what I mean.
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Anne B Anne B
Now I'm wondering if that kind of "feel", where you believe an idea but haven't thought about it, is different from the kind of "feel" where you have an emotion. When you have an emotion, like fear or joy, you are also believing something but haven't thought about it.
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Anne B Anne B
A grammar thought that may or may not be relevant:

In the four sentences in my first post above, “feel” is a linking verb, like “am". You could write “am” instead of “feel” in all of them and the sentence would mean pretty much the same thing. Example: “I feel nervous around rats” —> “I am nervous around rats”

But in “I feel that rats are scary”, “feel” is an action verb. If you tried to change “feel” to “am” it wouldn’t make sense: “I am that rats are scary”
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deroj deroj
Now I'm wondering if that kind of "feel", where you believe an idea but haven't thought about it, is different from the kind of "feel" where you have an emotion. When you have an emotion, like fear or joy, you are also believing something but haven't thought about it.

Idk.
I think reading ch 2, "Philosophy and Sense of Life", in "The Romantic Manifesto" might be helpful if this interests you. Maybe also ch 1 about psycho-epistemology.
IIRC I recommended this essay before when you wrote something similar.

Rand from "Philosophy and Sense of Life" (my emphasis):

Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics, man makes choices, forms value-judgments, experiences emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. Every choice and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around him—most particularly, of his capacity to deal with the world. He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false; or he may remain mentally passive and merely react to events (i.e., merely feel). Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes a habitual pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him. What began as a series of single, discrete conclusions (or evasions) about his own particular problems, becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences. This is a sense of life. 
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