Can We Know When to Trust Our Emotions in the Pursuit?

What is actual definition of emotion? There is no actual definition even though the Oxford Dictionary defines it as: “The part of a person’s character that consists of feeling”. Emotions are one part of the Ways of Knowing. Primary emotions are:

• Happiness
• Sadness
• Fear
• Anger
• Surprise
• Disgust

Those emotions are not learnt, they are inborn, because even born blind or deaf people show these emotions. So how did emotions help us in getting knowledge during the history? I think, that the best example of this will be war, as it’s always full of emotions, such as fear, pain, hope, sorrow, loss and others.

All of them makes people’s minds unclear and spoiled so they can’t perceive the reality properly. For example, there is a story about the Second World War. One German soldier was in a special group of people who was walking through the villages gathering supplies. Once they have been ambushed by Russian partisans, they split. After some time passed, this soldier saw a house burning and a woman who was crying inside. He ran into house and saved her, but on the way back to safe place he has been shot by a Russian soldier. The great misunderstanding happened that day.

The heroism of the German soldier was understood as an attempt to kill a woman but not to safe. It happened because Russian soldier was over full with the feeling of hatred and anger to a German and couldn’t think clearly. The other example of the influence of emotions on our knowledge and its gaining is art and what we feel about it. Mainly those feelings which we experience, for example, in front of a painting or while reading a book. In my opinion, a good attempt to explain this would be an example from real life situation. Once I was in the art gallery, and it was a modern art exhibition there.

The pictures were pretty weird (that’s what I thought) and I couldn’t understand what they showed. I was thinking about the meaning for a few hours but didn’t get it. So when my parents asked me about how was it I answered them that I didn’t like it. Next time I was there with my father and it was the art exhibition of the scenery paintings. I liked them and I understood the exact meaning of them. I felt warmth of the sunny day, cold of the windy winter and sadness of the autumn just because of the emotions they incident to me.

Compare to the modern art exhibition where I didn’t understand anything because paintings didn’t incident any feelings in me that one was much better and it is only because of the feelings inside me – emotions. In conclusion, I would say that even though emotions make our minds unclear and make it much more difficult to understand the reality properly, they also help us to understand the unknown things such as paintings or music due to the emotions they are keeping inside them. What is actual definition of emotion?