Until the fall of 2008, I would have said I wasn’t afraid of mice. But then, in that fateful autumn, I went to my kitchen one night to investigate strange sounds. As I stepped across the threshold and flipped on the light, a mouse dashed across my bare foot. I unleashed the loudest and most panicked scream I’ve ever unleashed (my poor sleeping spouse thought I was being murdered). It’s the only time in my life I have ever been literally paralyzed from fear.
Nothing about my biography leading up to the night mouse would have suggested that I was afraid of mice at all, much less panic-stricken around them. I am not afraid of other rodents or reptiles. I’m an animal lover, and I even kept a mouse as a pet when I was a child. My fear of the mouse in my kitchen was a complete shock to me. I never would have predicted that emotional response, and yet there I was, hysterically screaming and shaking in the middle of my kitchen.
Our emotions often surprise us. Sometimes we’re surprised by the depth or extent of our feelings: Maybe your friend’s flippant comment hurts you far more than you expected. Our emotions can also show up at unpredictable moments. Anyone who is grieving the loss of a loved one knows that the painful, longing sorrow can pop up anywhere and at any time. Some emotions, like my fear of the mouse, can catch us completely off guard because they conflict with who we take ourselves to be. Call these alienated emotions. They aren’t uncommon. Imagine a young boy who realizes he has romantic feelings for other boys; he might experience such feelings as coming out of nowhere and at odds with who he took himself to be. Imagine further that, when he confides these feelings to his mother, she is surprised to feel confusion or shame as opposed to the warm acceptance that she would have predicted.
Alienated emotions raise all sorts of questions about the relationship between us and our feelings. One set of questions is about how we evaluate ourselves and each other for our feelings. Philosophers, such as Robert C. Solomon, Martha Nussbaum, and Robert C. Roberts, have long argued that emotions aren’t just irrational forces that take over our minds like demon possession. We have reasons for what we feel, and we can change our feelings for good reasons. If I feel guilty for forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning again, even though I said I would, it’s because I believe I’ve done something wrong—I’ve let down my spouse or failed to keep my word. My guilt is a rational response to my own actions. If I am coward, I’ll feel fear not just toward mice but toward all sorts of otherwise harmless things. Our feelings are the result of our judgments, beliefs, and traits, and that’s how we use them to evaluate ourselves and each other.
Alienated emotions don’t fit well into this picture. If my feelings genuinely surprise me, the whole point is that they aren’t the result of some judgment, belief, or trait—I don’t know where they came from. It’s tempting to say that they must be the result of some deep-down or unconscious belief that I’m not aware of. But then we’re faced with the problem of evaluating people for beliefs they don’t even know they have. Imagine the mother of the young boy who is surprised by her own shame about her son’s same-sex romantic feelings. She may completely disavow homophobia, and there may be nothing in her past to suggest otherwise. And yet here are her mysterious feelings. Explaining her feelings by appeal to an unconscious or latent belief seems to just deny the possibility of alienated emotions altogether.
The second set of questions that alienated emotions raise is about self-knowledge. Our feelings are packed with information. They tell us about the world around us—whether things are dangerous, comforting, confusing, or enraging. They also tell us about ourselves. Philosophers, for example Michael Stocker, Christine Tappolet, and Michael Brady, argue that emotions bear a close connection to values. If I am outraged when my neighbor makes a racist joke, my anger tells me that I care about equality and human dignity. Often our feelings walk lockstep with our considered values or commitments: I already know that I care about equality and human dignity, so the anger I feel about the joke is no surprise to me.
Our emotions can also help us discover what we care about. I’ve never thought of myself as an outdoorsy person, but on a recent trip to Alaska, I took a raft trip through a bald eagle preserve. I was surprised at how much I loved being on the water, decked out in a life jacket and mud boots, feeling the raft drift and turn in the natural current of the river. My raft trip has made me think that maybe I could be more of an outdoorsy person than I thought. Emotions have helped many people discover and form new hobbies, passions, and relationships. You hear stories all the time of people trying an activity for the first time and saying things like, “I just fell in love with it.”
Alienated emotions pose a challenge for self-knowledge. The whole trouble with my fear of the mouse in my kitchen is that I don’t know what to trust: my fear that night or my otherwise mouse-fear-free biography. I could try to explain away my fear by appealing to the circumstances. It was night; I was already primed for danger because of the strange noises, and the mouse’s movements were sudden. Maybe it was just a reaction. But the depth and extent of my fear makes it hard to buy that story. If we believe that emotions can help us discover things about ourselves that we don’t already know or expect, we can’t just dismiss our alienated emotions when they don’t fit our expectations. They might be right, and we might be wrong.
We have no way to know immediately which of our emotions are authentic—which ones tell us something about ourselves and which ones don’t. This mystery is at the heart of both sets of questions about alienated emotions. We might think it’s only fair to judge people for emotions that really do reflect their beliefs and traits, but which emotions do that and which ones don’t? Which emotions tell me about myself and which ones are just reactions that can be explained away? There is likely no easy answer to any of these questions, but they do suggest that we shouldn’t be too quick to ignore or explain away alienated emotions. Not every alienated emotion will turn out to be revealing; some of them may be “just reactions.” But we can’t know for sure without some serious and sustained self-reflection—without doing the work of what Talbot Brewer calls “self-elaboration.” The lesson of alienated emotions might be that we shouldn’t be too wedded to our visions of who we are. Our emotions can, and sometimes should, lead us to revise our sense of ourselves.
Krista K. Thomasson
Krista K. Thomason is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Swarthmore College. Her areas of research include moral psychology, philosophy of emotion, and history of philosophy. Her most recent book, Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good, was published with Oxford University Press in 2023.
