Trigger warning

Is feeling the same as meaning? When we want to express something that we are thinking we often begin by saying "I feel that ...," which suggests that thinking and feeling are linked to the point of being indistinguishable. In today's science, thinking and feeling tend to be lumped into the same basket, both part of brain function, neurological chemical exchanges, or as some have called them in hipper computer lingo, organic algorithms. But they are very different. 

What I feel, no one actually feels. When I say that I am feeling sad, I can describe the feeling to someone else and they may have a sense of what I am talking about by relating it to their own experience. But everyone's feeling is unique to oneself alone. Feeling just happens, seemingly of its own accord. We don't ask to feel something, it arrives unbidden. Feeling is unpredictable and arbitrary. The situations that make one person feel something may make another person feel the exact opposite or nothing at all. Feeling is like water, liquid and without shape. We need to make efforts to contain it - by making sense of it. 

Meaning implies context. A knife in the hand of a diner means one thing. A knife in the hand of a mugger means quite another. And a knife in the hand of a sculptor means something else entirely. The artist Marcel Duchamp famously posed the question if a urinal was just a piece of ordinary plumbing or a work of art by submitting one for an art exhibition in 1917. Meaning is incomprehensible without context, and context changes meaning. And if that's the case, meaning by itself is arbitrary. Nothing inherently possesses a certain meaning, but rather possesses the possibilities of many meanings. What do we understand from the above example? The context is a necessary and determinant factor. And so if I told you that I saw a man with a knife, you might not be sure what to think, or you might presume. But to truly understand the meaning of the statement you would ask me other questions. Who was he? What was he doing? Where was he? And based on the answers I provided you could understand the meaning of the statement.

Feeling is a predicate to meaning, in fact it is the predicate to meaning. When we feel something what we naturally and instinctively do immediately afterward is ask ourselves what it means. But we don't do the reverse. We can not command someone to feel, but we can persuade them what their feeling means. We can also try to convince them to ignore or distrust their feelings, and since there is nothing as intimate and personal as our feeling, it is the distrust or denial of one's feeling that factors into the origin of anxiety (and its more serious variants, neurosis, depression, etc.) It is our willingness and capacity to make sense of our feelings that determines the scope of our responses. And that's tricky business, like taming and training a horse. The popular word of the day for our emotional responses is 'trigger'. People say that they get triggered by situations or by things people say, which is shorthand for having an immediate, strong and uncontrollable emotional reaction. The implication of being 'triggered' is that the people around you should avoid saying or doing certain things, a kind of warning that ones feelings are the responsibility of others and not oneself. It's a way of saying, watch what you say or do because I might explode. When I think of the word 'trigger', Roy Roger's horse (look him up) comes to my mind. That Trigger was a magnificent Palomino stallion, a movie star of the late 1930s to the early 1950s, who was said to be the most perfectly trained animal in the world. He knew 150 'tricks' including sitting in a chair and signing his name with an 'X'. He was also apparently housebroken, since as a movie star he spent so much time in hotels, theaters and hospitals (visiting sick kids). I am reminded that there was a time when audiences revered a horse who exercised grace and self-control in public. 

Okay, yes, in the end this post was about social media. And also about the cry babies in the White House and on Fox news, CNN too. We live in the era of whiners. People feel entitled to air their unfiltered feelings freely, but don't want to be responsible for the consequences. In fact they become offended when they are confronted with the consequences. There is no sense of shame, embarrassment or dignity. And because feeling trumps all other determinants of meaning (norms, ethical standards, values), there is a resistance to compromise. So to answer my first question feeling is not the same as meaning, and it shouldn't be.