Emotioning

The western culture to which we modern scientists belong depreciates emotions, or at least considers them a source of arbitrary actions that are unreliable because they do not arise from reason. This attitude blinds us about the participation of our emotions in all that we do as the background of bodyhood that makes possible all our actions and specifies the domains in which they take place. This blindness, I claim, limits us in our understanding of social phenomena. Let us reflect upon this.

1) All animals have different domains of internal operational coherences that constitute dynamic body postures through which their actions and interactions in their respective domains of existence take place. This we recognise in daily life to be similar to what happens in us by calling moods or emotions the different manners of interacting that we may observe in other animals.

2) The observer distinguishes different emotions and moods through the distinction of the different domains of actions in which the observed organisms move. Furthermore, as I have already said above (in "Rationality"), biologically, that which we distinguish when we distinguish emotions in daily life are dynamic body dispositions for actions (of course involving the nervous system) that specify at any moment the domains of actions in which the organisms move. Thus, all animal behaviour takes place in a domain of actions supported and specified at any moment by some emotion or mood. Indeed, all animal life takes place under a continuous flow of emotions and moods (emotioning) that changes the domains of actions in which the organisms move and operate, and they do so in a manner that is contingent on the course of their interactions. We human beings are not an exception to this. Moreover, in us human beings emotioning is mostly consensual, and follows a course braided with languaging in our history of interactions with other human beings. Thus, even for the recurrent interactions through which languaging occurs to take place between two or more human beings, it is necessary to occur in these a particular flow of body dispositions that moment after moment leads them to remain in recurrent interactions. When this flow of body dispositions for recurrent interactions ends, when in the course of this emotioning the emotion that leads to recurrent interactions in language ends, the process of language (the conversation) ends. In other words, languaging flows in the co-ordinations of actions of human beings in a background of emotioning that constitutes the operational possibility of its occurrence, and specifies at any instant the consensual domains in which it takes place. Still in other words, the operational coherences of languaging have the universality of the operational coherences of the co-ordinations of actions of the observers in the praxis of living, and the flow of changing emotions under which languaging occurs does not change this, it only changes the domain of actions in which languaging takes place.

3) When an observer distinguishes the operational regularities of the recursive consensual co-ordinations of actions in the praxis of living that constitute languaging, he or she speaks of logic. As such, logic is independent of the content in terms of the domains of actions involved; it is specified by the operational coherences of the praxis of living of the observer, and has the universality of the operational coherences of the consensual co-ordinations of actions to which human beings can give rise as living systems. Due to this, emotioning, as I have already said above (in "Rationality") does not constitute a flow through different logics, but only a flow through different domains of co-ordinations of actions, and rationality is not constituted by the contents of languaging, but by its operational coherences.

4) When an observer distinguishes a flow of co-ordinations of actions in language in a group of observers, he or she speaks of a conversation. As such, a conversation takes place as the operation of a group of observers within an already established domain of consensuality, or as an expansion of it, or as a process through which a new domain of consensuality arises. It is our emotioning that determines how we move in our conversations through different domains of co-ordinations of actions. At the same time, due to the consensual braiding of our emotioning with our languaging, our conversations determine the flow of our emotioning. Finally, it is at every instant the circumstances of our interactions in the domain of actions in which our conversations take place in the conservation of the particular kind of human being that we are continuously becoming in the praxis of living that generates the path of consensuality of our emotioning, and determines the course of our conversations. So, strictly speaking, human life is always an inextricably braided flow of emotioning and rationality through which we bring forth different domains of reality. And we live our different domains of reality in our interactions with others, explicitly or implicitly, in objectivity-in or without-parenthesis, according to the flow of our emotioning.

5) We modern western human beings usually claim to be rational animals in order to distinguish ourselves from other animals that we claim move only under emotional drives. That we are animals who use reason, there is no doubt. Reason moves us only through the emotions that arise in us in the course of our conversations (or reflections) within the braided flow of our languaging and emotioning. Indeed, what makes us human beings the peculiar kinds of animals that we are is not the operational coherence of our rationality, which is the operational coherence of our praxis of living as living systems in co-ordinations of actions, but our living in language in the constitutive braiding of languaging and emotioning.

6) Our emotioning also braids with our consensual co-ordinations of actions as we operate in first-order linguistic domains in our interactions with other human beings and with non-human animals. Indeed, it is this braiding of emotioning and first-order consensuality that constitutes the richness and complexity of our co-ordinations of actions with domestic animals that prompts us to call them intelligent.