the power of a name
and the creation of emotion
It is a feature of human psychology that we can change the character of our emotions by naming or labelling them. I want to explore what the bestowal of a name does to an emotion.
Here is one world. I have been having trouble in school, things aren’t fitting together as they used to. I feel less excited going into a new project.
If I’m a particularly reflective person, I might go a step beyond feeling or experiencing these things. I might, for instance, bestow a name: “I’m feeling burnt out” or “I think I want to do something else.” In saying this, I’ve attempted to pull together the various abstract sensations and vibes I feel under a single thing.
Such a move has its benefits. I now have a single thing I can point to in explanations of my actions to others and to myself. “Sorry, I’m not feeling up to it,” I say. “Why?” they ask. Without a name, a further emotion, a response such as “Ah, I’ve just been feeling burnt out recently” my behavior risks being under-explained. But now, equipped with a name for all the things I’m feeling, I am able to respond to their question with ease.
More importantly, though, it represents a gain in my self-knowledge. I am able to move from a position where I am not that aware of what is going on inside me, where I am simply acting out a bunch of different behaviors and feeling different things, to a position where all of these seemingly disconnected pieces fit into place. They are given a purpose, a role. I can evaluate them as fitting—maybe, after all, I am right to feel burnt out—or as improper, and perhaps requiring therapy.
By bestowing a name, by calling it “burn out,” I take a new stance towards my feeling. From a certain angle, I create it—even though the building blocks were already there before—as my emotion. Before it was nothing more than a swirl of behaviors and disconnected feelings, but, only in my naming it are they pulled together such that I can feel burnt out, rather than just tired, or bored, or what have you.
Consider a different possible name I might bestow: “I think I want to do something else.”
This might seem like less of a name. ‘Burn-out’ is something you capitalize no matter where it is in a sentence, whereas, “I think I want to do something else” is more of an assessment. Calling that a name is like calling the statement “It’s 45 degrees outside” a name. It stretches the word much too far.
Yet, this isn’t entirely right. After all, “I want to do something else” is, like the name “Burn-out,” a way of pulling together my various behaviors and feelings. They all fall under the wider description of “my desire to do something else,” as manifestations of it. Again, it represents the same sort of gain in self-knowledge: only once I have understood myself as having the desire will I be able to experience all of these emotions as a desire to do something else, and, of course, to later take it up as an object of evaluation.
But hold on a moment. We’ve—well, maybe you haven’t but I sure have—gone fast and almost missed an important point. We began by imagining that I have this set of behaviors and feelings. A lack of excitement, an urge to avoid, etc,. We then surveyed one way we might ‘name’ these various behaviors/feelings, as Burn-out. We’re now considering another candidate name: as a desire to, in this case, do something else. With both candidate names, we found that it was only after we bestowed the name that we could truly feel the emotion.
We might benefit from stopping for a minute, though, and asking how it could be that all of these various feelings and behaviors are all pulled under the name of a single desire or a want, and how that could have anything to do with my ‘finally being able to feel’ it.
Here’s the start of a possible answer. Prior to some introspection, to the thought-process that ultimately leads one to bestow a name, a person possesses disconnected feelings and behaviors. A person finds himself watching videos of tourists on the streets of Venice, and reading the stories of people who have moved there, for example.
As is, however, he has not seen how these feelings and behaviors fit together. He does not have a name for them, and, at most, experiences them in blips. Yet, at some point, he gets curious. He starts to try and figure out why he is watching videos of tourists on the streets, reading the stories of people who moved there, and so on.
It will be worried that this will begin to take the form of an empirical investigation. It is not as if, after all, our imagined person will be thinking to himself, perhaps while stroking his beard, “Hmm, I wonder what possibly could be the best explanation for this behavior…Ah yes! I must wish to go to Venice!” Have we gone wrong?
No, we have not. No guess-work is necessary on the part of our imagined character. Rather, the application of a name of some sort is simply what it is for him to finally turn his attention to these behaviors and feelings—his temptation to watch videos, for example. In order for him to take his video-watching as a behavior or feeling of his that he could ask a question about, after all, he will need to have something to call it.
Yet, once he has given the feeling/behavior a name, his question will have already been answered. He now knows, in virtue of his naming it, that he is engaging in said behavior—watching the video—exactly because he wants to visit Venice.
It is not as if the bestowal of a name is a contingent feature of human psychology — one extra thing we can do to our emotions, that we might as well have done without. Rather, it makes a great deal of our reflection and psychology possible. It is only through the bestowal of a name that we are able to crystalize disconnected feelings and behaviors into a single point, to become conscious of them as ours.