Is it better to suppress our negative emotions? How do we feel things like anger, envy, or spite without letting them take over and impact our relationships? Do these so-called negative emotions serve an important purpose in how we perceive the world and ourselves? 

Krista K. Thomason is a philosophy professor at Swarthmore College. Her books, Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good and Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life, deal with the philosophy of emotion and examine why negative emotions are a key component of life. 

She and Greg discuss the history of philosophical thought when it comes to emotions, why bad feelings don’t always need to be turned into something productive, and why a life free of negative emotions wouldn’t actually be fulfilling at all. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

The price you pay to master your emotions

49:52: We pay a price for the kind of control that I think we often want when we're trying to master our emotions. I think that's oftentimes what we're looking for. We're looking for safety and security, and we're looking for inner peace. We're looking for a life that is, as they say, frictionless and stress-free and all that. But I think what kind of life do we end up with if it's a kind of life where we have absolutely everything under our thumbs, and nothing escapes the boundaries of our will? What have we done? What sort of life is that? Is life in the comfortable, easy chair a life worth having, even if it never comes with any pain?

The role of emotions in self-discovery

08:24: Understanding and paying attention to your emotions is part of self-discovery. It's part of figuring out what are these things that matter to me. And sometimes your emotions will show what you're invested in and what matters to you, maybe before you fully realize it yourself. So there's this way that they can kind of point us in certain directions and help us learn things about ourselves that we may not initially realize.

Are negative emotions good?

05:45: We have this tendency to think that positive emotions are good, helpful things in our lives and that they're sources of information, but the negative emotions are somehow built on false positive beliefs. They are fundamentally irrational. They are seeing the world in the wrong ways, whereas positive emotions are seeing the world in the right ways.

On self-maturity

18:59: Emotional maturity doesn't have to mean reason controls the emotions. Emotional maturity can mean I am good at identifying what I'm feeling. I'm good at accepting that this is how I feel about something, and I'm also good at recognizing that this is how I am experiencing this situation that may or may not be reflecting how the situation actually is. But also, I'm good at just feeling my emotions without necessarily feeling like I have to do something with it.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Baruch Spinoza
• Stoicism
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Moral Saints by Susan Wolf
• Reflections on Gandhi by George Orwell
• The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
• On Solitude by Michel de Montaigne 
• Lisa Feldman Barrett

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Swarthmore College
• Professional Website

Her Work:

• Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good
• Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life