Photo by Islander Images on Unsplash

​We Feel Therefore We Are

collective effervescence, collective sadness,
​ and the primacy of shared emotions

There’s a Specific Kind of Joy We’ve Been Missing: Adam Grant NY Times, 7/11/2020

excerpts from NY Times essay by Adam Grant

Emotions are inherently social.  
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Most people view emotions as existing primarily or even exclusively in their heads. Happiness is considered a state of mind; melancholy is a potential warning sign of mental illness. But the reality is that emotions are inherently social: They’re woven through our interactions.

Emotions are contagious.
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Emotions are like contagious diseases: They can spread from person to person. “Emotional contagion is when we are literally infected with other people’s emotions,” my colleague Sigal Barsade, a Wharton management professor and a leading researcher on the topic, has explained. “In almost all of our studies, what we have found is that people don’t realize it’s happening.”

People are happier when they pursue happiness collectively, through caring and contributing to the well-being of others.

Psychologists find that in cultures where people pursue happiness individually, they may actually become lonelier. But in cultures where they pursue happiness socially — through connecting, caring and contributing — people appear to be more likely to gain well-being.

We find our greatest happiness in moments of collective effervescence.
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We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence. It’s a concept coined in the early 20th century by the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the sense of energy and harmony people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose. Collective effervescence is the synchrony you feel when you slide into rhythm with strangers on a dance floor, colleagues in a brainstorming session, cousins at a religious service or teammates on a soccer field. And during this pandemic, it’s been largely absent from our lives...Collective effervescence happens when joie de vivre spreads through a group.

Emotions can be spread through social media and text messages, too.

Studies show that if your spouse, your family member or your roommate develops depression, you’re at heightened risk for it. And contagion isn’t limited to face-to-face interaction: Emotions can spread through social media posts and text messages, too.

Whitehead on feeling the feeling in another.

The organic philosophy interprets experience as meaning the ‘self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.

The primitive form of physical experience is emotional— blind emotion— received as felt elsewhere in another occasion and conformally appropriated as a subjective passion. In the language appropriate to the higher stages of experience, The primitive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another.


Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28)  Free Press. Kindle Edition.

The Primacy of Shared Emotions

I have been wondering why I so enjoy watching other people dance, even as I cannot dance very well.  And why, at family gatherings, I so enjoy laughing with friends and family, even if I'm not sure what was so funny.  And why I enjoy watching kids celebrating at a little league baseball game, even as I am sitting in the stands.  I've also been wondering why I feel sad when I am mourning with others, even as, in isolation, I might not have felt so sad. 

I should have known. Emotions are contagious.  The emotions at issue can be positive (a sense of flourishing), negative (a deep sadness), or somewhere in between, but we feel these emotions, not simply because they originate in our heads, but because we catch them from others and share them.  It is an illusion to think that emotions simply begin inside us as utterly private affairs.  They also begin outside us and we catch them, not unlike the way that we catch diseases, except that some of the emotions we "catch" are very positive and life nourishing.

We learn about shared emotions from contemporary psychology, and we also learn about them from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, with his idea that each and every experience we undergo begins with feelings of the feelings of others.  The primitive or fundamental basis of each experience is, in his words, blind emotion received as felt elsewhere from another occasion and conformally appropriated.

Whitehead speaks of this conformal appropriaction as "experience in the mode of causal efficacy" and says that even the soul of the universe, even God, feels the feelings of others (each and every actual occasion in the universe)  Whitehead calls it the "consequent nature of God" envisions it as an everlasting, all inclusive subjective experience of empathy, of "feeling the feelings" of all.  God is the deep empathy.

God or no God, Whitehead offers a cosmology that fits the evidence of psychological research, suggesting that not only human beings, but all beings, feel the feelings of others.  Each and every actuality, microscopic and macroscopic - actualities in outer space and actualities on planet earth, actualities in the four dimensional universe and actualities in universes with other dimensions, actualities within our bodies and actualities in the faraway regions - begins with feeling the feelings of others.  We live in a universe where connections are emotional.  Inter-being is inter-emotionality.  Collective evervescence is one form that shared emotion can take at its best.  Collective bitterness and sadness are still others.  But one thing is clear; if we are to understand what's happening and beyond us, we must take into account shared subjective forms (Whitehead's phrase), shared emotions.  Descartes said "I think therefore I am."  He might as easily and better said, "We feel therefore we are." 

​- Jay McDaniel, July 11, 2021