Emotion and sentiment: Beyond a content difference

Abstract

Although the fundamental axiom of the philosophy of emotions holds that emotions are not feelings, it has been generally understood that feelings are a fundamental part of them. In this article, I propose to maintain that feelings not only are not emotions, but that they are not a fundamental part of them either. To achieve this, we will start from the characterisation of Ekman’s basic emotions and then observe that there are certain affective states that have in common the fact of not adjusting to their characterisation. This disadjustment, added to other essential features, such as the involvement of conceptual content and cognitive penetrability, clearly define a new category of affective state that is essentially differentiated from emotions. This allows us to glimpse a much more coherent scheme of the theory of emotions with current discoveries in the field of psychology and psychiatry.