Empowerment Through Thought

Its really weird to me, but whenver things are this busy my craving for philosophy really kicks up. In this craving, I picked up a new philosophy book from Helen De Cruz titled “Wonder Struck: How Wonder & Awe Shape the Way We Think” I’ve only just cracked it open but at the start she introduces an idea that feels really important to me.

This is the idea of epistemic emotions. These are emotions like curiosity, wonder, doubt, awe, and surprise. She defines epistemic emotions as “emotions that motivate us to explore our environment and learn more about it” Helen De Cruz is not the inventor of this concept, but something about the way she describes it really hit me.

For those of us who have spent years being gaslight, we experience the epistemic emotion of doubt SO OFTEN. We doubt our ideas, our experiences, our basic understanding of the world around us.

I’ve written to you about doubt before, but it feels so different to conceive of that experience not just as a way to question yourself, but also as itself an emotion.

Doubt is a tricky epistemic emotion because we do not want to do away with it completly. Doubt serves us. It helps us be less susceptible to people’s nonsense. It helps us question the authority figures in our lives. It helps us make sure that we are not unjustifiably confident in our own beliefs.

And doubt can be a harmful emotion. If you constantly and relentlessly direct doubt toward yourself, pretty soon you will convince yourself that you are a wholly untrustworthy source of information. This can be dangerous because then we start to rely on sources outside of ourselves to validate whatever ideas and beliefs we have.

When we think of things like doubt as an epistemic emotion, we can start to use some of the tools we have to deal with other emotions more broadly.

In Buddhist Philosophy the goal is to allow your emotions to come and go without taking them too seriously. These emotions are just visitors abd we don’t have to understand them as something deep and true about ourselves.

Maybe we can treat epistemic emotions like doubt in a similar way. We can notice when we are expereincing an intense bought of doubt. We can sit with that doubt without having to ascribe it a whole lot of meaning. Maybe we can even let those doubts arise without believing that this must mean we are unsure of everything.

What is your relationship to doubt? Do you keep a healthy balance of doubt or do you tend to let too much self-doubt surround you? I’d love to hear from you, so please comment below!