Stumped by a simple question

Here's a prime example of simple questions absolutely stumping you: "Can you explain the the difference between feeling and emotion?"

That's a question I was asked by a carpentry teacher with whom I have had several philosophic discussions. But this one was different, it felt different. 

My mind felt that it knew what the answer was but somehow, deep down, I wasn't happy with what I shared.

I intuitively and almost instinctively felt that emotion had a higher weightage or bore a deeper meaning in our lives, than feeling. So my response was that feeling was how we reacted to our surroundings as a response to any physical, mental or physiological changes, and emotion was our enhanced sensorial and conscious mind acting upon those reactions. So, I told him that feelings came first and emotion later. But I also felt that emotions could be unconscious and in our banter, strangely felt that even feeling could be unconscious - especially when we don't know what we are feeling. That unawareness, that ignorance of the feeling, or even its absence, made the two seem quite close to each other.

So what was I getting wrong? I then immersed myself trying to find out the actual difference between the two.  

As per the English dictionary, FEELING can be etymologically traced back to Old English fēlan, which is to touch, or perceive by touch. This is purely sensorial - with a physiological inclination derived by the bodily senses. It has since expanded to other senses too (I feel I hear something, I feel I smell fear etc). 

Emotion on the other hand, has its etymologically in the Latin emovere, meaning to move out, to stir up, to displace.

Linguistically, the two have got entangled and are used to mean the other freely. But on closer inspection, it is clear that a degree of weightage is given to each and they are not equal.

Emotion seems to carry more weight than feeling because emotion is understood as more more inward, whereas feeling is more outward. And one can see how this happened by tracing the history of their usage.

So as per English usage and meaning, emotion > feeling. Which was what I intuitively felt, but why does that feel wrong still?

I turned to science. Neuroscience to be more precise. Here, the question was not about the definition but about sequence - what comes first. And science has a clearer answer. . EMOTION appears first, FEELING follows.

This is because the brain prefers not to process more than it needs to, and finds shortcuts for tasks it considers high priority. Emotion is a biological process triggered in the amygdala (the part that is all about flight/fight response system, acting as a kind of internal alarm system. Because of this, emotion is primary, and largely unconscious or instinctive. Neuroscience tracks emotional response through increased heart rate, increased adrenaline, rapid breathing and heightened physical reactivity.

Feeling, in contrast, is the conscious awareness of these physiological and biological changes. It is the brain's recognition of what is happening to the body. This is private, subjective and shaped by personal experiences and memory. This is triggered in the insular cortex, the region responsible for self-awareness and social cognition.

So emotion comes first, and then feeling follows. Feeling cannot happen without emotion. But emotions can occur without ever becoming a feeling.

This arguments grows more complex once awareness enters the picture. There's a debate within neuroscience that both feeling and emotions can, in different ways, be unconscious.

But the essential point is this: neuroscience us tracking timing. it is measuring which part of the brain activates first. Emotion is primary, feeling is secondary.

This is already different from everyday usage. English measures these words on the axis of cultural and social usage importance. Science measures them words on the axis of neurological sequence.

But this still wasn't enough. Having studied philosophy and a little bit of spirituality, I felt there had to be another lens.

That's when I looked at Sri Aurobindo's point of view. And it was, at first, deeply confusing. Let me try to put it simply. To understand his view, you first need to understand how he describes the structure of human experience. He speaks of different planes of being: the physical, the vital, the mental, the psychic and beyond that, the Higher Mind. Each plane has its limitations, and the journey of consciousness is to move progressively from the physical towards the higher. This is not a framework for everyone - but bear with it because what it offers is genuinely different.

According to him, both emotion and feeling belong to the vital plane - the plane of life-energy, impulse, desire, and psychological response. Both are driven, to varying degrees, by ego. But they are not equally ego-bound.

Emotion, in his view, is more thoroughly governed by ego. It is how the self responds to what is happening around it. And in that ego-centric inner life, when things don't go according to the ego's needs, emotion is what fires: anger, sadness, desire. Feeling, though within the vital plane and not free of ego, is less completely ego-driven. It is more upstream. Feeling is the is the raw signal - emotion is what ego does with that signal.

So in Sri Aurobindo's framework, feeling > emotion. But the axis is different again. It is not about sequence, and not about cultural importance. It is about how ego-contaminated each state is.

When consciousness moves upward into the psychic plane, the meaning of both words shift. EMOTIONS are transformed here, they lose their compulsive, reactive quality. Feelings are purified and deepened and not longer need to attach to an object or a self. Ordinary emotion always needs something to latch onto: a person, an loss, a threat, a desire. Psychic feeling needs none of this. It is a quality of being rather than a reaction to something. There is, in my reading, and I should be clear this is my interpretation, not a direct statement of his, no ego-driven emotion within the psychic plane. What remains is something closer to pure feeling: wide, objectless and steady.

So we have now three different lenses.

The English language, through its etymological and cultural history, gives greater social and intellectual weight to emotion over feeling.

Neuroscience tells us that emotion comes first, physiologically and neurologically, as automatic, largely unconscious, and that feeling is the conscious awareness of these bodily changes.

And Sri Aurobindo's offers a third view, in which feeling is actually the less ego-contamininated of the two, and therefore, closer to a deeper truth and inner experience.

The one thing I noticed in all of three is that each is measuring on a completely different axis. English measures importance. Neuroscience measures the sequence. Sri Aurobindo measures ego-density, or how close to the pure self each state is. They aren't disagreeing with each other - they are not even looking at the same thing. And that I think, is the real reason I felt unsatisfied after every answer I reached. I kept expecting one framework to confirm or correct the other, but they were never in conversation with each other to begin with at all.

Ironically, that feeling of knowing-yet-not-knowing is itself a quiet demonstration of the difference. The restless sense that something more was there, unnamed, just out of reach, that was a feeling. What I did with it, the drive to search, understand and eventually write this - that was the emotion.

I have my answers now, let's see what my carpentry teacher has to say about this.