Letting Emotion Ride Well-Shod Over Data

21 Sep, 2025

I spoke last week about the way Anders Kølle sees the influence of information theory upon what other outlets and thinkers have dubbed the contemporary loneliness epidemic. Very briefly, if you don’t abide by the rapid pace and uncomplicated brevity of data’s flow, you’ll be good as ostracized, left to fester in your slow-moving complexity. If you give in and more or less dumb yourself down, you’ll probably still feel the lack and longing that comes from the inability to be engaged in and with the world as a fully unique human being.

Kølle is, of course, a twenty-first-century thinker. But I’m hoping he wouldn’t be averse to pulling in a counterpart of sorts from the previous century. Within his larger discussion of aesthetic theory, Scottish philosopher R. W. Hepburn examines what he calls emotional freedom, as well as the emotional education required to attain that freedom.

Here are the basics: if we only have recourse to unsubtle emotions (such as sentimentality) for understanding, much less describing, what we feel, we’re in some sense not free. “The emotion-cliché, the stereotype,” Hepburn says, “can be seen as a trap; for it says, implicitly, that this is the only option for feeling in this sort of situation…. the less a person understands the feelings and urges in him, the more he tends to be their prey, and the less free he is with regard to them.”¹ So for example, if you’ve been told and shown all your life that anyone who disagrees with you (about anything!) should give rise within you to indignation and aggression, you probably wouldn’t consider the possibility of asking what the disagreement is about or why it exists; or of acknowledging that the disagreer’s dissimilar opinion isn’t a mark of disrespect for you, an excuse to make you mad, or an attempt to wipe your own viewpoint from the face of the earth. But never having experienced the prospect of feeling otherwise about the whole thing than you do now, you’re not free to explore additional options, much less to make a choice between them.

Hepburn says those other possibilities have probably been floating around you unnoticed all along, but unseen as they’ve been, they won’t be real alternatives; you’ll have no “effective freedom until [you] have a concrete image and a vivid realization of the options.”² Before you can even think about considering those options, much less acting in accordance with them, you need to understand where your emotions are coming from and why, and what they’re supposed to achieve—and you need to see actual examples of emotional reactions that differ from your own. To stay with our example above, those might include someone meeting an objection not with anger and hurt, but with curiosity or a request to say more. Of course, there might not be anyone around able to provide you with those examples. But with their “thick” pictures distinct from those your chosen media outlet or group of followed and followers display on social media, art and literature can deliver those illustrations.

The important point here, though, is that no matter how sophisticated a model they provide, you can’t be open to, much less learn from, art or literature if you just give them a quick glance. As opposed to the scrolling through flat streams of data Kølle describes, you have to spend time with a book or a painting or a dance performance—and during that time, you have to be fully present and involved, not paying half-attention and keeping part of your brain devoted to responding to incoming texts or push notifications. That presence is required whether your object of study is short or long, epic novel or film, haiku or koan; a work of three lines may give rise to more, and more complex and conflicting, emotions than a work that extends over three volumes. Hepburn recognizes that the process of educating your emotions isn’t easy or quick; it might even be frightening. As he acknowledges, “Emotional freedom—like any other aspect of freedom—is both attractive and uncomfortable, disturbing.” You can easily give in and backslide, retreating to your clichés “with relief, and freedom in a measure willingly lost again.”³ Education into this freedom is a slow and daunting and never completed process.

Part of the courage required for it, I think, is in having to try out these newly revealed emotions and reactions for yourself. That doesn’t necessarily mean getting up and dancing with the troupe onstage; it might simply involve writing your own poem, instead of letting AI do it for you and tell you how to feel about the subject at hand. For George Saunders, that sort of involvement is encapsulated in the act of writing and revising a piece of work until it’s become something truly your own. In the process, you emotionally educate yourself enough to be able to understand your own thoughts and perceptions, and “identify the bullshit within [yourself] (and others)”; it’s thanks to the paces you’ve put yourself through in doing it for yourself that “you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.” As Adam Kelly sums Saunders’s view, “it is about overcoming those facets of one’s own character that prevent revelation and militate against exposure”—in other words, getting past your limited experience, the certainties that have shielded you from (legitimately) feeling foolish or wrong, to face up to a world of unknowns.⁴

To take another, related example, that educational process might entail engaging in a real-time conversation, unprotected by the control allowed by a text or IM exchange. As Sherry Turkle noted over a decade ago, many of us shield ourselves behind the pauses, editing capability, and lack of physical visibility texting offers, cutting down on the risk of saying or doing something wrong by analyzing before we send it how a comment might play out. She quotes one teen’s explanation: “You have time to think and prepare what you’re going to say, to make you appear like that’s just the way you are. There’s planning involved, so you can control how you’re portrayed to this person… editing it before you send it.” Talking on the phone, on the other hand, is “too much pressure.”⁵

The planning here would seem to acknowledge a range of possible reactions—but in being unwilling to feel and act on the ones that naturally arise, you limit yourself to others’ desires, to the reactions they think will be appropriate. In other words, you’re limiting your emotional freedom, falling into the demand of Kølle’s information-flooded world to shape yourself according to others’ expectations. As the teen said, you’re only “mak[ing] it appear that’s just the way you are,” not attempting to try and find out if that way really is yours, much less whether that appearance is really worth adopting. That way also assumes the receiver can’t be trusted to recognize or value a range of possible emotional responses, including your own unmediated ones. The situation Turkle’s informant describes is a far cry from that openness to change and transformation, that in-formation Kølle asserts is essential to human relationship.

It’s also an indication of the need for emotional education, which recognizes how essential that openness to change, to different futures, is. Emotional freedom acknowledges that the world may wind up staying the same, but that it probably won’t; that freedom means not fearing or feeling threatened by potential changes and the unexpected futures they bring with them. Hepburn explains that asserting you’re “jealous or in love” brings with it implications about what will come to pass as a result. Both states, he says, “have a course or courses to run”—but if you’re exercising your emotional freedom, you know you may be surprised by what happens along that course, and you won’t allow the possibilities to be ruled by “an over-simple popular myth [that] dominates one’s understanding of how some emotion ‘must’ work itself out…. bring[ing] a sense of inevitability to what is not inevitable at all.” That sense of foreclosure might even result in an entire existence “impoverished through the tyranny of a few repetitive, blinkering, undiscriminating emotions,” even an extreme situation held captive by “a state of obsession, where only one undiscriminating, reality-distorting type of feeling is in command.”⁶

Hepburn’s limit-inducing stereotypes function in much the same way that Kølle sees the flow and collection of data as closing off potentialities and futures. “Predictive analytics” in particular, he says, is “designed to identify and comprehend events well before they take place.” Analytics’ increasing capacity to weigh in on what the future may hold is equivalent to “the colonization of the possible, the domestication of the next.” What Kølle means is that, in attempting to tell us, and tell us clearly, which decisions we’ll make, which options we’ll prefer, how we’ll react to a given stimulus or situation, predictive use of data essentially precludes the possibility of experiencing a meaningfully different future; it limits our thought and behavior to the same ways we have now of responding to particular circumstances. In showing us how we are now, this use of data “speaks solely of a world that must be but remains insensitive and blind to the things that could be.”⁷

I doubt that claim really needs to be picked apart: the tyranny Hepburn describes is all too real today, so many of us gladly ceding to demagogues our responsibility to sort through how we feel about scenarios and developments we haven’t taken the time to understand. Even he, though, might be surprised at how near an obsessive extremity we are, thanks to the influence of constant information flows and the data-based predictions they enable. All the more reason to recognize how we should consider emotional freedom anything but an egocentric luxury, and more than what the corporate world considers emotional intelligence or soft skills, marketable qualities that’ll get you a better paycheck. Instead, Hepburn says that because emotional freedom allows you to grasp how and why others might react to a given situation, it “is at least as important to the moral [social] life as a tenacious holding to principle and maxim.”⁸

When you boil education down to no-nonsense skills training, assuming people can and will figure out how to identify and work through their emotions on their own, you’re leaving them in the state of unfreedom Hepburn describes. And with a whole society composed of individuals without the freedom to determine how best to manage their reactions—among other things, with funding for the arts in schools and as part of public priorities being declared frivolous—it’s unsurprising how ready those individuals are to take offense, and how prevalent and normal reactionary impulses become. It should be no surprise, then, that I’m going to pull this runaway train to a close with a finger pointed at the humanities.

Its boosters seem to recognize on some level that goes beyond self-interest that the arts and literature Hepburn turns to can help to counter this situation. But their all-too-frequent mistake, especially for promoters of the digital humanities, is in trying to convince the powers- and assumptions-that-be that the humanities’ worth lies in keeping those powers and assumptions propped up: that their role is, in other words, to prepare the workforce to contribute to the world-as-it-is via their soft skills and good vocabulary. Their “value-add” consists of the ability to present consumer capitalism with a human face, putting an aesthetic touch on the foreclosed, very efficient futures objective data has provided us.

In trying to keep their heads above water in a world of data-driven indoctrination, these cheerleaders seem to have forgotten about the fact that education is meant, as Hepburn has it, to “put [you] in a position to choose, knowing the alternatives, the pros and cons, the strength of the case.”⁹ When the anti-university crowd alleges that college will turn kids into raging anti-left anarchists, their delusion is based on a partial understanding that students are educated to learn how to see and explore and decide upon the options. It’s just that the options they may select aren’t the ones the naysayers wanted them to embrace. Instead of attempting to allay these fears via the assurance that “no, really, philosophy will teach you how to think outside the box for the benefit of your career,” we should make clear what education—as opposed to partisan indoctrination practiced by one side or the other—should entail, and why its aspirations are pretty damn important on their own. The recognition that education in general may mean nothing more, and definitely nothing less, than an ability to reason about what you and others are doing and why: that surely won’t do anything for the survival of the humanities as an institutional force. But the admission, and the aims it signals, will at least be honest, and very, very clear.

<sup>1. R. W. Hepburn, “Of Feeling and Emotion,” in “Wonder” and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields (Edinburgh University Press, 1984), 93.↩
2. Hepburn, 93. Italics in original.↩
3. Hepburn, 100.↩
4. Saunders’s “Thank You, Esther Forbes” is quoted in Adam Kelly, New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age, Stanford University Press, 2024. Quotations from this paragraph are from 220–21.↩
5. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011), 190.↩
6. Hepburn, 93, 93–4.↩
7. Quotations in this paragraph are from Kølle, 112 and 115. Italics in original.↩
8. Hepburn, 96.↩
9. Hepburn, 102. This, versus “be[ing] indoctrinated,” which “is to be prompted non-rationally to a belief or attitude or other state of mind: without, that is, being given or encouraged to seek good grounds.” No corporate promoter of emotional intelligence that I know of would be in favor of encouraging you to seek good grounds for either maintaining or ditching capitalism, of seriously exploring, much less pursuing, alternatives to a system that makes the corporate world as we know it possible.↩</sup>

emotion education humanities technology information theory

Subscribe to Off-Modern Onions!