Going from the Subjective Emotional to the Objective

We hate breaking subjective emotional things into their objective parts. We do so for the fear of losing the fun, the charm, the mystery and the beauty of the phenomenon. In fact, we don't want to explain the beautiful and inexplicable in terms of its “constituent” parts. 

Consider, say, Love. We are enamoured and swept by love. But if someone asks a person - why exactly do you love so and so person? ENLIST the points. Lets enumerate it as a 15-point love or a 23-point love or ….. how much ever. The immediate response would be - Yuck! Don't spoil the beauty, the fun. How can you break something beautiful and emotional like love into points and parts? 

Whenever something works, and we don't know why and how it works, there is a sense of impish charm and beauty associated with it. For example, How come this batsman can hit this shot so elegantly and effortlessly? How could this Mathematician have come up with such a formula or a theorem? Why does this theorem work even though it's not yet proved?...etc.

One possible explanation for the reaction in the above example (the enumeration of love points) is that if you break the “unknown” into the “known” then you know what exactly, and the ways in which, it can get damaged, and hence you might lose it! As long as its unknown and mysterious, it is somehow “protected” and “preserved”. But one principle does seem to work - if the size is very small or very large, then enumeration and enlisting does seem to make sense. If someone is a giant scientist, then we want to know the list of his achievements, however long. If something is a trivial emotion, we want to spell out the couple of components of it. 

Anyways, the point is something else. Consider Fear. Suppose there is some big, grand, cloudy phenomenon (say a person) which is the cause of your fear and is giving you sleepless nights. Here, if you break this fear into its constituent parts - by saying things like say, “OK, what am I afraid by? What exactly? Is it the face of the person? Is it because of that specific last month’s incident? Is it….. What can be done about the second and the third points? We can fix the second one easily with a ……. Here, this is indeed a positive exercise and this splitting of a subjective emotional phenomenon into constituent points and parts only helps us and solves our problem.

The process in case of Fear turns out to be exactly opposite to that in case of Love.

So, it appears as if it is not about breaking the subjective emotional into the objective at all. If things go pleasurably, there is joy, and it's “on”! If otherwise, it's “Yuck!”!