Emotional Self-Dissonance

This paper identifies and characterizes a commonplace but philosophically neglected aspect of human emotional experience, which I call emotional self-dissonance. I start from the position that emotional experiences generally involve taking things to matter in ways that reflect what we already care about. Building on this, I suggest that our various projects, pastimes, commitments, relationships, and habits together comprise an evaluative orientation through which we experience things emotionally. Although this orientation is for the most part cohesively organized, tensions within it are inevitable. I suggest that emotions of familiar kinds often incorporate a sense of these tensions. In addition, emotional self-dissonance can amount to a form of emotional experience in its own right, one that encompasses considerable variety.