In a recent conversation somebody asked a lady how she would feel if a stranger came up, called her a bad name and walked away. Would it make her feel good or bad? She said “neither”, and that she would not feel hurt because that person “obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about”. But is it really possible to not have some kind of feeling in this situation? And what kind of situation(s), if any, are genuinely neutral?
I believe that to be alive is to have emotions. Some of us are more barriered from our emotions than others, but I believe that we all have emotions, no matter how hidden. Furthermore, I would like to experiment with the idea that this element of human existence is not something we can turn on and off. We can block our feelings from being expressed outwardly, and can even block them from ourselves, but we cannot remove them or shut them off. They are there. Also, whether we block them (from ourselves) or experience them is not within our conscious control. When we are ready to consciously experience an emotion, we will feel it. It will come up.
Is it possible for any emotion to be neutral? That is, can an emotion be both ‘not positive’ (not even slightly) and ‘not negative’ (not even slightly)? It doesn’t seem possible by definition. Is it? Is there anything about which you can say “I feel strongly neutral”?
The other possibility is that certain things stimulate our emotions, and certain things don’t. Anything that doesn’t stimulate our emotions is neutral to us. In this case the question is, can we experience something without even the slightest emotional affect? That is, are emotions just one part of our mind that doesn’t always get involved? Or, are emotions more fundamental to our mind, ever present, and always ‘touched’, like the surface of a pond, by our experiences?
The Philosophy of Psychology 