2023-09-09 12:22:53
Opinion The bad word “felt”
The arbitrariness of the sensitive
As of: 12:31 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
How to get out of an affair with feelings
Quelle: Getty Images/Guido Mieth
The zeitgeist no longer wants to measure reality, it wants to “feel” it. No matter how many minutes the clock shows, it feels like you’ve been waiting for an hour, and that at what feels like minus ten degrees. How inflating our personal perceptions disempowers us.
It all started with the “perceived temperature”, which is now technically called “perceived temperature”. For what feels like 20 years, weather-sensitive people have been able to rely on meteorologists who ennoble the feeling of heat and cold as an objective fact in an attempt to rationalize their hypersensitivity. In the words of Wikipedia: “Perceived temperature is the perceived ambient temperature, which may differ from the measured air temperature due to various factors. It is a bioclimatic measure of thermal well-being and covers the spectrum from the feeling of warmth or heat to comfort and the feeling of cold.”
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Epistemologically, this is nonsense, because a perception is constitutively different from a measurement, even if the measurement, in order to be considered the application of a measure, must be perceived as a measurement. Although every measurement requires perception, not every perception is a measurement.
On the contrary: in order to assess the extent to which a perception corresponds to reality, measurement is required, which is no more identical with the perception than with reality, but rather serves to determine the relationship between the two. That is why there is a feeling of warmth and cold, which can more or less correspond to the temperature, but there is no “perceived temperature”. Temperatures are not felt, nor are body sizes or distances traveled. They are only measured temperatures. Well-being cannot be measured: it describes a quality, not a quantity.
Reality is to blame
Meanwhile, the feelings that have been inflated into object properties are inflated to such an extent that the “perceived temperature” can almost still pass as a concept. The linguistic trick is always the same: a past participle becomes an adjective, and the name for the result of a subject’s action becomes the nature of an object.
Anyone who accuses someone: “I feel like I waited an hour for you” risks being reprimanded: “But it was only ten minutes.” Anyone who instead gets outraged: “It feels like I waited an hour for you,” asserts himself that he is right, even if he is measuredly wrong. At the same time, the objectification of the subjective can be misused to get out of almost any affair: “It feels like the test went well” means: I feel like I did well. If I was measuredly bad, that’s reality’s fault.
The world of feelings inflated into facts is that of arbitrariness: If the extreme weather is rather non-extreme as measured, it is all the more dangerous because it is perceived extreme weather; The threat posed by Islam, on the other hand, is not as real as the feeling suggests, because it is a perceived one. In this way, feelings and facts, reality and its perception can be interchanged until the annoying object has disappeared along with the subject who experiences it.
#dont #feel #reality #blame