The discussion around emotions, whether they are bad or good, and what stands behind them is a matter of subjectivism in most cases. In this particular one, Robert Nozick refers to the recent philosophical literary findings, which describe the structure of emotions from a threefold perspective, meaning that there are three components that stand behind a human emotion: a belief, an evaluation, and a feeling. Weighing on numerous things that come from such way of thinking, the claim that emotions equal feelings, appears as not the case. Nozick is inclined to believe that a feeling is an integral component of an emotion, meaning that it has a more narrow meaning, than emotion, as it is one of its elements. In spite of the fact that all of the components are inevitably interlinked and interdependent, they still occur no matter how objective, proportionate, correct or true they all really are. In other words, the absence of the balance among a belief, an evaluation, and a feeling does not mean that there will be no emotion whatsoever. This leads to thinking that though objectively it may seem that there are no criteria of emotional evaluation, Nozick would disagree with that point on the ground that emotion can be evaluated through the consecutive analysis and evaluation of its components. Indeed, once you think about all of the abovementioned, it will inevitably occur to you that emotions are not feelings, as the latter appears as emotion’s important foundation and component; and that emotions can be evaluated on the basis of the harmonious co-existence of its three integral elements: a belief, an evaluation, and a feeling.
As far as the structure of the emotion goes, one should understand that feelings cannot be viewed as emotions due to the fact that a feeling of, let us say, anger, does not necessarily comes out in the emotion of anger. To put it another way, feelings do not always coincide with emotions, though they present an integral part of them. Emotions are explicit, while feelings are not. It is a certainty that feelings may become explicit too, however, in order for that to happen, a belief must be true, an evaluation must be correct, and the feeling must be proportionate to the evaluation. Even if all these pieces fall perfectly into one balanced out puzzle, one still cannot argue that at least, in this particular harmonious case, a feeling is an emotion, because, it would not happen if the belief was not truthful, and most importantly, if the evaluation was not correct.
To my mind, the question of criteria of emotional evaluation is more complex for Nozick to handle, however, as it was clearly stated in the thesis statement, Nozick would probably approach this question stating that the evaluation of emotion is something that can be approached in successive step, by first, evaluating the belief, then the evaluation, and of course, the proportionality of the feeling in accordance to the previously drawn evaluation. Such argumentation may be …