Our fears

When we fear the past we’re actually still looking ahead

Fear has typically been understood as a forward-looking emotion. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle defined it as that negative feeling (‘a disturbance’) that is due to ‘a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future’. From an evolutionary point of view, fear helps us avoid threats and prepares us for what could happen. It is because of the signal of fear that we find ways to escape dangerous situations like a growling wild animal or a collapsing tree. Both philosophy and psychology take this future orientation to be a constitutive feature of fear. ….[READ]