ABSTRACT
Our emotional lives are punctuated by peaks and troughs of feeling: episodes of sadness and envy; bouts of guilt or nostalgia; encounters with the surprising, the fearsome, or the heart-breaking. Just as important, however, are scenarios in which the affective texture of the world goes missing – when the agent is left unmoved, impassive, or dispassionate in the face of her surroundings. A loss of feeling can be temporary, for instance when a work of art leaves one cold, or when one does not react with warmth or goodwill towards another person. More significant experiences of emotional absence occur in conditions such as grief and loneliness, when familiar sources of affective engagement may lose their allure, casting a person adrift from ordinary objects of care and concern. A pervasive loss of emotion, moreover, may indicate that a person is cool and composed, or it may be a symptom of an undesirable character trait, such as aloofness or indifference. The things to which we do not respond emotionally are thus capable of revealing our underlying evaluative perspectives and our nature as creatures of feeling.
