Emotions embody counterfactual knowledge.
Emotions are embodied cognition. Thinking can provoke an emotional response. That response involves somatic responses that are outside of the brain. Those somatic states can then feed back to provoke or alter cognition. This loop is complex, with neither cognition or emotion being a pure or immediate activity. They each structure the state of the other.
The fear we feel when watching a horror movie is a part of the experience — we might even say the primary part. We then carry that fear forward, beyond the experience of watching the movie, into other experiences. We enjoy scaring ourselves because it allows us to experience a counterfactual in a way that feels real. This is akin to the experience of acquiring knowledge. We can be taught the algorithm to solve a math problem, but only when we know and understand it does it feel real. The state of knowledge is an internalization process. We internalize the emotional response to a situation differently than we internalize the conceptual contents of it.
When we watch a play in the theater, we experience a counterfactual timeline. We see alternate worlds and alternate versions of human experience play out on the stage. We know that the actors are not their characters. We know that the playwright has created the drama. We have an ironic position to it. We also see the drama unfold, and we experience it both conceptually and emotionally.
Shakespeare as playwright is crafting counterfactual worlds in order to allow the audience to experience an alternate timeline, an alternate version of history. These timelines are not in the course of natural time, they are fabrications. Once created, though, they take on more reality than mere “words” — the words spoken by the actors, written by the playwright. The words create a whole world capable of shaking a person who enters it. Emotional turbulence is created in the real world of the audience through contact with an alternate world on stage.
In Othello, Iago is the provider of the instruction, literally in the play. Iago is the shadow of Shakespeare the playwright, and Shakespeare is the provider of instruction that creates the “shadowing passion” of this tragic play, a simulacrum.
OTHELLO Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. (IV.1.50-52)
Actors were called “shadows” in the Elizabethan period. A shadowing passion is an imitation, a constructed drama. And Othello asserts that nature cannot imitate itself. Imitation is the work of a playwright, who instructs the actors in how to carry out a counterfactual version of reality. A passion play, in particular, portrayed a moment that overwhelms reason — the persecution and death of Christ on the cross, which ushers in an age of faith.
By invoking “Nature,” Othello is trying to rationalize his emotional state. He’s claiming that such intense feelings must be justified by reality - that nature wouldn’t create such powerful emotions randomly. His turbulent, chaotic emotions must have a cause in reality, a cause that goes beyond the mere words of Cassio. The cruel irony is that he’s completely wrong - his passion is indeed “instructed,” but by Iago’s careful manipulation rather than by any real evidence of Desdemona’s infidelity.
This line reveals a tragic flaw in Othello’s reasoning: he trusts his emotional response as evidence of truth, assuming that the intensity of his feelings proves their validity. It’s a kind of circular logic that helps him justify his growing rage while ignoring his wife’s protestations of innocence.
This moment shows Othello trying to maintain some semblance of rational thought even as he’s falling deeper into irrational jealousy. He’s attempting to make logical sense of his emotional state, but in doing so, he’s actually enabling his own manipulation.
Emotions in Shakespeare’s plays are not just feelings, but are actually a form of knowledge about what could have been - they embody the counterfactual possibilities that the play explores. Shakespeare is counting on the people in the audience to experience the inner reality of the drama emotionally, to invest themselves in his shadowing passion. The resonance of this emotional state embodies the counterfactual knowledge of the tragedy, and is carried out of the theater and into the world.
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