There are many words for emotions of hesitation. Trepidation, for instance, is the feeling of an uncertain beginning. To feel rattled, on the other hand, is to be given second thoughts upon an encounter with a disturbing reality, as if one has been grabbed and shaken by it.
A contrary mood is that of the headlong urge to enter quickly into a situation without taking time to assess the risks of doing so. To feel headlong is to feel prone to taking a plunge. It’s an entryway into emotional immersion. It is the drive that takes us to the point of reckless submersion in our feelings.
The Roman philosopher Seneca described the tone of headlong emotion in the context of anger, writing that, “It does not tempt the mind but carries it off by force, and drives on those who, lacking self-control, desire the destruction, it may be, of everyone, spending its rage not only on the targets of its aim but on whatever happens to cross its path. The other vices drive the mind on. Anger hurls it headlong.”
As a Stoic, Seneca simultaneously recognized the power of emotion and sneered at it, asserting that it was something he could master. As ever with those who pretend to have mastered their emotions, Seneca wasn’t capable of considering the full range of emotional experience. He was interested in understanding emotion only in order to argue against it. So, Seneca only reflected on one version of anger: Headlong anger.
Those who have allowed themselves to become more familiar with the emotion know that anger doesn’t require impulsive action. Neither does impulsive action require anger. There is simmering anger as well as headlong anger. In addition to headlong anger there is headlong joy.
Headlong emotion can come along with anger, of course, but it is independent of anger. To feel headlong is to wish to enter an experience headfirst, not in the sense of thinking things through, but in the sense of refusing to tiptoe. When we feel headlong, we are determined to be heedless, to cast careful thought aside. It is an emotion that seeks direct knowledge, rejecting prior research and the cautions of those who have gone before.
Headlong feelings are antiphilosophical. They embrace a perspective that is entirely outside of logic, seeking subjective sensation on its own terms. Forget the dry dictum I think therefore I am. The headlong drops passive thinkings and therefores in favor of a more active motto: I am and I go.
