When we think of emotions, we think of the typical list - happiness, anger, sadness, fright - all of which are different states of your mood. However, Tolstoy doesn't delve into an important part of his theory - what are emotions, or how do we receive emotion?
A typical argument would explore how emotions come to us through experience. We learn emotions, but I would even argue that they are innate. Tolstoy would argue that emotions can't be based on the pleasure we receive from an activity or the lack thereof, because "If we sat that the aim of any activity is merely our pleasure . . . our definition will evidently be a false one." This is why he ventures further in his definition of art, arriving at the definition we know today, one that involves the communication of a specific emotion between an artist and an observer.
The problem I see in the grand scheme of things is that anything that you learn solely through experience has to have a starting place - whether your learn through the experiences of your models and then apply them to your own, or other circumstances. But in this way, you aren't learning emotions through experience, which causes me to question the origin of emotion. Therefore, I would argue that emotion is certainly (at least partly) innate. What do you all think - where do our emotions truly come from?
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