Seriously though, what the hell is an "emotional truth"?

This is not an opinion about Hasan Minhaj.

To be clear, the question does indeed come from Clare Malone’s exposé about how the comedian has been, let’s say misrepresenting, his lived experiences in his comedy career, most famously his acclaimed standup shows Homecoming King and The King’s Jester. In a nutshell, a lot of his work focused on his experiences as a brown American, the discrimination that comes with it, and how people have reacted to him pushing certain buttons. However, many of the stories he tells in those shows didn’t actually happen—for example, no one mailed anthrax to his house in response to a bit on his Netflix show Patriot Act. Fact-checkers employed by the show also reported that he would act dismissive—or even hostile—towards them and the fact-checking process in general, and this especially affected female staffers.

Minhaj keeps bringing up the phrase “emotional truth” to justify his warping of the facts. It’s in the headline, it’s peppered through the story, and the article even ends with a quote from Minhaj asserting that “the emotional truth is first. The factual truth is secondary.”1 Personally, I have no idea what an “emotional truth” even means, so the whole time I was reading, I was hoping there would be some definition. Alas, I never got one. I also didn’t get one in Nitish Pahwa’s (very good) piece in Slate that uses the phrase in the subheadline,2 nor did I get one in Seth Simons’ response.

The conclusion I gather from this is that either none of us knows what the hell Minhaj is talking about, or I’m the only one who doesn’t know.

I actually tried to look into this concept maybe two years ago for an aborted blog post,3 but I ran into trouble when the main trustworthy sources I could find were for people with philosophy doctorates, and the one introductory philosophy course I took in college did not prepare me. It’s bothered me since I gave up and returned the book to the library with my tail between my legs, and I think I knew even then that there would be a round two.

So no, this is not just about Hasan Minhaj making shit up. This is for redemption. With that, let’s begin.

When you look for the phrase “emotional truth” on JSTOR, that purveyor of slightly old journal articles and great hats, the name Ronald de Sousa invariably appears. He’s a philosopher who deals in the philosophy of emotion, a field that wrestles with whether emotions are rational, what the hell an emotion even is, and yes, whether an emotion can be “true” or “false.” Sounds promising so far. So how does de Sousa explain “emotional truth?”4

Makes sense until—uh oh. What the hell do you mean by “formal object?” This is where things started to go wrong the last time… but it’s been a few years, I have more life experience, and no one said redemption was easy. So, in actually ordinary language (thanks for nothing, Mr. Reviewer Man), each emotion has its own standards for whether we think it’s true. We judge something like fear based on whether something scary, like a rollercoaster, is actually scary, and we judge something like anger based on whether the thing that makes us angry is actually “offensive,” like if your neighbor was justified in leaving that snarky note under your door. We don’t judge the truthfulness of someone’s fear by whether the thing they’re afraid of is offensive, nor do we judge the truthfulness of someone’s anger by whether the thing they’re angry about is scary. In short, that “formal object” is the answer to “why are you feeling like this?”

But the answer to “why are you feeling like this?” doesn’t necessarily need to be 100% factually true. Take the fear of monsters under the bed, and imagine that we were judging a child’s emotion of fear like we would judge a factual truth. We know that monsters don’t exist, so when we ask the question “why are you feeling like this” to a child, and they respond with “there’s a monster under the bed,” that would lead us to say “well, monsters don’t exist, so if they can’t exist, they can’t be scary, so your fear is false.” Besides being a jerk move, de Sousa says that this approach simply doesn’t make sense. The child can know, factually, that monsters don’t exist; that doesn’t negate their scariness.

This seems to be close to where we want to be going. We’ve got truth, we’ve got emotions. But I still don’t understand what an “emotional truth” is; if anything, I have a slightly better grasp on a “true emotion,” but that’s not quite the same thing. So when I found another source—this time straight from the Canadian horse’s mouth—I thought I had hit a jackpot:

Yes! This is exactly what Minhaj was talking about, right? So what do you have to say about it?

Fucking. HELL. So that was all for nothing. I braved the cursed high school memories to delve back into JSTOR, carried that heavy-ass book to my dorm and back to the library in shame, and revived this idea actual years after I initially gave up, all just for some guy to take me on a ride and leave me at the worst destination. Hey, Ron, here’s a formal object for you: YOU COULD HAVE LED WITH THAT TWO YEARS AGO!

So do I just give up? If the guy who titled his book “Emotional Truth” has fuck all to say about what that even means in this context, should we just say that Minhaj was being a lying liar who lies and move on?

It was around here that I realized I’ve been going about this basically all wrong. Let’s go back to the very beginning of this mess, where I said “the main trustworthy sources I could find were for people with philosophy doctorates.” Two years ago, when I first googled “what is emotional truth,” pretty much what I got were blogs on writing advice and the academic sources I mentioned earlier. Usually, I disregard sources like blogs when I’m doing research, and there’s a reason for that—blogs aren’t peer-reviewed and are rarely fact-checked. But in this case, when I’m dealing with a problem of factual truth, maybe I should have fought fire with fire.

In not doing that, I missed something pretty important and so obvious in hindsight: Minhaj isn’t invoking “emotional truth” as a philosopher. He’s invoking the concept as a writer and storyteller. Now that I’m finally seeing what’s been right in front of my face, I found this post from writer Jane Friedman:

That simple, huh?

Empathy, of course, is not simple at all, nor is it a perfect analog for “emotional truth.” But in the case of Minhaj, it’s finally starting to make a bit more sense to me. He’s dealing with the problem of how to make an audience sitting in the darkness feel like they can emotionally connect to a luminous figure on a stage. It’s the problem everyone trying to tell onstage stories to pay the rent faces: audiences just don’t respond well if they feel like they don’t know you. But the clock’s a-ticking, and you don’t have hours and hours to spill your life story, so it’s the storyteller’s job to engender the most empathy as efficiently as possible. Minhaj just didn’t think the facts were enough to do that.

I meant it when I said this isn’t an opinion on whether he was right or not to take the liberties he did. Again, smarter people have gotten there way faster and more comprehensively than I ever could. But I do think it’s worth interrogating phrases like “emotional truth” when other writers, and I say this with respect, don’t unpack them. For one, if the internet does what it always does and starts using “this is my emotional truth” out of context as a blanket cover for “I straight up lied to you,” it’s helpful to know where that term comes from so you know if you’re getting the wool pulled over your eyes.

More importantly though, when I go back and read those articles and let my eyes gloss over “emotional truth” without knowing what it means, the term runs the risk of joining words like “gaslighting” and “toxic” as generic catch-alls for “bad behavior” that the internet has stripped from their original contexts and bandied about to overstate harm. Those words are just sound and fury to me now, not the helpful ways to understand how we relate to each other that they maybe once were. Not letting that happen again is worth the effort. Even if it leads you down a two-year rabbit hole into a blood feud with a guy named Ron.