Are our thoughts responsible for the way we feel or does the way we feel governs the way we think?

Question

Are our thoughts responsible for the way we feel or does the way we feel governs the way we think?

Answer 1

Rene Descartes: 'I think therefore I am'

Answer 2

I happen to think that both are correct conclusions in proportion to the individual.  Some of us are governed by our emotions, others by logic, most by a combination of both.  An example of our thoughts superseding our emotion would be philosophical contemplation.  Where as seeing someone brutally attacked stirs up emotions in us which lead us to make certain conclusions i.e. emotions governing how we think.  

Answer 3

Your thoughts control your emotions. Where would emotions come from if not from thought? If you don't know that something sad has happened, do you feel sad? Why would you? You wouldn't because the thought wouldn't be there to guide your emotions. For more on this idea, see Byron Katie's work.

Answer 4

I believe that it is the latter: our feelings govern our thoughts.

Let's say the color blue is attached to a rather melancholy memory. Everything we look at that is painted with that color leaves us with a taste of sadness which then helps us form our opinion on that blue object.

Answer 5

Mostly the latter, seeing as it all stems from that.

The latter is how a child feels.We start thoughtless, and gather feelings, which lead to thoughts. Such as the feeling of being sung to as a baby. It may lead to the thought of 'safe'. Because a feeling requires an external influence, though, it could be argued the other way.

Answer 6

How we come to feel this or that about this thing or that person is controlled by our thoughts.

"Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is an automatic indicator of his body’s welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death—so the emotional mechanism of man’s consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering. Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.

But while the standard of value operating the physical pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is automatic and innate, determined by the nature of his body—the standard of value operating his emotional mechanism, is not. Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.

Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are “tabula rasa.” It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both. Man’s emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program—and the programming consists of the values his mind chooses.

But since the work of man’s mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are the product either of his thinking or of his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought—or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations, on faith, on someone’s authority, by some form of social osmosis or blind imitation. Emotions are produced by man’s premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly."

“The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness; Ayn Rand

That is not only the Objectivist position, it is also the Naturalist position.