This book explores three emotions: shame, love, and anxiety. Shame is examined as the quintessential emotion that is too embarrassed to speak its name, love in its complex relationship with ethics, and anxiety as a fundamental human disposition capable of revealing essential truths about human existence.

Each emotion is tuned to the movement of our lives from the past (where what we feel shame about occurred) to the present (where love for another is acted upon) and into the future (with the anxiety generated by the absence of certainties).

The philosophical analysis of the three emotions aims to contribute to explaining why emotional experience, interpreted rationally, serves as a means of discovering reality and a valuable source of self-knowledge.