A deep philosophical dive into Kawhi Leonard’s weird new t-shirt

New Balance debuted Kawhi Leonard’s new shirt and it’s far more confronting on a deeply philosophical level than I expected.

Playing off the stoic NBA star’s demeanor, it reads “No Emotions Are Emotions” on the front, with the phrase “Don’t Be Mad” on the back. You can take this at face value, and give it all little thought — but that’s not nearly as fun as overthinking what this shirt means.

The thesis of the Kawhi shirt is that there is no general state of being emotionless. Instead, a lack of emotion is an emotion in itself. This separates emotion from a construct like “darkness,” which is simply an absence of light, or “cold” which is a lack of heat. In the Leonard manifesto, his state of being — reserved and without grand gestures — is its own unique form. For sake of discussion, we’ll call this being “Kawhi.”

The concept of emotions is relatively recent in human history. The word itself didn’t come into consciousness until the 16th century, and while there were obviously emotions before that, the Greeks believed in strong, logical Platonic forms of emotion. For instance, love for another person and being hard-working were both loosely grouped under the term “passion.”

We’re going to assume Leonard’s shirt is an extension of his belief system. We can do this because he obviously had to sign off on the New Balance shirt before it was produced. Therefore, we can believe that Leonard believes that no emotions are emotions.

This line of thinking isn’t dissimilar to the work of William James, a psychologist and philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He posited that the burgeoning scientific community focusing on emotions as complex, deeply subjective traits needed to change. It was his belief that emotions could be analyzed and studied:

“The trouble with emotions in psychology is that they are regarded too much as absolutely individual things. So long as they are set down as so many eternal and sacred psychic entities, like the old immutable species in natural history, so long all that can be done with them is reverently to catalogue their separate characters, points and effects.”

Essentially, it was James’ belief that cataloging emotions was useful to the psychological community, differing from his colleagues at the time who thought emotions were too amorphous to study. In order to catalog these feelings, we need to have starting points. Most of us feel joy, sadness, anger etc. but there are more complex emotional constructs that could potentially be wholly unique to the individual.

It’s here we get back to “No Emotions Are Emotions.” Leonard could simply be the first human in recorded history to be in a constant state of lacking emotion. The canary in the coal mine, the patient zero — the first person to have a feeling of emptiness. Not in a way that lacks something, but rather an abundance of it.

This philosophy touts emotions as being without merit. A zen-like state, achieving “Kawhi” is to excel without need of emotional fuel. The shirt even comes with its own message for the frustrated: “Don’t Be Mad.” Not an admonishment of emotion itself, but rather the power of freeing oneself from negative emotion.

By definition, emotions are natural and instinctual ways of being. Achieving Kawhi is to replace these instinctual emotions with a null state. It rejects the notion that anyone can truly be “emotionless,” and instead achieves a new, more productive emotion in Kawhi itself.

Plato stated in the Republic that mastering and controlling emotions was the key to unlocking the power of the soul. An ideal, achievable form that valued judgement, reason and deductive reasoning over emotional rashness. It was Plato’s belief that humans should work to enforce reason over emotion — but even he came to realize this pursuit was flawed. By the end of his life, Plato no longer believed it was possible to completely divorce emotion from reason in the soul, even if he held the belief that they should be separated to achieve an ideal.

Kawhi Leonard succeeded where Plato couldn’t. Rather than trying to remove all emotion, he is replacing standard emotions with the “Kawhi,” an innate lack of emotion. To this end he has transcended base human instinct and become something special. Something evolved. This is more than a shirt; it’s a mantra that takes humanity to a new plane.

It’s also a shirt.