Back-posted from the FB note that made me realize I should just start blogging again:
First, I will say that in this piece I use "logical" and "rational" interchangeably. And that this piece was slightly inspired by the discussion of Logicomix at Symposium tonight.
Second, I will say that I don't think emotions are irrational. I think, however, that to elucidate their relationship to rationality one has to distinguish between two different senses of emotion - so let's start there.
One kind of emotion is the fleeting, temporal kind of emotion that arises in response to a specific situation. I'll call these feelings. People often think that feelings are irrational because the intense motivating quality they have is so transient, it seems whatever it is must be ephemeral and unreal. Some people embrace strong feelings as a part of their identity; others are disquieted by the uncontrolled madness they seem to bring.
The other kind of emotion could probably be better referred to as values. These are irreducible and enduring. They evoke consistent feelings when opposed or reflected upon, but even in the absence of feelings they can be abstractly known and articulated. One can dispassionately consider them, acknowledge that they themselves have no apparent basis, yet stand firm in the conviction that there is no better basis for behavior. They rarely change, except in the case of extreme (perhaps traumatic) life experiences, or when one simply discovers a deeper-lying value that accounts for both the generality of and any exceptions to the previously held value.
Sometimes people will also say that values are irrational due to their emotionality. This is the problem with Vulcans in Star Trek, and also the problem I have with Kant. Logic is perfectly fine for deducing conclusions from a set of premises, but you get nowhere without premises. Premises, postulates, axioms by definition cannot be proven. There are always irreducibles. So when it comes to rational human behavior, values are the premises. Emotions, in this particular sense, are the premises (along with factual beliefs, of course). Vulcans say "the good of the many outweighs the good of the few," but how can one determine the good of any number, if the people in question do not respond with happiness to anything? do not desire anything? How can even survival be classified as "good" without an emotional basis? Who is to say the universe is better now, or was better 10,000 years ago before agriculture, than it would be if all humanity died off and plastic-eating bacteria took over the Earth? Only us with our will to be here.
But surely feelings are truly irrational? Well, I don't believe that either. We don't simply have feelings for no reason. We have certain feelings in response to certain situations because of our previous conditioning, particularly early childhood conditioning, and conditioning has the kinds of effects it does because it made sense in our evolutionary past. We even have feelings that seem to come from no conditioning at all (whether this perception is necessarily always correct is beside my point) and straight from some bit of our brain that still thinks it's a lizard. Think of the lover who knows xe is in no danger of losing xir partner, even perhaps aspires to polyamory, and yet feels uncomfortable and jealous in the presence of a competing-gendered person that xir partner is close to. These feelings may not be appropriate, but they are rational. They come from a sequence of operations in the brain and can be followed back to their premises. The problem is that often these premises are hundreds of thousands of years old, or at least ten to a hundred years old, and no longer true.
This is why I view feelings with mild distaste and a good chunk of distance. Feelings are never "wrong," they can be wonderful, and they can even occasionally be useful, alerting you intuitively to incongruities you might have overlooked otherwise - but they are absolutely unreliable. It's for this reason that they should never be taken at face value unless the consequence is minimal, and often should be disregarded. Here I should hasten to clarify that I mean people should disregard their own feelings, and work to extinguish them, when the feelings are not consistent with their own values and factual beliefs. But while a person should not disregard the feelings of another - to do so would be disrespectful, not to mention a poor conflict avoidance strategy - a person experiencing feelings also should not demand that others take responsibility for them.
I hesitate even to bring up for critique the concept of "validating" a person's feelings because it is so widespread and generally positively regarded, and perhaps I misunderstand the intended meaning - but it seems that demands for "validation" are an attempt to make the other person accept unexamined feelings as truth. I can accept that a person feels a certain way, I can perhaps "validate" their feeling by agreeing with it if it is based on values and factual beliefs that align with mine, and if their values differ, I can agree to disagree. But if I can see no source for their feelings based in what I know of their premises, or any premises I believe in, then it seems unfair to expect my support in sustaining or acting out that feeling, when in fact I think they are either ignorant of facts or violating their own integrity to do so. I am happy to acknowledge feelings and be sympathetic to any suffering they may cause - I think this is what "validation" ought to mean. But I don't believe it's validating to a feeling to simply put it on a pedestal without analyzing to see whether it contains some real information, or if it's a chimerical impulse that we might learn to let go of.
So that's what I think about logic and emotions. Feelings are rational, but they are not necessarily derived from sincere values or true facts. They are the outputs of a more-or-less hardwired logic system that exists in communication with, but substantially independently of, what is commonly called "rational thought". Values, on the other hand, are half the basis of the logic system we use to make considered decisions - the "do Y" to the factual "given X". It gets a little muddy because optimizing feelings can be a value, but there are still multiple ways to achieve this - through environment manipulation or through self-training - giving one the choice of how to satisfy other priorities. Emotion is in fact an integral part of human rationality.
First, I will say that in this piece I use "logical" and "rational" interchangeably. And that this piece was slightly inspired by the discussion of Logicomix at Symposium tonight.
Second, I will say that I don't think emotions are irrational. I think, however, that to elucidate their relationship to rationality one has to distinguish between two different senses of emotion - so let's start there.
One kind of emotion is the fleeting, temporal kind of emotion that arises in response to a specific situation. I'll call these feelings. People often think that feelings are irrational because the intense motivating quality they have is so transient, it seems whatever it is must be ephemeral and unreal. Some people embrace strong feelings as a part of their identity; others are disquieted by the uncontrolled madness they seem to bring.
The other kind of emotion could probably be better referred to as values. These are irreducible and enduring. They evoke consistent feelings when opposed or reflected upon, but even in the absence of feelings they can be abstractly known and articulated. One can dispassionately consider them, acknowledge that they themselves have no apparent basis, yet stand firm in the conviction that there is no better basis for behavior. They rarely change, except in the case of extreme (perhaps traumatic) life experiences, or when one simply discovers a deeper-lying value that accounts for both the generality of and any exceptions to the previously held value.
Sometimes people will also say that values are irrational due to their emotionality. This is the problem with Vulcans in Star Trek, and also the problem I have with Kant. Logic is perfectly fine for deducing conclusions from a set of premises, but you get nowhere without premises. Premises, postulates, axioms by definition cannot be proven. There are always irreducibles. So when it comes to rational human behavior, values are the premises. Emotions, in this particular sense, are the premises (along with factual beliefs, of course). Vulcans say "the good of the many outweighs the good of the few," but how can one determine the good of any number, if the people in question do not respond with happiness to anything? do not desire anything? How can even survival be classified as "good" without an emotional basis? Who is to say the universe is better now, or was better 10,000 years ago before agriculture, than it would be if all humanity died off and plastic-eating bacteria took over the Earth? Only us with our will to be here.
But surely feelings are truly irrational? Well, I don't believe that either. We don't simply have feelings for no reason. We have certain feelings in response to certain situations because of our previous conditioning, particularly early childhood conditioning, and conditioning has the kinds of effects it does because it made sense in our evolutionary past. We even have feelings that seem to come from no conditioning at all (whether this perception is necessarily always correct is beside my point) and straight from some bit of our brain that still thinks it's a lizard. Think of the lover who knows xe is in no danger of losing xir partner, even perhaps aspires to polyamory, and yet feels uncomfortable and jealous in the presence of a competing-gendered person that xir partner is close to. These feelings may not be appropriate, but they are rational. They come from a sequence of operations in the brain and can be followed back to their premises. The problem is that often these premises are hundreds of thousands of years old, or at least ten to a hundred years old, and no longer true.
This is why I view feelings with mild distaste and a good chunk of distance. Feelings are never "wrong," they can be wonderful, and they can even occasionally be useful, alerting you intuitively to incongruities you might have overlooked otherwise - but they are absolutely unreliable. It's for this reason that they should never be taken at face value unless the consequence is minimal, and often should be disregarded. Here I should hasten to clarify that I mean people should disregard their own feelings, and work to extinguish them, when the feelings are not consistent with their own values and factual beliefs. But while a person should not disregard the feelings of another - to do so would be disrespectful, not to mention a poor conflict avoidance strategy - a person experiencing feelings also should not demand that others take responsibility for them.
I hesitate even to bring up for critique the concept of "validating" a person's feelings because it is so widespread and generally positively regarded, and perhaps I misunderstand the intended meaning - but it seems that demands for "validation" are an attempt to make the other person accept unexamined feelings as truth. I can accept that a person feels a certain way, I can perhaps "validate" their feeling by agreeing with it if it is based on values and factual beliefs that align with mine, and if their values differ, I can agree to disagree. But if I can see no source for their feelings based in what I know of their premises, or any premises I believe in, then it seems unfair to expect my support in sustaining or acting out that feeling, when in fact I think they are either ignorant of facts or violating their own integrity to do so. I am happy to acknowledge feelings and be sympathetic to any suffering they may cause - I think this is what "validation" ought to mean. But I don't believe it's validating to a feeling to simply put it on a pedestal without analyzing to see whether it contains some real information, or if it's a chimerical impulse that we might learn to let go of.
So that's what I think about logic and emotions. Feelings are rational, but they are not necessarily derived from sincere values or true facts. They are the outputs of a more-or-less hardwired logic system that exists in communication with, but substantially independently of, what is commonly called "rational thought". Values, on the other hand, are half the basis of the logic system we use to make considered decisions - the "do Y" to the factual "given X". It gets a little muddy because optimizing feelings can be a value, but there are still multiple ways to achieve this - through environment manipulation or through self-training - giving one the choice of how to satisfy other priorities. Emotion is in fact an integral part of human rationality.
No comments:
Post a Comment