Truth, Beauty, and Such
Nov. 16th, 2006 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gaudiorThis idea comes out of a discussion B and I were having the other day, wherein we were arguing (as we often do) whether or not rational thought is more important than emotion. I think I've come up with an answer I'm happy with.
Post-modernists often say that we can only experience subjective reality-- that if there is an objective reality out there, we're far too limited by our own experiences and beliefs to see it. I don't think I buy this entirely, as it doesn't really give a satisfactory explanation for why all of our subjective realities so often match up so well. Almost everyone agrees that the sky is up, that people eat food, that cats are furry. The differences seem to be mostly in matters of interpretation. (I may be oversimplifying the argument).
In fact, I think we all live in both objective and subjective reality. The objective one, we know about mostly by discussing it with other people-- "You see fur, too? This must be fur, then." Objective reality, then, is what can be described with language, what can be experimented on and quantified. Objective reality is rational thought.
Subjective reality is what is harder to express, what is not shared. And I think that the way we see our own, personal, subjective reality is through our emotions. What we feel is what is true to us. It may not be true to anyone else-- it may not even make sense to anyone else, and when we try to put it into the words of objective reality, it stops making sense and we might start to deny it. But it is the clearest reflection of our truth. If you get a promotion, and everyone agrees this is a wonderful thing (more money, more status, more responsibility), and you find yourself terrified and sad, then it is your truth that you loved your old job dearly, more than you wanted "success."
Which is why emotions are important. I do believe that both subjective and objective realities are "real," and both are worth considering. But the world's truth is not always your truth, and your emotions are a powerful tool to let you know what your truth is. Which is worth listening to, because it's your head you're going to be living in for the rest of your life, not everyone else's, so you might want to know what's really going on there.
--R
Post-modernists often say that we can only experience subjective reality-- that if there is an objective reality out there, we're far too limited by our own experiences and beliefs to see it. I don't think I buy this entirely, as it doesn't really give a satisfactory explanation for why all of our subjective realities so often match up so well. Almost everyone agrees that the sky is up, that people eat food, that cats are furry. The differences seem to be mostly in matters of interpretation. (I may be oversimplifying the argument).
In fact, I think we all live in both objective and subjective reality. The objective one, we know about mostly by discussing it with other people-- "You see fur, too? This must be fur, then." Objective reality, then, is what can be described with language, what can be experimented on and quantified. Objective reality is rational thought.
Subjective reality is what is harder to express, what is not shared. And I think that the way we see our own, personal, subjective reality is through our emotions. What we feel is what is true to us. It may not be true to anyone else-- it may not even make sense to anyone else, and when we try to put it into the words of objective reality, it stops making sense and we might start to deny it. But it is the clearest reflection of our truth. If you get a promotion, and everyone agrees this is a wonderful thing (more money, more status, more responsibility), and you find yourself terrified and sad, then it is your truth that you loved your old job dearly, more than you wanted "success."
Which is why emotions are important. I do believe that both subjective and objective realities are "real," and both are worth considering. But the world's truth is not always your truth, and your emotions are a powerful tool to let you know what your truth is. Which is worth listening to, because it's your head you're going to be living in for the rest of your life, not everyone else's, so you might want to know what's really going on there.
--R
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-16 02:27 pm (UTC)Also, rational thought allows us to know more about our emotions, and our emotions allow us morality. If everyone were supremely rational but no one had any emotions, there would be no morality and society would be a place no one ENJOYED living in because people would be trying to screw you (literally or metaphorically) all the time.
It's all well and good to say you can arrive at "Murder is bad" via rational thought, but you'll arrive there via the route of practical reasons why murder might have negative outcomes. You won't arrive there via the routes of "Other human beings have the right to live," "Removing a human soul from this world is abominable," or "Human bodies should be inviolable by other human bodies," any of that stuff. Because those are all things which are routed in empathy--in the identification with other human beings. And empathy is emotional. On some level if I think murder is wrong it's because I can make the empathetic leap to how I would feel about MY murder, and identify.
You can feasibly imagine a system of law in a rationality-only world where murder was against the law for societal order reasons, but since the reasons are that of convenience the rules will be thrown out by individuals at the drop of a hat, because no one feels impassioned about them and inevitably some other benefit to murdering your coworker will eventually outweigh the risk of being jailed, assuming you can't rig your trial.
Bottom line, without emotion there is no morality, and while in fiction characters without morality are interesting, they're not the kind of people one would actually want to live with.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-16 05:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 03:26 am (UTC)I think perhaps I was more focused on the relationship between emotions and morality because although people have been known to argue that emotions aren't necessary, I've never heard anyone argue that reason should be abolished, so it didn't really occur to me that the presence of reason wasn't an unspoken premise.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-16 05:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-16 05:47 pm (UTC)Granted most of what I read is either modern cognitive psychology or 17th and 18th century enlightenment aesthetics, which gives me an odd sort of perspective on this, but here goes:
The sort of consensual-reality situation that you're describing in the linguistic context- fur- goes beyond language. Tomasello's book "The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition" is a good place to go here: as humans, to a great extent we become rational and self-aware agents through identification with other humans as other selves, from a very young age. (And pardon me if this is psych 101 to you!) In other words, the grounding of reality is, from the start, sympathy (in its original meaning). This is the same principle that grounds ethics-- the identification with and acknowledgement of the other "me"'s out there. I'm certain objective reality is out there somewhere, but what we have is more like an intersubjective reality. Even our individual and unshared reactions are governed by our upbringing to this state of affairs. Emotions are powerful actors in this field.
It has been noted since at least Descartes that rationality on its own cannot motivate any action. We must begin with a desire for something, which is essentially an emotional state-- whether motivated by bodily need, morality, or a more complex interplay of our consensual reality. Rationality is merely a tool for balancing these desires. What's more, jumping from 17th to 21st century, it may be even less than that-- it might just be a faculty for explaining our decisions to ourselves. Recent studies on decision-making that have been done here at NYU have produced results indicating that for decisions that are simple enough to be calculated mathematically, there is a statistical algorithm governed by the erratic firing of certain neurons (I can't remember the location), which *all people* follow, no matter what they give as their reason for making that choice.
Most choices are admittedly more complex than this; but the question is whether the complexity means that the math is inapplicable, or whether it means that it is simply not yet calculable.
In short, I think it's wise to avoid not just generalization about things like subjective/objective, emotional/rational, but also to avoid *categorization* of these things at all. Cognitively, our brains are constantly trying to categorize in order to maintain a hold on the surfeit of data that our senses present to us; but it's essential to understand and attempt to undercut this reflex where we can, and try to catch a glimpse of the really weird stuff about our brains and our world.
And really, really thank you for posting this, it's (obviously) fascinating to me to read what people in various fields come out with on the subject of brains. BRAAAAINS!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-16 05:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-16 09:51 pm (UTC)vincent jackson beyonce baby
Date: 2012-05-08 08:00 am (UTC)