Rationality destroys ethical authenticity.
This discussion presupposes my belief that value is entirely relative.
To the individual that as a tendency to constantly analyse, I feel that moral motivation, or motivation in general, becomes a battle of mind against heart.
To an animal (of lower order consciousness) there is no deliberation about action, they act upon instinct, or emotion. The average human considers more subtle emotional drives but does not hold back in the heat of powerful feeling.
What happens (and this is partly coming from my own experience) when everything is viewed from a cautious, skeptical angle? Emotion can be viewed, as with thoughts, in what is more recently becoming popular: mindfulness. We are not our feelings, although they are a big part of being human, they can be observed. In my experience, this over analysis can cause detachment, for better or worse, and when combined with an existential approach, apathy.
There's nothing thrilling about analysing love, or humour, or excitement. There's a need for uninhabited, emotional reaction if we're going to make human and compassionate decisions. To me, the authenticity of feeling is dampened by thought.
I guess, if this was condensed into a single question:
How does one reconcile being human and emotional with being in a relative and free world, while feeling authentic and self-realised?
To the individual that as a tendency to constantly analyse, I feel that moral motivation, or motivation in general, becomes a battle of mind against heart.
To an animal (of lower order consciousness) there is no deliberation about action, they act upon instinct, or emotion. The average human considers more subtle emotional drives but does not hold back in the heat of powerful feeling.
What happens (and this is partly coming from my own experience) when everything is viewed from a cautious, skeptical angle? Emotion can be viewed, as with thoughts, in what is more recently becoming popular: mindfulness. We are not our feelings, although they are a big part of being human, they can be observed. In my experience, this over analysis can cause detachment, for better or worse, and when combined with an existential approach, apathy.
There's nothing thrilling about analysing love, or humour, or excitement. There's a need for uninhabited, emotional reaction if we're going to make human and compassionate decisions. To me, the authenticity of feeling is dampened by thought.
I guess, if this was condensed into a single question:
How does one reconcile being human and emotional with being in a relative and free world, while feeling authentic and self-realised?
Comments (38)
You mean by discussing it?
Point taken.
A specific question, how do I get angry (like, I'ma protest this shit now angry) about something that doesn't immediately arouse anger? Do you think arousal levels are fixed?
Don't they need each other?
Being clueless about what is happening usually involves a deficit in either or both experiences.
If what marks a capable organism is a way to protect themselves by operating within certain horizons, that is not to say that the mediation is without a cost.
There is no strategy that is good for all ends. That is not a good reason to let go of the steering wheel and just let everything play out without making selections.
Your starting point in thinking about the relation of feeling to rationality is an outdated one.
All rationality is inherently affective in that rationality only makes sense relative to a particular perpectival scheme, and perspectives are value systems.
While more traditional approaches in philosophy and psychology treated affective phenomena as at best peripheral to, and typically disruptive of, rational processes, embodied cognitive theories take pains to present emotion and thought as an indissociable interaction. According to current accounts, cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world . According to the newer thinking, affective tonality is never absent from cognition. "Moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical.
That does make the slightest bit of sense to me. Sorry.
Arousal being stimulation from experience (not sexual if that's what you imagined).
So intense situational circumstances naturally arouse strong emotive response in people. However our literal, intellectual understanding of a situation informs how we might emotionally react.
Im suggesting that, while some people might be biologically highly emotional, a certain intellectual awareness might dampen emotional response.
I realise that you didn't even make a statement, this is just a tangent but that's it, explained.
Agreed. However, it doesn't answer the question of being morally authentic when you don't have a baseline to choose from.
I suppose my point is, if your perspective is one of existential absurdity then how does one reconcile this with an authentic moral system.
What if our "background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities" drives us to theoretically dismantling our mood?
I still don't really understand this, even with the condensed question. Maybe if you were to give a more concrete example of a dilemma that's related to this?
In even more direct terms, "how does camus' sisyphus believe in himself?"
A concrete dilemma:
How does a person motivate themselves to protest against animal cruelty when the initial instinctive emotional reaction subsides and they're acting upon rationality, but rationally they know ethics to be absurd/relative/meaningless without emotional conviction.
My off-the-cuff reaction to that is, "If you're not feeling it any longer, why do it? Take a break for awhile." But maybe there's a good reason to keep doing something even though your heart is no longer in it?
I agree that there's reason to continue without being constantly emotionally engaged.
My point is, or at least my question: does a realisation of the absurd not constantly dampen our instinct to feel? Our thoughts inform our feelings and if our thoughts negate the inclination towards meaning then what is the result? Apathy.
Theoretically dismantling one mood doesn't leave us without any mood. There is always affectivity as a background comportment or attitude toward the world. An attitude of neutral, calm focus is still being in a mood. The world always matters to us, is significant for us, strikes us, is relevant for us, , affects us in some way.
Quoting Edward
A perspectival account of values like Nietzsche's wouldn't be 'absurd' or nihilistic to him. On the contrary, he would consider an 'authentic moral system' absurd. He would consider his ontology of the becoming of value systems to be a liberating, authentic approach to ethics.
Here's a question, do you think that emotional reactions are necessarily unhabited without rational thought? Or put in another way, is rational thought the only way emotional reactions can become 'inhabited'?
100% agree.
My issue is with a calm focused mood. I think, with philosophy this can too easily be a depressed mood. It's life affirming to be riled up and not entirely thought out.
I'm not well read on nietzsche. How exactly do people claim to obtain fulfillment from creating ones own value? I understand it as a principle but what is an example of self made value and fulfilment? It always seems vague.
Yes.
That Camusian sense of "absurd" doesn't do anything for me. I never felt any drive or inclination to see meaning or value as something objective. So the fact that it's subjective doesn't suggest any problem to me.
Sorry, I don't know what you mean exactly and by the word unhabited and do you mean uninhabited?
Yes sorry that's what i mean. I was paraphrasing your sentence, and messed up somehow :-)
The only reason I see them as authentic is that they're what defines our value and gives us motive. They surely don't have much relevance to the world without thought but too much thought and it's different.
Urm... Not really I suppose. Claws and tails? :)
Yeah, there is an abyss of sorts. We can find relative value in what we have despite this.
I've already had this discussion with you. All value is relative because it's meaningless to try and apply objectivity. You admitted it yourself.
In the same way that The Beatles aren't objectively The best band, drinking isn't objectively wrong.
Yes they define our value and motivation, but could there be anything that defines them? Or are they some force we are born with and nothing can influence it, other than maybe too much rational thought?
Claws and tails… and what about culture, tradition, upbringing? Do they also form emotional responses? And if so, does this still count as authentic, uninhabited?
No, they inform our thoughts, I would say.
Wtf is this
What? That's your actual quote.
Its not a s though some create their own value and others don't. We have no choice but to create values to the same extent that we create interpretations , perspectives, theories of our world. We are sense-making interpretative beings. It's less of a choice than that we always already find ourselves relating to our world via an explanatory scheme of one sort or another. Our choice isn't whether to have a worldview or not, its how adaptively we are able to continually adjust our perspectives to a constantly changing world.
Have you read Thomas Kuhn? He asserted that science changes by revolutions in scientific worldviews(paradigms).. Nietzsche would argue that a paradigm is also a value system. So when we move from one worldview to another we are changing our values.Cognitive therapy works by guided people toward adaptively modifying their outlooks . This is an example of attaining fulfillment through transforming our value systems. The goal is to move more and more effectively, which means creatively, through new experience.
Perhaps you could reiterate and explain more fully what you mean by “low”/“high” arousal in the brain. So please rewrite and give explanation of these terms if you can.
Generally speaking rationality is NOT separate from emotional response. We need an emotional intent in order to apply rational thought. Need gives us the means to act rationally whilst want is often confused with need due to how inaccurate our predictions of the furture are. Absurdism, to me, appears to be more about the application of worded thought as if it is a formulaic pattern build upon atomised parts - this simply isn’t proven/provable. We always end up hedging our bets to some degree or another.
I think the answer is that rationality is not inconsistent with emotion. As Hume observed, reason is the servant of the passions, not the other way around.
The goal of mindfulness is not to destroy all emotion, but to escape from overpowering, harmful emotion. Most emotions are not like that, so there is no point in employing mindfulness or other techniques to minimise them.
That ethics might seem absurd without emotional conviction is an empty theorem, since we will never lack emotional conviction. Even the Buddha had emotional conviction.