An Essay on Emotions and Reasoning
When we make decisions, essentially we are influenced more by our emotions than by reasons itself because, first, we need to perceive and understand something with emotions even before we use our intellect to judge something. Secondly, when we use logic, you follow the logic which you think is right and make the justification to believe them by finding an evidence.
Therefore, when you make a decision, first thing you are doing unconsciously is you are reacting emotionally, then you use reason to either justify your emotion or suppress it. When you chose to justify your emotion with the use of reason, you are no different from ones making emotion as a sole basis of their decision making; whereas if you are only using your reasons to suppress your emotion and making a decision against that to which your emotion could have led you otherwise is called a rational decision.
The act of finding benefits in reading novels, therefore, can surprisingly be described by this simple observation.
When you read novels, you are only thinking if this story would be good or maybe how the novel will conclude its story at the end, and nothing else.
When you hear a person says something like, novels will nourish your sympathy toward other persons, or novels will allow you to tell a good story about yourself, they are talking about the justification of their emotional attachment when emotional attachment itself is the strongest and the most decisive element in their determining to read novels.
Essentially, I believe, making decisions about our life or things that should excite us based solely on reasons and logic is entirely mechanical and robotic, and it is far from that which human beings should be doing.
David Hume put it somewhat radically by saying, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”
Our passions and emotions are the most powerful guide in our life and those emotions could be guided by our judgement of good and evils, moral or immoral, pleasure or painful, or fun or boring — all those sorts of things.
The most tragic thing can be planned by making use of human emotion. She who has control over his emotion is powerful than the person himself. All the historically regarded leaders are the ones who are most exceptional at talking to people’s emotions rather than logical mind. Teachers who are preferred by students at school are also the ones who excite students on subject rather than those who extensively list out the pros and cons of the subject on the balance sheet.
So, hereby I would like to make a case against those who “try” to find reasons in almost anything.
You are in the end slave of your passions. And human reason cannot act by itself in solitude but in accordance with our emotions. I would also go thus far as to say that extreme act of detaching oneself from emotion and passion in an attempt to become completely rational is in a way “dehumanizing” us.
Rather than becoming rational or logical at the expense of passion, one should embrace the inevitable detachment from emotion and be more sympathetic to our own feelings.
People believe in God not necessarily because they proved his existence through proof by negations but because it is true to them emotionally and spiritually. Reason indeed is not powerful than emotions and spirit.
There are some domains that reasons cannot do better than emotions — for instance, a decision about what to eat, who to trust, how to find happiness, which clothes to wear, whether to believe in human value and rights, finding truth in religion, or even finding moral laws. Those domains require the use of emotion more extensively than human reasoning because in most cases there’s no universal and absolute answer that everyone would agree to, and it is not provable with the use of logic. Mathematics, physics, biology, and other hard sciences require the power of reasoning more than that of emotions, since there exists a definite and absolute answer which is provable with reasons.
But one must never mistake also that ideas and opinions merely belong to human emotions, and any logical conclusion must go through the period in which it is possessed as an idea or opinion. Thus, a beautiful mathematical proof or brilliant observation of physics originate only from our passion and emotions.
In conclusion, we found that emotion should not always be regarded to be inferior to reasoning and that finding justification for emotional gravity is not intelligible — one should instead embrace the emotional gratification.
My opinionated and persuasive (I tried my best to be so) argument might ignite intense disagreement or oppositions even, but I am open to further discussions. Thank you my audience for sticking around.
