Peikoff - Reason - Emotions As A Product Of Ideas Flashcards
(18 cards)
Let us begin by defining the nature of emotions and their relationship to ideas.
What is the connection between feeling and thinking?
A feeling or emotion is a …
Response to an object one perceives (or imagines), such as a man, an animal, an event.
==> The object ITSELF, however, has NO POWER to invoke a feeling in the observer.
==> It can do so only if he supplies 2 INTELLECTUAL ELEMENTS, which are necessary conditions of any emotion.
First, the person must …
KNOW in some terms WHAT THE OBJECT IS.
==> He must have SOME understanding or identification of it (whether true or false, specific or generalized, explicit or implicit).
==> Otherwise, to him, the object is nothing; it is a mere cognitive blank, to which no one can respond.
Second, the person must …
EVALUATE THE OBJECT.
==> He must conclude that it is good or bad, desirable or undesirable, for his values or against them.
==> Here too the mental content may take many forms:
==> The value-judgements being applied may be explicit or implicit, rational or contradictory, sharply defined or vague, consciously known to the person or unidentified, even repressed.
In WHATEVER FORM the individual holds his values, however, he must …
Estimate the object in accordance with them.
==> Otherwise, the object—even if he knows what it is—is an evaluative blank to him.
==> Such an object cannot trigger an emotional response.
==> Being regarded neither as a positive nor a negative, it is A MATTER OF INDIFFERENCE.
Emotions are states of consciousness with bodily accompaniments and with …
SPIRITUAL—INTELLECTUAL—CAUSES.
==> This last factor is the basis for distinguishing “emotion” from “sensation”.
==> A sensation is an experience transmitted by PURELY physical means. It is independent of a person’s ideas.
==> By contrast, love, desire, fear, anger, joy are not simply products of physical stimuli. They depend on the CONTENT OF THE MIND.
There are 4 steps in the generation of an emotion:
- Perception (or imagination).
- Identification.
- Evaluation.
- Response.
==> Normally, only 1+4 of these are conscious.
==> The 2 intellectual steps, identification and evaluation, occur as a rule w/o the need of conscious awareness and with lightninglike rapidity.
One’s value-judgements, like one’s past knowledge, are present in the subconscious—meaning by this term …
A store of the mental contents one has acquired by conscious means, but which are not in conscious awareness at a given time.
==> Under the appropriate conditions, the mind applies such contents to a new object automatically and instanteously, w/o the need of further conscious consideration.
==> To many people, as a result, it seems as if men perceive and then feel, with NO INTERVENING FACTOR.
==> The truth is that a chain of ideas and value-judgements intervenes.
Value-judgements do not exist in a vacuum:
They are formed ultimately on the basis of a philosophic view of man and life.
==> Of oneself, of others, of the universe ==> Such a view, therefore, conditions all one’s emotions.
Most people hold their views of man and life only implicitly, not explicitly. But …
Such views nevertheless are CRUCIAL.
==> They constitute the fundamental programming of a man’s subconscious.
==> As such, they shape all of his evaluative and affective life.
An emotion derives from a percept assessed within a context.
The context is a …
Defined by a highly complex conceptual content.
==> Most of this content at any time is not present in conscious awareness.
==> But it is real and operative nonetheless.
What makes emotions incomprehensible to many people is the fact that their ideas are …
Not only largely subconscious, but ALSO INCONSISTENT.
==> Men have the ability to accept CONTRADICTIONS W/O KNOWING IT.
==> THIS LEADS TO THE APPEARANCE OF A CONFLICT BETWEEN THOUGHT AND FEELINGS.
A man can hold ideas of which he is rarely or never aware and which clash with his professed beliefs.
The former may be ideas which …
He has forgotten forming, or which he has accepted only by implication, w/o ever identifying the fact, OR which he actively works not to know.
==> If he then responds to an object in terms of such hidden mental contents, it will seem to him that his EMOTIONS ARE INDEPENDENT OF HIS THINKING, and even AT WAR WITH IT.
==> In fact, his emotions are still following from his conclusions, but he does not identify these latter correctly.
Emotions are not inexplicable demons, though they …
Become that if a man holds CONTRADICTIONS and does not identify his ideas EXPLICITLY.
==> Even then, the cause of emotions remains the same.
==> Strictly speaking, a “clash between thought and feeling” is a misnomer.
==> EVERY SUCH CLASH IS AT ROOT AN IDEATIONAL CLASH.
The reason this point has eluded philosophers is the …
MIND-BODY dichotomy, which has dominated the West ever since Plato.
Reason, the dichotomy’s advocates typically claim, deals with abstractions and is therefore “pure”, “nonempirical”, “nonmaterialistic”—while emotions are …
Bodily and worldly.
==> It follows that emotions are a factor independent of man’s mind, that they are a NONRATIONAL and even an ANTIRATIONAL element built into human nature.
==> It follows further that MAN CANNOT LIVE EXCLUSIVELY BY THE GUIDANCE OF REASON, since he must also contend with and express its antithesis.
Conflicts in men, Plato maintained—the conflicts so often observed between their professed beliefs and their feelings—are a result not of avoidable errors, but …
OF METAPHYSICAL LAW.
==> The universe IS a realm of conflict (true reality vs the world of particulars), and man, the microcosm, has to REFLECT THIS CONFLICT.
==> He, too, must be SPLIT INTO WARRING PARTS, with one element (the intellect) urging him upward to the eternal, and the other (passion) pulling him down into the much of action and the physical.
Plato is the West’s most influential advocate of the reason-emotion dichotomy.
The issue, however, is wider than Platonism.
As we say in the last chapter, the cause is basically epistemological, not metaphysical.
If, in any form, intrisicist or subjectivist, …
A thinker detaches the MIND FROM REALITY, ie DETACHES CONCEPTS FROM PERCEPTS, then he can hardly avoid a whole brood of ARTIFICIAL CLASHES.
==> Including a clash between the faculty that functions by means of concepts (reason) and the faculty that responds to percepts (emotions).
==> And then he will bemoan the “frailty” of his thought in the face of his inexplicable feelings.
==> Here again we see the ugly, distorted offspring of A FUNDAMENTAL PHILOSOPHIC ERROR.
AR sweeps this traditional perspective aside.
She holds that …
Man CAN LIVE EXCLUSIVELY BY REASON.
==> He can do it because emotions ARE CONSEQUENCES GENERATED BY HIS CONCLUSIONS.
==> And man’s conclusions have this kind of generative power because they are not revelations or inventions detached from the arena of physical action.
==> CONCEPTS (including evaluations) ARE MAN’S FORM OF INTEGRATING PERCEPTS.
