Emotions are weird. They’re primal. Primitive.
Aren’t there dystopian movies about that? I feel like I’ve seen one: “Equilibrium”: A hyper rational society where people take pills to shut off emotion.
The thing is, that reason supplies the coherent logical structures from which we build
But emotions provide the values which we build upon; the foundations.
I’m not sure we can reason our way to values. I feel like that would be dark. Utilitarian.
Reason only works if the assumptions are representative of reality or truth or fact in present time and context.
Emotion is present, viscerally rooted.
Reason is an abstraction of the present.
I’m open to like exploring this idea, the corporeality of emotion.
Emotion is like embodied reasoning, if you think about it. A more holistic form, an intuition of the present. It’s not cogitated. It’s the reaction of the body, a physical instinct, based on hormones and senses… but also… perceptions…. which are mediated by the mind, which makes it tricky, and hence irrational.
Reason is like this chain of thoughts… and it can stray too far from actuality or the present if it’s not rooted, whatever that means.
Thoughts can be present. They should be anchored to “real” things or concepts, which everyone can also refer to, and corroborate.
If they are too abstracted, it may be hard to corroborate, unless other minds follow the chain by reason on their own accord and end up at the exact same conclusion. They may contain truth.
Emotions and intuitions: They are like the realest. But also not.
Good intentions. But easily deceived
It’s like The Giver. Or Fahrenheit 451.
Reason becomes like an ideology: Axioms to live and die by, without nuance or idiosyncrasy, but pure reason.
You know what’s weird?
It’s weird that you can’t fully communicate what you “mean”. Like meaning.
You can say something, you can elaborate, but the meaning your words or actions represent are imbued with a lifetime of experiences that fall short of fully translating.
Like, you can say a sentence or write a verse, but even you may not know how to communicate the profundity a lifetime of experience has made it. Even now, all the examples that I’m trying to synthesize in my mind to produce and convey a simple idea that means something to me, and I’ll never be able to contain it all in a few words… unless you traced all my thoughts and experiences.
How many themes are recycled over time because of this?
Motifs, so profound and timeless, but they appear new when spoken by someone who tries to capture into present words, like a revelation.
William Dare 