belief – Observations and Misunderstandings

The emotions eh, who’d have them. Well most people actually. The suffering and torment of cognitive and physiological reactions that make no sense to us what so ever. More learned people than I am believe similar to me and equally more learned people think differently to me. When something makes little sense trying to form your own argument while being aware of such varied and different ideas simply makes the head spin further. Yet this is philosophy, finding a (temporary) point when you think you get it and being able to bask in your own glorious comprehension gives the self doubt it’s own value and makes it all worth it. And doubt I did, and momentarily bask a little too but only a little of course.

The module is now complete and while there was a lack of posts in here on my progress, or as a means to achieve progress, it feels right before moving on to the next module to cover a little of what I think I learnt. I won’t necessarily give an overview of the Philosophy of Emotions as that is too much of a task and there is not enough space or I suspect appetite for it, mine mainly, but will go over the question I answered for the assignment.

‘Being horrified by the events of the Rwandan genocide or Jewish holocaust justifies you in believing that those events were horrendous atrocities.’ Discuss.

Seems pretty straightforward I hear you say but what if you were to reframe the question using kittens instead as the object. It doesn’t seem quite so justified then, they’re only kittens and kittens are cute, genocide is quite clearly not. Ultimately the question is one of whether our emotions can justify our beliefs. For better or worse I argued not. They may influence our beliefs and help us to understand our beliefs, or help us understand whether our beliefs need deeper contemplation, but they’re on the whole too unreliable to justify what we believe about something. We form our beliefs, I argued, through a continually evolving conscious and unconscious process of reflection. Arguably this would be a form of conditioning, but it also comes down to experience and knowledge amongst other things. As our emotional intelligence and maturity increases, if it does, then we can trust our emotions more. Paradoxically, and this is a new thought, the more they were to increase surely the less likely we would be to trust our emotions as we became more aware of their unreliability and the importance of reasoned reflection. Our ability to use reason is important, and while our reasoning may be flawed for whatever reason it is still integral for the formation of our beliefs. Ultimately I believe kittens to be adorable and genocide horrendous because having learnt about them, what they are as conceptual objects, as well as the conceptual attributes of adorability and horrific, my reasoning relates each object with their corresponding attributing value.

There’s likely more but seeing as I’m not emotionally strong enough to torture myself by reading though my rushed and muddled assignment, whatever other points I made have seemingly drifted off into the ether. Having taken an eternity to get my head around the topic, there wasn’t a great deal of time to complete the essay and while I haven’t got the mark back yet, I’m not one for thinking and telling everyone I’ve done poorly while getting a good result. The most frustrating thing, although it’s also a real positive, is that I know I can do better and don’t believe I did myself justice. We use this and make sure we do better the next time but at the very least appreciate the fact it wasn’t as an unconquerable field of philosophic thought as it felt. In a perverse kind of way, I think I actually kind of enjoyed it in the end. Or at the very least had some kind of an emotional reaction that helped me form such a belief, or perhaps I will after a little more reflection.

It is very important not to speak on behalf of others. To say people do this or people do that, we like to imagine these things because we have recognised others acting in specific ways. In reality it is a two-fold mistake because if we do recognise these actions in others then we are generalising, and we are unaware that we recognise these behaviours because they are most likely things we recognise in others from ourselves. This is an over simplification and I suspect is just an example of one or two things, which I am then using to make sweeping statements in the very same way I derided others for above. The point of that incredibly long winded intro though was not to highlight that I clearly still don’t grasp the importance of only having a small word count, but to lead into making my own sweeping statements generally, using my understanding of myself to justify them.

I have spent much time reading today as I never went to work and I feel pretty pleased with myself. I have been suffering, as I mentioned in the past, from a form of readers block. Not only have I struggled to sit down and read, to do this intensely enough to focus on a book long enough to avoid forgetting about it has been impossible. Add to that the fact I have even gone against everything I previously believed and viewed the whole art of reading as a pointless endeavour, it is not too much of a stretch to say it has been a weird time recently. There have been periods in my life when I haven’t read much at all and others in which I can’t put a book down, one after another. Why that is is unclear but having been someone who has moved around a lot and spent a few weeks to a few months in different surroundings it is safe to say our environment plays a huge role in what we choose to do as a hobby.

There have been many moments in life when I have been frustrated by this constant chopping and changing of interests. Recently for example I have been frustrated with myself. There have been plenty of moments when I’ve killed time drifting from one piece of nonsense to another online. I should be frustrated because it is a waste of our finite time, but perhaps it’s also necessary to help us enjoy and appreciate the more important moments. The point I’ve been working up to from the beginning though is that it may just be okay to in this instance read loads and then not at all because as long as we’re always doing something, we will be doing what we enjoy. If I were to force myself to read and not do whatever that other productive thing is I would see reading as a chore and an ordeal. While I don’t deny there will always be a little effort required to find the discipline to sit down and do things that require thought, even if we really enjoy them, there must always be enjoyment in them or for me it defeats the point. It was good to read today, I found the time and I enjoyed myself. I read for the pure pleasure.

To link in with what now feels like a rather pointless first paragraph, I am making wild assumptions that everyone is just like me. They frustrate themselves when they are not doing the things they think they want to do, that they feel they should be doing. Instead they’re doing other things but perhaps not quite as intensely as they would be if they weren’t constantly imagining they should be reading. There was a point to the first paragraph although I now pretty much disagree with my own sentiment from it as I’m aware that not everyone does what I have just described. I will however leave it in so that the thought process from A to B can be clear for all to see. It appears it is okay to change your mind. What you say once need not be your belief forever more.

Tag: belief

The Emotions

Just Sit Down And Read