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.
Observations and Misunderstandings 