Pure Reason - Feb 9 2024

 

Pure Reason

Feb 9 2024

In classical Greek

the words for reason and passion

are logos and pathos.

Logic

and pathology.

As if the rational mind

must be rigorous, linear, spare,

as sterile as molten steel

cooled

to a precisely honed blade.

Like Occam's razor

Boole's true-or-false.

No emotion, no squishiness.

No fickle feelings

contaminating the brain

like vectors of disease.

Yet decisions made

with pure reason

fail miserably.

And anyway, I'm suspicious of purity.

It's the bugaboo

of racists

ideologues

literalists;

the exacting test

of the sniffily intolerant

and persnickety perfectionist.

You need fear, resentment, shame,

disgust, dislike, rage,

frustration and hate

to clear your head.

Gut feeling

and intuition.

That roiling mix

of passion

memory

and rampant id

to just get on with it,

instead of wallowing

in indecision.

The sharp knife

needs a little dulling,

the algorithmic mind

more maybe/and

than either/or.

Not pathos

but sympathy.

Not pathology

but empathy.

So much better than the steel-trap mind

slamming shut.

Yet here I am, all my life, trying to rise above it. Trying to cultivate temperance, serenity, dispassionate reasoning. Not succeeding, of course!

But really, why would evolution conserve this emotional capacity if it harmed more than helped? Surely, natural selection would have weeded out the Captain Kirks and McCoys and left only Spocks.

And interestingly, people with a damaged amygdala (the major processing centre for emotion) turn out to be pathologically indecisive. As well, how much harder would learning be if it didn't attach itself to some form of emotional salience. After all, when the lion ambushes you from the tall grass it certainly makes a strong first impression: no remedial lessons needed! Even romantic love — as ethereal and poetic as it is — has its instrumental uses: the strengthening of a pair-bond that needs to last at least as long as it takes to raise a child.

Pure reason suffers from what all purities do: it's narrow, exclusionary, unnatural.

I should note that, as I reread this now, I can see that all the emotions I listed are negative ones! Which clearly says more about me than anything else I've written here!