Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Mortimer Adler's
- Syntopicon
Essays
Emotion:
Editor's
1-minute essay
- Emotion, as its root suggests, moves and sets us to
motion.
Modern thinkers on this subject, psychologists and physiologists, emphasize the
facts of this phenomenon.
The ancients, however, viewed emotion as a moral issue, especially as related to
ethics and politics.
Yet, a point of agreement among all those who study this great idea:
- emotion is not mere, simple feeling; but, more significantly,
a complex, organic disturbance within the body.
In his treatise On the Circulation of the Blood, speaking of these bodily
disturbances, Harvey calls attention to:
- "the fact that in almost every affection, appetite,
hope, or fear, our body suffers, the countenance changes, and the blood appears to course
hither and thither. In anger the eyes are fiery and the pupils contracted; in modesty the
cheeks are suffused with blushes; in fear, and under a sense of infamy and of shame, the
face is pale" and "in lust how quickly is the member distended with blood and
erected!"
Also, Adler refers to Freud in this regard:
- "The line between the neurotic and the normal is
shadowy, for repressed emotional complexes are, according to Freud, also responsible for
the hidden or latent psychological significance of slips of speech, forgetting, the
content of dreams, occupational or marital choices, and a wide variety of other phenomena
usually regarded as accidental or as rationally determined."
This notion of "disturbance" is suggested within emotion's synonym,
"passion." Adler instructs that its root, akin to "passivity,"
expresses the idea that the body is acted upon, that emotion affects us, even,
attacks us, from the outside.
And what does emotion attack? It is the "higher" nature of men
and women, our dispassionate rational selves.
The Great Books writers speak of three main views regarding emotion and
reason:
(1) Reason should govern emotion: a view held
by Aristotle and Plato. Emotion is good if subordinated to the rule of reason and used for
noble purposes; further, Aristotle sees such virtues as courage and temperance in terms
of, as Adler states, "habitual emotional attitudes or responses which carry out the
commands of reason."
(2) Reason should get rid of emotion: the
Stoics, among them Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, preached of the inadequacy of emotions;
that we should beat them down and try to expunge them from our natures. Stoics founds
emotions to be a threat to reason and, therefore, advocated a calm, controlled,
inner-life.
(3) Emotion should govern reason: a modern
holding asserts that emotion should reign supreme; that reason is woefully wanting
concerning its ability to make life all that it should be. Proponents here are the German
Romantic philosophers, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Novalis. Also, Adler tells us, the
"English poet William Blake expresses a similar view... He contrasts the glowing
radiance of gratified desire with the withering effect of abstinence... He says, Damn
braces, bless relaxes, and Exuberance is beauty."
Spinoza, also, offering his opinion on the relation between emotion and rational
thought:
- "The mind is subject to passions in proportion to the
number of inadequate ideas which it has, and ... it acts in proportion to the
number of adequate ideas which it has."
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