The importance of the emotions

Can we live without emotions, without feeling? The article talks about emotion and reason. It starts out with stating that reason is cool, active, and deliberative while emotions overwhelm us and are impulsive and hot. There is an example about how we are overwhelmed by our emotions: when we have an anger fit and we realize afterwards and say things like, " I don't know what came over me", and relating to the previous article I read this is also when our rational mind awakens. Point being that we do things under the influence of or emotions but we come to realize that we were wrong when our rational mind starts to reason.

Two elements in the traditional view that are mentioned are Emotion contra Knowledge and Emotion and the Good Life. In Emotion and the Good Life it mentions the violent and destructive nature of our emotions but for many thinkers the key element of living a good life is the achievement of rational control over the emotions. An example for this is the movie Equilibrium. In the movie, everyone has to take a shot of their "medicine" which prevents them from feeling, so that no one has to feel any of their emotions and anyone who does not take their shots are killed on sight. The resistance however do not want to lose their emotions and will do anything to defend themselves. The leader of the people, called "Father", thinks that if we remove emotion there will not be any wars between people, everyone would be the same. Now this relates to how the Emotion and the Good Life reminds us of the violent nature of our emotions. However, the leader of the resistance can blend in with any of the other people because he has learned to suppress and control his emotions which in Emotion and the Good Life is the key element for living a good life.

I completely agree with what Emotions and the Good Life states. Even if our emotions are the cause of fights and wars they also let us feel happiness, peace, and all of the other things. If we could control our emotions, use our emotions instead of letting our emotions control us, things might be better in the world.

Hallmarks of the emotional mind

I read about the differences between the rational and emotional mind, and I think that these two are the basis of how we think. In the article it explains how the emotional mind reacts to the things that happen to us a lot faster than the rational mind. The emotional mind triggers emotions immediately that makes us do different things depending on what is happening. In the article it talks about how the emotional mind evolved as we, humans, did. However, the rational mind unlike the emotional takes time to think the problem through and come up with a rational path for us to take instead of just relying on our emotions.

The emotional mind reacts very quickly but the problem is that it might lead us to do things that the rational mind wouldn't. When I was younger, any kind of punishment my parents gave me I used to get really angry, yell, and throw stuff but it wasn't until I got to my room and sat down that I thought about what I had done and how that was not the best way to handle it. Point being that sometimes we can be totally unaware of what we do under the influence of the emotional mind until the rational mind awakens. A great advantage of the emotional mind is that it allows us to recognize other peoples emotional state. For example, we know when someone is sad or depressed allowing us to act according to their emotions, meaning that we wouldn't make fun of them or do something that might make them feel a lot worse than they already are, but surely this depends entirely on the person.

Relating to earlier topics from class, there are certain things such as drugs that could affect how our emotional mind acts in other words our perception. Under the influence of a drug we might not be able to recognize other people emotional state which make us act in a negative way, meaning that our emotional mind cannot recognize others emotions. We might say things we didn't mean or say things that we normally wouldn't say if we were normal. A good is example is Kanye West at last years grammy awards when he took the microphone from singer Taylor Swift and pretty much told the whole world she didn't deserve the award. Before the Awards started he was drinking on the red carpet and during the awards which could've have cause him to do that but what caused him to do that could also be his emotional mind because as I said before the article says that the emotional mind acts a lot faster than the rational causing people to think irrationally.

I think that the emotional mind and the rational mind could share an equal amount of importance in a sense that we can live only on one of these two. We need the emotional mind to act to some things faster but we need the rational mind as well to make decisions that have been thought about and not based solely on emotions. The emotional mind might play a greater role than the rational but that depends entirely on the persons idiosyncrasy.