From: Guru George (gurugeorge@sugarland.idiscover.co.uk)
Date: Wed Jan 22 1997 - 14:26:45 MST
On Mon, 20 Jan 1997 18:08:04 -0800 (PST)
"Lee Daniel Crocker" <lcrocker@calweb.com> wrote:
[snip]
>...And which is still nonsense. There is no "balance" any more than
>one can balance "green" with "loud". Reason and emotion are simply
>distinct things. They do not exist on the same scale to be balanced.
>They are incommensurable. Disjoints sets. Emotion exists, just as
>dice exist, LSD exists, and reason exists. But for the purpose of
>discovering the nature of reality, one must use reason /only/. Not
>"balanced" with emotion, dice, hallucinations or anything else. Of
>course, I like using dice for playing games, and I like using emotion
>for making life interesting. But not for discovering truth and making
>progress.
>
It's not quite correct to say that emotions aren't cognitive of reality:
they obviously aren't cognitive of rocks and trees and cosmology, but they
are cognitive of*human* reality; they evolved over a long period of time
in our pre-human ancestors as a means of displaying our own internal
states to others and cognising the internal state of our fellows.
Granted, taken too far, emotional kenning can become what Ayn Rand
called "second-handedness" (and what Buddhists call "ego"), but normally,
in average conditions, emotions are very smoothly functioning displayers
and discriminators of our internal states.
Guru George
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