Tok Essay -- Emotions vs Reason

Thomas Paine uses emotion to back up factual points in order to create an emotional

The poem “since feeling is first” is written by E.E Cummings in a stanza form with a total number of 16 lines. The sentences carry no more than nine words and no less than four words. It is about a man expressing his love to his beloved women. Cummings use of literary devices such as; metaphor, personification, imagery and denotation to express his feelings. “Since feeling is first” is a romantic poem that teaches a lesson about life. Its use of literary devices make the poem appealing to the readers.

Let’s begin to examine what Jagger’s method of investigative dispassionate belief means. Jagger realizes that emotion, like sensory observation is ignored or not taken into consideration in western epistemology. Jagger believes however, that emotions are needed for human survival and thus, emotions have an essential and useful value and “without emotion, human life would be unthinkable”. (pp.190, Jagger)

Jennifer S. Lerner, author of Emotion and Decision Making, talks about how our emotions can actively affect our actions. In Lerner’s book, it states, “We start with emotions arising from the judgement or a choice at hand, a type of emotion that strongly and routinely shapes decision making.” Our emotions cause us to make certain decisions in our everyday lives. For example a person who is feeling nervous and anxious about a specific outcome of a risky situation may choose a more safe route. A person who admires an organization may donate money. In both cases, our the way we feel about something or someone determines how we address a situation and how we treat someone or something. In some way our emotions act as our conscience in each situation we go through that requires us to choose an outcome .

Attempts to define “emotion” have proved to be rather difficult. Instead of searching for a comprehensive definition, Gross (2011) describes the three core features of emotions. First, emotions occur when an individual decides that a situation is relevant to his or her goals. Second, emotions are multi-faceted, and involve both subjective and physiological experiences, as well as behaviors. The third feature involves the authoritative nature of emotions. They have the powerful ability to interrupt ongoing processes, assert their priority over other activities, and force their way into awareness. For example, some traditions describe emotions as “disorganized interruptions of mental activity” (Salovey & Mayer, 1989). Emotions are such an

Lewis Thomas, an American essayist, conveys the importance of preserving the mystery of one’s mind in his essay, “The Attic of the Brain.” According to Thomas, humans produce internal conflicts because they overanalyze their choices. Internal conflicts are not only caused by overanalyzing, but also from the feeling of guilt which “repeats the same transgressive behavior in the future.” Guilt is an emotional experience humans constantly face after they realize they disrupted their standards of conduct, until they rectify their mistakes. Even though the punitive feeling of guilt brings forth a feeling of worriedness, Thomas mentions that overanalyzing a choice to discard “unidentifiable articles” in the attic or to preserve memories overwhelms the human mind. He uses the analogy of the multitude of “unidentifiable articles” in the attic to compare to the flood of ideas in the human brain. The commodities stored in the cramped attic are “an old chair, [and] trunkful of old letters” which serve as a purpose of remembrance, as the human brain is filled with crucial information that enables people to think, feel, and store memories (75). However, he argues that people frequently clash with their thoughts, since they clutter their brain with excessive information. People do not have the ability to control their own brain; as a matter of fact, the human brain, the most complex part of the body, controls itself. From his analysis of the human brain, it can be concluded that humans have “unconscious minds” that automatically process different thoughts and memories resulting in a limitless supply of creativity. People “discover new things” by learning from previous ideas and applying their creativity to their practical use. Overall, humans cannot operate their brain, but should allow the extraordinary mind to be free.

I belief that saying that a person can be taught to have knowledge is the same as saying a person who already beliefs in a topic or subject has a opinion. Which we know that opinion can be taught, but so can knowledge because you are teaching an opinion that soon will become a piece of information in a person's mind and that is what the definition is for knowledge. In other words, by learning an Opinion then they also will be receiving knowledge. Again like Socrates explains what Daedalus had told him about how we all will always have knowledge but our true opinion can be lost and maybe never be thought again. For a true opinion to stay in our minds we need to practice and think about the idea or a fact and turn it into an argument.

Individuals fail in life due to their inability to be true to their emotions. According

This book is divided into three parts. The first, 'Emotional Strategies: An Existentialist Perspective ' observes in some detail the ways in which we engage the world through sixteen different emotions, with several of their permutations. Following Heidegger; who believes that emotions tunes us to the world and Sartre; who reasons that emotions have a purpose, Solomon claims that we are responsible for our emotions. This coincides with the fundamental Stoic insight that we “are” our emotions. Aristotle discussed certain emotions at length, notably anger, which he described in remarkably modern terms. Commonly classified as a basic negative and destructive emotion, emotional reactions can usefully be read as, and ultimately even identified with, strategies we adopt as a way of dealing with the challenges of our lives- for example, prompting us to fight for justice and protecting our rights. Thus even

dismissal of all preceding drivel (as to adequately and respectfully embrace the noumenal realm). Coleridge’s brain waves wend in a circuitous manner, however, the final result is a sentiment-shift regarding man’s position before (or, as Coleridge concludes, beneath) God.

     "The Pardoner's Tale," by Geoffrey Chaucer, makes evident the parallel between the internal emotions of people and the subconscious exposure of those emotions. This particular story, from The Canterbury Tales, is a revealing tale being told by a medieval pardoner to his companions on a journey to Canterbury. Though the Pardoner's profession is to pardon and absolve the sins of people, he actually lives in constant violation of sins such as gluttony, gambling, and, most importantly, avarice. The Pardoner does feel guilt and advocates not to commit avarice; he exclaims, "'Radix malorum est Cupiditas,'" (line 426) as his theme more than once. Because he

Human emotions can be considered a blessing. They enable people to show empathy and kindness to others; to comfort or help someone that needs it. To be human means to have emotions. However, it is important that people have control over their emotions. This is especially true with strong emotions or feelings. This essay will focus on three emotions in particular: anger, love, and hatred. These three feelings commonly cloud people’s judgements, which in turn, causes them to make bad decisions. Overall, making decisions based on emotions leads to negative outcomes.

At the end of chapter 20 in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes his own experience with poetry and its effect on others’ imagination from an outsiders point of view:

Such a situation warrants Coleridge the title of visionary, and therefore his poem becomes a vision: a Romantically textual utopia whose realisation was challenged by the rational status quo of its historical origin. Due to this, Coleridge’s work will always seek practical affirmation and will therefore constantly be the source of metaphysically-oriented debate, leaving the dualism that rules it to be decided by the reader and the ideologies he or she brings to the text. This conclusion is supported by the words of John Beer:

For many people, they live their lives based on emotions. Emotions of happiness, love, success, and many more, could possibly be the most satisfying feelings. Except we commonly experience unpleasant emotions. There are emotions of anger, hatred, sadness, and disgrace. A very important question in the understanding of the human mind and highly related to cognitive science, is how do these emotions affect human cognition and the impact on our abilities to be rational? To tackle this question, we need to understand what emotions are, but not solely in the manner we are all familiar with, we need to understand them from a cognitive nature involving our physiology, psychology, and environment. Cognition, according to the Oxford definition