existentialism with its emphasis on emotions such as
angst and existential despair and suffering…
with suffering and despair being an emotional
reaction/feeling… to/about life…
as human beings, our responses to life are emotional responses,
not logical, rational responses…
(recall my little post about Jazz music and our emotional response to
Miles Davis being the greatest Jazz player and others think it might
be Brubeck or perhaps Coltrane with the greatest Jazz album being
“Kind of blue” or perhaps Coltrane’s “a love supreme”… the point being
that we respond to such list as the greatest by emotionalism, not
by logical, rational thought…in other words, we judge by our emotional
response to something, not by our rational, logical thought about something)
the problem lies in this fact that we still react emotionally to things
and not logically or rationally…
our first response to something is emotional, we lead with our feelings…
and later we might temper our first initial thoughts by being logical/rational…
that is why philosophers up to now have been wrong… they always began with
rational/logical thinking when we human beings always respond emotionally, at
least at first…what is needed is an archaeology of emotions…
which is something Foucault never did, but probably should have done…
in thinking about it… I would guess that rational, logical thinking is a relatively
recent evolutionary devise…emotions, instinct are the basic, fundamental
means of understanding our universe… and is has been this way for millions,
if not billions of years…at its heart, life is simply emotions being carried down
from generation to generation…life can feel pain and pain is an emotional
response to our environment…and all life can feel pain…
so in a very real sense, rational, logical thought is a higher form of
existence… it is the next step, as it were, of existence… we have at
its base, emotions, feelings… the pyramid as it were… on the bottom
is its base and that base is emotions/feelings…
the next level is thinking
and the third level is rational, logical thinking…
even today, after hundred of thousands years, we still have people,
who deny and refuse to engage with rational/logical thinking…
think about it… those who put religion ahead of science are those
who engage with the base feelings of human existence…
revelations/Jerusalem are emotional, feeling understanding of life…
and Athens is the philosophy/rational thinking about life…
and we return to this old idea of Jerusalem and Athens…
and we note that Jerusalem existed before Athens…
and Jerusalem has always existed within the history of human beings…
whereas as Athens, Athens has not always existed but came into existence
within the last several thousand years…
so in our pyramid, what comes above the rational/logical level?
I would say it is the union of the rational/emotional levels…
but that is impossible… no, no it isn’t, we have had human beings who
have successfully integrated rational/logical thought with their emotional/feeling
aspect of being human… the key one for us is Goethe…
he wrote some of the most beautiful poems in the German Language and
he made scientific discoveries… he was able to unite the two
factions of rational thought and emotional feelings…
we can do no better then to learn to follow Goethe…
and learn to unite the rational and the emotional…
Kropotkin