Your thoughts on this would profit a lot from some reading of recent research in neuroscience—specifically people like D’Amasio, LeDoux, and Ramachandran, Sacks (there are lots others, too). The idea that rationality begins with some ‘asking how-the-world is’ as if that act itself were not completely shot through with emotional responses is hopelessly naive. Without an emotional response, one could never even form the judgment that the world-is-any-particular way. The brain lesion studies on this are pretty clear; it’s an emotional response that both triggers and suffuses the judgments we make about the way-the-world-is. For sure strong emotional responses can get in the way of other emotionally charged inferences (those that are typically thought of as canonically rational), but the whole opposition of emotions and rationality, as if they were in any way exclusive, is wrong headed. There are some emotional responses to situations that we call rational, and there are others that get in the way of those. The normative evaluation of the judgments must be left up to some other valuative metric—e.g., conducive to other emotional attitudes, etc. In a word, Hume was right, righter than even he knew.
Your thoughts on this would profit a lot from some reading of recent research in neuroscience—specifically people like D’Amasio, LeDoux, and Ramachandran, Sacks (there are lots others, too). The idea that rationality begins with some ‘asking how-the-world is’ as if that act itself were not completely shot through with emotional responses is hopelessly naive. Without an emotional response, one could never even form the judgment that the world-is-any-particular way. The brain lesion studies on this are pretty clear; it’s an emotional response that both triggers and suffuses the judgments we make about the way-the-world-is. For sure strong emotional responses can get in the way of other emotionally charged inferences (those that are typically thought of as canonically rational), but the whole opposition of emotions and rationality, as if they were in any way exclusive, is wrong headed. There are some emotional responses to situations that we call rational, and there are others that get in the way of those. The normative evaluation of the judgments must be left up to some other valuative metric—e.g., conducive to other emotional attitudes, etc. In a word, Hume was right, righter than even he knew.
Damasio*