Another take on emotions as paths to understanding

    A man never thinks of his wife. He never does anything for her. He is indifferent to her needs. He feels nothing when she dies. But he says ‘I loved her.’ I would have great trouble making sense of this. I don’t think I could believe he genuinely loved her.

     A pet dog dies. The pet’s owner or human companion suffers “inconsolable grief.” He buries the dog with its picture on an elaborate gravestone. 

He visits the grave once a month, bringing flowers. Every year he lights a candle and weeps on the day of the dog’s death. He posts all this on Facebook. I would have a hard time believing the man truly loved the dog rather than using the dog’s death to put himself on display. I could only think of him as sentimental.

    But a man could grieve for a dog – I cried over Maxi – and that real grief partly reveals what a dog is as well as what a human being is. Emotions like grief are forms that our convictions about what is real and good take – paths of understanding what something is. They can be counterfeit but they are essential to be able to understand many things.

    I think when you unexpectedly come in the presence of a roaring waterfall, as I did hiking once in Yellowstone, awe is a response to what the waterfall is, to what it symbolizes as well. If a person came around that bend and in the presence of that waterfall said “cute”, I would say that person didn’t have a clue of what they were looking at even if they knew the definition of a waterfall and the geology behind it. Emotional responses can be more or less true to reality; more or less disclose or cover up the reality they respond to. “Cute” hides the reality of the waterfall.

    If you asked Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek to respond to the waterfall – an android without emotions, without flesh and blood, without a sense of mortality even – he could call up his memory banks and identify the phenomenon as a waterfall. He could – like an AI Chat these days – recount the geology of waterfalls, etc. But it would have no more significance than a speck of dust, a strip mine, or a garbage dump for him. I would say: Data cannot understand a waterfall any better than he can understand humor or emotion, because lacking emotion he lacks an essential capacity to understand anything. Without an emotional life connected to imagination, the world would just consist of meaningless objects and arrangements of objects, flat, nothing more significant than anything else. 

     [The purely logical view of the world described by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, one of my favorite books of philosophy: “All propositions are of equal value,” a proposition being nothing but the naming of objects or statements about factual states of affairs. Wittgenstein went on to say: “Everything in the world is accidental (only logic is necessary), and so nothing in the world can have transcendent value. If something has value or meaning, that value or meaning must lie outside the world.” To a Data, this would be right. But if the heart puts you in touch with dimensions of the world that are real and that pure logic and science are necessarily blind to – the thought I have been trying to make sense of – then value and significance are a part of the world and a part of human beings. It is the waterfall itself that is awesome, and my response is a response to that awesomeness. Data in this respect - responding to the waterfall -  is like a dog watching TV, or me looking at a piece of modern art.]

    That is why past philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine believed that educating the emotions was essential for a good upbringing. I would say all of our predecessor cultures believed that the universe was created such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it. Folks believed that objects did not merely receive, but could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt, awe or shock. The point was to teach the young to love what was lovable – beauty in nature, for instance, or kindness shown to others – and hate what was hateful (e.g. the desolation of a mountain forest through mountaintop removal; well hating in this case what was done to the mountain). Once our hearts are in the right place, our heads can make progress in understanding the world. But if our hearts are stunted, no degree of intellectual power can access the most profound truths about the world. Again, that is one reason why I think great books like A Christmas Carol are so valuable. And yet I cannot get my sons to read it.