Tok Essay — Emotions vs Reason
TOK Essay Reasoning and Emotions and the quest for Knowledge 19th century English philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that “deep thinking is attainable only by a person of deep feeling”, thereby implying that emotions, or “deep feeling”, play a key role in the quest for knowledge and the ability to reason, or, the ability to think deeply. However, day after day I am confronted with evidence contradicting his statement, and, although I do my best not to have biased perception, I do not see much in support.
Emotions cause me, day after day, to make poor decisions while a little voice in my head – a voice I like to call reason – urges me to act differently. The first example that comes to mind is the fact that I am currently working on this essay late at night while I did spend considerable time busying myself with other activities, activities that include the infamous wasting-my-time-in-front-of-the-television.
But Coleridge must have been aware that such a case was possible, and a reality, for countless many people: the plump who says she will go to the gym tomorrow, the middle-aged man who says he’ll go back to school, and he who could not resist the fruit. Still Coleridge believed that the positive effects of emotions on the quest for knowledge outweighed the negative, raising the questions: what role do emotions play in the pursuit of knowledge? And would our pursuit be better off without them or are they beneficial? This essay shall investigate the contributions of emotions – if any – to the pursuit of knowledge.
First of all it is necessary to draw a clear distinction between the individual purposes of reason and emotions. If knowledge would be a physical object, we would need to add a new element to the periodic table: reason, not emotion, for reason is what knowledge is composed of and emotion is – arguably but not certainly – what fuels the process of reasoning. I therefore find it a given that reason is heavily more significant than emotions when seeking knowledge. Nonetheless what Coleridge would presumably argue back, is that the ability to reason is useless when unable to put it to use.
He would claim that without emotions the process of reasoning cannot be fuelled and would therefore never be initiated. And one can only agree that this is a valid statement as it is based on the premise that the human desire to understand is an emotion. But what truly fuels intellectual inquiry, and thereby reasoning, is curiosity, or inquisitiveness, as it is what drives the individual to demand for knowledge. But I am not speaking in terms of individuals, but rather considering humanity as one being with multiple fragments. Thus the question becomes: is curiosity an emotion?
A 20th century psychologist by the name of Abraham Maslow once said: “What a man can be, a man must be”, thereby implying that the homo sapiens is a being of innate curiosity, thus defining curiosity as an instinct rather than an emotion. Consider the following illustration: you find yourself in a ten by ten room with nothing else but four white walls, the white floor, and the white ceiling. Except there are two doors, one with the inscription “happiness”, and one with the inscription “knowledge”. You thus find yourself in the same situation as Neo when Morpheus presented the two pills, one blue and one red. You must make a decision.
Perhaps for some, the Socrateses of the world, this is not hard as both doors lead to the same place. But the fact is, the vast majority does not study metaphysics for fun. You might strongly believe that you would open the “knowledge door”, though you have already chosen the “happiness door” many times before. For instance when you decided to sit on the couch and watch that entertaining TV program instead of completing work, it made you happier – or at least more satisfied – than working at the time being. Now, reminding ourselves that happiness is an emotion, what if the “happiness door” suddenly vanishes?
All that remains is the “knowledge door”. This is where the debate surrounding curiosity matters the most. Coleridge would say that you would, as there is no more emotional energy, simply remain in the ten by ten white room till hunger forces you to investigate what lies behind the door. He would enquire: “what would push you to the desire of opening that door? You have no more passion and no more hope of achieving happiness. ” The reason why, for Coleridge’s supporters, emotional energy plays such a key role is that happiness is the intrinsic finality of the human life: everything the individual strives for.
But the wish for happiness is not the only driving factor. Curiosity, assuming it is an instinct, will still be present in your chemical structure once emotions removed and therefore encourage you to open the “knowledge door”, or, take the red pill. Thus knowledge is achieved. However I must admit that this illustration is a simplified version of the ‘truth’. It is in fact heavily based on the presumption that knowledge in one entity with one outcome. But as we know, knowledge exists in distinct areas and can take many different forms. The ‘truth’ is that in our ten by ten white room, there would not be just one “knowledge door”.
There would be thousands, or even millions, behind which lay many different paths; paths which often intersect with that of “happiness”. These may lead to knowledge that varies from learning to play football to a solution to world hunger. So then, how would you know which door to choose from? Being an individual who relies purely on reasoning, you might have trouble with choosing which door to go through first; even though, being curious, you would like to go through them all. This was the problem that Elliot faced, a man who suffered from brain-damage in the emotional centers.
He tried to make decisions based solely on reasoning as he lacked of emotions to guide his steps. But the result was mere paralysis. Accordingly, let’s assume that the person trapped in our ten by ten room is Elliot, he must either choose football or world hunger. What Samuel Coleridge and Antonio Damasio, Elliot’s psychologist, might point out, is that Elliot would experience, even when we allow curiosity to be an instinct, a “mental paralysis” (Langemaat 155). Though in this case, being reasonable, Elliot might choose one at random knowing that the other will still be there once this one achieved.
But what if we take this in the wider context of several million doors? Are Coleridge and Damasio right? Because then Elliot, mortal, would not be able to open each and every one before the reaper comes along. Thus a choice needs to be made. And this is essentially the problem all human beings are faced with. We do not have enough time to learn everything there is to know, thus come to play guiding factors like intellectual capabilities and emotions, which escort us to certain doors. Hence, once engaged upon the path behind the door, reason leads us to the end of it.
And this perspective of emotional energy is a persuasive one (one that supports Coleridge’s statement), but it applies only to the individual as if the individual were the only one individual. If you go back up, you’ll see the phrase “I am not speaking in terms of individuals, but rather considering humanity as one being with multiple fragments,”1 which amounts to say that if we, humanity, all found ourselves in the ten (thousand) by ten (thousand) white room, all facing the millions of doors and all relying on reason solely, then we would be able to organize ourselves and accomplish an “intellectual division of abour” (Langemaat 48) to ultimately walk each path to the very end. And you would be surprised about how much of this we actually do in real life. This “division of labour” does take place, although not consciously. Our white room is a microcosm of the world: the doors are all the things that we can learn about, or, all knowledge stemming from the areas of knowledge. But in real life we do not need to organize ourselves into groups of mathematicians or groups of economists or groups of philosophers, primarily for two reasons.
The first is because we have other means of allocating intellectual labour, namely emotions and intellectual capabilities. And the second is that not everyone is needed for the labour as the life span of humanity is, hopefully or at least close to, endless as individuals just come and go. So to answer the initial questions, emotions do play a crucial role in the pursuit of knowledge as they act as guides for individuals in a world where learning is limitless. They chiefly operate as allocators of labour for intellectual progress to take place. However I do believe that they are not necessary and are actually time-consuming.
Reason seems to be enough for the “intellectual division of labour” to occur and be completed much faster. Though I must admit that this is merely a theory or perspective amongst a multitude of others. If I were offered to ‘rid’ the homo sapiens of emotions for labour to be finished faster I would decline as the labour is being done, perhaps slowly, but being done. And so we, humanity, are promenading on the many pathways of the doors we have opened; pathways that sometimes intersect over others and that sometimes fool us with a dead-ends. But I’m confident that, one day, we shall get there wherever “there” may be.
Word Count: 1597 ——————————————– [ 1 ]. This goes to say that you individually may not be very curious ( though curiosity is undoubtedly an aspect of your nature) but that humanity as a whole is. [ 2 ]. Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and personality. Harper and Row New York, New York 1954 pg 91 [ 3 ]. The Matrix. Dir. Andy Wachowski. Prod. Joel Silver. Perf. Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999. [ 4 ]. Van de Langemaat, Richard. Theory of Knowledge for the IB Diploma. Cambridge University Press, 2005 pg 155.
