Reason vs Emotion

“Stop being so emotional!”

I’m sure most people have heard this at least once in their life. But is being emotional really such a bad thing? Our society values reason so much more than emotion because it can be standardised and it forms the basis of many knowledge systems, for example, science and mathematics. Emotions are ignored as a way of knowing because they can’t be always be explained and everyone experiences them differently. Showing or even experiencing strong emotions is sometimes seen as a sign of weakness, but it is part of what makes us human. Just imagine someone with no emotions whatsoever- would you really be able to understand them?

Emotions are an important part of life, but to what extent should we trust their judgement? It is a very fine line to tread between reason and emotion. Too much emotion and you become an irritating wreck of tears and hysteria, acting impulsively without thoroughly thinking through your actions. Too much reason and you become unable to understand your emotions, making yourself unhappy by only choosing the options that are most reasonable rather than the ones that make you feel good. It may seem like a difficult choice, but most of the time people use a mix of both, in a way that they feel is appropriate to the situation.

So what is the problem? Surely all we have to do is choose the right one to use? The problem that arises is that we can’t and we don’t. Both reason and emotion are fallible and so we have to be pragmatic when using them in everyday life to make decisions.

Logical Fallacies and Rhetorical tricks: The wonders of Politics

As most people should be aware: Politicians lie. They may not lie completely openly, but they use illogical arguments and flamboyant language to distract you from the highly biased truth you are receiving. Now, I am going to concentrate on a speech recently made by the one and only David Cameron at the Tory Party Conference this year. The first thing that I noticed is how sickeningly smooth and calculated it is. Speeches are meant to be said out loud, and for good reason too. When you actually just read a speech in writing, it reveals the true extent of their attempt to manipulate you. You can see all the needless repetition that has come straight out of ‘Rhetorical Speech for Dummies’, desperately trying to rouse the people of England to be passionate about our ‘Greater Britain’.

He uses a false dilemma and also argumentum in terrorem,

“And the choice I faced was this:

Act – and we could stop them carrying out their plans.

Stall – and we could see innocent people murdered on our streets.”

He uses ad hominem on Corbyn,

“My friends – we cannot let that man inflict his security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology on the country we love.”

Regardless of whether you agree with this or not; this is a vicious attack on Corbyn but not his arguments or policies. A lazy way to convince the public: make them hate everyone else more than you.

“It’s not just that their arguments are wrong; it’s the self-righteous way they make them.”

Hypocrisy much? This entire speech is so incredibly pompous that it might actually develop its own opinion and try and run for PM.  (Cameron’s attack here is on Labour of course)

I picked this out just because it dripped with propaganda:

“The party that doesn’t care where you come from, but only where you’re going”

Using the experiences of this elderly man is hasty generalisation- one person does not represent Britain, and the personal aspect of this appeals to our emotions (argumentum ad misericordiam):

“Aged 82, this is possibly my last election.

In my life I have foolishly voted Labour, believing it served the working class.

How wrong I was. Labour is against all I aspire to.”

I’m sure that there are many more that I simply do not have the willpower to find, but this just shows how many problems and fallacies that a single person can find in only one speech made by only one politician. He used repetition to attempt to strengthen his speech- the number of times ‘we will’ came up was innumerable. Desperately trying to drum up a sense of British pride and community, perhaps. However, I must admit that being a politician is certainly not the easiest job in the world, and so Cameron is really not as bad as people say he is.

Of course, this kind of rhetoric has been around for a very long time; it’s definitely nothing new. That still doesn’t mean that we should accept it without questioning. As the lines of morality become increasingly blurred in today’s world; we must learn to find and process the information for ourselves, rather than blindly receiving lies from the mouths of those who need us to believe what they say to stay afloat in politics.

And to finish my overly extended rant, a very apt quote from Cicero (who was definitely a much better orator than David Cameron):

“When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.”

Even the greatest may sometimes have to resort to fallacy…

Language, Emotion, and Poetry (oh my)

Try to think without words in your mind. It’s pretty difficult, isn’t it? Even if you think of something that you don’t know the name of; you still describe it to yourself in words. Even emotions that don’t fit into the simple happy, sad, angry categories can be described with adjectives or other words- apathetic rage, bitter contempt, seething resentment (I only chose those just because they are so deliciously reflective of those incredibly pompous books that feel the need to throw in an obscure classical reference or half of the dictionary every two pages). We have such a wide range of words on offer, but is it enough? There are always some things that we can never express fully, even in description, and even the meaning of these abstract concepts often varies from person to person. Take the classic example of Love: it can’t effectively be defined in words because it doesn’t exist that way. It exists outside the boundaries of what we can define- even babies can show what we would call love towards their family, without language. The Ancient Greeks had split love up into multiple words- eros, agape, philia and storge; the words all denote different kinds of love. But even this expansion of language can never reach the true root of the problem. We cannot say for sure what love is since we all feel it differently (and for some people it seems not at all…)

The untranslatable quality of abstract concepts into reality also links to the difficulty of translating poetry. Poetry as an art form is designed to elicit emotions from its reader, to make them feel what the poet wanted them to. Perhaps it is a way of getting around the problem of abstract concepts: Poetry explains and defines through metaphor that which we cannot define with certainty. Everyone interprets poems differently, reflecting their own views and experiences onto what they are reading, drawing a completely different conclusion from anyone else. This shows the ambiguity of language, and how useful it can be; people can have the freedom to decide for themselves exactly what the poem means and is trying to say. This metaphorical language, however, can often be lost in translation.

There is something personal about reading poetry in your own language, like an old house that you’ve lived in for years. You know every corner of the house, and in your native tongue, every little nuance; the words carry a deeper meaning for you. You know how it all fits together, in a blend of imagery and sound and syntax. But in another language that you don’t know so well, the poetry is just a jumble of words that you remember from 3rd form vocab tests. It always makes me feel slightly wistful, that I will never truly access such a great wealth of beautiful poetry. Even books that have been translated lose something in translation. There is a great book called 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, translated from Japanese, which I have always wanted to read in its original language (if I could actually read Japanese), but would it even be the same? Would it have the same meaning to me as it did to a native speaker? Probably not, and so for now it is best just to read the watered-down English versions (even though the translation was very good), only unearthing half of the whole story, never fully appreciating the masterful penmanship of the original author. Maybe one day everyone will be raised as polylingual, swapping between languages to express different things, using the strengths of each one to reach a higher level of meaning. Or of course, all languages except one could die, and the world would be a much less diverse and interesting place.