Rational Philosophy

Whenever emotion overpowers my reason, I realize anew just how deep and powerful our emotional selves can be. Last night I blew up at my mother-in-law, convinced that I had reason on my side, completely unapologetic. And this morning when I woke up I felt the shame of hurting her feelings, and bewilderment at my irrational overreaction to what had upset me.

Emotion like reason, has its roots in our evolution as a species. Emotion came prior to reason. It developed out of the key, immediate survival responses of the human organism. Fear (and the fight or flight response), anger, sadness, happiness, disgust. As we have evolved reason we have naturally retained these valuable emotional responses, although we often use reason to suppress or override our emotional impulses.

Psychotherapy and similar therapeutic methods aim to help us smooth out the bumps in our emotional responses. It’s still OK to be angry or afraid, of course, but when our responses follow a particular pattern, or seem systematically extreme, we can try to figure out why and work on the underlying cause of these overreactions.

Emotion and reason sit side by side. We can reconcile them (sometimes) and we can better understand our emotions resulting in a happier cohabitation. But since emotion is an automatic response to a stimulus (like the reflex jerk when the doctor taps our knee with his mallet) the emotional response, however valuable in the moment, should never be used as the basis for a conceptual framework.

What do I mean by this?

To take first the example of my disagreement with my mother-in-law, I used my emotional response, my anger, as the foundation of my side of the disagreement. I slathered my rationale on top like icing on a dry cup-cake.

To take a more important example, the furore around abortion laws is an emotional furore. Reason rarely enters into the equation. People’s perspectives on abortion tend to polarize around their emotional response to the matter. The same is true of capital punishment. There are many other examples.

Likewise racists create a false rational framework founded on emotions of fear and hatred. There are countless other examples.
We can’t eradicate or expunge our emotions. But as individuals and as a society we would be well served to beware of using emotion as a starting point for reason.

In naming this site, I chose the term rational philosophy (even though philosophy should always be rational) because I want the posts to contribute to our understanding of the world around us using reason. I firmly believe that we all philosophize. Any reflection on our state of being is philosophy. Whether my reflection and analysis holds more weight or is more relevant or accurate than anyone else’s I will leave to the reader to decide. But as I begin these postings I commit that I will strive to be reasonable and fair. I have prejudices, and hobbyhorses, and weaknesses, but I will guard against them, root them out before I press “publish.”

I aim to post two kinds of content: That which is general and timeless, and that which is specific and of immediate interest. It seems to me that this captures the best of philosophy—to seek universal truth, and to try to use that truth to shed light on the the moment in which we live. When Socrates met with his fellow Greeks at the forum and engaged them in discussion, he held forth on some big subjects but at the same time urged his companions to think more sharply, to question more deeply.

In my second post, I hope to produce a broad sketch of my original philosophy that proposes some general ideas about our existence.

Thank you for reading,
Martin G. Walker