Philosophy, Emotion and Reason

The Soul of Thoughts

The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts.
Think only on those things that are in line with your principles
and can bear the full light of day.
The content of your character is your choice.
Day by day, what you choose, what you think, and what you do is what you become.
Your integrity is your destiny…it is the light that guides your way.
Heraclitus- Greek Poet

Philosophical Excerpts

from the Objectivist Philosophy of Ayn Rand

from the Stoic Epictetus

Objectivist Philosophy

A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy.
Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a bail and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown…

A similar contrast applies in the realm of action. An animal acts automatically on its perceptual data; it has no power to project alternative courses of behavior or long-range consequences. Man chooses his values and actions by a process of thought, based ultimately on a philosophical view of existence; he needs the guidance of abstract principles both to select his goals and to achieve them. Because of its form of knowledge, an animal can do nothing but adapt itself to nature. Man (if he adheres to the metaphysically given) adapts nature to his own requirements. A conceptual faculty, therefore, is a powerful attribute. It is an attribute that goes to the essence of a species, determining its method of cognition, of action, of survival. To understand man-and any human concern-one must understand concepts. One must discover what they are, how they are formed, and how they are used, and often misused, in the quest for knowledge. This requires that we analyze in slow motion the inmost essence of the processes which make us human, the ones which, in daily life, we perform with lightning like rapidity and take for granted as unproblematic…

Once a man has acquired a vocabulary of conceptual knowledge, he automatizes it, just as one automatizes the knowledge of spelling, typing, or any complex skill. Thereafter one does nor need a process of learning in order to grasp that something is a booklet portending an examination; the application of the relevant concepts is immediate and unhesitating. Similarly, once a man has formed a series of value judgments, he automatizes them. He does not need a process of appraisal in order to decide that he values a high grade on a test; the application of the relevant judgments is immediate. One's value-judgments, like one's past knowledge, are present in the subconscious-meaning by this term a store of the mental contents one has acquired by conscious means, but which are not in conscious awareness at a given time. Under the appropriate conditions, the mind applies such contents to a new object automatically and instantaneously, without the need of further conscious consideration. To many people, as a result, it seems as if men perceive and then feel, with no intervening factor. The truth is that a chain of ideas and value judgments intervenes…

An emotion derives from a percept assessed within a context; the context is defined by a highly complex conceptual content. Most of this content at any time is not present in conscious awareness. But it is real and operative nonetheless.
What makes emotions incomprehensible to many people is the fact that their ideas are not only largely subconscious, but also inconsistent. Men have the ability to accept contradictions without knowing it. This leads to the appearance of a conflict between thought and feelings.
A man can hold ideas of which he is rarely or never aware and which clash with his professed beliefs. The former may be ideas which he has forgotten forming, or which he has accepted only by implication, without ever identifying the fact, or which he actively works not to know. If he then responds to an object in terms of such hidden mental contents, it will seem to him that his emotions are independent of his thinking and even at war with it. In fact, his emotions are still following from his conclusions, but he does not identify these latter correctly…

Reason is a faculty of awareness; its function is to perceive that which exists by organizing observational data. And reason is a volitional faculty; it has the power to direct its own actions and check its conclusions, the power to maintain a certain relationship to the facts of reality. Emotion, by contrast, is a faculty not of perception, but of reaction to one's perceptions. This kind of faculty has no power of observation and no volition; it has no means of independent access to reality, no means to guide its own course, and no capacity to monitor its own relationship to facts.
Emotions are automatic consequences of a mind's past conclusions, however that mind has been used or misused in the process of reaching them. The ideas and value judgments at the root of a feeling may be true or false; they may be the product of meticulous logic or of a slapdash mess; they may be upheld in explicit terms, or they may be subconscious and unidentified. In all these cases, positive and negative alike, the feeling follows obediently. It has no power to question its course or to check its roots against reality. Only man's volitional, existence-oriented faculty has such power.
Feelings or emotions are not part of the method of logic; they are not evidence for a conclusion. The fact that a man has a certain feeling means merely that, through some kind of process, he earlier reached a certain idea, which is now stored in his subconscious; this leaves completely open the question of the idea's relationship to reality. To identify this relationship, one needs a process of validating ideas, i.e., a process of reason.
Although reason and emotion by their nature are in harmony, the appearance of conflict between them, as we have seen, is possible; the source of such appearance is a contradiction between a man's conscious and subconscious conclusions in regard to an evaluative issue. When this occurs, the conscious ideas may be correct and the subconscious ones mistaken. Or the reverse may be the case: a man may consciously uphold a mistaken idea while experiencing a feeling that clashes with it, one that derives from a true subconscious premise. In both kinds of case, however, the real clash is between two ideas. And the only way to resolve the conflict, to know which side is correct, is to submit both ideas to the bar of reason…

Man is a being of limited knowledge and he must, therefore, identify the cognitive context of his conclusions. In any situation where there is reason to suspect that a variety of factors is relevant to the truth, only some of which are presently known, he is obliged to acknowledge this fact. The implicit or explicit preamble to his conclusion must be: "On the basis of the available evidence, i.e., within the context of the factors so far discovered, the following is the proper conclusion to draw." Thereafter, the individual must continue to observe and identify; should new information warrant it, he must qualify his conclusion accordingly.

The Golden Sayings of Epictetus

But the rational and the irrational appear such in a different way to different persons, just as the good and the bad, the profitable and the unprofitable. For this reason, particularly, we need discipline, in order to learn how to adapt the preconception of the rational and the irrational to the several things conformably to nature. But in order to determine the rational and the irrational, we use not only the of external things, but we consider also what is appropriate to each person. For to one man it is consistent with reason to hold a chamber pot for another, and to look to this only, that if he does not hold it, he will receive stripes, and he will not receive his food: but if he shall hold the pot, he will not suffer anything hard or disagreeable. But to another man not only does the holding of a chamber pot appear intolerable for himself, but intolerable also for him to allow another to do this office for him. If, then, you ask me whether you should hold the chamber pot or not, I shall say to you that the receiving of food is worth more than the not receiving of it, and the being scourged is a greater indignity than not being scourged; so that if you measure your interests by these things, go and hold the chamber pot. "But this," you say, "would not be worthy of me." Well, then, it is you who must introduce this consideration into the inquiry, not I; for it is you who know yourself, how much you are worth to yourself, and at what price you sell yourself; for men sell themselves at various prices

Knowest thou what a speck thou art in comparison with the Universe?---That is, with respect to the body; since with respect to Reason, thou art not inferior to the Gods, nor less than they. For the greatness of Reason is not measured by length or height, but by the resolves of the mind. Place then thy happiness in that wherein thou art equal to the Gods.

The life of virtue is the life in accordance with nature. Since for the Stoic nature is rational and perfect, the ethical life is a life lived in accordance with the rational order of things. "Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well" ( Handbook , ch. 8).
Essential to appreciating this Stoic theme is the recognition of the difference between those things that are within our power and those not within our power.
Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions--in short, whatever is our doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our doing...So remember, if you think that things naturally enslaved are free or that things not your own are your own, you will be thwarted, miserable, and upset, and will blame both the gods and men.( Handbook , ch. 1)
The only thing over which we have control, therefore, is the faculty of judgment. Since anything else, including all external affairs and acts of others, are not within our power, we should adopt toward them the attitude of indifference. Toward all that is not within our power we should be apathetic.
What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things. For example, death is nothing dreadful (or else it would have appeared so to Socrates), but instead the judgment about death is that it is dreadful, that is what is dreadful. ( Handbook , ch. 5)
To avoid unhappiness, frustration, and disappointment, we, therefore, need to do two things: control those things that are within our power (namely our beliefs, judgments, desires , and attitudes) and be indifferent or apathetic to those things which are not in our power (namely, things external to us).
Toward those unfortunate things that are not within our power which we cannot avoid (for example, death and the actions and opinions of others) the proper attitude is one of apathy. Distress is the result of our attitudes towards things, not the things themselves. This is the consoling feature of Stoic fatalism. It is absurd to become distraught over externals for the same reason that it is absurd to become distressed over the past; both are beyond our power. The Stoic is simply adopting toward all things the only logical attitude appropriate to the past--indifference.

More Epictetus

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