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It's sad to see this in popular culture, but reationality does not mean total suppression of emotion. To be more accurate, modern concepts of rationality means

It's sad to see this in popular culture, but reationality does not mean total suppression of emotion. To be more accurate, modern concepts of rationality means that you are aware of your emotions, and that you can effectively process them in the correct context. So, crying in a support group is a completely rational thing to do, crying in a finance meeting, or during open heart surgery, much less so. It also means that you acknowledge and take responsibility for the care and upkeep of your emotions, and don't pawn these duties off on those who have not consented to it. Spock, while a fascinating character for a space opera, is not a good example of either rationality or emotional maturity. (At least not in the human sense.)

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Yeah. Adding to this, emotion informs rationality. There is no purely rational reason to do anything. It wouldn't be rational to avoid death if we didn't fear it. It wouldn't be rational to eat food if we didn't desire it. Rationality requires feelings like for example desire, disgust, fear, anger, hope to motivate performing any action what so ever. It's essentially the is-ought problem, without feelings, rationality alone only presents us with things that are, not what ought to be. If Spock was purely rational and void of any emotion, he'd be catatonic. He wouldn't eat, he wouldn't sleep, he couldn't do his job. If someone pushed him, he'd fall over and then he'd lay there with a blank stare. Reason allows us to act in more complex ways than knee-jerk reactions, allows us to predict outcomes that may override desires and fears, to prioritize among the perceived goods, to figure that every promise may not hold up. This is probably what people mean when they speak of acting rationally, applying rationality to the outcome of desires and fears are they really good/bad for us, or are they deceiving us into acting against our interest. This is basically Socratic ethics.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

Yeah. Adding to this, emotion informs rationality. There is no purely rational reason to do anything. It wouldn't be rational to avoid death if we didn't fear it. It wouldn't be rational to eat food if we didn't desire it. Rationality requires feelings like for example desire, disgust, fear, anger, hope to motivate performing any action what so ever. It's essentially the is-ought problem, without feelings, rationality alone only presents us with things that are, not what ought to be. If Spock was purely rational and void of any emotion, he'd be catatonic. He wouldn't eat, he wouldn't sleep, he couldn't do his job. If someone pushed him, he'd fall over and then he'd lay there with a blank stare. Reason allows us to act in more complex ways than knee-jerk reactions, allows us to predict outcomes that may override desires and fears, to prioritize among the perceived goods, to figure that every promise may not hold up. This is probably what people mean when they speak of acting rationally, applying rationality to the outcome of desires and fears are they really good/bad for us, or are they deceiving us into acting against our interest. This is basically Socratic ethics.