We have two radically different viewpoints to deal with: Rene Descartes' famous dictum,"I think, therefore I am", which epitomizes the hyper-intellectualizing , and its contemporary paraphrase, "I feel, therefore I am", which sums up the non-rational.
Why is there so much confusion about the word "thinking"? Where is the truth in all this? We can be enlightened by looking at the history of thinking. As long as nature was largely an enigma, and life-threatening, people's thinking was contaminated by painful emotions: fear, anxiety, worry, which led to erroneous beliefs and superstitions. Even the clearest thinkers had difficulty distinguishing rational from irrational ideas. I find it significant that all the early revolutionary scientists had some blatant blind spots, which let superstitition sneak into their otherwise accurate view of reality. Ever since the 17th century, at least in the scientific movement of the western world, a great deal of effort has been spent on making all observations objective and unclouded by personal feelings or wishes, to separate fact from fancy. This was an admirable, healthy, and necessary development, but it has gone too far. What was at first a refreshing new attitude has turned into a one-sided arid one, going so far as to claim: you cannot think straight if you have any feelings on the subject.
As a result, over the last 300 years, generations of scholars and researchers have struggled to separate their thinking from their feelings. In the process of becoming ever more intellectually sophisticated, they remained underdeveloped, even impoverished emotionally. Simultaneously, large numbers of people who cannot understand this "hard" science, because of its increasingly abstract and obscure nature, have been falling for irrational movements, where feelings and desires come into their own. So, while our world is being transformed by computer dating, genetic engineering, space rockets, and in danger of annihilation by nuclear weapons, we are being inundated by food faddists, anti-vaccine fanatics, UFO sighters, creationists, and stem cell research deniers.
In summary we can state: when the scientists decided to eliminate any knowledge not obtained by the cold, rigorous scientific method, they were trying to get rid of distressed feeling. In this process they lost also rational feelings, and threw out the baby with the bath water. At the same time, those who think science has gone too far, or are dissatisfied with its one-sidedness, have become anti-scientific and anti-intellectual. In their laudable attempt to get the baby back, they are getting the dirty water along with it!
Feelings of distress need to be felt, not acted upon. Thus, when we have gotten rid of our painful emotions, we will emerge with rational feelings: love for our fellow human beings, the earth around us, and the entire universe. These feelings, in turn, can inform and humanize our thinking.
Here is a table that can help us distinguish more clearly among three kinds of mental activity, all of which can go under the title: "True Thinking".
INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONAL RATIONAL
Devoid of feeling Based on painful emotion Based on love & zest
Out of touch with reality Rigid--closed system Flexible
Logical but heavy Illogical Logical & buoyant
Complicated Simplistic Clear
Hair-splitting Over-generalized Differentiated
Asks wrong questions Ready-made answers Leads to new questions
Theoretical Jumps to conclusions Leads to concrete
action & practical conclusions
1 comment:
I am distressed by the current scorn of science by adherents of the radical religious right. They reject the theory of evolution, the importance of stem cell research, and most findings from research psychology (for example the finding that children learn better without punishment). Instead, they base their convictions on a narrow interpretation of the Bible.
I think that the primary reason for this rejection of science is not that science has become too intellectual and devoid of feeling. The reasons are much more complex, having more to do with a deep-seated fear of change and a desire to return to a mythical age of “wholesome family values.” These anti-intellectual and anti-scientific people are not trying to balance science with more emotion. They are rejecting the scientific method in its entirety, including the questioning that goes with it, because they find more comfort in having all of their questions answered by a single source (the Bible). I suspect that their attitude is rooted in the fact that they were given ready-made answers as children and not encouraged to ask questions.
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