In Smith and Hyde, I found the topic of intensifying emotion by temporal and spatial proximity to be accurate and useful. I was automatically reminded of the photograph we saw of the child and the vulture. Someone had made a comment in that discussion that the vulture made him uneasy because he felt it could strike the child at any time. I think the lack of time and proximity of the photograph is why it is powerful. While someone could tell you that there are starving children all over the world, we don’t get a real sense of the problem till we see an actual child in need. Viewing the child’s malnourished body, up in the very front of the photo, evokes emotions of pity and fear to you instantly which brings the issue closer to you. And when we look at the vulture just waiting for the child our emotions are further intensified. We realize that the child might not have much time left so we have to take action now if we want to save him. Smith and Hyde write “..this sharing (lack of remoteness) makes Alcibiades susceptible to emotions that he would not have experienced at the time…(453).” What this means is that if the audience felt distance to the issue, they would not have felt those powerful emotions that promote them to take action. Seeing the power that proximity has, we as rhetoricians want to make sure that we are familiar and skillful in this technique if we want to move our audience to change.
Moving to Descartes’ Error, I was actually quite fascinated by Gage’s story. It was amazing and scary to see how important emotions are to making rational decisions. A point that was brought up in the book was that the reason why emotions help promote rational decisions is because emotions add value to the choices we make. So the reason why Gage and Elliot had trouble making decisions for the future was because they could not add value to any choice. Imagine going through life have no emotions or preferences toward an option. What if a loved one was in the hospital and the doctor asked you to pick between two courses of treatment: 1) Medicine that would help them live for a short period 2) Medicine that would help them live longer but would cause extreme and painful side effects. How would a person like Gage of Elliot make an important decision like this without emotions? How would they know what they are their loved ones value?
Until we started having these discussions, I never considered the impact our emotions have on our decision making. I always thought that decisions were based, on sound, rational judgement (free of those pesky emotions that seem to always cloud the issues).
ReplyDeleteNow I see that our emotions, and feelings are what drive us to make certain decisions, they are the basis for our decision.
Once I started looking at how our emotions represent the value we assign things, it all began to make sense. As I read about Gage and Elliot, I wondered if they had any concept that they had changed, that they were missing faculties that they once had, or if they wondered why they no longer felt emotions.
I read into the same thing about proximity when reading their example of Alcibiades. I think it's a great point to show about people being close to issues and how emotion affects them.
ReplyDeleteWhen you see the obituaries in the newspaper you feel sadness for the thought of someone having lost someone they loved. When the situation is put on you, i.e., when you lose someone you love, it is much different. The situation is a direct connection to you, which brings out much fuller and more intense emotion.
To further agree with your point on our reading of Damasio. He writes a section about monkeys and how the ones that have no emotions are shunned out of the group. Shunned?!! To me that was crazy because not only did the monkeys themselves have no emotion, but the group knew too and did not accept their family anymore. Emotions seem to play a bigger role than we think.
I grew up believing that emotions clouded the sound reasoning of rationale. Letting emotions get in the way of good reasoning was a fundamental failure, I was taught. Hence, the best decisions were made in the complete absence of emotion.
ReplyDeleteCan you imagine my surprise at reading Damasio? This goes against everything I was taught.
I now realize and appreciate the value of emotion. What I once considered a hindrance to good decision making, I now know as the reason why we can make decisions in the first place. Emotions add value to choice. Even when we try to rationally evaluate a claim against some type of reasonable criteria, we must realize that such criteria are normative, and emotionally valued.