Re: Apology to Alexis Jacobi
Posted: Wed Mar 13, 2024 2:34 pm
Well, again, I can't see how we have values without emotions. There is a non-rational core to what we prioritize, care about, love, hate, try to make, etc. Without emotions, the intellect is just hollow calculation as far as values. It wouldn't know where to begin. It could just as well decide ants were the most important creatures or be antinatalist or, really, anything at all.Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 2:19 pmI draw a distinction between feelings and sentiments. For example people today are obsessed by their *feelings* -- emotions. But in contrast, and just for an example, the best poets work in the realm of ideas and sentiments.Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 6:09 am Aren't our values, ultimately founded on heart, feeling emotions? Do they determine at the core what we choose to value/prioritize? From there reason works out application, and then also implication: if we value X, then Y is a threat to that. From what non-emotional vantage do we form a base?
It would be in my view enormously wrong to negate *the heart* in the sense it is often meant. But there is another side to the *heart* and I refer to the Latin concept of intellectus.
(Latin intelligere — inter and legere — to choose between, to discern; Greek nous; German Vernunft, Verstand; French intellect; Italian intelletto).
The faculty of thought. As understood in Catholic philosophical literature it signifies the higher, spiritual, cognitive power of the soul. It is in this view awakened to action by sense, but transcends the latter in range. Amongst its functions are attention, conception, judgment, reasoning, reflection, and self-consciousness. All these modes of activity exhibit a distinctly suprasensuous element, and reveal a cognitive faculty of a higher order than is required for mere sense-cognitions. In harmony, therefore, with Catholic usage, we reserve the terms intellect, intelligence, and intellectual to this higher power and its operations, although many modern psychologists are wont, with much resulting confusion, to extend the application of these terms so as to include sensuous forms of the cognitive process. By thus restricting the use of these terms, the inaccuracy of such phrases as "animal intelligence" is avoided. Before such language may be legitimately employed, it should be shown that the lower animals are endowed with genuinely rational faculties, fundamentally one in kind with those of man. Catholic philosophers, however they differ on minor points, as a general body have held that intellect is a spiritual faculty depending extrinsically, but not intrinsically, on the bodily organism. The importance of a right theory of intellect is twofold: on account of its bearing on epistemology, or the doctrine of knowledge; and because of its connexion with the question of the spirituality of the soul.