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Can We Know When to Trust Our Emotions?


Ms. ,

Grade 11 Theory of Knowledge

January 4, 2015


“There can be no knowledge without emotion… until we have felt the force of knowledge, it is not ours,” said Arnold Bennett, an English novelist in late 19th century. Emotions are one of the most defining natures of us human beings and are an important way of knowing.

With the help of empathy, for example, I am able to understand the motives behind other people’s behaviors. Nonetheless, there are also occasions in which emotions fail to function as a valid way of knowing. Once I was madly in love with a girl. Under the intense love, one of the most basic emotions, I tended to over-interpret everything she said and firmly believed that she felt the same way as I did.

But later it turned out that she had never liked me. When I eventually got over her, I re-visited our chat history and realized that all she said to me was just normal talk. This was when I found out how emotions could be disruptive, without my awareness, to the process of knowing; my reasoning became unreliable under my intense emotions.

The distinct experiences I had made me raise the knowledge questions—how are emotions constructive and disruptive in the attainment of knowledge? And what are those circumstances respectively?

History is the study of the past. Historians are not only concerned about the facts, but also what really happened and why they happened, a process which emotions play a big role. For example, there is a photo taken in 1940s in which a Japanese soldier taking care of a Chinese boy.

Japanese people would praise the action and conclude that Japanese soldiers adhered to humanity even during fierce war, while Chinese people would cite this photo as evidence of the blatant hypocrisy and propaganda of Japanese government. Both Japanese and Chinese people acknowledge the fact, but form completely different historical theories due to their patriotism, a kind of emotion, to their own countries.

Obviously, both theories are, to a greater extent or less, biased and lack validity, and emotions play a destructive role here in our pursuit of knowledge. As shown from the example, emotions can also be untrustworthy every now and then.

Although discrete historians, when formulating theories of the past, are inevitably affected by emotions, most of them try to be objective, that is, to get rid of emotions in the attainment of knowledge. For example, when analyzing presidents of America, they would always discuss both the merits and demerits of them—although president Nixon discouraged American democracy by eavesdropping his opponent, he broke the ice and built good relationship with China.

However, there is no way we can totally get away from emotions, and most of the times we do not even know the fact that we are affected by them. Emile Durkheim, a 19th century European sociologist, declares that we human beings are heavily influenced by social facts and social currents, that we are likely to feel emotions simply because other people around us are feeling the emotions.

For instance, many people are astonished by the atrocity of German soldiers, who ruthlessly killed millions of innocent Jews without a blink of eyes. Therefore, it is very important for historians to understand the motives behind the genocide committed by an entire nation.

But the question goes, could those Nazism soldiers know whether they could trust their emotions to gain knowledge about the right things to do? In the famous Milgram experiment of obedience, 70% of the volunteers chose to exert the 450-volt maximum electric shock under the force of authority, driven by obedience.

During the Second World War, the same obedience could be derived from the emotions of nationalism and patriotism. People in the Milgram’s experiment could hardly believe, in retrospect, that they had perpetrated something that cruel, and the extent to which they were affected by their emotions.

An implication of this experiment is that it is extremely difficult to know when to trust our emotions because we live in the society in which social facts shapes the way we think without our awareness. Most people never cast doubt on our pursuit of democracy and take it as a fact.

That is why, in writing the histories of their own countries, many historians fall short of staying away from their emotions, such as Chinese historians who severely downplayed the important role Kuomintang played in fighting Japanese invaders due to their loyalty and patriotism to the country and the Communist Party.

It is deemed as knowledge in history only because it corresponds with the value system in contemporary society.

Thus, we can know when to trust our emotions in the pursuit of knowledge only to a very limited extent; we can manage to distrust some simple emotions, such as affection and objection towards particular historical events and figures, but we mostly fail to be exempted from some collective emotions of cultural and historical contexts, such as patriotism, much of the emotion granted by the society from the moment we are born.

For example, my mother once lied to my grandpa, saying she was okay when she was having a breast surgery, to let my grandpa not to worry. The care and love behind the motive actually justify the action; my father and I both thought it praiseworthy and was the right thing to do.

In contrast, a person who uses lies to fraud money is usually despised and his action considered blameworthy because of his motive to harm other people. The two actions are intrinsically the same—telling something that is not true, but we use emotions to know whether the action is praiseworthy or blameworthy.

And what we have attained in the above two cases by trusting our emotions does seem to be knowledge and is commonly accepted in ethics.

However, what if the person you are killing is your lover?

There are usually two schools of views regarding the cases. Utilitarian philosophers would argue that in both cases saving five is required in order to be moral so as to maximize the total happiness—the five people bring more happiness to the world than the one person does.

On the other side, Kantian philosophers would argue that saving five while willing one is prohibited in both cases since you use other people as mere means and this is immoral.

Some people would choose to trust their emotions and save the lover without hesitation, while others may cling to their original decision through reasoning—for example, some people might think it is always better to maximize the total happiness of the entire human race; the deaths of five people could depress their families more in total than the loss of their lover would depress them.

In response to the essay question, we can know when to trust our emotions only to a limited extent, a conclusion developed through my discussion of history and ethics as two areas of knowledge. This conclusion can actually be applied to our real life. In making laws, people set explicit penalties regarding different crimes.

In China, for example, the penalty for intentional homicide varies from three-year imprisonment to sentence to death. We use reasoning to attain knowledge about what is the right thing to do—if a person kills intentionally, he must be subject to such penalty. Meanwhile, we use emotions to determine the degree to which the penalty is enforced; a woman in China who kills her alcoholic and violent husband only got a three-year imprisonment, while a college student who kills his classmate for trifles is sentenced to death; we are sympathetic to the former and antipathetic towards the latter.


Work cited:

1. Fine, G., “Introduction” in Plato on Knowledge and Forms: Selected Essays (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 5.
2.
Kant, I. Kritika chistogo razuma. Soch., vol. 3. Moscow, 1964.

3.
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6. IBO, ToK Guide 2015, p. 40, p. 48.


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