Logic

[prettymacoroni]

Why do people place so much value in being "logical" when doing so means ignoring our gut instincts and our emotions which are arguably the only things that make us human? I find myself trying to temper and rationalize my responses, but it feels like lying sometimes. I know that sometimes my thoughts wouldn't make sense to someone else, and that my

Comments

[socrateswarrior]

Look at it this way. Emotions are the base, and logic is what's built on top of that within a given human's perspective. Logic commonly gets a bad rap from those who would label it as a cold outlook on life, and that may be true - when logic exists in a vacuum. But, in a healthy individual, it shouldn't exist in a vacuum. It exists, in my opinion, as a lens on the raw reactions and responses that emotions provide us.

Sometimes intuition and a gut feeling are picking up on cues that your fully conscious mind hasn't, that's true. But equally as often, a gut reaction is obtained from insufficient data, which may be omitting a crucial fact about a person that we weren't aware of. Maybe you get a negative emotional response to a large, intimidating looking black man, as an example. That may or may not prove to be a valid response to that person - the point is, you don't KNOW. That's what logic says. Logic tells you, "He may look frightening, but maybe he's a family man on the inside and loves his kids." Again, it may or may not be the case, but logic opens the door to that possibility where an emotional response may leave it closed out of fear.

Even more importantly, logic provides us the minimum of a basic backdrop for us to walk over together without having the luxury of being able to read each other's minds. Basically, logic's objectivity allows us to more easily understand the arguments and perspectives of others when we're communicating. Logic alone tells an incomplete story about a person's perspective, that's for damn sure, but it's a good starting point - THAT'S why we are raised to spend so much time throttling a purely emotional communicative rubric. The problem, in my opinion, comes when people are unable to move past that initial logical connection and form a communique` based on emotions as well. It is within that emotional interaction that we're able to more fully understand each other.

When people don't move to that second, emotional step of communication, they begin to feel the way you say you're feeling, Ali, when you can't express your true emotions to the person or people you're talking to, and begin to feel as if your own emotions wouldn't make sense to another person, when in fact the opposite is true. All of us are a lot more alike in how we feel than we give ourselves credit for. We just can't SEE it because we never show it to each other. We're still communicating on the logical level.