A quotation from a private essay from August, 2009 - relevant both to recent conversation with my mother and to my own thought patterns recently. Sometimes I am very wise!
"More than things you think about, preferences are what you feel. Thus, they often arise organically out of lived experience, the basic choices one makes, and the semiconscious patterns of one's thought rather than agonized, stressful directed thinking."
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4 comments:
Thanks for this, Grace. Believe it or not, this is actually relevant to a recent conversation I myself had, too. It was about *opinions* more than preferences, but still... it seems like this kind of argument can really go a ways towards reclaiming some kind of real validity in emotion, and also towards supporting my quixotic contention against the idea of rational human behavior....
Well, also, I'm certainly interested in hearing the context for this (I assume not over this blog). Who knows, maybe I'm even interested in *sharing the context* of my own conversation....
Be well.
Heh. I think it's blatantly obvious that humans do not function in a particularly rational way (and that this is even the belief of most scientific psychologists). The problem is that we often want to explain ourselves, and that's hard to do when we're not being rational).
I think the context for any kind of decision-making discussion and/or thoughts I have is usually the same - career choice issues. Do you want more detail than that? Feel free to share about your own conversation, either here or in private.
Hmm. I mean, I think my response to this is... that it's one thing to say that human beings don't function in a particularly rational way, and quite another to have a contention (like I'm claiming for myself) against even the *idea* of rational human behavior. Like -- the idea that being rational is something that's even possible for people, let alone desirable or achievable. ... I mean, you know, most of the time, even the casual use of the word "rational" strikes me as fraught with problems....
I mean... okay. I looked for a while on Amazon recently for a book to give a friend for his birthday. He'd read, and liked, Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, and so I was looking at David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. So, at first glance, those books (McRaney's in particular) seemed to actually be on the side of irrationality, in that they were making exactly your point: that people don't, in fact, function rationally. But -- on closer inspection -- they appeared to be more like *laments* for that fact, cries for people to behave *more* rationally. So: I guess what I'm saying is that even people who firmly believe that what you're saying is obvious is true still seem to think a lot more highly of directed thinking than you appear to in your quote!
But: I'm also interested in your point that rationality is something that's actually useful for explaining oneself. ... Or that, at least, it's useful, maybe, just to *appear* to be rational? I'm interested, anyway, in the idea that belief in rationality can be something like... well, like an art project that I can't remember whether it was Brian Eno or Matthew Barney who did: whoever it was would attach an enormous elastic band both to his waist and to a wall of a room, run towards the opposite wall with a paintbrush, get there with just enough momentum to apply a few dabs of paint to the far wall, and then be snapped back before being able to paint anything else. In other words: the idea that convincing arguments can be convincing because they're like the process of running towards the far wall, overcoming the lack of evidence for rationality in the process, even though soon enough one gets snapped back, "to one's senses" as it were -- but not before a tangible impact (the brushstrokes on the far wall) has been made, by a momentary conviction that there really was a "rationality" there to reach....
Anyway, this wasn't even my main point, but I think I'll stop the comment here anyway. Until next time....
Hmmm. I think there's an important difference between saying that rationality is impossible and/or unachievable and that it's undesirable. Something can easily be possible but undesirable, or desirable but impossible.
I think we are in agreement that any kind of absolute rationality is impossible? So perhaps what it is you're "claiming for [your]self" is that rationality - perhaps even the kind of limited rationality that I think is possible - really is undesirable? I wouldn't go so far, any more than I'd want to say that emotions are undesirable. I think on some level my instincts about this are mostly pragmatist? Rationality is fine when it's useful, as is irrationality, but not every situation is the same. If you have decided on a goal, often for purely emotional reasons, but aren't sure how to reach it, rational processes, however limited, could be of some service, and if you are trying to work together with other people, as I said, having some kind of shared language to do that with is probably good.
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