18 February 2012

"If your skin is crawling, pay attention. If something doesn’t feel right, pay attention. If the hairs on the back of your neck prickle, if your gut clenches up, if a wave of wrongness washes over you, if your heart starts beating faster, pay, pay, pay attention. Do not second-guess yourself or rationalize anything that impedes your safety. Our instincts are the animal inside of our humanness, warning us of danger."

~Inga Muscio

I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that we qualify knowledge in our society. If an idea can be verified through scientific method, it has merit. If the idea came from a book that has had both titular and capitalization-conferred Greatness thrust upon it, it has merit. If the idea is arrived at through deductive, "rational" reasoning, it has merit.

But if an idea is arrived at via gut, intuition, or prayer, it doesn't hold sway with most people, at least not in mainstream or academic circles. And, to a large extent, that means that, when people are arguing, saying that someone is being "emotional" is the same thing as being wrong or somehow not playing by the rules of intelligent discourse. And, infuriatingly, that label is most often applied to women. The easiest way to dismiss a women in an argument is by saying she's being emotional, or her uglier sister, irrational. And while emotional arguments are not applicable in every situation, I also don't think they should be considered to be inherently without validity. With respect to Aristotle, his whole "man is a rational animal" idea has been as limiting as it has been liberating.

I'm not saying that we should be creatures purely driven by passion or intuition--that way chaos lies. But being purely "rational" also cuts out some of our most human bits, eventually leading us towards some type of cold stagnation. I might be a bit of a relativist, but I do think that there are multiple ways of knowing, and giving one primacy necessarily devalues a valuable other.

And I think that cheats us all.

1 comment:

  1. I agree. You cannot give precedence to one 'way' of thinking over another. Recently in my contemporary Fictions class, th prof tells me describing a text as 'nostalgic' is in some way belittling the text. A casual way of calling a text is when you cal it nostalgic, but what do I do if that's the 'emotion' that hit me (and most of the uppity silent class im sure) when I read it. and I certainly did not mean to call it nostalgic because I though any less of it. So I held my fort, and told him I don't mean it in the sense it is being thought of, I mean what I say. The prof had the grace of a wise man in saying, Yes I kknow you do not mean it "that" belittling sense!! Is nostalgia such a bad word?

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