Subject:  EMOTION |
Author:
Anthony
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Date Posted: 07:54:01 05/18/01 Fri
“Anger is a gift.” – Zack De Le Rocha
It seems like many of the college-educated people I meet seem to equate being philosophical with emotional neutrality. Is this belief a remnant of Greek Stoicism? A product of the rationalism espoused by the Age of Reason? A combination of these factors and others?
The stereotypical Western vision of disciples of Zen, for example, conjures up images of the stoic person, displaying no emotion in the face of all things. I am not so sure that this is so accurate a picture. I agree that the tenets of most Eastern philosophies center around balance, but I don’t think we were meant to suppress or ignore emotion. I DO believe that we can maintain strict control over the emotions, and not let them rule us. To suppress emotion brings on stagnation of the self (Freud by way of the East, you ask?). Supression of emotion can lead to inaction. Inactivity in Eastern thought is a prime evil. The Yin and Yang, for example, is not really about perfect stasis. The two forces interact dynamically, swirling around each other, both exerting equal force.
I consider emotion the instinct of humanity. Whether you believe that we evolved from the primates (and thus emotion is the remnant of animal instinct in us, and that it predates human consciousness/self-awareness) or that we were spontaneously created by a God or Gods (and that emotion was given to us as a blessing or a curse or both), or whether you believe in a combination of these two ideas, you cannot deny the power of emotion. After all, there WERE warrior monks in Asia that, I’m sure, got VERY emotional when fighting. But did they suppress their emotions? They more likely controlled it, channeled it, using it as energy in a fight. But that’s my interpretation.
I do not believe that the term “philosophical” is or should be synonymous with being “stoic.” In SOME philosophies, this may be the case. But I believe that it is perfectly natural to express emotion, and it is perfectly possible to be philosophical and emotional. The emotions give us a powerful means to accomplish things in life. For example, when my Web site was being plagued by some unknown person or persons that were attacking me via my Guestbook and Forum, I obviously got very angry. I credit my anger with the eventual flushing out of the person/persons responsible (turns out this unknown element, who I thought at first might be some strangers, turned out to be a person or more probably PERSONS that I used to work with). My anger drove me to find out the truth.
Now, concerning the tough guys out there sporting any of the variations of the “NO FEAR” decals on their cars/clothes. A man named Gavin De Becker wrote a book called “The Gift of Fear” a few years back. De Becker says that “victims of violent behavior usually feel a sense of fear before any threat or violence takes place. They may distrust the fear, or it may impel them to some action that saves their lives.” He believes that “we can all learn to recognize these signals of the ‘universal code of violence,’ and use them as tools to help us survive.” His book teaches “how to identify the warning signals of a potential attacker and recommends strategies for dealing with the problem before it becomes life threatening.”
As far as I am concerned, I believe the adage that states that we cannot know something without its opposite. So without fear, there is no courage. Courage is overcoming fear, not the absence of fear.
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