Emotions

Most of us have once wished to get rid of any type of feeling, thinking that losing our emotions would be a fair price to avoid ever being sad or disgraceful again or with the idea that losing them would make us wiser. But if this became true, we would not only lose our capability of being happy or sad, feelings are more complex than that. Getting rid of them would also have a negative effect in our relations with other people and a part of us would be forever gone. Plato once said wisdom and passion were two horses pulling a chariot in different directions, but he seemed to be quite wrong. They are not as separated as some of use believe them to be and we, definitely, cannot choose only one of them. Recent discoveries have shown that our reasoning is greatly affected by our emotions.

During this TOK lesson, we learned about the case of a man, Phineas Gage, who had had an accident when working in a mine and his frontal lobe had been greatly damaged. His memory and reasoning capabilities had not been affected in any way, but he lost all type of emotion. According to the ones who knew him, even though his rational part was unaffected, he stopped being the same person. His personality had changed drastically and his way of acting towards people was completely different. The lack of emotion prevented him from knowing how a person would react to whatever he said or did. Apparently, emotions are crucial to access rational decisions and without them it is impossible for us to entirely understand the world.

I had never thought of any of this before, I knew that if someone lost his/her emotional capabilities they would change in some way, but before this lesson, I had always overlooked emotions. I thought they were important, though not as important as reason is.