Well I'm alone on the couch tonight. Anna is asleep in her wooden bed, after only about an hour of protesting, claims of dire thirst and hunger (may be hard to believe, but she is well fed and has a water bottle in her room), and failed bargaining attempts from the tired little thing. I'm reading about faith and doubt, in a chapter on the utility of reason, and I decided even before I've finished the chapter, I want to make these words and truths somehow sink in. Become part of who I am and not just remain on a page in a book. So I'm placing them all here.
"Can any claim be more specious than to suggest that we want more objectivity, and less emotion, in guiding the course of our personal and collective lives? Emotion is not a defect in an otherwise perfect reasoning machine. Reason, unfettered from human feeling, has led to as many horrors as the crusader's zeal. What use is pity in a world devoted to maximizing efficiency and productivity? Scientific husbandry tells us to weed out the sick, the infirm, the weak. The ruthless efficiency of euthanasia initiatives and ethnic cleansing are but the programmatic application of Nietzche's point: from any quantifiable cost-benefit analysis, the principles of animal husbandry should apply to the human race. Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that strict obedience to "hard reason" rather than sympathy for fellow humans would represent a sacrifice of "the noblest part of our nature." It is the human heart resonating with empathy, not the logical brain attuned to the mathematics of efficiency, that revolts at cruelty and inhumanity.
In most of life's greatest transactions, where the stakes are the highest, it is to the heart we rightly turn, although not in utter isolation from the rational and reasonable. But whom to marry, when to discipline a child, when to let go of a dream, what to sacrifice and what promises to keep-- these are decisions best made when emotion in moderated but not obliterated by reason, by logic, by "scientific" thinking. And these decisions are certainly made, not in the absence of truth, but in recognizing those very truths which logic and science may be powerless to detect.
"We must consider love as an attitude by means of which certain aspects of reality become visible. The true meaning of the other as other, i.e, the meaning of the other as subject, becomes visible only through love. An attitude of preoccupation with ourselves, our own desires and interests, precludes our access to the true meaning of the other." --William Luijpen
This is not just metaphoric language. In the most emphatic and urgent meaning of the word, love reveals truth. It does not create the impression of truth; love does not merely endow something with a subjective truth--love is the only position or emotional disposition from which we become fully aware of the already present reality of the other person as more than a mere object among other objects in a crowded universe." Terryl and Fiona Givens, The Crucible of Doubt
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