Philosophers talk about the harm of resentment.

For example, on a cool morning, you cooked a pot of porridge, spread pancakes and heated milk for breakfast. You were about to wake up your family when you suddenly smelled a strange perfume coming from your husband's suit jacket. You know, husbands often meet female clients because of their work needs. You never doubted his loyalty, and you didn't notice anything unusual about him recently. However, your heart just can't calm down. The more you tell yourself not to think about it, the clearer the picture of your husband's affair will be in your mind.

People's emotions can't be suppressed by their own reason in this way. If the history of human philosophy is a brilliant biography of reason, then as long as we read it carefully, we will find another fact hidden between the lines: the Millennium history of struggle and exploration between reason and emotion. Plato compared the human soul to Federico's double-headed carriage, and the two horses representing irrationality were controlled by the coachman representing rationality. The more stubborn the horse is, the desire, and the other horse is passion. Although obedient, we still need to be supervised by reason at all times.

/kloc-Descartes, a philosopher in the 0 th and 7 th centuries, believes that emotion is promoted and maintained by irrational animal spirits. Hume, another philosopher, is even more pessimistic. He said, "Reason is and should be a slave to passion; It can't do anything but serve passion. For a long time, "emotion is irrational and irrational" has been taken for granted. It was not until the appearance of Robert C. Solomon, a representative of emotion philosophy in the 20th century and a philosophy professor at the University of Texas in the United States, that this view was questioned.

The relationship between emotion and judgment

The evolution of human emotions

The screening mechanism of emotions

The relationship between emotion and judgment

Solomon drew nutrients from the Stoic school and put forward the viewpoint that "emotion is judgment", and believed that human emotion is profound, complex and changeable, and can't be just a blind and irrational force. Emotion must include the value judgment of the relationship between self-happiness and the world, and it is a delicate expression of rational ability. For example, the essence of our dissatisfaction with our boss is not whether our heart beats faster, our blood pressure rises and our mood is agitated when we look at his decision-making, but whether we judge that we have been treated unfairly. This kind of anger includes our understanding of the ideal state of the environment, and the relationship between our own happiness and the unit, which is beyond the simple physical reaction or subjective feeling. In the same way, although an elephant cries when witnessing the death of its companion, its sorrow cannot be compared with that of human "ten years of life and death", because the latter contains a profound understanding of love, family, death and the meaning of life. Philosophers call this theory cognitive theory of emotion.

Solomon's theory is challenged by cognitive science and neuroscience. It is obviously not a simple philosophical question whether emotions must contain higher-order judgments as Solomon put forward. Psychologist Robert B. Zajonc has proved through the experiment of pure exposure effect that the more familiar things, the more positive emotions people will have, and participants don't have to realize that things are repetitive, so they don't have to make any judgments about them. Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist, found that when he removed the neocortex and sensory cortex responsible for language, memory and advanced logical thinking from the brains of mice, they still reacted with fear in the face of danger. Ledu called the emotional mechanism triggered by cortex high, and the emotional mechanism triggered by thalamus directly bypassing cortex low. The high and low roads are parallel and complement each other. It can be seen that the appearance of emotions does not necessarily involve the judgment of the object.

The evolution of human emotions

Cognitive emotionalists admit that fear of snakes does not necessarily involve complicated judgments such as "this is a poisonous rattlesnake", but if it is related to "danger! Without such a simple judgment, the physical reaction related to fear becomes incomprehensible. Why do we want to run away when we see a snake, but we want to throw ourselves at our lover? Why should we retaliate when we are treated unfairly and remedy when we do something wrong? These behavioral tendencies are obviously the answers to the specific problems we face, so we can't be ignorant of the problems.

From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, emotional judgment does not have to be consciously carried out in our minds. They were written into our genes by natural selection in the long evolution, and they did not operate unconsciously in our bodies, which Solomon called "body judgment". Emotion is like an automatic program, which provides unique solutions to different evolutionary problems. When the input item is "Danger", the "Fear" application will output "Escape". When the input item is loss, the sad app will output crying, and when the input item is impurity, the disgusting app will output vomiting. At this level, emotional rationality does not mean the application of our current speculative ability, but the eternal wisdom of biological evolution hidden in it.

However, it is precisely because of the long history of emotional wisdom that there is the risk of obsolescence. First of all, it does not necessarily meet the needs of today's society. Primitive human beings have poor living conditions, and the risk of malnutrition drives the human body to evolve a reward mechanism: whenever we eat foods with high sugar, high fat and high protein, our brains will secrete a lot of dopamine that makes people happy as a reward for eating "right" food.

Modern people's will to resist food is so weak and it is so difficult to lose weight. This mechanism is the chief culprit. Other inappropriate emotions, such as the impulse to punch each other when humiliated by the boss and the idea of running away when scolded by the wife, have brought us all kinds of inconvenience. Second, emotional wisdom does not necessarily conform to modern moral standards.

The above refutes the simple equation of "emotion = irrationality". So, does the common sense of "emotion = irrationality" hold? In Descartes' Mistakes, the author neuroscientist Antonio Damasio tells a case. 1848, Fenice Gage, an outstanding American railway worker, was accidentally injured in the blasting process, and a long iron bar penetrated his head. He not only miraculously survived, but also recovered without any obstacles in intelligence, language and physical fitness. Strangely, he used to be reliable and approachable, but gradually he became capricious and unruly. He invested recklessly and recklessly, and finally lost his job and wife and became a self-pitying alcoholic.

The damaged part of Jia Ge's brain is the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for complex emotional operations. Losing these emotions did not make him more rational, but made his judgment and decision-making a mess. From his clinical diagnosis, damasio found that these patients who lost these emotions have one thing in common: their thoughts are too "comprehensive" to make simple decisions within a reasonable time. It is difficult to make an appointment with them for a follow-up visit. Their minds will be exhausted every day of the next month, the existing itinerary and possible plans, weather, traffic, work status, and even personal feelings. It took a long time, but the day finally chosen never satisfied and reassured them.

The screening mechanism of emotions

Based on these findings, damasio put forward the "Body Mark Hypothesis": Emotion is like a spotlight, focusing our mind in a given range, and then letting reason think in it. We don't have to consider all the factors in detail, because our happiness, fear, sadness and anger have automatically classified a small part as "priority" and shelved others. At this level, emotional rationality can also be understood as a screening mechanism to help rational thinking make decisions in specific situations. Of course, this mechanism may not always screen out the best options for us.

An unfaithful man rationally knows to consider his wife's feelings, children's happiness and family harmony, but his love for his lover makes him forget these key factors. A jealous woman knows that peeking at her partner's mobile phone, stalking him and pressing him will only make their relationship worse, but the importance of these behaviors is infinitely magnified in her mind, so that they become the only option. Therefore, we can also understand emotional irrationality as the wrong screening of many options. Philosopher Plotinus said: "Human beings are between divinity and animality, and sometimes they tend to one, and sometimes they tend to the other. 」

If divinity represents human reason and animal nature represents human desire, then emotion seems to be in between, sometimes noble, sometimes shameful, sometimes ugly and sometimes elegant. In emotion, we can find both human goodness and human evil. In emotion, we can also find ourselves.