Can Emotions be Trusted?

Continuing on the tangent, the article that I linked to at the beginning of the thread The Polytheism of the Epicureans is a good and fairly brief presentation of the realist viewpoint. I've tended to follow the idealist take, but this got me thinking...

Quote from Godfrey

Continuing on the tangent, the article that I linked to at the beginning of the thread The Polytheism of the Epicureans is a good and fairly brief presentation of the realist viewpoint. I've tended to follow the idealist take, but this got me thinking...

I'm intrigued again Godfrey (Don runs off to read and re-read that article...)

Re: photos—I still have trouble embedding photos from Imgur when I'm using my cellphone. But that's mostly an Imgur problem. Much easier on the laptop!

Re: emotions—I like the distinction that Don is drawing between feelings/emotions and 'reactions'. But in a weird way, I can answer one of Susan's questions with a bit of a story. One of the most emotional people I've ever known seemed very happy.

He was a professor of Creative Writing and English Literature, as well as a musician, a poet, and a sort of hobby farmer. He was candid to a degree that was something formidable, bordering on gruff, and though clean-shaven, he looked as weathered as an old post. He had no time for bad writing; once when I was less wise but thought myself clever, I responded to a disagreeable essay assignment by writing it in Heroic Couplets—the most overwrought of verses. It was a cheap shot, which of course he saw right through. I received it back with copious notes, and a rubber-stamped, red ink heading at the top with these words: "Are you sure you want to turn this in?" I wondered how long it had been since he'd trotted that gem out. It didn't matter that I was among the best writers in my year. It was a bad essay, and we both knew it.

And yet, here's the thing; good writing was his claimed share of the food of the gods. It was what he seemed to live for, and when he found it, his haggard exterior quickened to a window into his soul. When I read Lucretius, where he writes that the shape of ever-flourishing Homer arose and wept salt tears, I see him still—intoning a few tender lines of poetry with a voice like a bassoon, as he clears his eyes by drying them.

Quote

He will be more deeply moved by feelings than others, but this will not prove to be an obstacle to wisdom. Epicurus