Knowledge and Emotion Essay Example

influences knowledge making it ours. I believe that emotion makes knowledge more relevant to individuals letting them own it, but objective knowledge can also be learned without the use of emotion.

My theory on the emotion-knowledge relationship refutes Mr. Arnold Bennett’s blunt statement that “there can be no knowledge without emotion.” I do not think one can make such an all-exclusive statement on such an abstract subject.

There can, in fact, be knowledge without emotion. This fact-based knowledge is what knowledge areas like science and math are founded on. Without this objective knowledge, many professions would be out of business. For example, the reason doctors get paid so much money is because they are expected to use reason to guide their actions and not emotion, which is not an easy task. No patient wants their surgeon to choke while they are under the knife because they let emotion cloud their judgment.

That’s why the operating-room surgeons that have a high success rate are the rational ones devoid of emotion like Burke on Grey’s Anatomy. However, emotions are also productive in reaching expedient solutions as seen in surgery where doctors are often forced to rely on intuition and educated guesses to guide their decisions when little factual information is known. This can be shown particularly in psychology, an emotion-based science, when a patient’s symptoms cannot be labeled under a certain disorder per the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a rational manual containing criteria for diagnosing patients1, but even then using emotion can be risky because in the end, emotions are ultimately fallible and do not promote consistency in knowledge.

Perhaps Mr. Bennett did not mean for his words to

be taken literally. Maybe he merely meant to say that knowledge is better understood when it has personally affected us rather than if we had learned it in a detached manner. Reading secondary sources like textbooks or instruction manuals will only get us so far. In the work place, the whole purpose of starting at the intern level on the corporate ladder is to gain first-hand experience using textbook education without doing any big damage in the process. While emotion does not always directly relate to experience, there is usually a connection.

In order to address this problem I equate experience with emotion because the large part of the experience remembered is the emotion associated with the experience. Our memories of experiences are biased based of the mood we felt at the time.2 Another problem with Mr. Bennett’s vision that “until we have felt the force of the knowledge, it is not ours” is that it views knowledge as a possession, but does not set up any standards for this ambiguous assumption. What does it mean to possess knowledge? How does someone do it? I interpret that one possesses knowledge when one understands it and accepts it to be true and worth using in the future.

In my opinion, anyone can possess knowledge as long as it corresponds with the external world, but people who use emotion to understand knowledge will come to different conclusions/interpretations than people who solely use reason. For example, a student in history class reading about the Great Depression will not readily "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV)." Psychology Classroom at AllPsych Online. 15 May 2004. 14 Jan. 2009 . 2

Meyers, David G. "Moods and Memories." Psychology: Myers In Modules. 6th Edition. New York: Worth Publishers, 2001. 344-345. comprehend the situation and motives behind the peoples’ actions like someone who lived in the Great Depression era.

The down side to having personal experience, argued by the skeptics, is that bias can easily be formed when not just relying on the facts objectively. Even the person living during the Great Depression will have bias based on their situation and emotions at the time. Most of their memory will be the emotions felt at the time and the knowledge is theirs because of these emotions. Empiricists, on the other hand, believe that although there will be bias in history, self-criticism and keen insight help to overcome this bias.3 Personally, I would subscribe to the empiricists’ view of bias because if one were to use the skeptics’ way of understanding bias, then little true knowledge can be known objectively which is a terribly depressing thought.

The problem with emotional bias is that knowledge learned through emotion only takes into account the present, not the past or future like reason-based knowledge because emotions are in the here and now and fade while the rational knowledge will be just as relevant today as it will be next week.

This brings up the question of whether reason or emotion is a better valued basis for making knowledge ours. It can be seen like a continuum with two extremes- people who only use reason to learn knowledge and on the other end, people who only use emotion. The reasoning people are usually called cold and heart-less whereas the emotional people are usually called melodramatic and over-exaggerated.

The majority of the general public lies somewhere in between, but how much should emotion come into the equation when learning and validating knowledge?

Obviously Mr. Bennett favors the emotional extreme, but major institutions in society think differently. In actuality, I consider fact-based knowledge to be more valued in education while emotion-based knowledge is more emphasized in society. Look at the primary school curriculum where reason-based knowledge areas like science and math are emphasized with three to four years’ studies while emotion-based areas like the arts are usually a one year requirement.

The professors teach knowledge not by asking the class how they feel about the subject, but by looking at the facts. Swinging towards the emotional extreme is media. While I have not been alive more than seventeen years, I realize at least in the short run there has been a general trend in the media to present commentary and opinions rather than facts. They play on people’s feelings towards the issue rather than valuing the facts. On television, reality shows have hit it big because they focus on the emotionally extreme people and find it entertaining. In society and the home, sayings like “learn it the hard way” and “what does your heart tell you” highlight the value placed on emotion.

While I do not believe the relationship between knowledge and emotion is of the nature described by Mr. Bennett, I do believe that emotion has a great influence on possessing knowledge because each person’s emotions are different and therefore, each person’s interpretation of knowledge is unpredictable. The problem with Mr. Bennett’s favoring of the emotional extreme is that some people can be overly emotional and melodramatic

to the point where it clouds their judgment of the facts and causes selectivity of only certain facts that match their current emotions. This is what leads to bias.

This does not mean I believe emotion should have no influence over knowledge. I understand that people on the reasoning extreme can understand knowledge from their objective viewpoint, but I believe that having emotion adds personal possession to understanding knowledge by making it relevant to them. For example, I despise math and work hard just to get by, but then I look at my friend Dung and wonder how she manages to glide right through all the axioms and postulates. It’s because she likes math and finds pleasure in doing it.

The best way to describe this relationship between emotion and understanding knowledge is that while people understand knowledge objectively, it is more easily understood using emotion and better to remember in the long run. This idea can be described by the famous author Mr. Robert Keith Leavitt who said, “People don’t ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.”4 His words ring true in multiple situations from understanding the purpose of a formula in math class to understanding the war situation in media propaganda. Emotion is meant to make knowledge more significant for the individual, but should not be considered with the almighty power that Mr. Bennett gives it because there can be knowledge without emotion such as scientific data.