Q&A: Does an Emotional Experience Bring Us Into Contact with Reality?
Does an Emotional Experience Bring Us Into Contact with Reality?
Question
I’m worried that the Rabbi, as a philosopher, detests questions of this kind, but this is a subject close to my heart and I’d like to hear your opinion.
I am a very emotional person; I experience feelings that I interpret as religious experiences (an experience of God or an experience of moral values).
I keep asking myself whether this experience represents reality in a genuine way. That is: in order to know God and the highest values, does one need to study philosophy or music?
In other words: does an emotional experience give us a truer encounter with reality, or in order to know reality do we need analysis and deeper study of the concepts of cognition?
I’d appreciate some help putting the chaos in my head on this subject in order.
Thank you
Answer
I don’t detest these questions; I just don’t know what to do with them.
I’ll only say that it is important to distinguish between emotion and intuition. Intuition is an intellectual tool, but emotion has nothing whatsoever to do with reality.
Discussion on Answer
No. What reality says to you is reality from your perspective (that is the relation between Kant’s phenomenon and noumenon). Emotion has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. I love something and you hate it, even though both of us see the very same thing. The difference between us is due to our different psychological makeup, not because of reality.
As for your question: 1. I don’t know what your view is, because I haven’t seen one here. 2. “Existentialist thought” is an oxymoron. 3. Maybe because of the previous two points one can identify the two things, but that is of course completely meaningless.
So, the Rabbi is saying that emotion is basically what reality says to me, not what reality is in itself.
Good enough for me.
By the way, is my way of thinking considered existentialist, or is that unrelated?