Reason Vs Emotion

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” – Luke 23:34

Cambridge dictionary defines,

Innocence: the quality of not having much experience of life and not knowing about the bad things that happen in life

Ignorance: lack of knowledge, understanding, or information about something

One finds sincere practitioners going effusive about ‘the word of forgiveness’ across many websites. To quote a popular site for ex., “Praying for one’s torturers is not human. Jesus was able to do it because of his intimate relationship with the Father.” It is obvious Jesus in his cries to God was treating his torturers as ignorants for they weren’t aware of ‘Him’ in a religionist’s perspective; they weren’t aware of the rebellion they were inciting by putting Jesus on cross in a historian’s perspective.

Putting to rest the religion for now, I will confine myself to my way of looking at things all but religion, atleast for the rest of the write-up.

To enter into the very pith of the above two words or ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for that matter makes things worse by getting one onto the shaky contours of reasoning – for what is goodness but a relative virtue that is zeitgeist and / or species specific.

Who exactly is innocent / ignorant? To put forward my level of understanding, an innocent/ignorant is the one who doesn’t put into use his faculties of reasoning. Now, is it possible for a person to be completely innocent/ignorant? My answer would be a firm, NO. Just like it’s not possible for a person to be a complete introvert or extrovert it isn’t possible for a person to be completely at extreme ends of a spectrum of innocence / ignorance either. Also, if he is less under the influence of Reason while looking at things, he must, for sure, be more under the spell of Emotion. So is it possible for a person to be completely logical or completely emotional? A resounding NO again(here’s a related post of mine), because both logic and emotion, though not correlated atleast until certain depths of consciousness, can coexist, at varying degrees in various personalities.

Logic and Emotion marry and coexist in any person so amicably to an extent that they become unrecognizable as binaries.

For instance,

1. A subordinate, at work, to make his point count, infront of his superiors, often, puts his own ‘twisting of facts’ garbed in assertion/confidence (or emotion garbed in reason or mythology(subjective truth) garbed in objective truth) at official meetings.
2. Sankara, Ramanuja, Madva, Chaitanya etc to quote Indian; St. Augustine and then St. Thomas Aquinas etc to quote European whose religious philosophies are often at opposite ends at various points with each other, were able to prove (or give an impression) to their contemporaries (and to their avid followers to this day) that their own way of looking at things, alone, is objective.

Here’s a super insightful write-up on this very exciting idea, ‘Your Truth – My Truth’ by popular mythologist, Devdutt Pattanaik.

To move little forward on the affect the Reason and Emotion might causate on the future, my sincere feeling, as journalist, Jacob Koshy summarizes about Noah Harari’s latest book, ‘Homo Deus’, in his amazingly written review, is thus,

With his work, Harari, “… opened a portal for us to contemplate on what kind of relationships we are forming with our data-crunching machines and whether ‘right’ must be determined by empirical evidence or good old ‘gut instinct.’ It does appear that Harari discusses a world that has solved hunger and religious fanaticism — facts that are at odds with our reality — but the future, as history tells us, sets in when we are least aware of it.”

I will conclude this part of my write-up by suggesting two very exciting, Nicholas Hoult starrer, films. One, the very famous, much critically reviewed, Mad Max: Fury Road, two, the less appreciated and less critics friendly, The Equals. While I wouldn’t comment about the craft of movie making, the reason being my ignorance of it as I wrote in another write-up of mine, I feel the latter has a more realistic idea (an idea that humans getting caught in slightest of Emotions is worse that can happen and Reason alone is virtue) of a post-apocalyptic world.

Zelig and the stray

It’s not often that you come across a movie in a documentary format, that too from a very famous director – one such film is Zelig. With Woody Allen both as a lead actor and director, it’s considered an epitome of perfection in the genre of mockumentary.

Contrary to what has been the norm when it comes to discussing with respect to the basic theme of this movie viz. being oneself irrespective of where you are / whom you are with, I will write about a situation that interested me.

More than half time into the story, when one after another person comes claiming the alleged damage and damages Zelig have caused them, public opinion slowly turns against him so much that in one scene a lady expresses a desire of getting him lynched by the court of law.

This brings me to the very concept of the validity of punishment as a reformative measure when a person commits an offense out of ignorance.

Is punishing a person a right choice when he / she commits an offense rather than making him go through the reformation?

Let’s consider Zelig’s case itself as an example: irrespective of whether he’s conscious of his committing crimes / mistakes, he has committed them and is he really culprit of all this? Our answer can’t be in affirmative.

Similarly a kid committing a crime wouldn’t be punished in the same way an adult gets punished because the former is considered ‘ignorant’ as regards the ways of the world.

Let’s now take a famous line from Bible as an example. Said to be the first in a series of seven last sayings Jesus utters from the cross and called famously as “The word of Forgiveness”, the line goes as follows

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do”

Now if you take Zelig’s case since he’s suffering from a disorder he can’t be held responsible for any crime that he commits – on the grounds of his being ignorant.

In the same way if one takes the biblical saying into the case and try to contemplate on the nature of ignorance and its spread across the world, it’s very much possible that what we believe as ultimate truth is very much ‘our truth’ rather than it’s really being true-in-every-sense. On further reflection on this lines, I feel, there shouldn’t be any reason to punish a person for a crime he committed out of ignorance. It’s only the reform that he requires in the end.

I will further try to explore on this fascinating biblical line, on ignorance and on innocence in another post.