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Full Idea
It is perfectly intelligible and entirely human to experience an emotion when seeing a low-flying bat, where we would not want to say that the experience was either rational or irrational.
Gist of Idea
Some emotions are direct responses, and neither rational nor irrational
Source
Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], Intro)
Book Ref
Goldie,Peter: 'The Emotions' [OUP 2002], p.3
A Reaction
Goldie is attacking the common tendency of philosophers to over-intellectualise emotions. This example makes his point conclusively.
| 5963 | Some say emotion is a sort of reason, and others say virtue concerns emotion [Plutarch] |
| 17203 | Minds are subject to passions if they have inadequate ideas [Spinoza] |
| 4864 | An emotion is only bad if it hinders us from thinking [Spinoza] |
| 12935 | Every feeling is the perception of a truth [Leibniz] |
| 23939 | We fail to see that reason is a network of passions, and every passion contains some reason [Nietzsche] |
| 23937 | It is reason which needs the anchorage of passions, rather than vice versa [Solomon] |
| 23947 | Dividing ourselves into confrontational reason and passion destroys our harmonious whole [Solomon] |
| 23958 | The supposed irrationality of our emotions is often tactless or faulty expression of them [Solomon] |
| 5335 | Emotions are usually very apt, rather than being non-rational and fickle [Flanagan] |
| 23967 | Some emotions are direct responses, and neither rational nor irrational [Goldie] |
| 23971 | Emotional thought is not rational, but it can be intelligible [Goldie] |