THE LAST THING I WANT to turn this blog into is a platform for me to complain about what I don't like about Shanghai, and sometimes, the world at large. The temptation is always high. For instance, I got home deadly tired today. I even slept on th bus on the way back because I had stood too long today, and the sleep I had last night was way less than adequate.
I was lucky that I didn't have my bike with me as I had no idea how I would have the energy to get on it to take it back home with me. When I set my goal to write this blog before I go to bed at night, I knew better than anyone else what were the kinds of things that got left in my brain after a long day of working, and especially writing.
While I'd like every single post to be like Roland Barthes' Writing Degree Zero, what seems to happen quite regularly is how I turn eventually turn it into a platform for personal social critic. Having the responsibility of delivering moral philosophy as a pedagogical subject neither help nor make it easier for me to think of this blog as a place to reflect in a positive manner neither.
I usually didn't go back to read what I wrote yesterday, or the day before, because I often wanted to focus on the present, and on what I would be doing, rather on the past. Although one of the reasons why I had been "so damn good" at keeping field notes when I was doing fieldwork was precisely because I loved the idea of being able to go back to trace, revisit, and re-comprehend myself through what I had written, which was the best depository of my personal feelings.
By doing so, not only that I would get to revisit my own subjectivity, but also make a certain value judgement about how well I had been able to manage (or mismanage) my time when putting those slices of subjective descriptions and read them altogether. It's almost a pathological symptom that had no cure for me.
So, when I was in the field, which wasn't that long ago, my room would be the only room in the lane (and perhaps one of the very few in the neighborhoods) whose light was still on at 1am in the morning.
Since my room was up on the second floor facing the south side, it was easy to spot the light coming from my window especially when every other room's lights had already been turned off and the lane in which my place was located was pretty much pitch black already. And that small light was a little desk's lamp that I used to illuminate my small black notebooks that I had to look at in the darkness in order to decipher my own scribbles and sketches.
In the summer, I would be almost naked when writing field notes at night like that because it's so hot inside. I could have left the door open to let the breeze in, but I never liked to look at the dark, quiet, and rather haunted-looking staircase connected my room (which I would be right there by my door if it would be open outward to let the breeze in).
Growing up in Thailand in the 80s and 90s where and during which time various stories of ghost and evil spirit were almost like lullabies to get children to fear the unknown so that they would listen to their parents, I always have this deep dear for the explainable, especially ghosts.
I remember that I didn't even want to go to the bathroom at night alone when I was young, and, of course, many times I had to commit an act that would lead my parents to have to clean up for me in the morning. I liked to sleep in the same room with someone, especially with my older brother and my mother, if they were around. I had this pathological fear of being alone in a room that was quiet and dark.
It's almost unimaginable then that for the last 15 years I have been renting a room to live alone. I sometimes still feel that I am not alone when I am actually alone (which often gets me the goosebumps like what I am having right now!). At the end of the day, the room that I rented to do my field research was at least, at the time, 80-year-old, so it's possible that someone may have died in the house or in the area surrounding it.
Long story short, even though I was not that afraid of ghost anymore, I couldn't imagine myself sleeping in the room that whose door not only was not locked, but also was opening to the darkness. True. I also feared of being robbed, hurt, and murdered. At the end of the day, the tenants were coming and going, and except the two old tenants whom I got to know well throughout the course of my field research there I did not know anyone else.
Social interaction there was limited by, I believe, the lack of trust among the new neighbors. Before it's dark in my room, I sometimes couldn't even make sense of the shorthand that I myself committed. I could have turned on the room's desk lamp, but I didn't do so because I felt that it would be more romantic to be typing under a small little lamp (in addition to the fact that I never really like fluorescent light from above anyway). Also, I would be drinking something while writing.
Mostly it's a glass of wine (thanks to a suggestion from one of my supervisors who once told me a tip regarding how a great writer like him composed and sometimes overcame his own writer's block!) I remember well how persistent I was in trying to write as much as I could, and everything I could. During the first few months, I didn't have internet there, so I would be writing without any distraction.
A small little radio that my friend helped me to buy online would keep me company only until a few minutes before midnight when the radio station that I always listened to then called it a day, and then the complete silence would take over.
post Day 11: Emotion is the Slave of Reason Fri, 04 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 In the 18th century, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote that human reason is "the slave of the passions." If Hume had meant by "passions" what we mean by that word today, his observation wouldn't be worth noting. Obviously, when we're seized by intense feelings like lust or vengeance, our reasoning faculties are not running the show. But Hume meant "passions" in a different sense; he meant feelings, broadly speaking.
He was saying that, though rational thought plays an important role in human motivation, it is in a certain sense never really calling the shots. When we decide to do something, we decide on the basis of a feeling. Where did Hume get this idea? Apparently through introspection—carefully watching his mind at work. In a sense, Hume was being mindful before mindfulness was cool. Indeed, as Western philosophers go, Hume was pretty Eastern.
A number of his views align almost uncannily with Buddhist thought, including an argument he mounted against the existence of the self. Some scholars have suggested that this may be no coincidence, that he may have somehow encountered Buddhist ideas even though they had barely begun to drift westward from Asia. Certainly the idea that[...]" While sitting on the plane traveling from Shanghai to Bangkok, I had, quite surprisingly, a rather deep thought about how I had been seeing my life anymore.
"What if the plane goes down tonight?" For some reason, even though I always know that air travel is one of the safest modes of transportation, I always have this morbid thought in mind every time before the plane takes off (but strangely not when it's landing -- for some reason, I always find comfort in having such a thought (what could be so bad about dying, right?) although I also pray to survive.
If I get really tired when I am on that seat (which is usually the case because of my habit of getting a nigh flight after a long day of work so that I would get to wherever I want the next day and hit the ground running), I'd often say to myself, "it would be okay if I die today" -- and I would really mean it. This way of thinking is what some might call " thinking stoically.
" The stoics lived around the third century BCE, and their influence have been widespread across Europe. Modern thinkers such as the philosophers Massimo Pigliucci and William B. Irvine return to the thinking of the stoics with the true hope that it could be helpful in the modern era in which we, good people, are all fighting against the evil force of capitalism.
Let me share with you here my favorite quote from Professor Massimo Pigliucci's blog "How to be a Stoic": A crucial idea that the Stoics derived from their physics is that life ought to be lived "according to Nature...The first thing to get out of the way is the misconception that Stoicism is about suppressing one's emotions and going through life with a stiff upper lip. Rather, Stoics taught to transform emotions in order to achieve inner calm.
Emotions – of fear, or anger, or love, say – are instinctive human reactions to certain situations, and cannot be avoided. But the reflective mind can distance itself from the raw emotion and contemplate whether the emotion in question should (or should not) be given "assent," i.e., should be appropriated and cultivated. He then goes on to talk about the "dispreferred indiffereces," such as wealth, health, and other goods.
They are indifferent "in the sense that they do not affect one's moral worth." This particular stance of the Stoic school of thoughts remind me of the writings of Laozi, Zhuangzi, and in particular Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially his first Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, in which he lays out the entire cartography of how our morality is by no means moral simply because of the advancement in things that we do not need, and of course the Chinese thinkers such as Laozi, and especially Zhuangzi.
These thinkers, living in different eras and from different cultural backgrounds (maybe closer in the case of Laozi and Zhuangzi), surprisingly agree on the most important truth and fact that life as a human being needs: we don't need all that much to live a good life, whether or not we know what it means.
Buddha, a contemporary of Laozi, has laid out the entire map of life as such in a very profound way, and all begins with the same very important notion that "we don't, and will never, need that much; so why are we spending so much and working so hard to get those things that could only give us the short-term sense of appreciation (usually immediately when we have them) and then become useless afterwards simply because, after all, we don't need them." The artificial need, which according to Rousseau, is by-design -- as it is the strategy of the elites to keep the poor in check by creating artificial needs for them to keep craving for, so that they could work their asses off trying to get what they think they could get in perpetuity.
If we understand this, then we don't need to be slaves to these artificial desires -- that weren't ours at the first place anyway -- anymore.
The 18th century philosopher David Hume, whose idea the author Robert Wright writes about in his book Why Buddhism is True in the paragraphs that I quote in the epigraph of this post, however, did make it clear to us all in his Treaties that this won't be easy no matter how hard we try, or how easy we would like to make it look and sound to our receptive senses. Why?
Because, as he famous said, "reason is a slave to the passions." Backed by modern science, this discovery of the bifurcated relationship between the emotional and the rationalizing capacities of the mind is central to how we not only should but must think about the social relationships we have with other people.
Neuroscientists argue that the most important part of the brain that controls our emotion -- the pre-frontal cortex (also known as PFC) -- is also the most important part of how we live our lives because without the working capacity of such part of the brain, we can't operate as social beings -- simply because the rationalizing capacity is the brain has a limited ability to only telling us "how to do things" as opposed to the initial thought of "what to do." The efforts of these modern stoics, such as Massimo Pigliucci, to relive the wisdom from thousands of years ago to help us understand the real causes and effects of our happiness is absolutely admirable, making me want to write another blog called "Thinking like Rousseau " (although I have a feeling that which is an unwritten subtitle of this blog anyway).
At the very center of the stoic philosophy is the idea that we are stronger than we think, and that if we are always prepared we will be able to encounter anything at all. Some of the stoics go so far even to, before going to bed at night, think about the worst case scenarios that could happen to their lives when they get up in the morning. As mentioned, if we're prepared for those bad things, even in our mind, we'll be likely to take them calmly and reasonably.
We will be less anxious and use less emotion to try to ease the pain caused by something that may only make sense in terms of reason. In other words, it's about turning the "hot emotion" into the "cold reason" -- because, at the end of the day, and make no mistake about it, emotion alone cannot solve anything.
In fact, I often let emotion take the steering wheel, and, I'd like to quote something that a friend (who is no longer my friend) once told me, "You are too emotional...you need to control it; good luck." The funny thing is that the moment I heard this friend of mine saying this, I got upset right away (haha).
Well, that's just a sign that I am an emotion person, and that my pre- frontal cortex is still working just fine:-) The question to be derived from this is, since when is being emotion a bad thing? Historically-speaking, human beings have been proud of their ability to be rational. In fact, to many thinkers, being able to conceive the world rationally is the only quality that distinguishes us from any other living creatures. So, for generations, we have been trying to keep our emotion in check.
Only until the late18th century, beginning in Europe, that the opposite polar of idea began to emerge -- and this, precisely, was the idea that gave rise to an alternative way of thinking about emotion that later became the platform for artists, musicians, poets, to exercise their creativity. Machines, when being used at a grand scale, created fear among human beings who did not want to be replaced by the ability of the machinery to be more efficient, more optimal, and, needless to say, more rationale, than human beings.
The unexpected yet collective efforts by thinkers, artists, professors during the last two decades of the 18th century gave rise to the idea of Romanticism, or the idea that it's our emotion that made us human beings. For the Romantics, the question began with, "are we happy being rational?" Not everyone was. And the same could probably be said for the "emotionalists" as well.
Rationality, the 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (who was also being credited for reinventing jogging as a form of exercising) would say, was the only thing that keeps us from killing one another in the state of nature where presumably everyone is living for himself or herself with no collective goal. That said, as Rousseau would disagree by saying something like, "in the state of nature, we don't need the same kind of rationality we would be needing to live in an industrial society." There's rationality in being emotional.
Rousseau then would explain and place an emphasis on the reason why he thinks human beings are better off living in the state of nature: because we are morally adaptable to social interactions, but only when there are not too much superficial impulses from outside. Emotion, in his sense, safeguards our souls from being brutally governed by our own selfishness -- the kind of selfishness that is recursive only in advance societies.
Artists, musicians, and designers like to exercise their emotionality rather than rationality because it's the only source of their creative ideas that work -- because emotion is the steering wheel. I think Hume was right about that. So, being emotional to say, among other things, is a good thing, as it means that you're being human -- being rational insofar as your interest in the well-being of others is what driving you to live a good life.
That said, the only instance that emotion could solve any problems is when the other person engaging in the problems at hand use reason to deal with it.
In fact, I read from somewhere that even modern science has a research that supports this stoic claim that thinking about the problems that have yet to reach you is not a total waste of time, but in a way, making you prepared for what might happen and what you might have to deal with, which, also in a way, is giving your life a little bit of strategies to make it worth living.
Emotion Versus Reason (Continued)