Journal Entry - 15/04/2009

The use of emotions has been proved to be extremely important and very useful. Expressing emotions can lead to varying perceptions of absolutely anything. But the use of emotions can often be faced with obstacles which hinder the knower from thinking straight and lead to biased perception which results in fallacious reasoning whose outcome is emotive language. This shows how closely inter-twined the four ways of knowledge are to one another.

The perfect was to highlight the above theory can be seen in the following example. The issue of India being colonized by the British can support the above statement about emotions. At the time of colonization almost all the Indians were looked down upon and treated in the most inhumane ways possible. This lead to the growth of fear within the Indians and only continued to increase in intensity with the passage of time. This intense fear which was brought about by the British who acted like the external stimulus, lead the Indians to have a biased perception about anything that related in any way to the colonizer. Like the introduction of telegraph poles in India, because of their growing fear they thought that these telegraph poles were built to hang any Indian that tries to defy the British rule in anyway. This perception only resulting in great fallacious reasoning, which was that they chose not to accept the introduction of the telegraph poles positively this would have only helped in the development of the country. Instead they used emotive language and said statements like “the British has only come to exploit and harm the country.” And this only completed the cycle that begins and ends with growing emotions due to external stimuli.

We also looked at the concept of Stoicism which fascinated me because the idea that follows this concept has always appealed to me. A valid co-relation with Stoicism which can be seen in History as well as literature is through Brutus. He was a true stoic who always suppressed his emotions, even when his wife Portia died, he didn’t shed a tear. The suppression of emotions is obviously extremely difficult but at the same time, as emotions are a medium of feelings, passions and moods which when expressed communicate plenty of messages. That is why, suppressing them could lead to varying amounts of miscommunication and misconceptions could be formed.