“in rationalists and romanticists and here he goes back to the 1630s and 1840s. The rationalists use mathematics and physics as a model and claim that rule based models can be applied to the humanities, ethics and politics. His primary source here seems to be Stephen “Toulmin’s Cosmopolis” which I’ve started reading on the basis of his reference. Morin argues that the two sides need to listen to each other as opposed being at cross purposes. :
I’m onboard with that. I would usually use the word “emotions” rather than “romanticism”. Now that you say it though I might adopt your word (or Moran’s) instead as it carries additional meaning. (have to think about) As I mentioned before my philosophical view keep evolving. At one point of my life I was heavily into a Buddhist-Stoic approach to my emotions which Hegel or Marcus Marcus Aurelius would have seen as more proper. We can, with practice of what is commonly called mindfulness, control our thought processes. What I eventually realized though is if we remove our emotions from decisions too much, we also lose part of what connects us to the rest of world. In other words, I believe our rational side also needs some help from our emotional side to be rational. There have been many MRI studies on psychopaths. And they appear to have less activity in parts of their brains usually associated with emotions. It makes sense their lack of empathy is what gets them to act in psychopathic ways. Or put another way, they need more emotion to be more rational. And on the flip side of that course, too much emotion and someone turns into a basket case.
Today rather than going too much into some particular view, I practice a little of this, a little of that. The tough part is sorting through all the junk to get to the right mix (which most of it is). That is why i have an iterative approach to philosophy. It can cause me some cognitive dissonance when I take bits of ideology from competing worldviews. and try to stitch them together into a logical narrative. To make the experience more pleasant I try to think of it as a sort of puzzle rather than just I’m doing something wrong. Part of brain’s software has some bugs and my curiosity wants to fix them. One could of course commit to something. Become a Scientologist. Or maybe find Allah and join the Taliban. I’d argue over 95 percent of humans do just that. I don’t see the appeal of trapping one’s mind in someone’s else’s box especially when all the boxes have some flaws in the them and even unappealing boxes can still have some gems.