Ever since man settled down to develop agricultural lifestyle and began the long and challenging journey to build civilizations throughout history, the central, integrating mechanism for coexistence with others was his creation of ethics. Ethics, according to the Oxford dictionary is “the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles” Ethics are “moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity”. And moral is concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior. From Latin mor- ‘custom’.
Philosophy studies the universal nature of man, and almost 2500 years ago Aristotle identified man as a rational animal. The history of philosophy before and since Aristotle has been a study of the identification of what does rational mean. Today through the advances in biology, chemistry and physics, we have a better understanding of the animal side of our being, but we have not had an explicit and clear understanding of our rational side that represents, formulates and influences our psychological manifestations until Ayn Rand stated that “Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses”.
As the ancient Hindu identified, the purpose of life is to live it, and the field of psychology centers on the study of life of the individual. Emotion is defined as “a strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others; instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge”. From émouvoir ‘excite’, based on Latin emovere, from e-(variant of ex-) ‘out’ + movere ‘move’. I’ll address the meaning of the Oxford dictionary definition of emotion at a later time, but for now, I’d like to focus on two aspects of emotions, that they are not a cognitive inducers of knowledge, but rather reactive expression, out moving feeling, triggered by a particular experience by the individual.
Your code of ethics will generate your emotions, as the philosophical ideas as to how you should conduct yourself will result in your emotional reactions to others related to yourself. And human nature has a way of guiding us in the beginning stages of our development automatically towards what is good for us.
The autonomic mechanism of the infant relies exclusively on the ability of his mind to identify the body-state as experienced by the self. The link between body-state, i.e., hunger pain, and body response, i.e., cry out to alarm the environment, is autonomic. The identification of the relationship between these two processes is implicit. The infant is not required to call to action the mechanisms of crying. It is, yet, outside of his volitional control. To the extend that the infant cries as result of hunger pain, he is signifying an implicit value. “I am in pain, I need help to get rid of the pain.”
To help alleviate the pain a caregiver feeds the child. The caregiver signifies to the infant, “I hear you and I’m hear for you”. In turn the child feels relieved and experiences pleasure. This interaction between child and caregiver becomes the hallmark for establishing a standard for explicit values. In the connection between the infant and caregiver there is a volitional aspect of the relationship on behalf of the caregiver and appreciation of value on behalf of the child. The child is required to not only identify that the food provided will alleviate the pain in his tummy, but he has to select to eat the food, in order to relieve the pain. To the extend that the child is willing to eat the food he is served by his caregiver he is signifying an explicit value. “Food is good for me, mommy is good to me, and I know it.” The child’s act is morally good.
Identifying and selecting what is good for him against the background of human interaction gives rise to the implicit understanding of the virtue of selfishness. He will be justly rewarded or punished in making his choice to eat or not to eat, respectively. If he eats when hungry, he fulfills a selfish requirement to feel normal and will experience pleasure. If he refuses to eat when hungry or not provided with food to fulfill his selfish requirement to feel normal, he will experience pain. The caregiver acts morally by providing food to the infant to fulfill her selfish value of the infant’s wellfare. When the infant eats she is satisfied and experiences pleasure.
Later in life, as a sovereign individual, it may be his selfish requirement to refuse to eat, in protest to an imposition on his being, that is more painful psychologically than the hunger pain in his stomach, and that refusal will be experienced as fulfilling his selfish requirement to feel normal based on his selected standard of code of value in relation to others.
The growing pain in his tummy makes the child feel frustrated, confused, helpless, and vulnerable. He cries. To address the pain his caregiver provides food to soothe him. The child eats, the pain goes away, and he feels relieved, helped, secure, and attached. This interaction between parent and child generates a positive experience for both and strengthens their union. The onus of differentiation between what makes him feel happy and what makes him feel miserable is on the faculty of reason. It is through the child’s ability to focus on the facts in reality that give rise to his sense of pain and pleasure, that determine how well he’ll develop his sense of what feels good and pleasant and what feels bad and painful. It makes his experience rationally moral, i.e., good and emotionally positive, i.e., enjoyable.
Based on his fidelity to existence and the ability to translate implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge, the infant will be successful at understanding the experience of positive and negative emotions. Implicitly, the autonomic mechanism will take care of his identification of the pain through crying. Explicitly, the volitional mechanism will take care of his crying by eating the food provided for him.
Acting to prevent pain the child is turning a negative experience into a positive one. The degree, to which he acts with determination to prevent the painful, is the degree to which he will enjoy the pleasant. It is his rational faculty manifested in his conscious choice to alleviate and later in life prevent pain that stimulates his motivation to act for the benefit of his organism. He develops a natural and healthy appreciation of his self and becomes a selfish actor seeking a psychological homeostasis. All action that supports his life is good; all action that undermines his life is bad. The action that supports his life generates positive emotions, the action that undermines his life generates negative emotions. That is the basic platform for positive and negative emotions. In time his actions must be integrated with the actions of other individuals in cooperation for pursuit of goals benefiting everyone involved in the interaction.
An infant is far from making moral judgments. But, his relationship with his body and mind and his interaction with his caregivers will determine whether or not he will develop an adequate sense of self and justice.
On the basis of the autonomic mechanism it is implicitly just that he cries when in pain. It is just that his mother soothes his pain as soon as possible. On the basis of his volitional mechanism it is just that he eats the food. The infant will appreciate this dynamics in his growing attachment to his primary caregiver and himself. The more he pays attention to his body-states, the quicker he will call for help. The sooner he calls the attention of his parents, the better he will feel as result of their intervention in making him feel well.
In time, the child realizes that he is the center of attention in the dynamic relationship with environment and parents. To successfully manage life his focus must be on his relationship with existence. His survival depends on his degree of selfishness as related to and affected by existence and interactions with other individuals.
The infant will cry until and unless the pain in his tummy goes away. Nature will teach him that to achieve wellness, it’s not enough to identify the cause of his discomfort, but pursue an action to alleviate the pain. The sooner he acts upon getting better, the sooner he will feel better.
When the child begins to understand this implicit in nature principle of call to action, he will start to formulate the basis of motivation. Once the child identifies that food is good for him, he is motivated to eat. In the beginning stages of development this process is implicit. After the child is capable of abstracting in conceptual terms the meaning of food for his well-being, he begins acting willfully in pursuit of that which is good for him. He begins acting morally, i.e., selfishly. Motivation relies on the virtue of selfishness.
To be motivated, the child must realize the significance and value of the object of his motivation to himself. What drives the pursuit, the act to achieve value, is the realization that the end result is beneficial to the actor. The greater the knowledge in the steps required to achieve one’s goal, the more lasting the motivation to finish the pursuit.
The evolution of civilized life of a human is correlated with the refinement of his code of ethics. To achieve a psychological homeostasis in a civilized society, we need to implement an objective, universal and standard code of ethics based on and guided by nature and directed by our consciousness.
Individually, man is an integration of body and mind, collectively men are members of a group integrated by their custom. Individually, man manifests seven emotions — anger, contempt, disgust, enjoyment, fear, sadness, surprise — universally noticed among humans. Yet, a group of men organized under a banner of an ideology or a religion will differ in the expression of any of the universal emotions based on different triggers inspired by the ideas adopted and practiced by the members of the group as a collective.
In this episode I linked the third branch of philosophy, ethics, with the third branch of psychology, emotions. Our interpersonal experiences motivate us to articulate the interactions with others from implicitly to explicitly valuable. By working to achieve a normal state of existence we turn negative emotions into positive. When we introspectively focus on ourselves and act justly we provide a selfish satisfaction to our interactive counterparts. Developing our extrospective skills in dealing with reality and other individuals we are motivated to pursue action benefiting all actors in the context of our lives.
In the next episode of the one in the many podcast I’ll focus on the link between the forth branch of philosophy, politics and the forth branch of psychology relationships.