I disagree with you on nearly all points. To briefly summarize, in no particular order: The instant feeling reaction may occur but we do examine our reactions, many of them also seemingly instinctual. I can't see how intuition (the instant reaction or awareness) is always feeling or ever only feeling. It could easily be learned response or quick cognition. I think, have learned, that feeling and reasoning are the really the same; one cannot exist without mingling the other. Yes, we can "compute" extremely fast. The slower analysis examines each part of the response, as it were, and that I can see, takes time and can be modulated by a sort of cognitive interrogation -- question-response process. But even that has feeling.
I like your reductive psychology of human response as either fear or safety but it's too simple and too polar. ( I admit my suspicion of the psychologists' obsession with "either-or" measurements of behavior.) Because even if all response happens in a continuum the blend of fear and safety may fluctuate moment to moment, each imbued by the other. Paradoxical? Yes. But paradox is the nature of reality and certainly the reality of consciousness in that we are in a continual effort to reconcile opposites. When we reduce the astonishing complexity of human behavior/traits to little pairs of opposite, like fear vs. safety, we run the risk of fitting the mind to words instead of fitting words to the mind. For example you could have said repulsion vs. affection, or fight vs. flight, or any number of similar opposites. They all work and none can be falsified. The impossibility of falsification implies that safety and fear are not genuinely intrinsic to individual behavior but could be an acquired group ethos or are pretended. For example, soldiers at the battlefield are encouraged to feel safe (your countrymen are with you, your god is on your side, etc. you are the most prepared, most powerful, etc.) whereas if their fear was encouraged, they would probably suffer defeat or give up. Our efforts to continually short-circuit the safety vs. fear model to see one as the other, suggests that something else, more fundamental, is affecting our behaviors. Because man is the only creature that functions by means of making metaphors -- to pretend one thing is another -- it may be that the constant fluidity and capacity of human metaphorical consciousness and action may be truly fundamental, somehow. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> . Our aesthetics, like fashion in general, etiquette and ethics, grammars, proprieties of behavior, and established guides of performances and behaviors--all of these are elaborate and complex interactions of the socializing of safety and fear mixed with the driving force of appetites. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
