“Emotions is no luxury, but a complex aid in the struggle for existence” is a famous quote by Antonio R. Damasio who is a and and distinguishes between emotions which he describes as the body states caused by somatic markers, and feelings which show the deliberate percipience of the emotional body states. Thus the person learns in the course of his development, for example, the body state which is connected with the reflex-like escape from a danger to perceive as fear- so a deliberate feeling. While the emotions are innate and produce a from the outside observeable physical behaviour, the feelings are based on experiences and allow therefore other protective strategies against dangers from the outside.
While Antonio only distinguishes between emotions and feelings, Henri Bergson is known as the most significant representative of the life philosophy and as a precursor of the existentialism. His oppinion towards intution is usually connected to the meaning of "ability to sense or know immediately without reasoning", and is also often regarded as a divine or prophetic power.
So, emotion helps each individual to make the right decision in their situation. It is the crucial role of feeling, to navigate, which follows through the endless stream of life’s personal decisions. While strong feelings can create certain kinds of havoc in reasoning the lack of awareness of feeling can also be ruinous, especially in weighing the decisions on which our destiny largely depends, for example: find the perfect matching partner, where to live, what job to do, which apartment or house to buy or to rent, etc. Decisions such as these cannot be made only based on reasoning one also has to take into consideration the feelings of ‘good’ and/or ‘bad’ when it comes to the point to buy a house. This situation requires gut feeling and the emotional wisdom garnered though past experiences. In these cases formal logic can never work as the basis for deciding whom to marry or to trust or even what job to do. Otherwise reason would somehow be blind and wouldn’t know what to do anymore without the enormous help of feelings.
Furthermore, emotions are basic for gaining information because they affect our way of thinking and gives us energy and hope in certain points in a life time which then are sometimes used in order to justify our believes. A good example for that is reading the newspapers. One could argue that there is always parts of the article which are fake or just wrong information whereas one person who wants to be the facts true doubts that. In such case, the belief in the newspaper and the intuition or will influences reader two and makes him belief everything even though it might be a wrong statement in there.
In addition, intuition is also one key factor in making decisions for example in sports. When a tennis player is in a match and runs for the ball to play it back to the opponent then it is intuition at which point of time the player is going to hit the ball in order to make a shot in the opponent’s field. The emotional mind is by far quicker than the rational mind, springing into action without pausing even a moment to consider what it is doing. In fractions of a second it decides what to do in order to achieve the best result.
On the other hand, emotion is not always a help when it comes to the point where a decision has to be made or springing into action is required. The emotions are sometimes also an obstacle or hinder to knowledge and strong feelings can influence our perception of things which would lead to confusion or distortion of our logic reason and inflame our language. For instance, when one is only responding to his feelings and almost completely ignores the thinking part which is also necessary in order to make the best out of the situation. This could have crucial consequences such as making hasty decision which could be regretted after a certain time. But not only making hasty decision is a consequence, also in science it could have effects on observations while doing a experiment.
Often, intuition is split up into two sections, one is called ‘natural intuition’ and the other is known as ‘educated intuition’. Natural intuition is difficult to explain because it is different by each person. It is basically the first reaction to a question without even having thought about it or the immediate action in a sport. This natural intuition helps in some ways which are explained earlier but it can not always be trusted because sometimes the feeling is just wrong, for example, a tennis player just runs to the right of the court because he thinks that the ball will go there but the ball goes to the left and he loses a point. Such example is a perfect demonstration of how intuition could be an obstacle.
Educated intuition is basically gaining information and therefore knowledge which usually requires a lot of concentration, like in school. Like Henri Poincare said “It is logic that we proved, but by intuition that we discover” it is also in real life. We always need both parts on one hand the thinking party and on the other the emotional (feeling) part. Only these two factors combined give the perfect mixture we need in order to make the ideal decisions in private life as well as in sport activities. Personally, I agree upon the conclusion of Henri Poincare who understood what is required to gain information and knowledge and successfully use them in one’s personal life.
Bibliography
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Damasio, Antonio R. "Emotion" "Wikipedia." Wikipedia. Zitat. <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion>.
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"Wissen und Emotion." Fachbereich IuK HdM-Stuttgart - VHDM. <http://v.hdm-stuttgart.de/projekte/iwm/roswitha_projekt_wissen_emotion/damasio/damasio_01.htm>.
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