The Reunification of Rational and Emotional Life

Abstract

It is suggested in this article that the need to ‘reunify’ the rational and the emotional is artificially created by the prior partitioning of the two. It is by way of a version of the ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ that the rational and affective dimensions of life have come to be seen as discrete ‘faculties’ or ‘processes’, presumably mediated by or caused by or correlated with still more basic physiological ‘processes’. All this is but another consequence of that unthinking positivist agenda that seems more attractive to most investigators than is the actual life lived by rational beings whose very interests guarantee that ‘affect’ will be a ubiquitous feature of activities that are at once ‘rational’ and realistic.