I can understand from an evolutionary perspective why we would have feelings, but that is all in my head. Feelings seem to defy practicality – as much as I want to intellectualize feelings, my reasoning always falls short of “truth”. (Yes, everyone, I am unfortunately a big, huge fan of scare quotes). However, I do believe that with a superior intellectual ability that people have developed feelings for a very evolutionarily cogent reason. And although I want my intellectualization to match my feelings, I understand that sometimes feelings must be trumped in search of truth (Notice – no scare quotes). Thus an exploration is in order.
We know about pair bonding and the fight or flight response but why we would have developed these feelings in tandem to our ability to think about them seems almost to be an evolutionary leftover from bygone times when instincts were more en vogue than they seem to be now. Without feelings, why would we ever devote our lives to another human being? It simply does not make any intellectual sense. Without feelings why would we ever try to live in social society? Isn’t it best to just kill or hurt whatever crosses our path to maximize our genetic potential? Instinctually there is a part of most of us that feels absolute revulsion at the idea, yet less intellectually superior beings that have no feelings do this on a daily basis.
So it is clear that we have feelings for an intellectual reason. They help us form social bonds. They make us pair bond. They make us raise our own children. They keep us from committing mass murder. In short, they keep us in civil society where, for whatever reason, people can best maximize their evolutionary fitness – i.e. we can have the most viable offspring. Without feelings, none of this would make any sense. Feelings defy reason and intellectualization precisely because if we could intellectualize our feelings, we probably wouldn’t have many. Perhaps I’m speaking for myself because I tend to think of feelings, most of the time, as a big, giant pain in my ass.
Feelings give us humanity in the sense that feelings make us human beings and not some other kind of being.
"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism"
Albert Einstein
"Eyes that do not cry, do not see"Swedish proverb
Terry Hatchett
