Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Does reasoning ever work?
in Philosophy
It does in objective matters. But in personal matters? For instance, a guy addicted to cigarettes may know he is ruining his health, he may even be experiencing health problems while smoking. Still, he doesn't drop the ciggie, he continues. It is as if no amount of logic can prevail against pure, strong emotion.
So if reasoning doesn't work, what will?
So if reasoning doesn't work, what will?
0
Comments
Most people are quite attached to their bad habits. Ain't it always the way.
The effectiveness of Reasoning alone seems dependant on the weakness of the attachment that is being challenged and
reasoning with attachment only starts to be effective when ones suffering noteably exceeds the stimulation that the attachment provides.
Reasonings work or failure seems very much dependant on factors outside of reasoning itself..
But once we messed up the reward system in our brain it is very difficult to restore its normal functioning. (At least that's my limited understanding of a complex subject...)
cheers
Perhaps this teacher's words will help -
"It is sometimes said that practicing mindfulness is easy; what is hard is remembering to do it. To help us remember, it’s useful to have a clear understanding of the forces in our minds that contribute to our forgetting. The one that the Buddhist tradition focuses on most is desire.
Desire is ubiquitous in human life. Living without wants, wishes, motivations, and aspirations is inconceivable. Some desires are quite healthy, useful, and appropriate; some are not. One function of mindfulness practice is to help us distinguish between these. And differentiating helps support the beautiful aspiration for liberation and compassion.
Any desire, healthy or unhealthy, can easily manifest as a compulsion. Wherever there is compulsion, we are not free. In the West, we sometimes call particularly strong desires “addictions.” Buddhism often refers to compulsive desires as cravings, clingings, or “thirsts.” Careful attention to our inner life, through meditation, for example, will quickly reveal that compulsions are deeply rooted in the mind.
One common hindrance to mindfulness that becomes evident in meditation is our propensity to think. Thinking can be quite compulsive, sometimes because of the power of a desire that we are thinking about, and at other times because we are simply addicted to thinking itself. The wish to remain mindfully present has to contend with the tendency to get lost in the mind’s desire to think.
As we touch into the deep satisfaction of being present, settled and concentrated in meditation, sensual desires become less and less powerful. Such satisfaction can even help to heal the compulsion behind some desires.
The more strongly the desire for sense pleasure hinders mindfulness, the greater is the value of learning to be free from it. And the more we value that freedom, the more likely we are to use that freedom to decide wisely which desires or aspirations we will allow to guide our life."
http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/articles/
Best Wishes
In some ways those people respond most easily to ( for example ) Cognitive Behavioural approaches... CBT is effective also in those people and/or conditions who do respond to reason..its just more indirect.
when my colleague was told he had lung cancer, he quit smoking immediately.
What you describe is not reason as much as a reasoned argument.
Who are you arguing with? Who are you trying to convince?
If reason is just another personality that visits you, such as emotion, then you have multiple personalities to contend with - who knows which one is steering at any one time - if reason however is simply a tool for your one and only personality then perhaps it will work differently.