Free Who Am I and If So How Many? by Richard David Precht Page B

attain the emotional sobriety of the Vulcan. The story of the expulsion from the Neverland serves as a nice little lesson, too: don’t give in to feelings and dopy notions of peace, love, and happiness; they are just delusions. In real life, everyone has to fulfill his mission and carry out his duties.
    But as we take a closer look at the episode, doubts creep in. How believable is the figure of Mr Spock? In contrast to earthlings, Vulcans neither express nor fall victim to feelings, but they must have at least some potential for feelings. If Spock is capable of love under the influence of spores, he must have what it takes to feel love, otherwise his feelings could not have been activated. In fact, Spock continually reveals feelings in other Star Trek episodes. His predominant disposition is a strong feeling of duty and responsibility . He is loyal and cooperative, and in order to size up conflicts, he needs to know what is more ‘valuable.’ He has to weigh human lives against risks, orders against destinies. All these considerations occur on the basis of values. And moral values are neveremotionally neutral (we will return to this point later). In other words, despite Spock’s rather odd facial expressions and body language, he is a person like you and me. And he is living proof of what he was evidently invented to disprove: that a human or humanlike creature without feelings is inconceivable.
    The reason is simple: feelings and reason are not opposites. In everything we do, these partners of the mind work in concert. Their interaction is smooth at times and quite bumpy at others, but they cannot function independently of each other. Feelings can sometimes get by without too much involvement of reason, but without feelings, reason gets stranded, because feelings orient thought. Without an emotional impetus, one’s thought process cannot get moving. Without a feeling of duty, Mr Spock would not be able to think strategically.
    Feelings are the glue that binds us together and are therefore anything but superfluous. Nor are they harmful, bothersome, or primitive per se, and they do not stand in the way of what really matters, as many philosophers would have us believe. Of course feelings can sometimes get in the way and have the potential to muddy clear thinking. During heated confrontations, I often find that I can’t manage to come up with good arguments until later, when I’ve calmed down. When I was head over heels in love with my high school girlfriend, I couldn’t think about anything else, and Latin class was a total waste of time. But even though we may often wish feelings away, a life without them would be catastrophic. It is better to have been beside yourself with joy, overwhelmed with fury, or rattled with jealousy at some points in your life than not to have known these vexing elixirs of our existence at all. Life without emotions would be pitiful; we would be absolutely incapable of action and have no idea what to think. Our neurons would no longer have anything to fire them up. Even a resolution to be totally rational and disregard feelings is emotionally based. Our thoughts, be they joyous, unsettling, devastating, dismaying, romantic, or somber, are invariably colored by our feelings.
    But what are feelings? Where do they come from, where do they go, and what do they do in the interim? Philosophers have been pondering these questions since antiquity – although it must be admitted that feelings aren’t exactly philosophers’ favorite subject. It is very difficult to get at the root of feelings by means of contemplation. And many philosophers gloss over, dismiss, or disparage anything that doesn’t fit neatly into their scheme.
    Nevertheless, even the ancient Greeks and Romans tackled the subject of feelings. Their vocabulary of feelings centered on pathos and passio , words that originally connoted suffering. The English emotion sounds somewhat more neutral, but it comes from the Latin word movere