SALVE — For Some Soul Healing
a brief sketch of what the section contains and what it expects
“Although it might belong to Socrates and other minds of the like craft to acquire virtue by reason, the human race would long since have ceased to be, had its preservation depended only on the reasonings of the individuals composing it.”
says Rousseau. And I think, we agree with him. He also says —
“Compassion is a natural feeling, which, by moderating the violence of love of self in each individual, contributes to the preservation of the whole species. … It is rather in this natural feeling than in any subtle arguments that we must look for the cause of that repugnance, which every man would experience in doing evil, even independently of the maxims of education.”
In short, we live in a world of emotions and passions. And humans by nature are not reasonable animals, as we thought Aristotle said (as per a medieval interpretation of him) but we are irrational beings. We are animals of the polis, who have a faculty of reason, but who also have, what Freud later called the ‘unconscious’, the irrational part, which affects out thoughts and words without our knowing about it.
We should not forget this aspect of ours. And perhaps that is why the philosophers of being human (existentialist…