The philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, asserted that we discover who we are through our actions in the world. When we look at the decisions we have made in life, we can come to see into our nature. Schopenhauer challenges us to not merely focus on the circumstance of our life, but to recognize that our choices and actions in the world stem from our beliefs, desires, and motivations. By owning how we enact our values in the face of life’s challenges, we can truly come face-to-face with deeply important aspects of our nature.
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Complex Choices Evoke Ambivalence
Making Choices Requires Thinking and Feeling
Complex Choices Evoke Ambivalence
Life often presents us with the need to make decisions that are complex and meaningful. These choices can be particularly difficult to make because of our ambivalence towards the options available. This ambivalence is inherent to the disparate and often conflicting nature of our emotions and motivations. Generally, we are not of one mind and have conflicting desires and motivations surrounding important choices.
The difficulty we have in making meaningful decisions reflects our essential nature. It can be confusing to grasp our nature because we are comprised of diverse and often conflicting needs that pull us in apposing directions. This motivational complexity reflects our ability to adapt, change, and grow under many different circumstances. This tremendous flexibility serves to help us adapt and grow, guiding and directing us toward fulfilling our fundamental needs and desires. However, this diversity also generates internal conflict as we struggle to arbitrate among our competing desires. Our recognition of this inherent internal diversity will help us tolerate our ambivalences, allowing us to make choices that are sustainable and growth-producing.
Making Choices Requires Thinking and Feeling
The ability to integrate thinking and feeling is essential for making viable choices in life. The most significant choices we make in life are those that require both thinking and feeling, both reason and desire. The nature of this combination is unique for each person and the decision, at hand. Some choices require more thinking, others require more feeling, and moral decisions require an integration of thinking and feeling. Moral or value-based decisions are not made on fact-driven rational analysis, nor based on raw emotions. In order to make Viable value-driven decisions in life, we must combine passion and thoughtfulness. This capacity for passionate reason is how we fully participate with the world. People are passionate, thinking beings; and, this passionate thinking is a fundamental aspect of our mind and human consciousness.
We experience the integration of thinking and feeling as having ideas that are meaningful, and plans that are compelling. This melding is experienced as having passion and desire along with reason and knowledge about a given situation. The integration of thinking and feeling is not an oscillation between thinking and feeling. Oscillating between thinking and feeling exposes us to the limitations inherent in those functions. Using reason alone, you may find yourself in endless analysis and procrastination. If you use feeling and desire alone, you may find yourself impulsively committed to a choice that is not viable. The melding of reason and feeling in making a choice is essential to making sustainable choices that are growth-producing.
The integration of reason and desire constitutes moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is neither pure emotion nor pure reason. Thinking and feeling combined creates a unique mental capacity — a passionate thinking. The field of Moral Psychology explores the process of moral reasoning to determine how we come to have values, convictions, beliefs, and strong feelings about life events. Creating values is an attitudinal process where we ascribe attributions such as good, bad, favorable, unfavorable to ideas, actions, and feelings. A key attribute of moral reasoning is the setting of cognitive filters through which we evaluate important and meaningful aspects of ourselves and our lives. Through learning to develop an understanding of moral thinking, we can expand these evaluative filters and enrich our personal experiences. We may also acquire the ability to learn how to communicate with people who have differing moral views.
Moral thinking shapes our conscience and drives our actions. Understanding the nature of moral thinking helps us develop a deeper appreciation of our convictions as well as help us to apprehend how others are driven by their convictions. The goal is to understand the moral thinking, not to attempt to reduce it or explain it away. Moral thinking is perhaps the most powerful aspect of our consciousness and we need to learn how to utilize it. The passions of moral thought will continue to shape our personal lives as well as the world in which we hope to continue living.
The capacity for holding strong convictions is an essential part of our humanness. As human beings, we each have the capacity for holding strong convictions, to feel that our view of things is the right view. This capacity to label events right and wrong, or good and bad, is foundational to human nature. Through developing our Moral Intelligence, we can engage our passions, values, and morals to help us flourish.