Adam Gopnik has a great New Yorker article (not online) on the genius and wickedness of G.K. Chesterton. Although he wrote some masterful books - my favorites are The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown detective stories - Chesterton was also a consistent antisemitic, prone to tedious defenses of Catholic orthodoxy.
To be honest, though, my favorite thing about Chesterton are his aphorisms: only Wilde is more quotable. Gopnik has found some great ones ("The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, but to make settled things strange") but he left out a few of my favorites ("Art is limitation. The essence of every picture is the frame." or "Playing as children means playing is the most serious thing in the world." or "Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.") But if I had to pick just one Chesterton quote it would be this one:
"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
That quote captures one of the unexpected discoveries of modern neuroscience, which is that our emotions are essential aspects of cognition. As people like Antonio Damasio have discovered, the absence of emotion doesn't lead to pure reason or a more rational set of decisions. Instead, not being able to experience our feelings leads, as Chesterton surmised, to a peculiar form of sociopathy.
Brain & Behavior
Comments (4)
I used to get furious when people would object to getting emotional about issues. I used to think it was ignorance on their part, that they were unaware that our emotions set our priorities. After all, nobody bothers to argue about something nobody cares about.
Later I came to understand it as a dirty trick, accusing someone of letting his emotions cloud his thinking, while the very attack is driven by the accusers emotion.
What really bugs me is that our educators -- kindergarten through college -- never clued us in. Matter of fact, many of them used this very dodge.
Posted by: 6EQUJ5 | July 8, 2008 2:05 PM