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Pleasure and pain By Leonardo da Vinci
I have said little about pleasure. Pain and pleasure are not twins or mirror images of each other, at least not as far as their roles in leveraging survival. Somehow, more often than not, it is the pain-related signal that steers us away from impending trouble, both at the moment and in the anticipated future. It is difficult to imagine that individuals and societies governed by the seeking of pleasure, as much as or more than by the avoidance of pain, can survive at all. Some current social developments in increasingly hedonistic cultures offer support for this opinion.
There seem to be far more varieties of negative than positive emotions, and it is apparent that the brain handles positive and negative varieties of emotions with different systems. Perhaps Tolstoy had a similar insight, when he wrote, at the beginning of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are like one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
حسّ سليم
هذا «التنوير العربي» يمثل ذروة الثرثرة الأدبية التي لا طائل منها
A genre of philosophical fantasy
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Knowing about the relevance of feelings in the processes of reason does not suggest that reason is less important than feelings, that it should take a backseat to them or that it should be less cultivated. On the contrary, taking stock of the pervasive role of feelings may give us a chance of enhancing their positive effects and reducing their potential harm. Specifically, without diminishing the orienting value of normal feelings, one would want to protect reason from the weakness that abnormal feelings or the manipulation of normal feelings can introduce in the process of planning and deciding.
— Descartes' Error
— Descartes' Error