Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Jaggar "Love and Knowledge" 4/17/12

"Love and Knowledge", Jaggar

In Jaggar's "Love and Emotion" she disassembles the apparatus we understand as knowledge and provides insight into the social construction of reason. She explains "emotions, then, are wrongly seen as necessarily passive or involuntary responses to the world", and that emotions provide important human perspectives in order further develop ideas in various subject matters. The association of emotive behavior as a negative attribute is entirely reflective of discriminatory attitudes towards women and femininity. It has become commonplace to connote emotionality with the feminine. Furthermore, things seen as womanly are also viewed as weak and are cast off as nugatory. It is in this way that reason provided by women has waxing and waning credibility because of the consistent subjugated place of women in society. Perhaps an important question to ask would be when, over the history of the patriarchal model, did emotion become viewed as suspicious and often silly form of reasoning?

The misinterpretation of the value of emotion in the construction of knowledge is extremely detrimental to the study of reason as a whole. By ignoring the value in the importance of emotions in reason, the process of apprehending any body knowledge becomes almost inhuman.

Jaggar describes the emphasis of understanding as one that is integral in providing a full comprehension of knowledge. Emotions are natural responses, genuine, and necessary in reasoning. A world lacking in emotion must also be absent in love and therefore is missing a large part of the point in the ability of the human brain to reason and make the decisions for the world and for the future of civilization. It is also vital to note one of Jaggars most notable points: the fact that knowledge has been socially constructed and can therefore be reconstructed.

Roz Raskin
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