Philosophy...

[JimC]

Where rational thought can assist in moderating unwanted negative emotional responses, it should be availed upon...

[Brian Peacock]

Where rational thought can assist in moderating unwanted negative emotional responses, it should be availed upon...

Does that not rather depend on who is doing the reasoning, who is having the emotions and who is making an assessment of their positivity or negativity?

I'd remind you that "rational self-awareness" was the proposed condition for properly regulating emotional responses. My proposition is that elevating or preferencing the (assumed) utility of 'the rational' over, or at the expense of, 'the emotional' leads to a diminishing of our fundamental humanity - and more generally a diminishing of other people's fundamental humanity (those who are not considered suitably or appropriately rational).

[Brian Peacock]

I'll offer some background about where I'm coming from with this...

In her treatise 'A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women' (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft noted that the fundamental divisions of the society of her time, expressed in social relations and through politics, religion, morality, family life etc, were rooted in the generally accepted idea that rationality and reason were identified with men, whereas feeling, emotion, and sentiment were identified with women. (Or as Jordan Peterson might put it: "Men are Order. Women are Chaos"!!).

Wollstonecraft thought it was absurd to say that women couldn't reason or were lacking in rational capacity, just as it was ridiculous to say that men did not or could not feel, but one of her most striking points was that these social conceptions (men are 'naturally' rational and women 'naturally' emotional) forced men to dress their feelings and passions as though they were reasoned and reasonable, and women to dress their reason as though it was merely emotion and sentiment.

Wollstonecraft thought that this, as both a description of relations between the sexes and as a principle for organising human society, was a mutually corrupting catastrophe for all concerned, not just because it delegitimatised women's reason but, chiefly, because it legitimised men's emotions, desires, passions and lusts.

In her view it was by these means--by men's appeals to being rational and reasoned creatures--that men asserted their self-declared position as 'natural' authorities in all things; the understanders of things; the deciders of things; the understanders and deciders of what women are and what women should be and do, and indeed the understanders and deciders of what society is and what it should be and do. It is through this subjugation of emotion that men were rendered, quite literally, dispassionate, while their actual passions, desires and lusts were granted additional social and personal force by dint of being easily elevated to the status of rational, reasoned considerations.

Wollstonecraft was spot on imo, and her ideas still resonate today. So when I hear that critical thinking, or reason, or rationality, or logic, must be brought to bear to tame, control, subvert or correct emotions, intuitions, or sentiments etc (usually, those of other people) I can't help but suspect that something deeper, and perhaps more insidious, is being exposed - particularly when it's suggest that the best or proper way to deal with so-called negative emotions is to simply reason them away; to literally think them out of existence.