But this notion of value [“utilitarian values”] reflects an astonishingly impoverished understanding of human beings: it’s based on the assumption that we’re nothing more than decision-making machines choosing among options based on how much they satisfy our hedonistic desires.
The law of movement itself, Nature or History, singles out the foes of mankind and no free action of mere men is permitted to interfere with it.
If you've followed what I've written from time to time, you should know that I'm a big fan of history as a form of knowledge (or a way of knowing), but I'm not at all a fan of "History" as a replacement for human thought and decision-making, a "plan" that we must recognize, reveal, and realize. So, I contend, say Arendt and Collingwood, among others.
"It’s the integration of cognition with affect that appears to be key to self-awareness.” [Dr. Donald Stuss.]
“You seem to be suggesting,” I [Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon] “that affect, or emotion, is very important for the brain’s high-level integrative and executive functions. Yet conventionally people think of emotion as a primitive aspect of human psychology. They believe the highest level of human intellectual function is rationality—cold, detached, and instrumental. And this conventional perspective suggests that, ideally, we should strip emotion out of our decision-making and cast it aside.”
“Exactly. I’ve [Stuss] spent decades studying the role of frontal lobes in logical cognition, but I’m now bringing in affect. We’ve shown that the polar region of the right frontal lobe—a region long regarded as useless—is a place important for humor and intentionality. The frontal lobes are also the source of our ‘gut feeling,’ which is something largely dissociable from knowledge and logic. The essence of human life is the integration of these things.”
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