- Prompt:
- I haven’t read the book Decartes’ Error yet, but I’m curious about how we got to a place where the emotions were considered… secondary to reason, perhaps even as distractions, by the culture. Like, rationalists often think that they can just reason, and emotions are a distraction. Is there a history of how we’ve interfaced with our emotions? I’m thinking e.g. of something like how Heidegger wrote a history of what it is like to be human. I’m wondering if e.g. the ancient greeks thought x, then maybe e.g. the industrial revolution made us too busy to think about our emotions. And how peasants didn’t have time etc. and now there’s a post like “Generalised Hangriness” which a friend has said is a watershed moments re: rationalists taking emotions seriously
Right, you’re trying to get at the historical arc of “reason is primary; emotion is suspect” and how we ended up with rationalist subcultures needing posts like Generalized Hangriness to rediscover “emotions are information.” The core story here is not that humans used to be emotional and then moderns became rational. It’s that Western philosophy inherited a very specific split, and then several later cultural movements amplified it for different reasons.
Let me walk you through a clean narrative from ancient Greece to LessWrong.
1)
Ancient Greece:
Emotions as Wild Horses
Plato and Aristotle did not believe that reason should ignore emotion. Instead:
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Plato: reason is the charioteer, passions are horses.
The horses aren’t bad — they’re powerful — but require guiding.
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Aristotle: emotions can be virtuous if expressed in the right amount (the “golden mean”).
Anger is good when it’s the right amount, for the right reasons.
So early philosophy wasn’t anti-emotion; it was emotion-as-something-to-prune-and-tune.
2)
Stoicism:
“Don’t let emotion control you”
Popular among educated elites (especially Roman aristocrats who needed to stay composed while in power).
This creates:
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An ideal of self-command
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Not no emotions, but no emotional reactivity
Stoicism is the first major cultural template for “the good person has interior calm.”
3)
Christianity:
Emotions become
morally suspect
Over ~1000 years, theology reframes emotions as:
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desires = temptations
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bodily appetite = threat to salvation
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“Virtue” = self-denial
This installs the cultural background assumption:
The body leads you astray; reason and willpower bring you toward the good.
This is where shame toward emotions begins to get baked into Western subjectivity.
4)
Descartes:
Mind and body get
officially divorced
René Descartes (17th c.) says:
The mind is a thinking thing; the body is just a machine.
This is the mind-body dualism modern Westerners unconsciously inherit.
Damásio calls this the “error” in Descartes’ Error:
Rationality requires emotional input.
Feelings guide practical decision-making.
Without emotion, the brain cannot choose.
This is the exact pivot point where:
-
Emotion becomes animal / base / unreliable
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Reason becomes divine / human / correct
You can feel rationalist culture echoing this verbatim.
5)
Industrial Revolution + Victorian culture:
Self-control becomes a
class marker
As capitalism accelerates, the ideal urban worker/citizen becomes:
-
punctual
-
disciplined
-
self-regulating
Emotional expression gets associated with:
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women
-
children
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the poor
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“the primitive”
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colonized peoples
Emotion is now not just irrational, but low status.
This sticks hard.
6)
20th century psychology splits in two
| Tradition | View of Emotions |
|---|---|
| Freud (Europe) | Emotions = subconscious forces that must be interpreted |
| Behaviorism (US)** | Emotions = noise; ignore the interior, measure only behavior |
So in America especially, feelings become scientifically illegitimate for about 60 years.
7)
The Counter-Move:
Neuroscience, somatic psychology, trauma research
Starting ~1970s onward:
-
attachment theory
-
trauma research
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affective neuroscience
-
somatic therapies (Gendlin, Focusing; later IFS)
These fields collectively argue:
Emotions are not problems; they are data about needs.
But academic psychology is slow to update culture.
8)
Rationalists rediscover the body
Now we arrive at your actual question.
Rationalists tend to inherit:
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Stoic ideal of composure
-
Cartesian mind/body split
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Behaviorist suspicion of interior experience
-
Victorian class-coded emotional restraint
-
Computer metaphor for cognition (“the brain is a CPU”)
So historically, rationalists think:
Emotion = bias, contamination of reasoning.
But then reality forces the update:
-
burnout
-
overwhelmedness
-
social problems
-
relationship problems
-
decision paralysis
So: the culture begins to update from the inside.
This is where Generalized Hangriness enters:
Emotions make claims that may be wrong,
but the signal behind them is important.
This is exactly Damásio’s point framed for rationalists.
Emotion ≠ enemy of reason.
Emotion = input channel for values, needs, and salience.
9)
Where this leaves us
We are currently living through a re-integration moment:
-
From “emotion is irrational”
→ to “emotion is evidence about needs and internal state.”
Rationalists didn’t discover this; they are catching up to:
-
affective neuroscience
-
trauma-aware psychology
-
somatic practices
-
pre-modern philosophies of virtue
But they are doing it in their own language:
-
“hangriness”
-
“somatic markers”
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“predictive processing”
-
“parts / subagents models”
-
“emotions make claims”
Your sense that this is a watershed moment is correct.
If you want, I can now do one of the following:
-
Make a visual timeline (ancient Greece → rationalism → trauma science)
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Summarize Descartes’ Error in 10 key insights
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Write a model of emotion that rationalists find intuitive
-
Map this to your personal developmental history
-
Generate an Anki deck for this conceptual arc
Which one should we do?