>I look at feelings as something that must be understood with applied wisdom.
then I would agree with you. As written though it's a false equivalency. With reasoning you lay your cards on the table for everyone, including yourself, to inspect and challenge, including the axioms. Feelings don't provide the same affordance.
>With reasoning you lay your cards on the table for everyone, including yourself, to inspect and challenge, including the axioms. Feelings don't provide the same affordance.
The problem is that with reasoning you can build whole chains on nothing more than skewed data and bad axioms that you also picked because of feelings.
That it's "laid on the table for everyone" is little consolation -- for one, because the cards are usually so intricately arranged that nobody or few will be bothered to follow them through.
It's like those saying "it's open source, so you can fix it yourself", ignoring the huge domain knowledge, programming skills, time, and effort required.
But with reasoning it can be even worse, because you can both skew the data and axioms as you like (as per your interests/feelings), and still pretend to the masses that they're perfect fine because they're based on "reasoning" / "science" / "statistics", etc.
Take the WMDs for example. In Ancient Athens they'd just say (as they did in many occasions): "There's this city-state, it's disobedient to our rule, or has resources we want, we should loot it".
In 21st century they say: "Our experts say they have such and such WMDs, and thus this and that, so would should invade and prevent them".
The first is a feeling (or a will). People can vote for or against it. The second is presented as a reasoned argument based on facts, which nobody of the masses can really verify (and none did, before the fact).
>The first is a feeling (or a will). People can vote for or against it. The second is presented as a reasoned argument based on facts, which nobody of the masses can really verify (and none did, before the fact).
It is verifiable though, at least in principle. WMDs either exist or they do not. Feelings have no comparable feature.
>It is verifiable though, at least in principle. WMDs either exist or they do not. Feelings have no comparable feature.
No, but as ultimately everything is based of feelings and wills (where would those value judgements necessary to reason would come from? Reason is totally neutral, annihilation of the other is the same to it as solidarity, given the right axioms), naked feelings can at least be judged as what they are.
>I look at feelings as something that must be understood with applied wisdom.
then I would agree with you. As written though it's a false equivalency. With reasoning you lay your cards on the table for everyone, including yourself, to inspect and challenge, including the axioms. Feelings don't provide the same affordance.