David Dyer-Bennet writes:
> I'd say that emotion is often *involved* in intellectual debates, and
> that they frequently *do* involve passion -- but that this is a bad
> thing.
I may be stepping outside the province of `intellectual debates,' but
emotion (if it's honest emotion, not faked or exaggerated for effect)
is a good indication of the intensity or importance of something to the
expressing person. There's a helluva difference between my wife's
opinion of leaving the toilet seat up and the right way to put the
toilet paper in the dispenser. Both seem to me to be 50/50 propositions;
I can make a decent intellectual arguement that both *are* 50/50
propositions. Nonetheless the strength of her reaction to one of them
leads me to yield the point without an arguement.
And no, let's not talk about the validity of either of those choices.
--
"Deconstruction is [when] a work is interpreted as a statement about itself,
using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Godel used to try
to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties." -- Chip Morningstar
in <http://www.dourish.com/goodies/decon.html>