Posted on October 29, 2025.
The blue evening skies and the orange leaves of October have never failed to surprise me. It's never been rational to me how much impact just the imagery of a three-month season could have on me. It seems that emotional intensity must be an essential quality of this impact, hence why one could never entirely reason it - it deals with emotion.
What concerns me is the perceived contrast attributed to emotion and logic, thought, reasoning, or rationality... Because this discernment has been repeated so often, one must have perceived a similarity between emotion and thought such that it wouldn't hold true when generalized to each of them. Following this observation, I find my mind driven to inspect a relationship between emotion and thought.
If I detected a property of emotions that diverged them from thoughts, it would be the human practice that we tend not to assign them epistemological truth values (true and false). Can you ever claim that an instance of happiness is true or false, judging by its accordance with reality? It carries some weight to note that this question doesn't bother with ethical valuations (e.g. good and bad).
The unverifiable and unfalsifiable nature of emotions should suggest a specific ground in consciousness that is unproductive to reason further, compared to the nature of thoughts. Take, for example, that I can't imagine an answer for "Why does one feel happiness?" If we adopt a physicalist basis and provide a biological expression of how emotions are processed, that remains insufficient, as it only explains how and not why, in the first place, neurons would act to elicit such a reaction - isn't that physical process literally called emotion?
For many thoughts, we're able to demand a reasoning behind them, and only axiomatic or some presumed thoughts could stand alone with no further question (e.g. "pain is bad" or "people should have freedom"). The continued questioning of the former type of thoughts should eventually result in the latter. For the latter type of thoughts, the unquestionable nature of emotions comes into play, and discussing the truth of these thoughts could be deemed an emotional debate.
In ethics, the good and bad values could be defined well in relation to emotions, specifically of pain and pleasure. Some normative ethical theories like utilitarianism and other philosophies like hedonism often come with an emphasis on "pleasure" in their definitions. Also, if we consider curiosity and doubt as emotions too, what is there left to disassemble of the nature of thought?
To reach a broader conclusion, we can say that all thoughts are driven by emotion, no matter how logical they are, and we perhaps can't talk of a philosophy devoid of emotion.
The polarization between emotion and thought awakens in me some ideas about the gender binary. The patriarchal belief that "men are the more logical gender" and that "women are more emotional beings" must have something to reveal. On the surface, when emotion and thought, fundamental elements of the human mind, are assigned genders, it's worrying to imagine even a collective mental health of society.
There resides a history behind the emotion and reason dichotomy and its relation to the gender binary. The attribution of emotion to women has excused women's coercion to their reproductive, bodily labor, as their minds were considered too inferior to commit to manual labor. They were discouraged from partaking in the "more complex" jobs of men and suffered with countless tasks of domestic service and a lack of personal agency. Today, rape culture traces back to these conditions.
"Just as sexual violence isn't something that simply happens without
implication, capitalist patriarchy isn't something that simply exists
without origin. Historically, as was an integral part of the development
of capitalism, women's labor—that of physical reproduction—is distinctly
corporeal. This process occurs only physically, fully within a body.
"Men's work," or manual labor, is physical in its operation, but
deliberate operations of the hands also necessarily involve the mind as
well—these acts are not performed innately, naturally; their every step
requires some brief intellectual evaluation. Following this, we can
easily observe a greater social emphasis on women's bodies than men's
bodies, as women's intellects are simultaneously presumed to be inferior
to those of men."
— from
Notes on Survivor Autonomy and Violence, Dangerous Spaces
Although it's undeniable that the patriarchy also harms men by discouraging them from expressing their emotions, we must not forget that, at the same time, this situation grants them the privilege of being taken more seriously in social situations and better education and employment opportunities. This also shouldn't hint at the illusion that women are completely satisfied when they show their emotions. Still, women are told that they're being too dramatic, usually by men, and they're perceived as the less logical gender.
Only with emotion can we realize and question the foul conditions and beliefs that have been imposed on us to accept them as normal. The patriarchal undervaluation of people's emotional reality normalizes the working-class alienation and continuance in the capitalist mode of daily life, silencing the imagination of an alternative world where we no longer have our labor stolen.
Men, affirmed by the emotionless strands of masculinity, poke fun at women's voices and experiences that highlight their assault. Without the consideration of others' suffering, which is an emotional experience, men continue to attack women and sustain the patriarchy, normalizing their cruelty. Little do working-class men realize their hard-headed attitude keeps them blind to the class oppression that also targets them and destroys their mental health, which really matters.
To summarize with numbered points,
Finally, revolution is an emotional action that resists the psychological manipulation that comes with the norm of masculinity, "logic" is an excuse to brand emotion as a negative trait, and emotion carries a revolutionary potential because it keeps one aware of their suffering.
Following my concentration on suffering, my mind and the month of October take me elsewhere, so to speak.
When the cats in the sky whine like they pour off diamonds, when the rooms of a hospital taste the tragedy of the patient's abandonment, when the intonation in one's speech reflects their mixed comfort with loss, what takes place is the vague, complex, but nevertheless ambitious act of romanticization. It's how the mind realizes the beauty of the sunlight when it captures the room. It's also the contradiction of enjoying suffering when it's also damaging.
Rationalization flips those shiny whens over, attaches emotion to many whys, and tries to obstruct the subject from possibly perceiving beauty in emotion. With "why do I feel this way?" one desires to feel understood, analyzes past experiences, and tries to figure out what has made their emotions so difficult-to-handle and intense. It's a feeling the body experiences, and that's what it is. It's the happiness hormones committing to their passion. It's also the lack of sleep that trenches one into insanity.
Both processes require the subject's conscious awareness of the situation that they're located in and an emotional experience they respond to. It becomes more evident that thought has its roots in emotion with rationalization and that an overt interaction between emotion and thought is certainly possible.
Romanticization and rationalization resemble coping mechanisms to deal with intense emotions, especially of suffering. When one romanticizes, negative emotions are suppressed by the feeler's insertion of themselves in a different context or their replacement of focus to their external perception, pretending like their life was an artistic exhibition. When one rationalizes, the replacement of focus now seeks rigorous, analytic data that functions to assign meaning for one's feelings or to distance the subject from their emotions.
Because the focus of consciousness moves from the painful event to a distractive one in each process, the subject feels a reduction in the intensity of their suffering. There should also be cases where suffering is too extreme to romanticize or rationalize.
I've been both a long-time romanticizer and rationalizer, and the lingering beauty of October has been hauntingly leading my mind to these processes. My wish, likely, is to escape the current situation I find myself in, every now and then. The material reality is very real, and shouldn't the suffering, that it fires, justify giving myself the illusion of detachment from it? Though, I would actually prefer not to suffer in the first place.
Given that suffering and the hostility against emotion exist in the same space, under the excused names of "logic" and "emotion," we can do either of these things: ignore our suffering altogether and harm our mental health, appeal to rationalization or romanticization to cope with it to an extent, or resist it with embracing the emotional experience.
In summary, it strikes me that emotion and thought are complementary to each other, instead of opposing forces, and that thought emerges from emotion. The perceived contrast between these two concepts likely has its roots in the patriarchy. Emotion enables one to recognize their suffering and drives logical thought consequently.
An aware mind realizes that for its best continuance, it should keep in touch with both emotion and logic, like it's already been doing behind closed doors to function, but without consciously discouraging the other.