Imperative to care
Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2014 5:31 pm
Can affections (in a broader sense than usual, not limited to biological definitions of emotional qualities) be said to represent our imperative to care for things?
For years I've been hunting the core of importance, and while I found out what importance is a long while ago (not a discussion for this thread) I couldn't find out how it really played out in an instance... a specific, particular, localized, tendentious sense. And how it mattered to humans.
However, I'm growing increasingly sure that if we could just free our notion of "affection" from being a mere emotional quality, to being a pattern of behaviour (to a compulsion to preserve), we could say that affection is the source of all human importance. That it represents our imperative to care for a thing. To react in such a way as to effort towards perpetuating that thing, with things like consciousness, mindfulness and so forth and our ability to plan (for instance out of habit or an in-grown set of response mechanisms), acting as the coherency with which we define our identity and structure of self, by which we sort out the structure of our affection, choosing things over one another, and managing the process of development, adjustment and orientation concerning our affections and the objects of our affections.
For years I've been hunting the core of importance, and while I found out what importance is a long while ago (not a discussion for this thread) I couldn't find out how it really played out in an instance... a specific, particular, localized, tendentious sense. And how it mattered to humans.
However, I'm growing increasingly sure that if we could just free our notion of "affection" from being a mere emotional quality, to being a pattern of behaviour (to a compulsion to preserve), we could say that affection is the source of all human importance. That it represents our imperative to care for a thing. To react in such a way as to effort towards perpetuating that thing, with things like consciousness, mindfulness and so forth and our ability to plan (for instance out of habit or an in-grown set of response mechanisms), acting as the coherency with which we define our identity and structure of self, by which we sort out the structure of our affection, choosing things over one another, and managing the process of development, adjustment and orientation concerning our affections and the objects of our affections.