Wednesday, August 18, 2021

What Fear Can Reveal

Fear is not irrational, no matter what it is directed towards, as having an involuntary emotion itself is not the same as having a fallacious or erroneous belief or otherwise failing to align with the laws of logic.  This can be a very comforting truth for those who struggle with intense fears and have wondered about the exact relationship between emotions like fear and the grasp of reason.  It is at least possible for any person to experience fear to such an extent that they find solace in this truth.  Whoever experiences this might even find that the clarity of certain concepts and desires has been heightened because of it.  Tethered to desires and ideas, fear deserves to be understood for what it truly exposes in its deepest manifestations.

Fear, like love, reveals a person's priorities right before their own introspective gaze, and a person's worldview rests behind how they intellectually and behaviorally react to their priorities.  Even if they never give anyone else an indication as to what they fear, someone can directly see into their own mind and identify what things might terrify them and why.  In doing so, they can understand what they most desperately hope for, what they feel about their own self, and what they are willing to carry out.  Fright and terror even have the power to motivate someone to look to truth and their psyche in ways they might otherwise run from.  In other words, fear can drive people to a desperation that cannot be quenched by philosophical blindness as they come to face their true selves.

Whether they already know a given truth or are discovering it for the first time, they can let fear motivate them to cling to reality or let fear rot them from within.  All fear provides a chance to do either of these things.  The subjectivity of experiencing fear means that people can be frightened of different things and that they can have differing psychological reactions to the same specific concept, object, or situation.  The intrinsic nature of fear means that it does not have to be a destabilizing emotion that scares someone away from self-awareness and a love of truth; it can give someone yet another reason to seek reason and introspection.  It reveals at least part of who a person is as an individual.

Fear can reveal far more about someone than just what they are afraid of, for what someone fears can be directly related to what they most prize, desire, and hate.  Some fears can be only tangentially related to a person's core worldview and personality, yes, as is true of other emotions when experienced in specific ways, but fear has a strong potential to cast genuine light on these things.  What a person fears indicates something about what they want or what they are comfortable with.  What a person wants indicates something about their priorities.  What a person prioritizes indicates what they believe.  Belief, of course, is a stance on the truth and falsity of various concepts, something far more important than comfort or and inescapable due to its universality.

No comments:

Post a Comment