Living Without Pleasure

Without emotion, pleasure, including some physical pleasure (for all pleasure is ultimately by necessity a mental experience and only some forms of it also involve the body), is either significantly lessened or nonexistent altogether.  After all, a person could not feel the deepest kind of desires, attachments, introspective nuances, or love of anything from minor pleasures to something like relationships, justice, or reason if it was not for emotion.  It would be possible for someone to live, think, and strive to achieve goals without emotion, whether they never had any emotion or lost the whole of it at some point, though there could be no strong feelings to experience while doing so.  This would just not allow for the same potential depths of pleasure that non-rationalists seem to squander on trivialities, ignore, or misunderstand.

Emotion does not make anything true other than that one has emotion, and it thus does not reveal anything about reality other than that one has or can have emotions, but it is still utterly inseparable from a life of joy, motivation, or contentment that one actually feels.  It would be easy for non-rationalists to take all of this for granted or to simply not realize any of it at all except in vague, random jolts.  For a person to most holistically and deeply understand themselves, including their capacity to experience pleasure and motivation even as it is felt pertaining to objective, demonstrable truths, he or she must dwell on their emotions beyond passively experiencing them and beyond just scarcely grasping what does and does not logically follow from them.

Since logical possibility and the metaphysical laws of logic are what permits or necessitates that anything is true at all and since no one can epistemologically know anything apart from reason (even introspection and sensory experiences cannot be understood apart from reason and would not be metaphysically possible apart from it as well), it is a deep truth that only those who wholly look to reason, liberating themselves from or avoiding all assumptions, who can understand emotion as it is: a spectrum of nonphysical feelings within one's mind that does not dictate reality beyond it and yet still allows for the strongest, most personal kinds of experiential concern for even truth itself.  This is in part why rationalists can find immense pleasure in not misunderstanding emotion as they have a special degree of awareness as to its true nature.

Far from leading a person to entirely dismiss emotion, reason leads people to embrace it without believing in things because of it--besides that one has emotion--and without yielding to the pleasures and possible depths of emotion alone.  Living without pleasure is something it is unlikely anyone would truly want if they knew all that it entailed, and a life without emotion is a life without pleasure except for the objectively less personal pleasures of certain physical sensations alone.  That emotion is epistemologically useless except for introspection, which still does grant absolute certainty when engaged in without assumptions (though even introspection would neither be possible nor knowable without the laws of logic to underpin it), does not cheapen or alter the fact that it is emotion that provides the strongest experience of motivation, something vital to a life where one embraces every knowable truth, even the truth about one's own sense of motivation.