#outside of ratfic anyway

[katherinakaina]

I keep seeing once in a while people pondering on an apparent contradiction in Daniil’s character – he is said to be a rationalist but he is evidently extremely emotional. Those things do not go together, right? People notice their confusion. They find all sorts of interesting explanations. From him being manipulative and performative, using his displays of emotion like tools to control people. To him not being rational at all actually, him lying to himself and others, not even knowing who he is, pretending and failing.

Every time I get over it and completely forget and then another one of these hits me in the face. What I forget is that in common understanding rationality is opposed to being emotional. While in the community it is a basic level understanding that there are rational emotions and irrational ones. The same way there are rational beliefs and irrational beliefs (which is to say true and false basically).

From here:

A popular belief about “rationality” is that rationality opposes all emotion—that all our sadness and all our joy are automatically anti-logical by virtue of being feelings. …

For my part, I label an emotion as “not rational” if it rests on mistaken beliefs, or rather, on mistake-producing epistemic conduct. “If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm.” Conversely, an emotion that is evoked by correct beliefs or truth-conducive thinking is a “rational emotion”; and this has the advantage of letting us regard calm as an emotional state, rather than a privileged default. …

Becoming more rational—arriving at better estimates of how-the-world-is—can diminish feelings or intensify them. Sometimes we run away from strong feelings by denying the facts, by flinching away from the view of the world that gave rise to the powerful emotion. If so, then as you study the skills of rationality and train yourself not to deny facts, your feelings will become stronger. …

I visualize the past and future of humankind, the tens of billions of deaths over our history, the misery and fear, the search for answers, the trembling hands reaching upward out of so much blood, what we could become someday when we make the stars our cities, all that darkness and all that light—I know that I can never truly understand it, and I haven’t the words to say. Despite all my philosophy I am still embarrassed to confess strong emotions, and you’re probably uncomfortable hearing them. But I know, now, that it is rational to feel.

Daniil probably suppresses some of his emotions to be taken seriously. But this is masking. And he is bad at it. He has strong emotions and strong convictions and they spill out of him regardless. He also values truth and honesty and that’s another reason why he can’t fully suppress his authenticity.

But all of it is about how to behave in polite society. How not to freak out neurotypicals. It has nothing to do with his thinking process, his beliefs and his goals. His rationality.

Now you can argue that his sincerity and his openness are irrational instrumentally, which is to say they lead to his downfall. He should have masked better and become more cynical if he wanted to succeed. Maybe? But that would also have its downsides, I’m pretty sure. (we’ll see what apathy meter does to his decision making soon enough)

Anyway, that is not the point I see people make. And I just really want people to stop making it. Strong emotions, strong ideals, passionate belief in a better future for humanity – those are all perfectly rational if they align with truth. And he does fail as a rationalist quite a lot as well, but this is purely an epistemological issue that has nothing to do with him being emotional.