This also suggests that emotions can be controlled. Emotions however, can give us truth- for instance, if we see a dead mean and smell his rotting body, we would instantaneously feel sad and have a sick feeling. The fact is that the man has died, and believing that triggers the emotions, thus we know it is true the man has died. Emotions are very dodgy in terms of giving us truth. Thus, it is of great importance that reasoning (another way of knowledge) is introduced into the whole spectra in order to separate the hindrance of emotions from the truth we seek through our senses.
“Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity. ” – Michel de Montaigne. This bias quote towards reasoning greatly implies the use of reasoning and logic in order to give us the truth, because senses by themselves are full of uncertainty. It is this that causes us to think about the validity of day to day arguments and knowledge we acquire and think of its greater implications in the world.
It makes us question about things we already know and the new things we are told. For instance, when we think we see a dead man walking, we reason out that if a man is dead, his heart his not beating and there is no blood being pumped through his body, thus no electrical impulses are being send to his brain and therefore he cannot be walking, or in fact, he cannot be alive. Thus, we apply the basic facts of how the human body works and come to a conclusion that the dead man walking was not the truth because it fits in with our overall sets of belief.
In order to get close to the absolute truth, we need to set apart our emotions just like Helen Keller did and think logically, or simply reason out. The final way of knowing- perception, is also vital for achieving the truth. Everything we see, hear, taste, smell, or touch, is not necessarily what we expect it to be. As said before, we know what something tastes like only because of its label or we can see what it is. If we were to blindfold a person and make him describe the texture of a rock and a pebble, he might not be very accurate in describing it unless he actually sees the size of the rock and the pebble.
Usually, in perception, the confirmation by another sense is required in order to fully believe in what we see, hear, taste, smell, or touch. Helen Keller must have perceived the world in a very different way as compared to us. Losing two of her most important senses that help us perceive the world, her certainty of knowledge would be questioned. Certainty depends on perception, and perception depends on senses working together, and senses working together depends on reason and language, all of this combined is what gets us closest to quest of pathway of absolute truth we intend to seek.
