Issue47【0806G desperado小组】第五次作业by坐照

wangyu0920UID: 199396

TOPIC: ISSUE47 - "Society does not place enough emphasis on the intellect-that is, on reasoning and other cognitive skills."
WORDS: 450         DATE: 2008-1-1 20:36:08

1.         有保留的赞成。理性认知和感性都很重要
2.         过分强调理性容易对人造成心理上的伤害，流水线
3.         但在大尺度的问题上，智力能更有效地创造出社会财富。教育
4.         同时，理性的认知能培养人们的美德——与以自我为中心的自私相对。

The speaker believes that the society should place more emphasis on intellect and cognitions. I fundamentally agree; however, the speaker might overlook the importance of emotions and feelings, which could be also necessary to ensure the well-being of our society as well as cognitive skills. Accordingly, I would be content that we should strike a balance between them.

I concede that undue emphasize on cultivating the intellect can be psychologically harmful to individuals. After all, experiences tell us that intellect could be effective to increase the economic productivity and social welfare when people follow certain regulations. Yet it is truly hard for people to work and live within the restrains of so many rules and principles for a long time and they could seldom feel happy or relaxed. Consider the workers who work all years around in an assembly line, it is probably boring and tough for them to repeat the same procedure time and time again. As a result, the depression may lead to lower productivity and less social wealth, all of which are not expected.

However, on a larger scale of problems, cognitive skills provide us a better method to create more welfare in an effective way. Take the education as an example; although free minds and individual interests are dispensable conditions for students, the ability of innovation is still based on a solid foundation of basic knowledge, theories and methods. To make a bigger success, one has to stimulate every little progress from the beginning. Meanwhile, for most common people, it is the cognitive skills rather than emotions that provide them with essential abilities to survive. Imagination may bring about happiness for a while; after all, no one could succeed without any practical skills.

Moreover, intellect could nurture such virtue as tolerance, judgment and understanding, all of which are entirely necessary in our contemporary life. It is absolutely dangerous for a society to overlook the intellect because people are more likely to be selfish and violent when they are living in a self-centered world. If we just focus on how I feel, what I get, then who else would consider the feelings of others, who can understand with each other and who could be a good partner to cooperate with? On the contrary, people would be more rational if we place enough emphasis on cultivating the intellect. In other words, anyone who behaves in a more reasoning instead of an instinct way would benefit from each other.

To sum up, from what have been discussed above, we can safely draw the conclusion that people would suffer from even more burden as well as be the same with machines without emotion and feelings. On the other hand, our society would not only be lower effective but also lack of virtue without intellect. Accordingly, I would be content that we should strike a balance between intellect and emotion.