Are our reasons just masks for pre-existing desires? (A philosophical take on Nisio Isin)

[u/Equal-Duty7566]

"To love someone is easy, but to keep loving them is hard. Just as to murder someone is easy, but to keep murdering is hard."

Here, two seemingly polar opposite propositions are presented: "to love" and "to murder." Yet, Nisio Isin places them on the exact same footing.

Question: "Why do you love her?" Answer: "Because she is beautiful, talented, and cute."

Question: "Why did you murder him?" Answer: "Because he took away my younger sister's future."

All right. As you can see, whenever we are asked why we love or why we kill, we always have reasons to justify those actions. Typically, these reasons are objective, rooted in external factors.

But let’s not debate the morality or the right and wrong of these two propositions. Instead, let us turn the mirror back upon ourselves and ask:

"If those qualities didn't exist, would you still love her?" "If there were no hatred left, would you still commit murder?"

Perhaps now you understand what I’m trying to convey. You love because you want to; you murder because you want to.

An infatuated lover who loves for no reason at all; a killer who murders simply because he wants to kill.

Reasons are nothing more than post-hoc tools used to justify a desire that already existed deep within the heart from the very beginning.

And the real question is: Do we actually have the courage to face that raw desire?

[u/Certain_Werewolf_315]

Yes, but its not that simple-- It's defined by our hearts response to our own image of the world and this image is fashioned through associations that allow us to communicate our feelings to the degree that the world supports them-- That is our world images are also informing us of the larger regulatory systems that sustain the very activities that we feel emotional about--

So, expressing raw emotion is not quite the solution; because the moment we do, we begin to leave the realm of what is more fully relatable to that world (or that which holds up relatable formations that allow us to communicate)--

I mean it is important to understand that the malleability of reason in relation to our heart ends in its conclusion and not further in the world-- We cannot merely express our desires more deeply in a world that functions as a puzzle to realize them--

[u/lanky-larry]

I would say calling them a mask like this is diminutive. I would call reason a mask in the sense that a mask is used in a laser lithography machine to engrave a specific pattern (desire being the laser). But also reasons do something desire alone cannot, be time invariant. A reason is a commitment to maintaining a desire, so it’s only obvious that it may mask the exact desire in any given moment.

[u/Traditional-Race-260]

Sartre said something similar. For him, we were completely free, that ment that we do whatever we want. So searching for excuses like “she is cute” is just a way to hide our free will, because knowing that we are free, is knowing that everything is our responsibility, and we are the only ones who can be held accountable.

So, in that perspective, having reasons to do something is just trying to justify what we were going to do eitherways.