Because you can’t know why you feel a certain way immediately, without some serious introspection, it is not a good idea to follow any feelings, because you do not know if what makes you happy is also pro-life.
That doesn’t sound right to me. I can think of many situations in which it’s perfectly acceptable, even necessary, to be guided by one’s feelings, with much less than full knowledge of why one feels a certain way.
Should I order the broccoli soup for lunch, or the minestrone? As long as I don’t have some terrible food allergy, or the restaurant is burning down around me, I’m on quite safe ground selecting either, aware of nothing more than that I happen to prefer one variety of soup over the other at this moment in time.
If I see an attractive lady across the room, assuming that I’m single and looking for love, why shouldn’t I go over and talk to her, motivated solely by my positive emotional reaction? Do I really need to know, in clear and conceptual terms, exactly why I like her, in order to ask her out on a date? Can’t the introspection wait until later? Can’t I just say, “She seems like a lovely person,” and move myself in her direction before she gets away?
How could one operate at all in the field of romantic love without a high degree of spontaneity — without a great deal of trust in one’s emotions, and the sense of freedom to act on them — i.e., without the inner security that one’s feeling responses do in fact represent pro-life values and value-judgments, and are unlikely to lead one to destruction?
Far too many Objectivists seem think that emotions are to be treated as guilty, or at least suspect, until proven appropriate. To a certain extent, of course, this is true: in principle, emotions are not tools of cognition, and are not reliable guides to action. But it’s a gross non-sequitur to conclude therefore that every emotion one experiences must be analyzed and understood before one can act on it — or worse, that emotions never play any role at all in a rational person’s decision-making process, especially in his most important decisions, such as what city to live in, which career to pursue, or whom he should marry.
One’s life and actions must be guided, overall, by reason. But living rationally absolutely entails an awareness of the meaning of one’s emotional responses in general, and the ability to act on one’s feelings to the extent that such is appropriate, given the context. If I know in reason, for instance, that I cannot make a wrong choice — if I know that either the broccoli or the minestrone soup would make a fine selection for lunch — then I’m free to let my feelings be my guide. If I have no reason to believe that dire consequences will befall me by talking to a particular girl that I see, I don’t particularly need to know why I’m attracted to her in order to say hello and find out more about her. And it would be the height of absurdity — of irrationality — to attempt to progress in a romantic relationship without any reference to or respect for my emotional responses, and to try to base my every romantic decision on sheer intellectual appraisal and calculation.
As bizarre as this last may sound, you can read posts on these very boards advocating almost exactly this policy. Of course, nobody could actually practice such lunacy, at least not consistently (or successfully). But to the extent that a person accepts a dichotomy of this kind, you can be sure that he’ll experience a lot of guilt, bitterness and frustration — and he’ll most likely wind up blaming Ayn Rand and that damned repressive Objectivism for it all.