Late to the party, but I'm just going to jump in here

I'm understanding where you're coming from in terms of emotion and logic being intertwined, and It's really messing with my head on how I thought rhetoric was working. For the past few weeks I've been thinking of rhetoric as a hyper logical form of thought. accepted that rhetoric is all language, be it rational or otherwise, but it seemed to me that rhetoricions (as in those who identify as such, and actively and purposefully think in a rhetorical mindframe) thought in a hyper-logical manner. But then as I'm reading Grassi, he defines rhetoric "as the speech that acts on the emotions" right off the bat. Well that throws a wrench in things.

Ashton posed an interesting question in saying "does passion motivate our purpose? Or does purpose motivate our passion?". At first, I thought "well obviously it is passion that motivates our purpose right?". No. Similar to Erin's discussion of logic and emotion, I think passion and purpose can go in the order that the individual puts them in, and if we're lucky, we'll be able to intertwine them. Let me go over some examples: If we make following our passions our purpose in life, than we can say that passion came first. If my passion is say, drawing, and I work hard at developing that skill than I have made my passion into my purpose. On the other hand, Let's take my friend Phiphi (I made her up, but still, don't tell her I posted this). Phiphi always wanted to follow her passion and be an olympic ice dancer. But she met a guy, had two children, and then...I dunno dumped? As a single mom of 2 kids, Phiphi's purpose has changed. She can't follow her original passions, because her duty now is foremost as a mother. But I bet she becomes pretty passionate about her kids. In this case, I think her purpose changed, which then followed a change of passion. This is how I'm seeing this topic though, care to tear me apart? (please do!).

The other thing Ashton said that intrigued me was "can one experience passion from a objective (logical) sense?" I don't think so. I think we can approach our passion logically, but I don't think we can experience it logically. To me, passion means an emotional response, emotional drive, emotional force etc. For me to think otherwise, I'd have to be convinced that we can experience emotion logically. We can't. We can be logical in our thoughts about emotion, but the overall experience of emotion is a natural feeling. We can analyze that natural feeling, even understand it, but to experience it, I don't see it being done logically.

I'm excited to see where this goes with next weeks posts!