"The interval between a cold expectation and a warm desire may be filled by expectations of varying degrees of warmth or by desires of varying degrees of coldness"
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Alexander is mapping the emotional middle ground most of us live in: that messy corridor between what we think will happen and what we want to happen. The line has the quiet precision of early 20th-century philosophy, when thinkers were trying to describe mind and value without turning them into either pure logic or pure mood. Instead of treating expectation as sterile cognition and desire as raw appetite, he treats both as thermometers that can be dialed up or down.
The trick is the temperature metaphor. “Cold” and “warm” do a lot of work without psychological jargon: cold expectation is the resigned forecast (“this is how it goes”), warm desire is the felt pull (“this is how I want it”). But Alexander insists the gap isn’t a simple binary. You can have expectations that are warmed by hope, faith, or optimism; you can have desires cooled by skepticism, shame, or a practiced sense of disappointment. That’s the subtext: our inner life is often a negotiation, not a clash of opposites.
Context matters because Alexander, in an era of scientific confidence and social upheaval, was invested in continuities rather than sharp divides. He’s pushing back against the idea that reason and feeling are separate departments. By describing gradients, he also smuggles in a moral-psychological insight: self-deception and self-control both operate in the middle zone. We survive by adjusting the temperature of what we expect and what we allow ourselves to want.
The trick is the temperature metaphor. “Cold” and “warm” do a lot of work without psychological jargon: cold expectation is the resigned forecast (“this is how it goes”), warm desire is the felt pull (“this is how I want it”). But Alexander insists the gap isn’t a simple binary. You can have expectations that are warmed by hope, faith, or optimism; you can have desires cooled by skepticism, shame, or a practiced sense of disappointment. That’s the subtext: our inner life is often a negotiation, not a clash of opposites.
Context matters because Alexander, in an era of scientific confidence and social upheaval, was invested in continuities rather than sharp divides. He’s pushing back against the idea that reason and feeling are separate departments. By describing gradients, he also smuggles in a moral-psychological insight: self-deception and self-control both operate in the middle zone. We survive by adjusting the temperature of what we expect and what we allow ourselves to want.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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