These two are often put forward as the two major pillars of our mental life. Some philosophers in the past have placed reason as the higher ideal. The reasoned life is nobler than the emotional. The emotions are viewed as irrational and contingent and so they are considered lower. J.S. Mill said it’s better to be an unhappy man than a happy pig. His point is that man is differentiated from animals by his capacity to reason and examine the world. Animals are driven merely by their instincts and needs. It’s better to be an unhappy yet reasoning man.
But what is reason? It is a process of applying thought to solve a problem. We pose a question and use our reason to get an answer. As such, reason is goal-oriented. If I did not have any goals in life, there would be no motive to reason. And what is a goal? Either it is a desire to achieve something I want or to prevent something I don’t like from happening. These desires and aversions are not themselves rational or necessary. My desire to drink good wine has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the fact that I enjoy the taste and warm feeling it gives me. Aren’t our emotional states simply the flavour of our desires and emotions? How flat life would be without them. Without an emotional response, I would have no motivation to do anything.
What am I getting at here? Reason is driven by goals that are motivated by our emotional response. As such, reason is the servant to our emotions. Put this way, in a sense, emotions have a greater importance than reason.
Does that mean then that life should be lived hedonistically? No doubt the philosophers had in mind such earthy emotional states as lust, drunkenness and pigs wallowing happily in mud. But we need to bear in mind that the spectrum of emotions is vast, including such states as love, altruism and taste. Therefore an emotional life doesn’t necessarily mean a debauched life (and some may say a bit of debauchery isn’t necessarily a bad thing either!). An emotional life is the only one we can have.
There is an interesting connection with my last post. Statistics is a type of applied reasoning. We have a hypothesis about the world and we use statistics to test it. We may consider statistics to be a purely objective mathematical discipline, but Hand has shown that our use of statistics involves a pragmatic choice. To do statistics correctly, we need first to be clear what it is we want from it. This will affect the way we apply statistical methods. In summary, statistics is driven partly by our intentions. (This is my interpretation, of course).
But what about pure reason? It is possible to reason in the abstract. For example, pure mathematicians reason about numbers in the abstract without any reference to the physical world. Since emotions are directed towards the world, doesn’t that mean that pure reason is divorced from emotions? Well, as a mathematician myself I have to answer, no. There are three motives for pure reason that I can think of. (1) Competition: mathematicians are interested in solving a problem before their peers or in pursuit of an academic career. (2) Joy: there is a sheer joy in working on a mathematical or philosophical problem for its own sake. (3) Dread: our frustrated inability to understand our place in the world can drive us to metaphysics. In each case the drive to pure reason is intentional and emotional.
When I first began to be interested in mathematics and philosophy, I bought into the idea that reason and the pursuit of truth were the highest motives of man. After some time, however, it occurred to me that ironically these interests are passions of themselves! Who’s to say that my passion for philosophy was better (or worse) than another man’s passion for golf, say? There is no reasonable way to make that claim. It’s worth remembering that the word ‘philosophy’ comes from the Greek for love of wisdom, and what is paramount there is the word ‘love’.
