Clearness, simplicity, and "the whole man"

LISTEN. The resonant and lingering issue for me, after our first Rationality class, is the enduring confusion around David Hume's famous and notorious statement about reason being rightly the slave of the passions. Steven Pinker rightly notes that Hume was decidedly not praising licentious hedonism or inviting the excessive indulgence of un-reason. He was just alerting us to the goal-oriented sources in our experience that give reason something to think about. Fine. 

But does that really entail the hyper-instrumental view that reason and feeling must be segregated, kept in separate chambers, and not mutually engaged except when we're puzzling about the most efficient means to our passionally prescribed ends? I think not. I think reason, understood in an appropriately-broadened conception, is anything but "inert" and non-impulsive. 

"Passions are the engine for all our deeds: without passions we would lack all motivation, all impulse or drive to act, or even to reason (practically or theoretically). This gives at least one sense in which “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions... So, reason has only an instrumental use. But whatever its other virtues, this model does little to explain why reason “ought to be” the slave of the passions. It also seems inappropriate to reduce passions to desires: passions have a great deal more structure than their attractive or aversive directions, important though those may be. What seems central to Hume’s view is the inertness of reason, its inability to generate impulses for the mind."  SEP

I think, with James, that reason and sentiment are inter-penetrative.

A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him of these two cravings [for clearness and simplicity]. No system of philosophy can hope to be universally accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or entirely subordinates the one to the other. The fate of Spinosa, with his barren union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that of Hume, with his equally barren 'looseness and separateness' of everything, on the other,—neither philosopher owning any strict and systematic disciples to-day, each being to posterity a warning as well as a stimulus,—show us that the only possible philosophy must be a compromise between an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity... Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs..." SOR

Is it the case that rationality is only good for devising efficient means to our chosen ends (desires, goals etc.), and cannot help us think about what those ends should be... and thus is entirely neutral with respect to value, virtue, character, goodness, kindness...? James would say that's too narrow a concept of reason and rationality. And if Kurt Vonnegut was right about the indispensability of the "rule" to ("God damn it, babies") be kind, what's the status of the rule? Is it a rational rule? A sentimental rule? Both? Neither?

For my part, I do want my rational deliberations to be informed by a kind of emotional intelligence. I don't want my thinking and feeling segregated in separate boxes. That of course raises the great challenge of getting the balance right between heart and head, intellect and our "passional" natures. Call it Spock's (or the Stoic's) dilemma. He's half-human. We're all human. If Aristotle's right, we're rational animals. We must, therefore, integrate and honor the parts of us that think and the parts that feel. We must overcome the violent and uncivilized passions, or re-channel ("sublimate") them. We can't just suppress or dis-integrate them. Only the purest Vulcans can do that. And remember, they're a fiction.

So let's drop the pretense that we are passionally-neutral calculators whose passions are just a given to be dealt with or dealt out. Let's think about them. That's what reason is really good for. Isn't it? Thinking about what it means to be a whole person?

Looking forward to continuing that conversation in class.