Submitted by Charles Knighton
Mere days before the presidential election in the USA, polls indicated that just under half of Americans approved of President Obama’s job performance in general, while 54% of respondents felt the economy and the country as a whole, were headed in the wrong direction. Mitt Romney, in private business, as head of the Utah Olympic games and as Governor of Massachusetts, demonstrated a marked proclivity in successfully handling such economic issues as those now besetting the USA. Thus logically, the election’s outcome should have been a no-brainer, right? Well, yes and no. One other poll, showing President Obama’s “likeability” at 63% compared to Romney at 38% was, in my opinion, key to Obama’s re-election.
The head and the heart have often been portrayed as two organs in constant battle. In Plato’s “Phaedrus”, intellect is a charioteer, pulled by one horse of noble passion while trying to whip his unruly companion into line. The philosopher David Hume would have thought the charioteer a self-deluded fool, for, in reality, it’s the horses that decide on the chariot’s direction: “reason is and ought only to be the slave of passions.” For Blaise Pascal, the conflict between the two is more like espionage than a battle of strength, since “the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”.
While there is some truth in all three models, where they mislead is in suggesting that the head and heart work against each other. In fact, unless they work in tandem, both would be unrecognizable. Often, if not always, we would not feel the way we do unless we thought the way we do. We desire things that we believe will give us pleasure, and if we find out they don’t, our desire soon subsides. Similarly, anger is calmed if we come to believe that someone has not done us an injustice after all. Rather than a charioteer, perhaps Plato should have conjured up images of a horse whisperer, who calms an agitated steed by reasoning with it, not beating it.
Hume comes closest to the truth, recognizing that the head needs the heart even more than the heart needs the head, since there is nothing in pure rationality that can provide us with any motivation. Nor can moral reasoning get off the ground without an empathetic understanding of the welfare of others. Without any input from emotion or feeling, reason is merely a cold, mechanical method of calculation. It can help us work out what the consequences of our actions might be, but it can’t tell us whether they are desirable.
In short, reason alone gives us no reason to do anything. Pascal was therefore only partly right. The heart and the head both have their reasons, but they share as many as they keep from each other
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