Should our head rule our heart?

The Shrink

When it comes to emotions, most of us are used to experiencing uncomfortably clashing feelings. One response is to let it go: how we feel is just how we feel, there’s no need to justify ourselves, and trying to suppress our emotions will only lead to unfortunate consequences for our health. “I don’t get angry,” as Woody Allen says in Manhattan, “I grow a tumour instead.” On the other hand, everyone will also be aware of emotions that are inappropriate or ill-fitting: being at the receiving end of someone else’s unreasonable anger, or harbouring feelings of unwarranted jealousy.

Perhaps, on reflection, most people would agree that emotions can be mistaken. Chances are, however, they would also think that even if their feelings are inappropriate, you can’t help what you feel, and that’s that. While the popularity of cognitive behavioural therapies may be spreading the word that thoughts and emotions are two sides of the same coin, and that changing one can lead to changes in the other, emotions are still commonly considered beyond assessment and beyond challenge.

But we would be wrong to perceive this as an “either/or” situation: uncritically embracing our emotions or denying them and pushing them away. We can be mindful of a particular emotion and accept that we are feeling it while at the same time being fully aware that it is out of place, and that we should do what we can to avoid acting on it.

If you found yourself inappropriately resenting the success of a colleague, for instance, it would be good if a watchful part of you were able to recognise both the feeling and the fact it’s unreasonable before the wrathful part writes them a bad reference. It’s a question of switching from an instinctive, partial appraisal to a more rounded and rational one.

So our head needs to be in charge in the sense of regularly monitoring and checking the responses and leaps of our heart. But this doesn’t require a tyrannical rule: a good head also needs to know when to get out of the heart’s way.

The Sage

The head and the heart have often been portrayed as two organs in constant battle. In Plato’s dialogue “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”.

There is some truth in all three models. But 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 unrecognisable. 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 lust 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 steer by reasoning with it, not beating it.

Hume comes closest to the truth, recognising 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 cannot 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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