Emotion & Rationality

Recently I had the opportunity to interview a potential candidate for an entrepreneurship organization I'm a part of, and, as the interview was coming to a close, asked him why he wanted to become an entrepreneur. After having referred to the idea that most people aren't in touch with their authentic desires as a given throughout the interview, he had a surprising inability to articulate his own authentic desires. He valued greatness, but couldn't define exactly what greatness meant. And it seemed that he hadn't even considered why he considered greatness to be something of value.

Over the past few years, I've taken every opportunity to ask 'why' that has been given to me. It's one of those questions that seems to cut right into the heart of the person you're talking to. After posing this question to a range of audiences, I've noticed a few patterns that tend to occur when you get far enough down the 'why' rabbit hole that I think are quite interesting. I try to tie these observations together with a broader framework about the role emotions play in our decision making, and come to a few quite elegant conclusions from a small number of key assumptions.

So, onto my observations. The first is, well, uncertainty. This is to be expected, as I'm asking for an examination of something inherently recondite. The way that this uncertainty is presented varies between a few common forms: reasoning which ultimately becomes cyclical in nature, outright refusal to answer, or people trying (nearly always in vain) to define objective axioms. I've found that a good metaphor that characterises the interactions of others with such questions is a murky void. It seems that presenting this void to someone or something unaccustomed to its ethereality is unsettling, and often intractable to their usual uses of logic. Perhaps this is not much of a surprise.

I used the word ethereality there on purpose. I wanted to emphasize its transience, intangibility, and to some, fragility. However, there's another element to the word; an implication of something otherworldly. Composed of ether. I think this is the key to understanding and learning to work with this realm, which seems to defy logic, and stump philosophers to no end—the idea that the tools we suppose the utility of may actually be misdirected. The tools of logic and rationality.

In my experience, the other defining feature of this realm has been its ability to stir emotions in people. Inquiries that stretch beyond the safety of normalcy often get quite heated; peers can get quickly rankled at the pointedness of these 'why' questions. One interpretation is that this is simply a defence mechanism that people tend to employ when faced with the aforementioned uncertainty. While this is almost certainly part of it, this would imply that the emotion was contrived in the moment without prior coordination. Or, if someone was drawing on previously formed emotion, that it would not truly apply. However, in my experience, this has not been the case; alternatively, I have often been faced with emotion that has felt both highly relevant and festering just beneath the surface, waiting to gush out the instant a pointed question breached the surface.

I propose that this is not a coincidence, but a reflection of the underlying structure of what initially seems to be the 'foundation' of all reason. This foundation is of great significance. I have often observed that people's whole lives are structured around such an emotional foundation—outrage at the privation of the homeless (or fear of joining the ranks), an enchantment with the beauty of mathematics (or a deep shame of your own mathematical inadequacy), or an addiction to immersion in novelty (or a domineering fear of change). I like to call conclusions that have been formed from such beliefs 'emotional conclusions', for there are no fewer conclusions than logical ones, but also inherently distinct.

I believe that, in many of my conversations, an ability to embrace these emotional conclusions would have led to much more productive outcomes. In other words, embracing the flood of emotion that is inevitably provoked by such deeply personal and intimate questions was a requirement for meaningful discourse. As I alluded to earlier, I believe much of the confusion that these 'why' questions can cause comes from mistaking emotional conclusions for logical ones, and trying to use the wrong set of tools.

With that being said, isn't it wrong to base your life around such things? Shouldn't choices be rooted in logic and rationality rather than what is often seen as nothing more than flippant, capricious and involuntary sensations? Well, how else, besides curiosity and acceptance, do you propose we act when faced with immutable axioms? Shouldn't you seek to understand your own internal, involuntary forces the same way that physicists seek to understand gravity, or historians the ideological interactions that have led to their modern day?

However, I want to be careful with metaphors like this. While they can be useful to grasp the importance of one role emotions play in our lives, I don't think they accurately portray the whole thing. And, to be honest, I don't believe emotions are any more fundamental than logic. Consider the discipline of cognitive behavioural therapy. It is built upon the idea that fundamental 'beliefs' shape our lives—beliefs that can be reshaped using the tools of rationality.

Rather than being fundamental, I believe instead that emotion forms a syzygy with rationality, creating a dynamic system where each part does not act in isolation, but in tandem, requiring the other half to be truly realised. Perhaps by making such a complex and imprecise metaphor I'm leaving so much room for error and interpretation that I'm actually not saying very much. Maybe this is already obvious to most people! Well, what is philosophy if not the documentation of your internal world... and surely no internal world is even remotely unique? Anyway, after a little more elaboration, I believe that you can derive certain principles from this idea that do have broader significance. For now, abandoning its prior definition, let us arbitrarily label the process of arriving at conclusions using the synergistic forces of both rationality and emotion 'reasoning'.

Primarily, I believe that only through a synergistic and interconnected understanding of both logic and emotion can accurate reasoning be done. Only then can we elucidate conclusions or other chains of thought that were previously unavailable to us. Similarly, by letting the logical structures we impose on the world be slightly more labile, we can make space for deeply emotional experiences that were otherwise inaccessible. In a sense, emotional conclusions are no more valid and necessary than logical conclusions. And to go even further, this binary separation between types of conclusions is in itself slightly arbitrary, for our logical and emotional processes are deeply interdependent and necessary for accurate reasoning, with no one conclusion ever being entirely logical or emotional. With that being said, I will continue to use the terms logical and emotional conclusions throughout this essay to refer to conclusions which are predominantly logical or predominantly emotional.

Let us now examine how this proposition fits into the framework of existing ideas. While this section may seem unnecessary and somewhat repetitive, hopefully it provides insight into how I arrived at the above conclusions, and gives more weight to the novel aspects of my ideas.

Carl Jung famously said "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate". You can aptly interpret this through the lens of this essay: until you incorporate the emotional axioms, conclusions and trends into your ability to logically reason, they will unconsciously direct your life nonetheless.

Wittgenstein famously said "At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded".

(Before interpreting this quote, I want to suggest that the fact we consider the emotional aspect of our reasoning to be the 'core' is more so a cultural trend than a universal truth. It is no more the core than the axiom that if P is true, and if P implies Q, then Q must be true. As a society, we pretend that emotional conclusions don't exist, effectively banishing them to the subconscious. Alternatively, perhaps emotional conclusions are in a sense more 'at the core'—I'm ill equipped to say much more.)

You can aptly interpret this quote through the lens of this essay too: even what seem to be the most logical conclusions have reasoning which is deeply emotional layered throughout.

David Hume famously said that reason, divorced from desires or sentiments, is 'motivationally inert', claiming that 'reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions'. Now, I don't agree with this; I only bring it up to attempt to expand on it. As I mentioned earlier, cognitive behavioural therapy, which is a deeply logical process, has the ability to drastically reshape our desires. Thus, I don't believe 'the passions' that he references are immutable and immune to the formative effects of logic any more than logic is immune to the formative effects of emotions.

On the subject of the formative effects of emotion on logic, I believe that some of these effects can be constructively characterised. One of these is the supplanting effect emotions can have when the logical signals we are receiving in a particular decision are too complicated for our mental framework to manage and thus simplified, or are for some other reason rather faint. For example, consider the idea of the things you choose to say in a conversation. The logical optimum at each turn to speak is likely drastically different from what we say in actuality. In fact, for no logical reason I argue that we only consider a very small portion of the potential things that we could say when deciding what to say. This simplification serves a purpose, and facilitates much of effective communication by eliminating 'analysis paralysis'; however, we seldom question it, leaving largely just our emotional impulses to guide our interactions.

To generalise this, I argue that whenever we have a possibly overwhelming array of choices that could be made in front of us, especially when there exists external pressure to make a choice, we tend to let emotions guide our reasoning much more than rationality.

One such choice, which occurs entirely internally, is our choice of worldview. There are potentially infinite ways to view the world, and yet I would argue that most of us only consider a select few, if that. Despite the overwhelming magnitude of the choice, or rather precisely because of the overwhelming magnitude of the choice, we are guided by emotions much more than logic.

However, I also believe that we can use emotional conclusions purposefully. In Einstein's 1945 letter to Jacques Hadamard, after describing his largely visual method of creating and merging ideas, he said that 'it is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements'. Moreover, he was known for frequently taking breaks to play the violin or piano while working. Perhaps he too is recognising the fundamental role emotions play in creativity, perhaps a subtype of reasoning?

In Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error, through an extensive account of several case studies, he demonstrates the inextricable nature of both logic and emotion, proposing that emotion and logic are intimately connected through 'somatic markers'. He posits that rationality requires emotional input, especially when our ability to logically process is overwhelmed. One of the most compelling of these case studies is of one of his personal clients—a man Antonio referred to with the pseudonym Elliot, who suffered damage to his prefrontal cortex following a surgery to remove a brain tumour in the region. Despite only suffering damage to an area of his brain responsible for emotions, he became completely incapable of making executive decisions—a choice that would require a choice of a potentially overwhelming set of options.

In all honesty, I tire of writing, so let me tentatively propose two ideas that I invite you to think about some more:

People at the bottom of society are not only logically challenged through inadequate education, but are often also emotionally challenged, burdened with traumas, hostile environments and systematic oppression. In what ways do you think our society could benefit from understanding such a model of reasoning? In what ways could our society adapt its notion of 'intelligence'?

Second, perhaps it is not a coincidence, then, that some of the most innovative, unique and revolutionary thinkers have been the most emotionally aberrant?

Thank you for reading!