Logic is Your Friend

In the history of popular thought there has emerged a very odd idea that logic is something cold, selfish, and oppressive. To the best of my understanding, this arose in the Romantic Period of the 19th century and became popular in the later half or so of the 20th century, but in this I may be wrong. The issue of importance is that in the imagination of modern America, the perfectly logical individual is imagined at best to be like Spock from Star Trek, or at worst to be like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Reason is presumed to be the enemy of emotion, and if it is not completely amoral then it is at least utilitarian and as such justifies many things that are quite clearly wrong. In my response this notion, I aim not to point out that this image of logic is misunderstood while still ultimately true, but rather to show that the modern understanding of logic is fundamentally wrong. Reason is intrinsically linked to both our emotions and to morality.

To start, there is the illusion that reason is against emotion. While it is true that the two must at times war with one another, that is only when our emotions behave in unnatural (I use the term "natural" here in reference to the nature instilled in us by God at Eden, not the twisted and sinful nature which emerged from the Fall) ways or are in unnatural circumstances that pit them against what is good, and when our emotions are working as they should in the kinds of circumstances for which they were made, reason supports them. The image Plato suggested for a healthy mind was one of a chariot in which one horse was emotion, one was spirit (that is to say, energy), and the rider was reason. It is true that reason must struggle against emotion, but only insofar as emotion falls away from its own true nature and purpose.

Now to understand when logic should and should not fight against emotions, we must first understand what that "true nature" really is. Emotions can be divided pretty neatly into passions, intuition, yearnings, and hungers (it will only be necessary to discuss passions and intuition in detail since yearnings and hungers parallel them). A passion is very easily defined when we consider the root word of "pass" which appears in it, indicating that a "passion" is a "feeling that passes." It is a feeling such as anger or happiness or sadness which comes to us at one time and not another depending on our circumstances. Intuition is another thing entirely; it is a feeling which does not emerge out of our current circumstances and certain intuitive feelings cannot even be imagined to be stronger in one moment than in another. When we say that if A is equal to B and B is equal to C then A and C must be equal, we are speaking from the authority of intuition. We are also speaking from intuition when we say that killing someone else for the sake of convenience is wrong. We cannot prove that our intuition is true (and I should add that while some beliefs may become so ingrained in our us as to behave like items of intuition, they are still distinct) and if we had to go on proof we would be sentenced to never know anything. If I dismiss the laws or morality as they are presented to me through my feelings then I shall lose any concept of "right and wrong" at all, and if I do away with the laws of logic as they are revealed through my intuition then I shall never have any method by which to build up an alternative set of laws.

In terms of the relationship between passions and intuition, passion can tell me that I am sad at having lost a loved one, but only intuition can tell me that this passing is sorrowful. What's more, my passion can be a hatred for someone else who has written a better essay than me, while my intuition tells me that the essay is admirable and it is actually my bitterness than is hateful. In other words, a passion is an event within me, but intuition is more like a window or a copy of life's own constitution carved into my soul.

It will be noticed now that while logic must often struggle against our passions, it is nonetheless founded on our intuition, or rather that half of it which we call the "laws of logic." Of course, logic itself is founded only on what our intuition reveals to us, and the intuition itself never professes to be more than an image within us of something greater than and outside of us. The question still remains as to what logic says about how we should behave. As has already been mentioned, a very odd idea has gotten out which says that behaving logically means behaving selfishly or in a utilitarian way. This is odd in many ways, but one way that immediately jumps out at me is that both the selfish campaign and the utilitarian campaign face the invincible enemy that is time; the man whose first priority is survival will one day die and the state of general happiness which the utilitarian hopes to achieve can never be more than a particularly high peak among the hills and valleys of history. In any event, logic can never support selfishness because no course is ever logical or illogical except in the context of some objective good. Utilitarianism can be supported through logic, of course, but it is not the only such attitude. In fact, in like of our own biases, our inability to know what certain actions will result in, and the disastrous consequences of utilitarianism seriously carried out (namely Nazism and Communism) over the last century build a rather solid logical case against utilitarianism.

Neither is the idea that the logical man is unemotional any more weighty. While the moral side of intuition does not demand our total assent in the same way that the logical side does, we must accept that at least some of it is right or else we shall not have any morality at all. Thus, in so far as we have defined the moral items of intuition and assented to them, they must be the guiding forces in any truly rational decisions we make. What's more, they must be the guiding forces in how we react to our own emotions. If I am bitter about something that is good I must suppress my bitterness, but if I am instead happy over that good thing then logic must demand that I embrace that happiness. Even when we are fighting our bad emotions we should still be trying to encourage the good ones. As such, we find that even when logic is at war with passion, it is not trying to stomp it out so much as it is trying to reshape it into some form that is not only aligned with objective reality but is also thriving in that role.