Good News Quote #33

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

As reason welcomes emotion and subjects it to the self-criticism that values truth over self, the two end up pulling together in the direction of making us better people.


Of course not all our reasoning works in that direction. When it goes off in the wrong direction, the problem is not that we're thinking too much, but that our thinking is bad, lazy or dishonest. Our reasoning then is not in the service of truth, which is what reason is really for, but promotes our own self-serving agenda. This results in the perversion of reason that psychologists call "rationalization," as I mentioned before. It's a form of irrationality in which our thinking is all about serving emotional needs that have nothing to do with what's really true. So instead of learning to put truth before self, and thus turning emotions toward justice, generosity, and humility, our thinking is corrupted by the wrong kind of emotions, which end up driving everything.

Good News Quote #32

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

This goes against an old stereotype about reason or rationality (I'll use these two terms equivalently). The stereotype is that in order to be rational, you have to deny your emotions. But that's never made sense to me. Reason is about finding the truth, whereas denying your emotions means telling lies to yourself about what you're feeling. There's no rationality in that. Some psychologists call it "rationalization," but that doesn't mean it's rational. In fact, "rationalization" is a technical term in psychology for a certain kind of irrationality, precisely because it refers to an attempt to avoid realizing the truth about ourselves.

Denial of reality is not what reason is for. And getting in touch with reality is one of the most important things our emotions are for. That's why reason and emotion -- thinking and feeling -- belong together: they both help us get at the truth about reality. But they get at the truth in different ways, which is why they need each other.