Reason and passion

Plato’s picture is the one everyone remembers: the soul is a charioteer driving two horses, one noble and one unruly, and reason’s job is to hold the reins. Aristotle is gentler: the passions are not enemies but material, and virtue is feeling the right thing toward the right person at the right time. The Stoics want the horses shot. Euripides, watching all this from the theatre, wrote the Bacchae to show what a god does to a man who thinks he has the reins.

Christianity complicated the map by making love the highest thing and lust the lowest and asking how to tell them apart; Augustine’s Confessions is the record of a man trying. Descartes wrote a treatise on the passions and treated them as mechanics. Pascal answered him in one sentence: the heart has its reasons that reason does not know.

Hume overturned the chariot. Reason, he argued, cannot move anyone to act; only passion does, and reason’s only job is to find the means. Kant put reason back on top and made it the source of the moral law. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who acts against his interest to prove he can, is the novel’s reply to both. The theme runs through Hamlet, who thinks too much, and through every book about love.