Reason and Passion
In his wake, Stoics like Epitectus emphasized that "the most important and especially pressing field of study is that which has to do with the stronger emotions...sorrows, lamentations, envies...passions which make it impossible for us even to listen to reason". The Stoic tradition still lay behind Hamlet's plea to "Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core", or Erasmus's lament that "Jupiter has bestowed far more passion than reason – you could calculate the ratio as 24 to one". It was only with the Romantic movement that a valorisation of passion over reason took hold in the Western tradition: "the more Passion there is, the better the Poetry".
The recent concerns of emotional intelligence have been to find a synthesis of the two forces—something that "turns the old understanding of the tension between reason and feeling on its head: it is not that we want to do away with emotion and put reason in its place, as Erasmus had it, but instead find the intelligent balance of the two".
Read more about this topic: Passion (emotion)
Famous quotes containing the words reason and/or passion:
“When posterity judges our actions here it will perhaps see us not as unwilling prisoners but as men who for whatever reason preferred to remain non-contributing individuals on the edge of society.”
—George Lucas (b. 1944)
“It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)