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, reason and/or passion:
“The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or just felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.”
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“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)