By Massimo Pigliucci
Spock: Logic and practical information do not seem to apply here.
McCoy: You admit that?
Spock: To deny the facts would be illogical, doctor.
This dialogue seems to me like a good summary of my own struggles during the years to reconcile reason and emotion, a problem that without much exaggeration can be said to vex all of humanity by the very nature of what it means to be human.
As many young people attracted to reason, I started out as a self-professed son of the Enlightenment, predictably one of my favorite periods in human history (the other, equally predictably, being Athens in the 5th century BCE or thereabout). Accordingly, when it was time to go to college, I chose a career in science, which I was lucky enough to be able to pursue from 1982 (when I first set foot in a lab as an undergrad in Rome) to 2009 (when I closed my lab at Stony Brook University).
Later in life came the onset of philosophical reflection (which could probably have been anticipated from my very early interest in Bertrand Russell, dating back to high school), which eventually led me to go back to graduate school to actually get a degree in philosophy, and finally culminated in switching careers and becoming a full time philosopher (of science) at the City University of New York last year.
In a sense, I started out under the influence of Spock and with a certain degree of disdain for McCoy, and it took me some time to appreciate both Spock’s own inner struggle with his half-human half-Vulcan nature, and McCoy’s humanity and delightful sense of humor. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you may be reading the wrong blog, or you may want to check here and here.)
Of course, Spock’s continuous attempts to control his emotions and to put reason firmly in charge are reminiscent of Plato’s theory of the soul, where the rational part ought to be in charge, keeping the “spirited” and “appetitive” parts in check. The idea is that we share emotions with other animals, but that what distinguishes us from the rest of the biological world is precisely our ability to reason through things before making up our mind about what to do.
The again, McCoy’s character is also complex: he is a trained physician, a man of science, and yet his emphasis is on the primacy of emotion. His philosophical equivalent was, of course, David Hume — a skeptic, a friend of major figures of the Enlightenment, and yet one who famously said “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Notice that this isn’t just a description of how things are for human beings, “ought” here is prescriptive.
For Hume, we do things — including writing about philosophy — not because they are eminently rational, but because we care about them. Accordingly, he also said that “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger,” meaning that reason can only be instrumental toward achieving objectives that we already care for, it cannot tell us what to care for.
Modern neurobiology tells us that both the Platonic and the Humean programs are doomed to failure. As Antonio Damasio put it in a series of three highly philosophically informed books on the science of consciousness (check this one, for instance), a healthy human mind is one that constantly negotiates between the excesses of reason and those of passion. Too much leaning on one side, and one becomes incapable of empathy, possibly embarking on the destructive route to psychopathology. Too much on the other side, and we join the long history of destructive irrationality against which the Enlightenment was a valiant, if flawed, reaction.
While it’s nice to have modern science validating with facts the idea that a sensible human being ought to try to steer a middle course between the Scylla of too much reason and the Charybdis of too much emotion, it was yet another philosopher who had arrived at that conclusion 24 centuries ago: Aristotle. His virtue ethics is based on the insight that we improve our happiness (in the holistic sense of the ancient Greek eudaimonia) by a combination of reflecting about what we do and why, and practicing virtue so that it becomes second nature. Not reason against emotion struggling for primacy inside us, then, but rather a continuous flow aiming at a dynamic balance between the two. (Before anybody even thinks of making the analogy, let me assure you that I do not have any eastern mysticism or new agey crap in mind.)
Okay, Massimo, could you please get off the historical-philosophical-Star Trek train of thought and give us a concrete example? I am tempted to talk about serious issues, but this isn’t a therapy session, so let me take my own lifelong struggle with weight management instead. I am now a reasonably healthy male in his mid-forties, I achieved a quasi-ideal body weight about a decade ago, and have kept it since.
This has not been easy, and still isn’t. I started out as a rather chubby kid (by European standards, don’t think of modern McDonald’s babies), who went through the standard yo-yo of various kinds of diets for many years. At some point I realized that a radical change of strategy was needed, and I discovered the basic principle of healthy living: eat everything with moderation (with almost no fried or sweet stuff) and exercise regularly. It worked, and it’s still working. But it also is a constant struggle, because I don’t particularly enjoy going to the gym, and I am constantly tempted by any kind of chocolate I encounter.
But Aristotle was absolutely right: contra Hume, I initially used my rational understanding of the problem to guide and reshape my behavior and my emotions. It worked! The more I practiced healthy living, the more I not only got used to it, but I began to enjoy it, especially the feeling of well being and of power over my own life that it gives me. But contra Plato, I no longer strive to suppress my passion for food, but instead, enjoy the variety and quality of cuisines that I find in this constantly bewildering place where I am lucky enough to be living: New York City.
My newfound situation, however, is not the end of the struggle, but merely the current point of dynamic equilibrium concerning that aspect of my life. As Aristotle thought, life is a project that ends only with one’s death (the later the better — with certain conditions — thank you very much), and eudaimonia is not a final state, but an ongoing quest. It is as if I am trying to roll Spock and McCoy into one person, not so that they can (rather amusingly, it must be said) forever fight with each other, but because the result of that mix is a most fulfilling human existence.
