The Heart and the Head (again)

                                                                Edith Stein (1891-1942)

Plato and Aristotle both believed that emotional responses – which then may inform action – could be more or less appropriate to reality. For example:

·        Aristotle describes virtue as a state of character involving the right emotional response. Emotions like fear, anger, or desire must hit the “mean” appropriate to a given situation. For instance, courage is the mean between recklessness (excessive fearlessness) and cowardice (excessive fear). Both fail to conform to the true dangers or opportunities of a situation.

·        In the Poetics Aristotle argues that the emotions of pity and fear aroused by dramatic action help the audience grasp the deeper truths of human vulnerability and moral responsibility. These emotional responses are not arbitrary but are cultivated to align with the reality of human frailty and ethical dilemmas.

·        Aristotle also sees emotional alignment as connected to phronesis (practical wisdom), which ensures that one’s emotions are not only moderated but also attuned to the particulars of each situation. For example, righteous anger in response to injustice is what a virtuous person feels: i.e. a person who perceives and acts according to the moral truths of the situation. A Christian saint, who sees deeper into moral reality than Aristotle’s virtuous pagan, may temper anger with pity.

·        For both Plato and Aristotle, shame is not merely an unpleasant emotion but reveals moral and spiritual misalignment.  Shame also connects the individual to the communal and divine dimensions of goodness, as it often arises from failing to meet the expectations of others or the higher moral order. When properly directed, shame helps us recognize our alienation from the good and can inspire us to return to harmony with it. Plato sees this as essential for both personal and societal virtue.

·        Plato describes prisoners in a cave who mistake shadows for reality. Upon being freed and exposed to the true world of forms, their emotional responses (fear giving way to awe and wonder) manifest the nature of reality from a human perspective.  

 

I could go on.

Plato and Aristotle both emphasize reason in guiding emotions. For Plato, emotions, such as desires or anger, are part of the soul's non-rational aspects and are "blind" without the rational part, which directs them toward the good and truth. His allegory of the chariot in the Phaedrus vividly illustrates this dynamic, where reason must control the spirited and appetitive elements to align the soul with its ultimate purpose. Similarly, Aristotle sees emotions as not inherently irrational but as needing cultivation through reason and habituation. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he underscores that virtue involves feeling emotions appropriately, in harmony with reason’s judgment about what is right in specific situations. Both philosophers argue that emotions, left untethered to reason, lead to disordered lives, but when shaped by reason, they become integral to moral excellence and an accurate apprehension of reality. Their shared insight underscores the continuity in their views of the rational soul's harmonizing role in human flourishing.

     Emotions, while not "cognitive" in the modern sense, play a critical motivational role in the moral and intellectual life for both thinkers. Without emotions, the judgments of reason would lack the dynamic force needed to inspire action. For Plato, the spirited part of the soul (thumos) is essential for motivating the pursuit of justice and virtue. It acts as a bridge between reason and desire, providing the energy to implement rational judgments. In his Republic, Plato shows how emotions like shame, when aligned with reason, become powerful allies in moral development, helping the individual resist base desires and act in accordance with the good. Similarly, Aristotle highlights the necessity of emotions in motivating virtuous action. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he argues that emotions, when properly habituated, enhance our ability to respond to situations with the right degree of intensity and aim. While reason identifies the good, emotions provide the energy to pursue it, and practical wisdom (phronesis) ensures their harmony. Aristotle famously claims that virtue involves both acting rightly and feeling rightly, suggesting that emotions, when rightly tuned, are indispensable for moral excellence (for bodily creatures), . Thus, while emotions are not rational in themselves, both recognize their role in ensuring that the insights of reason are carried into action and fully integrated into the life of the soul. C. S. Lewis summarizes this best:

. . .

And this is where my position differs. Just as emotions can be untethered from reality (from the Good), thoughts unformed by right emotion can also be untethered from reality. Thought about an evil done, for example, uninformed by remorse, is equivalent to an irrational emotion (anger at your child) disconnected from insight into reality (the reality of children in general and your child in particular). Thoughts, when uninformed by right emotion, can also become untethered from reality – this is an inversion of the classical emphasis on emotions requiring the guidance of reason. I think that emotions are not merely passive forces needing rational correction but active contributors to the alignment of thought with reality.

• Emotions, when attuned to the Good, can provide essential insight into moral reality. For example, remorse over an evil act reflects not just a cognitive judgment that the act was wrong but also a profound recognition of its moral weight and relational consequences. What we feel tells us what is important and feeling often precedes intellectual understanding. Without this emotional resonance, the thought about the act remains abstract and potentially disconnected from its full reality.
• Conversely, thoughts lacking emotional engagement—like indifference to suffering—risk becoming cold, detached, or even complicit in moral error. It is because we feel pity that we know that even those most unfortunate have dignity, for example.

Here I am close to the thought of Edith Stein, whose work I still need to study more closely. Stein argues that emotions are not merely subjective reactions but intentional acts that disclose values in the world. For instance, joy reveals the value of something good achieved, while sorrow uncovers the loss of something precious. This aligns with the phenomenological tradition of seeing emotions as cognitive in a broad sense, helping individuals grasp aspects of reality that might be inaccessible through abstract reasoning alone.

   My position implies that some emotional responses – Stein's joy (also joy for C. S. Lewis – go deeper than intellect, are spontaneous, and make possible the deepest metaphysical and religious insights. They don’t need to be trained by reason in the person of authorities who are rational (parents, teachers); they judge reason. Indeed, certain emotional responses such as joy or Sehnsucht can reach deeper than intellect, arising spontaneously and serving as a gateway to profound metaphysical and religious understanding. Joy, for Stein and C. S. Lewis, is not just an affective state but an engagement with the world that reveals the fullness of value inherent in a meaningful experience. In her analysis, Stein considers emotional acts as rooted in the soul's depth, where they connect to spiritual and metaphysical dimensions. Joy, for instance, might arise spontaneously in response to beauty, truth, or goodness, transcending intellectual deliberation and providing direct insight into the essence of these realities. Such emotional acts are pivotal in religious experiences, where they open the person to the divine, facilitating an intuitive grasp of the sacred that might elude purely rational thought.

. . .

Art - especially song and poetry - is to emotional intelligence as dialectic (philosophical conversation) is to the pure intellect. It is striking how marginal poetry has become; how empty music has become in the society I inhabit. Consumerism and capitalist work, bureaucratic and technological society is toxic both for philosophy (head) and poetry (heart), which I say are interconnected and in harmony together can disclose Being. I share with Tolkien and many Romantics the belief that something precious and essential has been lost in industrial-technical-scientific society. Among other things like community, craft, and real farming, what was lost was a poetic and symbolic consciousness, "a mode of knowing that connected us with nature and the natural law" (Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education). We see nature as meaning stuff not only because nature as science reveals it has in capitalism pushes it on us but because we have laregely lost the ability to see it otherwise. This is the famous wasteland metaphor of Elliot, the hollow men metaphor of Nietzsche. The imagination has been colonized by capital and the Nothing threatens (Ende, Never-Ending Story). 

    

The first course I attended during college was called Literature and Philosophy. How intuitively perfect. Both are together necessary to be at home in a world we can partially understand.