Feelings and Rationality: the battle of heart ❤ versus brain

 Blog on striking balance between Feelings and Rationality: the battle of heart ❤ versus brain 🧠 

By Naeem Khan

Both mind and heart have their reasons to exist. Heart has a reason which reason can't understand. Both have their utility as per demand of the situation.  You can't be emotional when logic is required and the other way round. 

You must be logical to say 2 ➕ 2=4. Here you have no choice to be emotional. It's a fact. It's math.  You're helpless before the very eyes of  SSPPAL(Science, Spirituality, Philosophy, Psychology, Art and Law). You have to agree as there is no other choice. You can make your Science to refute the previous one, otherwise you're defenseless under the nose of SSPPAL. 

Once you're with your mother or beloved one or homeland or a flower or a river with gushing water,  you must be effusive with emotions. If you're not passionate,  you're stony, a deadpan and a phlegmatic personality. 

When you're planning via critical thinking be rational and use your mind, not your heart. Do objective analysis and evaluation for decision making or solving a problem.  Once you decide,  now be passionate to achieve your goal. Don't be frigid and glacial now. Be fervid and frenzied now as your start is cool. Be rational to decide your love and now love vehemently and fanatically.  

Emotional intelligence is necessary as feelings are experienced consciously, while emotions are demonstrated  either consciously or subconsciously.  Reaching to the depth of  emotions may take your  lifetime. Emotions are both physiological and psychological as these see reactions activated through neurotransmitters and hormones released by the brain, feelings are the conscious experience of emotional reactions. 

You can travel from mind to emotions and finally feelings or passions. Study Spinoza and Hume to understand the philosophy of passion.  Logicians and rationalist like Descartes,  Bertrand Russell,  Gottlob Frege,  Aristotle, Alfred Taski,  Berkeley, Karl Popper will make you rational. 

For philosophers of freedom, passion is a “disease of the soul” (Kant), for the rationalist philosophers (Plato, Descartes), they blur the trial and prevent access to truths. Whereas for the Romantics (Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, …), the passion intensifies life, stands for liberation.

My approach is holistic and intelligent. Intelligence is the mental capability of adjustment with available situations.  Do as per the demand of the situation.  Be passionate in the bed with your love or in the garden with flowers.  Passion in modern sense is not suffering but it's journey from passivity to activity.  Passionate is dynamic and energetic.  I prefer the word passionate to emotional. 

Let's see what philosophers opine on passion:

– Cicero: “Zeno gives this definition of passion: Passion is a commotion of the soul opposed to right reason and against nature”

– Descartes: “You can usually appoint passions all the thoughts that are excited in the soul without the help of the will, and therefore no action that comes from her only by the impressions that are in the brain, because anything that is not action is passion “(Treatise on the Passions of the soul)

– Spinoza: “I mean disorders of the body through which the power to act in this body is increased or diminished, helped or reduced, and at the same time, the ideas of these disorders. When we can be the adequate cause of someone One of those conditions, so I mean by love action, in other cases a passion “(Ethics)

– Hume: “The passion is a violent emotion of the mind and sensitive to the appearance of a good or bad, or object which, owing to the original constitution of our faculties, is fit excite an appetite “(Treatise on human nature)

– Kant: “The inclination that the reason the subject can not be controlled or managed with difficulty there is passion” (Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view)

– Kant: “The passion takes the time and, however powerful it may be, she thought to reach its goal. Passion is like a poison swallowed or disability contracted and she needs a doctor who heals the soul from inside or outside, who knows yet most often prescribe drugs palliative “(Critique of Practical Reason)

– Kierkegaard: “We have lost more when we lost her passion when one has lost his passion” (Diary of the Seducer)

– Hegel: “Nothing great has done great in the world without passion” (Reason in History)

“What is essential is invisible to the eye.” — Pascal observes: The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart. Blaise Pascal