No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
and
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
- Blaise Pascal, Pensées
The Pascal quote (I hope the link to the full Google Books page works for context), has long been a favorite of mine.
C.S. Lewis, later in the same essay, clarifies and summarizes with the following:
The head rules the belly through the chest. —the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment— these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.
The heart and its love is the key to man, and the key to faith. Per Pascal:
The only knowledge which is contrary alike to common sense and human nature is the only one always to have existed among men.
1 comment:
I am a complete sucker for this stuff, Justus. The circle can possibly be squared a bit by both the last few paragraphs of the introductory essay in The Abolition of Man, Men Without Chests, and by the entire second essay, The Way.
Recall that Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, was indicting relativism and lamenting the effect that the rejection of the Tao (that timeless set of values and virtues upon which societies of many stripes have been built) has had on the development of virtue. He describes that effect thusly:
"The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
In The Way, he gets to the question of whence the Tao comes. Lewis discusses this at some length in Mere Christianity. However, in this case, he avoids the theological question and sticks to the metaphysical. The Tao exists (as it has for time immemorial), often in conflict with our Instincts, so it must come from somewhere and is the only true arbiter of value judgments we make. By suspending his argument there, he leaves open the possibility that we can honor values and virtues (like love and the "heart") without truly being able to explain whence they come. This helps me reconcile the Pascal quote with what I believe about values, virtue, tradition, etc. They come simply from the collective wisdom of the ages. The source of THAT wisdom Lewis examines in other books.
Post a Comment