For most of Western thought, when people consider it, they divide thought into two primary categories. There are people who single out logic and reason, and who regard that mode as the core of human identity, as the pinnacle of human achievement, and as the mark of our uniqueness as a species. They hold this form of thinking to be in opposition to emotion, which they view as somehow sliding back into an animal existence and an inferior state of being. Of course, this charge upsets the emotionalists, being that they are - by definition - emotional. They insist that it is passion and feeling that liberates one's artistic sensibility, imagination, our deepest ability to connect to the world around us, and that reason is somehow sterile, stillborn, not really fully human. And the greats of history line up on one side or another of the divide. Let me share with you a couple of people who weigh in on this one.
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Pythagoras, the great Greek mathematician, says, "Reason is immortal, all else is mortal."
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Sophocles, in his brilliant tragedy, Antigone, writes, "Reason is God's crowning gift to man."
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Cicero, Roman politician and senator notes, "He only employs his passion who can make no use of reason." It's a fallback.
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And then we have the French weighing in, of course, on the other extreme: Blaise Pasqual teaches, "The heart has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of."
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Rabbi Yisrael Lipkin Salanter teaches, "Man is free of his imagination, but bound by his reason".
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Felix Frankfurter, Justice of the United States Supreme Court, fulminates, "Fragile as reason is, and limited as law is, that the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will, and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings."
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The last voice I want to share, who doesn't agree at all with Justice Frankfurter, is Albert Einstein, who you might expect to weigh in on the side of logic and reason, but he does not: "I am enough of an artist," Einstein clarifies, "to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited, imagination encircles the world."
Apparently we must make a choice as to who we want to be in the world: We can identify with Mr. Spock, the guy with pointy ears from Star Trek. One can struggle to sublimate our human tendency to emotion and embrace our Vulcan commitment to dispassionate reason. In Jewish tradition the person that comes closest to this ideal is Aher, Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya, who we are told in the Gemara, has the capacity to reason so brilliantly that no other sage could understand what he was teaching; who - even as a heretic - could out-logic the halachic thinking of Rabbi Meir, his student, who was by far the most brilliant posek of his time. And what does that extreme commitment to reason lead Aher to? Nothing but heresy! The other choice is to identify with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a brilliant, juvenile, impulsive jerk who gives in to his emotion and produces fabulous music and screws up every life he touches, including his own. In our tradition, that emotional extreme is represented by Samson, the jock who is able to bring the house down, but who could not contain himself in the presence of a Philistine skirt.
A commitment to unadulterated reason and logic, which views imagination and emotion as somehow degraded and a betrayal of the highest heritage of being human, or a commitment to the exclusive rule of passion, giving in to one's fantasy and emotions as the best and surest way to connect to the world around us, viewing reason as somehow a paranoid defense against honest feelings - those seem to be the options that Western and Jewish tradition present us. My job is to make that dichotomy problematic.
The Explosive Tale of Phineas Gage
Let's travel in time back to 1848 Vermont. The season is summer, and a man named Phineas Gage is a foreman on a railroad construction project for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad. His job is to supervise blasting the rock away by first drilling a hole into the rock, pouring gunpowder into the hole, tapping sand over the gunpowder, and then striking the mix with a three-foot long, 13 lb iron peg with sufficient force to ignite the gunpowder. Because the sand is tamped down hard, the explosion is forced down into the rock, rather than up toward the laborers.
On this fateful day, Gage is in the process of pouring the gunpowder, when someone calls his name. He turns around and, without thinking, rests the iron rod in the gunpowder. Witnesses report that they heard a powerful explosion, saw a cloud of smoke, and then a metal projectile soaring through the air. This projectile was the iron rod - now a missile - that had pierced under Gage's chin, ripped through his cranium, and then soared high into the air. Gage was found lying down after this escapade, but sat up, talked, had a drink, sat on the back of a cart, and drove on the back of the cart into town to see the doctor, who was surprised to see a man with a hole in two parts of his head where none had previously existed. Gage's coworkers gathered the iron rod and brought it to the doctor, thinking he might find it significant somehow, and from that point on and through the rest of his life, Gage refused to part with the iron rod; he carried it with him everywhere.
Gage was fine, ruled the doctor. He was able to speak, he was able to move, he was able to taste, and touch, and smell. He was able to engage in rational conversation. He seemed to be okay. Within two months the wounds had more or less healed, and then people noticed something odd about the man. His friends said, "Gage is no longer Gage." This man who had previously been hardworking, started to lose jobs one after another. This man who had formerly been temperate and kind, was now irascible, obscene, given to such profanity that women were counseled to stay out of his presence lest it shock their womanhood. He spent the rest of his life unable to form relationships, alienated from his friends, unable to hold a job. For a while he was even part of a freak show at the circus.
In a brilliant book, Descartes' Error, Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio from the University of Southern California, considers this case and many others. He points out that in case after case in which people's brain injury somehow tampers with their ability to process emotions, even when their reasoning seems unimpaired, the result is that their logical capabilities are diminished. They are not able to use emotion to guide their decision-making. They are no longer able to reach conclusions. It turns out that the view that our old antagonists logic and emotions are separate and opposing facilities is biologically false. Thought requires the input of emotion. Emotion requires the input of thought. These are two different facets of one integrated process.
So what does the Blend of Emotion and Logic mean for us?
What does it mean that logic and feeling are integrated in a single mental process? Recall, please, that the purpose of higher learning is not merely the memorization of large bodies of facts. It is not merely the confident rehearsal of complex behavior. The purpose of higher learning, to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, is to formulate "an original relationship to the universe."
Forging an original relation to the universe means we do not rely simply on the relationship that others have already established, but instead, we fashion our own way; a way that is informed by the best judgments and insights of those who have tread the path of life before us, of those who walk it with us, yes. But ultimately, what our education seeks to do is offer us the capacity to craft our own honest relationship to the cosmos, to the world, to God: a heightened sense of wonder, a persistent commitment to each other, to all humanity, to all living things, to the world. In that endeavor, the false opposition of thinking and feeling betrays both efforts, producing instead a caricature of education in which we either resist book-learning, as though that is something somehow separable from living itself, or we so venerate book-learning that we train ourselves to stop seeing the people in front of us and the world of which we are a part.
Neither extreme represents the best of either feeling or thinking. It was Rabbi Abraham Ha-Kohen Kook who writes in his Orot Ha-Kodesh,
The fierce power of imagination is a gift from God. Joined with the grandeur of the mind, the potency of inference, ethical depth, and the natural sense of the divine, imagination becomes an instrument for the holy spirit.
Imagination and mind becomes an instrument for the ruach ha-kodesh, the holy spirit. We are called, then, both as Jews and as living beings, to integrate what we feel with how we think, to recognize that logic is so permeated with emotion, feeling is so intimately connected to analysis, that the two are inseparable and indispensable. Such an enriched notion of thinking/feeling means cultivating both poles as expressions of our truest humanity. Such an integration means honoring the discipline of learning and scholarship as indispensable contributors to the emotional depth, self-awareness, critical judgment, and moral clarity that being a functioning adult and being a good Jew requires. And, finally, this enhanced thinking/feeling means honoring the dance of imagination as the indispensable root of character, vision, hope, initiative, and love.
In his book Surprised by Joy, the Christian theologian C.S. Lewis recounts a time when he referred to philosophy as a subject that he loved. His companion responded to him, "To Plato, philosophy was not a subject, it was a way." That response seems so Jewish to me! Philosophy as a derekh! As a dao! What would it mean for us to approach our learning, not as a conglomeration of subjects, but as a derekh. To be able to train ourselves to walk on the way, and to grow to walk in wholeness on that way, is the challenge that a fuller learning offers.
Goals Along the Way
We need to be willing to do the disciplined learning that educated emoting takes. The Mishnah Zavim (1:6) tells us, "Not everyone who leads to answer is praiseworthy, except if they give the reason." What the Mishnah is saying is, one can reach the right conclusion; the authors of the Mishnah are not disputing that the person who jumps with the answer (Call on me! Call on me!) is right. But what matters most is the process of reasoning that allows everyone else to join in the steps of learning, including others on the way as well. The process of integrated reasoning empowers participation.
In Massekhet Berakhot (6b) we are told, "The reward for a halachic discussion lies in the reasoning." Reasoning. Ours is not a tradition that distrusts logic. To the contrary, we revel in a disciplined mind, and what can only be discovered by using the mind. But, I will hasten to insist that to be able to engage in logic well, to be able to utilize reason soundly, requires a great deal of prior learning. When I was a junior in high school, I enrolled in an Advanced Placement course in American History; the teacher, Saul Taischoff, a wonderful pedagogue, stood up and said the following: "This class is not a discussion; it is a lecture because at this point I know something about American History, and you don't. You will spend a year listening to my lectures and reading the assignments. At the end of the year you will then know something about American History, and at that point anyone who wants to come into my office and have a discussion about anything about American History, will be welcome to do so." Turns out that Jewish tradition says more or less the same thing, "Learn first, and then reason (Shabbat 63a)." Reason unaided by hard, factual knowledge, is fantasy. To be able to reason responsibly requires great learning first.
But detailed learning is not enough. After putting in the hard time sitting, memorizing, learning, practicing, rehearsing, drilling - I'm talking here about grammar, vocabulary, concepts, facts, techniques - after lavishing the time to master these critical tools, dare to imagine! Learning is not simply the compilation of facts. Make plans to soar! Cynthia Ozick tells us "to imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination." Dream! As you walk on the path, think about what once was, and is no longer; think about what might have been, but isn't; think about what ought to be. Then muster your prodigious learning in the service of the dream, in the assertion of the hope!
Above all, cultivate curiosity. Find the world infinitely fascinating. Let the questions spawn yet more questions, so that for each new answer you unveil, a thousand new questions emerge in their shimmering radiance. Find the people you are with, the communities you touch and serve, the books you study, the authors you read, find them all endlessly fascinating, inspiring, and energizing. I quoted him once, and I'm going to quote him again - Albert Einstein,
The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of his mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
During the period of the Days of Awe and Sukkot, when we recited Psalm 27, we ask, "Teach me, Holy One, your ways." Learning is not a subject; it is a way. It is not something that one does, it is a process for transforming who we are, for bringing succor and uplift to our broken hurting world.
As we sit in our sukkot, muster the courage to drink deeply of the learning that the world offers you; dream wildly, and make of your logic a passion, and of your emotions, a logic, such that in this new year, we can bring ourselves and our battered world one step closer to the kind of wholeness, the kind of nurturing, and the kind of holiness that can only result from human beings unfettered.
Never lose a holy curiosity.