Reason’s Emotional Roots

Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing? – Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it. – Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error

Critical of Critical Thinking

Rationality has always faced an uphill battle. It stirs few passions and obeys no creed, meaning that when it challenges ethnic, religious, or political loyalties, it can typically be subdued with a simple appeal to the human heart. Some people ignore reason more eagerly than others but we are all, to some extent, averse to rationality.

Over the past few decades, we’ve mapped out many ways reason gets sidelined. We now have lists of cognitive biases which, to some, prove the futility of rationality. Because we’re innately biased, some say, objectivity is impossible and reason’s only function is to reassure us of beliefs which can never, in reality, be justified. But humans can, and often do, reason effectively—otherwise planes would never fly and pensions never pay. Instead of pointing to cognitive biases to impugn rationality, therefore, we should look to them to improve it, to show where our reasoning goes wrong and how to lead it right.

Famed experimental psychologist Steven Pinker agrees. In Rationality he writes, “The principles of cognitive psychology suggest that it’s better to work with the rationality people have and enhance it further than to write off the majority of our species as chronically crippled by fallacies and biases.”

However, when it comes to enhancing rationality we often overlook a crucial factor. Although we might emphasize statistical literacy or teach about logical fallacies, we rarely discuss the importance of healthy, stable emotions—which are essential to reasoning well in daily life.

Reason Versus Emotion?

We generally view reason and emotion as opposites: a person can rationally reflect, or emotionally react, but they can’t do both at once. Yet this cannot be true. Flesh-and-blood humans don’t have emotional switches, which turn on and off as reason flickers through life. We’re not rational at some times, and emotional at others. We’re always a mixture of both—whether we’re solving mathematical proofs or flipping out in traffic.

To reason effectively, we must skillfully apply thought and emotion. Thoughts lay out a path to a goal, but emotion motivates us to choose certain goals in the first place.[1] In other words, emotion provides the ends and thinking supplies the means.

Once again, some people draw the wrong lesson from this. If all reasoning is motivated by emotion, they say, then rationality cannot exist. But this assumes that reason and emotion are mutually exclusive, which just isn’t so. Many scientists feel overwhelming motivation to uncover truths about the universe, and they may also be driven by the desire for prestige. Does this mean that we should dismiss, say, climate change modelling or condensed matter physics, simply because they sublimate out of an emotional kernel? Of course not.

Motivated reasoning is wholly compatible with rationality, as long as the motivation comes from a healthy place.

Take two people, equally familiar with the rules of rationality. Give one a heart filled with curiosity, kindness, and humility, and give the other a heart full of spite, hubris, and paranoia (perhaps fueled by a Twitter addiction). In a world as complex as ours, where implicit assumptions prop up even the most rigorous of arguments, the curious person is destined to be more rational than the spiteful one.

This difference is not due to a disparity in knowledge; each person knows, in the abstract, how to be rational. Rather, the difference lies in the emotional dispositions—the curiosity and openness—motivating the application of that knowledge.

Because they colour our outlook, emotions are integral to rationality. In fact, emotions provide the raw material of understanding itself.[2]

Emotional Understanding

Think of intuition, and you’re more likely to think of astrology, chakras, and Trump’s most trusted policy advisor than you are to think of rationality. But intuition plays a key role in reasoning because, for scientists and evangelists alike, it forms the primal substrate of our worldviews. Without intuition we couldn’t be rational because, at base, intuition is how we understand anything at all.

To illustrate, imagine that you suddenly became a perfectly logical being. In this state, feelings—including intuition—cannot move you. In fact, because you’re perfectly logical you don’t feel emotions whatsoever. You can calculate, postulate, and apply Bayes’ theorem without error, but without emotions you can’t actually make sense of any of it. This is because knowledge hinges not just on thinking certain thoughts, but also on what we take those thoughts to mean. And meaning is an emotional, intuitive matter.

What tells you whether a thought is true or false, sense or nonsense, worth accepting or rejecting? It is not the thought itself. Nor is it subsequent thoughts, which you might use to poke and prod the thought in question. If you think “I’m enjoying a tea on Mars,” followed by “I’m reading words in English,” you just know that one thought is false and the other true, no deliberation required. This knowing takes place non-conceptually, at an intuitive level. A more challenging thought—perhaps “How many known moons does Uranus have?”—might require some Googling, but even then you will ultimately accept (or reject, or not care about) the answer based on a feeling.

At some point in the thinking process, thoughts give way to feelings of understanding (or doubt), and these feelings orient our sense of truth. Although understanding can be triggered by thoughts, understanding is not a thought itself; it is a felt sense. If we honestly tell a teacher that we understand something, we’re not saying that we can think the right thoughts, or parrot their words back at them. We’re saying that we appreciate the meaning that certain thoughts convey. And without emotions, this appreciation—this meaning—cannot manifest.

Of course, feelings of understanding don’t necessarily signify truth. But this is why emotional skills like curiosity and humility are so important: they keep us from assigning too much certainty to the experience of understanding.

With this in mind you can appreciate how, as a perfectly logical being, you would be largely impotent, neither able to understand nor take action on even the most precise chains of reasoning. In the words of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, your decision-making landscape would be hopelessly flat. Without emotions, you would struggle to assign value to logic. Without value, you would struggle to decide whether something is a conclusion worth caring about, or simply another assumption to feed further logical arguments. And without emotionally clear-cut conclusions, your logic would be useless.

Gluttons for Understanding

Evolutionarily, it makes sense that understanding exists beyond thought, because it is a reward for connecting heretofore unseen patterns. Essentially, understanding tells us that we have attained fresh insight, allowing us to cease our conceptual search so that we can stop thinking and actualize new knowledge. If understanding were a thought, it would feed (rather than subdue) further deliberation.

Unfortunately, just as many people overindulge in social media and junk food, so too they overindulge in understanding. The recent explosion in conspiracy thinking is due, in large part, to easy access to heaping platters of ill-informed understanding, which trigger feelings of certainty that shut out alternative perspectives.  

Society is now filled to the brim with rationality freeloaders, who benefit from science, technology, and evidence-based policies, all the while constructing their own understanding around intellectually shoddy (and socially harmful) foundations. This situation is known as the Tragedy of the Rationality Commons, whereby people reap the fruits of our collective rationality yet contribute nothing back (or even self-servingly degrade it). For example, Tucker Carlson can benefit from living in a (somewhat) stable democracy and make millions flaming irrational prejudices which threaten to burn it down, only because other people do the hard work of maintaining his society’s rational institutions.

The rules of rationality offer some protection against irrationality’s intuitive lure: by confronting us with a series of cognitive checks, they interrupt the premature formation of low-grade understanding. However, these checks take time to learn and effort to implement, and although they eventually lead to deeper, more rewarding insights, most people will always be tempted to grab less taxing forms of understanding—especially now that they are only a podcast, or a TikTok, away.

Less Effort Required

Irrationality feeds upon, and is fed by, reactivity and closedmindedness.[3] For this reason, healthier emotions at scale would solve much of the Tragedy of the Rationality Commons. As Pinker says, “If we could put something in the drinking water that would make everyone more open and reflective, the irrationality crisis would vanish.” And while the cognitive checks of rationality take energy, well-tuned emotions actually lead to a reduction in effort (largely because they disarm anxiety and stress).

Because we’re all a bit lazy we should, wherever possible, reduce the effort required to be rational. Instead of reasoning one’s way out of ill-informed, outrage-inducing views, healthy emotions offer a lower friction path to feeling one’s way out. From here, rationality can more easily bloom.

Skillful emotions can make a person more rational even if they have no familiarity with biases, fallacies, and statistics. For instance, have you ever been frustrated at someone’s flaws and failures, and spent significant mental resources judging them? And have you noticed how, with just a hint of compassion, you can sidestep this frustration, see the person in a wider context, and understand that they are not the sole cause of their negative traits, but are instead victims to circumstance? If so, congratulations: you have seen through the fundamental attribution error, a cognitive bias where we overemphasize self-contained personality traits and ignore how situations influence others’ behaviour. And you saw through it without even needing to know what it was.

Of course, you could also defuse the fundamental attribution error by making a conscious effort to spot it—but if your compassion muscles are weak you’ll quickly get sucked back into your frustrated, irrational framing of the situation.

Emotional openness provides space for alternative perspectives, without which rationality is impossible. This is a wonderful fact, because it means that we can all play the ultimate non-zero sum game, where personal happiness and societal flourishing go hand in hand.

Opening Up

Many of us would like healthier emotions, but we struggle to overcome habitual inertia. We might see glimmers of profound openness—perhaps on vacation, or on psychedelics, or in the midst of a cold plunge—but it rarely lasts as long as we’d like. It is often said that insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and hoping for different results. But to me, this just sounds like life: we repeat unskillful habits even though we wish we wouldn’t.

Fortunately, emotions can be trained—if one knows how to pay attention.

Without attention we are blind to our minds, and damned to repeat old habits. For instance, during movies I often blurt out what I think will happen next. I dislike this habit, which only serves to annoy those around me (even if my predictions come true). Despite this, I’ve been doing it for years. And when I watch a movie with a scattered mind, I can do nothing to stop it—the words spill out all on their own. But if I come to a movie with some focus, and clearly see the impulse to speak, no words ever leave my mouth.

Attention is what it feels like to have escaped the event horizon of habit. And the more attention we bring to life, the less pull our habits exert. By paying attention, we can see beyond habitual biases, beliefs, and closedmindedness, and open to a flexibility of mind which primes us to be rational, and which also happens to be an intrinsic good.

In other words, by feeling better we can think better. What a lovely fact of the human condition.

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[1]Pinker again: “Pursuing our goals and desires is not the opposite of reason but ultimately the reason we have reason.”

[2]Different people mean different things by the word “emotion.” As used in this essay, emotion refers to any non-conceptual aspect of experience which affects—and is affected by—thought.

[3]This is not to say that all incarnations of irrationality are associated with negative emotions. For instance, a person may believe that they are sending goodwill into the universe whenever they meditate. This may be irrational, but it’s also emotionally healthy.