QUESTION
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” (David Hume)
Discuss this idea in relation to at least three of: Machiavelli’s The Prince ; Shakespeare’s King Lear; Moliere’s The Misanthrope; Goethe’s Faust; Wollstonecraft’s Travels in Sweden and Norway."
The grand virtues of the heart, particularly the enlarged humanity which extends to the whole human race, depend more on the understanding, I believe, than is generally imagined."[26]
Bibliography
Reason as the Slave of Passion:
A Discussion of Passion as the Motivating Force in
King Lear, The Misanthrope and Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
King Lear, The Misanthrope and Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
T.E. Cornish
November 21, 2012
LS 800
Mankind has been considering the
relationship between passion and reason since ancient times. In the ancient text the Bhagavad Gita, the god Krishna advises the relinquishment of all desires,
and counsels contentment in wisdom.[1]
The Old Testament famously pits passion
against reason beginning with Adam and Eve giving in to their desire for wisdom
and eating from the Tree of Knowledge.[2] Since that notorious expulsion, we have been
struggling to define the relationship and merits of these two faculties, and
their relative importance in human lives.
David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, wrote
in his treatise on human nature that “Reason is, and ought only to be, the
slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve
and obey them.” [3] Passion is the energy and power that drives
human action and change. It is hard to
conceive of being able to reason your way into wanting a change without some
desire at the outset urging you to action. Why would we need reason if our passions
didn’t create desire – and what function can reason have other than to facilitate
the satisfying of our needs and desires, regardless of any judgment as to the value
of those desires? Despite this, the
master-slave metaphor seems, at first glance, too limiting to be a universal
truth. Those of us who prize intellect
and a rational approach to life are loath to cede eternal primacy to
passion. While it is easy to acknowledge
the motivating power of passion, we want to hold out for a more powerful role
for reason, or at least the possibility of the occasional leadership role. The permanent power inequality in Hume’s
metaphor is one obstacle to accepting his premise. A related difficulty lies in the absence of
moral considerations, or indeed of any value judgments, in his statement, and
our desire to credit these functions to reason. It is sometimes difficult to
define passion (need, desire) vs. reason, particularly when we consider our
ability to reason out complex decisions and to use reason to prefer, at times,
one passion over another passion. This makes it challenging to eternally
relegate reason to a subordinate role particularly if a passion seems unworthy
of reason’s abilities, even unreasonable. Consideration of values leads us towards
the minefield of whether this passion or that is worthy of reason’s efforts,
which in turn raises the spectre of a reason/passion power struggle. However we
must strip out any consideration of judgment as a possible mechanism for reason
to assume the master’s role in the relationship. Hume’s statement is a pure statement of motivating
forces. The truth of Hume’s insight lies
in the premise that if you look at any action, any decision-making or value
judgment, you will find at its inception an attempt to satisfy some desire or
need. Hume goes further by saying that
reason should not aspire to any motivating role itself. An individual’s needs
and desires are the motivating forces that drive us and this is how it ought to
be. Reason may guide us, it may weigh one passion against another but it cannot
provide the motivating power. This
remains passion’s purview.
One can look to literature to try to support
or disprove the truth of this, considering not only whether reason is a slave
to passion but also whether it ‘ought only’ to be. Examining a tragedy (King Lear), a comedy (The
Misanthrope), and a non-fiction work (Wollstonecraft’s Letters written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark), we’ll see that Hume’s
assertion holds true through all three genres.
Reason is indeed a slave to passion and confusion about the truth of
this comes from a lack of recognition of all of the motivating passions at play
or from misguidedly trying to apply judgment as to outcome or whether a
particular desire is worthy of reason’s effort.
Shakespeare’s play King Lear, emphatically a tragedy, offers us several characters
that seem easy targets for reason vs. passion labels. It’s easy to brand characters such as Goneril
and Cordelia as evil passion vs. the voice of reason - and here is where we first
come to grief with Hume’s statement. We
want to see integrity, honour and morality as good, rational qualities. The audience meets Cordelia, a daughter who
tempers her fitting love for her father with a reasoned acknowledgment of its
degree and a reasoned refusal to lie about it.
Passion is not controlling
her. Reason is! We see Kent, “noble and true-hearted Kent”[4]
who balances passion and reason, with reason seeming to exert judicious control
over passion, and we are inclined to cite this as disproof of Hume’s
metaphor. Reason is no slave to passion
for these characters. Similarly we want
to cite Goneril, Regan and Edmund, all three of whom are motivated by base
desires such as greed, jealousy and hunger for power, to demonstrate the evils
and dangers of allowing passion to reign over reason and to try to attack
Hume’s assertion. When these three
characters give in to their passions – and when Lear temporarily allows his anger
to cloud his judgment and disowns Cordelia[5]
– tragedy ensues and ultimately, and reassuringly for an audience in search of
a moral message, the supremacy of their base passions over reason results in
their destruction.
Kent, Edgar, and Albany are three of the
most rational characters. Their actions
and behaviour are reasoned: Kent arguing on Cordelia’s behalf, not fooled by
her sisters’ false speeches,[6]
and Albany unwilling to condone Goneril’s treatment of Lear and later
repudiating her.[7] It’s tempting by the end of the play, when
most of the main characters have died and these three remain alive and poised
to rule Britain, to take this as proof of reason’s supremacy over passion.
But this is not what Hume is arguing. To conclude that reason is the motivating
force for Kent, Edgar, Albany or Cordelia, we would have to assume a lack of motivating
passions on their part, and that a completely disinterested intellectual force caused
their actions. It isn’t practicable to
prove here that such a disinterested force is impossible but if we look more
closely at the words and actions of each character, we see that in every case,
the character has been motivated by passion and that their reason has been made
to serve their passion; whether that passion be laudable, contemptible, or just
petty; whether it be loud and destructive, or quiet and honourable. Hume’s premise denies the possibility of
reason initiating anything without a desire or need as the motivating force.
The play begins with the elderly king
trying to preempt any conflict over the succession that must occur after his
death. He decides he will divide his
kingdom amongst his three daughters but his desire to have his daughters compete,
to prove the superiority of each one’s love for him, backfires. His two elder daughters, Goneril and Regan,
both motivated by greed and hunger for power, provide fulsome speeches exalting
their love for their father. His
youngest, but not least, daughter Cordelia, the one he tells Kent he loved the
most, is unable to lie to secure her third of the kingdom.[8] She tells her father she loves him but only
as much as a daughter should:
Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less.[9]
Her integrity will not allow her to give a false
speech. Cordelia says her heart is “so
young, my lord, and true”[10]
but her reasoned approach does not mean that her passion is slave to her reason,
nor that she has no passion or that her passions are less motivating of action. Cordelia values honesty and honour more than
power or riches.[11] These are her passions and her reason serves
her passion.
Lear is unable to see past his anger and jealousy. His rash decision to disown Cordelia and
endow all to his sycophantic daughters, made when his anger overmastered his
judgment and sense of fairness, sets in train most of the play’s tragedies. Kent loves and is loyal to his king but he
cannot stand quietly by and watch Lear unjustly disown the daughter who loves
her father most truly.[12] He is courageous and allows his integrity and
honour, his moral code, to dictate his actions.
He tells Lear that he has allowed the wrong passion to overpower his
reason:
Be Kent unmannerly,
When Lear is mad. What wilt thou do, old man?
Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,
When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour's bound,
When majesty stoops to folly. Reverse thy doom;
And, in thy best consideration, cheque
This hideous rashness: answer my life my judgment,
Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least.[13]
Kent is banished for his principled stand,
but once Lear’s sovereign power has been ceded to Goneril and Regan, they soon
turn on him, stripping him of the vestiges of his retinue and treating him with
parsimony and contempt.
Goneril and Regan are both greedy for power
and they very clearly use their reason to serve and obey their passions,
plotting successfully to gain control of the kingdom, and once the power is firmly
in their hands they show their true colours towards their father.[14]
The two sisters act rationally and
logically, saying and doing what it takes to obtain what they desire. When Lear flees the treatment he has received
at Goneril’s castle, Regan derides his emotional reaction to how he is being
treated, and advises Lear to trust them and to do as they tell him:
Give ear, sir, to my sister;
For those that mingle reason with your passion
Must be content to think you old, and so--
But she knows what she does.[15]
She does indeed.
Lear’s reason cannot cope with these
betrayals and with the realization of how he wronged Cordelia, and he begins to
lose his sanity. Insanity, real and
assumed, is used to show what can happen when reason conflicts with passion’s
rule – and this highlights reason’s subservience to the power of passion. The Earl of Gloucester also feels he is going
mad when he experiences tragedy, tragedy resulting again from reason serving
and obeying passion:
Thou
say'st the king grows mad; I'll tell thee, friend,
I am
almost mad myself: I had a son,
Now
outlaw'd from my blood; he sought my life,
But
lately, very late: I loved him, friend;
No
father his son dearer: truth to tell thee,
The
grief hath crazed my wits.[16]
In Act I, Scene II, his illegitimate son
Edmund, greedy for power and dangerously jealous of Edgar’s legitimacy and
position, convinces Gloucester that Edgar is plotting to kill him, thus turning
Gloucester against Edgar. Edgar is forced to flee to the countryside and disguises
himself as mad Tom. Another pretender to
insanity, Lear’s fool, offers much insight into what is going on, though his
words sound mad. He escapes life’s demands
by relinquishing the appearance of reason.
These characters retreat into madness when their reason is unable or
unwilling to cope with the forces of passion around them.
Hume’s contention that reason is a slave of
passion and ought only to serve and obey, seems to disenfranchise a key
component of reason: judgment. But the importance of judgment does not manumit
reason from passion’s motivating control.
To consider reason’s judgment component as an argument against Hume’s
metaphor is to ascribe to decision-making a motivating power that is not
necessary. Judgment and decision-making
are not quarantined from the motivating powers of passion. Employment of these faculties, especially
with issues of honour or morals, involves the assessment of competing desires and,
though some may seem lesser or weaker, still compel reason’s service and abilities.
Cordelia, Kent, Edgar and Albany appear at
first glance to contradict not only whether reason is a slave to passion but
also whether it ought only to be. But
these characters, though quieter and reasoned, are motivated by their passions
as are Goneril and Edmund. Kent is a
man of honour, loyal to his king, but intelligent enough and principled enough
to protest his treatment of Cordelia.
His loyalty and his love for his king, as well as his honour, compel him
to return in disguise after his banishment, in order to continue to serve and
protect his beloved king. In this he is
obeying the dictates of his passion. Edgar
tells Albany about Kent’s irregular actions:
Kent,
sir, the banish'd Kent; who in disguise
Follow'd
his enemy king, and did him service
Improper
for a slave.[17]
It is not reason compelling Kent to do
this, it is passion. Reason just tells
him how best to do it.
Edgar is unfairly treated but his love for
his father obliges him to forgive this betrayal and to act to protect and save
him. His decency, honour and honesty are
just as much a force compelling action as Edmund’s jealousy and greed compel
his. Albany is also an honourable and
fair man who makes his decisions and carries out his actions according to his
values. Being true to these values is what he desires, and Albany uses his
reason to judge those around him and to make decisions to serve these desires.[18]
Cordelia is loving, honourable, honest - a
person of integrity. Her refusal to lie to gain material benefits (or even to
retain the love of her father) is due to her reason serving her passion for honesty
and integrity. Despite being disowned by
her father, she is courted by the King of France who admires her integrity.[19]
Yet she abandons a desirable and safe place
at her husband’s court, to sail back to Britain with an army to try and save
her father. This clearly is her reason obeying her love for her father. Though
she dies in the end, her actions allow her to reconcile with her father
suggesting that Shakespeare is in agreement with Hume’s premise that reason is
and ought to be a slave to passion.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, as did Hume,
during the 18th century.
After a difficult upbringing due to financial woes and her father’s
abusive alcoholism, she became involved in education and wrote for a
progressive newspaper. She wrote about education, particularly the importance
of the education of females.
Wollstonecraft greatly admired scientific innovation, writing that “the
virtues of a nation […] bear an exact proportion to their scientific
improvements.”[20] She also believed in the benefit and the possibilities
of politics, stating “Politics, becoming a subject of discussion, enlarges the
heart by opening the understanding.”[21]
Her letters reveal that, despite her
respect for reason, she was a woman tormented by her passions, particularly her
love for Gilbert Imlay. In Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and
Denmark, Wollstonecraft is trying to cope with his infidelity and the
collapse of her relationship with him.
She describes how her “spirits [had] been harassed by various causes -
by much thinking - musing almost to madness.”[22]
Wollstonecraft valued the passionate
side of herself, possibly more than her intellectual side:
You have sometimes wondered, my dear friend, at the
extreme affection of my nature - But such is the temperature of my soul - It is
not the vivacity of youth, the hey-day of existence. For years have I
endeavoured to calm an impetuous tide - labouring to make my feelings take an
orderly course. - It was striving against the stream. - I must love and admire
warmth, or I sink into sadness.[23]
Intellectually she could appreciate the power
and value of both passion and reason, seeing the interconnectedness of both faculties. Wollstonecraft considered that reason
generates imagination and “produces taste, and an immense variety of sensations
and emotions, partaking of the exquisite pleasure inspired by beauty and
sublimity.”[24] She felt that the experiences of life operate
both on passion and reason, as two intertwined forces. Upon visiting an isolated town she is
thankful not to have been born there, “bastilled by nature - shut out from all
that opens the understanding, or enlarges the heart."[25]
As we saw in Lear, reason can be overpowered by passion. Wollstonecraft’s distress and the torments
caused by her doomed passion for Imlay (including two related suicide attempts)
show the power that passion wields, even for someone who believed deeply in the
importance of reason for both men and women.
The grand virtues of the heart, particularly the enlarged humanity which extends to the whole human race, depend more on the understanding, I believe, than is generally imagined."[26]
Moliere, the 17th century French
playwright and satirist, targeted hypocrisy and self-delusion in his play The Misanthrope. His main character is a man who considers
himself to be behaving rationally but who deliberately refuses to allow his
reason to temper his passion solely to fit in with society.
Alceste prides himself on his intolerance
of hypocrisy. He feels superior about his
rectitude and honesty, and about his refusal to compromise, declaiming “I
choose to get angry, and I do not choose to listen.” [27]
(1) He demands an uncompromising degree
of honesty from all around him, telling his friend Philinte “I call it
unworthy, base, and infamous, so far to lower one’s self as to act contrary to
one’s own feelings.”[28]
(1) Alceste’s privileged life soon
spirals out of control when his passion for being right and his pride refuse
any room for the tempering of reason.
Unlike Goneril, Regan and Edmund in King
Lear, who make their reason slave to their passions, Alceste deliberately
refuses to listen to reason, replying to the advice of his friend, Philinte by
saying, “All men are so odious to me, that I should be sorry to appear rational
in their eyes.”[29] (3)
He is a strange character, a man who
takes a rational hypothesis, that if society prizes honesty then we should not
tolerate hypocrisy, and makes this his passion.
What his passion is of course is righteousness, an unusual passion
compared to greed and jealousy but a motivating force nonetheless.
Alceste’s other passion is more
traditional. He loves Célimène, a
manipulative and deceitful widow, who delights in juggling her retinue of
admirers. Alceste is too discerning not
to see Célimène’s faults but admits, “I confess my weakness, she has the art of
pleasing me. In vain I see her faults; I
may even blame them; in spite of it all, she makes me love her.” [30]
(6)
In contrast Philinte appears very reasonable
and tolerant, advising Alceste that, “Good sense avoids all extremes, and
requires us to be soberly rational. […] My phlegm is as philosophical as your
bile.“[31]
(4) He is a loyal friend but his
tolerance and rationality extend to allowing Alceste to make self-serving advances
to Eliante, the woman Philinte loves.
This would seem to argue against the desirability of reason as slave to passion
but, by the end of the play, the value of his reasoned approach is upheld when
Alceste sabotages his chances at happiness by refusing to allow his reason to serve
his passion and ultimately rejecting Célimène.
This leads to Philinte and Eliante, the two characters in whom reason seemed
to override passion, agreeing to marry - and they are the only two to find
happiness. We see Hume’s statement borne
out. Not only did their reason serve
their passion but, despite all appearances to the contrary, this was the only
office their reason ought to have pretended to.
All their actions seemed propelled by reason and occasionally seemed
opposed to their passions but ultimately we see that it was their passions that
were motivating them all along, and by their reason serving their passion, all
unfolded as it ought to have unfolded.
These three works show us a variety
of characters, with a variety of passions.
It is easy to get sidetracked with trying to assign a value to each
passion and to try to endow reason and judgment with an independent power, but an
examination of each person’s words and actions show us that the only motivating
powers are the passions, in whatever form and degree they manifest
themselves. While reason has wisdom and
skills and provides guidance, the only force launching reason into action is
that which motivates and compels it to satisfy a desire - and passion’s
sovereignty reigns supreme.
Bibliography
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, II.iii.3.
Laurie L. Patton,
Trans. Bhagavad Gita. London: Penguin Classics, 2008.
Molière. The
Misanthrope. New York: Dover Publications, 1992.
Old Testament, Book
1 , Genesis.
Shakespeare,
William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. The Cambridge
Text. Vol. King Lear. London: Chancellor Press, 1982.
Wollstonecraft,
Mary. Letters written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009.
[2] Genesis;
3.1.
[4] William
Shakespeare, The Complete Works of
William Shakespeare, King Lear, The Cambridge Text [London: Chancellor
Press, 1982], I.iv.122-123.
[5] William
Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i.233-234.“Better
thou hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better”
[20] Mary
Wollstonecraft, Letters written in
Sweden, Norway and Denmark, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 109.
[22] Mary
Wollstonecraft, Letters,36.
[23] Mary
Wollstonecraft, Letters,50.
[27] Molière, The Misanthrope [New York: Dover
Publications, 1992], I.i.
[28] Molière, The Misanthrope, I.i.
[30] Moliere,
The Misanthrope, I.i
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