Wednesday, November 21, 2012

ESSAY # 2 Reason as a Slave of Passion



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."




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


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.





[1] Laurie L. Patton, Trans. Bhagavad Gita [London: Penguin Classics, 2008]II.55.
[2] Genesis; 3.1.
[3] Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, II.iii.3.
[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”
[6] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i.
[7] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.v; IV.ii.
[8] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i.123.
[9] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i. 91-93.
[10] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i.107.
[11] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i.223-233, 248-249.
[12] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i.140-142.
[13] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i.145-152.
[14] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.iii.15-21.
[15] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.iv.231-234.
[16] William Shakespeare, King Lear, III.iv.166-171.
[17] William Shakespeare, King Lear, V.iii.218-220.
[18] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.iv.313-314; IV.ii.30-97, V.
[19] William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i.214-223, 249-260.
[20] Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 109.
[21] Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters, 109.
[22] Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters,36.
[23] Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters,50.
[24] Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters,62. 
[25] Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters,69.
[26] Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters, 69, Footnote 1.
[27] Molière, The Misanthrope [New York: Dover Publications, 1992], I.i.
[28] Molière, The Misanthrope, I.i.
[29] Molière, The Misanthrope, I.i.
[30] Moliere, The Misanthrope, I.i
[31] Moliere, The Misanthrope, I.i

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