There’s No Reason To Feel This Way — Or Any Other

Just because reason defines us, it doesn’t mean it is all that we are.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy

How many times have we heard and used the phrase, “there’s no reason for them/her/him to feel this way”?

The eternal battle between emotion and reason follows us ever since we developed the latter. Plato represents this as a chariot pulled by two horses, one of which stands for intellect and the other for passion.

First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome.

– Plato, Phaedrus

I look at my cats, and I know they couldn’t care less about anybody’s reasons. Their reaction to how I treat them has nothing to do with the reasons behind my actions. They would respond in the same way to my attempts to bathe them regardless of whether I did this to rid them of those pesky flees or because I were a sadist. My reasons are completely irrelevant to them.

In contrast, when it comes to humans, reason is the very trait that distinguishes us from them. It makes sense, then, that we care about reason a lot. We scrutinise almost every…