#112: David Hume and the battle between reason and passion
You've done the coaching and the therapy, you've read the books, you've listened to the podcasts - and finally, you can accept that you're just as worthy as the next person! You belong here! You can stand up, take up space, and be proud! You can stop carrying all that anxiety, fear, and shame! Except ... nobody told your anxiety, fear, and shame. You feel just as uncertain as you ever did. And, to make things worse, you now also feel like an irrational mess, because if all those insights you've made about yourself haven't made any difference, perhaps you're beyond help?
Don't worry, friend. We've all been there. Your imperfect friend here is throwing you a lifeline in the shape of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. Weird image, but still: you're normal, you're still moving forward, and all you need is a primer on what's going on when what you believe clashes with what you feel.
Reference:
Hume, David. 1739: A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Section III.
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, imperfectionists! And greetings from British summer time, where I began my working day sitting in the garden with my coffee and my laptop and the sun in my eyes, but where I now record this episode wearing a woolly jumper, with the rain hitting the windows and the lights on because it’s so grey outside. In this episode, I want to zoom in on a topic that’s come up plenty of times in previous episodes, and in … well, I wouldn’t say every coaching session, but certainly a lot of them: the battle between the head and the heart, between reason and emotion, between what you know and what you feel. However you want to put it. I remember my first really annoying battle with this. I was in my early twenties, and I had a few therapy sessions for the first time ever. I remember being surprised, and feeling a bit cheated, when the insights I made during therapy didn’t immediately and automatically ‘correct’ the way I felt. ‘Correct’, there is in scare quotes - but we’ll get to that. I went into this program of therapy really believing that, were I to discover that my anxieties and hang-ups were in some sense irrational, they’d just vanish. Because, why wouldn’t they? If I discovered that, say, I didn’t actually need to feel so nervous when talking to people I didn’t know, then I’d immediately course-correct and turn into a social butterfly who was at ease in every situation, able to chat with literally anyone without feeling uncomfortable. Of course, I soon discovered that that wasn’t how it was going to work, and I felt all sorts of things about that. Frustration with myself for being so irrational, and frustration with the process for not working in the way I expected it to work - because, if I wasn’t going to be able to change these problem feelings through rational reflection, then how could I change them? Or maybe I couldn’t change them? Maybe there was no hope? I know that, not only will this head versus heart battle be familiar to plenty of you, but so will the exasperation that follows - the frustration and the sense of hopelessness people feel when they realise they’re in the grip of convictions that just don’t make sense. This is a difficult battle for anyone to fight, but I wonder if it’s especially painful for academics - after all, we stake our identity on being smart, questioning, rational people who care about evidence and justification. Surely, we think to ourselves, we’re just not cut out for this type of work if we’re so powerless to escape the grip of frankly deranged fears, anxieties, attitudes, and all the rest of it? Now, I’ve spent plenty of time working with people to try to loosen the grip of these problem states, and I’ve talked about it on the podcast too - too many times to mention here, but there was a deep dive in episode #28: Moore's paradox: When what you believe about yourself doesn't make sense. Definitely go and check out that episode if you want some suggestions about how to take your emotions out of the driving seat. What I want to address in this episode, though, is how to take the demoralising sting out of that head versus heart struggle. Because acting according to what makes sense rather than what we feel isn’t the only part of the battle - there’s also the frustration and the self-criticism that follows when we realise what an irrational hot mess we are. That frustration and self-criticism just add to our problems. I’ve seen in coaching sessions how lifting the lid on the fears and anxieties that influence our decisions and outlook can be the opposite of liberating. Noticing when we’re influenced by states like these is an important step in freeing ourselves from that influence, but it’s also alarming, because despite all our problems, we at least thought we were acting from reason and truth - and then it turns out we’re not. May as well just give up now, right? If this strikes a chord with you, philosophy has your back. Specifically, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume has your back. Here’s an important and reassuring takeaway right off the bat: you don’t need to worry when you discover that you’re not acting from reason, because nobody acts from reason. Reason can’t - to quote Hume’s words - ‘produce any action, or give rise to volition’. End quote. If you’re ever tempted to think otherwise, then you misunderstand the relationship between reason and emotion, or the ‘passions’, as Hume calls emotion. So, let’s take a closer look at what Hume has to say about reason, the passions, motivation, and action. Hume writes about this in his Treatise of Human Nature, book 2, section 3 - and this section is pretty short, less than 2,000 words. I’ll put a link to it in the episode notes, because some benevolent soul has put the whole thing online for you to read. Hume is concerned with motivation in this section - it’s entitled ‘Of the influencing motives of the will’. Let me quote the first two sentences of this section, because I think they’ll resonate with you: ‘Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates. Every rational creature, ’tis said, is oblig’d to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, ’till it be entirely subdu’d, or at least brought to a conformity with that superior principle.’ End of quotation. Relatable, right? And not only his remarks about the battle between passion and reason, but also the stuff about virtue and how we ‘ought’ to ensure that our actions are guided by reason. When we end up being guided by emotion against our better judgment, we end up blaming ourselves for being weak. But this is a mistake, according to Hume, who argued that it’s the passions, not reason, that motivate us to act; and that when our passions motivate us to act in a particular way, contrary to what our reason tells us we should be doing, reason is going to lose the battle, every time. It’s at this point that Hume makes what is probably his most famous remark, immortalised in undergraduate philosophy essay questions everywhere: ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.’ So, what is the role of reason in action, according to Hume? Well, one of its roles involves understanding cause and effect. If you want to achieve a particular goal - a goal whose importance to you, by the way, has to do with the passions; in other words, with your emotions about the goal - then reason can help you get there. If, for example, you really want to travel to visit your best friend this weekend, then you need reason to make that happen: it’s reason that you use to work out what time you need to set off and what train you need to catch and whether you can afford to take the trip. So, while it’s your passions - your desire to visit your friend - that choose the goal and give you the motivation you need to take the trip, it’s your reason that gets you there. Both are required for action. Without reason, all you have is your desire to see your friend, which leaves you sitting at home stamping your feet and yelling ‘I want, I want!’ But without passion, you’d have the capacity to work out how you’d travel to visit your friend if you were to want to do so, but since you don’t want to, why would you bother? Just as reason can’t provide you with the motivation to act, it can’t prevent you from acting either. So, if there’s a tub of ice cream sitting in the freezer which you really want to eat even though you don’t think you should, your reason alone is powerless to stop you. To ensure you don’t cave and eat the ice cream, you need the help of your passions. You need either to lose your desire for the ice cream - which maybe you could do by dumping a jar of mustard into the tub, unless mustard ice cream is a thing that fashionable people eat now. Or you need to counteract your desire to eat the ice cream by creating an even more compelling desire not to eat it - which you implicitly recognise if you’re one of those people who sticks unflattering or aspirational photos on the fridge door in the hope of overpowering gluttonous impulses with vanity. Hark at me: ‘gluttonous impulses’. I’m really channeling this 18th century philosopher vibe for you. Anyway. One thing that emerges from all of this is that, since the passions just aren’t the sorts of states that reason can engage with - they aren’t true or false, they don’t accurately or otherwise represent reality, they just are - it’s simply confused to think of the passions as being irrational. You can’t argue with emotions. Hence Hume’s remark, ‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.’ Preferences, desires, and other passions are like hunger and thirst in this respect: you either feel them or you don’t, but whether you feel them and the extent to which you feel them is not affected by reason. But. You knew there was going to be a ‘but’ coming. Reason and passion are actually more closely intertwined than I’ve led you to think so far. Hume points to two ways that they can be connected in ways that sometimes lead us to call passions irrational. The first is that certain emotions are predicated on certain beliefs, and changes in the underlying beliefs can - and, indeed, we tend to think, should - affect the emotion. For example, you might be overjoyed because you’ve just received an email from a Nigerian prince who tells you that he is willing to pay you millions simply for allowing him temporarily to deposit a sum of money into your bank account - but when you share your excitement with a killjoy friend who explains the scam and reveals that you’re not about to get rich, after all, your happiness recedes and you feel disappointed instead. In other words, your happiness - which is a passion - was predicated on the belief - which belongs to reason - that you’re about to get rich, and when you reject that belief (using reason) you’re not happy any more. If, after your friend has convinced you that there is no generous Nigerian prince sending you emails from a hotmail account that was set up a few hours ago, you continue to feel overjoyed about your impending windfall, then we can view your joy as irrational. But, according to Hume, what’s really going on here is that your joy is irrational because it’s a sort of hybrid reason/passion state, and because the reason part is mistaken, not because passions themselves can be rational or irrational. The second way that Hume saw reason and passion as connected in ways that can lead us to call certain emotional states irrational happens when we’re motivated to act in ways that we mistakenly believe are going to help us get what we want. So, you really want to be rich, and you mistakenly believe that sending your sensitive banking details to a Nigerian prince with vast riches but who only uses free email domains is going to achieve that, which gives you the motivation you need to send the email. This motivation, like all motivation, comes from the passions. But since that motivation is based on mistaken beliefs about cause and effect - and since beliefs are part of reason - we can call your decision irrational. But again, that’s because your decision sprang from a combination of reason and passion, and because the reason part was mistaken. When we have these hybrid reason/passion states, the passion part can be pretty stubborn. It’s not always easy to change how we feel by tackling the underlying belief. Changing the feelings happens slowly, not instantaneously following a rational insight, much to the disappointment of 20-something Rebecca-in-therapy. We see this, for example, when we’re in love with someone who betrays us. Discovering the betrayal undermines our love for them - but often not immediately. The emotions take a while to catch up, as we grieve for the person we thought they were and struggle to work out where to put our love for them, and perhaps also beat ourselves up about still loving someone who behaved that way. Or, we might be driven to succeed in a career at all costs, because we have a deeply buried fantasy that doing so will finally please a perpetually disappointed parent - and if, through therapy, we realise that nothing will ever please that parent but that we can flourish whether they’re pleased with us or not, we might nevertheless continue to struggle to let go of the now-rejected conviction that unless we find a particular sort of success, we don’t deserve love or happiness. There is also a whole host of ways that reason and passion can interact that have been revealed over the years, post-Hume, by psychologists, many of which you can harness to help shape your thought and behaviour. I’ve mentioned some of them in previous episodes of this podcast, like Alia Crum’s fascinating work on mindsets, where - for example - one study showed that the extent to which people felt satisfied after drinking a milkshake was influenced by their beliefs about how many calories it contained. It’s certainly possible to change our emotions. But, as I said earlier, how to change our emotions is not my focus in this episode. My focus is, instead, what you do when you’re in that middle state while you’re waiting for the passions to catch up with reason. When, that is, through coaching, therapy, or self-reflection, you’ve made some insight that undermines the way you’re going about your life, but that insight doesn’t seem to have made any difference. When you’re thinking things like, ‘I see now that refusing to be contactable by email 24/7 doesn’t make me a bad colleague - so why do I feel so guilty when I stop checking emails at 5pm?’ and ‘Ok, I was wrong to believe that unless I always put my own needs last, nobody will ever love me - so why do I still feel like a terrible person when I prioritise myself?’ Because this is the really frustrating part. You thought you had problems when you started coaching or therapy or whatever - but really you had no idea. The problems you thought you had were barely the tip of the iceberg! Look at you - you’re an absolute mess! Is there any point in even trying? Should you just give up now? If that’s where you are right now - and I think that anyone who engages in self-reflection is constantly there, with regard to something or other - please know that what you’re feeling is normal. The fact that things haven’t slotted into place yet doesn’t mean they never will. Uncovering misguided justifications for the ways we think, feel, and act is an important part of the process of change. You might feel that you were in a better place when you were still one of those people who believed that their inner critic was just speaking the truth - because at least then, your beliefs were aligned with the way you were feeling. You still believed that always putting yourself last was the right thing to do, and so of course it made sense that you’d feel bad when you prioritised yourself. When that belief changed but the feelings didn’t, you feel like an irrational mess, and perhaps you also feel really unsettled and a bit panicky because if the feeling doesn’t change even after you’ve realised how irrational it is, then perhaps things can never get better? Here’s where Hume’s model of the reasons and the passions comes in helpful. The sorts of motivational states you’re hoping to change by undermining the beliefs that justify them are hybrid states: they’re part reason and part passion. They’re part passion because they’re motivational, and according to Hume, only passions can motivate us to act. And they’re part reason because they’re linked to justificatory beliefs, which belong to reason. When you make insights that undermine the justification for those states - and which you think those states ought to respond to - you’re addressing the rational part of those states only. You’re not touching the emotional side. So, the fact that you find yourself in an unsettling unbalanced state where your beliefs and your feelings are out of whack doesn’t make you a hopeless mess - this is just the way it works. What you’re experiencing, from the inside, is the difference between the ways that beliefs and feelings respond to reason. Your feelings - at least, the ones that belong to these hybrid states - will catch up with your rational side, eventually. You won’t always be in love with that person who just betrayed you, and you won’t always feel guilty about setting boundaries around when you check emails. You don’t have to like the fact that your emotions take longer to catch up - I mean, who does? - but if you can accept that it’s just the way this works, then perhaps you can stop worrying about whether you’re abnormal and whether things are actually getting worse, rather than better. You’re moving in the right direction. While you’re waiting, though, you can take another leaf out of Hume’s book. Remember that, according to Hume, you can’t change your motivation with reason alone. If your passions are leading you to make one set of choices but you believe you should be making another set of choices, and if your only strategy to change that involves using reason to undermine the rational part of the hybrid reason/passion states that are providing your motivation, then you’re not using all of the tools at your disposal. You can also work directly on the passions. You can stop yourself wanting the ice cream by mixing mustard into it, or you can find something that you want even more than the ice cream to lead you to make different choices. Life isn’t all about ice cream, but there are analogs for whatever it is that’s important to you. Like, if you find it really difficult to switch off from emails at 5pm, why not commit to doing something much more enjoyable at that time? Meet up with a friend, go to the cinema - anything wholesome that pulls on you more strongly than your email guilt. Just as important, though, is this related and more general point: progress doesn’t always look the way you expect it to look. The process of living out your aspirations isn’t always itself aspirational. Positive change is often slow, frustrating, and downright alarming. Sometimes, when you feel like you’re taking a backward step, it’s only because you were wrong about what the next forward step would be like. Don’t give up on yourself. Until next time!
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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