Reason vs. Passion: Comparing Aristotle and Plato

Introduction: Beyond the Head-or-Heart Dichotomy

It is well known among students and scholars of philosophy that both Plato and Aristotle hold reason in high regard. But what is their view on passion? It may be surprising to learn that neither philosopher holds a negative view of passion in and of itself. What both thinkers do point out, however, is that passion should be subservient to reason. Passion governed by reason is not a bad thing for either philosopher, and what is more important is that some passions or emotions should be promoted over others (Urmson; Taylor).

The problem that most modern readers have when it comes to understanding what passion means is that they define the term in all-or-nothing terms, applying a kind of either/or approach to the question of whether one should live by the head or the heart. Both Plato and Aristotle supported some degree of combination — that is, that head and heart should be in alignment for happiness to be achieved, and that both should be oriented towards the good. For moderns influenced by the philosophy of the Romantic Era, passion is associated with unrestrained feeling, or with the heart serving as the sole guide and arbiter of action. Understanding the ways in which Aristotle and Plato conceived of passion and emotion, and how they associated it with reason, is therefore essential to understanding the nature of the relationship between reason and passion.

The Conflict: What Should Rule, the Head or the Heart?

The conflict over whether the head or the heart should be the governing voice of action has been of particular concern in the modern era. It was the Romantic Age that gave such strong support to the heart, partly in response to the Enlightenment, which had advocated solely for Reason. The French Revolution, after all, enshrined Reason and effectively deified it, operating on the assumption that man needed nothing more than logic. It is not surprising, then, that humanity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion were utterly absent during the Reign of Terror that followed. The Revolution demonstrated that when man gives himself over wholly to Reason while neglecting the impulses of the heart, absolute horror can result. The bloodletting that transpired during the Reign of Terror in Paris substantially bears this out.

At the same time, the Romantic Age went in the opposite direction, essentially deifying feeling and emotion as that which should guide life. Feelings, as long as they were passionately felt, were all that mattered — and this in turn led to its own set of problems for those who followed this line of thinking. Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, left a string of deaths in his wake as he pursued the grand feelings and emotions he celebrated in his poetry. His wife, Mary Shelley, turned Percy's pursuit of feeling into the basis of her gothic horror novel Frankenstein, which told of a man consumed by passion, which in turn begets a monster that destroys the life and work of its creator.

In both ages — the Enlightenment, in which Reason was upheld above all else, and the Romantic Age, in which Passion was upheld as the supreme guiding force — unspeakable horrors resulted, indicating that the all-or-nothing approach to whether the head or the heart should rule was too extreme. Neither Plato nor Aristotle advocated such an extreme position. On the contrary, each in his own way advocated for a balance, or at least an alignment between the two, in which both were oriented towards the higher ideal of goodness. Though each philosopher differed in his approach to this balance — in terms of whether reason should be viewed as an end in itself or as a tool to be applied to daily life — the essence of their perspectives was that reason should govern passion, or that passion, at least, should be oriented towards reason.