Heart vs. Head

Jonathon Haidt's The Happiness Hypotheis, which I've mentioned more than once on this blog, makes several references to "the elephant" and "the rider." He uses the metaphor of an elephant rider to explain what might be difficult to conceptualize about the mind. Plato inspired his choice of metaphor: 

In days gone by this mind of mine used to stray wherever selfish desire of lust of pleasure would lead it. Today this mind does not stray and is under the harmony of control, even as a wild elephant is controlled by the trainer. -Plato, Phaedrus

Sigmund Freud compared the id and the ego; Carl Jung compared the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious; David Hume compared passion to reason; and what I've found most easy to understand is the non-fancy comparison of emotion and intellect used by William Irvine in On Desire. All of these dualities summarize what I'm trying to get to the bottom of in my own life: the heart versus the head.

As a brief background (because I can't stand to think of it anymore, much less write of it): I'm in love with someone who I shouldn't be in love with. This is not to insult his character in any way; he is a great person with whom I am completely infatuated. It's just that this obsession is unmerited, and it's starting to tick me off. As I said, he is lovely, but to put it simply, the extreme degree of my love is unrequited. It's not that I'm overlooked, I have a chummy way of charming him as well. But (to stay brief) he is happy to be alone.

A friend lent me On Desire after about five too many glasses of wine and a strewn-too-long conversation about how the chapter on love and attachments in The Happiness Hypothesis forever changed my outlook on relationships. My friend handed me Irvine's book, told me he thought I would love it, and then I put off reading it for about two years. (It happens.) My first clue:

Falling in love is the paradigmatic example of an involuntary life-affecting desire. We don't reason our way into love, and we typically can't reason our way out: when we are in love, our intellectual weapons stop working. Falling in love is like waking up with a fever. We don't decide to fall in love, any more than we decide to catch the flu. Lovesickness is a condition brought upon us, against our will, by a force somehow external to us. (12)

Irvine quotes Blaise Pascal: "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know." Great. I'm screwed!

Falling in love is not the only instance in which our desires choose us. We crave things out of thin air all the time, but instead of speculating, we just fulfill the desire. Right now I'm craving the last two cookies from a batch I made this week-- coconut, walnut, and chocolate chip. They are delicious! I'm not at all hungry. My emotions desire to feel pleasure, so my intellect is directing me toward the dopamine-inducing chocolate and sugar.

The fourth chapter of On Desire introduces emotions and intellect as the wellsprings of our desire. Emotions are the source of our hedonic terminal desires (69). They are our constant desire to feel good for the sake of feeling good. They have no agenda, and emotions are stubborn. Intellect will usually form our nonhedonic terminal desires. Because they are nonhedonic, they are typically inconsequential, like my desire to tap my foot as I'm writing. Intellect does have an agenda as it is most useful when it's forming our instrumental desires: necessary desires that act as steps to achieving the terminal desires created by our emotions. In the above scenario, my desire to eat cookies was an instrumental desire created by my intellect, as it knew this would end up with some endorphins and please my emotional desire to feel good.

So how do I whip my intellect into shape and convince it to override my emotions and get over this dude I can't stop thinking about? It's not going to be easy.

The desires formed by emotions are highly motivated . . . emotions can effectively veto desires formed by the intellect. [But only] sometimes, if our willpower is sufficiently strong, our intellect can override desires formed by our emotions. The intellect's best strategy for dealing with emotions is to use emotions to fight emotions. The intellect might point out, for example, that what the emotions want would in fact feel bad, that what they want may feel good now but will feel bad later, or that although what they want will feel good, there is something else that would feel even better. (71-74)

Wala! I'll just imagine over and over again the heartbreak that would ensue following a relationship with a person who doesn't want to be in a relationship. The guarantee of future heartbreak should surely prevail. But it doesn't; I've been doing that for months.

Why does the intellect play second fiddle to the emotions? . . . For the simple reason that [emotions] refuse to fight fairly. [When emotions deal with intellect, they] don't us reason to gain its cooperation. They wear it down with emotional entreaties. They beg, whine, and bully. They won't take no for an answer. They won't give the intellect a moment's peace. (76-7)


My mom says sometimes I just gotta follow my heart and I'll know what to do. So far that's what I'm left with... to be continued...