I guess the most recent example in my mind was the Turtle Cake from last night. My friend Alice baked some condensed deliciousness into a pan and then served it up to our dinner group. I partook. I partook plentifully. Subsequently, I had trouble falling asleep later. A little too full and a little too hyped up on sugar. A small and anecdotal example, to be sure, but it still serves to demonstrate the simple fact:
You can have too much of a good thing.
Here at school, I most often talk about this concept in terms of balance. You can get so involved in studious activities that you miss out on some of the unique experiences and opportunities that exist outside the classroom or library. You can get so invested in extra-curricular causes that you become almost pedantic and separated in your approach to interacting with other people. You can even hang out with other people so much that you forget to follow through on your previous commitments. You have to balance sleep and work, exercise and food, and free time with work time.
The balancing of the activities of life is a constant question that requires evaluation upon evaluation. Yet, in and of itself, it’s not particularly surprising. What has been causing me to consider and take pause, however, is the balance between the head and the heart.
I have always been inclined toward the disciplines of the head. I like words and ideas. I’m no number-cruncher (goodness knows) but I do enjoy philosophy and books. Yet, I’ve been wrestling with the simple question, “Can you think too much?” I’d readily agree that you can overanalyze a situation, but, on a more aggregate level, can you place undue emphasis on your intellectual faculties when life requires a more balanced approach.
I guess I’m coming back to some points that I read a while ago in The Abolition of Man. C.S. Lewis describes our impulses and instincts, especially biological ones, as stemming from the stomach. Our heart, naturally enough, is the source of our emotions. And the realm of the intellect and reason exists in our head. He relates these three areas as analogous to a human system. If any one of them is dysfunctional, the entire body has trouble.
He goes on to claim that modern man has become a “man without a chest.” In describing intellectuals, Lewis notes, “It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.” And then, later in the text, he describes how the balance is supposed to work. Rather than a denying of emotion and an overreliance on thought or the inverse suppression of thought in favor of emotional, there exists deep relationship. He writes, “No emotion is, in itself, a judgment; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”
So, can you think too much? Yes. Can you rely on your feelings too much? Yes.
Is there a balance between the two? Yes.
Have I found it? No, but I am going to keep trying.
Overall, a very succinct post. But I disagree with the guts of it.
Everything that goes on physiologically, goes on in the head. The heart, literally, only pumps blood. The stomach digests food. The brain controls everything — it tells the heart to pump, the stomach to shit, the eyes to blink…
When Mary Rottencrotch “breaks your heart,” and you get that overwhelming sense of pain, anger, sorrow, whatever in your guts — it’s the brain directing emotion there. You wouldn’t say “my head hurts” after finding out Ms. Rottencrotch devoured the entire varsity football team one drunken night. It’s just not poetic.
Emotion is completely illogical, not alogical. It’s what makes us irrational. This irrationality is, ironically, rational. It makes way more sense for someone to be overly emotional than for someone to be devoid of emotion.
It’s true, as Ducasse said, that the heart literally only pumps blood, and that the brain is the center of both thought and emotion. On the other hand, literally, the stomach doesn’t shit either. We must be careful not to take things too literally and therefore miss the point.
I think that Matt’s point (correct me if I’m wrong, Matt) wasn’t that emotions are literally rooted in our physical hearts, but that we can’t rely completely on rationality to govern our lives–a tendency that has perhaps increased since we came to our current understanding that the brain controls all functions.
If it helps, scratch the analogy of the head vs. heart, and look at it as two halves of the brain, both of which must be considered. If ruled totally by the emotion-half, there will be no rational thinking (which would be alogical, rather than illogical, since illogical connotes the opposite of logic, while alogical is simply the absence of rationality). It is certainly dangerous to live by the completely emotional side of things, but it is just as dangerous to make decisions based on pure logic.
Lauren,
RE: stomach shitting, was making an allusion to “The Recluse” by Cursive on the Ugly Organ album. “My ego’s like my stomach, keeps shitting what I feed it.” Also, the head bone’s connected to the neck bone, the neck bone’s connected to the…
RE: alogical vs. illogical, emotion is a one of those tricky things that only humans can comprehend but can’t really explain. That’s why robots don’t understand Love. Emotion is alogical for robots, but it’s illogical for humans (hence my point that it’s baffling to see someone devoid of emotion). It just doesn’t make sense. Fear, Anger, Regret, Longing, Love, Happiness, Pain, Suffering — all emotion stems from the brain and NOT the heart or the stomach. That’s my point. It’s poetic, romantic, hyperbolic to say that one’s heart is broken.
This whole thing stems from the Lewis quote. I disagree with Lewis because he was a Christian apologist — something that I find completely ridiculous — also for the same reason I disagree with Aristotle’s Physics. It’s just plain wrong. Can a balance exist between emotion and rationality — yeah, sure. It’s called Buddhism; but emotion LITERALLY doesn’t stem from any other place except the brain.
I’m not saying that it’s 100% right to be completely logical; I write poetry, for Chrissake. But c’mon.
Whether or not your agree with the “poetic” language of Lewis’s idea or choose to disagree with Lewis simply “because he was a Christian apologist” the point of this post is something relatively unambiguous. It even seems that we all agree on some level.
There is a conflict between our emotions and our logic, regardless of the physical source they may stem from. When faced with this internal discrepancy, the question then becomes: how should we therefore act?
To quote another poet and theologian, Khalil Gibran, “I am the flame and I am the dry bush, and one part of me consumes the other part.”
To quote the Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, “Je dis qu’il faut être voyant, se faire voyant. Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.”