Thursday, March 27, 2014
Week 10 Day 1: Passion and Reason
One of my classmates brought up the idea that reason can lead you to passion, and will push you forward towards the meaning of life. However, I completely disagree. Passion is the root of all human nature. We fight with it, we embrace it, we try and throw it away, but always it stays with us. Passion is with us from birth, and nothing can get rid of it. And really why should we? Two brothers started with a dream of sailing with the birds, and that gave us the planes we use as transportation today. One man with a crazy hairdo wanted to understand how the world worked and gave us some of the fundemental rules of science we have today. And one man decided that he would teach a class the wonders of philosophy, and here we are now. Acts of passion fuel our reason. Reason is the understanding of why the world works the way it does, and why we work the way we do. If I went through life only working on reason, I would never deviate from the path my parents taught me. I would follow the best path, never changing course to see if anything else might be objectively better. And that would be a terrible existence. If I never had the passion to decide for myself that I should become a writer and it was decided by my reason only, how could I gain happiness from that experience? As for the arguement that reason leads to passion, how can it? How can I look at a situation, reason what to do from it, and then become passionate about that work? Instead, I would need some passion in order to reason what to do in any current situation. Without passion, the world is stale and boring, and I would not like to live in that kind of world.
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I would have to agree that reason alone cannot take one too far in making a decision. Passion is what motivates one to making the choice to doing something. One could reason out why they want to be a writer—it makes money if they sell books and if you’re successful, you could make a lot of money—but it takes passion to become a successful writer in the first place. In fact, if one goes into a certain profession based on reason alone, they end up making that passion stale if there is anything at all. I was talking to my history professor this week about the money that a professor makes. He’s in the lower range of payment for professors but he was explaining to me how the professors that make the most money from their job usually end up with a class that is entirely uninvolved at all. Which would be preferred in this instance—to be a professor of a class that is entirely out of touch or to be a professor of a class that is getting the class involved, interacting with them, reaching out to them, getting them into a conversation. This is the difference between reason and passion in the case of the writer. A successful writer must have passion…one cannot be a writer with reason alone. Likewise in all situations. If one is motivated by solely reason, one becomes stale.
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