Reason and Passion

Although Hume said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” he did not mean that passion should be allowed to set itself up as an arbitrary tyrant. Even a slave needs some independence to serve his master well; beliefs born out of passion serve passion badly.

Jon Elster, Strong feelings: Emotion, addiction, and human behavior, Cambridge, MA, 1999, p. 145

It would be good if we could somehow insulate our passions from our reasoning powers; and to some extent we can. Some people are quite good at compartmentalizing their emotions. Often, however, they don’t have very strong emotions in the first place. They may get what they want, but they do not want very much. Granting supreme importance to cognitive rationality is achieved at the cost of not having much they want to be rational about.

Jon Elster, Nuts and bolts for the social sciences, Cambridge, 2012, p. 70