All too often, when we pursue philosophy, we are told to leave our emotions at the door. The reasoning behind this common position is that emotions – especially motivationally strong ones such as anger or grief – are said to be fundamentally irrational, and hence they (and by proxy the emotional speakers themselves) have no place in rational debate (the cornerstone of modern philosophy). Using the complex and highly emotional topic of grief as an example, I aim to demonstrate that there are instances in which ‘leaving our emotions at the door’ would in fact prove irrational, and we should instead recognise that emotion and logic, far from being inherently incompatible, are in some cases practically inseparable. The fact that modern philosophy often shuns emotion doesn’t mean that philosophers have ignored emotions entirely: in Symposium, for example, Plato (360 B.C.E.) outlines detailed accounts of what it might mean to be in love. Meanwhile, Aristotle’s (350 B.C.E./2009) concept of eudaimonia (well-being/happiness) still appears in any discussion of what it means to live a happy life (although our modern understanding of happiness is quite different from Aristotle’s). The ancient Stoic philosophers were perhaps even more influential in the formation of Western thought about emotion, with their teachings
often interpreted as stating that one must escape the influence of one’s emotions entirely if one hopes to fully embrace rationality and live a good life (Graver 2007). This thought has been a particularly major driving force behind Western philosophy ever since, resulting in pendulum-like swings in thinking between periods of pure rationality and eras of decadent emotion. The pendulum of history was certainly to be found in this latter category during the Romantic period, when artists, poets and scholars popularised the nobility and desirability of strong emotions, above all love and grief (Stroebe et al. 1996). But Romanticism was promptly succeeded by a strong return to the Stoic ideal of emotional detachment, thanks in large part to Sigmund Freud and his successors. In his 1917 article Mourning and Melancholia, Freud presented his theory that grief is a process of gradual detachment, in which the grieving person brings up memories of their departed loved one and withdraws all their ‘psychic energy’ from the former relationship. Once this process is done, Freud hypothesised, the psychic energy of the bereaved is no longer tangled up in residual attachment to the deceased, and so the bereaved is now ready to “reinvest” their energy into new 25 | P a g e
