James Henley

The Relationship between Desire and Reason

A week ago at our Sunday night Lab gathering I shared about the need to be constantly cultivating within ourselves a desire for more intimacy with God (you can listen again here). As part of preparing my thoughts for preaching, I often end up with lots of off-cuts of material that didn’t quite make the cut. I thought I’d begin to share some of this extra, bonus material on the blog.

Here are some thoughts on Desire that didn’t make it into the final cut - how classical and modern philosophy has tried to make sense of the relationship between reason and desire.

Have you ever been presented with a problem or an issue and felt torn between what you know should be the logical response to the problem, and your emotional response? Sometimes people describe this with phrases like ‘clouded by emotion’. When presented with a problem or the need to make an important decision, I often feel torn between what I feel inside and what I know should be the logical response to the problem.

The dilemma is this: which response should I trust? The emotional or the logical? Desire or reason?

Philosophy and theology has spent a lot of time trying to make sense of which response is more trustworthy, and what the relationship between the two should be:

• Most Buddhist philosophy teaches that earthly desire and emotion should be cut-off completely and ignored in the search of a higher level of reasoning.
• Christianity over the centuries has generally taught that there is something untrustworthy about desire, and that particularly earthly desires (the ‘desires of the flesh’) are bad.

But these philosophies cause us a problem:

Isn’t it the same emotional desire for earthly things within us that also creates in us a good, healthy desire/longing for God?

Some other thoughts:

• In the 1600s, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that the ‘fundamental motivation of all human action is the desire for pleasure’.
• The Greek philosopher, Socrates, wrote that individual desires must be postponed in the name of pursuing a ‘higher ideal’.

So if desire motivates, and in particular can motivate us towards God, then perhaps it isn’t desire itself which is bad, but how we choose the object of our desire?

This is the conclusion that the classical Greek philosophers began to come to - that perhaps desire itself isn’t bad as long as it is handled carefully.

The Dark Horse
In a piece of work called The Phaedrus, Plato suggested that the soul is like a chariot guided by two horses:

• a dark horse of passion
• a white horse of reason

Aristotle, a student of Plato, suggests that the white horse of reason should lead the dark horse of passion, helping it to discern the best object of desire.

What do you think the relationship between desire and reason is? How do we find a balance between the two?