What is reason and what is emotion? Can these two concepts play a big role in someone's life, and can they work together?.
Reason are the mental powers concerned with forming conclusions, judgments or inferences, good sense. Emotion or passion is the strong agitation of the feelings caused by experiencing love or hate. The famous philosopher of the ancient times named Plato gives us a different definition of these two terms, he connects them to the soul, actually he gives them a big function of the soul. Plato divides the soul in three parts: spirit, desire, and reason. Desire is our emotions, feelings, desires, for example when someone has a craving for chocolate Plato would say that it is the part of the soul he calls desire that induces that craving. Reason is the part of the soul Plato calls wisdom, intelligence, and logic. A good example of that would be when one does not want to eat the chocolate because he or she would gain weight. Plato would refer to that action as using reason. The most important part is the spirit, which is the part that actually tells us what to do. It chooses the action to be performed. It is being pulled either by the desire or by the reason part of the soul. Consider the examples given above for desire or reason, if we assume that the craving for chocolate is larger than the thoughts of gaining weight or in other words desire is stronger than reason, the action that follows would be to eat that chocolate. In this situation the spirit chooses an action on behalf of the desire and not the reason. Using Plato's concept of the soul we can safely conclude that reason and emotions can actually work together and one can be presented stronger than the other in different characters. .
We can use two characters of the Greek tragedies that we have studied and argue that one demonstrates passion in the service of reason and the other, reason in the service of passion.
