The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Vital Interplay of Intuition and Rationality in Love and the Emotional Mind

I’ve been rereading the excellent A General Theory of Love (public library). From a chapter titled “The Heart’s Castle,” which opens with Denise Levertov’s beautiful poem “The Secret,” comes this beautiful articulation of the interplay of intuition and rationality in matters of the heart and mind:

If empiricism is barren and incomplete, while impressionistic guesswork leads anywhere and everywhere, what hope can there be of arriving at a workable understanding of the human heart? In the words of Vladimir Nabokov, there can be no science without fancy and no art without facts. Love emanates from the brain; the brain is physical, and thus as fit a subject for scientific discourse as cucumbers or chemistry. But love unavoidably partakes of the personal and the subjective, and so we cannot place it in the killing jar and pin its wings to cardboard as a lepidopterist might a prismatic butterfly. In spite of what science teaches us, only a delicate admixture of evidence and intuition can yield the truest view of the emotional mind. To slip between the twin dangers of empty reductionism and baseless credulity, one must balance a respect for proof with a fondness for the unproven and the unprovable. Common sense must combine in equal measure imaginative flight and an aversion to orthodoxy.

A General Theory of Love is one of five essential books on the psychology of love and superb in its entirety.


Published March 15, 2012

https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/03/15/general-theory-of-love-2/

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