Where’s the logic in a piece of art that makes your heart soar, whether it’s a song, book, movie, painting, sculpture, performance, or any other kind of art? There is no logic there. Art isn’t supposed to be logical; it’s supposed to make you feel something. There is a time and place for logic. If you want to travel to the moon, then logic (along with facts and reason) will help you get there. But if you want to stand on Earth and gaze up at the moon, marveling at its beauty and wonder, then all the logic in the world isn’t going to help you. That’s squarely within the domain of emotions and feelings.
Logic and emotions both have their place; one can’t act as a substitute for the other even though some people wish that could be the case. Some think that our intellect and our logic separate us from animals, but that’s not so. Animals use intelligence and logic all the time. They use tools to help them do more than they can by themselves (such as apes who use sticks to gather and eat termites), develop complex societies (such as ant colonies), and communicate with each other (such as bees who use dances to communicate with each other about flowers they’ve found, including how far away the flowers are from the hive). There is a lot of logic, complexity, reasoning, structure, and order in the animal kingdom, so the fact that we as humans have all of that doesn’t separate us from animals. However, our emotions and our feelings do separate us from machines, and I hope we never lose that separation as machines become more commonplace both around us and within our bodies.
I used to place a ton of emphasis on logic, reason, and consistency. I thought that I could be completely consistent in my thinking and figure out any number of things without invoking emotion. Looking back, I now realize that my emotions were always present underneath my thought processes, quietly influencing my decisions without my being aware of it. Now I’m enjoying exploring my inner emotional life and learning how this all works from my experiences as well as through books. I’ve learned that emotions can’t be overridden or eliminated with logic. Attempting to do so will only cause the emotions to manifest in other ways, such as pain, disease, anxiety, depression, difficulty interacting with other people, etc. Emotions have something to teach us, so they should be fully felt and experienced. Additionally, emotions and logic can and should complement each other. You can use your emotions to figure out the kind of life you want to live and the kind of world you want to live in and then use logic and reason to figure out how to get there. I feel like I’m at my best when my emotions and logic work together like this as opposed to when I’m running purely on emotion with no logic or purely on logic with no emotion. Like so much else in life, it’s a balancing act, and finding the sweet spot makes all the difference.