I bet you can picture someone who knows how to get his shit together. Someone who has everything under control under all circumstances. An individual emotionally stable, balanced, solid, in other words: reliable. This person rarely cries or shouts in public and keeps performing smoothly despite all sorts of adversities.
I believe you can also imagine a melodramatic, passionate and
extremely sentimental human being. A creature so driven by its feelings that
reaches worrying levels of excitability. Someone exhibiting outbursts of rage
and joy, fury and lust, despair and ecstasy in equal measure.
While
the first type is consistently praised, we often perceive the last kind as weak.
We pity them because they get carried away by their emotions in a way that
paralyzes their judgement. Poor things. We are rational animals; we should use
our intelligence to our favor. We should think, rationalize, logicalize. We
should control our impulses, we should not act on instinct, we should repress
our passions and excitements.
We should regulate the magnitude of our emotions before they
get unmanageable, or so they say.
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote in Of The Purpose of Science (1):
“…suppose that pleasure and pain are so intertwined that whoever wants as
much as possible of the one must also have as much as possible of the other”.
If it were your choice, either as little pain as possible at
the expense of scarce pleasure; no suffering or distress at the cost of your joy and happiness… what would it be? stoicism or epicureanism?
What would you pick: ANALGESIA or DRAMA?
Back to the examples mentioned before: who is wiser? the one who holds back and deprives himself from any sort of feelings (good and bad) for the sake of avoiding any bit of discomfort, disturbance, or displeasure or the one who embraces himself to passion and sentiments?
Is it more intelligent for someone to live his life impassive and detached; strictly speaking: indifferent? Or is it smarter to be enthusiastic, craving for desire, awake and eager; strictly speaking: someone... alive?
There is no right or wrong in this.
If you ask my opinion, I would quote Bernard Le Bovier de
Fontenelle (2) while touching your heart “take care of this, my friend, as it
is also brain.”
(1) Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science, occasionally translated as The Joyful Wisdom or The Joyous Science (1882).
(2) Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle. Noveaux Dialogues des Morts (1683).
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