On reason, emotion, instinct, reality, and their paradoxical partnership in the human

enterprise:
We cherish the illusion that we are creatures of reason and dignity, yet in truth we are forced
to operate within bodies and within a physical universe in which reason and dignity play, in
many ways, minor roles, indeed. Our most powerful urgesfor air, for food, for sleep, for
companionship, for love, for sex, for elimination of bodily waste, for cessation and avoidance of
pain, these and many moreoften force or pressure us into behaviors that would never have
been designed by our reason, and are incongruous with our sense of dignity.
Which of us, if consulting reason or dignity, would design the reproductive and eliminative
processes so that they must share organs? Which of us would make a philosophers will weak at
seeing the outlines of a fetching womans curves and swells, or his knees buckle at the gaze of
her eyes, the flash of her smile, even at hearing a few words in her voice? Which of us would
design our bodies so that a third of life is consumed by sleep? Which of us would make our
organism susceptible to so many dread illnesses, generated by our own bodies or passed on to us
by our fellow humans, other animals, tiny insects, even invisible viruses and bacteria? Which of
us would allow death to enter by so many doors, and often without knocking?
Our dignity and reason operate within parameters set for us by factors other than dignity or
reason. The design of the human body, including our many emotions and urges, comprises much
that seems not only arbitrary, but even unreasonable and undignified.
We find the Victorian drawings of cats and dogs and rabbits in coats and buttoned vests and
top-hats or bell-mans caps so amusing and absurd perhaps because in dressing up such animals
for our amusement we are desperately attempting to cover our own nakedness a second time
desperately attempting, in our assigning incongruity to such pretensions in the case of these other
species, to forget how incongruous is our own artifice of dignified clothing, and the ordered and
reasonable lifestyle it represents, incongruous with the body beneath, and, indeed, with great
swaths of the universe within and without, and all the way around.
An interesting feature of this odd amalgam of rational and irrational elements driving us is
that even the very intelligent are, for the vast majority of their consciousness, blinded from
recognizing the incongruity of reason and dignity with so much of human existence.
Yet as unavoidably riddled with irrationality and caprice and humiliation is human existence,
there is little doubt that we benefit by imposing upon our lives some degree of reason and order
and intention and dignity. How, then, shall we best integrate the first category and the second,
how shall we live authentically holding in our hearts and hands such disparate elements? For
going to the opposite extreme, rejecting civilization and embracing barbarism is, of course, no
panacea.
Part of the answer, as is the case with so much of mature living, involves choosing greater
awareness. If we do not deny our inescapable primal inclinations, do not blind ourselves to our
many irrational constraints, do not attempt to disown our necessary deficits of dignity, we shall
not be living in fear of light and in trepidation of truth.
The gardener attempts to cultivate only his designated patch of earth; he does not pretend he
should be able to make the forest bloom, and the desert and ocean, tooand he feels no shame
or internal discord when those vast stretches of land and sea remain untamed.
Here, as in so many arenas, when we overreach, we distance from ourselves the very thing
for which we have reached. Reason and dignity are good and noble thingsbut if we pretend, to
ourselves or others, that all aspects of human life can be consistent with them, we create this sad

irony: In asserting something which is not so, we become unreasonable; and in rejecting our own
identity and running from an awareness of our own reality, we become undignified.