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Reason of the Heart

Reason of the Heart

The doctrine, sustained from Homer through Pascal to Jung and Hillman, that the heart is itself an organ of cognition whose mode of knowing is irreducible to discursive reason. Pascal’s formulation — “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of” (Pensées §423, cited in Peterson 2025) — names something the Lineage had held continuously: that valuation, relation, and the apprehension of presence belong to a faculty seated in the chest, not in the head.

In Homer the three heart-organs kradiē, ētor, and kēr deliberate, ponder, command, love, and grieve as agents within the person; ētor “deliberates in two ways” (Iliad 1.188), ker reasons and loves, kradiē “orders” action (Sullivan 1995, pp. 70–71). For Plato the heart’s longing becomes the wing of the soul that grows in eros (Phaedrus). For Ibn ʿArabī, glossed by Corbin, the heart is the subtile organ whose himma makes essentially real the figures of the imaginal world (Corbin 1969, p. 224); Corbin connects himma directly to the Greek enthymesis, the act of holding present in the thumos.

Jung names this faculty psychologically: the feeling function is “the function of values,” and Eros — distinguished from Logos as “the principle of relatedness” against “the principle of discrimination” (Jung 1984) — is the principle that organizes its work. The reason of the heart is the rationality of Eros: it perceives by relation, values by sensing presence, and apprehends by image. Hillman recovers the same organ as the thought of the heart: “the heart is the seat of imagination… imagination is the authentic voice of the heart” (Hillman 1992). The Cartesian split that gave thinking to the head and feeling to the body collapses the original organ; the Lineage’s insistence is that it can be — and must be — recovered.

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