Intelotion And Emotion In Gulliver's Travels

1502 Words7 Pages

Both intellect and emotion are involved and important to the human soul, creating a crucial contrast which humankind must learn to equally balance. There must be a constant neutrality to balance the two. The age of Enlightenment serves as an intellectual and emotional motivation which humankind benefits, its goal to reach complete intellectual is unreliable and impossible to achieve. To be at a state of complete, perfect reason is unachievable for humans because emotions are an essential aspect of being an existing human. Only is humankind can maintain equilibrium between both intellect and emotion, they; then, have a chance to be generally content in life. If humans sustain or put more effort into one force then the other, it deprives the essential interaction within the human soul and leaves it unequal and discontented. Several brilliant minds of the Enlightenment argue mostly for the continuous perfection of reason. …show more content…

Johnathan Swift’s novel, Gulliver’s Travels, demonstrates this miserable and dreadful consequence of human life managed only by reason. The Houyhnhnms is a society that represents the ultimate end of the Enlightenment thinkers by removing emotion and passion from their lives. Gulliver describes the Houyhnhnms understanding of reason “Neither is reason among them a point problematical, as with us, where men can argue with plausibility on both sides of the question, but strikes you with immediate conviction; as it must needs do, where it is not mingled, obscured, or discoloured, by passion and interest” (Chapter 8, pg. 246). The goal of these creatures’ existence is to completely remove any emotions from the intellectual faculties. In Swift’s works, he based his story on a society of animals to emphasize that this lifestyle is not human. This being said, it illustrates that life without emotion would not exist if you are a living human