My friend and I send each other the same email at the same time, forwarding one we’ve both received from a purveyor of Japanese embroidery supplies. An artists’ co-operative in a town recovering from an earthquake has made kits for sewing traditional bags, giving a purchase the air of virtue although there is nothing stopping a person giving money without receiving an embroidery kit.
I don’t need it, I message her. Define need, she messages back.
On this occasion, I am adamant. I want space in my house and money in my pocket more than I want another sewing project. The question isn’t really need but desire, a basic estimate of cost and benefit.
I don’t need it either but I’ve ordered it anyway, my friend says.
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Reason not the need, I say. I say this quite often: Reason not the need/Our basest beggars/Are in the poorest thing superfluous. It’s from King Lear, the ageing monarch’s response to his ungrateful daughter’s assertion that he doesn’t need his own retinue. Allow not nature more than nature needs/Man’s life’s is cheap as beast’s, it goes on: When ‘need’ means only ‘what sustains life’, humans are just animals.
Many interesting arguments and applications diverge from this point: don’t non-human animals also have a desire for and even right to pleasure? What exactly is nature’s need, and how far beyond it lies dignity? (This last point is relevant, for example, to State benefits.) Is it right, morally or factually, that ‘our basest beggars’ have a superfluity of things? Is there any sense in which a person who has enough clothes to be warm, clean and decent can ever claim to ‘need’ a new dress?
But lately, I’m more interested in the ‘reason’. It’s a verb here, an injunction to Goneril and Regan to stop arguing on the basis of logic, for a change that is really to do with their desire. They suggest that it’s unnecessary for their father to retain his own servants when he can ask theirs for anything, but Lear and the audience know that this restriction is about control more than domestic economy. The logic of ‘necessity’ is invoked to cover the exercise of power.
We’re used to this on a national scale. Governments will usually claim that a questionable extension of power is a ‘necessary’ response to a new situation, ensuring that any ensuing debate is about necessity rather than principle or ideology, and it’s often a short step from ‘necessary’ to ‘convenient’.
In a personal setting, an insistence on need and reason is very often a way to avoid clear and present emotion. ‘Am I being unreasonable?’ I find myself asking. ‘What would a reasonable person do?’ Reason, in this game, is the opposite of hysteria. Reason means logic, restraint, endurance. Reason means keep your voice down, don’t cry, don’t make a fuss.
[ The patriarchy loathes women in midlife. Don’t fall for itOpens in new window ]
My academic expertise was in what was once called ‘the age of Reason’, though as King Lear shows, the idea of reason was around long before the 18th century. The Age of Reason was also the Enlightenment, the development of recognisably modern scientific thinking that prioritises what can be counted, replicated and tabulated over emotion, creativity and art (like all dichotomies, this science/art divide is false, but it’s also pervasive).
Scholars stopped referring to the ‘Enlightenment’ because the scientific developments of this era in Europe brought darkness to millions of people. The quest for knowledge was always secondary to the quest for wealth and power, but they’re not separable. By asserting that ‘reason’ was the defining characteristic of elite white men, Europeans invited themselves to imagine that those without reason (everyone else) were weak in mind and morals, in need of discipline, education and government by those who knew what was and wasn’t necessary.
I am not anti-science. The fruits of that line of thinking include almost all the goods of modernity, including those which (unevenly) liberated (some) women from brief, miserable lives as baby-making machines. I am not always against reason, but the word, like ‘natural’ and ‘common sense’, often alerts us to a hidden agenda.
Sometimes we should be unreasonable, because reason is not always the right priority. Reason is not the answer to pain, grief, sorrow, longing, hope or joy. Emotion doesn’t go away when we call it unreasonable, which is good, because – as Cordelia in King Lear eventually, fatefully, teaches us – among many unreasonable human qualities is love.
