Reason-Emotion Dichotomy

The reason-emotion dichotomy is the belief that thinking and feeling are opposed faculties, so that a man must choose between being rational and being emotionally alive. Objectivism rejects it as a false alternative built on a mistaken account of where emotions come from, and holds that no clash between the two is inherent in human nature.

“An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Galt's Speech", Atlas Shrugged

What an emotion is

Objectivism treats an emotion as an automatic estimate: a response generated by the subconscious from a lightning-fast appraisal of a situation against the values a person holds. Two things follow from that.

The first is that emotions are effects. They are consequences of one's ideas about what is good for him and what threatens him, whether those ideas were adopted deliberately or absorbed without examination. A man does not choose his emotions directly, in the moment, any more than he chooses the result of an arithmetic operation once the numbers are in.

The second is that emotions are not tools of cognition. They report on the relation between a situation and the value premises stored in a particular person. That is real information — about him. It is not evidence about what the situation is. A feeling of certainty is not certainty, and a feeling of dread is not a fact about the future. See Emotions and Arbitrary.

Why there is no inherent conflict

If emotions come from value premises, and value premises are held by the same mind that reasons, then reason and emotion are not two rival authorities. They are a faculty and one of its downstream effects.

What a person identifies consciously and what his subconscious has stored can nonetheless come apart, and that is what a felt conflict actually is. The Objectivist reading of "my head says one thing and my heart says another" is that two premises are in play and at least one of them has never been examined. The response is neither to obey the feeling nor to suppress it, but to introspect: identify the premise generating it, then judge whether it is true.

This gives emotions a real and non-trivial standing. They are not noise to be overridden; they are a report on the contents of one's own value structure, and taking them seriously is how a person finds out what he actually believes. What they cannot be is a substitute for the evidence. See Consciousness and Volition.

Where the dichotomy comes from

Rand traced the split to the older mind-body dichotomy and to the two failed accounts of concepts that flank the Objectivist one.

Intrinsicism places the objects of thought in a realm apart from the world men perceive and desire. Reason then becomes cold, abstract and unworldly by construction, and everything that ties a man to concrete existence — his wants, his pleasures, his loves — falls on the other side of the line.
Subjectivism takes the same picture and switches allegiance. If reason cannot reach reality anyway, feelings may as well govern, and the "authentic" person is the one who acts on impulse.

Both accept the same premise, that a man's mind and his desires belong to different orders of being. The Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, the picture of the scientist as emotionally dead, and the picture of the artist as necessarily irrational are all cultural expressions of it.

Objectivism's answer runs through concept formation: concepts are formed from percepts, so thought never leaves the world in the first place, and there is no realm for reason to be exiled to. See Analytic-synthetic dichotomy.

Consequences

Emotional repression and emotional whim are the same error. Both treat feelings as unanalysable data that can only be obeyed or crushed. Both skip the step of asking where the feeling came from.
Happiness is not opposed to rationality; it is its result. Happiness is the emotional state that accompanies the achievement of one's values, so a code of values suited to man's life produces it rather than costing it. See Purpose and Self-esteem.
Art is not the province of the irrational. Objectivist esthetics treats art as the concretisation of a metaphysical view, addressed to the emotions precisely because emotions respond to values. See Esthetics and Sense of life.
Sex is not a concession to the animal in man. Rand treated romantic response as an expression of a person's deepest values rather than a force in tension with them. See Sex.

Common misunderstandings

That Objectivism prescribes suppressing emotion. It prescribes the opposite: identifying it. Suppression leaves the premise in place and merely hides the evidence of it.
That "emotions are not tools of cognition" means emotions are worthless. It is a claim about what they are evidence of. They are indispensable as data about oneself and inadmissible as data about the world.
That a person can reprogram his feelings by deciding to. He cannot, directly. Emotions change when the underlying premises change, which is slow, and the lag between a corrected conviction and a corrected response is expected rather than a sign of failure.
That the ideal is the emotionless man. Rand's fictional ideal men are drawn as intensely emotional. What distinguishes them is that their feelings and their judgments issue from the same set of values. See Howard Roark and John Galt.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "Galt's Speech", Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. "The Objectivist Ethics", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Rand, Ayn. "Philosophy and Sense of Life", The Romantic Manifesto. World Publishing, 1969.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 5.

External links

Emotions at the Ayn Rand Lexicon

Epistemology Topics
Senses \| Consciousness \| Volition \| Concepts: Unit, Concept-Formation
Objectivity \| Knowledge: Context, Hierarchy \| Reason: Certainty, Truth, the Arbitrary \| Emotions