Reason of the Heart

What Is the Reason of the Heart?

Pascal wrote the phrase that has echoed through centuries of philosophical and theological reflection: “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point” — the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of (Pascal, 1670, frag. 277). For Pascal, “the heart” was the faculty through which one apprehends God directly — an immediate, intuitive certainty that precedes and exceeds logical demonstration. The heart does not arrive at conviction through argument; it receives truth through a mode of contact that thinking cannot replicate or fully articulate. Pascal was not dismissing reason but identifying its boundary: there exists a domain of knowing where discursive thought reaches its limit and another faculty must take over.

Hillman reclaimed Pascal’s phrase and grounded it not in divine revelation but in the psyche’s own capacity for valuation. In The Thought of the Heart, Hillman argues that the heart’s mode of perception is aesthetic — it responds to the world through beauty, through the particular qualities of things, through what he calls “the thought of the heart” as distinct from the thought of the head (Hillman, 1981). The heart thinks, but its thinking is imaginal rather than conceptual. It perceives the soul in things before the intellect can classify or categorize them.

How Does the Heart’s Reason Relate to the Feeling Function?

Jung classified feeling as a rational function — not because it follows logical rules but because it evaluates experience according to a consistent internal standard of worth (Jung, CW 6, para. 724). Hillman extended this insight by insisting that feeling is not merely personal preference but a form of intelligence with its own coherence and authority. In his essay on the feeling function, Hillman describes it as “the reason of the heart” — an organ of perception that discerns value, meaning, and moral weight through tone, atmosphere, and imaginal resonance rather than through proof (Hillman, 1971). The heart’s reason is not irrational; it follows its own inner logic, but one that thinking cannot articulate or control.

Within the convergence psychology framework at Seba Health, the reason of the heart names what emotional sobriety requires: the mature operation of the feeling function, a capacity to remain in contact with unresolved experience until value reveals itself from within rather than being imposed from without. Where Pascal framed the heart as a channel for God, Hillman treats it as the psyche’s own organ of moral imagination — the faculty through which the soul registers what matters.

Why Does This Distinction Matter Clinically?

The clinical significance of the reason of the heart lies in its capacity to name what is lost when feeling remains undifferentiated. A person disconnected from the heart’s reason does not lack values — that person lacks the capacity to feel values as lived realities. Hillman observed that when feeling is inferior, valuation becomes either compulsive and rigid or vague and sentimental (Hillman, 1971). Recovering the heart’s reason means cultivating a relationship with the feeling function that allows it to operate on its own terms — slowly, aesthetically, through sustained attention to the images and situations that call for response.

Sources Cited

1. Pascal, Blaise (1670). Pensées. Various editions.
2. Hillman, James (1981). The Thought of the Heart. Eranos Lectures. Spring Publications.
3. Hillman, James (1971). The Feeling Function. In Lectures on Jung’s Typology. Spring Publications.
4. Jung, C.G. (1921). Psychological Types (CW 6). Princeton University Press.