Reason Is a Servant: Hume, Smith, and the Primacy of Feeling

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Reason Is a Servant: Hume, Smith, and the Primacy of Feeling

In A Treatise of Human Nature (Book II, Part III, Section III), David Hume asserts with ringing Scottish clarity: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

A century before Freud and two before fMRI scanners, Hume understood something deeply subversive for his Enlightenment milieu: that human beings are not rational calculators who occasionally get emotional, but emotional creatures who use reason to get what they already want. Intellect, in his view, is post hoc—an advocate, not a judge. It doesn't set the ends; it merely optimises the means.

Adam Smith, often mistakenly recruited as the high priest of Homo Economicus, was cut from the same tartan cloth. His Theory of Moral Sentiments precedes The Wealth of Nations and should be read as its psychological foundation. Smith's "impartial spectator" is a kind of internalised conscience, not a utilitarian calculator. Moral judgement arises from emotional resonance, from sympathy—the capacity to imagine and feel the emotions of others. He was writing not about autistic traders but about emotionally complex social beings.

So yes, they both agreed: feelings come first. Reason follows behind like a clever but servile valet, stitching together post-rationalisations, tinkering with logistics, and giving our monkey-brain lusts a veneer of respectability and the turbocharged boost of smart social competence.

Now, to the broader point: all human life is about feelings, not intellect. That’s not just a philosophical claim—it’s a neurobiological one. Antonio Damasio, the neurologist, showed that patients with damaged emotional centres in their brain—even if their reason remained intact—could no longer make decisions. They were lost in trivial indecision, paralysed in choosing lunch, let alone life paths. Emotions are the prioritisation system, the value assigners, the motivators of action.

Without affect, cognition is a sterile machine: efficient perhaps, but directionless. A perfect intellect without desire would never leave the bed. Or even the womb.

So what is intellect, then? It is not separate from feeling—it is feeling, sharpened. When you fall in love with a proof, or tremble before a symphony, or get that electric pleasure from solving a conceptual knot, that’s emotion in its most refined register. Intellect is just emotion in evening dress.

The trouble is that the Enlightenment, and modern technocracy after it, tried to banish the passions—treating them as embarrassing relics of our ape past. It mistook the servant for the master. But in doing so, it built systems that claim neutrality, objectivity, and reason—while serving the unacknowledged passions of power, status, fear and greed.

And now AI, our mirror, threatens to finish the job: intellect with no feeling, no embodiment, no stake in life—yet pretending to understand it. But that's another essay, or maybe I already posted it here.

To conclude: yes, Hume was right. We are the passionate creatures of our biological destinies, and intellect is but a tool in their service. The tragedy is that so few of us know what we truly feel—and thus, what we truly want. So reason ends up serving not our deepest desires, but our most proximate compulsions and delusions.

A final irony: even the desire to be rational is itself a feeling. The cool rush of certainty, the ascetic thrill of logic, the pride of being above the fray—all passions in disguise.

And so we feel, and call it thought.