Consider the following comments on reason.
We like to think reason steers the ship, when often it only narrates where the current has already taken us.
The heart has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of.
Blaise Pascal
To reason well is easy, to notice when you have stopped is the hard part.
Cold logic can build a flawless argument on top of a feeling it never examined.
Sometimes the most reasonable thing a person can do is admit a decision was never reasonable at all.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that reason is something I trust and distrust in the same breath, because the same faculty that clarifies my choices also disguises the feelings that quietly drive them. Open with a particular decision, one I justified with careful logic and only later recognised as something I had wanted all along. Then explore the tension between reason as a guide and reason as an alibi, the way a clever mind can construct an airtight case for whatever it had already decided to do. A useful structural move contrasts the moments when thinking slowly saved me from a mistake with the moments when it merely dressed an impulse in respectable clothes. Caution: avoid the flattering conclusion that I am a rational creature who occasionally errs, since the honest account may be that I am a feeling creature who occasionally reasons.