Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions -- a situation thought of as "creative tension" and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right.
Hume allows that, speaking imprecisely, we often say a passion is unreasonable because it arises in response to a mistaken judgment or opinion, either that something (a source of pleasure or uneasiness) exists, or that it may be obtained or avoided by a certain means.
Not every company can drive passion like Unreasonable, or create an organic movement that turns into a rapidly expanding brand universe.
Passions cannot, strictly speaking, be evaluated as reasonable or unreasonable, despite our practice of calling passions unreasonable or irrational when they depend in some way on poor reasoning or false beliefs.
But, in Friel's version, it is unequivocally about the disruptive nature of passion, which "makes the unreasonable perfectly reasonable".
In just these two cases a passion may be called unreasonable, but strictly speaking even here it is not the passion but the judgment that is so.
The first he says follows directly from the Representation Argument, whose conclusion was that passions, volitions, and actions can be neither reasonable nor unreasonable.
First you need to plumb the depths of your own passion, your own willingness to find something about which you can be childishly, tirelessly unreasonable, a squalling infant with an economic rash.
In the coming months, we need to be more prominent in the blogosphere, a space where our fears, passions, problems and potential solutions can be articulated--a powerful force for reason in unreasonable times.
