Heart vs. Head

I’ve seen the following quote attributed to Abigail Adams:

“I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.”

If she indeed said it, I’m sure it was inspired by her husband’s rival/friend, Thomas Jefferson.

Maybe the best critique of Jefferson’s contradictory nature came from Thomas Jefferson himself, in his “Head vs. Heart” love letter to Maria Cosway.

http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/archives/documents/frame_ih198172.htm

At one point his heart tells his head:

“When nature assigned us the same habitation, she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she allotted the field of science; to me that of morals. When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced; when the arch of greatest strength, or the solid of least resistance is to be investigated, take up the problem; it is yours; nature has given me no cognizance of it. In like manner, in denying to you the feelings of sympathy, of benevolence, of gratitude, of justice, of love, of friendship, she has excluded you from their controul. To these she has adapted the mechanism of the heart. Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the incertain combinations of the head. She laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not in science.”

Could it be that in the cohabitation of our new country, Hamilton was the head and Jefferson the heart? And could it be that Jefferson’s rationalization for keeping slaves came from his head, and writing the words, “all men are created equal,” came from his heart?

And could it be that 2009 will go down as the year the world waited out a Battle Royale between the Head and Heart in the “divided empire” of Barack Obama’s mind?