Emotion and intellect are treated, almost without exception, as two faculties, and the resulting problem is taken to be the problem of their integration. This paper rejects that premise. Emotion and intellect are not two faculties but one process, differentiation, running in two modes. Emotion is valenced differentiation. Intellect is recursive differentiation, the same operation turned upon its own prior products. The felt division between them is how a single process appears from within when it runs in its two modes, not a report of two underlying things, and the problem of integration dissolves because there were never two things to integrate. The paper grounds this in the two primaries of differentiation, distinction and relation, which the developmental record locates before language and before the self, and which are therefore the operations of differentiation as such rather than the equipment of a developed intellect. It then advances its central claim. Mind is built at two thresholds by one mechanism, compression to saturation. At the first, valenced differentiation compresses until it saturates, and the saturation produces the self, the differentiator of the interior. At the second, recursive differentiation compresses without the bound that limits the first, packing concepts into denser concepts until it too saturates, and the saturation produces reason, the differentiator of the conceptual field. Reason is not a faculty added to the mind nor merely an arbiter between feeling and thought; it is the structure that emerges when conceptual compression saturates, and its governance of the relation between intellect and emotion follows from that more basic office. The account yields a falsifiable prediction: that the systematic governance characteristic of mature reason emerges later in development than the recursive intellect on which it depends.
Paul W. Barnes (Mon,) studied this question.