Pinker on the rational-emotional dichotomy:

The Romantic movement in philosophy, literature and art began about two hundred years ago, and since then the emotions and the intellect have been assigned to different realms. […]

The irrational emotions and the repressing intellect keep reappearing in scientific guises: the id and the superego, the biological drives and cultural norms, the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere, the limbic system and the cerebral cortex, the evolutionary baggage of our animal ancestors and the general intelligence that propelled us to civilization.

In this chapter I present a distinctly unromantic theory of the emotion. […] I will show that emotions are adaptations, well-engineered software modules that work in harmony with the intellect and are indispensable to the functioning of the whole mind. The problem with emotions are not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values. We often call an act “emotional” when it is harmful to the social group, damaging to the actor’s happiness in the long run, uncontrollable and impervious to persuasion, or a product of self-delusion. Sad to say, these outcomes are not malfunctions but precisely what we would expect from well-engineered emotions.