Reason Knows Not Jennifer

There is something deeply puzzling about the idea that we can be ignorant of our own reasons. Whereas Pascal attributed certain reasons to the heart versus the mind, we may attribute such reasons to the emotional versus the cognitive mind or to the unconscious versus the conscious mind, but the central conviction remains the same: we may be moved by reasons without ever consciously thinking of them as reasons. How is it possible, though, to respond to something as a reason without consciously thinking it through? In what follows, I elaborate on why we should be puzzled by the possibility that our reasons are unknown to us, explaining why some simple solutions are inadequate, and developing a more promising line of response based on the nature of action in space. While I shall focus, for the most part, on unconscious reasons, in the end it should be clear how the proposed line of response helps to make sense of emotional reasons as well.