Feeling ambivalent about feelings

Rachel in A&P the other day read us a quote she found on Julian Baggini’s blog, averring the joint testimony of both modern philosophy and psychology as to the irrelevance and unreliability of feelings in establishing truth.

Responsibility is one area in life where philosophy and psychology leave us with the message: do not trust your feelings. You carry responsibility for whatever is within your control, whether you feel its weight or not.

If so, this represents a real shift – a stunning and almost patricidal development in the history of thinking about feeling. William James, father of modern psychology and of pragmatic philosophy, thought and felt very differently. He defined rationality as a sentiment, a “feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment,” and the divine “only such a primal reality as the individual feels.” In Principles of Psychology he wrote:

In its inner nature, belief or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than anything else.

In Varieties of Religious Experience James says, as I reminded some friends in Maine a few years ago,

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done. Varieties of Emotional Experience

And he commenced “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” with the declaration that

Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only thing our minds could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes  at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.

So it’s in that light that I continue to waver over JMH’s tenth quiz question, about evidence.

Do you believe that feelings about things should be admitted as evidence in establishing reality?

No, I don’t. But I do think feelings matter, and while they’re not evidence per se, speaking strictly and empirically, they still have a great deal to do with the evidence we allow ourselves to see and act upon. Reality is not simply a feeling, nor does it depend on your feelings or mine. Reality is ultimately mind-independent. But our feelings are nonetheless inseparable from what we take for real, for how we establish our personal sense of reality (deluded or not). So, is that a good thing, or do we need to aspire to a more “radically feelingless” regard for truth?

Yes. No. Not sure. And that, I guess, is why I’m a humanist of the pious variety.

Tags: feelings, Julian Baggini, Portland ME, reality, SAAP, William James