To Reason and To Feel

Introduction: This is an experiment on autotheory. The purpose is to process some of my own thinking on “feeling” and “reasoning” through research and theory. The style was inspired by The Argonaut by Maggie Nelson. My idea was to write in the style of stream of consciousness. I begin without a thesis, structure, or ending. I was intrigued by the direction that this method could take. The end as it stands now is by no means the way I intend to end. I plan to continue developing this project to a place of natural closure.

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“The unexamined life is not worth living.” I don’t know how much I believe in that anymore. Not in a sense that I will stop thinking and opt to take “soma” from Brave New World or the blue pill from the Matrix. But rather, instead of “examining,” I question if there are other ways of experiencing life that is just equally rewarding. Instead of scrutinizing, I wonder if there is an alternative approach to life and living; instead of reasoning life into meaning, I wonder if I could feel life into fruitfulness.

The word “meaning” seems to pop up everywhere these days. It could very much be because I am paying attention to it for the sake of this writing. But more and more I notice the unspoken obsession and tendency of thinking about the meaning of things. In my recent class on the philosophy of technology, multiple essays were on the topic of meaning. A few articles question the possibilities of living a meaningful life in Virtual Reality. In middle schools, one of the most asked questions by English teachers is “what did [insert author] mean when they said [insert quote].” During my museum visits with friends and family, the question I am asked the most is “what does this work means.” From academic writing to novels to memoirs, books are filled with the word “meaning” in the titles, from The Meaning of Things to The Meaning of Life. Even in the context of spirituality, in my conversations with my engineer mother on the topic of religion and faith, the questions I hear her asking the most are “what do you think the passage means” and “what is the meaning of life.” While never responding to her question explicitly for the sake of supporting her spiritual reflection, every time when she poses the question, I wonder in my head, “does it have to mean anything?”

Indeed, what did it all mean? Maybe something. Maybe nothing. Maybe meaning should not be what one seeks in moments like this.

If we think the Aristotelian idea of the “examined life” as the way of finding the meaning of life, then reasoning and thinking are the mechanisms that produce meaning. What is at the core of the concept of meaning are interpretation, analysis, induction, and deduction. And this logical mechanism behind meaning might be what my impulse was trying to reject by asking the question “does it have to mean anything.”

The idea of reasoning has long been criticized by many feminist scholars from many perspectives. Some have noted the aggression in the language of making an argument, others have identified reasoning as the product of male-dominated western intellectual history with the use of gendered metaphors. In Man of Reason, Genevieve Lloyd identifies how men have framed the sphere of western intellectual history. In the book, Llyod notes the standard method of “dispassionate” reasoning developed by Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and other "Men of Reason" has shaped what it means to produce knowledge.[1] The separation between thinking and everything else was engrained the western intellectual history. The Sophist has long separated “passion” from “reasoning.” Descartes further estranged “thoughts” from the “body.” Enlightenment elevated reason as the only form of knowledge production. And contemporary sciences seem to be disinterested in things outside of their “rational” selves. Yet beyond such separation, what is also more at stake is the act of reasoning is deeply gendered. Not only does reason wall off emotion, “passion,” and the body, in process of men forming theories of knowledge, gendered metaphors are also used. Nature has been considered as female – Mother Nature – especially in the context of Enlightenment. In Llyod’s analysis of Francis Bacon, she notes that Bacon has notoriously employed violent metaphors in describing how knowledge is to be unearthed from Nature and how knowledge is to be used to control Nature.[2] “[Nature is] only to be commanded by obeying her” and “leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave” are quotes from Bacon when he argues for the man’s “rightful” dominance of “Mother Nature.”[3] And even in today’s language, if we think about the verbs associated with the idea of reasoning and meaning, aggression is still embedded. Meanings are to be “extracted;” arguments are to be “won.” The sense of dominance nevertheless prevails.

But if it is not to reason, what is it? While the feminist critique on reason does provide me with a premise of thinking about reason in relation to its history rooted in the western intellectual history, validating my impulse of seeking the alternative, it has yet provided me with an answer. With that, I did what any other millennial would do when encountering existential questions, I took my question directly to google; and as expected, it yielded unsatisfactory yet provocative threads of thoughts. “The opposite of meaning” and “the opposite of reasoning” were what I typed into the search bar. Words returned were “irrationality” and “thoughtlessness.” “Thoughtlessness” immediately set me back. If the opposite of reasoning is thoughtlessness, then the stake seems to be too high. If the opposite of reason is “thoughtlessness” as in the root of banal evilness according to Hannah Arendt, then I risk too much by wanting to stop reasoning. Yet, whereas the desk murderer in Arendt’s example carried a numbed sense of un-processing, I think what I longed for was another mode of processing that is outside logic, thinking, and reasoning instead of shutting the processing engine down altogether.

While I had a feeling of “feeling” is what was getting at with the refusal to think, it is not until the one sentence by Helen Cixous, all was made clear. In “Castration or Decapitation,” when theorizing about the feminist text, she writes “[the feminist texts] don’t rush into meaning, but are straightway at the threshold of feeling. There's tactility in the feminine text, there's touch, and this touch passes through the ear.”[4] Through Cixous’ sensuous writing, the difference between reasoning and feeling as two mode of processing mechanism emerges. Feeling yields a tactility – a sensory experience – that is not produced by reasoning. Feeling hovers above meaning. Feeling does not rush into “examining life.” Feeling does not rush into meaning. With this conception of feeling, the problem of thoughtlessness seems also to resolve itself. There is a numbness to the desk murderer. The unthinking is the result of unfeeling; the thoughtlessness is the result of feelinglessness. With this, feeling might after all play a role in thinking. The the activation of senses could come to aid thoughtfulness.

The whole reason that I am processing the idea of feeling and reasoning is that growing up in a household of engineers as an artistic, emotional, and sensitive kid, the tension has always been there. When I was in first grade, my mom wrote a well-received parenting essay entitled “Crying Doesn’t Solve Problems.” In the essay, she describes an anecdote where rational thinking had perfectly resolved a parental situation. The incident is mundane. One time at McDonald's, right after I have gotten an ice cream cone, with the jitter that is the result of excitement, I immediately dropped it on the floor. As my mom vividly describes in the essay, the same moment of the ice cream hit the floor, my face changed and tears rushed into my eyes. And at also the same moment, my mom halted all upcoming emotions by putting up her hand in front of me and assuring me that she would get me another ice cream. And according to my mom, that was what stopped the tears from dropping from my eyes. In this essay, her thesis was, just as the title suggests, that crying does not solve problems; and her goal was to show the effectiveness of reasoning and to elicit other parents of employing the same rational problem-solving oriented practice of parenting instead of spoiling, pampering, or criticizing. Obviously, progressive parents of today would have so much to say about the emotional unavailability that is screamed by this essay. (And I should also say that my mother has made clear that she no longer believes the statement "crying does not solve problems" but still believes that proper parenting should be rational.) But aside from her thesis, what derives from the story is the temporal element of feeling and reasoning. There is an immediacy of feeling and a latency of reasoning. In the story, tears were instantaneous, the second ice cream was belated. Emotions were instantly felt, and solutions were sequentially processed. The experience was immediate and thinking had a lag. Feeling feels closer to heart, and reasoning happens at a distance.

Sometimes I feel bad about a choice that I think would be the best. I think that is something many people can relate to. Personally, I have also realized I tend to perceive many things with feeling prior to reasoning. Feeling is important to me. When finishing novels, I like to feel the experience before coming back to re-think the plots of the book. I overthink the choices that I have made with reason more than the choices that I have made with feeling. When drawing and creating, the sense of what it might look like drives the direction of it. I like running precisely for the absence of thoughts and the abundance of sensations.

Over the years of growing into my own skin, I have learned to honor the act of feeling. I feel the best when I get to feel. There is something liberating when I am in tune with my feelings. There is a freedom in the experiential element of feeling. There is an intimacy in the immediacy of feeling. There is an openness in the ambiguity of feeling. There is an ease in not having to explain myself. There is a relief in losing control of thoughts. There is a joy in letting my senses wander. Whereas reasoning is structured, feeling is elastic. Whereas thinking is contained, feeling is multidimensional. Feeling does not shout. Feeling does not assert. Feeling hums, reasoning argues. Feeling escapes; reasoning encloses.

To say the above is also to say that feeling is not reducible to emotion alone. While “emotion” might be the first synonym for “feeling,” here to me, feeling also includes an experiential element that is integral. To make a choice through feeling is to activate the senses as well as the emotion; feeling good or bad about a choice is not just about positive or negative emotions, but also about the state of felt sensations and mental being.

In the process of researching theories of feeling in order to process my muddled feeling on the topic of feeling, I came across the book called Critical Feeling: How to use Feeling Strategically by Rolf Reber. The book approaches the idea of feeling from the perspective of psychology. Based on the concept of critical thinking, Reber proposes the idea of critical feeling as ends and means in complement to critical thinking. In the book, Reber defines feeling to include five main elements – emotions, mood states, preferences, metacognitive feelings, and bodily sensations.[5] I especially liked this definition. Just like my above thinking about how feeling is not reducible to emotion, here, feeling is defined as a processing system. Feeling is a collective of parts rather than one singular linear entity of processing. Critical feeling then refers to the “the reflective use of feelings that is focused on guiding attention.”[6] In the book, Reber suggests the importance of using critical feeling in resolving the limitation of critical thinking, such as the value-driven mode of reasoning or overdeliberation.[7] Though writing from a perspective of psychology, he also proposes the extension of his psychological study of feeling extend into the realm of philosophy, science, and the humanities. The re-appropriation in the humanities feels particularly exciting, especially in the context of feminist writing. While emotion, affect, and mood have all been studied in the humanities, the act of feeling has yet to be explored. There seems to be many possibilities to the ideas of critical feeling and many literary directions in which critical feelings can venture into.

[1] Genevieve Lloyd, Man of Reason: Male and Female in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). [2] Ibid, 7. [3] Ibid, 7-8. [4] Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?,” trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7 (1981): pp. 54. [5] Rolf Reber, Critical Feeling How to Use Feelings Strategically (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 35. [6] Ibid, 60. [7] Ibid, 27-33.