To Reason and To Feel

An excerpt of a book-length essay.

The unexamined life is not worth living. I don’t know how much I believe in that anymore. Not in the sense that I will stop thinking and opt to take “soma” from Brave New World, or the blue pill from the Matrix. Rather, instead of “examining,” I question if there is other way of experiencing life that is 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 for the sake of this writing. Yet increasingly, I notice the unspoken fixation on the meaning of things. In my recent graduate class on the philosophy of technology, multiple essays address the topic of meaning, contemplating whether one can live a meaningful life in virtuality without a physical body. Thinking back to my middle school English classes, if my memory serves me well, one of the questions I heard asked the most was “what does [insert author] mean when they say [insert quote].” During my museum visits with friends and family, the question I am most often asked is “what do you think this artwork means?” From academic writing to novels to memoirs, books are filled with the word “meaning” in their titles. The Meaning of Things! The Meaning of Life! Man’s Search for Meaning! Even in the context of spirituality, in my conversations with my engineer mother on the topic of religion and faith, the questions she asks most often are “what do you think the passage means” and “what is the meaning of life.” While never rejecting her question overtly for the sake of supporting her spiritual reflection, every time she poses the question, I wonder in my head, “does it have to mean anything?”

Indeed, what does it all mean? Maybe something. Maybe nothing. Maybe meaning shouldn’t be what one seeks in a moment like this.

“Meaning” seems harmless if not promising in most contexts. One would aim to comprehend the meaning of a word before using it in a sentence; one would think through the meaning of a concept before its application. Yet in the above cases where “meaning” is used in an abstract setting (the meaning of an artwork, the meaning of a literary work, the meaning of life), where I was invited to quickly consider the “essence” of something for the sake of arriving at a conclusion and moving forward, I can’t help but feel a sense of exertion. These questions, in the banal forms that they take on, seem to be inviting me to engage in a trivial act of dissecting, extracting, and uncovering. “Meaning,” in these cases, then takes on a singular, definitive, and unwavering air. Often than not, such “essence” is assumed to be skillfully reached through a set of maneuvers of the mind, and these maneuvers tend to invite one to squeeze through thought, untangle through reason, and contend through arguments – a series of forceful analytical acts that seem to be unyielding in nature. Therefore, it might seem that, in the search for meaning, piercing logic takes precedence; wandering marvel must recede into the background. Order must be introduced in the formation of meaning; expansive curiosity must give way. If we think the Socratic 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 these types of meaning generation is interpretation, analysis, induction, and deduction. Such a purely 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 its 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 has long been seeped within the Western intellectual tradition. The Sophist separated “passion” from “reasoning.” Descartes estranged “thoughts” from the “body.” Enlightenment further elevated reason as the only form of knowledge production. Contemporary sciences and analytical philosophy seem to be disinterested in things outside of their “rational” selves.

Yet beyond such separation, what is also at stake is the act of reasoning is deeply gendered. Often referred as “Mother Nature,” the concept of nature has been considered as female dating back to pre-Enlightenment times. 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 thinking about the verbs associated with the idea of reasoning and meaning, aggression are 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 roots in the western intellectual history, validating my impulse of seeking an alternative, it has yet provided me with an answer. With that, I did what any other Zillennials 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 that “feeling” is what was getting at with the refusal to think, it is not until my encounter with the one sentence by Helen Cixous, all was made clear. In “Castration or Decapitation,” when theorizing the feminist text, Cixous writes “[Ecriture Féminine or 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 reveals itself. Feeling yields a tactility – a sensory experience – that is not produced by reasoning. Feeling hovers above meaning. Feeling does not rush into meaning. Feeling does not rush into “examining life.” With my newfound insights between Cixous’ words, the problem of thoughtlessness seems also to resolve itself, caringly absolving the guilt in my refusal to think. 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 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 mother was invited to speak at a PTA conference and share her parenting insights as a busy high-level executive who is equally passionate about her professional work and the significant task of raising a child. To that request, she wrote an essay entitled “Crying Doesn’t Solve Any Problem.” The essay was rationally argued and sentimentally delivered. An anecdote about rational thinking perfectly resolving a parental situation was sensibly shared. The incident is mundane. One time at McDonald’s, right after I had got an ice cream cone, with the jitter that was the result of excitement, I immediately dropped it on the floor; the moment that the ice cream hit the floor, my face changed, and tears rushed into my eyes, and it was at the same moment, my mom put up her hand in front of me and halted the tears, assuring me that she would get me another ice cream. According to my mom, it was the swift action of putting up her hand, along with the promise of a second ice cream, that stopped the tears from dropping from my eyes. With the incident as evidence, in her essay, her thesis was, just as the title suggests, that crying does not solve any problem. Through the essay, her goal was to show the effectiveness of reasoning and to elicit other parents to employ the same rational problem-solving-oriented practice of parenting instead of spoiling, pampering, or criticizing.

Progressive parents of today would have much to say about the essay, and I should also say that she has slowly come to recognize the power of tears over the years and moved on from her full endorsement of the idea “crying does not solve any problems,” albeit she still believes that proper parenting should be rational. Yet aside from her thesis, what derives from the story is the temporal element of feeling and reasoning. There is an immediacy in the act of feeling and a latency in the act of reasoning. In the story, tears were instantaneous, the second ice cream was belated. Emotions were instantly felt, and solutions were sequentially introduced. The experience was immediate and thinking had a lag. Feeling feels closer to heart, and reasoning happens at a distance. If I tap into my personal memory archive in recalling the event, I can’t say that I remember the exact proceedings of what happened then and there, but I intimately remember the feeling of happiness lasting for quite a while after I left the McDonald’s.

Sometimes I feel bad about a choice that I think would be the best. This might be something that many people can relate to. Lately, as I have been paying more attention to the act of feeling and reasoning, I have realized that I tend to perceive many things with feeling prior to reasoning. Feeling is important to me. Its intuition and immediacy mediate the space between the world and me. When finishing novels, I tend to feel my experience and sentiments before coming back to think the plots. I over deliberate the choices that I have made with reason more than the choices that I have made with feeling. When drawing and illustrating, the “sense” of what it might look like drives the direction of my creation. I like running precisely for the abundance of feelings and the absence of thoughts.

In A Natural History of the Senses (1991), when describing the sense of touch, Diane Ackerman notes language’s fixation with the depiction of touch.

“Language is steeped in metaphors of touch. We call our emotions feelings, and we care most deeply when something ‘touches’ us. Problems can be thorny, ticklish, sticky, or need to be handled with kid gloves.”[5] 

While the writing is about senses, what amazes me really Ackerman’s ability to unintentionally answer my inquiry with so little effort and so few words. “We call emotions feelings.” Unmistakably, feeling is the information that we gather at the end of our tactile experience. When tactual sensation gets processed, we get into moods. That explains the texturized nature of emotion, and such “tactility” that consists of multiplicity, immediacy, and instantaneity, is precisely what Cixous was trying to convey in the idea of Ecriture Féminine. (In fact, “tactility” was Cixous’ actual word used, I realize with delight.) Therefore, to write the feminist texts is to write the text that is multidimension and unwavering in experience. The path leading back to Cixous might seem redundant; but occasionally, one needs to walk the outer paths a few times before arriving at the center, especially when the urge to avoid meaning is strong.

To say that feeling involves a tactility is maybe also to say that feeling is not reducible to emotions alone. While “emotion” might be a synonym for “feeling” (especially so in the McDonald’s incident), feeling also includes a sensible 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 the positive or the negative aspects in moods, but also about the state of felt sensations and physical being.

If to touch is to be in contact, to feel is to touch, then, to feel is to be in contact. (I am bemused by my accidental use of syllogistic reasoning here.) This idea was enlightening to my daily experience. As a spatial person, whenever in a place of needing reflection, I imagine myself placed within all that needs to make sense and let all things to be around me, to navigate through me, or in other words, to touch me. To be present with thoughts, to be contacted by language, to be poked, shoved, teased, taunted, dragged, stretched, lifted, and wounded by ideas is where I feel at my best.  

On that notion, maybe the idea of feeling can maybe be explained as a conceptual type of contact. (I choose the word “contact” over “touch” here specifically for its expansively emphatic nature – to be “contacted” by an alien, to be “contacted” by God, to “make contact” with a long-lost solider.) One can be contacted by thoughts, ideas, relationships, or any abstraction of a concept. When you feel inspired at the end of the book, you are lifted by the spirit of it. When you feel happy in the presence of your partner, you are enveloped by the gentle energy of them. When you are overwhelmed by grief, the absence of the person lifts all the pressure that there is used to be, placing you in a vacuum, stretching you in all directions, making it hard to breathe. When your thoughts are being nudged by other thoughts, new ideas come about, knowledge generates. When Roland Barthes talks about the idea of “punctum” in photography, he might very well be punctured by the directness of photography and the unmediated memory of his mother.

In other words, everything is experiential. Everything can be translated into pressure and the absence of pressure.

I feel the best when I get to feel. There is something liberating when I am in tune with my feelings. There is a pleasure in the experiential element of feeling. There is an intimacy in the immediacy of feeling. There is a freedom in the flexibility 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 thinking. 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; reasoning does not whisper. Feeling does not assert; reasoning does not wiggle. Feeling hums, reasoning argues. Feeling escapes; reasoning encloses.

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[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] Diane Ackerman and Adolf W. Schwartz, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 70.