What does reason feel like to you?
by: Dave Belden on January 14th, 2010 | 9 Comments »
A rightwinger at a netroots conference has been emphasizing the importance of reason in his work. The videographer unexpectedly asks him what reason feels like. It feels like security, the conservative replies. He had a tough childhood, and embracing reason helped him to get out of the chaos of his life.
The videographer is Edwin Rutsch, whose website on progressive values and empathy is an enticing place I hope to explore. I met Edwin at the Engaging the Other conference, where he was taping people talking about empathy. It turned out we live a block from each other on the same street. So we’ve been getting together. This week he was describing the recent PBS TV series “This Emotional Life.” He praised the series but had one basic criticism of it, that it maintained the fiction, so endemic to our culture, of reason and emotion as somehow opposites. He quoted George Lakoff on the neuroscience of mirror neurons, which shows that in the brain our capacity to reason is literally constructed upon our ability to empathize with other people.
So then Edwin mentioned this moment two years ago when he asked an interview subject what reason felt like. He wishes he had asked a lot more people the same question and is thinking about doing so in the future. “Reason is an emotion,” he said. I replied that I didn’t think it was: it has many emotions associated with it, a different mix for each of us, but to say it’s an emotion suggests that’s all it is. Breaking your arm has many emotions associated with it but isn’t in itself an emotion. Not a very good analogy, and maybe just a kneejerk reaction of someone who is deeply trained to see reason as different from emotion.
And yet that’s not really where I am at. The presentation of ideas that I like best are those that bravely explain what the ideas mean, emotionally, to the person presenting them, and why in terms of their passions and even material interests, they may favor them, or may have resisted adopting them. “Bravely,” because to do that contravenes the notion, fiercely held in traditional academia, that ideas stand alone as logical constructs that are independent of the interests and emotional needs they serve, so that it is not relevant to vulnerably show one’s heart while explaining one’s ideas. Postmodernism is supposed to deconstruct all that, and I can’t claim to be well read in the field, but the most interesting book I have read about it, the one that grabbed me the most, was a memoir that explained how postmodernist ideas served the emotional needs of some of their proponents. I’m not sure that most postmodernists have been as brave as that, but hope I can be proved wrong.
But over to you. What does reason feel like to you? Maybe you could think about it and jot down some answers. That might be a good prelude to telling us if you think this a good and fruitful question to ask. Does it help get at the unnatural split between reason and emotion in our culture?
What does reason feel like to me? So many different things. It can feel like
- peacefulness, ease, a delicious escape from real life, when I immerse myself in pure reason puzzles. I’m partial to puzzles without words (escape from my wordy life), ones that take all my concentration to the point of excluding everything else, including noise, like the phone ringing. I think they do for me some of what meditation (which I’m not much drawn to) does for some others. I can feel the endorphins kicking in.
- discomfort, arousing anger or shame, when someone else’s reasonable argument challenges my own deeply held ideas, and I start to think it out with a great deal of resistance.
- excited pleasure, when I think I’m really getting somewhere. It’s not a feeling of security in the sense of safety within the walls of one’s home, for example, but of pleasure at going into the flux of contradictions and paradoxes, where security rests in being open, in not after all being freaked out by new ideas (see previous bullet), and the pleasure comes with finding new syntheses that make some good provisional sense of things: somehow encompassing both the old knowledge and ideas and the new. This is one of the best feelings in my life, and I am strongly drawn to it, though it’s may be as hard to acquire as that occasional feeling in a long distance race when the pain diminishes and the joy kicks in.
This is not an easy exercise. But it’s interesting to me. Is it to you? Have I described feelings, or states of mind, or thoughts about feelings rather than the feelings themselves? I am intrigued if anyone else wants to comment on what reason feels like to them.
Hi Dave,
How fun to see our conversation converted into a blog.
Here is the actual interview I talked about. I was interviewing people at the progressive Netroots bloggers conference in Austin TX about what they felt progressive values were. I was also asking people how have conservative values failed? Dave Nalle came up and wanted to be interviewed. I didn’t know that he was actually a conservative checking out the conference. We ended up talking about his values and that’s were reason came up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juFmHvP587Y
He then blogged about the encounter as well. It starts the fourth paragraph down at this page. So you can see it from his point of view.
http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/digging-through-the-netroots/page-3/
The Feeling of Reason.
I’ll think more about my own feelings connected to reason and post them later. I find it a fascinating question about what reason feels like since there’s this idea out there that reason is “dispassionate.” This seems totally inaccurate since there’s never a moment where one uses reason and doesn’t feel something.
The first feeling that comes to mind about reason is having to read heavy philosophical books in collage. Working on my empathy documentary project I now read some academic books on empathy as well. There’s a feeling of heaviness, control, concentration, focus and stress. I see intellectuals-philosophers as very reason based people. They try to squeeze out feelings, but they are using the feelings of control and concentration to squeeze out feelings that may arise spontaneously. I’ve felt another type of reason were I feel light, relaxed, spontaneous, and creative. That’s when I allow and continuously incorporate spontaneous feelings to arise and integrate them with other thoughts.
just some initial thoughts .. more later.
PS. Dave, Here’s the links to your interview on the nature of empathy.
Empathy Documentary: David Belden on Empathy (1 of 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkAiQyBtYTs
Empathy Documentary: David Belden – Empathy Boats in the Pit of Chaos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRS0gOlN7so
Hmm, yes, well, if people want to know what I look like they can go there, but if they want some stuff worth watching on empathy I’d suggest the Dominic Barter one I linked to and then search for other names on the Empathy Documentary list on YouTube, like Kurt Schneider, or Meganwind Eoyang (I haven’t looked at those videos yet but they are people I want to learn from). The one with Miki Kashtan is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dalUb-75hMQ&feature=related.
Edwin do you have all these videos in that project linked to from a list by name of person interviewed? I looked but could find it.
Here’s a link to an overview of all my interviews on empathy
http://progressivespirit.com/Empathy/Projects/Interviews/
BTW. I will be at the NSP conference in San Francisco and hope to interview speakers and participants about their stories and insights into the experience of empathy.
I’ll probably come back to the links to Edwin’s work on empathy when I have a little more time, but now I’d like to say a few words on why I resist the question What does reason feel like? The term has so long been associated with downplaying the feeling component of experience that the question does not work for me. On the other hand, it’s not hard to talk intelligently about many of the connections that various things closely associated with reason have with the emotions. The ancient Aristotelians and Stoics knew, for instance, that beliefs or opinions can be stated in language, which can be analyzed, and emotions are constituted by beliefs; change these beliefs and emotions change (or emerge or disappear). Values, or value judgments, are key components or correlates of emotions. Dewey’s redescription of what earlier thinkers called reason in terms of problem-solving intelligence also provides us with a way of connecting reason and emotion. Experienced frustration (in extreme cases, pain) motivate the activation of problem-solving intelligence; and the lack of complete equanimity motivates continued inquiry. Solving problems–including the smaller problems into which we break down the bigger ones in hopes of solving them–is pleasant. So I would argue that the emotional dimension of experience provides a context for what is usually called rational activity.
Dave and Edwin –
What a great question? My first ideas of what reason felt like to me had to do with our usual connotations of reason as dispassionate: clearheaded was the word I heard in my head. But really that was a cultural, not a personal, response. When I’m reasoning something out, it feels like an exciting puzzle or a frustrating riddle. I also think reason feels like a desire to control by knowing — getting things into categories, so I can control them better. This is part of my addiction to knowing, which I think is fostered by our culture. Those are my first thoughts. I’ll see if something else comes up.
Reason feels to me like lightning in a storm–if “lightning” were less flashy and more subdued. When I watch my daughter, who is bipolar, struggle in the middle of chaotic mixed states–these could be aptly described as one heckuva “storm”–she grabs onto reason as a way to ride out the storm, that hot flash of serenity that can lead the storm’s energy to ground.
I don’t always see that reason is necessarily an end or a result but a process, a means of riding a very rough and tumble wave into a wash of even modest clarity.
Of course the thing that made my head buzz the most, Dave, was that conservative’s feeling of reason as security. Seems to me, that’s the addictive emotion that so often gets in the path of authentic solutionizing. Sometimes solutions do not feel secure at all and if one balks at a solution of this type because it doesn’t feel reasonable (because reason feels like security), then one is not likely to find a solution, or, in the case of anthropogenic global warming and climate change, to willfully walk away from solutions “reasoning” that such problems simply cannot be. I grew up with fundies and a conservative parent… who is still very much conservative and absurdly fundie while my brothers and I are completely at the other end of the continuum, having found the fundie urge/craving for security almost always doesn’t serve any solutionizable purpose.
Yet another great post, Dave (& Edwin)!
Great and challenging question, thank you!
Equating reason with feeling would seem to imply that either reason is a sensory-emotional state or that feeling can exist independent of experience. Regardless of how much Plato and/or Democritus one cited, one would be hard pressed to make a convincing argument for either view.
As to the correlative relationship of reason to feeling; Einstein, elegantly, states it best, “…a profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence.” And again, “…that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence. (“Ideas and Opinions” New York; Crown Publishers, 1954)
Great and challenging question, Thank you.
Equating reason with feeling would seem to imply that either reason is a sensory-emotional state or that feeling can exist independent of experience. One would be hard pressed to make a convincing argument for either view.
As to the correlative relationship of reason and feeling; Einstein, elegantly, says it best, “…a profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence.” And again “…that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate.” (“Ideas and Opinions” New York:Crown Publishers, 1954)