Feeling and reasoning seem to be two utterly opposed things; many people would think that a good argument ought not to be mixed too much with private feelings, and that the intrusion of subjective feeling will make a paper bad.
Of course, broadly speaking, that is not wrong. Good papers at least seem cold; apart from the opening and the closing, they rarely contain any lyrical sentences.
Still, leaving aside scientific and technical papers, as far as philosophy is concerned, I believe the best philosophical papers must be saturated with the author’s personal feelings. The key lies in how to infuse feeling, and absolutely not in how to drive feeling away.
Feeling is like a flood of hot blood: formless and diffuse. It cannot give reasoning a strictly ordered form, but it can inject strength into it. If one merely pours out feeling, letting emotion spill forth, then those surging fluids do indeed run counter to abstract reasoning. Yet the key to reasoning lies in how to keep feeling from gushing out at will and instead channel it toward a specific direction. Without the scaffolding built by reason, the spilling of feeling is blind and scattered; and if there is no infusion of feeling, then rational discourse is empty and weak.
To use an indecorous metaphor from literature inappropriate for children and the young (ladies and children, please cover your faces): take that thing as an example. After being engorged with blood, it becomes hard and usable. Blood itself has no shape and is not hard, yet without blood flowing into it, that thing could not possibly become hard. So what exactly makes that thing hard and formed? Is it the shapeless blood or the soft sponge? Neither—or rather, both. Only when the two cooperate in the proper way will it do. The visible structure itself cannot be too rigid; it must leave room, so that it can become full of life. And although blood provides inner strength, it cannot be allowed to overflow outward; therefore blood must be wrapped and hidden beneath the surface……
Words without feeling are either pale and dull, or soft and feeble. Truly moving and eloquent discourse must surely be full of feeling, and the way this feeling is full is inward rather than overflowing outward. What the reader directly encounters, of course, is the surface diction, but the force within it comes from the feeling contained beneath the words.
Therefore the philosopher’s ability has two layers: one is the inner force of feeling, and the other is the craft of diction that expresses and contains feeling. The reason philosophy’s reasoning differs from lyricism is not that the amount of emotional participation is greater or lesser, or whether emotional participation is allowed at all, but that in lyricism, diction is open, allowing feeling to pour out and flow forth freely. In reasoning, however, diction has a stronger binding force: it cannot easily let feeling overflow, making people directly sense the surge of emotion; instead, it wraps feeling up so that it remains hidden and unmanifest, providing power to diction from within. Thus diction must also possess proper tension. If the shell of diction exceeds the inner substance of feeling by too much, that is called ornate but hollow, empty, bloated, and lacking force. If the shell of diction is too narrow and cannot restrain the flow of feeling, it may in turn lead to depression or mania.
Of course, apart from this metaphor, another reason philosophical reasoning needs the force of feeling is that any rational thinking ultimately always takes root in feeling. I won’t drag in Heidegger’s notions of “state-of-mind” and the like here; to put it briefly, the process of thinking is also always a sequence of moves that mobilize emotion. Although there are some steps in thinking that can be formalized—formal logic, for instance—and thus detached from emotional beings and handed over to machines for calculation, in the end those abstract sequences of symbols still have to be understood by humans, and that inevitably requires mobilizing the corresponding emotions.
However, the philosophical status of emotion is not the topic I want to discuss right now. In fact, this topic arises from a discussion about the concrete business of writing articles. So let me say a bit more about how to bring feeling into reasoning.
It must be emphasized that what I advocate is “organizing abstract matters of principle with concrete feelings in tow,” and by no means “organizing concrete matters of principle with abstract feelings in tow.” It is not the case that introducing many abstract words referring to emotion—such as “love” and “hatred”—into reasoning is what I mean by infusing feeling. Worse still is using these abstract concepts to analyze affairs in some concrete situation. For example: “Because people ought to love one another, in this situation it should be like this and that…,” or “Because he did such and such a thing, I ought to hate him….” —This kind of sentence structure introduces those abstract emotional concepts into a concrete, immediate situation, and then carries out reasoning on the basis of those seemingly plausible concepts, finally judging some situation that is happening right there and then. In my view, this pattern is the worst of all: it destroys both sound reason and sound feeling.
Feeling is not an abstract symbol, but something real: vivid sensations in concrete situations, and sensations reawakened and reproduced by memories of those sensations. For example, love as a feeling is elusive, yet it has concrete situations or objects; or rather, the feelings of love or hate are always things that we directly feel, in person, when we encounter or interact with concrete situations and concrete objects. Because of these living feelings, the abstract word “love” is not completely empty. Without emotional experience in concrete situations, and merely talking in the abstract about theories like “people should love one another,” one may sound extremely eloquent, but in the end it is probably unavoidable that it will lapse into unreality. So-called “abstract theory” does not necessarily mean theories containing emotional words like “love”; words like “value,” “interest,” “life,” and so on—if various concepts lack the lived experience of likes and dislikes, they are hard to genuinely understand. For example, when you want to say that something is beneficial, there must be some similar or related experience that lets you personally feel that the corresponding result is good; and if you keep saying that this thing is beneficial, while in fact you yourself can only feel the pain such things bring you, then this view that “this thing is beneficial” is a bad one. Especially if you still insist on altruism, you may well end up spreading suffering.
Only when sufficiently rich and living emotional experience stands behind abstract discourse as support can such abstract discourse be reliable, credible, and forceful. Of course, in order to persuade others when communicating, one must extract more public principles or patterns from concrete, private contexts. But in this process of abstraction, there is no need for you to forget the concrete situation; on the contrary, you can call to mind those concrete situations even more, letting the surging feelings influence your own speech. It is not a matter of abstractly summarizing those concrete situations, but rather something like dancing while listening to music: the association of situations and the discourse of principle are two different kinds of activity, yet so long as you let them coordinate naturally, they will naturally fit each other.
My own writing proceeds in just this way. Of course, it is not that any topic can be accompanied by vivid emotional impressions; in most cases the surging emotions seem hazy and indistinct. But one of my special skills is that, when reflecting on or reviewing some concrete situation, as a by-product I can write some abstract argumentative essays. In these articles, it is hard to see the influence of my private experiences and perceptions; it seems as though I am speaking about purely objective matters of principle, especially on topics like love, ethical politics, and so on. In fact, when I am writing those articles, I am always deeply immersed at the same time in some concrete, private situation. What surges in my heart is entirely personal feeling, while what comes out under my pen is abstract reasoning—again, to emphasize, absolutely not abstract concepts being used to summarize concrete situations, but emotion and thought naturally occurring in sync.
There is also another point: the derivation of abstract symbols itself does not involve sincerity or falsity, only correctness and error, whereas deliberately lyrical writing may be affected and insincere. The most effective way to tell a person’s sincerity unmistakably from his writing is to read his argumentative prose—feeling saturated into cold reasoning can absolutely not be faked. In particular, if behind his discussions of various topics that seem on the surface unrelated to one another you detect the same current of feeling, then at that point you can be certain beyond doubt of the sincerity of the author’s whole personality.
When this short piece was being written, it was repeatedly delayed by all kinds of factors, with the result that my train of thought became sluggish and I was absent-minded. If I hadn’t happened to announce the topic to someone in advance, I probably would simply have changed the topic…… In the end I still managed to force it out, just barely—please bear with it……
July 7, 2009
Latest comments
- uniceros
2009-07-08 00:25:37 Anonymous 115.155.143.90
You could get a bit more hardcore and continue from there~ For example: “Reasoning with feeling is a process similar to erection, so……”
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In short, it should be rooted in feeling and expressed naturally.
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“When this short piece was being written, it was repeatedly delayed by all kinds of factors, with the result that my train of thought became sluggish and I was absent-minded. If I hadn’t happened to announce the topic to someone in advance, I probably would simply have changed the topic…… In the end I still managed to force it out, just barely—please bear with it……”
Uh, what am I saying? Sorry…… - astrophil
2009-07-19 10:40:52 Anonymous 222.95.19.8
That’s right. Good papers are all full of blood and vitality, so I especially admire that person named Foucault.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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