How Does It Feel?

Princeton Professor Robert George recommends that we see ourselves living today in an Age of Feeling and Feelings. In other terms, terms that ought to be familiar to my readers, we are living in a therapy culture where the value of ideas depends on how much therapy we have had, and where those who disagree with us are said to be suffering from unresolved emotional distress. 

We no longer exchange ideas. We no longer debate propositions or policies. We fixate on our ideas, the ones we feel most deeply, and reject everyone else for having failed to have done enough therapy. They have not dealt with their issues and thus they are not just wrong, but not worth debating or even respecting.

The issue is complex. If therapists want you to get in touch with your feelings they are assuming that your feelings will show you something relevant about your reality. This involves introspection but it does not involve analyzing real world situations. It does not tell you what to do to solve problems. It limits itself to your subjective state.

As Professor George puts it:

That is because most people today do not believe that their personal values and convictions, though the products of feeling, are subjective or relative. They believe, or are at least prepared to act on the belief, that those convictions are, in some sense, objectively true. And not only that, in practice many people treat their beliefs as infallibly true and thus treat their feelings as if they are infallible sources of truth.

It gets more complicated. In Freudian psychoanalysis the issue is not how you feel but what you want. They ought not to be confused. Freud’s theory begins with wish fulfillment, not with emotional lability. 

Worse yet, the situation becomes more complicated when analysts decide that they want to figure out what other people want from you. It becomes less about what you really really want and more about how you are reacting to what other people want from you.

And that does not really answer the question of what truth is. After all, does your truth lie in your desire or your feelings? Or is there a truth that is impersonal, that is true regardless of whether or not you feel it. 

What about scientific truth or even philosophical truths? 

By definition, scientific truths are objective. They are not subjective. Evidently, those who make a fetish of feeling have little use for objective truths. The case of transmania makes that clear.

But then, what about tradition? What about policies that have been shown to have worked in the past? Ought we to respect tradition? Or ought we to reject tradition because it is not subjective?

Take the case of language. However much you are in love with your feelings, you are still obliged to use a language that other people understand. That means, a language that has evolved over centuries. You might want to impart your style to your sentences, but you cannot speak your own private language. As Wittgenstein famously said, there is no such thing as a private language.

In principle, the search for your true feelings is promoted as a way to improve your relationships with other people. And yet, if two people are not speaking a common language, and using words as they ought to be used, they are unlikely to connect.