Reason and World Versions: Thoughts on "Men without Chests" in The Abolition of Man

 

    We don’t go to the store and buy the world version of our choice. Partly, we have been socialized into a world version or more than one competing world version. We are usually unaware of the fit between a world version and our concrete social and economic life. Still, it is safe to say that the fit is often not good, that a world version distorts the realities of our social, political (including historical), and economic life (from now on “social life” for short). That can be a form of limited consciousness. That can mean the world version functions ideologically as Lockean liberal individualism functions to mask true economic structures and power relations in the USA or Putin’s postcolonial particularism masks power relations in Russia – or the form of Islam sanctioned by the regime in Iran legitimates the political and economic power of the mullahs and their morality police. The world versions already there influence us already – at the limit in the form of rebellion against one.

   More powerful still are the practices of everyday life, which limit what is intelligible and unintelligible in a world version. I have eaten meat slaughtered in factories for most of my life. That deeply ingrained practice conditions how I think about animals and thus nature, including human nature. This practice therefore limits what world versions I can take seriously as making sense of my life. It is a massive barrier to understanding animals as holy, as limits to my own needs. And as animals are part of nature, it is a barrier to understanding nature as holy. There are other barriers of an intellectual kind to seeing animals or nature as holy: the seeming cruelty of ecologies in which predator and prey are central, for instance. In the scientific world version, animals (including us) have no intrinsic value or meaning; nothing prevents us from treating them a food material to be industrially processed. One version of Christianity, which interprets the Genesis 1:26

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

in a certain way, seems compatible with the industrial reduction of animals and nature. That conflicts with other currents in Christianity that emphasize God’s love for the world, his Creation; His continuing role in causing the world to exist; the idea of Man has been given stewardship over nature, the right to use it well in love, but that it still belongs to its maker who will judge us on our stewardship. This current of Christianity – most people who call themselves Christians are unaware of it – is not easily reconcilable with our meat-eating practices and our reduction of nature in general.

     Now this latter version of Christianity seems right to my head. But it is not such a simple matter even then to just make that part of my world version. Reason is that which accesses reality, either disclosing aspects of it or, when it fails, covering up reality. Not just thoughts or propositions disclose reality – or cover it up (I get this metaphor for truth from Heidegger) – but also emotional responses. In general, I deny we can neatly distinguish between the heart and the head. Both in cooperation are necessary if the most important truths are to be disclosed; both fail together when they are covered up. So intellectually – with my head and partly my heart – I reject the industrial slaughter of animals and the reduction of nature this practice is an aspect of; they are not compatible with the world version I wish l had.

      But here I am using a laptop, thus using electricity to do a task I could do with a pencil and paper. And I feed my boys and myself with industrially produced meat every week. True, if it were cheap and convenient I would change these practices. Equally true is that if I really understood animals and nature as my wished-for world version required, I would be writing with pencil and paper and we would not eat much meat at home – and the only meat we did eat would be produced under conditions compatible with our stewardship. I even I less excuse for I have seen with my own 11-year-old eyes the horrors of the slaughterhouse (a chicken slaughter factory) and have heard more stories from my father, who was more intimately aware of it. My point is this: the practices we live with limit what we can take seriously even if we suspect they are problematic. Reason would mean conforming my thoughts and feelings to reality – to feeling horror over eating factory meat and never doing it as well as having the thought that it is wrong. I will only say I truly understand the wrongness of factory meat when this happens.

   Of course, I could become a responsible consumer of meat and force my boys to limit their diet so that I could, perhaps subconsciously, advertise myself to myself and others as a righteous person, giving myself a self-gratifying feeling of being better than those who eat industrial meat. That is sentimentality, a kind of counterfeit attitude.  That discloses nothing about reality; it moves no one as authoritative or revealing; it rather annoys people, who good antennas for that kind of “virtue-signaling.” But that doesn’t mean that all such lives fail to reveal some truth. Wendell Berry’s writings reveal a life that reveals the truth of the world version I wish I could find compelling enough to live.

   Adopting a world version, it is clear, involves habits and feelings learned from an early age. Plato and Aristotle knew this as  I suppose most people did until recently. Aristotle explicitly writes in the Nichomachaen Ethics that education should aim to induce children to like what they ought to like and dislike what they ought to like. Most cultures as part of their world versions presupposed that the universe was such that emotional responses could be either more or less in harmony with it. When children then reach the age of reflective thought, they will have the power to understand intellectually what goodness requires and what is evil and to be rejected. St. Augustine defines virtue – the most important telos of education – as the realization of the potential to love every object in a way that is appropriate to it. “Children must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful,” to quote C. S. Lewis’s reading of a passage in Plato’s Laws. Before we reach the age of reason, we must learn to feel the truth that goodness, truth, and beauty are loveable. To the extent our emotional dispositions are not so educated, we will be blind to reality, which is to say to that which is good, true, and beautiful – to reality.

      I understand the relationship between feelings and reason somewhat differently from the tradition, however. C. S. Lewis describes the relationship I want to criticize like this:

  No emotion is, in itself, a judgment: in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it (“Men Without Chests,” in The Abolition of Man, p. 29-30 in my edition. It was Lewis who first taught me the importance of emotions in reasoning, I think; or rather highlighted the significance of what I had read in Plato and Aristotle but not really attended to. I fuller treatment of the view I now what to criticize is found in Josef Pieper, Die Wirklichkeit und das Gute, 1949, which gives a Catholic-Thomist view of reason as intellect.)

 

I, as I wrote, believe it makes more sense to conceive of emotion and thought as two aspects of Reason, defined as our capacity to disclose reality, to grasp truth. That means I do not think emotions are blind. They express a form of judgment. Remorse expresses the judgment that I wronged someone; grief expresses the judgment that someone I loved has been taken from me; anger expresses the judgment that I have been unjustly treated, etc. These judgments can be right or wrong, just or unjust, more or less appropriate to reality. Emotions are largely the way children think – I know that stretches the normal use of the words – badly at first because their emotions are most subjective and do not reach reality. It is the job of the educator (parent, teacher) to free the child’s feelings from their own solipsistic inner life to be able to respond to reality, i.e. that which is not reducible to their own inner life (e.g. teaching a child not to be angry at his brother because his brother wins a game of UNO).

    The view I am criticizing locates reason entirely in the intellect. The feelings to obey the intellect as the beast pulling the cart should obey the human master (who has a whip if needed). But the intellect alone cannot distinguish between, say, the world version of a Himmler and the world version of Christ any more than AI in the movie the Matrix. It would be like Neo trying to argue to the AI that it should not reduce humanity to a battery because we have human dignity. AI is obviously to human dignity not because it was raised badly but because it has no emotional life, which is to say, no bodily life. But that is a picture of the Intellect uninformed by feeling. The intellect uninformed by feeling is an intellect uninformed by value, by a sense of the Good or beauty. It is more computer-like than human (as the history of modern Empiricism and Nominalism testifies).  As though we can just recognize something with our intellects and our willpower runs the message to our emotions, and our emotions obey. That makes no sense.

    Lewis’s own example makes clear what is wrong with attributing all reasoning powers to abstract thought. He writes that he does not enjoy the company of small children and that he recognizes this as a defect in himself – “just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind.” Children (all things being equal) are delightful and a man who cannot experience this does indeed suffer from a form of meaning-blindness. (The same kind of cognitive dissonance I described about meat eating.) He continues:

And because our approvals and dissapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it).

 

Now it is true: our emotions are not self-authenticating. We can feel in ways that are sentimental or counterfeit; we can feel in ways that do the object of our feelings injustice. But that is no reason for making feelings blind, for thoughts expressed as propositions are also not self-authenticating. Both thoughts and feelings – and usually the one accompanies the other when anything outside of science or simple facts are in play, as they are when we are questioning world versions – can reveal or conceal, can be just or unjust. The abstract intellect should not be privileged. The very language Lewis uses is the language of judgment: feelings are recognitions of objective value, responses to an objective order, are in harmony with reality or not. How can they be blind?

    In many areas, thoughts and feelings are blind and deaf without each other. If I wrote “All men are created equal” and then went home to my plantation and the leisure purchased by the labor of people I had enslaved and that I keep in slavery ultimately through the threat of violence, then prima facie my expressed belief in the abstract proposition is, well, empty or lacking at least.

   I would even say our emotions are our first access to reality. I don’t understand the abstract concept of human dignity or a common humanity until I am moved by the suffering or demeaning of people like those enslaved on Jefferson’s plantation. The best Jefferson could do was the cognitive dissonance of I experience with industrial meat. Why? The same reasons: his upbringing, the practices that form the background of his life. Thus the importance of training the child’s feelings, and thus the importance of being gifted with a world version that makes conceptual space for this aspect of reality.

  I would also say imagination is a critical aspect of Reason. The inability to imagine a person of a certain category as morally your equal conditions the ways we feel. A Spartan could not imagine the full humanity of the Helot, and his entire system of education drilled this inability into him.

   How are such vicious circles broken? Often they are not. When they are it is often through the imagination. Something sublime happens: you see the other as a fellow human being; we see the animal as a fellow creature. I cannot go into this further here. But when it comes to world versions, they are just frameworks for seeing things as this rather than that. Feelings and imagination are what condition this seeing in the first place, with intellect often lagging behind. But not always. Sometimes intellect recognizes truths that our feelings and imagination struggle to catch up with. My point here: all are intertwined. All are part of Reason i.e. that which allows reality to disclose itself to us.

   And my overall point: world versions are not like shopping for a vacation. Nor can abstract intellect, divorced from emotion and imagination, do much. That is a big mistake of many philosophers: to treat world versions like scientific theories to be validated or not by speculative reasoning and evidence. Thinking about world versions involves your whole self, heart and soul. It is something we can only do as the individuals we are: there are no neutral techniques or methods. Such fundamental thinking always challenges your life. It is always autobiographical, often confessional. It involves deep understanding of the world we grew up in and live in as well.

 . . .

Another thought in “Men without Chests” (Abolition of Man), which should be read along the little jewel “Meditation in a Toolshed.” Here are the passages I want to focus on.

In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it 'sublime' and the other 'pretty'; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: 'When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall... Actually ... he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word "Sublime", or shortly, I have sublime feelings' Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: 'This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.' …

    The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant. It is true that Gaius and Titius have said neither of these things in so many words. They have treated only one particular predicate of value (sublime) as a word descriptive of the speaker's emotions. The pupils are left to do for themselves the work of extending the same treatment to all predicates of value: and no slightest obstacle to such extension is placed in their way. The authors may or may not desire the extension: they may never have given the question five minutes' serious thought in their lives. I am not concerned with what they desired but with the effect their book will certainly have on the schoolboy's mind. In the same way, they have not said that judgements of value are unimportant. Their words are that we 'appear to be saying something very important' when in reality we are 'only saying something about our own feelings'. No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word only. I do not mean, of course, that he will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial. The very power of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him. (Men without Chests)

…

 

It is strange: Lewis’s criticism here of logical positivism is just as appropriate to modernists and postmodernists would like to believe that a human being or a human collective constructs reality, and lives in worlds of their own making. Of course, this is possible to some extent. Iris Murdoch wrote that we make pictures and then become like our pictures. Ideology is powerful. We all are to some extent creatures of Plato’s Cave. But our tendency to distort reality for self-interested reasons is not what is at issue here; it is the denial that anything of reality can be disclosed to us, either because reality has no form (like cookie dough our minds cut up any way we want) or because we are cut off from reality, condemned by our having to represent it in some way to experience it. I suppose what distinguishes most “moderns” from many “postmoderns” is the belief that at least science discloses reality. But what both share is the belief that meanings and values are not a part of Being but anthropomorphic projects onto the neutral screen of Being. That is what Lewis is criticizing and I agree with him.

   Galileo is a good place to start with the modern notion that only what science can disclose can possibly be real. Here he is not as a scientist but as a philosopher framing science:

As I form a conception of a material or corporeal substance, I simultaneously feel the necessity of conceiving that it has boundaries of some shape or other; that relatively to others is great or small; that it is in this or that place, in this or that time; that it is in motion or at rest; that it touches or does not touch another body; that it is unique, rare, or common; nor can I by any act of imagination disjoin it from these qualities. I do not find myself absolutely compelled to apprehend it as necessarily accompanied by such conditions as that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, sonorous or silent, smelling sweetly or disagreeably; and if the sense had not pointed out these qualities, language and imagination alone could never have arrived at them. Therefore I think that the senses, smells, colors, etc. with regard to the object in which they appear to reside are nothing more than mere names. These exist only in the sensitive body for when the living creature is removed, all these qualities are carried off and annihilated. I do not believe that there exists anything in external bodies for exciting tastes, smells, and sounds, etc. except size, shape, quantity, and motion.

Here we see the segregation of meaning from Being in action, the de-meaning and de-valuing of the universe at the beginning of its history. It was from here a short step to making size, shape, quantity, and motion human constructs as well. One of my favorite interpreters of our history, Lewis Mumford, puts it like this:

But actually, Galileo committed a crime far graver than any of the dignitaries of the Church accused him of; for his real crime was that of trading the totality of human experience, not merely the accumulated dogmas and doctrines of the Church, for that minute portion which can be observed within a limited time-span and interpreted in terms of mass and motion, while denying importance to the unmediated realities of human experience, from which science itself is only a refined ideological derivative. When Galileo divided experienced reality into two spheres, a subjective sphere, which he chose to exclude from science, and an objective sphere, freed theoretically from man’s visible presence but known through rigorous mathematical analysis, he was dismissing as unsubstantial and unreal the cultural accretions of meaning that had made mathematics – itself a purely subjective distillation – possible.

 

Coming back to Lewis and the responses to the waterfall: for Galileo they all would be “subjective,” as many of my students, followers of Galileo, would say. If the gray of Kilian’s eyes or the brown of Paul James’s eyes are not in their eyes but in my sensitive body alone – my body constructs the colors I see in their eyes; the color is not really in their eyes. Just so, the feelings of awe I have felt in the presence of certain waterfalls are constructed by my psyche and have nothing to do with the waterfalls themselves.

   But why do I have to believe that? Because an android would see them? Because a butterfly would perceive them differently? Because an alien with a differently constructed body would construct the color or the emotional response to the waterfall differently? Because some aspects of reality, perhaps, can only be disclosed to certain kinds of sensitive bodies – why not say that? That a deaf person cannot hear at all or an android cannot really hear the beauty of the Bach Prelude in C major does not make the music or its beauty unreal. Nothing, absolutely nothing, forces me to believe that my senses or my emotions disclose nothing about the world. They might get in the way of doing Galilean physics – which reveals something else about the world, something by the way that gives us the kind of power over it that I would never want to exercise in the presence of the awe-inspiring waterfall. The awe it inspires reveals something deeper than Galilean physics can reveal about it just as my response to Bach’s Prelude reveals something almost infinitely deeper about it than a physical analysis of its sound waves could. In fact, the latter are part of the same reality just abstractly bracketed out.

   I am included to say: Being in general, of the being of my boys’ eyes or the Bach Prelude or the waterfall is the set of all non-sentimental, non-ideological, non-distorting, non-falsifying thoughts, feelings, or imaginings that they give rise to, that are intelligible to any finite or infinite consciousness. That seems circular, I know. There is an analogy to reading and translating literature or poetry. So much has been written about Macbeth, for example, much of it profound, much of it with an axe to grind, etc. But to say it is about the Easter bunny would be falsifying. As long as an interpretation is arguable, we can learn something. That makes more sense than to segregate all these possible meanings and values – disclosed by such responses – from Being. 

. . .

   'How can Paul's eyes objectively be brown when a being whose eyes were differently evolved or in a different light they would appear a different color? Don't considerations like that prove that the color is in our brains and not in reality?'

   - I grant your premises but deny the conclusion. What follows from this premise is that Paul's eyes in reality correspond to a range of colors depending on the eye and light. I say this range of colors all are part of reality. Brown is revealed to me; a different shade perhaps to an imaginary alien. Because a color-blind person doesn't see any color is no reason to believe it is not there. And this is an analogy for other meanings - they eyes as "mirrors to the soul" does reveal something about human eyes. To say some quality is merely subjective only means that it is projected onto reality but in the light of day cannot be fairly said to belong to reality - as when a boy in love and projects only the most saintly qualities on his beloved, unable to see that she is deceiving him and kissing every other boy in the class. That would be an example of a quality being purely subjective. 

. . .

I tend to use feelings and emotions synonymously. I have read of technical uses in psychology. I reject them for my writing because they do not reflect actual usage. Here is the best attempt to make sense of the difference I have come across - by Karla McClaren, "Is it a Feeling or an Emotion?":

It’s the difference between having and knowing

An emotion is a physiological experience (or state of awareness) that gives you information about the world, and a feeling is your conscious awareness of the emotion itself. I hadn’t really understood why the distinction was such a big deal, because I don’t experience a huge gap between emotion and feeling. I mean, if there’s an emotion going on, I feel it. Bing.

But this isn’t true for everyone.

Many people are honestly unaware that they’re having an emotion. For them, the emotion and the consciousness of it are not strongly connected, and they don’t even realize that they’re fearful, or angry, or depressed. Their emotional state has to become so persistent that it drags them into a severe mood (or is pointed out by someone else), and then they can realize, “Oh, I guess I’ve been really sad about my mom, or afraid about money, or angry about work.”

For many people, there’s a disconnect between emotion and feeling; there’s no consciousness of the emotion at all. They have the emotion, but they don’t know about it. The emotion is certainly there, and their behavior displays the emotion (to others at least), but they aren’t feeling it clearly.