Doyle Saylor wrote:
> Doyle
> Reason has traditionally been regarded as corrupted by feelings. For
> instance the cliché example that dogmatism interferes with reason.
> These assertions arose in the early Enlightenment period. In most
> cases today, pure reason in the sense of logic is not on peoples mind
> concerning the left, but recourse to arguments which rely upon careful
> reason still holds sway even if persons like Kelley rely upon other
> tools. In this case Kelley uses moral statements which on their face
> hardly have any connection to reason in the sense of logic. This is
> so, because if I acted for reasons of shame I clearly would not be
> just "reasoning", but relying upon my precondition of how I feel about
> a situation. Whereas the reason is supposed to give choices, and
> plans in sensory details minus the "bias" of shame and guilt.
What's so unreasonable about planning to avoid feeling shame or guilt?
If one believes those feelings are deserved, then one will tend to respond with one kind of plan, if undeserved, one will tend to respond with another. But in either case, the feelings need not be an impediment to reason.
Of course, it's ALWAYS a bad idea to make decisions while in the throes of negative emotions, but that's a long ways from saying that they are impediments to reason and nothing more.
> Doyle
> First of all it has to be clear to everyone that feelings cannot be
> subtracted from human thought without injury to reason.
An excellent point, which Doyle then goes on to support by recourse to brain research. But then he begins his next section with a seemingly contradictory statement:
> Doyle
> We do not think with feelings.
How can Doyle reconcile these two statements? I don't think it's possible.
Doyle continues:
> So the way Kelley uses the terms shame
> and guilt she confuses planning and explanations with feelings.
> Rather I say feelings are experienced as intensities without
> conscious thought, and conscious thought is applied to feeling to
> "understand" what feeling means.
But what of unconscious thought? It seems to me that Doyle is trying to completely separate thought and feeling here -- which is certainly a useful therapuetic or introspective process, but even then it may be no more useful in the long run than taking apart an engine: the real value comes in being able to put it back together again afterwards.
In contrast to Doyle's approach, which I believe has some validity, I recommend the approach discussed, for example in Chapter 4 of Elizabeth Spelman's *Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering*. In this Chapeter, "The Virtue of Feeling and the Feeling of Virtue," Spelman discusses, as an example, the difference among 4 different expressions of feeling:
1. Ivylawn College regrets the occurance of racist incidents on its campus. 2. Ivylawn College is embarrased by the occurance of racist incidents on its campus. 3. Ivylawn College feels guilty about the occurance of racist incidents on its campus. 4. Ivylawn College feels shame for the occurance of racist incidents on its campus.
The differences here involve other thoughts about the nature of institutional responsibility, for example. Particualr emotions are thus condensed expressions of ideology (my take, not Spelmans). Of course, novelists have known this since forever. Part of being a great novelist is the ability to make such large structures of consequence turn on such powerful emotions.
> So shame is a name applied to a feeling,
I agree with Doyle's point to this extent: in labrotory-like conditions it's quite possible to simply choose how to identify a feeling, to relabel fear as excitement, for instance.
But in the examples that Spelman gives, the feeling arises in large measure from the very complex of ideas that are entailed in the expression of emotion. The relatively atomistic process that Doyle describes fails to do justice to the solid-state latticework of realworld entailments.
But of course, our understanding of solid-state physics depends on our knowledge of atoms, so I'm hardly dismissing his approach out of hand.
Thus, when Doyle says:
> Doyle
> We in fact have no idea if guilt and shame refer to two different
> states of feeling within the brain. It is more likely that feelings
> are logarithmic scales of response within a neural network to body
> sensation which interpenetrate frontal lobe, parietal lobe, and
> temporal areas appropriate to language production, and proprioception.
I think he's on to something, but it's the wrong thing to bring to bear in this case. What needs to be considered here is the constrasting networks of entailments that flow from the specific invocations of guilt vs. shame. These entailments concern ideology and the state of the world.
I disagree with Doyle's statement:
> the reference to shame and guilt
> are not about feelings, but about taking moral stances in the world
> and using these stances to advance working class interests.
as creating a false dichotomy. Feelings in this case are the inwards manifestions of our moral AND intellectual (ideological) stances in the world.
Furthermore I disagree with the following:
> Moralism
> is rightly rejected by Marxist. This is so because we do not want
> people to as Kelley writes:
>
> Kelley
> Do you really want people to not cross
> the picket line because they'll be jeered at or
> embarrassed and not because they truly understand
> why it's important?
On the grounds that Nathan elucidated quite well in his post -- that emotions, even social coercion may be vital to creating a changed condition in which reason will reach a very different conclusion than it otherwise would.
Or, as Nathan himself puts it:
> In the ideal, you want consent, but consent is a tricky concept
> that may involve threats of social ostracism to even create
> enough power for the oppressed to make a strategy credible
> enough to make sense to those living in fear. Because until
> a protest is successful, many people reject it as (you noted)
> not worth the extra costs when they are already poor. But
> once the boycott is successful (partly because of the social
> sanctions applied), many people may retroactively "consent" to
> the sanctions because the protest was successful.
In short, I think that Doyle's micro-analytical approach holds promise, but ultimately it's got to make sense within Nathan's macro-analytical framework.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"