reason and feeling: the great divide
There lingers in the zeitgeist an unspoken acceptance that scientists do ‘reason’ and the arts pick up the other stuff. But is that a valid split? And what is its impact on our metaphysical grasp, on our understanding of the way the world works?
This is a theme explored by Alfred North Whitehead and Mary Midgely, amongst others. It shifts us towards a metaphysics of patterning or organism. Moreover, it recognises imagination as the bridge, the transcending integrating factor, fundamental to our ways of knowing, of apprehending such patterns and patterning.
Mary Midgely and a detour from the dominance of analytical philosophy
I’ll start with Mary Midgely. I’ve been reading Metaphysical Animals by Mary Mac Cumnaill and Rachael Wiseman, in which they describe the friendship between four female philosophers studying together in Oxford during the Second World War: Irish Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley.
As Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman describe, these four were there in Oxford at a time when ‘metaphysical speculation’ – a deep and open exploration of the nature of the universe – was being sidelined in relation to logical positivism – a vision of human beings as “efficient calculating machines”. “It was declared” they say, that “questions that were not amenable to scientific investigation were embarrassing muddles”. Logical positivism was seen as a triumph of logic, analysis and hard data over everything that was woolly, subjective, emotional and uncertain.
In contrast, in the war years at Oxford, so they explain – when the philosophy department was mainly peopled by women, European refugees, and conscientious objectors – metaphysical speculation came back to life. There was once again “talk of poetry, transcendence, wisdom and truth”. These four friends were committed to finding ways to do philosophy “in a more engaged, creative and open way”.
After the war, the picture returned of the accomplished philosopher as “free, independent, lonely, powerful and rational” and, as a result, “alienated from his own nature, from the natural world .. and from other humans”. The counter question asked by the four women:
How can we be so sure that such disembodied, analytical thought processes can adequately capture the messy complexity of the living world?
Whitehead, the enfeebling of thought and the rise of organism
A couple of decades earlier than Midgely, Alfred North Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World explores this same theme through exploring the divide between classical science and its counter-narrative, Romanticism. Whitehead outlines how, by the eighteenth century, we had come to see science as purely focused on objectivity and universality – a mechanical science, discoverable through Reason alone. But, for him and others, this aroused unease. Enter the Romantics. The Romantics sensed that this scientific view ignored the aliveness and subtlety of ‘this’ hill or ‘this’ particular experience. Crucial aspects of the world, they felt, were dismissed and ignored. In contrast, says Whitehead, the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth grasps that the whole of nature is involved “in the tonality of this particular experience”. The point is that by focusing on what is the same everywhere, we are dismissing the uniqueness of context, and we are excluding something vital.
Whitehead was particularly interested in how we humans seem able, on the one hand, to espouse the idea of a science of universal determinism and yet, au même temps, see ourselves as “self-determining organisms”. We implicitly assume that the determinacy of scientific realism does not apply to us. Whitehead is highly critical of this irrational split and points out that it allows us uncritically to hold two incompatible beliefs at the same time. For him, this “radical inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts for much that is half-hearted and wavering in our civilisation.” We are disempowered, indeed “enfeebled” by our split. Furthermore, by ignoring inconsistencies, we may be completely blind to core insights and ‘metaphysical truths’ that can only arise through addressing, grappling with, and transcending this separation, this seeming paradoxical disconnect.
Mary Midgley, in Science and Poetry, reaches similar conclusions. She says that this unaddressed divide positions “Feeling and Reason as rival principles waging a war within human life”.
The point I am emphasising is that, when we develop our perspectives relying on Reason alone, we not only risk landing on a partial slice of a view, but one that runs the risk of being flawed and deficient. For Whitehead, seeking to find a metaphysics that resisted accepting this divide led him to the primacy of ‘organism’ – a relational, interwoven patterning of factors present in a particular context – rather than a metaphysics of ‘things’. This was a very radical position to hold in the light of the power accorded to classical physics. And his view was strikingly similar to that emerging from the work of physical chemist Ilya Prigogine. Prigogine wrote Order out of Chaos together with philosopher Isabelle Stengers, and they make explicit the connections of the work on the thermodynamics of ‘open systems’ with the processual views of Whitehead, Bergson and others. The centrality of self-organising patterns – or organisms in the language of Whitehead – is fundamental to Prigogine’s development of complexity science. And Mary Midgley reached this same metaphysical conclusion:
“There are patterns. Organisms all have their relations and their place in a context.”
enter the imagination
Mary Midgely’s next step really interests me. If our metaphysics allows for the reintegration of reason and feeling, then what is our way of knowing? She argues that reason and feeling are “aspects of a single whole that might be best understood by attending to its middle term, imagination”.
The re-enthronement of Imagination as an appropriate and powerful way of knowing is a theme I keep bumping into.
For example, I was entranced to hear Jeannette Winterson talking about One Aladdin Two Lamps, in which she explored the metaphysics underpinning the stories of the Arabian Nights. She made the point that these Eastern stories display a very different worldview from the stories of the West with their focus on heroes and journeys and the triumph of good over evil. The stories in the Arabian nights are, she says, more chaotic, more situational – driven by happenstance and unintended consequences. There is less a sense of direction, or unequivocal moral message, and the protagonists tend to be a more complex mixture of greedy and generous, lucky and unlucky. So that was interesting in relation to my understanding of the cosmology of Daoism and to engaging with the world as complex.
But it got better. Winterson went on to say that such stories, as they are not linear and directional, make more space for the imagination. And her point is that stories can imagine different futures; and stories can inhabit the past, present and future all together and transcend time. To change, she said, “we need new stories which imagine new futures and lessen the hold of the old stories.”
The previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams is also a fan of the imagination. In a talk he gave last year, I wrote down his words:
Imagination, amongst other things, gives a sense of what is not there; it is open to the absent, the silent voice.
To imagine is to invite justice – the imagination reveals the presence of other selves and justice is a side effect of the imagination. It comes about by ‘seeing’ other living beings and leads to the potential for resonance.
In Solidarity, he builds on this theme: To develop empathy requires an imaginative ability to stand “at the point of another’s perspective on the world”. He continues: “Empathy is the imaginative sharing of another’s field of perception.” Without that ability, inviting justice is an idea rather than an unavoidable embodied sense of what is there (an ontological statement – what is) and also what is needed (an issue of axiology – what should be).
conclusion
What am I trying to say? That dividing reason from feeling and the heart is a misleading way of conceiving of the world. This was the insight of philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Mary Midgley. And both concluded that, if we seek to transcend this divide, then pattern or organism become the central metaphysical feature – not universal laws on the one hand, and the particularities of felt sense of ‘this’ place on the other. And this insight – the way the world is best understood as constituted through the patterning of relationships – emerging, stabilising and subsequent dissolving – is central to the processual science of complexity, the science of open systems.
Furthermore, in order to engage with our world – to grapple with patterns that are not fixed, objective and certain, but paradoxical, subjective, ever shifting, and of which we are a part – we need, amongst other things, the imagination. Imagination is the bridge that reintegrates and transcends reason and feeling. The re-empowerment of the imagination – and its role in grasping the present, opening the door to envisaging new futures, empathising with the plight of others – is an idea and practice increasingly needed in today’s troubled times.