More on the inner life

Will Duquette is a professed lay Dominican (something I am working towards). He has some good thoughts on the inner life at the following link.

The inner life: feelings

Feelings, for all my life I'll feel it.
I wish I've never met you, girl;
You'll never come again.

 So, is that last line a lament or a threat?

 If you're too young to remember those horrid lyrics you should consider yourself blessed. If you can't help yourself, you can find the song they come from here.

Speaking strictly musically, it's actually a pretty good song. It's the lyrics that make it abominable. And, odd as this may sound Morris Albert is, philosophically, in the same camp as Dante (maybe) and Proust (definitely) about feelings. That is to say, he thinks of feelings as things that happen to us. Dante, in case you are wondering, considered involuntary love to be superior to cultivated affection and Proust thought involuntary memories of the past to be superior to willful attempts of "remembrance of things past" (which is why he hated that title when it was applied to the English translation of his novel).

It's an open question as to whether Dante really believed this or whether it, and his supposed love for Beatrice, were just a literary convention. I think he was too smart to really believe it or really love Beatrice myself. To really believe it seems to me to be a modern problem; it seems to be, as Gottlob Frege put it, a disease in thought peculiar to the modern mind.

In any case, what Morris Albert and Proust share is a belief that there are authentic mental stirrings that are not result of our efforts and that these are superior—even if they cause us pain—to things we consciously try to achieve because they are not sought after.

I think that's just wrong. Feelings are not something that happens to me; they are my reaction to what happens to me. I can control my reactions. I can't control them perfectly. It is going to be difficult for me to control my feelings if I really have to catch the 8:15 bus and the driver doesn't see me at the stop and heads right by. On the other hand, the ancients judged men by how well they handled such situations; men were expected to respond in a controlled way when sentenced to death, for example.

That may seem like so much nonsense now but I believe that controlling your feelings makes you and your life better than they otherwise would be. It not only does no good to get all worked up over the missed bus, it decreases the quality of my life to do so. We're told the opposite. We're told to open up and let our feelings out.

But letting anger out just makes you unhappy. Your pulse races, your body releases adrenalin and you get all tense. You don't feel better for doing it. You feel worse. And people who have to deal with you feel worse too because you become difficult to deal with.

Look at Morris Albert again, a woman has left him and he wishes he'd never met her. Is that healthy? He is now going to treat his entire relationship with this woman as something negative. There are no good memories? There are no lessons learned that he can apply to future relationships? The woman he once loved is so utterly worthless that it would have been better to have never met her? That's a stupid, self-destructive way of considering a past relationship.

The feelings we have about a failed relationship are within our control. We can shape them and mold them; we can train ourselves to respond in certain ways.

Self-analysis is useless for this. What, if anything, would self analysis mean? Notice that any attempt to describe self analysis requires us to use metaphors that do not, in fact, correspond to any real activity: "look deep withing myself", "turn inward", and so forth. What we can know and what we can control are our outward responses. To the extent that we talk about inward responses at all, we do so in a negative way: "stay calm", "don't sit around mulling about it", "don't get worked up".

What we really have when we have feelings

One of the more telling linguistic shifts of modern times has been the substitution of words meaning feelings for words meaning belief. Jennifer says, "I feel like you don't trust me?" As many have pointed out before me, the primary consequence of that shift is to make these statements incontestable. The assumption is that you cannot be mistaken about your own feelings. If I am in pain, then I am in pain and you can't say I'm not.

And there is something to that. Randy may respond to Jennifer by saying he is jealous, and he probably is jealous (although people do lie about such things sometimes). But it should be reasonable to ask whether Jennifer and Randy are entitled to feel the way they do. It's telling that Jennifer doesn't want to have an argument about the facts. Did her actions cause Randy to suspect her? It's equally telling that Randy wants to talk about his feelings of jealousy rather than discuss what actions of Jennifer's might justify his jealousy. What both are trying to do is to avoid acknowledging that their feelings are the result of a thought process. Each has considered the others actions and has reached conclusions about what the other is thinking or doing.

Randy notices that Jennifer is always away and that her absences aren't always explained, that the explanations she does give are vague and perhaps they sometimes don't stand scrutiny. Randy knows this doesn't necessarily mean Jennifer is cheating but he wonders and it shows. This feeling isn't something that just happened to Randy. It took sustained effort on his part to arrive at this feeling.

Jennifer, likewise, knows that things she is doing are causing Randy to wonder. It's not some bizarre, unexpected discovery that he is beginning to wonder what she is up to. Let's stipulate, for the sake of the argument, that Jennifer is not actually cheating on Randy. All she is doing is beginning to develop an independent life away from him. The argument could go either way. What is important to note, however, is that in neither case are their feelings something that just happened to them. Their feelings are the product of the way they have analyzed the actions of the other and of how they have responded.

In both cases, it would be entirely reasonable to ask if these feelings were justified.

One of the telling things about modern life is that we tend not to do that. We tend to do just the opposite. When we train people to interact with others, we teach them to validate their feelings. We teach them to say, "You must be frustrated", or "I understand your anger" because we don't challenge people's right to really have their feelings. When couples see a therapist they are encouraged to discuss the way they feel and not to discuss what they do or don't like about what the other did. Ironically, liberal democracy, which was built on the right to free expression of political and religious beliefs, now suppresses freedom of expression of fact and opinion because of the effect this expression might have on the feelings of others.

This is turning us into a bunch losers and it's undermining the basis of our society. There isn't much we can do about the first but we can at least stop pretending that we don't control our own feelings and start taking responsibility for them.

Some thoughts on the inner life

The inner life is a subject that I have very strong views about. In the past, these strong views have inspired some pushback. I've been rethinking the matter. The following is an attempt to work some stuff out in writing.

I've long been of the opinion that a person would do well to function as if there were no such thing as an inner life. It's not that I deny we have inner feelings and thoughts and so forth. I get suspicious when we call this jumble of inner stuff a separate "life". My suspicion has always been that if you take care of the outer, the inner will resolve itself.

Years ago, a woman I knew admitted to me that there was nothing she could learn about a man by having sex with him that she couldn't have learned by studying his behaviour outside of bed carefully. She admitted this rather ruefully as she had learned this, too late, after spending the best decades of her life taking the first approach, that is having sex with men as a way of getting to know them instead of really getting to know them before deciding to have sex with them. My beliefs about the inner life have tended to be pretty much the same: we spent far too much time focusing on our inner life in the mistaken belief that doing so will improve our outer life when the opposite approach is more fruitful.

I think we make two deceptive moves when we think about our inner life (I'm cribbing all of this from Wittgenstein.). The first is to imagine that it is a thing that we should be able to analyze. Here it is:

Except that is too plain and obvious. If someone asks, "Where and what is your inner life?", you can just point at it. Okay, but play the game and actually do it. Put your finger on the screen right where the box is and say, "This is my inner life". I know, you want to say, "But it isn't really my inner life." I'll get to that. For the time being, play the game. If your inner life really were in the box above, you could just point at it and say, "Here it is."

Okay, let's get back to that concern. The problem isn't, we want to say, simply that my inner life isn't those words in a box. The problem is that it couldn't be. My inner life is this very mysterious thing. It is not easily accessible. It has an opaque black box around it.

 And that's odd. I mean, that should strike us as odd. Most of the time, my inner life is easily accessible. I have feelings, fantasies, secret thoughts, hidden shame, suppressed desires. They're all there and I know about them. If anything, I spend more time making sure my inner life stays inner: I don't want my friend to know that I am actually bored by his problems and am only listening because I want to be a good friend; I don't want my boss to know I think this team-building initiative is a pile of crap; I don't want my women friends to know how curious I am about what it would be like to see and touch their breasts.

Why is it that the inner life suddenly becomes an immensely complex and difficult thing when we try to talk about it? Part of the answer is that the examples I give above don't seem good enough to us. If, like me, you grew up in a good liberal household where people talked about New Yorker short stories with reverence, you will want to say that the above examples are indeed part of the inner life but that the real inner life, the one worth having and knowing about, is (or should be) much richer and more valuable than that.

This is where I take a slightly different tack than Wittgenstein. His approach was to show us, through countless reminders and puzzles, that the way we talk about the inner life is incoherent. We put it in a box, he would say, and we claim that this box is inaccessible to our senses. You can't see, taste, smell, hear or touch it directly. The only way to get at it is ... well, what? Introspection? Freudian analysis? Some sort of direct experience that only works with the inner life? Wittgenstein, with incredible patience, works through each and every one of these examples and shows us that every attempt to spell out this rich inner life ends in confusion.

But there is also a deeply troubling moral aspect that arises when we dismiss the mundane inner life we all know about to focus on something else that we claim is supposedly rich and wonderful and would radically change and improve our lives if only we would take the time to really get in touch with it. If this inner life, this thing that is there and seems terribly important even though you can't touch it or see it and can't prove it exists is beginning to sound sort of like God, then you are beginning to see the problem.

Here is why I have begun to change my mind about the inner life. If we look at someone like Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose feast is today, we get a very different approach to the inner life. Aquinas didn't seek a richer inner life but a more impoverished one. He wanted to empty his inner life in order to make room for God. I've never tried that, not honestly anyway.