PHIL5588 · Philosophy

Varieties of Feeling - G/UG

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

Philosophical, literary, artistic, and religious traditions are sources for descriptions and evocations of many kinds of profound and humanly compelling feelings that are not reducible to the labeled emotions. There are, for example, feelings of guidance and direction; feelings of discernment and heart-knowing; feelings of reverence and aesthetic contemplation; and feelings of communion. Feelings often play a role in ethical decision-making, as well as in love. Between the aridity of some forms of intellectualism, on the one side, and the facile advice to trust the gut and the immediacy of whatever intuition appears, on the other, there is a powerful realm of human feeling that calls out for rigorous inquiry.To ignore this realm is to overlook one way to cultivate depths of our humanity.Great literature is often a haven for acknowledging this differentiated realm of feeling that philosophy can benefit from considering. The ancient pillars of the Western discourse on Love, PlatosSymposiumandthe BiblicalSong of Songs,suggest the vastness and potential goodness of feeling. The tripartite soul as conceived by Plato and Aristotle, in which the rational is assigned the task of supervising, controlling or persuading the spirited and appetitive parts, will be respectfully fathomed as a prelude to considering many refinements, qualifications and challenges to this hierarchy granting dominance to rationality. The era of Shakespeare, Cervantes and Montaigne issues one challenge; the romanticism of Wordsworth, Keats and Blake another; and a burgeoning body of philosophical and literary materials on feeling in the 20thcentury extends the unfolding of this formidable ancient conception. As the plenitude and variety of feelings are acknowledged, how must ethics be reconceived?