thinking, feeling: an introduction

There is a strange separation that goes on when we discuss critical thinking and emotion, as though there is no space for the two to co-exist, as though their purposes are distinct from one another or that one inhibits the other. Amidst the chaos and noise of battle cries that emanate from the increasingly polarised sides of our social landscape, it is becoming harder to find the time to contemplate. Our attention is shortened and the time to respond is now or not fast enough. The space to think through feelings and respond to things critically is being squeezed social moment by social moment. Like our polarised politics, our intellect and emotions have become compartmentalised too. 

The variety of ‘isms’ and ‘ologies’ at our fingertips provides a useful shorthand for groups of thought as well as a space for communities to form on the basis of shared identity markers and values. However, the ease with which we can adopt these ready-made ideologies means we are no longer thinking and formulating our own, or questioning the ideologies we put on so easily. We have begun to take people, ideas and identity at face value or Facebook value. As the airing of our issues, both personal and political, moves increasingly online, we are dealing with only the approximation of a person, idea or identity and jump even quicker into sweeping judgments and generalisations, inevitably finding ourselves in a state of cultural parochialism. 

We are outraged. We are angry. Both are important and necessary tools for social change but should be paired with an air of discernment and an avoidance of creating comic book heroes and villains out of humans. Despite this, critical thinking alone is not the answer. Critical thinking comes with its own energy of inaccessibility: an academic glasses-on-the-end-of-your-nose snootiness that can, at times, feel so detached from the lived experience of that outrage and anger. Feelings are real and powerful and cannot be explained away with academic terminology. There is no point searching for the truth of an issue if we don’t interrogate the true feelings of each other, to understand one another. Emotions are an easily accessible tool in our sensory toolkit; an intuitive and human way of understanding our world around us. It is essential we consult them at every stage of a critical process but also keep in mind the ways they can be flawed and contorted and at times lead us astray from the truth.

This column aims to bridge the widening gap between justifiable emotional responses to social issues and a kind of critical thinking that can so often feel distant from the visceral experience and feeling at the heart of our current cultural divisions. I wish to acknowledge the contradictions at the heart of us and suggest that the way we resolve these contradictions involves critical feeling in order to attempt to understand each other, to circumvent our biases and recouple our emotions and intellect. Thinking, Feeling is about exactly that: a whole lot of thinking paired with a whole lot of feeling and a space to explore all the messy stuff in between. As the gap widens and our polarised cries fall increasingly on deaf ears, it feels necessary that we begin to listen to each other, to think hard about the things we assume about ourselves and others, and to keep our hearts open. Only then might we begin to bridge that gap.