Title and cover news (!) plus research gleanings from my chapter on emotion
Feelings come and feelings go, and feelings are ... a good and useful part of our created selves.
Hi all, and a special hello to new sign-ups who’ve arrived since I was last in touch.
This week I made it to a very exciting part of the book creation process, which is filling out a long questionnaire the publisher sends over before they begin working on marketing strategy, the title, and cover design. Marketing is super important, certainly, but it’s the titling and design development I really enjoy. I pitched about half a dozen title and subtitle ideas and now am waiting to hear back.
For the cover, I suggested a text-heavy design with bold fonts. I like these new and forthcoming covers and passed them along as examples of the feel I have in mind:
Part of these covers’ appeal to me is the subtler use of red, white, and/or blue—it communicates a political angle, I think, but avoids pigeonholing the book as a policy text or partisan rant.
All that said, it’s wholly possible the final cover will look nothing like these books, and that will be fine, too. I don’t think I gave such specific input on the cover of A Flexible Faith, and I was happy with how it turned out. Part of writing a book is trusting that the graphic designer, like the editor, knows things you don’t know and that the book will be better for that knowledge.
Once we have a title and cover finalized, I’ll share them here first (please tell your friends about this show). In the meantime, I’ve got an article and a video for you now.
An article, excerpted
This week, I’m working on my chapter about the role of emotion in knowing. As the subhead of this note suggests, I think feelings have legitimate role in the processes of acquiring knowledge and assessing truth claims. In fact, I think the strict division between reason and emotion we imagine in ourselves is significantly that: imaginary.
Moreover, emotion is not—as Christians are sometimes wont to suggest—a bad part of us to be suppressed and ignored, or somehow more fallen than the rationale parts of us, or more opposed to God. Growing up, I often heard a rhyming proverb: “Feelings come and feelings go, and feelings are deceiving. My warrant is the Word of God—naught else is worth believing.” I’ll make this case at much greater length in the book, of course, but in short, I think the rhyme is wrong in its categorical rejection of feelings. Our capacity for emotion is given to us by God, and we shouldn’t set it thus in opposition to Scripture (or reason).
One source I’ve found very helpful while working on this chapter is this 1989 paper from a philosopher named Alison Jagger. Here are a few (of many) insightful portions:
Within the Western philosophical tradition, emotions have usually been considered potentially or actually subversive of knowledge. From Plato until the present, with a few notable exceptions, reason rather than emotion has been regarded as the indispensable faculty for acquiring knowledge . […]
[R]eason was taken to be objective and universal [… while] emotions [were portrayed] as non-rational and often irrational urges that regularly swept the body, rather as a storm sweeps over the land. The common way of referring to the emotions as the 'passions' emphasized that emotions happened to or were imposed upon an individual, something she suffered rather than something she did. […]
This derogatory Western attitude toward emotion, like the earlier Western contempt for sensory observation, fails to recognize that emotion, like sensory perception, is necessary to human survival. Emotions prompt us to act appropriately, to approach some people and situations and to avoid others, to caress or cuddle, fight or flee. Without emotion, human life would be unthinkable. Moreover, emotions have an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value. Although not all emotions are enjoyable or even justifiable, as we shall see, life without any emotion would be life without any meaning. Within the context of Western culture, however, people have often been encouraged to control or even suppress their emotions. Consequently, it is not unusual for people to be unaware of their emotional state or to deny it to themselves and others. […]
Accepting that appropriate emotions are indispensable to reliable knowledge does not mean, of course, that uncritical feeling may be substituted for supposedly dispassionate investigation. Nor does it mean that the emotional responses of women and other members of the underclass are to be trusted without question. Although our emotions are epistemologically indispensable, they are not epistemologically indisputable. Like all our faculties, they may be misleading, and their data, like all data, are always subject to reinterpretation and revision. Because emotions are not presocial, physiological responses to unequivocal situations, they are open to challenge on various grounds. They may be dishonest or self-deceptive, they may incorporate inaccurate or partial perceptions, or they may be constituted by oppressive values. Accepting the indispensability of appropriate emotions to knowledge means no more (and no less) than that discordant emotions should be attended to seriously and respectfully rather than condemned, ignored, discounted or suppressed.
Epistemic secession, caught on camera
I decided against explicitly referencing this video in my book, but I’m sharing it here because I find it fascinating. I want to be very clear: I’m not sharing this to laugh at these people. I don’t think this is a laughing matter, nor do I think they are anything but sincere and even well-intended. (Sincerity and good intentions aren’t enough to put you in the right, but we shouldn’t deny their existence even if we encounter them in service to wrong beliefs or actions.)
The interviewees here are in a state of what Jonathan Rauch (whose older book on knowledge, Kindly Inquisitors, I recommended a few emails ago) calls “epistemic secession” (in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, which I expect to recommend a few emails in the future). Rauch defines this phenomenon as “not just confusion and disorientation but a cultic alternative reality.”
Epistemic secession goes beyond the spin that’s always part of politics to wholesale mental fabrication of a new world—one in which, for the folks in this video, former President Donald Trump is still actually, secretly the ruling president and could publicly reassume the functions of the office at any moment. Of course, diehard Trump supporters aren’t the only people who epistemically secede, nor is the secession always political.
There’s no easy “fix” for this. You can’t force people out of epistemic secession if that’s where they want to be. But neither, I think—if the secessionist is someone you love—can you simply accept it as a permanent state. That tension and conviction are a big part of why I’m writing this book.
That’s it for me today! You can reply here or on Twitter if you like—I’d love to hear from you.
Best,
Bonnie