Feelings De-throned
I don't understand emotional life.
That's a sentence I've uttered many times in my adult life, and my confusion has always boiled down to a frustrating realization that in many instances, it simply doesn't matter what you feel because a given course of action is determined and right, and to do otherwise (because you feel like it) is to court foolishness, if not outright moral disaster. And yet, given my particular personality type, (MBTI - INFP for those who might know about Myers-Briggs), my preference for giving weight to feeling states as I assess the life information coming at me puts me in a particular bind when it comes to deciding on wise courses of action.
In other, simpler words, it is easy to be ruled by what I call feeling states. (I could just as easily say 'feelings,' but the notion of feelings creating a 'state of being' gives it more force, and, I think, is more accurate.) I think perhaps now I am re-phrasing the difficulty I started with, changing it from I don't understand emotional life to the more honest I don't understand why my feelings aren't primary. Which is perhaps most honestly said like this: I don't understand why what I want is not central to the unfolding of my life or worse yet, Why am I not the most important thing around?
All the above falls into the category of things my wife wonders about like this: "Why do you tell people these things about yourself?"
Dallas Willard argues that our age has bought into David Hume's claim that "reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions." (Willard, Renovation of the Heart, p. 153). As I was praying this morning, a phrase came to mind regarding all of this. "The emotions are not primary." Which is a very different thing that saying "emotions don't matter" or "what you feel isn't important." Obviously, feelings and emotional states are a deep part of who we are, and to repress or bury feelings can be as disastrous as anything else.
But in the divided nature of our hearts, it is hitting me with new force that intelligence and emotion each have roles to play in the unfolding drama of spirit and will and action--indeed, in the spiritually forming life of the disciple of Jesus. We need to recognize that the spirit of the age we live in is to invest emotional life with oracle-like power so that our feelings states are perceived to be the wisest guides to truth we have.
Simply put, I don't think feeling states are the wisest guides to truth...not at all.
Then what? What can be more primary to my existence and experience than how I feel? I'm tempted to say, "What I think," but that simply puts me out of one camp into another.
But here's a question that I need to research and reflect on: How many times did Jesus base his action on what he felt in a given moment? I know that he did, but when and why, and how did it impact his overall commitment to his clearly stated goal, "to do the will of the Father?"
This post is too long as it is. But to relate all this to the artistic process, as we know, artistic insight often happens in flashes, mixtures of emotional and thoughtful realizations that suggest work almost immediately. But then comes the long work of the doing, the long hard middle, which is far more orderly than the word "passion" suggests. In these stages, to be ruled by how you feel (which is often pretty lousy), is to end up with little that resembles the power of the initial vision.
So what is primary?
That's the question, isn't it?
9:23:50 AM
