And how do you feel about that, I ask my friend.
The question is a running half-joke between us, glib with the option of taking it seriously. We’re both good thinkers, analytical, argumentative, quick-witted at the business end of a lecture theatre, discovering in our fifties that this kind of intelligence isn’t always the same as knowing how to live with big feelings. (As ever, call it menopause if you must but there are much more interesting and generative ways to think about acquiring something akin to wisdom.)
I don’t think I’m alone among thinking, feeling adults in haziness about the distinction between the two. I remember another friend, years ago, insisting that thinking and feeling were the same thing, which I knew then and know now isn’t true partly because two words in the same language never mean the same thing. Think of shy – hesitant – reserved, or red – crimson – scarlet: there’s no such thing as a synonym. “Think” and “feel” are big words, stable across centuries and languages; obviously there are distinct meanings.
Sometimes it’s plain. We might have feelings about politics and those feelings might determine our thoughts, but thinking about, say, long division is different from having feelings about it. I used to feel panic-stricken, confused, fearful in maths lessons, while on a good day I could think about straight columns and subtraction. The former got in the way of the latter but they were different processes.
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The difficulty is partly that “to feel” works so broadly across physical sensation and emotional subtlety. Feeling stiff in our muscles is qualitatively different from feeling excitement. It doesn’t work to imagine that feeling is bodily and thinking is intellectual, even if that mind/body distinction had any validity in real human experience. Excitement comes from hope and expectation, and shows up in our heartbeats, breathing and digestion. Hope sounds disembodied, but it clearly isn’t: thought or feeling?
There is the same blurriness around anger, fear, love, and also tiredness, appetites (of all kinds), disgust. Without thought and knowledge, these emotions which are also physical sensations could not exist.
All tried and tested philosophical ground, and unsurprisingly I have nothing new to add, except to observe that recently I am trying a new trick: is it possible to care a little less about what other people think without a lessening of attention to how other people feel?
Like many women in midlife, I am losing at least some of my interest in other people’s judgment of my choices. I am dressing more comfortably and more eccentrically, second-guessing others’ opinions of my behaviour with less rigour, maybe beginning to do just a little more of what I feel like doing and a little less of what I think other people think I ought to do. This strikes me as progress, liberation.
[ Let’s not leave it until we’re old to wear purpleOpens in new window ]
But I do not aspire to care less for other people’s feelings. In some ways, the declining self-consciousness that comes with caring less about others’ opinions seems to come with increased attention to their emotional states. The most electrically present and responsive people are often those who are least bothered about other people’s judgments, because anxiety about how we are seen gets in the way of seeing others. Perhaps the less we worry about what people think, the more attentive we can be to how they feel?
I think of John Berger’s famous observation that “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Fifty years after Ways of Seeing was published, we might expand that idea beyond binary gender: people who have to watch themselves have less opportunity to look up and out. Self-consciousness is the opposite of paying attention.
[ A reader tried to needle me by scoffing at knitting. I was intriguedOpens in new window ]
As Berger saw, watching ourselves is a structural requirement more than an individual choice. People with less power have to do more of it. The less safe you feel or think yourself, the more watchful you will be; the more watchful you are, the less everyone’s feelings matter.
So I think (feel? no, think) maybe feelings are what we need and want to mind in ourselves and each other; what thrive in safety and relationship; where mind and body are, as they should be, indistinguishable. And perhaps – as my disastrous experience of maths lessons suggests – feelings are the ground in which thoughts grow. You can’t think long division, or poetry or plumbing or philosophy, while you feel afraid.
