Values and Feelings

On a traditional view wisdom, dealing with what is certain, gives us the moral order, and prudence, dealing with the variability of contingent events, has to implement what is right, and among the contingent events would be feelings. At the same time devotion, surely a matter of feeling, was highly prized, but one should be prepared to cope with dryness – a lack of feeling. At the same time a continuous lack of feeling was seen as problematic.

Modern psychology recognises a complete lack of moral feeling as psychopathic, an illness of a sort, and so recognises a substrate of feelings as necessary to psychological health. At the same time it is recognised that feelings themselves can be disordered and Karl Rogers’ counselling method would bring about a situation where they are recognised, named, understood and appropriately dealt with.

Lonergan describes thought without feelings as Shakespeare’s “pale cast of thought” and describes feelings as the mass and momentum of our living. At the same time I think that modern life tends to occupy itself with a set of replaceable functions so that personality is largely irrelevant to function and feelings are in abeyance. In terms of mass and momentum perhaps many are half alive. Recognising the situation some may feel alienation and so set the ground for a different sort of future.

There is a development of feelings which may be crushed out or which may go too far and lead to sentimentality and the stars being God’s daisy chain. One may disparage what others already possess and so harm your own development. You may focus on personal attainment in one area so that you lose sympathy and the capacity to relate.

One may claim of feelings that they seek expression. The lover writes poems or does a tap dance. The soldier before battle tests his weapons once again. The penitent seeks absolution. The rapist awaits his chance. Those who love purely catch a glimpse of God and worship.

Lonergan claims that values are apprehended in feelings. At the basis of apprehending the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value is trust and belief. We have an empathy which sets our feelings in resonance with others. Believing others we ask why and if the others explain well we are set on a path of intelligent appropriation of values, of “things that matter”.

We are stirred too by the fine example of others, a leader or maybe a figure from the past like Lawrence of Arabia. I suspect though that the feelings that promote values also arise from within. Man is not under the immediate impulse of instinct like other animals but Oetinger the Swabian pietist thought instincts developed gradually to form an interpretative structure which he identified with Lord Shaftesbury’s “commonsense” – the sense that makes community. For Oetinger this was the sense that allowed a true interpretation of Scripture. Here we come upon a supernatural instinct which the Catholic Church recognises, “think with the Church” but equally, “feel with the Church” – “sentire cum ecclesia”.

The fact of feelings is to do with the fact of bodiliness, so at rest feelings are very basic, such as being cold, or tired or hungry, or comfortable, energetic and replete. We are made though for bodily self transcendence in family love, in love for our people (witnessed to by the soldier, but expressed in countless other ways: “love your neighbour as yourself”). Our relationship with our God in the Christian religion is also bodily, though not only bodily. So Simon Peter finds himself being directly quizzed “Do you love me?” His answer affects the heart of Christ as well as expressing his own. At the end game which lifts us to Heaven, we find our emotions totally involved in the self bestowal we call love.

Emotions then are not confined biological purpose but escort our living in its technical achievements, its social developments, its cultural developments and in its religious developments. St John of the Cross in his dark night of the soul has darkened the world around him but his heart, his emotions are totally involved with the unseen God who works within him.

Lonergan is sometimes seen as a dry as dust thinker, but actually he places the body with its neural systems at the base of all our conscious performance and our conscious performance involves the body and feeling all the way to the self surrender and discovery which is love.

Bodily neural life is organised by the psyche which as such is an unconscious organising power which shapes up what we deal with in consciousness in the way of images and feelings. As the psyche is higher than the neural system, so intentionality is higher than the psyche. As the psyche depends on the neural so intentionality depends on the psyche. In all that we do we are feeling about it. In all that we do we have imaginative equipment at work, particularly, I think one should point out, words. A damaged psyche will limit intentional performance so there is dramatic bias and dramatic conversion which might actually be rather a long and tedious affair dealing maybe with something long forgotten and deliberately forgotten. Actually as Neitsche who went mad pointed out for our sanity there are some things we should deliberately forget, I think in this sane utterance of a later madman, we gain the clue that though the psyche is unconscious and shapes our conscious potentialities as to images, words, feelings it is not immune to influence from our conscious performance. If our psyche is damaged some way, it is through our conscious performance that we might hope to heal it. It is healthy to see any conversion as a long term process, even life long, and this applies to psychic conversion too and perhaps above all.

Lonergan uses the “operators” to describe the movement from sense, to intelligence, to reasonableness, to value laden responsibility and he uses the term quasi-operators to describe the imaginative and verbal and emotional concomitance of facts which keep us interested when thinking about something, which keep us detached from making a conclusion when considering all the evidence, which give us energy and prudence when deciding and performing.

The neural system and the psyche remind us we are bodily and they, at the culmination of the process of development, show us that the goal of love is not some abstract definition but includes a bodily and emotional self donation. We have to keep coming down to the fact that psychically we are bodily and limited human beings capable of but one course of action. When it comes to love the quasi operators are often more important than the operators. This of course can be a cause of folly whether the love is divine, or familial, or for a people and mankind.

When there is a choice to be made, there is often a “wrenching” for part of our emotional love life has to die. You can only watch one programme on TV – or if you switch back and forth you miss something of each. I loved Economics but when the priesthood called, I had to get into a quite different realm of studies – I had, trusting in God, to let things go. A person is in love with two people but can only marry one – there has to be a letting go, and not quite as detached as that of St Thomas More who married the older sister because he did not want to upset her by marrying the younger. A middle aged man feels young again in the company of his secretary – he has to let the temptation die if he is to stay faithful to his wife. The fact that there are values to be upheld mean that there is wrenching to be borne. This is in large measure the meaning of the cross we have to bear if our life is to be an intelligible offering to the Lord (St Ignatius) “If you love Me, keep my commandments”.

So while values arise in feelings, genuine values also have the task of directing the emotional life in a way which is worthy. Fr Lonergan sees the Marian dogmas as helpful here. He sees the main body of dogmas as “The Church making an act of faith and so expressing her faith” when it is threatened as it was threatened by the Arian heresy in the early fourth century. He sees the Marian dogmas, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption as guiding the devotional life of the Christian away from sin and to the hope of Heaven.
Feelings are the Mass and Momentum of our living whence may arise disvalues as well as values. The intellectual life under its own norms and with the help of faith is purified from error and moved to the truth including the truth of values. Feelings too are typically in need of purification if we are wholeheartedly to pursue the good.