Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People Know

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 34, Number 1, pp. 263-265.

 By Suzanna Smith 

The very title of Eva Brann's book suggests the extent to which "our feelings" is a topic at once familiar and unknown. The title could have been "Feeling Your Feelings" or simply "Feeling Feelings," but she seems to have wanted to stress the fact that the feelings she is concerned with belong to "us." At stake is not the possibility of one feeling shared by all but the many feelings we feel on our own, and occasionally, with others. Still, there is some sense of commonality implied by the use of "our" in Feeling Our Feelings, although not perhaps the sort of anxious sense of commonality that one might feel if one were to read a book called Spending Our Money. Whatever tentative impression of a community of readers (and feelers, as it were) that we might have gleaned from the first part of the title is qualified in the second part, which suggests a distinction between how philosophers and people perceive the feelings. Philosophers think about feelings; people know them. If knowing is the object of thinking, it would seem that the philosophers are not quite people, but that they are aspiring to be more like us in thinking. But if knowing—or thinking that one knows—prevents one from rightly perceiving that one should attempt to know more by thinking, then perhaps it ought be the other way around.

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