What I've Been Reading

How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs.

Wow! One of the best books I have read this year. It is one of those books which we have to re-read every year to keep our thinking from straying.

John Stuart Mill's defense of the feelings and the imagination has two components.

The first is that brining analytical power to bear a problem is not enough, especially if one's goal is to make the world a better place. Rather, one must have a certain kind of character: one must be certain kind of person, a person who has both the ability and the inclination to take the products of analysis and reassemble them into a positive account, a structure  not just of thought but also of feelings that, when joined to thought, can provide meaningful action.

The second component is this: when your feelings are properly cultivated, when that part of your life is strong and healthy, then your responses to the world will be adequate to what the world is really life. To have your feelings moved by the beauty of a landscape is to respond to that language in the way that it deserves; to have your feelings moved in a very different direction by the sight of people living in abject poverty is to respond to that situation in the way it deserves. The latter example is especially relevant to someone like Mill who wishes to be a social reformer: if your analysis leads you to the conclusion that is it unjust that people suffer in poverty in a wealthy country, but your feelings do not match your analysis, then something has gone awry with you. And it may very well happen that if the proper feelings are not present and imaginatively active, then you will not even bother to do the analysis that would reveal unmistakable injustice. If the feelings are not cultivated the analytical faculties might not function at all.

It is, then for John Stuart Mill, looking back from the end of his life on his youthful sufferings, impossible to draw a line that separates analysis on the one side from feelings on the other and to conclude that only the first side is relevant to thinking. The whole person must be engaged, all the faculties present and accounted for, in order to real thinking to take place. Indeed, this is Mill is what it means to have character: to be fully alive in all parts and therefore ready to perceive the world as it is - and to act responsibly toward it.