A dazzling wealth of stimulating reflection and wise insight. To read
Feeling Our Feelings is to relive one's own early moments of
intellectual awakening, with the all the advantages of age and
experience. Eva Brann proves to be a most steady and enlightening guide
on an inquiry into the relation between life and thought that few have
pursued so thoroughly.--Susan Shell, Department of Political Science,
Boston College
In Feeling Our Feelings, Eva Brann considers what the great
philosophers on the passions and feelings have thought and written about
them. She examines the relevant work of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics,
Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Adam Smith, Hume, Kierkegaard, and
Heidegger, and also includes a chapter on contemporary studies on the
brain. Feeling Our Feelings provides a comprehensive look at this
pervasive and elusive topic.
'Feeling our feelings' comes from the words a little boy called Zeke
said to me some thirty years ago when he was four. I was swinging him in
a park in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and not doing it right. 'Swing me
higher, ' he said, 'I want to feel my feelings.' The phrase stuck with
me; you might say it festered in my mind; it agitated questions: Why do
we all want to feel our feelings, so generally that people 'not in
touch' with them are thought to be in need of therapy? What feeling was
swinging high inducing? Was it an exultation of the body or an
exhilaration of the soul? When he wanted to be feeling his feelings, was
there a difference between the general feeling, the mere consciousness
of being affected, and his particular feelings, the distinguishable
affects?--as, when you sing a song, there is a difference between the
singing done and the song sung--or is there?--Eva Brann, from her
Preface
Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in
Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for fifty years. Brann holds
an M.A. in Classics and a Ph.D. in Archaeology from Yale University. She
is a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal.
