Becoming a whole thinker

It's easy to assume that emotions have little place, if any, in thinking well. After all, an argument based on "I just feel this is the way it is" isn't much of an argument at all. So should we check our emotions at the door?

To continue in How to Think, Alan Jacobs uses the example of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. He was raised by his father to be a thinker, no emotions necessary with a true Brit stiff upper lip. But as brilliant as Mill was, he reached a point of mental collapse. What rescued him from the brink was a volume of Wordsworth's poetry in which he experienced a delight that had been missing for so long.

Mill's writes "the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings... when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives." Jacobs interprets this as "The analytical mind constantly separates, divides, distinguishes until its whole mental world lies in pieces around it. And where will that mind acquire the energy it needs to put things back together?"¹

This is why we need both - the rational mind and the affections of the heart. We need to be whole people who think carefully but also feel deeply if we are able to take the "products of analysis and reassemble them into a positive account, a structure not just of thought but also of feeling that, when joined to thought, can produce meaningful action."²

But this makes perfect sense. Knowledge can be a very useful tool, but when it is wielded without compassion, it can wound. I've been on the receiving end, but I've used knowledge tactlessly and carelessly too. But when there is an actively engaged heart behind the mind, knowledge can be used wisely to help and not hurt. In fact, the heart may motivate the mind to inquire and study in the first place.

Jacobs ends this section of the book with a definition of thinking which is worth considering:

"This is thinking: The power to be finely aware and richly responsible. We just need to learn how to be more aware, how to act more responsibly."³

1. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, Alan Jacobs, Currency Books, 2017, pg. 42.
2. Ibid. pg. 43.
3. Ibid. pg. 49.