Feeling Is Knowing
I just finished reading the latest book by an author who has really influenced my thinking about knowing:
Antonio Damasio.
The book I just finished is called Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious.
Way back when, Damasio really helped me frame and write my doctoral dissertation, which was on how teachers know in moments of spontaneity (which is every moment, of course). I loved him because he claimed that knowing is fundamentally embodied, not something that happens just in our brains. (Brains being, of course, part of our bodies.)
He contributed to my rather unusual theory of learning. For that I am ever grateful to him.
This latest book is super interesting because Damasio claims to have solved the hard problem of consciousness.
Huzzah!!!
In so doing, he reiterates the central role feelings and emotions play in our being conscious, which is to say in our knowing (and in our knowing that we know — our consciousness). Feelings and emotions being the signals that inform us about our internal state and the external world.
Here’s something he wrote that caught my particular attention:
We only come to know that we know — which really only means that we only come to know that each of us, individually, is in the possession of knowledge — because we are simultaneously informed about two other aspects of reality. One aspect concerns the states of our ancient chemical and visceral interior, expressed in the hybrid process called feeling. Another aspect is the spatial reference provided by our musculoskeletal interior, especially the stable frame that anchors the edifice of our selfhood. (p. 152)
By “hybrid” Damasio means “at home in both body and brain” (p. 7) — meaning responsive to internal and external stimuli. “This hybrid condition,” Damasio claims, “may help explain why there is a profound distinction but no opposition between feeling and reason, why we are feeling creatures that think and thinking creatures that feel. We go through life feeling or reasoning or both, as required by the circumstances” (p. 7).
In other words, as human organisms, we are
all brilliant.
In even other words, consciousness, or knowing that we know — which is something we want our students to do, right? — depends on feelings (including emotions) and bodies in space. Could we say, then, roughly, that learning depends on reason, certainly, but also feelings, emotions, and movement?