I really like this apologia by Justin Good for the objectivity (and thus, potentially, for the truth-carrying capacity) of feelings.

4. Beauty is a feeling, but feelings are objective and more precise than “thinking.” Feelings are not irrational reactions, but highly evolved ways of gathering information, knowledge and meaning from the environment. What we call thinking – linguistically-mediated inferential reasoning or reflection – is cumbersome in comparison to the countless ways our mind/body reads, and is read, by the ecosystem. Information is everywhere and there are countless ways of picking it up. The feeling of being grounded and centered which people often experience when finally alone with nature is not “subjective” but rather a keen cognitive awareness of the geometry of life around us.

The context here, of course, is the esthetics of windfarms, but I believe the notion of the power of feelings to mediate objective truth has other applications as well. Our discussion group has been reading Karen Armstrong's A History of God, and one of the foundational polarities in that book is between theology as rational and theology as experiential/intuitive. Armstrong wants us to conclude that the rationalist project as applied to our understanding of God (a primarily Western way of apprehending the sacred) always comes up short, whereas religious experience recurs perpetually and rarely fails to satisfy. Relilgious experience is too often dismissed as "merely subjective." Good's comment reminds us, with Pascal, that "the heart has its reasons that reason does not understand."

It was a beautiful morning, the campus was nearly empty, ornamental plantings were in bloom, cars on College Avenue were few, and I took advantage of the opportunity to try out my new camera. The Lawrence campus is especially pretty in spring, and it's fun to try to capture a bit of that beauty in photos.

The camera is working pretty well, don't you think!

Lawrence Memorial Chapel
Originally uploaded by hirbyfam.