Feeling Like It, by Tamar Schapiro

The sense of feeling like it that concerns Tamar Schapiro in this stimulating book is that of inclination: of feeling like a drink, of feeling like giving up, of feeling like staying home on a rainy evening when there is something urgent that needs doing. Her focus is on ‘the moment of drama’ when we are influenced by such inclinations, and have to choose whether to act on them or not: whether to take the ‘high road’, where we resist, or the ‘low road’, where we succumb. Shapiro characterizes the relevant inclinations by means of three features (p. 31): As she sees it, there have been two traditional accounts of these inclinations. One, the ‘brute force view’, treats them simply as external forces that act upon us. For Schapiro, this position works as a foil, since she thinks that no serious thinker has actually held it. The traditional alternative Schapiro terms the ‘practical thinking view’. This is bound to be an inclusive approach, given the wide range of thinkers that Schapiro wants to place in it, but the central idea is that the inclination works through, rather than against, your practical thinking: in some sense the decision to yield to the inclination is the upshot of that reasoning. I wasn’t entirely convinced that this class should be as inclusive as Schapiro makes it. For instance, her reason for including Hobbes is that he held that all action must start with the imagination (pp. 58-9). But all that Hobbes means by this is that we have a representation of the thing that we desire. Our desires are thus targeted, unlike, say, digestion or the circulation of the blood; but shouldn’t they be understood as targeted brute forces? There is not much practical thinking there. Perhaps the point is largely terminological, but it does put pressure on the issue of quite how we should understand the thinking that is involved in practical thinking.