No,
I haven’t even read the book, much to my wife’s dismay. She loves it.
I
can’t help it if some English chick got to the title first. The fact remains
that life sees a constant interplay between sense and sensibility. And,
ironically, people are not often sensible to this interplay, and the concept
that it might exist offends their sensibilities.
OK,
definitions. By “sense” I mean the realm of our thoughts- our rational
faculties. By “sensibility” I mean the realm of conscience. In a given
situation, some courses of action seem “right” and some seem “wrong”. Even
before we have thought about it, this is so. And in fact when we DO think about
it, these “sensibilities” of what seems right and wrong inform our thinking.
And that is what I mean by sensibility.
Take
some random situation. Say your waitress was rude to you. What is your
immediate response? Some people would tell her off. Some would smile and thank
her. Some of me would sulk or pout. Others would ask her if something was
wrong. In each case, the response isn’t carefully thought-out; it is
more-or-less immediate. And the differing natures of the responses are due to
people’s differing sensibilities. For instance, to some people it seems “right”
to tell her off, because she has no right to talk that way. OK, I hope you get
the idea. That’s the world of sensibility.
Meanwhile,
in the other half of the brain, we have situations that require thought and
decision. We have to go over the facts and the options and puzzle out what to
do. (I hope that generally means puzzling out what is right to
do, but I don’t want to be overly optimistic.)
The
topic, here, is the interplay between sense and sensibility. Often, as we use
our sense to consider options, what we are really doing is making up
rationalizations to excuse or justify the thing that our sensibilities suggest
we do. The fact is that we have already determined to obey our sensibilities in
an unexamined, uncritical way. It’s less common to use our sense to examine our
sensibilities. It’s much harder, and even less common, to overrule our
sensibilities with our rational faculties. That ultimately requires doing
something that feels wrong, because we know it is right.
Am
I alone here, or does it seem to anyone else that a very large segment of
humanity never ever encounters this tension? I mean, by and large I think we
all obey our sensibilities, merely using our sense to excuse ourselves. But it
seems like a lot of people aren’t even aware of the divide. Sensibility is all
that exists to them. If it seems right it is right. No room, time, or
reason for all this silly navel-gazing. It’s better to be forthright, strong,
decisive.
It
seems like such an unexamined life.