Toward a Sensuous, Suffering, and Passionate Materialism
In his 2022 book, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, theoretical physicist and mathematician Leonard Mlodinow argued that “emotion shapes virtually every thought we have.” Antonio Damasio’s neuroscience research, first published in his 1994 book Descartes’ Error and in many books thereafter, has shown that the distinction between feelings and emotions is, fundamentally speaking, not scientifically accurate.
What’s more, turning to Columbia University historian William V. Harris in his 2001 book, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, perpetuating the idea that reason had to control feelings and emotions “was for the most part in the interest of all who benefited from the smooth functioning of the state or the family.” To put it another way, the necessity of supposedly masculine “reason” to control the chaos of “emotion” has been used to justify hetero-patriarchy, class oppression, white supremacy, and colonization for thousands of years.
