I think I’ve become a feeling-type-in-training. It’s annoying to be a beginner, to have to bungle things, and always, necessarily, in front of at least one other person. It’s like learning a foreign language or karate.

When you’re an “objective” rationalist you can explain other people’s emotions away as subjective and irrational. Give up that little baseless prejudice, you realize there is in fact a better and worse to interactions that has little to do with easily argued they are.

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Does this midlife development represent a reversal of my old convictions? Not at all. It is a continuous development from my old position, which led from a monistic conception of The Truth which is discovered rationally, to pluralistic truths which can humbly coexist in semi-rational relation to an inaccessible Truth, to a social conception of thought, which replaces rationality and logic — which governs thinkability, but not reality itself — with reason, which is using thinking as a bridge between the thinker and the social and natural world. Once you arrive at this point, you start to understand what feeling types seem born knowing: that each person has one’s own experience, and that experience is at least as real as a brick hurtling toward your head, thrown by an indignant anti-solipsist.

And I hope feeling types will see this and ask: What’s the analogous experience for a feeling type? What’s thinking-type-in-training look like? Hint: It’s one thing to respect another person’s experience and its another to grasp its inner logic… Can you really claim to love someone if you don’t really try to know who that person is? And can you really claim to have tried to know who a person is if you haven’t tried to understand how that person thinks about things? And how is that accomplished except by trying (even unsuccessfully) to follow their thoughts?

In the end, thinking and feeling are inseparable.

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Perhaps this is why the androgyne is a traditional symbol of unity and unification on either side of differentiation.