Sense and Sensibility

[Anonymous]

#709

“That kind of experience is known by everyone in a way, yet hardly anyone knows it, as one simply knows other things. Everyone has at times had it, and yet–isn’t this odd?–hardly anyone talks about it. Our language has no name for it.”

Cool idea. Hmmmmm. Is it right that we have no words for it? What about inspiration? Intuition? Gut feeling? Hunch? Trusting your instincts? Feeling right with yourself? Feeling stronger choices? In rhetoric, pathos and ethos invoke it. In life, every destructive or tragic choice, action or judgment we make is based on some instinct, emotion or impulse that leads us astray. Often there is a dualism in our words for felt senses. Christianity labels one duality as Providence/temptation. We all have an angel and a devil on our shoulders offering conflicting senses of how to think and what to do.

Jane Austen called a similar duality Sense and Sensibility, with her characteristically playful, layered and overlapping meanings. In S&S, sense can mean good sense, a kind of cold-eyed rationale appraisal of an unfair world and the best paths towards success and survival. But sense also means the senses we feel. Sensibility also suggests emotion, but with a kind of over the top, unrestrained acceptance which is personified in Marianne Dashwood and maybe also her mother. Their uncritical embrace of emotion leads these two Dashwood women into wishful thinking and even delusion, with almost tragic consequences.

But in Elinor Dashwood, sense means both emotional sense and good sense in dialogue with each other. Indeed, Elinor has such good sense that she does not admit her emotional senses even to herself in her thoughts. But underneath the good sense, ELinor’s emotional sense quietly triumphs at every turn, as the love she feels for Edward from the first Chapter leads her to a series of choices that always value heart over head, even as she rationalizes each one.

This has me thinking that felt sense, in the way we are trying to use it here, might also channel some of Austen’s dialogue with good sense as well. –Sean

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