Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [101]
Why does this detail matter? Well, for someone like Hume, a change of heart must always depend on a change of heart in the colloquial sense. Such a change is not some apprehension of a rational truth that might be dispassionately explained and appreciated. Instead, the change must be the birth or the rekindling of feeling, an affective reaction rather than an intellectual one. We might speak of a kind of seeing and knowing here, but not in the way that we speak of seeing and knowing our way to solving a geometrical proof.
We don’t have to look very far to find all sorts of examples that fit this kind of description. Years ago, I watched one of my brothers die, and after I spent his last night alone with him in the hospital, I certainly emerged a changed person. Unlike the Grinch, I didn’t do any complete about-face, but the experience left me a different fellow in key respects. How so? Well, I definitely didn’t gain any deeper intellectual appreciation of the biological facts of death. My brother was there, and then he was gone. His heart was beating, and then it was not. His brain had electrical activity, and then it was all gone. I understood these biological facts going in, and I certainly understood them going out. But my appreciation of death was different, and the important difference had to do with the emotional experience of watching my brother die. The difference was a feeling one, not a dispassionate thinking one. The experience left a deep mark on my life.
If we return to the Grinch, his experience seems more like mine than it does like a Kantian change of heart. Seuss says that the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day, and the sense is that he feels something new, something that leaves him a changed Grinch. Hearing Who-ville singing without their Christmas presents and trappings put the Grinch on a serious wonder.
And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: “How could it be so?
It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without packages, boxes or bags!” (Grinch)
I don’t think the Grinch reaches a new, dispassionate conclusion, the way we might about a geometrical or logical proof. Instead, I think he experiences a new kind of feeling toward the Whos, something that changes the way he sees the world; in the process, this change in sentiment changes who he is.
A Final Word: Who Gives a Grinch?
Let’s suppose that I am right here about the Grinch. Again, Seuss tells us that the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day, so it seems we are on safe ground with this guess. Even if the Grinch’s case is a change of feeling, this is just one fictional example, and it needn’t say anything definitive about whether most changes of the heart are more about the heart than the head, so to speak. The example of the Grinch invites us to reflect on how reason and emotions figure in being good more generally. Kant was very worried about making moral goodness a matter of feelings in any important sense. After all, we cannot command ourselves to feel something in any straightforward way. As he saw things, moral goodness must be within our power, and indeed, must be equally so for all of us if praise and blame are to make sense. How could it make sense to hold people responsible for what they do or who they are if these things rely on feelings that they might or might not have through no fault of their own? He sought a foundation for moral goodness in reason, and he believed that reason could hit on right action not just by accident but by tracking the moral truth, just as theoretical reason tracks the truth in mathematics or logic. Ideally, feeling would run parallel to reason, but feeling on its own could never have any moral