The Age of Feelings

By Robert P. George

Thursday, June 12, 2025

 

Some historians divide the epochs into the “age of this” and the “age of that.” And so we are sometimes told that the medieval period, at least in Europe, was the Age of Faith. The general idea is that in that era the touchstone of truth was conformity to religious doctrines. Now, this is certainly an oversimplification, at least to the extent that it suggests that the medievals — especially the great Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers of that period — did not hold natural reason and the power of human intellect in high esteem. They certainly did. Still, it is not flatly false.

 

Faith mattered to the people of the Middle Ages. The great thinkers of the era — Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Anselm of Canterbury, Maimonides, just to name a few particularly influential ones — were people of faith. They believed (as I myself believe) that there is harmony, rather than conflict or even tension, between faith and reason, and that faith can and should be reasoned and reasonable. What’s more, they regarded the apparent incompatibility of a proposition with the doctrines of their faith as indicating a problem with the proposition, just as they regarded a proposition’s apparent incompatibility with a principle of logic or other norm of rationality as indicating a problem with the proposition.

 

Then we are sometimes told that the Enlightenment period was the Age of Reason (or the Age of Science). The idea here is that in that era the touchstone of truth was conformity to what reason establishes or confirms. This, too, of course, is an oversimplification, at least insofar as it suggests that people in the period of the Enlightenment (or, better, the period of the various European and British Enlightenments) were all strict rationalists who saw no legitimate role for faith in the quest for truth. Still, the idea of the period of the Enlightenments as an Age of Reason is not flatly false. Even the religiously observant among the great thinkers of the era placed an extremely high premium on rational inquiry, deliberation, and judgment in every domain of knowledge, including the theological.

 

Well, if the medieval period was, at least in some meaningful sense, the Age of Faith and the Enlightenment era was the Age of Reason, what should be said of our own time? How might we label our age? My answer is that we are living in the Age of Feeling — and of Feelings. A great many people today have come to suppose that the touchstone of truth is not faith or reason (or, as I myself believe, faith and reason) but rather feeling and feelings.

 

Because feelings are subjective, what this development has produced is a widespread subjectivism or relativism. But to say that is itself to oversimplify and potentially mislead. Things are more complicated. That is because most people today do not believe that their personal values and convictions, though the products of feeling, are subjective or relative. They believe, or are at least prepared to act on the belief, that those convictions are, in some sense, objectively true. And not only that, in practice many people treat their beliefs as infallibly true and thus treat their feelings as if they are infallible sources of truth. And so, we witness the spectacle of many people embracing a fierce moral absolutism based on beliefs that are the products of nothing more than subjective feelings. It is this aggressive — and, let me add, rationally indefensible and dangerous — absolutism that undergirds people’s willingness to toss out basic civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, and to join “cancellation” mobs determined to ruin the reputations and destroy the careers and lives of people whose ideas they regard, often quite absurdly, as “hateful” and “harmful.”

 

The antidote to all this is a renewed commitment to getting at the truth of things — especially the great moral and political questions that divide and vex our fractured society. The truth, not “my” truth or “your” truth — because, contrary to what many influential voices in our culture, politics, and even our institutions of higher education would have you believe, the truth about even the most controversial matters can be objectively known and cannot be altered by one’s subjective feelings or “lived experiences.” Indeed, one’s acknowledgment of truth’s objectivity is essential if one is to be what we should all strive to be, namely, committed truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. From the morality of intentional killing and the meaning of marriage to more abstract philosophical and theological propositions, there are right and wrong answers to these questions.

 

It is incumbent upon all of us to resist the temptation — and the social pressure — to say that there is only “my” truth and “your” truth and no such thing as the truth. Moral subjectivism, though self-refuting (the proposition that there is only “my” truth and “your” truth and no objective truth is itself asserted as not merely “my” or “your” truth but the truth, whether or not you or I like or accept it), is not something that people try to reason or argue their way to these days; rather it functions as an unspoken, and ordinarily unnoticed, premise of the Age of Feeling. In my view, moral subjectivism is a direct impediment to earnest and honest truth-seeking, whether by persons or institutions. My own academic home, Princeton University, despite being a nonsectarian institution, rightly apprehends truth’s objectivity in its recognition, within its principles of general conduct and regulations, that the central purpose of the university — its telos — is the “pursuit of truth.”

 

Now, none of this takes away from the fact that truth-seeking is a collaborative enterprise. That’s in no small part because all of us are frail, fallen, fallible human beings. Any of us can be wrong, and all of us are wrong sometimes. And we can be, and sometimes are, wrong not only about the comparatively minor, trivial, superficial things of life but also about the big, important things: human nature, the human good, human rights, human dignity, human destiny.

 

By challenging others and by allowing others to challenge us, especially on the big issues, we can deepen our understanding, correct errors, and get nearer to the fullness of truth. Of course, progress is not inevitable. Decline can happen. What were once securely held truths can be abandoned or displaced. But the proper response to the possibility of decline is not to insulate one’s ideas and beliefs, or the dominant ideas and beliefs of some group or of a certain time and place, from challenge and criticism. That is the straight road to obscurantism, dogmatism, tribalism, and groupthink. Don’t go there — we must not become like the evil we deplore.

 

The free exchange or marketplace of ideas, supported by principles of freedom of thought, inquiry, and discussion, cannot guarantee the attainment of truth or the avoidance of error. In this vale of tears, nothing can give us such a guarantee. Intellectual freedom, open inquiry, robust civil discourse, and openness to genuine dialogue with people who see things very differently from the ways we ourselves see them nevertheless provide our best shot at getting to the truth. We should tolerate — and in a truth-seeking spirit engage — ideas we think are wrong, even badly, indeed tragically, wrong. And we should do that, not because there is no truth, but precisely because the free exchange of ideas gives us the best shot at getting to the truth, deepening our knowledge and understanding of truth, and achieving that rarest and most precious of all categories of truth, namely, wisdom.

 

Note: This essay is drawn from the author’s new book, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment.