Robert Fabricant on the Difference Between Feeling and Knowledge

category: Meta

Published August 07, 2009 @ 12:44PM PT

The Pop!Tech blog has been pumping out pure gold lately, and today's post by Kristen Taylor is one more great example. In it, she links to a video produced at last year's event by frogdesign's Vice President of Creative, Robert Fabricant and GOOD Magazine. The piece is all about the difference between feeling and knowing.

In the short animated video, Fabricant imagines a pair of shoes that could instantly transport us to different places based on the memory of their feel on our feet. The dunes of Saudi Arabia, a slippery rock in Camden, Maine, the cool dirt of an Iowa corn field.

The video is profound because it reminds us that our society is incredibly intellectualized. That is not to say that our society is intellectual, but rather that feelings and emotions are subjected incessantly to the tyranny of the commentary of the brain. We interpret everything, and sometimes it's overwhelming and the reality is we simply can't think our way out of a feeling.

This is not new in history, as the conversation between faith and rationality, between knowledge and feeling have been ongoing for centuries. But the intensity of the psychic fracture it can produce is made more profound by the omnipresent information that surrounds people in modern society. And I think there is something profoundly important about remembering the connection to our bodies themselves. Ken Robinson points out that the intelligence of the body is one we have systemically minimized in importance in our education system.

The conversation matters for those of us in the nonprofit world because, to some extent, the underlying objective that connects us all is an attempt to make people feel - not just rationally know - but feel in the depth of their guts that they are a part of something larger than themselves, connected to people they will never see, and stewards for generations to come.

Keep track of Robert on Twitter at @fabtweet

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Comments (1)

Thanks, Nathan! Great post thinking through this video; we are loyal readers of this blog, and I think your last point is so important about creating connections (and to aspire to a record we could be proud of) for future generations--

Posted by Kristen Taylor on 08/07/2009 @ 02:50PM PT
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Author

Nathaniel is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, which works annually with hundreds of students in dozens of countries around the world through curricular programs and student project incubation.