From Facts to Feelings

Available for over a year

Where once facts, evidence and rationality were the path to knowledge, now the logic of feeling, of ‘my truth’ and ‘lived experience’ offers an alternative. Do we know our world through objective facts, or through subjective feelings? It’s become easy to explain this fault line as something peculiarly modern, a cocktail of culture wars and social media frenzy. But is this right? Could there be a longer, deeper and more complicated story? The history of the rational Enlightenment is familiar, but we don’t talk so much about how and why we might have come to privilege personal feelings and experiences. Professor Abigail Williams begins with the cultural notion that personal feelings matter and individual experience might in some ways be the ultimate truth. From the cult of sensibility to the birth of Romanticism, Freud's couch to Oprah Winfrey's celebrity interviews, how does feeling offer a different way of seeing the world? Producer: Julia Johnson Presenter: Abigail Williams Executive Producer: Samir Shah A Juniper Connect production for BBC Radio 4