Just recently, I stumbled across the book “Sensuous Knowledge” by Minna Salami. It is a brilliant masterpiece that brings feminism to everyone. It also reminded me of certain aspects of my work on Effective Emotionality. Salami begins her book with making a case for holistic knowledge in which “System 1” and “System 2” are integrated. System 1 thinking operates at lightning speed. It is as if your brain knows, effortlessly. Instinct and accumulated experiences fuel it. Now, System 2, on the other hand, is a slow burner. It requires some effort. It is the conscious, logical side of the equation. Minna Salami differentiates between Europatrichal Knowledge (System 1 and 2) and what she calls Sensuous Knowledge. 

The general understanding of knowledge claims to incorporate an emotion-free and objective rationale. But wait, we all know there is no such thing as objectivity. Being objective means being fully aware of the totality of the narratives we use to filter through the world. It means that you are capable of seeing and processing information without judging based on what you feel and know. 

Minna Salami points out remarkably that the core of Europatrichal Knowledge is a “constructed and biased narrative that brazenly centers on whiteness and maleness.” This knowledge has been supposedly stripped of emotions. Suppressed and covered-up, unaware emotions not only foster the narrative that women are more emotional and, therefore, less intelligent, but they also turn into a dangerous and uncontrolled power when left unattended. 

And yet,  somewhere in time, in a twisted way, we have accepted that this is the way of humankind, a way to use knowledge to bend nature to our will, to create elites, and to suppress the ones who are weak because they are emotional. 

What does it mean to have a whole human experience?

Never would I have guessed that what was lacking in my understanding was how colonialism (which started in Europe) stripped us of being whole humans in the sense of knowledge, not only through thinking but also through creative and emotional processes. 

You might have experienced these metaphysical shifts within yourself when you have all these different fragments of ideas, knowledge, and feelings. But it usually doesn’t make sense till someone else puts it together for you. Minna Salami did that for me. 

As much as I love the art of meditation and emptying the mind to reach a point of understanding without necessarily being able to put it in logical terms, at times, it takes seeing the connections within the matrix from another perspective. 

The answer lies in collectivity. 

There is more to any of us than being rational. As humans, we are also emotional and creative. Rationality fosters the belief that to be logical, we need to be free of emotionality. Creativity is only permitted if it is part of exploratory research and not part of creative expression because creative expression is thought to be emotional. But emotions are a prerequisite for human experience and a form of how we experience our senses. There is no human experience without emotions. 

Nevertheless, we try to exclude emotions from every decision through the taught processes we have. We will say, ‘I think’ instead of ‘I feel’ in important conversations. We will make a point to clarify that our decisions are based on logic and rational thinking. And we try to ensure that we are not basing our decisions on something as airy-fairy as intuition, emotions, or inner sensations. We believe we are logical human beings. 

What if I told you that rationality and logic are an illusion? They are as much made-up concepts as feelings or even the naming of emotions. 

Scientists such as Albert Einstein and Maria Sybilla Merian, were so brilliant because they relied on creativity, intuition, imagination, inspiration, and insight. According to Einstein, these were as important as logic. 

And what if the traditional labeling of emotions as irrational is just a way of distracting us from our full potential? What if true logic is a full experience of our senses, thoughts, emotions, and analytical skills? What if logic and rationality mean being able to understand our inner sensations and make sense of our emotions instead of suppressing them?

Salami proposes the term Sensuous Knowledge. Sensuous Knowledge is “kaleidoscopic, with/within. The mind exists with and within the body, reason with and within emotion, the feminine with and within the masculine, and vice versa”.

This term detaches knowledge from one fixed point of view and creates a holistic understanding of knowledge. A knowledge that incorporates the entire human experience and not only one detached process. 

Decolonizing Knowledge

It all is interconnected. Emotions are part of every experience and every thought process. Just as I propose in Effective Emotionality, Minna proposes a holistic understanding of human knowledge in Sensuous Knowledge. Her approach is different in regard to her starting point, which is based on decolonizing knowledge. Even though I have been criticizing much of the existing literature and approaches, as well as the dominating aggressive marketing for books written by men and the lack of supporting women in academia and literature,  I have been aware that a certain kind of knowledge is still being pushed onto us. I have labeled and criticized some approaches by white women as soft and intellectually weak. 

Some research is significant in enabling one to see things differently. Mahmood Mamdani proposed that “Modern colonialism and the modern state were born together with the creation of Nation-State nationalism and did not precede colonialism. Nor was colonialism the highest of the final states in the making of the nation. The two were co-constituted.” 

The Colonized Mind started in Europe by brainwashing most non-Catholics into believing that the only way to support their state was to adhere to the catholic belief. In the case of Britain, that meant to support the pope no longer. Colonization and religion are directly interlinked. The suppression of creativity and emotions through the national church was visible to me even as a child. But that did not open my mind to the idea of how colonized our thoughts really are. 

Different perspectives are needed to close the circle and create a holistic view. 

A holistic view of experience – being able to experience integrity. 

We experience the world with all our senses and process information with our entire body. Emotions, or what we consider as such, are the internal chemical experiences that are part of processing information. They simply happen as part of our human experience. It can be as simple as hearing some music that moves you, a smell that brings up a memory, a pleasant encounter, a difficult conversation, a surprise, or every interaction you are having. If you are fully present in the moment, you can sense the emotions that are coming up. You might not be able to name them, but that isn’t necessary.  

Generally, there are two sides (or categories as some psychologists refer to) of emotions: uplifting and downlifting (or, as traditional-school psychology refers to positive and negative emotions). Uplifting emotional experiences enable us to move forward, feel excited, enthusiastic, and aligned with the situation and actions required. 

Downlifting emotional experiences are more complex as they showcase a discrepancy between how we want to experience a moment vs. what is actually happening. These emotions show us that we are not aligned with the current circumstances. This could be based, amongst other things, on fear, values, unfamiliarity, insecurity, personal beliefs, and grief. Generally, these experiences hold us back. They have the power to block us from moving forward, or tell us that something is wrong. 

It is far easier to be present when experiencing downlifting emotions than uplifting ones. One reason for that is our negativity bias, but the second reason, and maybe even the main reason, is our culture. (Which is maybe the reason why people in Africa and many other non-Western Cultures are much more content because they have figured out how to be equally present when experiencing uplifting emotions.)

What are emotions?

Emotions are energy in motion. I like to imagine them as energy moving circularly because they create movement within your body. They start in one place and then expand throughout the body. The law of conservation states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed from one form to another. Emotions are neurochemical reactions or signals within our nervous system. They appear either through sensory information received from the environment or are generated through our thoughts. 

The three main neurotransmitters, also called monoamine, associated with emotions are dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. Serotonin is the satisfaction and self-confidence neurotransmitter, Norepinephrine is the attention and reaction to stress, and dopamine is the reward and pleasure neurotransmitter. In addition to the monoamines neuromodulators, many additional secondary chemicals in the brain are also related to emotions.

Research suggests that these monoamines neuromodulators “might be the primary neural basis for emotions”. We learn through conditioning and socialization how to interpret these sensations, which is why certain situations are experienced as pleasurable for some while others will have an adverse reaction to the same situation. Overall, it can be said that much is still unclear regarding emotions. And maybe the most significant obstacle that we are facing is that we are trying to explain  something that isn’t logical in logical terms. This opens the question if it is actually possible to use a methodology that, first and foremost, tries to dismantle the mere existence of emotions as a useless human attribute. 

But how can something be useless or the source of suffering when it is the essence of how we connect with one another? Even more so in how we navigate through moments of uncertainty. Only in a binary world is it necessary to create labels and deem something as dangerous. 

Emotions are not binary.

Why we need to stop understanding emotions from a binary perspective and why a re-articulation is needed. 

Traditional psychology and neuroscience use classifications such as positive and negative. In certain situations, activating our fear/freeze/flight mode makes sense, in which cortisol plays an important role. Nevertheless, it is unclear how our modern brain decides which situation is stressful and which is pleasurable. Of course, socialization, as well as epigenetics, play a significant role in the fast subconscious interpretation of a situation. In most situations, I argue that binary thinking is the main culprit for the classification of difficult (negative) experiences.  It hinders us from a holistic experience. It tries to place a sense or reason into everything that is happening. This logical thinking relies on us stepping away from creativity, sensuality (in the sense of using our senses or sensuous knowledge), intuition, and effective emotionality. It demands that we place everything into a box. 

The reason, maybe, why we are all collectively so broken is because we know inherently that we are suppressing a significant component of ourselves. 

Mark Vernon speaks of an “innate sense of the transcendent, meaning an awareness of a level of existence that weaves through and underpins the empirical, rational, and emotional: it is powered by wonder, generates wisdom, and insists on asking ‘why?’” 

If we are suppressing and modifying every sensation within us in order to fit into a social construct, a role and a system, then we are not allowing ourselves to be fully who we are. 

Should we be asking why when it comes to logic?

Remember the last time you were in a state of flow? Was it when you were writing, dancing, walking through the forest, or just letting time pass by while looking at the clouds? What do you do before you tap into a state of creativity? 

According to Mark Vernon “This type is described as dispositional, rather than propositional, and is active in a wide range of human concerns, from the creation of art to the cultivation of virtues.”

These moments in which we allow ourselves to explore and be – without logical understanding – are often the moments that most make us feel whole and integrated. The moment you move your logic into the background, solutions start to appear with ease. And yet we still use logic and reason as tools to help us to move through our creative and emotional processes. 

As Iain McGilchrist explains: “It can also be understood that logic and reason must be the servants of the imagination and comprehension.” 

Emotional intelligence is not about controlling your emotions. Instead, it is about comprehending emotions to their fullest without judging and labeling them. 

What hinders us from moving forward and experiencing the moment for what it is, is not the experience of emotions. It is the reaction to them; the reactionary thought process that is being released through activating logic and reason, which irrevocably means trying to take away the emotions. The shouting, the fast breathing, the cursing, the faster heart rate and the ‘what if’ questions. Those are not your emotions. They are reactions to your emotions, often holding you back from moving forward. 

The impact of culture, colonialization, and religion on our way of thinking. 

Much of our culture has been designed to align us to serve the dominating class in our societies. In the Middle Ages, that was most commonly the royal families, the landowners, and the church. Constructs such as shame, pitty, and jealousy were designed to keep us aligned with the believe that we are in competition, that the core of being a human means to overcome your wrong desires, that desires are wrong in itself, and we need to be afraid of acting in a wrong way because there will be consequences. 

The whole concept of land ownership is by default, created to keep individuals in their correct places.

Binary thinking and why we need to let go off it.

As the name suggests, non-binary thinking is the opposite of binary thinking. Binary thinking gives the choice of A or B, right or wrong, being included or being excluded, being happy or being unhappy. Non-binary thinking, on the other hand, is the belief that there are endless realities. Non-binary thinking releases us from processing information into two distinct categories, and instead, allows us to envision a world where it doesn’t matter what box you fit into. Everyone is free to find their own place and live their lives their own way.

Summary: 

In this article, we explored Minna Salami’s concept of Sensuous Knowledge and its relationship with Effective Emotionality. Sensuous knowledge challenges the traditional separation of logic from emotions and advocates for a more holistic understanding of knowledge that incorporates the entire human experience. I hope that this article enables you to decolonize traditional knowledge frameworks by recognizing and integrating emotions into decision-making processes and, with that, enabling your effective emotionality. 

Book:

Clio. Women, Gender, History: The gender of emotions, Volume 47, Issue 1, January 2018

Robert C. Solomon 16 Myth Seven: Emotions Are Irrational https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3573683

History of the term emotions “Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis

Jiang et al. 2022, Monoamine Neurotransmitters Control Basic Emotions and Affect Major Depressive Disorders