 Philosophically, emotion is a central feature of Dewey’s critique of traditional epistemology and metaphysics. He decried traditional systems which, in their pursuit of rational access to truth and reality, create an invidious distinction by casting emotion as confused thought, distraction, or bodily interference which needs to be suppressed, controlled, or bracketed. Emotion is intertwined, psychologically, both in the individual (in reasoning and acting), and in the wider culture (with social forms of meaning creation). Attempts to balkanize emotion are motivated in part, he argued, by the desire to segregate leisure from labor, men from women; on this reading, the traditional rationalistic bent is, in effect, a power-play that deserves intellectual and moral critique.