Mike, I'll save you the trouble, I just typed it up this morning for
my zettelkasten. There may be some typos and I don't include the
references.
Cheers
Feeling, Thinking, Knowing
By [[louis-arnaud-reid]]
In an article on [[carl-jung]], James Hillman writes that at the end of the
century " there were no clear distinctions among the various components of
the mind which had been grouped, or discarded, in that bag called 'the
affective faculty'. From the time of the Enlightenment in Germany, the soul
was divided into three parts: thinking, willing and feeling.
Fundamentally, this third region of the psyche, like Plato's third class of
men, was inferior". Furthermore, this bag of feelings was always in
opposition to thinking, or as Moses Mendeslssohn said: "We no longer feel
as soon as we think ''. Hillman adds that the opposition between thinking
and feeling is still found in the scientistic psychology of head without
heart, and the romantic psychology of heart without head.
'We no longer feel as soon as we think'. This might be supplemented by
other over-simple generalizations: 'As soon as we think we make
statements': 'To claim to know anything entails (inter alia) being able to
state it clearly': 'Knowledge is expressed in the form "that-p"; what
cannot be so expressed is not knowledge'.
These are, doubtless, oversimplified--through the paradigm 'that-p' is
normally taken for granted in epistemological discussions: moreover, this
is an assumption which has dominated western thought. On the other hand
philosophers and plain men constantly give cognitive nuances to
feeling-words and ideas, suggesting 'feelings' and 'intuitions' which have
something of a cognitive-claiming character. We at all times speak of
cognitive 'feelings' about moral and humanitarian matters, about people,
works of art, political decisions. Ryle listed different uses of the word
'feeling', some of which are cognitive-claiming. Jung used 'feeling' in
various cognitive ways, but very pragmatically and often inconsistently.
'Feeling' is used cognitively by philosophers--existentialists,
phenomenologists ... by James, Bradley, Alexander, Whitehead, MacMurray,
Langer ... by Gestalt psychologists -- in a large variety of ways. In the
twenties (and more recently), I argued for feelings as cognitive. Very
much the same line was taking in the fifties about 'emotion' -- often too
easily run together with feeling, as if the two were identical. There was
a sort of rediscovery of the cognitive element intrinsic to emotion -- by
Bedford, J.R. Jones, Kenny, Peters, Mace ... 'Emotions', it was argued,
cannot be understood merely in terms of internal ongoings, but are integral
with cognition and behavior relevant to the situations in which they
arise. Peters' term 'appraisal' (cognitive appraisal) of the situation,
sums up the best of it. (It is substantially the same as what I was trying
to say but of feeling, in the twenties.)
Although 'feeling' has been so variously used, and there is a large
literature of emotion, the dominance of the 'that-p' concept of knowledge
has been so powerful and sustained that it has tended to force the
reduction of other sorts of knowing to its own pattern. This is
particularly questionable in claims to know values -- moral, personal ,
aesthetic -- where, though knowledge-that may have it's important place, it
is not everything. Feeling there at least seems to have an essential
cognitive part to play. I can do no more than suggest nowe that neglect of
that is not only detrimental in philosophy itself, but has serious moral,
social and educational consequences as well. I believe the time is more
than ripe for a fresh look at the relations between feeling and knowing.
2
The treatment of feeling by many 'straight' psychologists earlier in the
century was thin. (And in some later textbooks, it is perhaps not
surprising that writers self-blinded by wholly behavioristic approaches,
have not even mentioned 'feeling' in their indexes!) Earlier, feeling was
mainly regarded as a hedonic tone-- sometimes as the tone of emotion --
with a range from the positively pleasurable to the (negatively)
unpleasurable. Whether there could be 'neutral' feeling in between, was a
matter of controversy. Feeling was sharply distinguished from the
character of the concrete mental states of which it was the character or
quality. And it was said to be intransitive, and definitely
non-cognitive. Feeling (some held) does not even 'know' facts of inner
occurrences" feeling is 'the way you feel'.
I remarked on the habit of running the words 'feeling' and 'emotion'
together, as though distinctions don't matter here. They do. But since
this paper is on feeling, not emotion, I cannot say anything adequate now
about emotion and its relation to and distinction from feeling. I can only
affirm, without supporting argument, that actual emotions are largely
episodic, whilst feeling, I shall suggest, is underlyingly present through
conscious lifeL most of the time when we feel we are not having emotional
feelings at all. Emotional feelings occur when there is an 'appraisal' by
the psychophysical organism as a whole (not 'cognitively' only, but
cognitively-conatively-affectively-organically), of any situation which we
are in, and in which, because of this total appraisal, we are stirred up,
excited, etc., in countlessly different ways, in a marked degree-- a degree
not precisely definable. And there, for now, I must leave 'emotion'. It is
just possible that the rest of the paper may, indirectly, show my statement
to be less bald than, standing by itself, it must appear to be.
3
Because there is no generally accepted usage of the word 'feeling' (except
for the earlier, inadequate uses), I shall start with a clean slate and
stipulate my own-- bearing in mind that stipulative uses can be justified
if they can clarify and illuminate. I have hinted at the seriously
detrimental effects of the division between feeling and other aspects of
active mind. If we can reconceive feeling in its setting in the whole
economy of the psychophysical organism in living transaction with a world
which is independent of it, and recognize feeling as in organic relation
with everything else, I believe that such reconception will throw light in
various ways on knowledge and understanding.
'Feeling' is indefinable, except by so-called 'ostensive' definition: it
can be displayed in examples of its different manifestations. According to
Susanne Langer, feeling, the mark of mentality, emerges at a certain stage
of evolution, when "neurophysiological processes can be said to 'break
through to feeling'". Like -- but it is of course only an analogy -- the
incandescence of a piece of iron at a high temperature, feeling is the
living process becoming aware of itself.
At this primitive stave, feeling just seems to happen, and this
consciousness, the emergence of the primitively psychological from the
irritable physiological, is a mystery no one has yet begun to understand.
But two things have to be kept in mind:
1) the inseparability of the organic processes from the organism's feeling
of it, the fact that as Langer puts it, the "being felt is a phase of the
process itself". On the other hand (2) there is the conceptual distinction
between the feeling, which is (if primitively) mental, and the organic
processes which are felt.
Even at this stage, the notion of feeling as living process becoming aware
of itself has a dimly cognitive flavour, even if the cognition is, so far,
of a rudimentary kind. Feeling, on one side of it, is feeling-of, and on
the other side, it has a content -- at this low level, sensation-content.
There is never just feeling: feeling awareness could not be without feeling
of something. At the human level, the denial by earlier psychologists
(e.g. Woodworth) that feeling is cognitively transitive, was wrong. We
can't experience the feeling of sensations of toothache or tiredness
without, indivisibly, feeling toothache or tiredness (though we need not be
naming them). Yet granting this, it is important to keep the conceptual
distinction between feeling, or immediate experiencing, and the content of
that feeling. Feeling is the most immediate, inward and private thing we
know, and is is the inner side of conscious experience in the widest and
most usually accepted sense of that term, conscious experience which in
human beings includes action of various kinds, thinking, imagining, having
moral and aesthetic experiences, maybe religious ones, coming to know and
coming to terms with the external world, ourselves and other people ...
Feeling is the immediate experience of indwelling in that conscious life in
its most inclusive sense. To symbolize the conceptual distinction between
feeling and its content -- without which discussion can be muddled -- I
shall sometimes use 'IE' for the participles denoting the process or event
of feeling or immediate experiencing, and 'C' to stand for content of
feeling. Feeling as it actually occurs is always IE(C).
I suggested above that feeling is 'underlyingly' present throughout
conscious life. Usually it is tacit (Polanyi's word) not focal. We are,
of course, often consciously aware of feeling, and under a very wide range
of conditions, usually when hedonic tone (positive or negative) is marked,
and when we say there is 'affect'. By affect I mean here not just hedonic
done, but the markedly toned feeling of the whole complex which is felt
(IE)C. This toned feeling of the whole complex has what may be called
'quality', strictly speaking unnamable because each complex felt is a
particular, different from every other; and the quality of feeling or
affect shares in this particularity.
But apart from very definite affect of which we are consciously aware,
there can be underlying affect which is less strong or definite, as in a
general mood; and this can color the rest of conscious experience. We are
depressed, or sad, or elated, or happy... The 'spectacles' are dark or rose
coloured ... Then there are many occasions when there is no noticeable
affect at all, and we are not consciously aware of feeling as such. But
even then, there can be said to be underlying feeling. Lacing one's shoes,
putting out the milk bottles or the cat, as routine activities, normally
have not affect worth mentioning. But if we retrospect, we can recognise
the feeling of being on the inside of the experience, and recognise that if
it were not for the underlying intuitive feeling-awareness, we could not
have the focal experience of carrying out these activities.
4
It is clear (and no one disputes) that feeling is on one side very private
and subjective, and that this has often been identified with hedonic tone.
But here we are interested in the relation of feeling to the cognitive
functions of mind. When, however, the words 'cognition' and 'cognitive'
are used, it will be necessary for the purposes of this particular
discussion to remember several things. (1) The term 'cognition' must be
taken in a very open way and given a wide range of application. 'Cognition'
must not be confined here to the 'that-p' form, to beliefs expressed in
clear propositional statements, rationally checked for their truth in
prescribed (and proscribed) ways. This is one main sort of knowledge, but
one only. I want to include also direct experience-knowledge,
acquaintance-knowledge (not in Russell's restricted sense), as well as
knowing-that, connaitre and kennen as well as savior and wissen. (2) I am
assuming that there are degrees of knowing, and error and truth mixed.
Misapprehension is cognitive, though erroneous, and 'truth' a regulative
ideal of cognition. (3) I am talking now of claims of knowledge.
Validation, testing, 'proof' of knowledge-claims also of course need
consideration. I shall have a word to say on this at the end.
Negatively, emphasis on the private and subjective aspect of feeling has
led to its isolation from the rest of active knowing mind. In the
objective stress on fields of propositional knowing such as mathematics and
the sciences, it is easy to overlook feeling as having any part to play in
such knowledge.
On the other hand everyone knows that the active truth-seeking mind has its
'passion for truth'. Again, feeling can be a pioneer for
knowledge-to-come; tentative hypotheses are often 'felt' before they are
explicitly formulated; there are 'feelings-after', hunches, and so on.
Emotions, of course, are deeply suspect. Even the passion for truth can be
distorted into bias. This is fair enough, and it is true that what T.H.
Huxley called 'clear cold logic engine of the mind' has a dominant part to
play in some kinds of propositional knowledge. The main aim of business is
to get as near to impersonal and objective truth as possible. We do attach
proper names to great discoveries--Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck ...
But it is, in the end, the truths that matter and not the fact that their
discoverers had significant cognitive-feeling-experiences about them, or
that they may have had to suppress their feelings and desires. This, at
any rate, would be a prevailing view among many scientists. I do not say
all, or always. And I am certainly not saying that the total human value
of the life of science can be summed up by saying that it is productive of
important propositional truths. But in doing science the truths can be,
with justifications, distinguished, even separated, from the value
experiences.
It is when we come to values, and to our claims to know them, that the
importance of feeling, its relation to knowing, and its function in the
process of knowing, begins to stand out most clearly. On the one hand, we
cannot know values at all without, at some stage (not all the time),
feeling them. On the other hand we cannot justify our judgements of value
without various detachedly cognitive processes of thought and action.
Feeling and active thinking and doing are all in organic relation to each
other in a way here which is much more clearly marked than when we are
thinking, relatively impersonally, about value-free matters of fact, about
what 'is the case'. There, the main function of feeling in relation to the
search for factual knowledge might be called an auxiliary one: here, as I
am suggesting, feeling is intrinsic at some stage to the knowing, or
organically related to it. In both cases we require transitiveness, the
self-transcendence, of cognition apprehending what is independent of the
apprehending mind. But in knowing values, I am saying, it is different: in
moral, or aesthetic, knowledge the feeling of the value of what we know is
inseparable from and continuous with the self-transitive knowing of it. In
cognitive experience of value, feeling is part of the knowing, and colours
what is known. Aesthetically, in poet's mood, the
... daisies pied and violets blue
And lady smocks all silver-White
And cuckoo-buds of yellow ----------
Do paint the meadows with delight....
Intrinsic values can be thought of generically as what we are interested
in, care about, desire, feel-for (or feel-against). Value is a bipolar
concept: there is a psychophysical pole, a pro or con approach, and an
objective pole. This is obviously a minimal account: value situations in
the most general sense are situations in which we feel-about-something, and
the 'value' is what we feel-about. We have to feel: sometimes feeling
leads to values of lasting and enlarging importance; sometimes they turn
out to be spurious, false. The rationale of different sorts of value
judgements is clearly of paramount importance.
V
Leaving all this for the moment, I want to return to the 'that-p' concept
of knowledge, in order to consider how it affects the very possibility of a
catholic or inclusive account of knowledge. I am assuming the familiar
current theory of propositional knowledge-that which takes the form: 'I am
sure about (or believe) p: it is true (or 'the case'); and I have a right
(or good reasons) to be sure'...
Such a statement is on its own showing a self-restricted account in that it
applies to the propositional genre only. But if we go further, and take it
as 'the' paradigm of knowledge, the way is automatically closed to
consideration of other kinds of knowledge-claims, already mentioned. Apart
from knowing-how, which Ryle expounded, there is the knowledge 'with the
direct object', acquaintance-knowledge of fact or value. These cannot be
exhaustively explained in terms of propositional knowledge-that,
knowledge-about.
Knowledge of fact cannot be so exhaustively explained. There is, always,
the cognisising of a given element. Take a borderline example. Sitting
waiting in my stationary car, I suddenly feel a sharp impact on my back.
There is an instant of felt sensation experiencing (IE) of what we can
subsequently describe in the words as
'impact-of-car-hitting-my-car-from-behind' (IE)C. But for the first
instant, there are no words. Words start when I exclaim 'What's that!'
Then comes the diagnosis. But the very question 'What's that?' (subtly
transformed from an exclamation to a question) presupposes
experience-'knowledge' of that about which the question is asked.
Usually knowledge-about (expressible in statements) and
experience-knowledge overlap, or coincide, though they are
distinguishable. If the word 'intuition' be taken here to mean
apprehension of a field as a whole, and I have (say) an immediate intuition
(experience-knowledge) of an area of my Study, my intuition has content, of
which it can be said that, on the one hand, I know it simply given the
experience of perception now, without words (and I know 'about' it in that
sense). On the other hand, I know its content as a precipitate of
knowledge-that, acquired, partly through language, accumulated and
assimilated from the past. I know-that there are books, chairs, desks,
etc... But these have their place in the field of my total intuition which
in itself is not expressible in propositional language. As before,
knowledge-about as expressed in words, presupposes wordless
non-propositional experience-knowledge, is dependent on it.
It is true that when we are focally interested in propositional
knowledge-about particular facts, experience-knowledge falls into the
background: this is true in abstract thinking, perhaps outstandingly so in
the focus on symbolic meaning in pure mathematics. When, on the other
hand, we turn knowledge of values (where feeling as cognitive plays an
essential part), experience-knowledge can be of central importance. I will
take an example from aesthetic value now, and return to it later.
Suppose, in the Tate, I am struck, almost stunned by the complex
magnificence of a huge Turner. Here, obviously, I could say, and go on
saying, all sorts of things about it-- its colors, patterns, composition,
its space...And often, in criticism, description and analysis plan an
important part in helping our appreciation. But those are all subsidiary
to, parasitic upon, something else, the direct wordless intuition of the
picture as a whole. It would be shocking nonsense to suggest that all the
most excellent statements about the picture, however many, could possibly,
in themselves, and without being assimilated into something different --
the intuition of the picture -- add up to aesthetic knowledge. There is a
positive content in experience-knowledge of art which cannot be
propositionally 'said' at all. And this is central. The same soft of
thing can be said of knowledge of persons.
Since the 'that-p', 'knowledge-about' model, with its focus on the truth of
statements, will not do for aesthetic and other kinds of knowing, it is
worth considering whether a sort of 'Copernican' revolution in the theory
of the relation of knowing to truth may not open the way to a more catholic
view of knowledge.
I said earlier, of attempts to get as near as possible to impersonal and
objective truth (e.g. in science) that subjective process of coming to
know-- the experiences of the feeling, knowing minds who propose and in
some degree possess the knowledge -- tend to be forgotten and to fall into
the background. A habit develops of thinking of systems of true
propositions as though they existed on their own, as though knowledge
could, almost, be defined in terms of the truth of independent-standing
propositions. I say 'almost', because in the definition, 'belief' or
'being sure' are mentioned. Yet the living mind which searches after
knowledge, falls into the shadowy background and propositional truth seems
to assume dazzling, blinding importance. One kind of truth, propositional
truth, is like the sun, the knowing mind a dark planet, or, if illuminated,
deriving its light as knowing from the impersonal source, it's only, single
sun.
But suppose we get away from, the notion of truth--after all never
satisfactorily defined, as belonging to propositions. Suppose we think
instead of the searching mind as the active center (a very uncertain
'sun'!) from which the very possibility of all cognitive illumination
emanates, and think of tentative truth-claims, perhaps of many kinds, as
functions of the seeking mind working on its job, trying to do it well, and
in some degree, even if small, succeeding. Or more widely, of truth and
other sorts of validity as a quality of the measure of the success of the
whole psychophysical organism as it tries, cognitively and in other ways,
to come to terms with itself and the world it inhabits. This view cannot
be developed now: but however vague it sounds, it at least does not submit
knowing and knowledge to the dominations of one -- never defined --
propositional model of truth. And positively, it will be possible then to
consider openly other kinds of cognitive claims of the exploring
psychophysical organism -- feeling, active, creative, as well as knowing.
Having removed a barrier, it will then be easier to consider these other
ways mentioned -- the tentative seeking to know persons, moral good,
aesthetic value. And it will be easier to see how feeling functions as an
organic part of the cognising, as it does not so function in more detached
and impersonal knowing. All this can, of course, merely be suggested. And
questions of attempted justification of the claims, I shall mention only
very briefly at the end, referring particularly to aesthetic knowing.
VI
In knowing persons, we have, in addition to learning many things about them
as we go along, to feel with, and often for, them in direct encounter.
What I meet when I encounter another person is not just a cluster of
descriptive predicates nor just a 'case' with certain classifiable
characteristics. I meed a person now, face to face, and it is for this
individual (individual not instance) for whom I have empathy and sympathy,
manifestations of cognitive feeling. If there is absence of cognitive
feeling, there is a lack of something in the knowing. And here I am not
thinking of what is called 'emotional involvement' with another person, but
of a self-transcending cognitive effort in which cognitive feeling plays
and indispensable part.
Moral knowing has, of course, been enormously written over (as has knowing
of other persons). Here I am concerned chiefly with knowledge of basic
principles of good -- rather than with rules of right-doing -- and with
knowing good directly and intuitively.
There has to be a point somewhere in the knowing of morally good when we
cognitively feel it as good. An example is the direct intuitive
apprehension of caritas, care for the good of others; sometimes it is
compassion. To feel caritas as good we have to know it directly in a bit
of actual immediate experience, in some personal situation. Knowing and
feeling here are inseparable.
I am saying that (at some stage) feeling plays an essential part in the
knowledge of a person and in the knowledge of an intrinsic moral value like
caritas. I am not saying that feeling alone -- perhaps a moment of felt
insight -- can apprehend caritas clearly in its fullness; its existential
meaning can be known more fully only be knowing it in its operation in the
total complex of human living which caritas can infuse and transform. And
this knowledge and understanding demands all the powers of knowing,
critical thinking, active feeling mind, working together. The same is true
of the knowledge of other moral values -- integrity, justice...
To put more generally: the feeling being discussed now obviously is not
like what had to be mentioned earlier, the feeling of a bodily, sensational
experience of, say, toothache, or having a hot bath (Such a feeling is
recognisably cognitive, but in a week and uninteresting sense.) It is not
even just a warm immediately felt mental or spiritual appreciation of some
shining manifestation of caritas or integrity -- however apposite on the
occasion that may be. What is before us now is feeling entering as an
element into some of the highest and most human enterprises -- personal,
moral, and, as we shall see, aesthetic. It is feeling as a necessary part
of apprehending important and complex human values. Feeling, I am
suggesting, can feed, nourish, enlarge and enrich the content of that
thinking. This in turn can, retroactively, affect the concrete realisation
of the values. The concern is with feeling, thinking,
acting--distinguishable of course, but through of now not in abstracted
separation from one another, but as related, as interacting in the way that
only the parts of an organism (here the psychophysical organism) can
interact with one another. They contribute to each other, modify each
other and the whole, so that thinking, feeling, knowing and action, working
together, can be come a function of the whole organism. In the space left,
I can only hint at how this happens in art. (It is developed more fully in
my Meaning in the Arts.)
The phenomenological story of the place of feeling in the arts is an
endless one. Not only are there many forms of art, each with special
characteristics, but each work is an individual; and feeling, as concrete,
will be individual too. But that the knowing of any individual work or art
involves the cognitive aesthetic feeling, cant I think reasonably be in
doubt. The knowledge and understanding of a poem or a picture or a piece
of music requires the use of several modes of understanding; but what
unites them all into relevance is the cognitive feeling of and for the
individual work as a complex whole and as it is presented. To say this is
not to retreat into subjectivity, as if the feeling were a private ongoing
within the mind-and-body: that would be the watertight faculty-view all
over again. If the feeling is regarded as sharing in the self-transcending
activities of the active cognitive organism, then it fulfils a function
which they alone could not achieve.
Of course the embodied mind, as active and knowing, has to divide up things
in order to deal with them: we can (more or less) only do one thing at a
time, and can only give focal attention to this or that abstracted aspect
of a cognised situation at any one moment. But feeling, with its inner
continuity and flowing changes of toned-quality as the content of feeling
changes, is the tacit underlying influence. For example, a performing
musician has much 'cognitive' work to do in studying his score; musical
analysis and synthesis is one part of learning music. He has to attend,
too, his senses alive and active, to the medium of the music and to
muscular and many other skills involved in performance. Though there is
constant overlapping, it would be fair to say that for the most
accomplished musicians (it may be different in geniuses like Mozart) these
processes take time, and have (more or less) to be done at different times,
in a relatively slow learning process. But though these seritim processes
are necessary, they also have to be 'forgotten' as far as the focal
attention of the mind is concerned, and the effects of all of them have to
be gathered into the fluid, single concentrated relevant cognitive feeling
for the actual music as a complex unity. Musical knowledge in action is
felt knowledge in action. Until this happens there can be correctness,
technique, conscientiousness, but not musical vitality. It is the vitality
of knowing here, the living embodiment of felt knowledge in the
psychophysical organism of the musical performer, and the aesthetic
embodiment of it in the performed music, which is the crux of it all. And,
perhaps, a further point can be made. Feeling, here affect, is not only a
uniting cognitive awareness of the living whole. It is a reinforcement of
vitality. Silvan S. Tomkins, writing of emotion as motivating power, and
speaking of instinctive drives, argues that drives without affect are not
in themselves sufficient to fulfil their functions. Two of his examples
are anoxic deprivation and sexual tumescence. In gasping, choking,
drowning, it is not simply the imperious demand for oxygen which drives,
but also the rapidly mounting panic. Pilots who refused to wear oxygen
masks at 30,000ft suffered a more gradual anoxic deprivation, which
resulted not in panic, but euphoria. Some met death with a smile on their
lips. "It was the affect of enjoyment which the more slowly developing
signal recruited." And in sex, tumescence, product of the sexual drive, is
not in itself enough; it requires the excitement of the whole man, not
merely his sexual organ. I suggest that these, very different, examples
could be taken as reinforcing the claim that feeling, in the aesthetic
situation, is an 'amplifier'...
On the side of artistic creation, too, feeling has an important part to
play. In artistic creation there is a stage in which something like what
[[jean-piaget]] calls 'syncretistic thinking' takes place. Anton
Ehrenzweig, concerned with art, speaks of the contrast between our highly
differentiated thought and 'undifferentiated' thinking. He writes: "the
deeper we penetrate into low level imagery and fantasy the more the single
track divides and branches into unlimited directions so that in the end its
structure appears chaotic. The creative thinker is capable of alternating
between differentiated and undifferentiated modes of thinking, harnessing
them together to give him service for solving very definite tasks. The
uncreative psychotic succumbs to the tensions between conscious
(differentiated) and unconscious (undifferentiated) modes of mental
functioning. As he cannot integrate their divergent functions, true chaos
ensues." Without digressing on this interesting remark about the psychotic
or begging any questions about the unconscious, we can apply another word,
'dedifferentiated', which Ehrenzweig also uses in discussing the creative
thinker. I think the actual word, though better than 'undifferentiated',
is less than perfect. For if we consider what happens within the margins
of the artist's conscious experience, there can never be a complete escape
from the differentiation which with the aid of language we have learned to
make from babyhood on. In other words, in conscious life, even to its
margins, there can never be complete de-differentiation. (I am not denying
what may happen in the 'unconscious' or through its influence; here and now
it is simply not being discussed.) I think a better word is
'dediscursive'...
And that this kind of thinking and feeling does occur in the process of
artistic creation, there is no doubt. The processes of artistic creation
vary enormously with different artists, and are not well understood; and
there are no rules. But in (say) the composing of poetry, there can be a
time when the poet is relaxed from the focal tensions of ordinary thinking
or logical rules. He lets himself sink into what can best be called a
feeling state, in which floating images, snatches or strings of words,
enter his mind and are received semi-passively, without critical scrutiny,
seeming to form themselves as they 'will' into patterns which he accepts
without trying, at that moment, to make sense of them. In terms of
everyday thinking they may be 'nonsense'. The poet at this stage is in a
child-like--but not a childish--receptive mood. He accepts the images and
words, in a sense attends to them and in a queer way can enjoy them. He
may be able to retain them in memory for later poetic use, or he may
scribble, not caring whether they are 'nonsense' or not: perhaps he enjoys
it all in a kind of ecstasy which is difficult to describe to anyone who
does not know it directly, and which to commonsense may seem quite mad.
But later, the poem may come.
The story of this artists' madness must be as old as history. Socrates
speaks of the poets in this way, poking gentle fun at them. As usual,
Shakespear puts it better than anyone:
"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them into shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name
Painters know it too in their own ways. The ordinary laws of Gestalt are
relaxed; spaces between solid objects become positive shapes, sky is no
longer background to landscape but integral with it; composition is
sometimes like automatic writing. And in the coming together into an
artifact, feeling for the whole, alike in poetry and painting and other
arts, dominates the forming and direction of the parts. At the receiving
end of art, again, we have to allow global cognitive feeling to have its
way. Through cognitive, but dediscursive, feeling we become able to grasp
new structures, new values, new aesthetic meaning so completely embodied in
its formed medium that it cannot be 'said' in any other way, and certainly
not said in ordinary discursive language.
VII
The discussion in this paper has been mainly of cognitive claims arising
out of direct value-experiences in which feeling plays an essential part.
These cognitive claims inevitably issue, at some stage, in value judgements
which take the form of propositional statements claiming, at least
tentatively, to be true. But claims are one thing; the validation of them,
another. The validation of judgements of value --ethical, and here
particularly aesthetic--is a highly complex and controversial problem, on
which there has been a large amount of writing. In aesthetics, it is much
tied up with the claims of works of art to be individual and unique. As it
is impossible here to say anything philosophically significant on this
question, I must -- with art in mind -- content myself with a mere
statement of belief.
I believe there can be validation of judgements about art. There are no
knock-down arguments or proofs. But 'arguments' of a sort, and the giving
of 'reasons' or 'grounds', there can be. In attempted justification of
aesthetic judgments about art, the form of thinking is different in some
essential respects from argument and reasoning in other fields. But there
is no doubt that there can be reasonable discussion between people of
perceptive aesthetic experience. And though there will always be, and very
properly, disagreements and disputes about aesthetic 'taste' ('no disputing
about tastes' is false here), enlightened discourse among enlightened
people, who combine assertion with listening and learning, can modify and
correct partial views and improve aesthetic understanding, moving through
more liberally grounded opinion nearer to 'knowledge'. And some things we
can safely be said to know--for example that Shakespear is a better poet
than McGonagall. But I don't think the fact that even McGonagall 'knew' it
is much evidence!
VIII
In conclusion: I have used 'knowing', 'knowledge', 'cognition' in a wide,
and on some views a loose sense. As far as the propositional form goes,
this is no worse than Plato's ranging about from Eikasia and Pistis to
Dianois and Epsiteme or Noesis. At the bottom end, crazy beliefs,
conjectures, opinions are not 'knowledge' in the sense of Dianoia or the
(ideal) Noesis. But they are all, in our wide sense, 'cognitive'. And if
direct 'experience-knowledge' is postulated as being cognitive, its range
is equally wide, from worm-like (cognitive) feeling, or vague, scarcely
differentiated human feelings of 'something there', right up to the
developed and educated direct insights into (say) moral goodness or the
complex aesthetic quality of works of art -- these being nourished and
illuminated by reflective thinking assimilated into the insights. The
contextual meanings of [[Plato]]'s Noesis or [[spinoza]]'s [[Scientia
Intuitiva]] of course make words inapplicable here. But the profound
insight into a work of art has something of the supposed directness of
Noesis. If, on the other hand we go on just assuming what is
etymologically, epistemologically, psychologically (and occasionally even
clinically) in effect a schizoid division of thinking and knowing from
feeling, these insights will be incomprehensible. And we shall go on
suffering from the many damaging effects--not only in philosophy but in
education and elsewhere--of the denial of human wholeness.
On Sun, Jul 11, 2021 at 6:00 PM Mike Archbold <jazzbo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/9/21, Daniel Jue <d...@cognami.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > In a 1977 paper by Louis Arnaud Reid in the Proceedings of the
> Aristotelian
> > Society #77 "Thinking, Feeling, Knowing" doi
> 10.1093/aristotelian/77.1.165
> > , the author gives a (IMO) great argument about how "feeling" (not
> > necessarily those marked by noticeable hedonic tones) are an inseparable
> > part of our "knowing" something, both before and after we proclaim to
> know
> > that something.
> >
> >
>
>
> I will have to get this paper. Whenever I think too much about
> understanding I come up against this problem that understanding is (at
> least in part) a *feeling*. Thanks!
>
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 9, 2021 at 2:03 PM Mike Archbold <jazzbo...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> You've got an opinion. We all do!
> >>
> >> I'm doing a survey of opinions about "understanding" for the meetup
> >> -->
> >>
> https://www.meetup.com/Northwest-Artificial-General-Intelligence-Meetup-Group/
> >>
> >> 2 events are envisioned this summer:
> >>
> >> 1) Survey -- discuss tribal opinions in the AGI community as well as
> >> published works about what "understanding" means for a machine,
> >>
> >> 2) Critiques and Conclusions -- compare, generalize, hopefully reach
> >> some conclusions.
> >>
> >> So what is your definition of "understanding"? I have collected about
> >> a dozen so far and will publish along with the events.
> >>
> >> We are also having an in person event this month for those around
> >> western Washington:
> >>
> >>
> https://www.meetup.com/Northwest-Artificial-General-Intelligence-Meetup-Group/events/279258207/
> >>
> >> Thanks Mike Archbold
> >
> >
> > --
> > Daniel Jue
> > Cognami LLC
> > 240-515-7802
> > www.cognami.ai
--
Daniel Jue
Cognami LLC
240-515-7802
www.cognami.ai
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