Feeling, Time, and Mind, Part 1 of 3

The difference between emotion and feeling is that emotion means to move out from — that is to say, it implies, based on its Latin root emovere, to emanate from. It could have any particular quality; emotion can be rage or love or indifference. 

Feeling, on the other hand, implies a caring —the arousal of feeling implies not just an emanation, a movement out of a being and into the world, but also a direction to it. Feeling has a preference in a way that emotion does not.

Feeling is deeply tied to the question of agency, because agency presumes a preference. In the simplest molecular sense, a molecule repairing other molecules in the cytoplasm of the cell prefers that proteins be folded in a certain way; and if they are, it returns them to the nucleus for repair. Agency always acts either out of self interest or altruistic interest. Because pure agency understands organically that it’s part of a community, it doesn’t presume a difference between self interest and altruistic interest. They are the same simply because the interests of the community are the same as the interests of the individual. In highly evolved insects such as termites and bees we see this in its most essential expression. This is in fact by far the most intelligent and naturally perceptive understanding of relationship in community. As the Gurdjieff work maintains, “it isn’t for me.”

Feeling, as it is unto itself, is a heightened form of sensation. We look to sensation of body and being as the ground floor of feeling, which can bring elevated impressions of it according to intensity. All of this is input for the mind; and it occurred to me this morning, considering the mind and the question of agency and impulse, that we spend very little time examining the mind carefully, especially given the fact that we spend so much of our time — in essence, all of our time,—within it in one way or another. In terms of day-to-day experience, it’s the room we almost never leave.

My wife asked me the other day what the relationship between time and feeling is. This gave me pause; with all of my extended thinking about the nature of meaning, it’s a question I never considered, and so I’ve decided take it up as an investigation.

In order to tackle this question, I rephrased it a bit from where my wife began and retitled the investigation feeling, time, and mind. 

Human beings undertake almost nothing unless an emotional impulse — and a feeling, which imparts interest — exists. One of the classic symptoms of extreme depression is physical, emotional, and intellectual paralysis, in which only anguish functions. There is no way to correct an individual whose emotional impulse and feeling are defective from outside. I have known more than a few— and I’ve tried it, with absolutely no success. Motivation does not work unless there’s already an energy for impulse there. Once there is, one can do a great deal; but without it, inertia rules both mind and agency.

In the most basic sense, impulse and feeling function in order to preserve survival: there is a behavioralist, mechanistic, and Darwinian understanding of these actions that presumes to explain them, but they don’t give us a fundamental reason for why they exist in the first place. Molecules don’t actually have a need or reason to organize themselves in a mechanistic universe; they might as well do nothing. In this sense, the mechanistic rationalist model of the universe is one of eternal depression in the sense that there is no meaning to anything; it all just happens by accident. Yet this model presumptively edits feeling and its weirdly powerful action out of the picture, along with a whole range of extraordinary results of care for oneself and the community.

None of these phenomena could emerge without time to support them. In this sense, impulse, agency, emotion, feeling, and care all emerge on the loom of time as warp and weft threads that create a fabric. The action of care — of compassion — emerges from the action of time. An individual event divorced from all its circumstances and conditions has been stripped of everything that gives it meaning and creates the potential for care. So without time, compassion could not exist. It’s the sequential arrangement of affairs itself that gives rise to the potential for feeling and for care. In a chaotic arrangement — let us suppose, for example, a universe in which time can run in almost any direction, forwards or backwards or even in a loop — the potential for compassion and care is destroyed, because causal relationship is sabotaged. In this sense, we see that time and its subordinate servant of relationship become the most important factors in the arousing of feeling. 

Remembrance of things past : Jan 8, 2014.

Movement, the Inner, and the Outer

 On behalf of our search for inward relationship,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.