The following text is an excerpt from the introduction to my book, Taking Heart and Making Sense, published in 2022. I have added a few subtitles for readability.
If you’d like to understand more about how a theory of feeling relates to various contemporary uses of embodiment, you might like to start with my article What is Embodiment Philosophy? It provides a broader context for the theory developed in my book.
Taking Heart and Making Sense: A new view of nature, feeling and the body
Taking heart and making sense is something we must do many times in life. We all face challenges or reach junctures where we need to dig a little deeper, find a little optimism—to take heart—while we also settle on a way of understanding that seems useful and that we can live with—we make sense. But people do this in very different ways. Each person’s perspective on their own life is different and it is often difficult to know how things really are for someone else, what their experience is like. Such separateness is a part of being human. That is a theme of this book and seems important to acknowledge early on; we are separate and individualised beings. But an even bigger theme of this book is that we are interconnected beings, with each other and with the natural world. The first point we already know, but the second needs explaining. Western culture currently does not seem to understand it. This book offers one way of explaining our interconnectedness along with our separateness. Feeling is central to both.
In our own lives, feeling is important to understand because it is always present, even if sometimes it is very quiet. It is not some part of our consciousness that we can add or take away. It is the foundational level of our experience—of the physical body but somehow more than the body because the present, feeling body is also formed of its history. Often this history will be outside our awareness, even as it continues in our functioning, in our reactions to situations and in our habits. Yet even when we are unaware, feeling interprets this history; it relates our present and past as we recognise situations, whether by a subtle sense or a tumultuous change.
A theory of feeling must account for both objective knowledge and subjective experience
In a broader social sense, the relevance and importance of understanding feeling cannot be overstated. Secular Western culture seems to be adrift, without a strong sense of the value of life or the best way for human beings to live and engage with one another. One key reason for this lack of moorings is that human experience—and its relation to the broader nature—is not adequately accounted for by the narratives that underpin and influence Western culture. Feeling is rendered essentially meaningless by both science and postmodernism and genuine alternatives have yet to come to fruition, although they are certainly in the making. We need theory that can explain human feeling—and subjective, individual experience—while still affirming the importance of science and empirical research. Such theory should support rigorous knowledge and understanding of the world, while at the same time anchoring us in a stronger sense of meaning and value, of our individual and collective lives, and of our participation in the very process of life itself. It should help us to develop care and concern for others as well as to deal with the undeniable difficulties of life, the fear and insecurity inherent in being alive.
It is not easy to chart a path that explains the depth of our interconnectedness while acknowledging the uniqueness of individual experience. Yet, if we can do this, we can begin to understand how working with our own experience effects change beyond ourselves—reverberating through interactions, groups and societies. Accepting my feeling helps me to accept yours. Understanding my history helps me to understand yours. This occurs at a much deeper level than we currently appreciate. Even so, we must take care not to romanticise feeling. Experience can be painful and alienating, particularly if we don’t understand how it arises. Our feelings can be confusing and contradictory, and can push us to act in ways we don’t understand or later regret. Human beings are complex, perhaps unfathomably so. We are capable of inflicting immense suffering on one another. Yet we manage to live relatively peacefully together in many places, sustained and buoyed by mutual care and cooperation, despite our flaws and differences. Our capacity to care for and connect with each other exists deeply in the natural way of things.
Explaining human experience in a useful way requires that we move beyond the concept of the isolated individual that permeates so many aspects of contemporary life. People are largely understood as entirely separate from one another and from nature—unconstrained, self-reliant and in competition. When we see ourselves this way, we tend to instrumentalise the natural world as an entity entirely disconnected from us, which we can only exploit and attempt to control, rather than in which we participate. Indeed, many of the metaphors we use to describe life itself are based on a fantasy of control—brains control people, genes control cells, chemistry controls physiology, natural selection controls evolution. None of these are accurate. They are based in the underlying view that the world is made of physical things and that other outside forces move them.
A theory of feeling requires a new metaphysics
This book puts forward a different view, that we need to understand the intricacy of interactions that form nature—including individual human beings—from the ground up. Here I am referring to metaphysics—our foundational concepts. Even if we think they are irrelevant, they are everywhere. In recent years, we have helplessly witnessed the unprecedented destruction of animal and plant life, some of it centuries old, in megafires on more than one continent. We have discovered an enormous garbage island floating in the Pacific Ocean and microscopic plastic particles in every level of the food chain. Even so, we continue to live in more or less the same way and to plunder ancient natural resources, all while having our lives turned upside down by the worldwide spread of a new disease. I cannot help but think that the view of the world as composed of lifeless matter creates death because this view does not engender the right kind of care and concern. But perhaps this is poetic license. What I am certain of is that ideas collectively shape us as much as actions, and that when we change our worldview we can observe new phenomena. One of the most important phenomena that comes into focus when we understand nature differently is that meaning is immanent in nature, in living processes. This helps us to both value life itself and to experience and reflect on our humanness. Meaning is immanent in the living body, in the natural world. We experience this first as feeling.
Human beings are in and of the natural world. We can develop perspectives on the world, but we cannot stand outside it and view it objectively. A different underlying worldview can help us to come to terms with this without leading us into the idea that truth is relative—and the nihilism this idea leads to. is book in no way disagrees with the value of science and empirical research. Rather, it provides a broader view that highly values scientific inquiry while acknowledging the limits of the ideal of impartial observation. Many of the theories discussed in this book, which form its overall argument, are interpretations of empirical research. The purpose of presenting an alternative metaphysics as part of this argument is to develop a foundation that is already strongly implied in some branches of science, particularly biology and cognitive science. We are possibly on the verge of a paradigm shift.