They try to use self-esteem to fix lack of self acceptance. And conditional self-esteem is always a shaky construction therefore prone to causing worry. — hope

You can’t have self-acceptance without self-understanding. And you can’t have self-understanding without an understanding of your world, particularly your social world and you place in it. And you can’t come to a realization of what needs to be understood about your relationships with other people , how and why they care or don’t care about you, without feeling social anxiety. Social anxiety lets us know what we are puzzled about , what we need to work on. It can be an extraordinarily creative emotion because it shakes us out of our complacency and pushes us to change and grow. I don’t know anyone who achieved healthy self-acceptance without allowing themselves to be open to anxiety and to use it to learn about themselves.
Self acceptance isnt easy. It is an endless process of development.

Seriously though. Aren’t you ever kept up at night tossing and turning over concerns about the future? Do you worry about getting older, about illness,? What about work related anxiety, like an upcoming performance review, or conflicts with other employees? Do you have anxiety about speaking in public? Do you get nervous before a sports competition? Do you worry you won’t have enough money to pay the bills , to pay off debt or for retirement?

Or maybe I just think longer and deeper. — hope

work it

Also maybe mine is better, and all the others are coming form the very ignorance mine attempts to expose and remove — hope

That’s cause you Da Man

You seem to be be forcing these labels into the two categories you want to see them as. You want to describe worry over everything bad that may happen to one’s loved ones as fear, and worry over one’s own self as anxiety. And you want to call the former healthy and the latter unhealthy. But this isnt generally how most psychologists define these terms. They see
Anxiety as pervasive in modern society. It reflects our struggle to cope with a fast paced, constantly changing world that we are desperately trying to predict and stay one step ahead of. The quality of this feeling, they argue , is different than the intensity and immediacy of fear. That is why it is is suited to modern times , where immediate dangers to survival are uncommon, but an endless series of smaller threats abound.

Fear is a natural response to prediction of external harm. Anxiety is something else. — hope

Yes, I think fear and anxiety can be usefully distinguished. Fear involves the anticipation of imminent, serious harm or loss. Anxiety involves the anticipation of an event that may produce a less severe harm or loss , and is not as imminent. Anxiety is worry, rumination, apprehension, restlessness. Anxiety over the upcoming medical test can turn to fear once the result is known. Both fear and anxiety can be described as neurotic or healthy, depending on the circumstances.

Anxiety is caused by your irrational self doubt and self hate related to those things, triggered by those things, etc... — hope

You just made that up. Do you have any sources for this peculiar definition of anxiety? It seems to me all you’re doing is trying to distinguish a neurotic from a healthy anxiety. You could do the same thing with all other emotions, including joy.

Basically stop doubting and hating yourself, and start accepting and loving yourself, and your anxiety will be gone. — hope

What if most of your anxieties concern the welfare of those around you that you care about?

Is there anything wrong in stating that neurotransmitters are scientifically assumed to play a role in the regulation and experience of affective behavior? — Shawn

I appreciate that you’re making this claim as general and open-ended as possible. In fact , I suspect that the claim is so flexible as to run the risk of saying very little. What is a neurotransmitter? Well, it’s the ‘fuel’ that allows neurons to communicate with each other. So affect implies a brain, a brain implies neurons, and neurons imply neurotransmitters. Not sure what else one can learn here.

what is wrong with assuming that moods are really just neurotransmitter levels working in the brain? — Shawn

As long as you realize that no mood ca be reliably induced by manipulating levels of single neurotransmitters. Neurohormones are involved in affect just as they are involved in all aspects of cognitive function. But moods are much more complex that anything that can be reduced to individual hormones. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors do not always alleviate depression for this reason. I would go so far as to say that the way neurotransmitters are involved in moods is inseparable from the way they are involved in cognition in general.

The implication is that there is something that is the same in each expression. This is an assumed, almost unconscious transcendental argument: You understood the meaning of my utterance, therefore there must be a thing that we call the meaning of that utterance that has been transfered from you to me. — Banno

My understanding of the meaning of your utterance is just a sense that is produced via my construal of your utterance. That sense may include my assuming that what you mean to say is exactly the same as what I am construing as the recipient of your utterance. Or I might make no such supposition. I may instead assume that I construe something that is likely similar enough to what you intended to convey that we can have a useful interaction , but whether that is in fact the case must be born out by my observation of your subsequent behavior. I may later decide that you intended to convey something very different from what I was assuming and I will either have to resign myself to concluding that your utterance is incomprehensible to me or begin exploring ways of making sense of your utterance that is useful to me.
So nothing has been transferred from you to me. You fell into an utterance , and I received an utterance that was somewhat different from what you experienced ( or so we can both demonstrate to each other by repeatedly surprising each other with mutually unpredictable behaviors ) but close enough for both of us to be able to benefit from the interchange.


“ For about three centuries now Anglo-Saxon man has labored under the somewhat mislead-ing assumption that knowledge is transmitted through the senses. This was John Locke's great notion in 1690' In expressing it, he provided the essential spade work for both modern experi-mental psychology and the courageous empiricism of Sigmund Freud. But great ideas, like great men, sometimes have a way of eventually blocking the very progress they once so coura-geously initiated. Thus it is, even after continued experience in psychotherapy, most of us still hold doggedly to the belief that one man's understanding of the universe can be somehow encoded within a signal system and then transmitted intact to another man via the senses. The signal system is often called "language." Indeed, Pavlov's psychological term for "language" was simply "the second signal system.” George Kelly

Because ongoing experience is a carrying forward of a past. That past enters into, participates in, what occurs into it, even as that past is changed by what occurs into it. That’s why there can be neither absolute novelty nor absolute identity.

This maintains the misleading reification that there is a something that is expressed, something reproduced. It isn't always so. Better to say something is done. Instead of looking for meaning, look at what we do when we use words. — Banno

There is, must always be something that is expressed, something that is repeated, but in so doing the repetition alters. But don’t make the mistake of treating what is repeated as a presence, an object or subject.

I will defer to Derrida on the relation between reproduction, repetition, meaning , subjectivity and pragmatic ‘doing’ in your sense.

Repetition is altering, and this is what Derrida calls `iterability':

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."

"Through the possibility of repeating every mark as the same, [iterability] makes way for an idealization that seems to deliver the full presence of ideal objects..., but this repeatability itself ensures that the full presence of a singularity thus repeated comports in itself the reference to something else, thus rending the full presence that it nevertheless announces"(LI29)). ...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)." "The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”

This situation is valid not only for linguistic signs, but, Derrida says, for all of what philosophy calls experience, "even the experience of being"(Limited,Inc.,p.9)

So what is left of idealizing notions like self, ipseity, internality , intrinsicality , subjectivity and objectivity is the element, the mark , which is only a differential, an in-between.

"convey" implies that something moved from here to there, so one might be tempted to ask what it is that was moved, and set that out in words. But nothing - no thing - was moved. — Banno

Yes, if we think of convey via the metaphor of displacement in physical space. But instead we can think of words like convey , express , transport ,articulate, trasmit, elucidate, repeat , not as the spatial displacement of an unchanged entity but as a reproduction which alters what it reproduces in the transmitting of it. To convey a meaning is to alter what is expressed.

what the painting conveys is different from what any interpretation provides. — T Clark

Isnt the painting itself an interpretation, and always a slightly different one every time we return to it , the same way that a novel or a poem means exactly how one interprets it at any given time , but is interpreted slightly differently every time we return to it? Or these words I’m writing now and you are reading now, don’t we , each in our own way, see their meaning as exactly what they are, at any given reading, which changes its sense from
reading to reading?

As long as we are conscious we are construing our world moment to moment on the basis of how the next event is similar and different with respect to the previous. This is the basis of all language. As we perform this construing moment to moment , we perceive each event both in terms of it’s unique content and its affective relation to what went before it , how it either carries forward or changes a previous mood , a feeling disposition, a motivational attitude , the way in which events matter to us.

Music is a language that particularly well suited to convey these shifts in feeling from moment to moment. That does not mean that it is content free. It can’t be , because the shifts i. feeling that we experience when we listen to music have to be about something. Music is ideational. It tells a story via affectivity but also via a vague, unspecified content that is undergoing these feeling and attitude fluctuations. One can think of notes as profoundly impressionistic words. Written and spoken words , on the other hand, ade best suited for conveying crystallized content , leaving out what is nonetheless intrinsic to their sense , their affectivity.

Every word you are reading right now presents its own music. It either carries forward a previous feeling or changes it. It has built in emojis, which we hear in spoken intonation and emphasis but have to fill in ourselves when we read a written text . But no word ever spoken or written or received with the intent to mean something is devoid of its own accompanying musical feeling tone. The feeling tone is always intrinsic to the context of the word ( what the person speaking or writing it intends to convey by it or how the recipient intends to interpret it ), not separate and added on.

So words can be impoverished in the encoding of affect, and music without lyrics is impoverished in fleshed-out meaning content , but words and music convey both affect and sense content. What is only conveyed implicitly in one language via the contextual intent of the speaker and recipient) is conveyed explicitly in the other.

Regarding your quote , of course when we hear the first notes of a song we notice the physical instruments -and other such surface details. But as we become absorbed i. what the music is saying , where it is taking us, we are transported , just as when reading text we at first notice physical details of the page , the font and size and color
of the letters. If it is an engaging novel , by the time we get caught up in it we may complete forget we are reading words on a page. Instead , we are in the drama.

I don't think the song is sitting in the muso's head, complete, just needing to be birthed. I think it develops as it is played. — Banno

Sure. What I said about the evolution of a philosopher’s new idea applies also the the musician. Within their own medium , in struggling to compose something new there is a move from the tentative and incipient to a crisp , clarified and focused musical product. I’m just saying that articulating their ideas in words is not a
necessary part of the process, unless the song includes lyrics. But just as forming a vague idea into words doesn’t lose the profundity of the ideas for the philosopher , turning a vague impressionistic inconsistent musical sketch into a finalized written score doesnt lose the profundity for the musician.

that I prefer vanilla to chocolate ice-cream is a subjective fact - or if you prefer, it is a subjective truth. It's truth is dependent on my own taste.

That this text is written in English is not dependent on my own taste or feelings. Hence it is an objective truth.

That's an end to it; don't allow the notions of subjectivity and objectivity to take on any more significance.

in particular, don't pretend that there are either only subjective facts, or that there are only objective facts. — Banno

What does ‘my own’ mean? Empiricism and Idealism each have their own ideas about this, but in the end they are two side of the same coin. The social constructionism of Ken Gergen and Jon Shotter argues
that it is possible to conceive the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.

I agree with them as far as this goes. But I still don’t know what subjective and objective facts are , assuming we allow for both. And I don’t know what a joint or shared interaction is. I see everything you just said about subject and object , and intersubjectivity , to apply to a dynamic that comes into play before we assume the notion of participants in a language game. How do you describe a participant in such a game ? Why is the joint action, the language game ‘public’? It certainly isn’t private. It isn’t located in a container or self-reproducing continuity. But public implies
at least two. Two what? Subjects? No that’s not right.
Dimensions of a whole? And what do these two or more share in the joint action of a language game? In the moment of the sharing is there a dissolution of the plurality into a singularity of sharing , a single sense distributed among the plurality?

Music and visual arts can can of course still be profound. There is a strong sense in which setting out the meaning of a piece is detracting from it.
3h — Banno

In coming up with my first original ideas in philosophy, I didn’t know how to articulate them in words. Why?Because they were still too tentative , to much like a loose sketch , to internally inconsistent and unfocused. It took me a few years before i could write down the first word to describe these ideas. Over time my vocabulary became richer and more precise. Dinthis detract from
the peofundity of the original ideas? On the contrary , the verbalization made it possible to make much more rapid progress in transforming what I began with. Eventually I abandoned a lot of my original
vocabulary , but this was only made possible by creating it in the first place so I could see more clearly what it was I was so enthralled with. I think creativity is a cycle beginning with tentative , incipient music-like intuitive stabs at the new. One hears a new music in one’s
head. If one is a musician one doesn’t have to take this process any further, but if one is a scientist or philosopher one warns to enrich, tighten and define what is at first only a feeling so that it becomes a coherent , clarified concept rather than remaining only a loose sketch.
I’m not saying the verbal is more profound than the musical , but neither is the musical more profound than the verbal, or the painterly.

What is subjective is only understood in contrast to what is objective — Banno

Very true. Tell me more about how you transcend the subject-object binary. I don’t see it in any of your writings. Tell me how some of the cognitive scientists you are interested in do this.

The visual image of that painting doesn't tell you that there are symbols embedded in it, so how could they come to mind by simply looking at it? — frank

How does the visual image of the word ‘hello’ that you are looking at now tell you that there is a symbol embedded in it? What is a symbol? What is that that allows you to ‘decode’ a seemingly random pattern of dots into first a series of lines, curved and angles, and then further into letters, and after that into words? Isnt visual interpretation and thus symbolization involved every step of the way ? When we see a picture of a chair , aren’t we doing f something similar, beginning with the perception of a seemingly random spread of dots and from that we construct lines, angles and other shapes, and then finally recognize these features as all
belonging to a single object? Do we need a name for the object in order to recognize it as an object? How are lines symbolizing letters which in certain sequences symbolize words different from lines symbolizing pieces of a visual object which in certain combinations symbolizes the whole visual object? Isnt it symbolization the whole way down in both cases?

That painting is full of symbols that relate to events before and after the event. I think you need words to convey past and future. — frank

If only words convey past and future , how is it that visual images convey the present?

When looking at the painting, why couldn’t we deal with those symbols that come to mind relating to events before and after the event in either verbal form or via images of the past or future? We could
conjure in our heads extensions of the scene moving either backwards or forwards in time, just as we can verbalize such shifts in time

My position is that music, and visual arts, don't mean anything. Meaning comes with words. — T Clark

But don’t the components of a painting tell a
story? When we look at a written word, we begin with the geometries of lines and curves and angles , and then recognize letters , and then words, making use of context to anticipate the next word. Don’t we do the same
thing when we look at a painting, begin with geometries of line and shape and shadow and color and then piece
together larger meanings from these simpler perceptions, the story the painting tells?

I could describe in words da Vinci’s last supper, or show the painting. Could the words used to describe the scene ever convey more than the visual image?

What we do by naming, using words, is telling stories. — Mww

Is the sharing of a perceptual image or a sound recording also the telling of a story?

Banno
13.5k
↪Aidan buk Here's where this discussion generally leads, Aidan. To a division between those who think there is something more to be said and those who think it can only be shown. — Banno

the idea of an intersubjective locus of meaning makes no sense without subjectivities that interact.
— Joshs

This is a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, relying on meaning rather than use, while giving primacy to the subjective. You would maintain some variation of a private language, disguised as "subjectivities". Go ahead, but then you can say nothing interesting about them. — Banno

Im not relying on meaning in Wittgenstein’s sense, and I knew using that word would cause trouble here. For me there is nothing but use, and I also dont mean ‘subjective’ in the way you think I do. Showing is using , which is changing. This takes place before we can talk about a community of language users , because primordially we dont yet know what a community of people or voices or bodies is. Before any of this is the way temporality, prior to any constituted notion of community , throws me outside of myself. The
‘me’, the ‘I’ , the ‘self’ always returns to itself differently. It is already its own social outside prior to the concept of a language community. You can only think
of this as a subjective inside , a box with a beetle , if you are misunderstanding what it is that is supposed to be changed by temporality every moment. You would have to begin with something present to itself first, which is mot what I am arguing for.

Derrida discusses this relation between temporality and language games.

Derrida says all speech is ‘writing’ , so when I speak or write to myself, I am speaking to the other. This is the origin and only site of the social.

“That totally affects a structure, but it is a duty, an ethical and political duty, to take into account this impossibility of being one with oneself. It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other.”


“From this point of view, there is no difference, or no possible distinction if you will, between the letter I write to someone else and the letter I send to myself. The structure is the same.”

In response to a question about the connection between time and language , he says:

“In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public': , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation' : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public', and I am too concerned with and interested in politics and history to use them so easily.

Now the next question, again a very difficult one, has to do with the distinction between the other and time, between alterity, intersubjectivity and time. Again, you make recourse to Wittgenstein in a way which I cannot address here.

. No doubt, for a meaning to be understood and for discussion to start, for literature to be read, we need a community that has, even if there are conflicts, a certain desire for normativity, and so for the stabilization of meaning, of grammar, rhetoric, logic, semantics and so on. (But, by the way, if these imply a community, I wouldn't call it a community of 'minds' for a number of reasons - not least those touched on In response to your last question regarding the 'inner' .)

But this is not really the context in which I connect the question about the other who is 'radically other' (that is, is another 'origin of the world' , another 'ego' if you want, or another 'zero point of perception') with that of 'another moment' in time (between this now and the other now, the past now and the now to come, there is an absolute alterity, each now is absolutely other ). So how do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my
quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I' without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I', that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I' and nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I'.”(Arguing with Derrida)

For Heidegger(1982), temporality as pure self-affection is not the essence of subjectivity but the essence of Dasein, which is not a subjectivity but what lies in between the subjective and the objective.

“The Dasein does not need a special kind of observation, nor does it need to conduct a sort of
espionage on the ego in order to have the self; rather, as the Dasein gives itself over immediately and passionately to the world itself, its own self is reflected to it from things. This is not mysticism and does not presuppose the assigning of souls to things. It is only a reference to an elementary phenomenological fact of existence, which must be seen prior to all talk, no matter how acute, about the subject-object relation.”
“To say that the world is subjective is to say that it belongs to the Dasein so far as this being is in
the mode of being-in-the-world. The world is something which the “subject” “projects outward,” as it were, from within itself. But are we permitted to speak here of an inner and an outer? What can this projection mean? Obviously not that the world is a piece of myself in the sense of some other thing present in me as in a thing and that I throw the world out of this subject thing in order to catch hold of the other things with it. Instead, the Dasein itself is as such already projected. So
far as the Dasein exists a world is cast-forth with the Dasein’s being. To exist means, among other
things, to cast-forth a world, and in fact in such a way that with the thrownness of this projection, with the factical existence of a Dasein, extant entities are always already uncovered.”

So here with Derrida and Heidegger we have the tow poles of self-world interaction; the anticipative protection outward from my past into experience, and the absolute novelty of what I anticipate into
Thus the self continues to be itself only by being absolutely other than itself to moment.

We open the armagnac and share it - we might talk about sharing the experience of drinking.

Then things get philosophical and someone says something like that we only know what the armagnac tastes like to each of us; we can't share what it tastes like in itself... and the little man appears, because the taste of armagnac-in-itself is as nonsensical as the little man who wasn't there. — Banno

I don’t think the Wittgensteinian approach completely resolved the problem because the idea of an intersubjective locus of meaning makes no sense without subjectivities that interact. We can say that we only know what the armagnac tastes like to each of us without assuming that there is such a thing as the armagnac-in-itself, just as there is no such thing as a self in itself or a self for itself or a ‘what it is like’ in itself.

Wittgenstein was right to argue that the sense of anything is only produced in interaction , but this interaction is not the same thing as a pure ‘sharing’ in which the sense of an experience is a outlet ‘we’ phenomenon. There can be no pure ‘we’ sharing of any sense because then this shared ‘we’ becomes a thing in itself.

The felt sense is a vague , impressionistic sketch of what the word crystalizes.
— Joshs

The crystallization you refer to is achieved by throwing away much of the information included in the original experience. — T Clark

Isnt this what we are told words are supposed to do, give us only this generic dictionary meaning? But is this really how each of us experience the meaning of a word? Do two people ever experience the meaning of a word in the same way? Does one person ever experience the meaning of the same word in the same way twice? If you read any of of the same words I just wrote twice do they connote the same exact sense each time? So what exactly is it that a word locks in? I know we say that this is supposed to be what words do, but what does a word, used this instant, in this context, lock in that a feeling, felt in this instant in this context, doesn’t?
I say that a ‘feeling’ is a particular change being made in the way we relate to a situation, just as a word is. What give a feeling the richness a word doesn’t have? Is it some intrinsic , immediate mystery? Or is it a discrete relational difference , a change made in my comportment toward the world?

Aside from the difference between a feeling and a word, what’s the difference between a feeling and an intention or a perception?

I was puzzled why such a brilliant genius like Nietszche who is so popular today would make such statements. I Know it's taken out of context but nevertheless if a philosopher today was to make such pronouncements I think he/she would be severly attacked for what seems discriminatory. — Ross Campbell

“A number of Nietzsche interpreters argue that Nietzsche was using irony and other devices to make points that were not on the whole intended as anti-female.

Susan Padilla writes:

Nietzsche probably utilized the tools of irony, parody, and hu- mor as a way of coping with his difficulties concerning the accu- racy and value of language. Finally, because his work is so an- fractuous, it is absolutely critical that any one comment of Nietzsche‘s be explicated only in context with the greater whole of his work. It is virtually impossible to make singular selections or anthologize Nietzsche without distorting his meaning.”

“Friedrich Nietzsche is widely regarded as a man who hated women. His work has been assaulted with accusa- tions of misogyny. It is true that his writing contains nu- merous references to women, few of which seem com- plimentary when taken at face value. From his earliest works, to those composed at the end of his life, one can identify dozens of excerpts to support the misogyny charge. One can read almost any work by Nietzsche, employ a narrow interpretation, and conclude that he was in fact a misogynist. His comments regard- ing women appear, at best, ambiguous. At their worst, they seem down right degrading. At least prima facie, Nietzsche seems per- haps the most sexist philosopher in history. A closer examination of his book Beyond Good and Evil will reveal a different picture. There is a different exegesis of Nietzsche which exonerates him from the charge of misogyny. Properly construed, Nietzsche is revealed as a man who appreciated the natural instincts and po- tential power of women, and who, through his use of irony and his criticisms of both ―woman as such‖ and women, wished to educate women on approaching the emancipation issue more effectively without losing their inherent femininity. He in fact implored women to cease in the cannibalization of other women and ―woman as such‖ in order that they could better achieve their goal of emancipation or even better, from Nietzsche‘s per- spective, to achieve a goal of self-overcoming, and in so doing become free spirits.”

The other is understood entirely by a body of knowledge possessed by a self, so no separation is possible. No mind independent other can exist, so a self cannot be separated from other.


This conception of self has a central density of information then extends outward, similar to a hurricane, to wherever and whatever it has information of.

How would you conceive a self, and thus a boundary of "subject"? — Pop

The subject-object boundary is none other than the finite, discreet nature of time. Time is nothing outside of the experience of time , and the experience of time is that of my immediate past ( and by implication all of my prior history linked to it ) being changed by implying into a new event which occurs into that implying. The now is always a differential. It is what occurs to me by changing me.

You're changing the meaning of the word "talking." Talking uses words. This from the web:

Talk - speak in order to give information or express ideas or feelings; converse or communicate by spoken words. — T Clark

I can also talk to myself , as if I were speaking to someone else, neo sued in fact I am
speaking to someone else. I can also think ‘pre-verbally’, using the felt as a of a situation. But to me words are merely more richly articulated versions of a felt sense.
The felt sense is a vague , impressionistic sketch of what the word crystalizes. What the verbal and the pre-verbal , the merely ‘felt’ and the conceptualization have in common is that they are both ways of construing new events.

I know that what I call experience, wordless awareness, is different from knowing or understanding using language. It feels different in a profound way. It uses different parts of me. I — T Clark

Is it anything like this?:


“Our usual way of thinking divides experience into discrete entities: thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, body sensations, and so on....These experiences are cut apart from each other. If you were now to say to yourself, "How do I physically sense this situation as a whole?", even the question is confusing. It involves an unusual way of sensing. We are used to letting "physical" and "body" refer to just sensations. Can we physically feel a situation? We usually think of "situation" as outside, and we split that off from our inside.”
“ A characteristic of this felt sense is that it is experienced as an intricate whole. One can sense that it includes many intricacies and strands. It is not uniform like a piece of iron or butter. Rather it is a whole complexity, a multiplicity implicit in a single sense.”
“Thus intellectual meanings are in their very nature aspects of subjective feelings. Any moment's subjective feeling implicitly contains many possible meanings which could be differentiated and symbolized. Everything we learn, think or read enriches the implicit meanings contained in subjective felt referent. For example, after reading a theoretical paper, my "feeling" about it will implicitly contain many intellectual perceptions and meanings which I have, because I have spent years of reading and thinking. When I write a commentary on the paper I symbolize explicitly the meanings which were implicit in my "feelings" after I read the paper.
Clearly, such "feelings" contain not only emotions, but attitudes, past experiences, and complex intellectual differentiations. Thus the "feeling" which guides the adjusted person implicitly contains all the intellectual meanings of all his experience. As his "feeling" functions, it is a modified interaction of these implicit meanings. When an individual is said to "act on his feelings," this complex total functions as the basis of action. It includes implicit intellectual meanings; it is not mere emotion.”(Gendlin, E.T. (1959).

I’m not suggesting this is your belief, but according to a long-standing Western tradition, which continues today in cognitive neuroscience, science, affective feeling is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily’, dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity,
calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.

I believe in collapsing the distinction between feeling,intention, perception and action. Thus, to feel is to construe, which expresses.

↪Joshs You be the sort that talks about the music but don't feel it?
put into words... they become something different.
— T Clark — Banno

But feeling is already an expressing , and as such it IS a kind of talking.

Picture yourself in what nowadays is called a "flow" state; when you play so smoothly that there is no distinction between you and the guitar; when you cruise the corner perfectly, no distance between you and your chosen ride; when you look up to find that you've been coding for hours but it seems a few minutes. — Banno

In a flow experience , am I melding with the object or is the object melding with me, or is it not necessary to choose one or the other option? I think in order to have this experience of timeless immersion there must be a unity of similarity linking one moment of the flow to the next. This requires that each new event have a sense of belonging to the previous as variations of an unfolding theme. What occurs fulfills my anticipating into it. The flow isn’t interrupted by the unexpected and this is what makes it appear timeless. The anticipative aspect is what drives this experience and keeps it unified , and this is the subjective contribution.

Why decided to experience it as outside? Why put in place the subject-object?

That's what is here:
The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject are not only intermingled ; they also constitute a new whole
— Joshs — Banno

Not sure I follow. The subject doesn’t decide to experience an object as outside. The outside imposes itself on the subject. The ‘subject’ here isn’t an entity but merely a pole of an interaction.

Didn't you say much the same thing as I did here? I understood what I said... — Banno

Maybe I said the same thing, but what phenomenologically informed cognitive science wants to emphasize, in contra distinction to computational, representational models of cognition, is that there is no generic outside. What I experience as my outside ( the keyboard , chair , room, etc) is what is pragmatically useful to me relative to my goals as a functionally integral cognitive system. I’m not just talking about how I use objects but their very sense. Similarly, each organism is shaped by an environment unique to its mode of functioning.

In other words, my outside is constrained, shaped and co-produced by the anticipative directionality of my cogntive system.

If this is what you meant then we are in agreement.

All is half truths except for this sentence? — frank

Including this sentence, because this sentence is also a product of subject-object interaction. Except rather than half truth I would say contingently constructed sense.

What's odd is that you seem to think that this helps. I don't see how. — Banno

My fault for trying to respond to a critique without an argument behind it.

It led me to think that in the process of becoming verbal there's a concomitant loss of experiential wisdom. Maybe that doesn't make sense to others - words again... — Tom Storm

I don’t know that words trap to any greater extent than thoughts do. It’s the construing that constrains ( as well as enables) , whether that is verbal or pre-verbal.

That’s being in itself in a nutshell. Irreducible subject-object reciprocal relationality.

Andy Clark on phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty:

“Merleau-Ponty stressed the importance of what I have called "continuous reciprocal causation "- viz., the idea that we must go beyond the passive image of the organism perceiving the world and recognize the way our actions may be continuously responsive to worldly events which are at the same time being continuously responsive to our actions. Consider a lovely example, which I think of as "the hamster and tongs" :

“When my hand follows each effort of a struggling animal while holding an instrument for capturing it, it is clear that each of my movements responds to an external stimulation ; but it is also clear that these stimulations could not be received without the movements by which I expose my receptors to their influence . . . . The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject are not only intermingled ; they also constitute a new whole .” (Merleau -Ponty)