Felt Meanings of the World Chapter 1

The first step in achieving an appreciative understanding of the world as felt is to make explicit the metaphysical nature of sensuous feelings. The ultimate point of the present chapter is to show that sensuous feelings are not only feeling-sensations of the I, but are also sensuously felt features of the world, these features being termed “feeling tonalities.” This will contravene the traditional presupposition that sensuous feelings are but “sensations or emotions of the soul which are related especially to it,”[1] as Descartes says, and thus as phenomena related solely to the soul have no global metaphysical significance. I wish to show in particular that some feeling-tonalities have sources in the world as a whole, these sources being global importances.

As culminating my descriptions in this chapter, the discussion of feeling-tonalities occupies the last three sections (I.8-10). This discussion is preceded by preparatory analyses of the feeling-sensations of the I to which the worldly feeling-tonalities are correlated (I.6-7). I begin in I.6 with a critical and historical analysis of the rationalist theory of feeling-sensations that prevented their correlation with feeling-tonalities of the world from being recognized. This historical critique will uncover a further rationalist misinterpretation of feeling not discussed in the Introduction.

In this chapter, sensuous feelings rather than global importances are the phenomena that are being made explicit in significations. This signifies that the appreciative method of knowing discussed in the Introduction is here being directed upon feelings rather than global importances. In this case, the reappreciative afterglows and concentrations are inspired to make explicit the sensuous aspect of the feelings in which the global importances are appreciated.

chapter, an aspect that is made explicit in mundane reappreciative feelings, these being afterglowing and concentrating reappreciations that are inspired by important parts of the world or by the feelings in which these world-parts are appreciated.[2]

I. 6. The External Characterization of Feeling-Sensations as Consequences of Reasons

An internal characterization of a feeling-sensation explicates it solely in terms of determinations found in the feeling-sensation itself. Specifically, the feeling-qualities of pleasure or pain found in the feeling-sensation are allowed to become manifest solely in reference to other feeling-determinations also found in the feeling-sensation and with which the feeling-qualities of pleasure or pain are united. Such an internal characterization allows one to recognize the feeling-tonalities of the world that correlate to the internal determinations of the feeling-sensations.

An external characterization of a feeling-sensation defines it as a quality of pleasure or pain that is related to something external to the feeling. An external characterization is rational if the external phenomena in reference to which the pleasurable and painful sensations are defined are reasons that explain these sensations, specifically, causal reasons. As so characterized, a feeling-sensation is a pleasurable or painful consequence of a reason, i.e., a pleasurable or painful effect of a cause.

The result of an external and rational characterization of feeling-sensations is that the concept of the world as sensuously felt becomes replaced by a concept of a world of causal reasons to which the feeling-sensations are externally related. By this means, the world we experience as correlating to our feeling-sensations becomes represented as the world as reasoned about, and the sensuously felt features of the world that correlate to our feeling-sensations, the feeling-tonalities, are left unrecognized.

The above remarks can be developed and substantiated by presenting a historical analysis and critique of the external and rational ways of characterizing feeling-sensations. The origin of these ways of defining and classifying feeling-sensations can be understood from an examination of the first systematic classification of feelings, which Aristotle developed in Book 2 of Rhetoric.

In the second book of the Rhetoric, Aristotle is concerned with classifying affective-sensations rather than with other types of feeling-sensations, such as mood-sensations,[3] and in this tendency he is followed by virtually every subsequent author of a “treatise on the passions.” Affects (pathe) are “movements of the soul” involving pleasure or pain, and as such are distinguished by Aristotle from the pleasurable or painful complements of a function, such as the pleasure associated with seeing.[4] Affects are distinguished from one another primarily by three external factors: 1) the cause of the affect, which is a good or evil phenomenon, 2) the people about whom the affect is felt, and 3) the states of mind that are the mental preconditions of the affect.[5] In regard to the internal nature of the affects, nothing more is said than that they are qualities of pleasure and pain. This is illustrated in Aristotle’s definitions of pity and envy. Of pity Aristotle writes: “Pity is definable as a feeling of pain caused by the sight of a destructive or painful evil that happens to a person who does not deserve t.”[6] Note that Aristotle’s remark that pity is a “feeling of pain,” which is the only reference he makes to the internal nature of pity, is in sufficient to demarcate the individual essence of pity or to distinguish it from the other affects, for a number of these other affects, such as envy, fear, and shame, also have this very same internal characteristic. Aristotle thus is forced to differentiate pity from these other affects by pointing to differences among the things to which they are related. For example, envy, like pity, is a “pain,” but it differs in that: “Envy is a pain caused by the sight of such goods as the aforementioned ones, riches, power, aristocratic birth, etc., and it is felt about people who are our equals.”[7] Pity and envy also differ in the predispositions of the people who feel them; pity is felt by elderly or weak men, etc., and envy by small-minded or ambitious men and the like.

These definitions are prototypes of the future definitions of the qualities of feeling-sensations, although the form of these definitions was modified in two ways. Aristotle’s emphasis on the external aspects of feeling was retained, but his theory of the three kinds of external phenomena underwent a number of changes. To begin with, his conception of the predisposing state of mind was abandoned. Aristotle’s classification was undertaken in the context of a theory of rhetoric, and he wished to describe the predisposing states of mind of the different affects in order that a speaker may recognize and attempt to instill them in his audience. In the subsequent “treatises on the passions” the feelings were examined in other contexts, and the need to investigate their predisposing states of minds was no longer deemed to be of prime significance. Aristotle’s distinction between the causes of the affects and the people to whom the affects are related had a more significant influence. It was not adopted as such, but in two modified forms. The first modification, the less popular one, lay in extending the category of the “people” to which affects are related to the larger category of “objects” in general, such that affects are defined as related to causes and objects rather than causes and people. The second modification, adopted by most of the subsequent writers on affects, was to extend the category of “people” to that of “objects,” and then to identify the objects of the affects with their causes, so that affects are defined as related to only one external phenomenon, the objective cause.

The classification of affects in terms of causes and objects received its most famous and influential expression in Book 2 of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature. Pride and love, for example, are described by Hume as types of pleasure that differ in terms of their objects and causes. The object of pride is myself, and its cause is something good which is related to myself; the object of love, on the other hand, is another person, and its cause is a good quality of the person. Hume’s classification of affects is of especial significance in that it was the first classification using the cause/object distinction to achieve an explicit insight into the external nature of its principles. Hume’s insight into this feature of his classification is expressed in the following passage, in which he indicates that feeling-sensations, exemplified by pride and humility, are “simple” and so can not be defined. All that can be done is to describe the objects and causes (the “attendant circumstances”) to which the feeling-sensations are externally related:

The passions of PRIDE and HUMILITY being simple and uniform impressions, ‘tis impossible we can ever, by a multitude of words, give a just definition of them, or indeed of any of the passions. The utmost we can pretend to is a description of them, by an enumeration of such circumstances, as attend them.[8]

The classification of affects by means of the single concept of their “objective cause” was practiced by most of the stoic, patristic, scholastic, and modern philosophers. The predominance of this method of externally defining feelings is exemplified by the fact that the treatise on passion that most influenced Hume’s treatise, Francis Hutcheson’s An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, and the treatise that was most influenced by Hume’s theory, Thomas Reid’s theory of passions in the third essay of Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, both used the single “causality” principle in their definitions of the passions. Some of the other philosophers who used it are Cicero, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel. Among these philosophers, the one who achieved the greatest clarity about this external principle of definition and classification was Spinoza. In Book 3 of Ethics, Spinoza distinguished pleasure, pain, and desire as the three basic types of affects (affectibus) and proceeded to distinguish their various subtypes by aligning these affects with different causes. The nature of his external definitions may be gleaned from two examples: “Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause [idea causae externae].“[9] “Pleasure, accompanied by the idea of an internal cause [idea causae internae] is named honour.”[10]

It can be gathered from these two definitions that Spinoza’s principle of external definition and classification is none other than one of the traditional principles of causality. The principle that where there is a difference in the cause, there will be a difference in the effect, entails that “there are as many species of pleasure, pain and desire ... as there are species of objects that affect us.”[11] Spinoza explains this further in a passage which explicitly states the principle which has been used — mostly in an implicit manner — in a majority of the traditional classifications of affects:

…the pleasure which is an effect, for example, of the object A involves the nature of that object A, and the pleasure which is an effect of the object B involves the nature of that object B, such that these two pleasurable affects [affectus] are by nature different inasmuch as the causes from which they originate are different.[12]

Since the affective sensations of pleasure and pain are defined and differentiated in reference to their external causal reasons, it follows that the world as affectively experienced is to be defined accordingly, viz., as a world of causal reasons. The sensuously felt features of the world that are correlated with the internal differentiations of the feeling-sensations are unrecognized because these internal differentiations are themselves unrecognized. The world as causally reasoned about becomes substituted for the world as sensuously felt, and the global-metaphysical nature of sensuous feeling remains hidden from view.

This external and rational theory of feeling-sensations predominated in the epoch of rational meaning that extended from Plato to Hegel, but was expounded with less frequency in the subsequent epoch of rational meaninglessness. This is due to several factors, one being that in the middle and late nineteenth century, attention began to be turned toward the physiological disturbances accompanying feeling-sensations. In the nineteenth century, with the works on emotion by William James and Carl Lange, attention was turned towards visceral physiological disturbances; in the twentieth century, following the publication of Walter Cannon’s Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage (1916), attention was predominantly directed towards cortical events. Such thinkers showed less concern with classifying types of feeling-sensations than with classifying the types of their accompanying visceral or cortical physiological occurrences. Feeling-sensations themselves were differentiated in terms of these disturbances, e.g., a recent proponent of the peripheral or “visceral” theory, M. A. Wenger, writes that we “distinguish between emotion per se only insofar as we can differentiate patterns of visceral change.”[13] Insofar as the traditional “causal reasons” of the feeling-sensations are discussed in these theories, they are conceived as “external stimuli” of the physiological disturbances.

A second basis for the declining preponderance of the external rational classifications of feeling-sensations is that a second major group of thinkers who were interested in feelings, the phenomenologists, were less interested in classifying feeling-sensations than in studying “feelings” in the sense of the acts of awareness that accompanied feeling-sensations. Many of these thinkers, like Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and others, were concerned to describe the “feeling-acts” or “intentional feelings” of ethical and aesthetic values, whereas others were concerned with feeling awarenesses in a nonaxiological context, e.g., Sartre was interested in the emotional “consciousnesses” of magically pursued purposes, and Heidegger in the moody “disciosedness” of Dasein’s thrownness into the world. In the few cases where feeling- sensations were mentioned, e.g., in Brentano’s reference to “sensuous pleasures and displeasures” in The Origin of Ethical Knowledge,[14] Scheler’s discussion of “feeling-states” (Gefuhlszustande) in Formalism in Ethics and the Material Ethics of Value,[15] Sartre’s theory of “coenesthesia” in Being and Nothingness,[16] and Frederik Buytendijk’s mention of “emotional sensations” in “The Phenomenological Approach to the Problem of Feelings and Emotions,”[17] feeling-sensations are described in their qualitative aspect as pleasures and pains, without further internal typological determinations being mentioned. And in the few instances where they are typologically diffetentiated from one another, they are differentiated externally and rationally; e.g., Scheler differentiates feeling-states in terms of their different “causal objects” (understood phenomenologically); each bodily feeling- state, for instance, is distinguishable as “a state that corresponds to the agreeableness of a food, a scent, or a gentle touch, etc.”[18] “Agreeableness” is understood here as a value-property that belongs to the causal object (the food, etc.) of the feeling-state.

Other approaches to feeling besides the physiological and phenomenological ones shared this general disinterest in feeling-sensations. Gestaltists were concerned with the forms of conduct exhibited in affects, psychoanalysts with their unconscious motivations, ordinary language philosophers with the words we use to express or refer to feeling-sensations, to name a few of these other approaches.

This systematic neglect of feeling-sensations and a concern with other phenomena that are associated with feeling-sensations reflected in different ways the traditional view that feeling-sensations cannot be studied in themselves, in an internal fashion, and that a theory of feeling must occupy itself with external phenomena that are correlated in some way with feeling-sensations. However, if the presupposition that feeling-sensations have no internal typological determinations apart from their pleasurable and painful qualities had been questioned, a further internal and typological character of feeling-sensations could have been found, their character of flowing in a certain direction and manner. The discovery of these feeling-flows could have led in turn to the recognition that there are sensuous features of the world correlating to these flowing feeling-sensations, such that the world has a sensuously felt reality of flowing in a certain direction and manner. And the discovery of these sensuous world-flows could have led in its turn to the further discovery of the sources of the world-flows, the worid-importances or felt meanings from which the flows emanate. The world as felt could therein have revealed itself, not as a world of “causal reasons” in the traditional sense of good or evil objects, or a world of physical “stimuli,” or of phenomenological “causal objects” to which values attach, but as a world of important sources of feeling-flows. On this basis a metaphysics of feeling could have been developed, a metaphysics based on the insight that the world can and does have meanings other than reasons, meanings that come to appearance as the sources of sensuous feeling-flows.

Such in outline is the course of the descriptive explications to be followed in this chapter and the next two chapters. These explications must begin with the first and crucial descriptive demonstration that every further description is dependent upon — the demonstration that feeling-sensations do have a complex internal nature that is describable in terms of the category of feeling-flow.

I. 7. The Internal Characterization of Feeling-Sensations as Qualitative-Flows

Feeling-sensations are the sensuous feelings adhering to the I; they appear in the marginal or attentional reflexion that “I feel,” or more fully, “I sensuously feel.” The first step in elucidating the feeling-sensations of the I is to say a few words about this “I that sensuously feels.”

The I that feels is not itself a sensuous phenomenon. But this does not mean that it is a concept or an act of awareness. It is to be observed, first of all, that the I that appears in the “I feel” does not appear as a concept or idea of something; specifically, it does not appear as an I-concept that would be something different from an I of which it is a concept. Instead, the I appears as a “something” itself, i.e., as a “something” of which a concept can be formed, but which is not itself a concept. It is a nonsensory “something” (or rather “somebody”) that appears immediately in reflexive awarenesses. It is to be observed secondly that this “somebody” is not an “awareness of” something; rather, it is that which is aware of things. “Awarenesses of” are features of the I.

Feeling-sensations are also features of the I, but they are not “awarenesses of.” Instead, feeling-sensations are some of the phenomena of which the I is aware. The I’s awareness of its feeling-sensations is what is expressed by the phrase “I sensuously feel.”

An elucidation of the “I that feels” can be achieved by a brief contrast of this “I” with the “empirical ego” conceived by Sartre. For Sartre, the “ego is nothing outside of the concrete totality [totalite concrete] of the states and actions it supports.”[19] The ego is not a “one and many,” a “one” that has “many” states and actions, but is the “many” states and actions themselves. In this vein Sartre writes about the ego and its qualities (which are the substrates and potentialities of its states and actions):

…we do not finally know the ego as a pure creative source [une source créatrice pure] besides the qualities. It does not appear to us that we could find a skeletal pole [un pole squelettique] if we removed one after the other all the qualities. . . . at the end of this plundering, there would remain nothing, the ego would have vanished.[20]

As a description of the phenomenon of the ego that appears to us in our reflexive awarenesses, this does not seem to be accurate. Sartre mentions “love” as an example of a state of the ego. When there is an awareness that “I love Jane,” the “I” that loves is not given, as Sartre would have it, as an “infinite totality of states and actions.” “I love Jane” does not appear in the phenomenal form of “an infinite totality of states and actions loves Janes.” Sartre articulates this awareness as a fulfilled intuition of the love as the present state of the infinite totality of states and actions, and as an empty consciousness of the infinity of past and future states and actions.[21] But the “I” that loves is not reducible to the love qua present state of the infinite totality of states and actions. If it were so reducible, there would not be the phenomenon of an “I” that loves, but only the phenomenon of the love and the other states and actions with which the love is synthesized. “I love” would then mean no more than that “there is a love that is synthesiaed with an infinite totality of other states and actions.” But surely it is intuitively felt to be evident that I love. It is true that the love belongs to the totality of states and actions, but this totality, like the love itself, is given as belonging to the I. It is my totality of states and actions, not your totality or his totality. The “I” that is given in reflexive intuitive feeling is a unique and unitary “somebody” who, although related to his states and actions, is not reducible to them.

Much more could be said about this “I that feels,” but at present I wish to mention only one further point, a point I will endeavor to establish in Chapter 6, that an “I” which is irreducible to its experiences is not by that fact a transcendental-constitutive ego. The “I that feels” is the personal unity of experiences, the single person who has the many experiences and who is not constituted by these experiences (and thus is not an empirical ego), but who nevertheless is not constitutive of the world he experiences (and thus is not a transcendental-constitutive ego). The “I that feels” is rather a part of the world he experiences, an appreciative part.[22]

With this last remark we can terminate our preliminary descriptions of the “I that feels” and commence our descriptions of the feeling-sensations felt by this “I.” We can begin by comparing these feeling-sensations with the so-called “visceral physiological disturbances” that occur during our feelings, e.g., the muscular contractions and distensions that occur in the stomach, chest, face and throat, the blushing, and the increase of bodily temperature. According to James, feelings are these physiological disturbances, insofar as these disturbances are observed by us:

Every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is FELT, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs. If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different local bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his various emotional moods… Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him. It is surprising what little items give accent to these complexes of sensibility. When worried by any slight trouble, one may find that the focus of one’s bodily consciousness is the contraction, often quite inconsiderable, of the eyes and brows. When momentarily embarrassed, it is something in the pharynx that compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a slight cough; and so on for as many more instances as might be named.[23]

James is here confusing biological and anatomical categories with categories of feeling. It is true, as he points out, that a “bodily consciousness” is experienced in our feelings. But the body does not appear in this consciousness as a “biological body” consisting of muscular con tractions and resolutions, obstructions in the pharynx, and so on. For example, the muscular contractions in the eyes and brows do not appear as muscular contractions in the eyes and brows. A “contraction of the eyes and brows” is an affectively neutral category; it describes this bodily occurrence not as it appears to a worried person but as it would appear to a biologist or anatomist observing the changes in his body and cataloguing them in terms of scientific categories. A conceptualization of this “con traction” as it appears to the worried person must employ categories proper to feeling-sensations manifested in a prescientific “I feel.”

Such categories include, first of all, the traditionally recognized category of the quality of feeling, the pleasurable and painful qualities and their subtypes, as pleasure divides into pride-pleasure, joy-pleasure, love-pleasure, etc., and pain into fear-pain, humiliation-pain, anger-pain, etc. Besides the qualitative category there are the nonqualitative categories. These include categories of several nontypological characters of feeling, characters which do not vary with each variation in the qualitative type of feeling, as well as one typological character of feeling, a character that does vary in correspondence with the qualitative types of feeling. The non typological characters of feeling-sensation are inessential characters, as they are not determinative of the individual types of feeling and thus do not enter into the internal definition of each type of feeling. Because of their inessentiality, I will not discuss them here, but will briefly explicate them in Section 9 of this chapter. The one typological character of feeling-sensations besides their qualitative character is, like the qualitative character, an essential feature of feeling-sensations, since it is determinative of and enters (along with the qualitative character) into the internal definition of each type of feeling-sensation. This nonqualitative typological character is the flow of the feeling-sensation, which can be formally elucidated in the following way.

Each qualitative sensation of pleasure or pain flows in a certain direction and manner. The direction of the flow can have one of several modes, it can be an upwards flow, or a downwards, forwards, or backwards one, or it can be some combination of these, such as backwards and downwards. The directionality of the flow can also be experienced in certain privative or negative ways, as a feeling can be “suspended” before a downward flow. The direction of the flow, is always characterized by a certain manner in which the feeling flows in that direction. The manner could be one of radiating, cringing, sinking, plummeting, etc. Each specific quality of pleasure or pain has its own distinctive feeling-flow; the feeling-flow of fear-pain is different than the feeling-flow of humiliation-pain, and so on for the other qualities of feeling.

Before some of the specific qualitative-flows are described, I should point out what may already be obvious to many, namely that the terms being used to describe the direction and manner of the feeling-flow are being employed in a metaphorical way. The word “upward,” for instance, is not being used to refer literally to a spatial direction, but metaphorically to suggest a character of feeling that in some respects is analogous to an upward spatial direction. The metaphorical language of feeling-flows is evoked by the reappreciated feeling-sensations themselves, and captures these feeling-sensations as they actually were experienced. In this language, feeling-sensations put themselves into words, and the metaphorical words they evoke are such that they cannot be “translated” into literal statements that are their equivalents. The connection between feeling and metaphor is further discussed in later sections, and no more need be said for the present.

In the following, I describe the feeling-flows of the sensations of pride, humiliation, anger, love, hilarity, fear, anxiety, sadness, and some

The direction in which the feeling-sensation of pride flows is upwards. It flows upwards in the manner of an inflated rising. In reference to pride it is said that one’s ego is “inflated”; with regard to the feeling- flow of pride this designates the sensation of rising upwards in an inflated manner. This sensation of rising provides a determinate reference to the phrase that one feels “puffed up” in pride, and that in intense pride one’s self-esteem “shoots sky high.

The. direction in which the feeling-sensation of humiliation flows is downwards. It flows downwards in a plummeting manner. The downward flow of humiliation is not the slow, sagging flow of sadness, but the quick and violent emotional “drop” that occurs when one’s self-esteem has received a sudden blow. One plummets downwards in humiliation, and one continues to plummet downwards in this violent and painful way as long as one is feeling the sensation of humiliation.

The feeling-sensation of angry retaliation is different from the in itial “outrage” one feels when first affronted; angry retaliation is an angry “striking back” at something or somebody, and as such flows forwards, towards the person or thing at which one is angry. It flows forwards in a violently attacking manner. In this respect, the feeling-flow of retaliatory anger differs from the feeling-flow of love, which also has a forwards direction, for in love I experience a sensation of flowing forwards in a manner that gently binds me together with the other person or thing.

The feeling-sensation of hilarity is present in hilarious laughter. The flow of this feeling-sensation is upwards, and it flows upwards in a manner of quick, staccato surges. Hilarious laughter is not the polite social laughter that one engages in voluntarily, but the genuine laughter that one is affected by and that one has no control over. In this laughter, one’s feeling springs upwards in quick, discontinuous surges. This feeling-flow constitutes the feeling of “shaking with laughter.” The vocal expressions of laughter—the “Ha! Ha! Ha!”—are expressions of the staccato surges of feeling that are uttered in the same rhythmic pattern as the staccato surges themselves. However these vocal expressions are not necessary to this feeling-flow, as it is possible to laugh silently.

The distinction between fear and anxiety is the most widely discussed distinction between types of feelings made in this century. It has been discussed by Sigmund Freud, Heidegger, Ludwig Binswanger, Paul Tillich, Sartre, Karen Homey, Rollo May, and a number of others, but in these discussions only differences between fear and anxiety other than the differences between their feeling-sensations were mentioned. The feeling- sensations of fear and anxiety are both painful in their quality, but these pain-qualities flow in different directions and manners.

The flow of the feeling-sensation of fear is backwards; it has the direc tional sense of retreating backwards and away from the existent that is threatening me. It flows backwards in a shrinking and cringing manner; I have the sensation of “shrinking and cringing back from” the threatening existent.

But anxiety is not felt as a “retreat from”; it does not flow backwards but has the directional sense of being suspended over an inner bottomlessness. In fear my ego is felt to have a bottom to it, and the backward direction of the feeling-flow manifests a feeling of security in this respect. But in anxiety my ego is felt to have no foundation; the directional sense of the flow consists solely in the precarious “being suspended” over the abyss of my ego. The onrush of anxiety is identical with the sudden crumbling of the secure foundation my ego had been felt to be resting upon. The more intense the anxiety, the further down this inner void is felt to go. There is always the feeling that I am about to fall helplessly down this void, and become extinguished as a self, but I never do; anxiety is only the precarious feeling that it is imminently possible for me to fall into the abyss. This sensation of being suspended over an inner bottomlessness is in the strict sense not a direction in which the anxiety is flowing. Rather than flow in a direction, anxiety is a flow that is suspended before the possibility of flowing in a downward direction.

The feeling-flow of anxieties that are less intense have a different directional sense. The anxiety of a low degree, the feeling of nervousness, does not manifest a sensation of bottomlessness, but only of the coming- into-question of the foundation of my ego. What is felt as imminently possible is not my falling down an inner void, but the very opening up of this void. My ego is still felt to rest on a foundation, but this foundation is under stress and strain, and it is felt as possible that this foundation may give way.

The manner in which the suspended flow of anxiety flows is also different from the manner in which fear flows. Anxiety is suspended in a quavering manner. Anxiety is a feeling of quavering and quivering over the bottomless void that has opened up in my ego. This is what we refer to when we say that in anxiety “we are coming apart at the seams”; in anxiety we can no longer “hold ourselves together.” We cannot “get a grip on ourselves,” but are helplessly quavering over the abyss.

The feeling-sensations so far described immediately adhere to the “I that feels.” Other feeling-sensations present themselves as immediately adhering to the whole of my body, and as only mediately adhering to the I. Such feeling-sensations are fatigue, vigor, feverishness, drunkenness, and so on. The difference between these two kinds of feeling-sensations appears in our linguistic expressions. We say “I am inflated with pride” but not “my body is inflated with pride,” thus expressing the fact that the feeling-sensation of pride immediately adheres to the I and not to my body. On the other hand, we say “my body is tired,” expressing that the feeling-sensation of tiredness immediately adheres to my bodily-whole, and by virtue of this body being my body, mediately adheres to my I (and thus we also say “I am tired”).

I will describe one such feeling-sensation, tiredness or fatigue. The feeling-flow of fatigue permeates my whole body; it flows downwards in a dragging manner. As such, it is similar to the feeling-flow of sadness, which flows downwards in a sinking and sagging manner. But they differ in several respects; one difference is that the feeling-sensation of fatigue flows through my body as a whole, whereas the feeling-sensation of sadness does not. Another is that the flow of fatigue appears to “drag down” the ego from below, while the flow of sadness appears as a “sinking down” of the ego under its own weight. In fatigue, the body “weighs down” the ego, but in sadness, the ego “sags down” under its own weight.

It should not go unnoticed that some of the feeling-sensations which mediately adhere to the I immediately adhere to one part of the body rather than to the bodily-whole. Such are the gustatory, olfactory, and localized tactile feeling-sensations. Feeling-flows are also exhibited in these feelings, e.g., a feeling-flow can be felt in my leg as a painful wincing back and away from something that is cutting me.

We are in a position now to draw some conclusions about the nature of the “I’s immediate and mediate feeling-sensations. First, the relation between the flow of feeling-sensations and physiological disturbances can be exactly determined. Negatively speaking, it is clear that metaphorical statements about the flow of feeling-sensations are not translatable into literal statements about physiological disturbances in the body. The statement that in retaliatory anger “I feel a sensation of flowing forwards in a violently attacking manner” is not literally understandable as the statement that “I feel a muscular hypertension in my chest and throat, an in crease in bodily temperature, and blood rushing to my face.” These statements do not have the same referents, one of the statements refer ring to an item in a literal way and the other statement referring to the same item in a metaphorical way; they refer to two different items. For the feeling-flow is not the physiological disturbances. But the feeling-flow and the disturbances are integrally connected. The feeling-flows are sensuous appearances presented to the “I that feels” by the physiological disturbances. These appearances neither are the physiological disturbances that present them, nor are appearances wherein the physiological disturbances appear as physiological disturbances. Rather, they are appearances wherein the physiological disturbances appear as qualitative feeling-sensations flowing in a certain direction and manner. While the physiological disturbances can be described in the literal language of biology and anatomy, the sensuous appearances they present are describable only in the literal language of feeling-qualities and in the metaphorical language of feeling-flows.

These qualitative feeling-flows essentially constitute the complex internal nature of feeling-sensations. It is through describing them that we are able to formulate the “just definitions” of the feeling-sensations that Hume declared to be impossible. It is true, as Hume pointed out, that the qualities of feeling-sensations are simple phenomena, and that a description of them alone is insufficient to distinguish one feeling-sensation from another. Both fear and humiliation, qualitatively described, are pains, and thus cannot be descriptively differentiated from one another on that basis. However, rather than differentiate them externally, by describing the external things to which these pain-qualities are related, it is possible to differentiate them internally by describing other internal determinations of the feeling-sensations with which these pain-qualities are united. The pain-quality of fear is internally united with a feeling-flow that flows backwards in a cringing manner, and the pain-quality of humiliation is internally united with a feeling-flow that flows downwards in a plummeting manner.

It is true that in describing these feeling-flows it is sometimes helpful to refer to some external existent to which they are related. Angry retaliation is describable as a flowing towards the person at whom one is angry, and fear is describable as a cringing backwards from the existent that is threatening one. But these external references are neither necessary to nor part of the internal characterization of these feeling-sensations. Strictly speaking, the internal nature of retaliatory anger is characterized as a painful sensation of flowing forwards in a violently attacking manner, and the internal nature of fear as a painful sensation of flowing backwards in a cringing manner.

The metaphysical implications of these internal characterizations of feeling-sensations shall be developed in the next three sections. We shall see that these characterizations enable us to recognize and typify the different sensuously felt features of the world (in Sections 8-9) and that this in turn enables us to comprehend that sensuous feelings of the world have sources in the world, these sources being the felt meanings or importances of the world (cf. Section 10).

The next step in the development of the understanding of sensuous feelings and of the world as sensuously felt is to show that the qualitative-flows of the I’s feeling-sensations are correlated with qualitative-flows that permeate the world. These latter qualitative-flows are constitutive of feeling-tonalities. It is in the internal structure of these feeling-tonalities that the world is sensuously felt. These feeling-tonalities are not felt by the world but by the I; nevertheless, unlike feeling-sensations, they are not felt to be features of the I but of the world. They appear to be relational features of the world, features the world possesses through being felt by the I. The world is imbued with feeling-tonalities when it is being apprehended by an I that feels, and the world has its tonal-features only insofar as and as long as it is being apprehended by this feeling I. It is not the case that feeling-tonalities seem to be features the world possesses independently of the I, and really are not such features; it is the case rather that feeling-tonalities seem to be features possessed by the world dependently upon and in relation to the I, and really are such features. This will become evident, I believe, as descriptions of these tonalities are developed in the following.

It is instructive to note by way of an introductory remark that although the flowing feeling-tonalities have not been described in philosophical or psychological studies of feeling, they have been portrayed in literature and the arts: orchestral music and painting, especially the musical compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven and the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, contain many auditory and visual depictions of flowing tonalities. I will offer some examples of these depictions below, after I have first articulated some of the general characteristics of these tonal-flows in philosophical categories.

The nature of the feeling-flow that belongs to feeling-tonalities can be initially explicated by contrasting it with “flowing” aspects of the world in the usual sense of this term, as when we speak of the “flowing” of water or air. In this ordinary sense of the word, what we have in mind is a natural flow. A natural flow has three characteristics whereby it differs from a tonal-flow. The first of these characteristics is that the natural existent which is flowing is constantly changing its position in space. Secondly, the natural flow is not a sensuous aspect of the existent that is flowing, but a synthetic interrelation of the different spatial positions that the existent assumes through time. The consciousness of the existent’s present spatial position in connection with the consciousness of its immediately past and immediately expected spatial positions constitutes the awareness of the existent’s “flow” through space. Thirdly, the flowing of the existent does not involve the whole of the thing, but only its boundaries. The existent’s flow is nothing other than the steady changing of the boundary relations between the flowing existent and the existents it is flowing past.

Now a feeling-flow that belongs to a feeling-tonality differs from a natural flow in that it has none of these three characteristics. This is illustrated most clearly in the feeling-flows of the perceptual feeling-tonalities. The perceptual feeling-tonalities that “flow” do not change their position in space; rather, they are feeling-tensions that animate and vitalize the perceptual existents they permeate. They enliven these existents with an emotional energy and “bring them to life” with feeling. This emotional energy does not move from one existent to the next, but remains in the same existents, animating continually the same spatial regions. And unlike the natural flow, this flow of feeling-tension is not a temporal connection of the different spatial positions of an existent it is enlivening. Instead, it appears as a sensuous character of the existent, and it appears as such to each perception of the existent, without needing to be “constructed” out of the succession of the existent’s appearances. Furthermore, this tensional flow does not involve only the boundaries of the existent; it animates the entirety of the existent, the bounded areas of the existent as well as its boundaries. And since the existents in the background can be animated with the very same feeling-flow, the foreground existent does not necessarily appear in its flowing as something that is in contrast with its background.

If the feeling-flow of tonalities could not be described further than this — as a nonnatural flow of feeling-tension—it would be impossible to differentiate the different types of tonal-flows that correlate to the different types of sensational-flows. However, the tonal-flow does admit of a further description; like the sensational-flows, the tonal-flows have a direction and manner in which they flow. In fact, this direction and manner of the tonal-flows is so essential to them that it is through flowing in a direction and manner that corresponds to the direction and manner of a coexperienced sensational-flow that the feeling-tonalities are recognizable in the first place as typological sensuous feelings that adhere to the world. I recognize that typological sensuous feelings adhere to the world because I apprehend phenomena in the world—qualities flowing in a direction and manner—that exactly correlate in their structure to the typological sensuous feelings that are adhering to my “I.”

In the following, I will exhibit by way of illustration the tonal-sensation correspondences that obtain in the feelings of joy, sadness, fear, repugnance, and love.

The feeling-sensation of joy flows upwards in a radiated manner. In joy, I feel uplifted and elevated, as if I were “on top of the world” or “on cloud nine.” The expression that in joy “we feel in high spirits” and that “we are radiant or beaming with joy” captures the direction and manner of this sensational-flow. This feeling-sensation is experienced as correlating with a similar feeling-tonality that imbues things in my environ mental surroundings. The things around me seem to be infected with a joyousness that springs out of them and gives them an “uplifted” momentum. In a joyful perception of a landscape, the trees and pond appear to be radiated upwards with this joyous vitality; the pond appears to be shimmering upwards, the trees appear to be almost springing out of the ground with a joyful momentum, and the branches seem to be reaching towards the heavens. Everything in my view is expanding and leaning upwards, radiating from itself a joyous energy. This joyful radiation has been effectively portrayed by Van Gogh in some of his paintings, particularly in The Orchard, and musically in the first, third, and fourth movements of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and the last movement of his Ninth Symphony.

The feeling-sensation of sadness flows downwards, in a sinking manner. In sadness, I feel downcast, in low spirits. Likewise, the things in the world appear to be forlornly sinking and sagging downwards; a sad and gloomy landscape is one wherein everything appears to be sadly drooping to the ground. The branches of the trees are permeated with a sadness that makes them appear to be listlessly drooping downwards, and the sky is infected with a sadness that makes it seem to be a vast canopy sagging downwards towards the earth. Van Gogh has captured this sad drooping of existents in a number of his paintings, such as The Church at Auvers and the Quay at Antwerp. The auditory feeling-flow of sadness has been expressed in the slow and melancholic movements of a wide range of works, e.g., the sounds in the slow movement of Beethoven’s Hammerkiavier Sonata are thoroughly infected with the sagging and downward sinking flow of sadness.

The sensuous feelings of joy and sadness are similar in that the directions and manners of their sensational and tonal flows correspond to each other in a parallel rather than reverse fashion. The sensational and tonal flows of joy both flow upward in a radiated manner, and the sensational and tonal flows of sadness both flow downwards in a sinking manner. The direction and manner of other sensational and tonal flows, however, correspond to one another in a reverse fashion, as is exemplified in fear, repugnance, and awe.

The feeling-sensation of fear, we know, flows backwards in a cringing manner. But the feeling-tonality that imbues the worldly existent does not flow backwards in a cringing manner, but forwards, towards me, in a looming and menacing manner. The existent I fear seems to loom towards me menacingly, as I cringe and shrink from it in fear. The animal or per son of whom I am afraid seems larger than life, he seems to dominate my spatial field, and to be encroaching upon my vital space in a threatening way. The closest Van Gogh came to painting a fearful feeling-flow is in his Cornfield with Crows. A more exact depiction of this tonal-flow can be found in some expressionist paintings, particularly in Franz Marc’s Tigers. Musically, it is most clearly expressed in certain passages of Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste.

The feeling-sensation of repugnance flows backwards, away from the disgusting existent, and it flows backwards in a repelled manner. The feeling-tonality of repugnance has a reverse flow; it flows forwards, towards me, and it flows forwards not in a repelled manner but in a repelling manner. A repugnant thing is one that affectively repels me; it seems to be flowing at me with an emotional energy that thrusts me away from itself. When I encounter a disgusting existent, such as a pool of vomit that suddenly greets me as I open a restroom door, I feel repelled by it. The revolting pool of vomit seems to be discharging a feeling-flow that obtrudes upon me and thrusts itself into my awareness in an unpleasant manner. The feeling-tonality of the repugnant vomit has an offensive flow that pushes me back, so that, if I want to examine the vomit more closely, I have to make an effort to bring myself closer and look at it, instead of instinctively backing away from it and turning my head. It is an aim of a contemporary painter, Francis Bacon, to endow many of his paintings with such a repugnant feeling-flow, although he aims to make the repugnant effect more subtle, and thus more quietly disturbing, as in his Study of George Dyer (1971). Karlheinz Stockhausen introduces a repugnant auditory-flow in some of his works, e.g., in certain passages in Contact and Kommunion, although most of his sounds express the tonal-flow of the uncanny and dreadfully strange.

The sensational-tonal correspondence in the feeling-flow of awe is more complicated, in that it involves all four flow-directions. The feeling- sensation of awe flows backwards and downwards in a shuddering manner. In its feeling-tonality, the awesome existent is felt to be flowing forwards and upwards, and to be flowing in the manner of towering above me and swelling over and dwarfing me, rendering me diminutive and insignificant. This tonality is visually depicted in some of John Turner’s paintings, e.g., his Snowstorm; Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, and auditorily in Anton Bruckner’s symphonies and in the first two symphonies of Jean Sibelius.

It is not to be thought that all forward or backward feeling-flows exhibit a reverse correspondence. Some, like love, have a parallel correspondence. The direction of the sensational-flow of love is forwards, towards the loved existent, and it flows forwards in a gently binding manner. The forward flow of love is a mild and soft diffusion that gently spreads towards the other and attaches me to the other. As endowed with a loving feeling-tonality, the thing I love is also felt to flow forwards, towards me in a gently binding manner. The sensational-tonal flow of love is thus an intertwining flow. During this feeling, there is no longer a felt “gap” between myself and the other, but a “bridge of loving feeling” that links us together. The visual appearance of this flow is depicted in Rembrandt van Rijn’s Return of the Prodigal Son, to give one example, and auditorily it appears quite distinctively in the Romance of Wolfgang Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20.

Besides its visual and auditory forms, the tonal-flow also appears in gustatory, olfactory, and tactile guises. One such instance can be mentioned, that of a painful tactile flow. When a sharp object is painfully cutting me, I experience a feeling-sensation of wincing back and away from the object, and in correlation with this sensational-flow the sharp object is felt to have a tonal-flow of flowing forwards, towards and into me in a piercing manner.

Tonal-flows are no less present in images and signs that I apprehend in imaginative and signitive awarenesses than they are in the perceived things I apprehend in perceiving awarenesses. I can imagine a sadly drooping and sagging landscape no less than I can perceive one. In my use of words there also can be found an inflectional feeling-flow: if I talk in a sad and depressed tone of voice, my words will sound sad and downcast; they are inflected with a downward sagging flow The words I read, write and use in thinking have a less noticeable feeling-flow, but a flow is nevertheless present. If I am reading a poem that makes me joyful, the words on the page marginally appear to me to be tinged with the vibrant and radiant tonal-flow of joy.

These descriptions of tonal-flows lead us to conclude that the rational- metaphysical tradition is in error in believing that sensuous feelings are features only of the self and not of the world. A feeling, said Kant, is but a “subjective sensation”[24] (subjektive Empfindung), echoing the view espoused since Aristotle that pathe are merely “movements of the soul,”[25] or, in Cicero’s more telling language, perturbationes [26] that take place in the rational soul’s “lower half.” In opposition to this rational-metaphysical tradition, it must be asserted that every feeling-sensation of the “I” is experienced as corresponding to a feeling-tonality of the world, such that through my feeling-sensations I am connected to a sensuously felt reality of the world. This world is not a world of causal reasons but a world that tonally flows in a certain direction and manner. By virtue of these correlated tonal and sensational flows, the world and I are joined together in an extrarational and sensuously appreciative way.

This conception of the tonally flowing world can be placed in a broader perspective, and my criticisms of other theories of sensuous feelings can be stated in a more refined way, if the explication of sensuous feelings is extended to uncover a series of internal determinations in addition to the quality and flow determinations.

The internal characteristics of sensuous feelings besides the qualities and flows are inessential characteristics in that they are not determinative of the individual types of sensuous feeling and thus do not enter into the internal definitions of these types. Because of this they are called “non typological characters” of sensuous feeling. For this consideration, and for another consideration I shall mention below, they are not of central interest to a metaphysics of feeling. However, a short description of some of these nontypological characters, and an indication of the extent to which they have been noticed by philosophers and psychologists, will enable me to specify both the metaphysical significance of the qualitative-flows and the precise respects in which other theories of sensuous feelings are inadequate.

One nontypological character of sensuous feelings is their intensity. Although tonal-intensities have been overlooked, thinkers since Plato[27] have often noticed that feeling-sensations display a greater or lesser degree of intensity. They have also correctly but tacitly realized that a description of feeling-intensities is inadequate to define and classify the individual types of feeling-sensation. This is because feeling-intensities admit only of a relative and twofold distinction between high feeling-intensities and low feeling-intensities, and such a distinction is obviously insufficient for purposes of distinguishing among all the individual types of feeling- sensations. This recognition is expressed in an implicit manner in Hume’s theory, wherein feeling-sensations are divided into the “calm” and the “violent”[28] but are nevertheless indicated to be indefinable in a “just” way in terms of this and the qualitative divisions alone. The most ambitious attempt to typify feeling-sensations in terms of feeling-intensities was made by Wilhelm Wundt,[29] who endeavored to distinguish the characters of tension/relaxation from excitement/depression, and to associate these feeling-characters with specific physiological occurrences, an attempt, however, that was shortly and appropriately shown to be unsuccessful.[30]

Feeling-intensities are similar to feeling-qualities in that they are describable in a literal way; the phrase “a feeling of great intensity” is no more metaphorical than the phrase “a feeling of pain.” Other non typological feeling-characters, however, are similar to feeling-flows in that they are describable only in untranslatable metaphorical terms. Three examples of these characters are feeling-colors, feeling-weights, and feeling- temperatures.

Feeling-colors are nontypological characters of feeling that are re ferred to metaphorically by color words. These are not simply ways of talk ing about feelings, such that these color words “actually have no referents” when they are used to refer to feelings. Nor are feeling-colors simply “associations” between feeling-qualities and natural colors, such that, for instance, the feeling-quality of sadness “makes me think of the color blue.” Rather they are felt characters of feeling-sensations and feeling-tonalities. In sadness, I feel blue. This does not mean that I visualize the color blue while I am sad, nor that I somehow sense this color in the sad feeling. Rather, I feel, as an aspect of my feeling-sensation and feeling-tonality, a feeling-character that is analogous to the color blue. There is a feeling- character of the sadness to which no word literally corresponds, but which can best be described as the analogue in the realm of feelings to what blue ness is in the realm of colors. Some other qualities of feeling also possess their own feeling-colors. They are usually referred to by certain stock phrases. In anger, I see red. In joy, everything about me seems to be bathed in a rosy gleam. Envy is fused with a feeling-green; I feel green with envy. To feel cowardly is to feel yellow. In boredom, everything seems gray.

However, feeling-colors do not vary with every feeling-quality. Not every distinct feeling-quality is fused with a distinct feeling-color. What, for example, are the feeling-colors that are fused with pride, humiliation, repugnance, fear, awe, anxiety, etc.? This is not to say that these qualities have no feeling-color, but that they have no clearly distinguishable type of feeling-color that is fused with them and them alone. It is true that humiliation is a slightly “darker” feeling than pride, but beyond this general difference not much more can be said. Pleasurable feelings usually are “lighter” or “brighter” than painful feelings, but the particular types of colors (red, blue, green, etc.) are fused in a clearly distinguishable manner only with some of the particular types of qualities.

Feeling-qualities are also fused with feeling-weights. Sadness, grief, and fatigue are heavy feelings: I am “weighed down” with sadness, I am “burdened” with grief, I am so tired that my shoulders sag, my head is bent over, my feet drag along the ground, my limbs are so heavy I can barely move them. Joy, gaiety, and vigor are light feelings. I feel “light hearted” in gaiety, my “burdens are lifted” in joy, I walk with a “lighter step” when I feel invigorated. The variations in feeling-weight show less differentiations than those of feeling-color. Beyond the distinction between heavy and light feelings, very little can be said.

Feeling-temperatures are also present in every feeling. Sadness is a cold feeling. So is the feeling of arrogance and haughtiness (“He has an icy manner”). The feelings of love and friendliness, on the other hand, are warm feelings. Anger is hot (“He is hot under the collar.” “His temperature is rising”). Feeling-temperatures also show less variations than feeling-colors.

Of these three feeling-characters, it is only the feeling-colors that have been referred to in philosophical or psychological literature in a way that is worthy of comment, for the feeling-colors have been referred to as characters, not of feeling-sensations, but of feeling-tonalities of the world. Thus these references express at least a tacit recognition that there are feeling-tonalities of the world, a recognition that is unusual and remarkable when considered against the background of the traditional presupposition that sensuous feelings are not features of the world but only of the self. However, in most of these references to tonal-colors, such as in Anthony Kenny’s statement that “the objects of depression are… things which seem black”[31] and Stephan Strasser’s remark that “if I have an elevated disposition, all appears to me ‘in a rosy light,’ “[32] there is no express indication that these metaphorical descriptions of how things appear in feelings are references to sensuous feeling-determinations of the world. Color metaphors are used in describing how the world appears in feelings, but the nature of the referents of these metaphors is not made explicit.[33] But there is at least one reference to these tonal-colors in which we can find an explicit recognition and statement that these tonal-colors are sensuously felt features of the world. Edmund Husserl writes in his Logical Investigations of the pleasure-sensation belonging to joy:

…attaching to the presentation [Vorstellung] there is a pleasure-sensation [Lustempfindung], which at the same time is located and apprehended as a feeling-excitement [Gefuhlserregung] in the psycho-physical feeling sub ject and also as an objective property [objective Eigenschaft]: the event ap pears as if it were bathed in a rosy gleam.[34]

This passage represents the nearest thing we have in philosophical or psychological literature to an overthrow of the traditional presupposition that sensuous feelings are not features of the world. However, Husserl did not develop his insight or realize its significance, nor, more crucially, did he recognize the nonqualitative typological determinations possessed by the tonal features of the world. Husserl was unaware of feeling-flows, and as such was not in a position to offer the traditionally omitted “just definitions” of feeling-tonalities or of sensuous feelings in general.[35] It is only the feeling-flows that vary with each of the variations in the quality of a feeling, and that through these variations enable each and every quality of feeling to be internally defined as a quality that is united with its own unique type of feeling-flow.[36]

More significant, however, on the metaphysical level than the typo- logical nature of feeling-flows, is that feeling-flows are the characters of sensuous feelings that refer to the felt meanings or importances of the world. The feeling-flows of the world come to appearance as flowing from sources in the world, and these sources are the world-importances. It is through experiencing the flowing of the feeling-tonality, and not its intensity or color, etc., that I feel the tonality to have a source. For example, to experience in depression a tonal blackness of things is not to be pointed towards a source of the black tonality, for a character of blackness does not in and by itself refer to a source wherefrom this blackness comes. “To be black” is “to be black,” and it is not “to be a blackness coming from…” But to experience a tonality that flows downwards in a sinking manner is to be referred by the flow to a source of the flow, for to flow down wards is to flow downwards from somewhere, from a source.

The source from which the tonality is felt to flow is not to be con fused with that which imbues the world with the tonal-flow. The I that feels imbues the world with the tonality, such that the tonality is, as it were, “painted on the world” by the I as flowing from the importance the I is apprehending. The character of flowing from a source requires two items, the I that bestows the tonality as flowing from the source, and the importance that so to speak “demands” or “invites” the I to appreciatively respond to the importance by imbuing the world with a tonality that flows from the importance. The feeling-sensation is the manifestation of my appreciative response in myself (as a feature of myself), and the feeling- tonality is its manifestation in the world (as a feature of the world).

The importances or felt meanings of which the I is aware are the subject of Chapter 2; in the following section we will lay the groundwork for bringing these importances into view by examining the manner in which feeling-tonalities refer to them by flowing from them as from their sources.

To show that feeling-tonalities permeate the world is only one step on the way to uncovering the full metaphysical significance of these tonalities. The next and final step is to make it manifest that some feeling-tonalities are felt to flow from meanings of the world as a whole. This can be done by describing the depth and breadth of the world-emanation of the tonal-flows, where “emanation” refers to the felt character of the tonalities as flowing from a source.

A feeling-tonality has a deep world-emanation if it flows from the interior of the world (and conversely, has a shallow world-emanation if it flows from the surface of the world). A feeling-tonality has a broad world-emanation if it flows from the whole the interior or surface of the world (and has a narrow world-emanation if it flows from one part of this interior or surface). These different world-emanations combine to produce four basic modes of world-emanation: i) narrow and shallow, ii) broad and shallow, iii) narrow and deep, and iv) broad and deep. An explication of these four modes of world-emanation will indicate that the fourth mode, the broad and deep world-emanation, manifests a relation of feeling- tonalities to meanings of the world as a whole.

Before I begin these descriptions, it is necessary to become clear about the nature of the verbal significations in which these world-emanations are to be articulated and made explicit. The significations, “interior,” “surface,” “emanation,” “source,” etc., are to be understood in a metaphorical way that corresponds to the felt characters of the world. The felt “interior” of a sensible phenomenon, for instance, is not to be understood in a literal sense as being the spatial interior or the physical matter that is located inside the physical surface of the phenomenon. Rather, a felt “interior” is a nonspatial and nonsensible reality that is intuitively felt to be “inside” a sensible phenomenon in a way that is not but is somewhat analogous to the way in which space or matter can be spatially inside a physical surface. Moreover, it should be emphasized that unlike some metaphorical descriptions, these metaphorical descriptions cannot be translated into literal terms and sentences. “He is a pig” can be literally translated as “He has a voracious appetite, is ill-mannered and unrefined,” but “a tonal-flow that is emanated from the whole interior depths of the world” has no literal translation. This also implies that these metaphorical categories cannot be interpreted in light of the traditional rational-metaphysical categories. The surface/interior distinction, for example, cannot be under stood in terms of the properties/substance distinction (Aristotle), the nominal essence/real essence distinction (Locke), or the phenomena/noumena distinction (Kant), etc. This distinction can only be understood outside of the sphere of rational-metaphysical categories, and in terms of the reality that one immediately feels.

It must not be thought that this metaphorical knowledge of the world is inferior to a literal knowledge, as has been maintained in a rational- metaphysical tradition beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and including such recent exponents as Frege, Russell, and Carnap. Aristotle asserted that in a perfect philosophical language there are no metaphors, and that the presence of metaphors is indicative of a defect and unclarity in one’s understanding of the world.[37] According to this view, truths about the world are expressable only in literal terms, ultimately in the literal categorical terms of rational metaphysics, “cause and effect,” “substance and accident,” and so on. The untenability of this view is revealed in an evidentially felt manner in the reappreciative feeling-afterglows and concentrations, in which a substantive metaphorical knowledge of the world is obtained. In these feelings, and originally in the feeling-afterglows, the felt realities of the world are allowed to “speak for themselves,” to inspire their own verbal articulation, and in many cases these realities inspire metaphorical formulations that capture what is inexpressible in literal terms, or what is expressible only in an inadequate and inferior way in literal terms.[38] The felt truth of these metaphors is immediately experienced in the reappreciative afterglows, wherein the felt realities in their vanishing intuitive presence evoke the metaphors and in this evocation appear as truly intimated by these metaphors.

It is such an intimative truth that is communicated in the following descriptions of the four modes of the world-emanation of feeling-tonalities.

Feeling-tonalities that have a narrow and shallow world-emanation flow from one part of the surface of the world. The surface that is felt to be the source of the flowing is the sensible appearance of the world. It is the “look,” “taste,” “smell,” etc., of the world that emanates the feeling-flow. An enchanted feeling-tonality, for example, may flow up wards and outwards in a shimmering and dreamlike manner from the colorful look of a sunset; or a feeling-tonality of repugnance may be flowing towards me repellingly from the odor of a corpse. These feeling-flows seem to emanate from the world’s outer aspect, the bodily surface of the world that is exhibited to my senses, and do not emanate from a source deeper in the interior of the world. And they seem to emanate from only one part of this surface; e.g., the piercing pain in my toe flows from the thumb tack I am stepping on, and does not flow from the remaining surface of the world.

Feeling-tonalities with a broad and shallow world-emanation flow from the whole world-surface. When I arise in the morning groggy and only half awake, everything around me appears to be enshrouded in a sleepy haze; the furniture and contours of my room, as well as everything else I am perceiving, seems to be emanating a thick veil of sleepiness. The same is true for the delirious explorer wandering in circles in the jungle: everything appears to him infused with a feverish glow. And to the old wino, stumbling through the streets at night, everything appears permeated with a drunken fog. These are feeling-tonalities that the whole world- surface seems to have when my body is in this or that state of feeling (such as illness or fatigue). These tonalities flow from the way everything looks, sounds, tastes, emanating from the entire bodily surface that the world exhibits to my senses.

These tonalities emanate from one part of the world-interior. The most common instances of these tonalities are those emanating from the people I relate to and respond to with feeling. The soft binding-together flow of love is not felt as a binding-together between the other person’s bodily surface and myself, but between the other’s ego and myself. In such a case, although the feeling-tonality appears to imbue the other’s bodily surface, it does not seem to arise there, but from further within. What I intuitively feel is not that the other’s eyes and face are lovingly-bound- together-with-me, but that the other himself is, and that the loving bindingness is merely flowing through his eyes and face from the interior reality of his ego. But since I do not sensuously perceive this interior, I do not perceive the loving flow emanating from it. Rather, prior to all explicit judgment and cognition, I have an immediate intuitive sense that the sensuously apparent flowing of the other’s body stems from and emerges out of an imperceptible source that is within the other’s body.

Phenomena other than people can manifest a feeling-tonality that seems to emerge from the depths behind their sensory surface. A painting can be viewed superficially as consisting only of “aesthetically arranged colors and shapes,” but it also can be interpreted more profoundly, as a sensuous manifestation of a deeper reality. For instance, the Pieta from Villeneuve-les-Avignon, by an unknown fifteenth-century painter, can be imaginatively interpreted and felt as a sensuous manifestation of the solemn presence of God. In such a case, the solemn and holy tonal-flow that in fuses the painting is felt to emanate from a reality beyond the sensory surface of the painting.

Even a bone can seem to emanate a tonal-flow from deep within itself. An archeologist may feel overawed upon finding the femur of a smilodectus. He does not feel the femur to be emanating an awesome feeling-tonality from its sensible appearance, but from deep within itself, from its historical reality as a several million year old femur of a smilodectus.

The tonal-flows that have a broad and deep world-emanation have their source in the whole interior of the world, and not just in one part of this interior, such as in the interior of a person or bone. They emanate from deep within the whole sensible surface of the world. Such tonal-flows are experienced in global moods and affects. For example, in a serene mood I am oriented towards the whole in serene contemplation. In this contemplation, there is felt to emanate from far within the whole sensible surface of the sky, the field, the trees and the strollers, a profound calmness, an all-embracing serene feeling-flow that gently glides upwards. I contemplatively feel adrift in a vast ocean of serenity that diffuses through the whole surface of the world, and gently buoys and lifts everything up wards in one peaceful motion. All the many things in my surroundings are united in an ocean of calm. I am not oriented in this contemplation to the surface appearance of the world, to the look, sound, and smell of the whole, but to the one inner reality that is behind the surface, the reality that cannot be perceived but is felt to be within the whole of what is disclosed to my senses. But the source of this serene-flow is not felt to be all of the individual inner identities of the sensible phenomena, not their inner identities as my friends, my beloved, this age-old oak tree, and the like; the source is rather the one inner identity possessed by the entire sensible surface that is exhibited to me, its identity as a surface of the world as a whole. This inner global identity of the entire sensible surface is the whole interior of the world, the global interior. In the serene contempla tion, I ‘feel the intuitive omnipresence of a vast whole that extends far beyond this whole sensible surface and that at the same time encompasses this surface and myself in respect of our imperceptible identities as parts- of-this-whole. It is from this imperceptible whole that the serene tonal- flow calmly emanates.

I am present to this whole in global affects and moods. This whole is not something to which I rationally infer, but something to which I am sensuously connected by virtue of interconnected sensational and tonal flowings. Globally flowing expansions and contractions embrace me from within the global interior and make me sensuously expand and contract with the globe itself.

The global interior emanates through the world-surface different types of flows. Through this surface, I feel that the world-whole is awesomely towering over and above me, or is disseminating a softly binding flow of love that intimately ties me together with the whole itself, or is beckoning me from afar, into the wondrous felt distances deep within itself. Or I feel it flowing towards me fearsomely, looming towards me and contracting around me through the whole surrounding surface.

Through these flowings, I am carried into the great sensuous metaphysical regions of the world. In global joy, I am radiated to the celestial region of the world, the tonal peak of the world. I feel myself and everything else to be “on high,” to be elevated to the very top of the world, and to be radiated there by the vast global interior itself.

In global despair, I am cast down to the nethermost region of the world, the world-abyss. Global despair differs from global sadness, for in global sadness I and everything else are sinking downwards, towards the bottom of the world, but we haven’t yet reached bottom. In global despair, on the other hand, everything and myself have been hopelessly sunken to the very bottom of the world. We have “hit bottom” and can go no further downwards.

The middle region of the world is occupied by global equanimity. Global equanimity although somewhat similar to global serenity, is nevertheless different; serenity is more positive, more pleasurable, more affirmative; it is an upwardly directed feeling, belonging in the upper tonal half of the world, near to, but not at, the joyous top of the world. Equanimity, by contrast, is an absolutely still feeling; it flows neither for wards nor backwards, neither upwards nor downwards, and is not suspended before or oriented towards any direction at all. It is perfectly directionless. In equanimity, everything about me is utterly stilled and brought to a complete rest; everything becomes like an endless, still and rippleless pond. Everything is frozen in the motionless silence that obtains in the absolute center of the world.

The existence of such sensuous metaphysical regions as these puts into question the traditional rational-metaphysical opposition between the sensuous and the metaphysical. In the metaphysics of rational meaning, the sensuous, the irrational, and the nonmetaphysical are associated with one another. This was first argued in a substantial way in Plato’s Phaedo, wherein Plato advises the philosopher to transcend the sensuous and to “free himself from feeling” (Phaedo 69b-c) as much as possible, as it is only in nonsensuous ratiocination that the philosopher can climb to the metaphysical regions, the regions of the eide and the theion, the essences and the divine, these being the regions of the reasons, the aitiai, that ex plain the world. These metaphysical regions are nonsensuous regions. It is because of this, as Hegel concluded at the end of the epoch of rational

meaning, that there is an ultimate “contradiction between the spiritual [geistigen] and the sensuous.”[39]

However, if the spiritual and the metaphysical are viewed from a different perspective, from the point of view of feeling, it can be seen that the sensuous has its own spirituality and its own metaphysical import. This spiritual-metaphysical nature is manifested in the global tonal-flows, for these flows are constitutive of the sensuous metaphysical regions of the world. In fact, it is not through being rational beings, but through being sensuous beings, that we are metaphysical beings, for it is by virtue of our sensuous feelings that we can be carried to the top of the world, the bottom of the world, the center of the world, and the like. It is these sensuous metaphysical regions, and not the nonsensuous regions of global reasons, that can be known to exist, as is evinced both by the positive descriptions in this chapter and by the negative arguments developed in the epoch of rational meaninglessness.

But these sensuous regions are not the only metaphysical realities we know to exist. They make manifest a nonsensuous metaphysical reality, but not a nonsensuous reality of reason. Rather, they make manifest a reality of importance. The metaphysical importances are the regional sources from which these sensuous regions flow. The tonal-flows constitutive of these regions flow from sources deep in the whole interior of the world, and these sources in the global interior are the importances of the world as a whole. Each different type of tonal-flow has its source in a different importance of the world-whole. One global importance is the source of the despairingly-sunken-to-the-bottom-of-the-world, a different one is the source of the joyously-radiated-to-the-top-of-the-world, and likewise for each type of tonal-flow that is emanated from the whole in terior of the world.

It is true that the other three modes of world-emanation also have sources in importances, these sources being importances of a part or of the whole of the surface of the world, or importances of a part of the interior of the world.[40]

But what are these important sources? They are not causal reasons of tonal-flows, not good or evil substances in the traditional sense. Nor are they to be identified with values. And certainly they are not facts, or facts-that-have-values. But then again, importances are not to be identified with feelings. The possibilities of characterizing them in any familiar way seem exhausted.

This question about the nature of importances can only be answered by allowing the sources of tonal-flows to come to a pure appearance in aftergiowing and concentrative reappreciations,. and by allowing these sources to therein evoke their own verbal significations, significations that uniquely capture their nature. It is the task of the next chapter to offer an introductory exposition of these significations, and to therein elucidate the general nature of importances and of the feeling-awarenesses in which they are appreciated.

[1] Descartes, Les Passions de l‘Ame I, 27.

[2] A clarifying note is required here concerning the phrases “the world,” “the world-whole,” and “world-part.” Unless I expressly indicate otherwise, or it is clearly indicated otherwise by the context, I shall henceforth use “the world” to refer both to the world as a whole and to the world in respect of its parts (i.e., in respect of each, some, or any of its parts). Accordingly, to say that “sensuous feelings can be features of the world” means that they can be features of the world-whole and can be features of a part of the world. If I wish to refer exclusively to the world as a whole, I shall use “the world-whole,” and if to a part of the world, “world-part.”

In saying that “sensuous feelings are features of the world as well as features of the I,” lam really saying—to put it exactly—that they are features of the world-whole and of world-parts other than the I, as well as of the I, for the I too is a part of the world.

[3] Affects are distinguished from moods in Chapter 3.

[4] See Politica, VIII, 7, 1342A, 8 and De Memoria et Reminiscentia, I, 450B, 1 for the assertion that affects are “movements of the soul.” For the statement that they involve pleasure or pain, see Ethica Nicomachea, II, 5, 1105B, 22-23, and Ethica Eudemia, II, 2, 1220Bff, Magna Moralia, I, 7, 8, 1186, and Rhetorica, II, 1, 1378A, 20-21. The theory that pleasure and pain are complements of a function is developed in Book X of Ethica Nicomachea.

[5] Aristotle does not, however, consider these three items to exhaust the possible ways in which affects can be defined. Affects can also be defined, for in stance, in terms of a material reason (aitia). Thus the material reason for anger is blood boiling about the heart. Cf. De Anima, 1, 1, 403A-403B. I distinguish physiological disturbances from feeling-sensations in 1 .7.

[6] Aristotle, Rhetorica, II, 8, 1385B, 13-14.

[7] Ibid., II, 10, 1387B, 23-24.

[8] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigge edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), Book II, Part I, Section 2, p. 277.

[9] Spinoza, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, Pars III, Def 6, in Opera II, op. cit., p. 192.

[10] Ibid., Pars III, Prop. 30, Sch. (Opera II, p. 163). I am following the Dutch version in reading “internal cause” rather than “external cause.”

[11] Spinoza, Ethica, op. cit., Pars III, Prop. 56. (Opera II, p. 184).

[12] Ibid., Pars III, Prop. 56, Dem. (Opera II, p. 185).

[13] Wenger, “Emotions as Visceral Action: An Extension of Lange’s Theory,” in Feelings and Emotions, ed. M. Reymert (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), p. 5.

[14] Brentano, von Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, Appendix IX.

[15] Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1921). Pt. II, Ch. 5, Sc. 2, pp. 262-65.

[16] Sartre,L’Etre et le Neant, op. cit., Pt. III, Ch. 2, Sc. “pp. 396-400.

[17] Buytendijk, “The Phenomenological Approach to the Problem of Feelings and Emotions,” in Feelings and Emotions, ed. M. Reymert, op. cit., pp. 127-41.

[18] Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik op. cit., p. 262.

[19] La Transcendance de l’Ego (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1966), p. 57.

[20] Ibid., p. 61.

[21] This is explained by Sartre as follows: The ego is “the ideal unity of all the states and actions. As something ideal, naturally, this unity can embrace an infinity of states. But one can well understand that what is offered to the concrete and fulfilled intuition is only this unity insofar as it incorporates the present state. By virtue of this concrete nucleus [noyau concret] a greater or lesser number of empty intentions (by right, an infinity of them) are directed toward the past and toward the future, and aim at the states and actions not presently given.” Ibid., p. 69.

[22] The “I” that feels is also neither a soul nor a substance. Nor is it the “person” Scheler conceives, which is the personal unity, not of individual intentional acts, but of the essential kinds of intentional acts; such a “person” is in truth a theoretical construct.

[23] The Principles of Psychology, Vol. II (New York: Dover, 1950) pp. 450-51.

[24] Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, #3, in Werke, Band V (Berlin, 1922), ed. Cassirer, p. 275.

[25] Aristotle, Politica, VIII, 1342A, and De Memoria et Reminiscentia, I, 450B,1.

[26] Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, IV. v. 10.

[27] Plato, Philebus 41C-42B.

[28] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, op. cit., p. 276.

[29] Wundt, Grundzuge der physiologische Psychologie (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1908-11).

[30] See for example F. B. Titchener’s criticisms in Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention (New York, 1908), pp. 125-68.

[31] Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), p. 61.

[32] Strasser, The Phenomenology of Feeling (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1977), trans. Robert Wood, p. 188.

[33] Certain remarks in Sartre’s L’imaginaire, psychologie phenomenologique de l’imagination (Paris: Gallimard, 1940), Pt. II, Ch. 2, suggest that he also was aware of some nontypological characters of feeling-tonalities, but Sartre also did not expressly acknowledge them to be sensuous feeling-characters or to be different from the nonsensuous affectively apprehended properties like “injustice” or “dangerou