Taking Heart and Making Sense

The introduction to my book

Hello friends and readers,

Here’s the introduction to my book, Taking Heart and Making Sense. In the new year I’ll start posting the whole book, one chapter per fortnight in the podcast format here on substack.

When people ask me who this book is for I sometimes answer that it’s for philosophers interested in therapy and therapists interested in philosophy. But that’s just to offer a very general sense of possible readers. You might be a bodyworker interested in metaphysics, or a biologist interested in feeling and emotion. Or simply a human interested in humans.

Introduction

Taking heart and making sense is something we must do many times in life. We all face challenges or reach junctures where we need to dig a little deeper, find a little optimism—to take heart—while we also settle on a way of understanding that seems useful and that we can live with—we make sense. But people do this in very different ways. Each person’s perspective on their own life is different and it is often difficult to know how things really are for someone else, what their experience is like. Such separateness is a part of being human. That is a theme of this book and seems important to acknowledge early on; we are separate and individualised beings. But an even bigger theme of this book is that we are interconnected beings, with each other and with the natural world. The first point we already know, but the second needs explaining. Western culture currently does not seem to understand it. This book offers one way of explaining our interconnectedness along with our separateness. Feeling is central to both.

In our own lives, feeling is important to understand because it is always present, even if sometimes it is very quiet. It is not some part of our consciousness that we can add or take away. It is the foundational level of our experience—of the physical body but somehow more than the body because the present, feeling body is also formed of its history. Often this history will be outside our awareness, even as it continues in our functioning, in our reactions to situations and in our habits. Yet even when we are unaware, feeling interprets this history; it relates our present and past as we recognise situations, whether by a subtle sense or a tumultuous change.

In a broader social sense, the relevance and importance of understanding feeling cannot be overstated. Secular Western culture seems to be adrift, without a strong sense of the value of life or the best way for human beings to live and engage with one another. One key reason for this lack of moorings is that human experience—and its relation to the broader nature—is not adequately accounted for by the narratives that underpin and influence Western culture. Feeling is rendered essentially meaningless by both science and postmodernism and genuine alternatives have yet to come to fruition, although they are certainly in the making. We need theory that can explain human feeling—and subjective, individual experience—while still affirming the importance of science and empirical research. Such theory should support rigorous knowledge and understanding of the world, while at the same time anchoring us in a stronger sense of meaning and value, of our individual and collective lives, and of our participation in the very process of life itself. It should help us to develop care and concern for others as well as to deal with the undeniable difficulties of life, the fear and insecurity inherent in being alive.

It is not easy to chart a path that explains the depth of our interconnectedness while acknowledging the uniqueness of individual experience. Yet, if we can do this, we can begin to understand how working with our own experience effects change beyond ourselves—reverberating through interactions, groups and societies. Accepting my feeling helps me to accept yours. Understanding my history helps me to understand yours. This occurs at a much deeper level than we currently appreciate. Even so, we must take care not to romanticise feeling. Experience can be painful and alienating, particularly if we don’t understand how it arises. Our feelings can be confusing and contradictory, and can push us to act in ways we don’t understand or later regret. Human beings are complex, perhaps unfathomably so. We are capable of inflicting immense suffering on one another. Yet we manage to live relatively peacefully together in many places, sustained and buoyed by mutual care and cooperation, despite our flaws and differences. Our capacity to care for and connect with each other exists deeply in the natural way of things.

Explaining human experience in a useful way requires that we move beyond the concept of the isolated individual that permeates so many aspects of contemporary life. People are largely understood as entirely separate from one another and from nature—unconstrained, self-reliant and in competition. When we see ourselves this way, we tend to instrumentalise the natural world as an entity entirely disconnected from us, which we can only exploit and attempt to control, rather than in which we participate. Indeed, many of the metaphors we use to describe life itself are based on a fantasy of control—brains control people, genes control cells, chemistry controls physiology, natural selection controls evolution. None of these are accurate. They are based in the underlying view that the world is made of physical things and that other outside forces move them.

This book puts forward a different view, that we need to understand the intricacy of interactions that form nature—including individual human beings—from the ground up. Here I am referring to metaphysics—our foundational concepts. Even if we think they are irrelevant, they are everywhere. In recent years, we have helplessly witnessed the unprecedented destruction of animal and plant life, some of it centuries old, in megafires on more than one continent. We have discovered an enormous garbage island floating in the Pacific Ocean and microscopic plastic particles in every level of the food chain. Even so, we continue to live in more or less the same way and to plunder ancient natural resources, all while having our lives turned upside down by the worldwide spread of a new disease. I cannot help but think that the view of the world as composed of lifeless matter creates death because this view does not engender the right kind of care and concern. But perhaps this is poetic license. What I am certain of is that ideas collectively shape us as much as actions, and that when we change our worldview we can observe new phenomena. One of the most important phenomena that comes into focus when we understand nature differently is that meaning is immanent in nature, in living processes. This helps us to both value life itself and to experience and reflect on our humanness. Meaning is immanent in the living body, in the natural world. We experience this first as feeling.

Human beings are in and of the natural world. We can develop perspectives on the world, but we cannot stand outside it and view it objectively. A different underlying worldview can help us to come to terms with this without leading us into the idea that truth is relative—and the nihilism this idea leads to. is book in no way disagrees with the value of science and empirical research. Rather, it provides a broader view that highly values scientific inquiry while acknowledging the limits of the ideal of impartial observation. Many of the theories discussed in this book, which form its overall argument, are interpretations of empirical research. The purpose of presenting an alternative metaphysics as part of this argument is to develop a foundation that is already strongly implied in some branches of science, particularly biology and cognitive science. We are possibly on the verge of a paradigm shift.

This book deals with complex ideas from a variety of disciplines. Interdisciplinary work involves a different set of constraints than specialised academic work. I have tried to provide enough detail that the key points of theories are covered but not so much detail as to overwhelm the reader. Academic disciplines have become more and more specialised in recent decades—at the same time as pressures on academics have increased manifold because universities are now run as businesses rather than institutions for the public good. The result is a proliferation of highly specialised publications that no one can keep abreast of along with the general decline of funding to the pure humanities and sciences—areas of research that do not directly generate financial revenue for institutions. In this way, and to our detriment, the entire system we live under replicates itself.

With the intention of resisting this fragmentation of knowledge, I have based most of this book on discussions of books that are already syntheses of research. They are all written by scholars and scientists. Some are meant for a more general readership while some are more specialised, but they all offer thorough arguments and many draw on empirical research. This means that interested readers can easily follow up discussions. It also means that I can treat these books as texts in themselves. I assume that all the research they report is sound, so I can work with the specific ideas and themes they each put forward as well as make connections between them to further my own argument. This is the way I have learnt to do interdisciplinary research and it is not perfect because it cannot properly acknowledge all the scholars dedicated to specialised research. It also cannot fully explain the intricacies of theories and debates within particular Fields. Still, I believe it is a valid endeavour and can help to overcome fragmentation while demonstrating an important role for philosophy in this endeavour, and in public life much more generally.

One of the areas in which scientific understanding has progressed rapidly in the past two decades is the field of neuroscience. Recent themes that are relevant to theories of feeling are the brain’s role in homeostasis (life regulation) and interoception (sensing or representing the inner state of the body). These themes are obviously related to each other and are important for how we understand the arising of experience—or feeling. While much has been discovered about these key processes, extrapolations about whole body functioning, behaviour and experience are often either partly or completely described through those metaphors of separation and control, with the brain as an ultimate regulator. is can lead to far-reaching conclusions about human life that I see as unhelpful and inaccurate, conclusions which cannot help us to consider how best to live or how best to deal with collective problems beyond optimising our own separate experience. They do not help us to understand meaning and value in and with the world.

Questions about life functioning, inner sensing and experience should instead be seen in terms of the whole body as a particular kind of system in particular kinds of relationships. Thus, rather than asking how the brain controls the body or how the brain constructs meaning, we need to ask how whole systems regulate themselves and how whole systems look at themselves. Then, even more importantly, we need to consider how systems understand themselves in relation to other systems and other phenomena. These questions uncover the need to reconsider our most basic assumptions about reality and reconstruct a worldview based on different assumptions. While such a project is in some respects very abstract and is conceptually demanding, a new perspective gradually emerges that encourages and makes space for a much deeper appreciation of the intricacy, the inherent value, the symphonic interwovenness of the natural world and the profoundly creative process of evolution. This beautiful, shimmering, changing wholeness includes our humanness in relation—our tender vulnerability and our unique potential. These are big, ambitious themes but we need such themes to help carry us through to a genuinely new way of being with each other and within the natural world. My hope is that this book will become part of the chorus that can do this.

Rather than simply announcing the need for a new metaphysics, Part One of this book demonstrates this need by discussing some key theories of emotion and feeling in psychology, cognitive science, philosophy and neuroscience. e intention here is twofold—to o er concepts and details that are important and useful for a theory of feeling as well as to highlight limitations in each perspective that point to the need for change at a more fundamental level. Chapters one to three therefore provide background theory as well as setting the scene for the theory that follows. Most works referred to in detail are recent publications but trajectories of development, particularly within cognitive science, over the past twenty-five years are also referenced.

Part Two—chapters four to seven—offers a theory of nature based on a new set of fundamental assumptions. I first clarify why this is necessary—in chapter four—by discussing the dualistic thinking that underlies the history of Western thought and continues to pervade Western culture. Chapter five outlines and justifies new categories to base our worldview on. I suggest that change is the fundamental characteristic the we can identify in any phenomenon and discuss a way of building perspective into the way we think about things. We may not have absolute knowledge of anything but we can develop stable and meaningful perspectives. We can do this by understanding the world as formed of processes, always existing in relation to other processes. The basic orientation here—of process/relation—is inside/outside. Current ideas in theoretical biology are explained in chapters six and seven so that we can better understand how living systems function both within themselves and in relation to other systems and phenomena. Understanding life in this way means that we can more easily see creativity and interconnectedness as fundamental to the natural world. Meaning is immanent in nature, including in human life.

The best way to bring such theories of nature into a new way of understanding feeling is by first understanding behaviour. This helps to keep our theorising stable, in the manner of science, because we observe living systems from the outside. This is especially important for observing animals. We can see what they do without assuming anything about how they feel. Part three—chapters eight to ten—makes the transition from understanding behaviour to suggesting a different way of looking at feeling. In chapter eight I develop an idea of behaviour as complex attunements to create harmony amongst levels inside and outside of a system; and chapter nine further supports this by discussing the neuroscience of implicit learning and memory. Finally, in chapter ten, I can speak about feeling as a holistic, inner sensing—a sense of fit. This concept is a way of understanding how animals move through their lives with feeling. They recognise situations and on some level recognise themselves, even if they may not experience the same emotions as human beings. As the sense of fit helps us to understand animal lives as meaningful for them, it also allows us to be clearer about just how much of our human behaviour is habitual and automatic, and in that sense nonconscious.

Part Four then deals with human experience. Chapter eleven looks at human behaviour from the perspective of interactions among people and in groups before chapter twelve connects this perspective to a theory of infant development. Finally, in chapter thirteen, I describe a new way of understanding feeling—as unique, individual metaphors. This explains how our human feeling is built up in our histories but also emerges creatively in present-time situations. It means that our personal experience is stable and meaningful, created in concert with others, but that it is not fixed or essential; it can change. Chapter fourteen explores how feeling and language interact in the ongoing gestalt of conscious experience. Language is more precise but feeling is more honest. Neither should be prioritised—they are simply different forms of understanding that function in relation to one another. I suggest that attending to feeling along with thoughtful, even rational deliberation brings out the creative potential of consciousness as a process. We can become more present with ourselves and with each other.

In conclusion, I mention some of the ramifications of the overall view of feeling developed, particularly in relation to the underlying speculative metaphysics. While tentative, they can lead to a very different perspective on our human relations. We are quite literally in this together. us, even though this book does not directly deal with the current global environmental issues, I believe that a better understanding of human feeling—along with the fundamental nature of the evolutionary processes through which human experience has arisen—could offer a much needed, but complementary counterpart to the increasingly desperate voices of so many esteemed scientists. We must not only change the way we live materially but we must care for and cooperate with one another to do so. We must value life in a new way.