Here is the fourteenth chapter of Taking Heart and Making Sense.
If you’re new here, you might like to read an intro article about the book. I also recommend listening to the book’s Introduction first. You can also find all previous chapters, in order, here.
In previous chapters I’ve tried to illuminate how experience might begin as the sense of fit, which we can think of as a holistic sense of how things are going. I imagine that might be the felt experience of other beings, particularly animals, but potentially all the way down the evolutionary scale, to single-celled organisms. As life becomes more complex and more informed by memory, more differentiated feeling experiences become possible, as a stronger sense of self also emerges.
I hope the idea of the sense of fit has illuminated some points about our human experience that are often neglected, most importantly that feeling is always present. The holistic, ongoing feeling of experience (which, if we are focused on other things, might be quite subtle), is so much more nuanced than the oversimplified way we often think and talk about emotion. Feeling brings all of our experience forward. I see it as our most basic conscious experience, on which all other experience depends.
Obviously, though, not all of our experience is pure feeling. This week’s chapter focuses on the role of language, and how feeling and language interact in our experience. That is clearly a big topic! I make a few suggestions that follow from the theory I’ve outlined in the book as well as from simply observing experience.
One thing that we can all easily notice is that language and the activities it makes possible (thinking, speaking, writing, etc) are more active than feeling; using language is within our control. Feeling, on the other hand, requires us to be more receptive; we allow, listen to or reflect on feeling rather than make it happen. We switch between these more active and receptive modes all the time, and probably to varying degrees in different situations.
It’s hard to overstate (and even really to understand) how important language is to our experience. As part of conveying our experience and ideas to others, language allows us to highlight, summarise or contain aspects of our experience in ways that feel complete and allow us to keep going; language enables us to express something. We can identify this in conversation, particularly when we linger over a particular word as we try to describe something to another person. If we don’t quite capture what we want to express, we’re left with an uneasy or unfinished feeling (the feeling of lack of fit), so we might try again until we find a match (again, guided by feeling). We feel not only how the conversation is going, but that there’s something there to describe or say next, as though we reach out (or perhaps inward) to bring something into awareness.
Any readers who are familiar with the philosopher and therapist Eugene Gendlin will probably notice his influence on my work here. As I mention in this chapter, Gendlin coined a term for the feeling into that reaches for precise words to describe experience: he named that activity focusing. He sees focusing as central to the success of counselling. It is an activity we do within ourselves; we pause and feel into the edges of our experience. In doing so, we make explicit that which is implicit.
Going over this week’s chapter, I’ve been thinking deeply again about what the concept of the implicit actually refers to. It’s so tempting to imagine that the implicit points to something that is literally there underneath, particularly if we understand the brain as an agent or controller (a perspective that I’ve argued against through the whole book!). To offer a fairly straightforward example: think of when we describe a word as being on the tip of my tongue, that common experience of trying to bring a particular word forward but not quite getting it. We already know what we mean, we know there’s a word for it, but somehow the word isn’t quite becoming explicit. If we pause a few times, yet the word fails to appear, we might even become frustrated. Often, at some point, we give up, only to find that suddenly, moments or even hours later, the word pops in when we’re focused on something else (along with the very pleasant feeling of completion).
Even if that feeling of trying and failing to find a word is of the brain doing something, the brain doesn’t separately know the word. There isn’t a lower level at which the word itself is present; it hasn’t yet come forward. And we could say the same for all our implicit memories (which is most of our memory). There simply isn’t a separate experiencing entity underneath that is remembering what we cannot consciously; the memory is only present as the sense we have, the edges of our experience. We want to imagine that the brain knows something that we don’t yet, but it doesn’t. The brain is a different level and perspective from our actual experience. It doesn’t know anything; only we do.
Quick overview:
This chapter discusses the relationship between feeling and language in our ongoing experience. I argue that rather than seeing language in human beings as a higher level of consciousness, it is better unaderstood as the separation within an existing gestalt; language provides the means for experience to separate and recombine, in a paradigmatic creative process. I discuss this with reference to the work of Eugene Gendlin, as well as some insights from biosemiotics.
I suggest that myelination of particular neurons might facilitate separation in time, of some neural patterns in relation to others. The process of myelination might support the creation and recreation of the summary forms of experience that make language possible. It could offer a way of creating discrete forms in relation to continuous experience, making it possible for the system to redescribe and reflect within itself. In this way language steps outside of the overall hierarchical organisation of the system, and it becomes possible to override feeling. Minimising feeling has a protective function that might work well in highly stressful situations, particularly for children, but diminish the fullness of experience when it becomes habitual.
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