What is "Feeling"?

In his parting comment, Burk refers to my “retreat to feeling.” By use of the term “retreat,” he connotes that there is something inappropriate in invoking feelings when discussing the legitimacy of religious belief. “Retreat” is a metaphor for avoiding something that one cannot win against. In other words, he sees my attempt to incorporate “feeling” among the pieces of evidence we invoke in deciding what to believe as really just a way of avoiding his challenge to religious belief.

I see it, by contrast, as a way of answering that challenge—by introducing something relevant to the assessment of that challenge. The invocation of feeling will be viewed as a retreat rather than a response when “feeling” is taken to be irrelevant, so that the invocation of feeling amounts to leaving the “legitimate terrain” in which critical discourse concerning religious belief ought to be taking place.

So the question that arises is whether a consideration of “feeling” is relevant for a discussion about the legitimacy of religious belief. To answer this, we need a more precise definition of “feeling.” I suspect that at least some of what is at issue between defenders of religion who take their cue from such figures as Schleiermacher and Hermann Lotze and Rudolph Otto, and contemporary criticis of such religion, may be resolved if we progressive defenders of religion did a better job of explaining what, exactly, we mean by “feeling.”

In its most ordinary contemporary usage, “feeling” encompasses pleasure and pain, and what I might call the non-cognitive components of emotions and desires (for example, with respect to desires there’s what you want and the judgment that it is on some level worth pursuing, but then there’s how it feels to want it, which we might describe as an “intense ache” or an “urgent hunger” or a “mild interest” or some such thing).

“Feeling” as Schleiermacher used that term is a much broader concept. What it references is what is immediately present in consciousness, as opposed to the objects of consciousness (which, for Schleiermacher as for Kant, are constituted from the “manifold” of experience through the conceptualizing and unifying activity of the subject).

But part of what happens when the self constructs objects of consciousness is that certain elements of the experience feel a certain way—specifically, there is something about these elements, immediately given in experience, which inspire us to treat them as if they’re coming to us from outside of consciousness itself. They “feel” like veridical encounters with an external world. As such, feeling plays a crucial role in the construction of empirical experience. Sensory impressions “feel” a certain way, and the way that they feel is instrumental in our treating them as originating in objects beyond consciousness that are impacting our consciousness. Schleiermacher, following Kant, referred to this dimension of consciousness as its “receptivity.” There is, if you will, a feeling of being acted upon or being receptive to the other.

And, of course, there are other things that are immediately given to consciousness. When we act, there is the feeling of spontaneity—and this feeling does not merely or even primarily accompany external physical acts (which happen in the empirical world of objects that influence us, and so are intermingled with a feeling of receptivity as we experience our own physical acts as external objects that effect us). This feeling is more pure in relation to wholly internal acts of consciousness: when we imagine something or think through a problem, or decide to perform a physical act.

There is also the unity of consciousness, which suggests a single subject of consciousness, a self that is one thing in some important way. I “feel” like a unified and individual being undergoing a diversity of experiences, rather than just a cluster of sequential experiences.

And when we “toggle” between receptivity and activity, there is a sense of something underlying them both, which is now being receptive, now being active. The subject of experience and the agent of action is, in effect, the same self—a self that underlies both receptivity and activity. But putting things in this way is too conceptually loaded. What is immediately given to us in consciousness is a “feeling” in the sense that Schleiermacher has in mind, and what I offered just above is really an interpretation of that feeling.

Schleiermacher points out that when we dwell in this pivot point between receptivity and activity, when we are quiescent enough to just be that self which acts and receives, without getting caught up in either feeling, then we experience yet another feeling which he calls “the feeling of absolute dependence.” It is like out sensory receptivity—it feels as if I am being affected by something beyond me—but it is different, too.

I’m inclined to describe it in the following way: Consciousness has a subjective “pole” and an objective “pole.” Ordinary sense experience “feels” like it’s coming from the objective pole and impacting the subject. But I am the subject “facing” the objective pole of experience, the feeling of absolute dependence might be described as “coming from behind me.” And unlike the way sensory experience feels—as something outside the self effecting some part of the self in some way—the feeling of absolute dependence is a sense of the total self being effected in a fundamental way. Put in interpretive language, it feels as if I am in contact with the source of my very being, upon which all of my receptivity and activity depends.

What I want to say is this: when we move beyond merely describing the empirical world to offering a worldview, that is, an understanding of the nature of reality itself, we are moving beyond what science can do. To say that the empirical world is all that there is amounts to a worldview that goes beyond merely describing the empirical world. It takes seriously the feeling of veridicality that accompanies sense experience, but it seems to me that it “explains away” much if not most of the rest of the immediate experience of consciousness as delusions produced by the functioning of the physical brain. All my acts are caused by brain processes which can be traced back according to the laws of the empirical world in such a way that there is no genuine spontenaity. The feeling of unity is an effect of the brain’s activity—but the brain itself is a collection of things, perhaps infinitely divisible.

But why should the “contours of consciousness” beyond the empirical ones be so thoroughly dismissed? Are they truly irrelevant in trying to come to grips with the nature of reality, that is, in trying to decide which worldview we should pragmatically adopt in the course of living our lives? Is there, perhaps, a worldview that takes seriously all these feelings, and makes sense of them all—including the ones associated with empirical experience—without explaining them away? Perhaps not, but if there is wouldn’t such a worldview be better, all else being equal?

In any event, we won’t answer these questions if we pre-emptively dismiss “feeling” and regard the efforts to take feeling seriously in philosophical reflection as nothing more than a “retreat.” I suspect that such dismissal, however, may rest on the tendency to understand "feeling" in only a very narrow sense, according to which it is very easy to treat feelings as irrelevant for questions about what is real. My hope here is simply to help clarify the broader sense of feeling that I (and Schleiermacher and others) are invoking in these discussion.

I should add that I haven’t even gotten into the moral and aesthetic dimensions of human experience here, which it seems to me also need to be included in “the pool of things we are trying to make sense of” when our task is to construct a holistic account of reality rather than to merely describe the empirical world encountered in sensory experience. While I think that we can never claim to have knowledge with respect to such holistic worldviews, I think it is pragmatically impossible to avoid adopting some kind of worldview for practical purposes in the course of living our lives. And so we need to make some kind of decision. In so doing, I don't think it is fruitful to pre-emptively dismiss some things that might turn out to be relevant in the course of making such a decision. "Feeling" is one of those things, along with a pragmatic (including moral) assessment of the outcomes of living by one worldview or another.