Feelings

The pursuit of writing begs the question, "why?" I constantly need to better grasp all the ramifications within the framework of my intent. No meaningful voice, I believe, can transpire without facing the question of why. I found myself going through posts written in the past ten years. Consciousness, I feel, runs through a multilayered spacetime. We are left to wonder where exactly it resides from atom to stratum. On an individual level, it is the ability to reflect on one's thoughts. A pause involves the act of metacognition. It means to ​​step aside, as it were, from oneself and analyze and judge the operations of one's mind. The same image repeatedly appears in my head of myself drifting away. Each step forward initiates a necessary halt, and another round of reflective bits begins. 

I have followed the wise advice to read Whitehead's writings. For him, consciousness "enlightens experience which precedes it" (1). There can not be any consciousness without past -- individual or collective -- experience. The "residual trace" spoken by Utpaladeva echoes when I read Whitehead on the question of memory. There are some elements of recollection in consciousness, sparks from the "dim recesses of the Unconscious." But the Unconscious is a labyrinth. Lost in the maze of a dream-like reality, we follow breadcrumbs that guide us to sprinkles of light and fragments of memory. Oblivion motivates our quest.

 From William James to Alfred North Whitehead, drops of perception to drops of experience, mechanisms that we observe from smaller to larger scales are the ultimate notion embodied in the term 'concrescence' that is a never-ending process of becoming in a seamless flow. Whitehead talked about the Universe's creative action, "always becoming one in a particular unity of self-experience and thereby adding to the multiplicity," which is the Universe as many. The primary stage in the concrescence of an actual entity is how the antecedent Universe "enters into the constitution of the entity in question, so as to constitute the basis of its nascent individuality."

To be is only to be an avatar allowing the transmission of information, an archive of the past concealed within. From the first cell, a clock hides in the Unconscious. Memory is in the cloud. As we wonder how matter came into being the first hundreds of million years, how particles clustered to give rise to the first stars, some find an analogy between artistic and cosmic creations. One thing led to another; from Whitehead's essay on cosmology, I stumbled upon Samuel Alexander's works. The question raised in my previous post by John Archibald Wheeler, "How did the Universe come into being?" may not be appropriately asked, he argued. It should be "what sort of a thing the world is in its ultimate and simplest nature?". He explained that "just as the object known is revealed through the ordinary reaction to it, so the work of art is revealed to the artist himself through the productive act wrung from him in his excitement over the subject matter" (2).

In a conceptual reality filled with the emotion of time, I find it telling that Whitehead repeatedly uses such a subjective and evocative word as "feeling". At the same time, David Bohm talks about small, 'quantized' wavelike excitations on top of an immense background of spatial energy. Although common words like emotion, feeling, and excitation may be borrowed, I agree because we feel more than we can know. A feeling, Whitehead writes, is "the appropriation of some elements in the Universe to be components in the real internal constitution of its subject." For him, all actual entities, including electrons, atoms, and molecules enjoy a little bit of feeling "at least in rudimentary forms" (3).

My perspective on cosmic consciousness may be not only a choice but a conceptual feeling that has “found integration with other feelings” (1), which poets are fond of, thrive on, and are nurtured by. The question that emerged from Whitehead’s reading is whether consciousness can be without its subjective form. Can there be objectively something beyond ourselves, a consciousness beyond individuality? For him, feelings “taken in their original purity devoid of accretions from later integrations” do not involve consciousness because consciousness is a “subjective form arising in the higher phases of concrescence,” It “primarily illuminates the higher phase in which it arises,” and only “illuminates earlier phases derivatively.” 

Whitehead’s take on feelings is to be examined in light of other contemporary statements pertaining to the psychology of emotions. To the question “Are there pure states of feeling?” if we reply in the affirmative, writes Ribot, “then the state of feeling is considered as having at least sometimes an independent existence of its own and not as condemned to play forever the part of acolyte or parasite” (4). And if we pursue the analogy between the mind and the Universe, we could think of the emotion of time as an “organized manifestation of the life of” feelings as defined by Whitehead.

Poets feel with their intuitional minds. I imagine cosmic consciousness to be the gathering of a higher order in which “floating” parts of ourselves meet “floating” parts of others. Poets understand by feeling as they engage in a dialogue with the Universe. It may be that cosmic consciousness is but a shadow for the growth of feelings is to be “distinguished from the objects to which those feelings relate”(5). In both cosmic and artistic creation -- we may say that creativity is a state of feeling that feeds on itself and its environment. Poets who wander in reverie are sensitive souls whose doubts time will answer. Will intuition triumph over the anguish in which uncertainty has thrown us? For we may conclude that there are feeling-like “phenomena” (6) in organic and inorganic matter alike.

And when we wonder about the accidental nature of the Universe, whether it has risen from free will or in a superdeterministic way,  we may dwell upon Alexander’s description of an artist or a poet who may not, systematically,  first form an image. To paraphrase Alexander, they may be clueless of what they want to express, but find out what they wanted to express by expressing it for they have, in general, no precedent image of their work and don’t know what they will say till they have said it, and it comes as a revelation even to themselves. Writing and direct carving are, I feel, an irrepressible and fragmented journey, the purpose of which is still a mystery. Its key, I hope, will help me escape the labyrinth of my own twists and turns. But some mysteries may be beyond the reach of imagination.

1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
2. Samuel Alexander, Artistic Creation and Cosmic Creation
3. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, The inequality of man
4. Theodule Armand Ribot, The psychology of emotions
5. Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity
6. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, The philosophy of a biologist