44
Chapter 6A--The Mind of Feeling
Chapter 6
The Mind of Feeling
Langer’s intellectual adventure culminated in her massive trilogy, Mind: An Essay in Human Feeling. This astounding work defies easy summarization and critical evaluation, although in one way it is a clear continuation of Langer’s engagement with a permanent set of concerns:
· the nature of philosophical reflection in relation to non-philosophical methods
· symbolization, or symbolic transformation, as the central activity of human mentation
· the development of a comprehensive concept of feeling to cover the total mental field
· the centrality of art as the heuristic key to mind
· the nature of abstraction as the pivotal act of mind
· the role of images in the development of mind
· the evolution and implications, both epistemological and cultural, of the great symbolic forms of language, myth, ritual, art, science
At the same time Langer turns more explicitly to issues that can only be characterized as ‘metaphysical,’ especially as dealing with the ‘metaphysics of mind.’ Mind is a kind of philosophical tour de force, a complex web of semiotic, phenomenological, psychological, metaphysical, and meta-philosophical reflections. Its sources range from the introspective and personal to the most arcane researches in neurochemistry and neurobiology in multiple languages, comprising pivotal neglected materials from the past as well as, at least when Langer was writing, up-to-date work in wide variety of scientific disciplines.
In one sense Langer’s Mind is more a deepening than a revolutionary advance or radical break with her previous work. It is, however, certainly and fundamentally novel, both in format, method, and tone. Langer wanted to develop “a philosophical theory of mind” that “can serve the mental and social sciences” (21). How? “It means going back to the beginnings of thought about mental phenomena and starting with different ideas, different expectations, without concern for experiments or statistics or formalized language” (21). In a sense this is exactly what Langer does, although her sources are at times extremely technical and specialized, rooted in at times arcane areas of biology and psychology.
Langer defines the central problem of Mind as “the nature and origin of the veritable gulf that divides human from animal mentality, in a perfectly continuous course of development of life on earth that has no breaks” (M xi). The gulf is found in the human power, indeed need, to produce symbolic images. Images have a unique power to make us “originally aware of the wholeness and over-all form of entities, acts and facts in the world; and little though we may know it, only an image can hold us to a conception of a total phenomenon, against which we measure the adequacy of the scientific terms wherewith we describe it” (M xii). Consequently, Langer wants to find an adequate image, not model, of mind, which for her is a distinctive biological phenomenon. Where?
It was the discovery that works of art are images of the forms of feeling, and that their expressiveness can rise to the presentation of all aspects of mind and human personality, which led me to the present undertaking of constructing a biological theory of feeling that should logically lead to an adequate concept of mind, with all that the possession of mind implies. (M xiii)
Works of art, as we have seen in the last two chapters, are for Langer “expressive forms,” manifesting every type and way that vitality and feeling can be structured and appear. These forms can cover the whole of life and can reveal the continuous shifts, without metaphysical gaps and breaks, between physical and mental realities, while still pinpointing crucial thresholds “where mentality begins, and especially where human mentality transcends the animal level, and mind, sensu stricto, emerges” (M xiii).
Langer distinguishes firmly, in this context, between an image and a model. They serve different purposes. “Briefly stated, an image shows how something appears; a model shows how something works. The art symbol, therefore, sets forth in symbolic projection how vital and emotional and intellectual tensions appear, i.e., how they feel” (M xiii). This gives the art symbol an enormous heuristic fertility for Langer. Art symbols make up a realm of “pure semblances” (M xiii), a field of holistic symbols, that give us the key to how to conceive life itself. “Under the aegis of a holistic symbol, the concept of life builds up even in entirely scientific terms very much like the vital image in art, with no break between somatic and mental events, no ‘addition’ of feeling or consciousness to physical machinery, and especially, no difference of attitude, point of view, working notions, or ‘logical language’ dividing physics and chemistry from biology, or physiology from psychology” (M xiv). What Langer wants to do is to expand, generalize, and systematize some literally meant scientific terms and observations and in this way to develop a comprehensive theory or account of mind. The key philosophical and methodological notion is that of generalization, proceeding stepwise toward a synoptic view that has metaphysical import and value. Surprisingly, in spite of its bulk, Langer makes no claim in the trilogy to prove “the sole rightness” of her approach to her central problem: “the problem of conceiving mind as a natural phenomenon, a ‘natural wonder,’ and to us the greatest of all such wonders of nature” (M xv). Langer is certainly right in this, even if her investigations are, in fact, indispensable for a refined and nuanced semiotic naturalism. She makes a more modest claim for ‘serviceability.’ In spite of her sovereign mastery of a vast panorama of materials and her ingrained habit of working alone, Langer in effect pleads for collaboration and extension.
My procedure in this and the following chapters has by necessity to be conceptual and philosophical. I want to situate and evaluate Langer’s conceptual framework and the distinctive methodology she follows. In one sense I want to take a conceptual x-ray of her theory of mind, indicating its essential distinctions, some perspicuous exemplifications, and its points of intersection with as well as parallels to other projects. The contexts will be methodological, semiotic, epistemological, aesthetic, cultural, and moral. The present chapter will be concerned with ‘subjective mind,’ the ‘mind of feeling.’ The following two chapters will be concerned with ‘objective mind,’ that is, mind as emerging out of a matrix of acts and mind as embodied in cultural and symbolic artifacts. In these chapters we will see how Langer reformulated and recapitulated central themes of her earlier work on myth, ritual, the origin of language, the rise of science, and so forth, with the addition of an explicit ethical or moral dimension, epitomized in the discovery of death.
Feeling
Langer’s mature and definitive concept of mind, just as her aesthetic theory, is based on the concept of feeling. Feeling is, quite generally, “whatever is felt in any way, as sensory stimulus or inward tension, pain, emotion or intent.” It is the “mark of mentality” (M 3). Feeling characterizes physiological systems, not as an additional reality but as a dimension or phase of the system. In the cases of physiology and psychology, as understood by Langer, the “overlapping of the two fields is patent” (M 3). Psychology is “oriented toward the aspects of sensibility, awareness, excitement, gratification or sufferent which belong” to physiological events, which are clearly materials, when they reach a certain level. Mentality and feeling are synonymous. Mentality is a field of “felt impingements and activities” (M 5) and covers feeling, thought, sensation, and dream (M 6). A science of mind needs, Langer thinks, not so much a “definitive concept of mind, as a conceptual frame in which to lodge our observations of mental phenomena” (M 5). And this is what the conceptual frame of ‘feeling’ is meant to supply. It is a generic term which is meant to be deliberately open, not freighted with a vast range of conceptual baggage from the philosophical tradition in which one particular kind of mental event is chosen to represent or norm all the rest. For Langer, mentality, in whatever form, is present when there is ‘feeling’ of any sort or grade.
But to speak of ‘feeling’ is not to say there are ‘feelings’ as distinctive reified entities. We have above all to avoid a basic misconception, that is, “the assumption of feelings (sensations, emotions, etc.) as items or entitites of any kind” (M 6). This is a “genuine metaphysical fallacy” (M 6). For Langer “to feel is to do something, not to have something” (M 7). Langer proposes, accordingly, to reconstruct the concept of feeling, which she calls “the modulus of psychological conception” (M 7). Assuming a world of vital processes Langer asserts that “being felt is a phase of the process itself. A phase is a mode of appearance, and not an added factor” (M 7). It is a becoming aware of processes, in which processes enter into their psychical phase, “the phase of being felt” (M 8). This does not create another order of reality, for “the phase of being felt is strictly intraorganic” (M 7). While, as we will see, such processes can give rise to extraorganic structures, the objective semiosphere, they are thoroughly ‘natural.’ Moreover, they are aspects of, modifications and transformations of, the normal substrate of a universal feeling tone or tonus that marks organic life. There is, to be sure, a “fabric of totally unfelt activities” which Freud, according to Langer, reified as ‘the “Unconscious,” though Langer considers “the theoretical basis of classical psychoanalysis “ as “overassumptive” (M 9). This fabric of unfelt activities is made of a web of acts, some of which become felt in their psychical phase, although Langer will resolutely repudiate all forms of panspsychism. Feeling is to be strictly regarded as “a phase of physiological process” (M 9) and the category of feeling allows the “paradox of the physical and the psychical” to disappear (M 9). They are not two different levels of ‘reality.’ They are two different ways in which natural processes occur.
Langer’s chief thesis is then the following. “The entire psychological field—including human conception, responsible action, rationality, knowledge—is a vast and branching development of feeling” (M 9). And, furthermore, “there is not some primitive form of feeling which is its ‘real’ form” (M 9). No form of feeling is more ‘basic’ or ‘fundamental’ than any other nor can one manifestation or form be ‘reduced’ to any other form. In this sense Langer operates according to the principle of ‘semiotic parity,’ paralleling Justus Buchler’s concept of ‘ontological parity.’ This is not only a conceptual decision on Langer’s part. It is also based on a commitment to a kind of semiotic phenomenology, which she in fact carries out in the course of her work as a whole, and especially in the three volumes of Mind. So, her project is both constructive, governed by a systematic intent, and descriptive, in search of ‘authentic instances’ of feeling. It imposes on her the task of drawing the lines between the ‘significant joints’ in the plenum of feeling. The ‘forms of feeling’ have to be ‘natural’ in the sense of being able to be marked off from one another. But by being marked off they have also to be related in some systematic context, since we need to avoid both rigidity of distinctiveness as well as the night in which all the cows are black approach. Hence, it is imperative for Langer to be able to uncover both the general structures that characterize feeling as such, as a quality that permeates all its forms, and to specify what is specific to each of its forms.
Feeling is an activity rather than a ‘thing’ or ‘entity.’ Activities in general can be felt in many ways, we will see, but there is a clear divide, in principle, between the feeling of impact, of something intersecting with us ‘from outside,’ and the feeling of autogenic action, that is, of something felt as action. So, we have here a distinction between exogenous feeling and autogenous feeling, even if there are rarely any completely pure or unmixed cases. This distinction will appear throughout the analyses in Mind. Any organism embedded in an environment is a center of receptivity and of activity, indeed, the organism is a kind of system that is subject to various degrees of fine control. The relation between the environment and the organism is asymmetrical in that the environment has a kind of gross control over the organism but the organism has a fine control over itself and its engagements with the environment. The organism is by no means a passive medium upon which the environment writes its messages. The organism is rather “a continuous dynamism, a pattern of activity” (M 10) that is, essentially an ‘open system.’ All vital action is “interaction, transaction,” (M 10), that is, intrinsically reciprocal, but while the environment determines what is given, the organism determines what is taken (11).
The organism as an open system is a locus of creativity or “creative advance,” in Whitehead’s sense of the term. The immediate and permanent task of the organism is “keeping going” and developing structures and skills that respond appropriately to the “exigencies of contact with the plenum of external events” (M 11). The organism is structured by both need and demand: need for external stimuli and the demand the external field places upon it. Because the organism is in constant ‘motion’ it is imperative that it develop, as the occasion demands, a “transitional dynamic pattern” of adjustments. The organism must deal with “qualitatively different kinds of impact” (M 11). Sensibility, which Langer calls, “a major department of feeling” is certainly constituted by these different kinds and, indeed, “more typically the sources of sensations are peripheral” (M 11), and come from the outside. At the same time there is a “background of general body feelings and a texture of emotive tensions” (M 12) that not only pre-structure the organism’s receptivity to the aforementioned plenum of external events but also functions as background for the vital rhythm of autogenic acts (M 12), that is, acts that arise from the center of the organism itself.