Abstract
The arguments of this chapter and the next have two overarching objectives. The first is to show how affect is essential to consciousness, such that there can be no conscious feeling without affect and vice versa (there can be no affect zombies and there can be no happy trees). The second objective is to provide resources for understanding the special nature of conscious feeling. These objectives are joined together by the thesis that consciousness is an affectively self-regulating stream of feeling. I will argue this thesis by showing that affect is among the basic traits of consciousness that constitute its essentially dynamic and relational or stream-like character. In the larger scheme of the book, the arguments of this chapter and the next constitute an attempt to show how peaks of enjoyment can be understood as “the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience” (Dewey 1934/1980, p. 46).
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Notes
- 1.
Whitehead claimed that conscious feelings are distinguished by “affirmation-negation contrasts” (1978, p. 243), which I understand as non-perceptual feelings of the contrastive determination of perceptual feelings. Although this idea is central to my approach to affect and consciousness, I believe that it does not, by itself, explain the nature of consciousness or its dependence on some kind of complexity.
- 2.
In the previous chapter it was suggested that negative feelings are constituted by losses of harmonic intensity. Yet we have good reason to believe that negative affect is more than just a comparative feeling. See Chap. 8 for further discussion.
- 3.
A bit later, in his Psychology: Briefer Course (1892/1984), he reduces the traits to four, omitting the appearance of independent objects.
- 4.
Here is a glimpse of the metaphysical and phenomenological riches that can be mined from the examination of flow. On the metaphysical side, flow has been developed by Bergson, Whitehead, and others into process cosmology, for which all causation, and all actual, enduring existence, has the same dynamic temporality found in consciousness (see Röck 2019). On the phenomenological side, flow has been elaborated by Husserl and others as “time-consciousness,” considered to be one of the most important topics of continental phenomenology (de Warren 2009). James’s writings on flow—in Principles, found principally in the chapters on the “Stream” and “The Perception of Time”—were seminal for both traditions.
- 5.
This is one of the main contributions of Husserlian phenomenology to our understanding of experience. See, e.g., Zahavi (2005).
- 6.
This postulate is akin to the optimality principles endorsed by Leibniz and others (Rescher 2010), with the key difference that it allows for choice. See Barrett and Sánchez-Cañizares (2018) for further discussion. See also the “law of consciousness” described by Josiah Royce in 1885, p. 357. This postulate also bears a certain resemblance to the Free Energy Principle (FEP) developed by Karl Friston (2010) and others. In particular, the concept of “optimal grip” developed in Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014) in relation to FEP overlaps in many ways with present discussion. However, my own view is that this resemblance is superficial, and that the fourth postulate fits better much with the law of maximum entropy production (LMEP) as articulated by Rod Swenson (1997). An extended discussion of FEP and LMEP is beyond the scope of this book, but one fundamental difference can be summarized as follows. FEP is essentially a homeostatic function, while LMEP is essentially a “heterostatic” or self-amplifying function, although it can act like a homeostatic function within certain contexts (see Swenson 2020; Barrett 2020). As a maximizing principle, the fourth postulate certainly “acts” much more like LMEP; whether there is a more substantial connection is an open question. See Conclusion for more discussion.
- 7.
The claims of this paragraph reveal the cosmological background in which enrichment—pursuit of harmonic intensity—is a feature of all events in nature. Especially within this wider context, the use of “good” should not be understood in a moral sense. From our point of view, the “goods” or “ends” achieved by nature may be “an ecstatic culmination, a matter-of-fact consummation, or a deplorable tragedy” (Dewey 1929/1958, p. 97).
- 8.
Though inspired by the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, the following discussion of meaning is considerably simplified and does not adopt his terms or differentiate between different aspects of meaning that pertain to the sign, interpretant, and immediate object. For a more detailed account of Peirce’s theory of signs that explains his peculiar terminology, see, e.g., Nöth (2011). See also Neville (1989), for an important distinction between “network” and “content” meaning that is elided by present discussion.
- 9.
A similar point is made in different language by Dan Arnold in his recent essay, “Pragmatism as Transcendental Philosophy” (2021): the relatedness of conscious feeling is given in a phenomenal sense (not the epistemic sense famously rejected by Sellars), while the meaning of this feeling is taken. The way in which dynamic relatedness of feeling can both given and taken is essential to the current pragmatist approach to experience as a self-interpretive activity.
- 10.
In this respect, we can say that all perceptual experiences are “predictive.” I try to avoid this term, however, as it implies an inferential operation that goes on behind perception. Instead, I suggest that prediction is inherent to the intentional, selective, and emphatic nature of the contrasts of perception.
- 11.
In the “invisible gorilla experiment” subjects are shown a video of a basketball game and instructed to count passes between players. While absorbed in this task, a significant proportion—more than half—fail to notice that someone in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the game and waves their arms.
- 12.
Some might say that engagement by itself cannot be true or false, only wide or narrow, rich or poor. For example, it might be said that the failure to notice a gorilla in the midst of a basketball game does not entail any falsehood unless something is asserted about this experience that is contradicted by the gorilla. Yet it could also be argued that insofar as engagement is intentionally directed it implicitly involves some assertion that this engagement is appropriate and adequate to the present situation. See Neville (1989) for extended discussion of these points.
- 13.
It may seem as the conformity required for maintaining a good grip constitutes a truth condition, but the matter of truth is much more complicated than this. For example, narcissists are highly adept at maintaining a satisfyingly good grip on the world in a way that is deeply distortive. In the present context, “grip” describes the kind of engagement or causal interaction that determines the flow of experience; it is not the same as our commonsense notion of “getting a grip,” which connotes a “reality check.”
- 14.
Unfortunately, this condition does not exclude the comforts of self-delusion and other common pitfalls of human experience. It merely suggests that within any context there is a limit to the kinds and degree of delusion that can be maintained. In the long run, at least, nature does not suffer fools. But it seems that we have a tendency to indulge in just as much delusion as present circumstances allow.
- 15.
This sounds like we know the answers to our own questions and then reward ourselves for getting them right. In fact, all such decisions are hypotheses about how to direct experience, and may lead either to frustration or to the wrong kind of satisfaction. Thus the present picture of engagement is very different from a cybernetic model in which “satisfaction” is derived from closing the distance between the present state and a predefined goal state. Also, an advantage of this picture is that it registers one of the perennial pitfalls of human inquiry: our tendency to change the parameters of inquiry—switching midstream from one problem to another—so that satisfaction is obtained more easily. See “Answering an Easier Question,” Chapter 9 in Kahneman (2011).
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Barrett, N.F. (2023). Affect and Consciousness. In: Enjoyment as Enriched Experience . Palgrave Perspectives on Process Philosophy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13790-7_6
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