I did indeed mean to make 'feelings' the more biological term, and
'emotions' the more cultural one. Perhaps I also meant 'feelings' in a
proprioceptive sense that shades into a phenomenological one ... it is what
we gut-feel that may often have no name, no cultural meaning, the strange
and complex states of our organism as they feel to us, feelings that change
on many time scales, overlap, etc.
Diane focusses on the early childhood experience. Perhaps there it is
easier to map felt-sense feelings onto biological processes. My hypothesis
is that our feelings get more complex as we develop bioculturally. We learn
how to feel in ways specific to our culture; our feelings get
differentiated and mixed by the typical experiences we go through
(sometimes in atypical ways). I am quite sure that there are more possible
feelings than there are 'emotions' that can be named or described in any
culture-usual way. So if we want to extend our analysis and description of
emotions, if we want to be able to make more kinds of meanings with and
about emotions/feelings, then one way is to proceed from the
sensed-feelings that are always at least partly more than, more complex
than, sloshing out of the culture-name buckets we're given to put them in.
Methodologically this is a pretty radical project. For one thing it does
mean a return to introspection as a legitimate source of scientific data.
Maybe we don't have to call it scientific anymore. Useful data, meaningful
information, legitimate starting points for reflection, systematization,
critique, theorization, intervention, growth ... something better than
Science allows itself to be.
I mentioned the phenomenological viewpoint because Husserl, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, Ortega y Gasset, and their progeny have been pushing this
antidote to overly typology-bound thinking (including a lot of the
semiotics I do) for a long time, grounding it in the simple observation
that our experiencing, even filtered by language and other
typological-categorial cultural meaning systems, always overflows the
categories available for dealing with it. If we let ourselves be limited by
those categories, we miss much of our life-being-with; but if we let
experiencing guide us, we can grow our meaning systems in new ways. Such a
path is potentially very subversive of the constraints of culture,
including interest-born ideologies, etc.
How to do it? One guide I've found is the work of Gene Gendlin, a
neo-Heideggerian philosophical-therapist (and U of Chicago professor,
journal editor, etc.) An early work is _Experiencing and the Creation of
Meaning_, and there has been much since. I mostly have it in
pre-publication form, but it should not be too hard to track down the
cites. He has certainly traveled this route already, and perhaps there are
others who have. Any leads?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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