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Saturday, 21 May 2016
Marking the separation of the capacity for feeling from the content of feeling need not imply a metaphysical dualism, only a phenomenological one, as long as the latter is understood to have a necessarily transcendental counterpart. The capacity for feeling in this understanding has no limits and can be presumed to be infinite in both the positive and negative directions, with the range of feeling enabled by our bodily constitution occupying only a small sub-interval of that range. It's no surprise that embodied feeling follows a logarithmic law in relation to stimulus, which are transduced into signals in a tree-like structure. New levels of the tree activate when preceding levels are filled up, and so we can imagine a state of maximum content of feeling, almost never experienced, when all such levels are activated. In this case an increase in stimulus could produce no increase in feeling. This would be torture, but only by way of sensory modalities. There are other kinds of feeling however, such as emotional feeling and self-feeling, and other subtle kinds that are hard to name, feelings whose object is inward and which are incited in complex ways by some whole of experience. What kind of limits exist for this kind of feeling? Are they subject to their own version of Fechner's law? Is the sense of self Fechnerian? Everything suggests that this is not the case and that intensities of both positive and negative feeling infinitely beyond the ordinary human range are conceivable, could exist in possible beings with which we shared the same capacity for feeling. This is because there is nothing inherent in the notion of the capacity for feeling that could serve as a limit, unless that capacity itself were embedded in another kind of knowing which would simply take over from feeling when the latter was fulfilled. Here fulfillment would not mean a maximum of intensity but the completion of the self-awareness adumbrated in its particular mode of feeling. Perhaps this is just to say that the inward directed feelings, despite being experienced as essentially embodied are only feelings by analogy.
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