Saturday, 7 January 2017



Experience is divided but the terms of this division are not obvious. Say it is into experiencer, experienced and experiencing - but then once you admit experiencing, do you really need the other two? Experiencer and experienced are modalities of experiencing, depending on how it leans, and the leaning is also such a modality, and so on to dizzying depths - the fact is that the mind recoils from a thorough monism, which doesn't refute it in the least. If we merge experiencer and experiencing and keep the experienced then we are back with noesis and noema, which are more general terms than is implied by their reference to knowing. How are thought and feeling distinguished? Thought is on the side of, or has its centre of gravity in, the noema - you can objectify thought without distorting it. Thought is what is unchanged whether it is grasped directly or reflectively, whether I have the thought or reflect on the thinking of it, intend the object or reflect on the intention. The abstract of an abstraction is just an abstraction. Unlike this, feeling is on the side of the noesis. In fact noesis could be defined in a circular way as the inner feeling that accompanies the experiencing. To feel something is to be aware of how you feel in relation to it - it is perception by way of the self. Does it have its own kind of logic, certain fixed relations of different feelings? If so it is a feeling-into, an unfolding of the self implicated in a feeling and expressed in the answering or succeeding feeling - this will be systematic and subject to the test of truth, but context-dependent and not able to be abstracted. Because noesis can't be objectified neither can feeling.

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