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Wednesday, 14 February 2018



Thinking, feeling and willing are the three essential components of subjectivity, or of what we can call mind or consciousness. They are distinct but not separable. It is possible to imagine processes akin to thinking and willing in non-conscious mechanisms, but taken in this way such are only analogies or heuristic descriptions, and they confuse the issue if not understood as reflective or second-degree phenomena. Thinking and willing more properly should be phenomena of which it is meaningful to ask what it feels like to respectively think or will. Similarly, for feeling and willing, it is meaningful to ask, what is it that is felt or intended, hence that they give or arise from matter of thought; and of feeling and thinking it can be asked with what valence or to what end, or simply wither do these occur, and hence that will is implicit in them. It is not inappropriate, therefore, to consider the triplicity of components as a trinity, reciprocally absolute. While each of the three is only what is expressed in the verbal form of 'I + verb', this seems to be especially true of feeling. When there is feeling there is someone who feels, only ever 'I', hence the odd priority of the 'what does it feel like?' line of questioning. The nature of this 'I' is what is especially interesting, since logically it cannot belong to anything that is thought, felt or willed. Human subjectivity is characteristically self-conscious, but this kind of consciousness which involves a particularly fertile recycling of the contents of thinking, feeling and willing, is foreclosed in respect of this 'I'. Theories of Self or of no-Self are merely attempts to change the conditions of the foreclosure, to vary the lease. They cannot approach the overwhelming simplicity of the contentless 'I', empty of all notion of emptiness, one beyond all notion of oneness.   

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