FEELINGS AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF THE BODY

Emotive Dynamism as a Concentrator of Experiences

Psychology and anthropology usually discriminate between the corporality, the sensuousness, and the spirituality of man. Without disclaiming in any way the profound validity of this discrimination, indeed with direct reference to it, we intend to stress here the significance of emotivity, inasmuch as our chief objective is to draw an integrated image of human dynamism, insofar as it is possible. In this image emotivity defines both a specific form of and a specific current in a dynamism that in a special manner forms part of the personal dynamism of human actions. The

psychical strand in emotivity may be seen as running between corporality and spirituality, but far from dividing them it interweaves with the one and the other, bringing them together. Apparently the function performed by the emotive

dynamism consists in concentrating human experiences, a fact that will come out more clearly later in our discussion. In spite of the distinct difference between the emotive dynamism and the reactive dynamism of the body, they are closely interrelated and condition each other. All that determines and constitutes the spiritual transcendence of the person - his attitude toward truth, good, and beauty with the accompanying faculty of self-determination - stimulates a very deep

emotive resonance in the human being. The resonance - its quality and intensity - is thoroughly individual and in its own way also determines the quality and intensity of the personal transcendence itself, or at any rate provides a special basis for the personal transcendence in man. Emotions are also the source of the expressiveness of man's actions. It follows, therefore, that an insight gained along these lines into the innermost recesses of specifically human nature can lead us very far on the way to an understanding of the person and the action; it would be impossible to reach a sound understanding of the person's integration in the action without an analysis of the emotivity.

The Affective and the Motor Stimulus

We may begin our analysis at the point where the somatic dynamism, so to speak, stops and where simultaneously emotivity comes closest to the reactivity of the body. Emotivity, like reactivity, is strictly connected with the operation of stimuli. We know that somatic reactivity consists in the ability to react to stimuli and in the preceding chapter we were primarily concerned with motor stimuli. Alongside this ability and very close to it there seems to be another one, namely, the ability to feel.

This ability at the somatic level also consists in the reception of stimuli coming from material objects, from various bodies; but their effect is not somatic and does not consist in a reaction or a movement of the body; their effect is psychical and is expressed in feelings. Although conditioned by a reaction at the somatic level, it itself transcends through and through the somatic reaction.

Feeling Places Psychical above Somatic Subjectivity

Feeling or sensation stimuli differ essentially from the motor stimuli, though they very often come together (e.g., the hand is instinctively jerked away from a hot object). Feeling or sensation itself is not a somatic motion or impulse; its relation to the body is similar to that of the subject to an object and though in a feeling as such there is no awareness of this relation, the body - even one's own body - becomes in it an objective sense element that also penetrates into the field of consciousness.

Thus feeling and sensation allow man to emerge from and above what in the

preceding chapter we called the "subjectivity of the body." While such "subjectivity"

is in itself closely related to the somatic reactivity and to a large extent remains unrecorded in consciousness, the psychical subjectivity, which emerges together with feeling on the basis of the body, is already included in consciousness.⁶⁷ For feeling as such constitutes a cognitive sensuous reflection of the body, which thus becomes accessible to consciousness - because of feeling the body becomes an objective content of consciousness and is reflected in it.

Feeling Underlies the Consciousness of the Body

Since the relation of feeling and sensation to consciousness is of fundamental significance for personal dynamism, we must examine it here as carefully as possible. First, there is the feeling of one's own body; the body, its different states

and movements are the source of sensation stimuli which play a decisive role in enabling man to have an experience of his body. In this experience feeling is

included in consciousness and combines with it to form a single common basis of the experience, though sensuous feeling differs from mental awareness. Attention has been drawn on various occasions to the fact that the range of consciousness of the body is, so to speak, currently determined by the field of feeling. For instance, the whole inner dynamism of the body, of the organism, which is connected with the body's vegetative vitality, remains, as long as nothing of it penetrates into the field of feeling, beyond, as it were, the reach of consciousness. The clause "as it were" is important, because in being conscious of the body man also has a kind of general awareness of its inwardness and its inner dynamism. This consciousness is

substantiated by means of the corresponding sensations and feelings, for instance, the feeling of a bodily pain makes the inward workings of one's own body come within the scope of consciousness. Such a concretization of consciousness in feeling is entirely sufficient as a basis for experiencing one's own body.

Self-Feeling

In the habitual experience of one's body there are sensations and feelings and thus sensory stimuli expressing the body and its reactive-motor dynamisms. These sensations reveal to every man not a separate "subjectivity" of the body but the somatic structure of the whole subject that he is, of the whole ego. They reveal to what extent he is a body, to what extent his soma participates in his existence and his acting. We may even say that a bodily sensation - a direct reflex of the body, a reflex that in a way is being continually formed and shaped - has in this respect a fundamental significance in one's own bodily ego. This habitual experience results, as noted above, from many sensations or feelings and manifests itself as a general self-feeling. Physically and psychically we always feel more or less "well" or more or less

"bad"; man always has present in him some kind of feeling or self-feeling, which forms a sort of psychic fabric or undercurrent of his existence of acting. The direct and proper object of self-feeling is the whole somatic ego, which is not isolated from the personal ego but is, on the contrary, intrinsically cohesive with it.

It is important to stress that man's self-feeling manifests a distinctly qualitative trait and value element; we all know that we may feel either well or unwell and that within the limits of these essential distinctions there are various grades and subtle differences of tone. It is this that we want to express when saying "I feel well" or "I do not feel well," or in many other similar expressions such as weary, exhausted, ill, fine, fresh, and so on. Man can also feel that he is efficient or inefficient in his doings and this, because of psychical reflection, brings into prominence the significance of efficiency in the motor-reactive dynamism of the body. Time and again we have opportunity to see how this dynamism as well as its efficiency conditions the so-called "higher psychical functions"; for instance, we know all too well that physical weariness adversely affects the mental processes of thinking and that a good rest

"clears" the mind and brings precision to our thoughts. In this way we also realize how intrinsically cohesive is our somatic ego with the whole of the personal ego, how strict is their mutual union.

"Precedence" of Consciousness over Feelings in Personal Dynamism The feeling of one's body is a necessary condition for experiencing the integral subjectivity of man. In this experience the body and consciousness are, as it were,

bound together by feeling, which is the most elementary manifestation of the human psyche as well as the nearest reflection in it of what is somatic in man. This sensory reflection in the psyche differs essentially from the reflexive function of

consciousness, whose fundamental significance in having the personal experience of a concrete human ego we discussed at the beginning of this study. The

interpenetration in this experience of feeling with consciousness brings into prominence the general relation that in the domain of human cognition exists between senses and mind. The relation is bilateral because a feeling we have of our own body allows us to establish an objective contact with it and at the same time reveals the psychical subjectivity integrated with the somatic body-subject. Does not a feeling "happen" in a psychic way within the human ego and does not this

"happening" reveal subjectivity? Subjectivity is thus, so to speak, revealed to consciousness, which - with the exception of extreme cases when emotions

overcome consciousness - retains a sort of "precedence" over feelings. In fact, we have the awareness (among other things) also of our feelings, which means that in the normal course of events they are "subordinate" to consciousness. On the other hand, we cannot assert the opposite, namely, that we have a "feeling of

consciousness," that we feel our consciousness. It is this precedence of

consciousness, which brings with it a certain order and "subordination" of feelings, in particular the feeling of one's own body, that is the condition of self-determination and thus also of self-governance and self-possession; it is the condition of the realization of the action, of the really personal dynamism.

The feeling of one's own body reveals the psychosomatic subjectivity of man. Since this occurs in relation to consciousness, which performs both the reflective and reflexive function, the awareness of that subjectivity brings with it the

"subjectification" and interiorization of the ego in consciousness which also extends to and contains the body as something belonging only to myself and different from all other bodies. To have a feeling of his body allows man as much insight into his own soma as he needs for self-determination in the action. In the same way the person's integration in the action is established; the integration is equivalent to a normal experience of one's body, an experience that is conditioned by feeling and consciousness. Any defects or insufficiency of feeling that would obstruct it becomes a factor of disintegration.