What is Intellect Without Emotion?

[daisyrocket]

Intellect without emotion happens to be just that, intellect. Many a great contemporaries of my time have spent great amounts of energy developing their intellect. These analytical minds capable of the most scrutinous reflection on ideas all too often fail in dealing with emotion, let alone aknowledge the existence as vital to the experience. Who can blame them? It’s not a pleasant experience delving in to the darker [only dark in comparison to the not so dark] areas of your mind to understand the function of emotion relating to consciousness.

Emotion is more often than not the driving force behind our thoughts. How then can someone unsatisfied with the simplest things in life, as many are, make universally reasonable observations? From the perspective of an emotionally unstable [not necessarily erratic; a lack of emotions is in itself unstable] individual, interpretation of observation can seem reasonable. The same way the sun shining through stained glass windows may appear beautiful and awe inspiring to the observer; however, it is not the true sun! The sun is reality. The stained glass is our perception, our biased clouded lense of perception through which we interpret our observation of reality.

Growing, learning, expanding our consciousness with childhood experiences tend to paint over our unbiased, infantile observation of reality. Traumatic experiences are rarely removed, though transformed; however, with a relatively easy-going childhood our lense gets dirty. In many technically advanced cultures there is no process available to the majority to clean said lense. As we come of age a lot of the dirt is washed away with experiences that contradict our child held ideas; however, some remains.

From here we drop our child personas and put on our hopefully responsible adult personas. The clarity is refreshing, so refreshing that whatever still there is gone unnoticed. These tiny specs of dust left on our lense begin to gather more dust, grow in to our beliefs of reality. How can you say your view is the absolute truth any more than I can say my view is the absolute truth? We can say it. We can believe it. True enough for us to continue living as sheep, it is never the truth.

Then one could say there is no universal truth. The closest being geometry to a universal truth. Does this mean that our experiences are meaningless? Quite the contrary.



Any comments are appreciated.

[Personable]

Intellect without emotion happens to be just that, intellect. As if it could be that easily divided. I know and as you will later note as well and contradict yourself.

Many a great contemporaries of my time have spent great amounts of energy developing their intellect. These analytical minds capable of the most scrutinous reflection on ideas all too often fail in dealing with emotion, let alone aknowledge the existence as vital to the experience. Who can blame them? You apparently. You're obviously trying to deal with (mayhaps analytical) emotion-shy philosophers; let's agree that emotion in scientific research isn't welcome, specially in the naturals sciences. There are branches in philosophy that try to limit the influence of emotions and they are rather successful and those people, to me, don't seem to be missing emotionality in life. It's just their work that is strictly logical-rational-etc. thus, cold.

It’s not a pleasant experience delving in to the darker [only dark in comparison to the not so dark] areas of your mind to understand the function of emotion relating to consciousness. I don't know about you, but that my favourite thing to do and I find the darker areas to actually be brighter.

Emotion is more often than not the driving force behind our thoughts. How then can someone unsatisfied with the simplest things in life, as many are, make universally reasonable observations?
I am unfamiliar with the unsatisfied many who make such observations, definitely not the general academia.


From the perspective of an emotionally unstable [not necessarily erratic; a lack of emotions is in itself unstable] individual, interpretation of observation can seem reasonable. The same can be said about an emotionally stable perspective.

The same way the sun shining through stained glass windows may appear beautiful and awe inspiring to the observer; however, it is not the true sun! The sun is reality. The stained glass is our perception, our biased clouded lense of perception through which we interpret our observation of reality. So? That isn't influenced by the emotionality of the observer.

Growing, learning, expanding our consciousness with childhood experiences tend to paint over our unbiased, infantile observation of reality.....How can you say your view is the absolute truth any more than I can say my view is the absolute truth? We can say it. We can believe it. True enough for us to continue living as sheep, it is never the truth.
Let's say I agree, save the "our unbiased, infantile observation of reality" part. There are no facts, only interpretations. Anyway, what has this to do with intellect without emotion?

Then one could say there is no universal truth. The closest being geometry to a universal truth. Does this mean that our experiences are meaningless? Quite the contrary. It's up to you to construct the meaning in your life. There's no meaning intrinsic to the universe.

imho.

[daisyrocket]

I agree! You point out many a good points. All meaningful in their own right! Reread it in the context of applying to the New Age Movement folks. Perhaps you will understand where I was trying to go. Perhaps not. I rather appreciate your constructive critisism.

[asphara]

Hi

I've just bee writing about emotion and ossification - I'll past some of it (buts have been chopped out so it might skip at points;

The etymological roots of 'emotion' are the Latin word "e" for 'out', and "movere" for 'to move' (Young 1963, p.450); that which moves from within outwards, often associated with catharsis or relief. We include instinct, emotion, sensation, the somatic drives and impulses, and the activities and productions they give rise to. Emotionality is sense-responsive and sense-oriented, and does not know no an object, because sensation is from beginning to end a somatic experience, becoming an object only through conceptualised apperception. Concepts, words and consciousness are socially ossified phenomenon, but when emotionality realises itself through them, we have subjectivity - that is, emotional sociality, or socially circumscribed emotionality.

Emotionality rides the crest of the immediate, experiencing life as a becoming totality of sensation, whereas social conscious experiences discrete forms and the abstract antimonies of time, space, identity and so forth - hence in modern consciousness, we are aware of a world beneath the world. Emotionality experiences progress reactively and antagonistically, and is essentially conservative, that is concerned with psychodynamic balance. From this point of view we can understand emotionality as something like what Adorno means by “life”, which “has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production" (MM, p.15). The "dissolution of the subject" would be the excision of emotionality; but we will be recognising this as an excision from social consciousness and life processes, not an extirpation (although this is arguable in the case of some socio-psychopathologies).

Social ossification is understood here as the accretion, sedimentation, and entrenchment of human forms including language, concept-objects, practices, commodities, consciousness, habits and so forth. The paper will challenge any approach to human production as discrete or semi-autonomous processes. Commodities, words, concepts, things, rituals, values, practices, habits, styles, our bodies, our minds and our genetic material - all develop through social reproduction, exchange, accumulation and differentiation, all gain social valuations in addition to sensuous qualities, and all creep forward incrementally and axiomatically. All production must pass through the body, consciousness and materiality; and as Hegel, Lukacs, Adorno and Castoriadis have found, totality is the only standpoint from which the development of human consciousness, and social experience, can be understood. Social reality is a social totality - a total social reality.

Adorno writes that thought is now just "petrified views of objects, the mental precipitate of social ossification" (MB, pp. 40-41). The important point here is that categories of mind are not merely developed through language, but of all sensuous patterns in social experience. Sensation, perception, thought, words, object society, state and so forth are not separate orders of reality but a continuum - moments in a becoming totality, as recognised most clearly by Hegel, Adorno and Castoriadis. Hegel offers a useful historical model; (from Lucaks, from philosophy of right) "the whole is sundered into the different concepts” which are “a fixed and permanent determinacy”; “not a fossilised determinacy but one which permanently recreates itself in its dissolution." This shape, which I think of as the ‘Hegelian Pattern’, is a view of existence which can be traced back to the pre-Socratic thought of philosophy, but which was submerged in medieval and early modern thought over the Platonic schema, which divides forces of order and disorder on the level of microcosm and macrocosm.

Marx wrote that it is not the "consciousness of men that determines their being, but...their social being that determines their consciousness". Yet he was the one who criticised thinkers for positing a “reflective connection in what constitutes an organic union" (2000. p.383) - and there are many grounds for questioning the division between consciousness and social reality. The latter is the sensuous world as apprehended by the former. In other words, social reality is conscious reality - a continuum, but not even that; the very same immanent moment. Consciousness is the very pathway of all fungible production - the closing moment in the pathological cycle that makes production cumulative. Carpenter hits on this when he says that civilization is "the selection and chiselling of thousands of minds through the centuries", eliminating all "defects, disproportions, inharmonious details" (AC, pp.145-146). All production - words, thoughts, things, actions and so forth - reproduce specific patterns of sensation. Labour shapes the sense patterns; the sense patterns shape mind; mind shapes labour; and indeed, are only separate insofar as we have come to separate them.

To sum up how we are viewing the production cycle, we have; emotionality, exfoliation, ossification, concepts-objects, consciousness, conscious thinking, saying and doing, social reality, emotional reality, and then round again through exfoliation - each revolution of this cycle furrowing its pathway a little deeper.
The social human is as much a socially produced thing as the commodity, in the sense that they are a "natural stratum" (Castariadis 1987, p.186) worked over by the production process. However, civilization is, at the same time, the work of human instinct. The question is how it gets caught up in the interstices of its own coaglulation.

Edward Carpenter (1844?-) offers a very simple and dynamic way of thinking about production, which is in harmony with important correlations in Western tradition. He describes production as emotional "exfoliation" - and we note the allusion to removal of dead skin. During this process, an emotion gathers "clearness and materiality", and "solidifies itself in organisation and structure" (CC, p.133). This view captures the structural characteristics of instinctual realization, wish fulfilment, objectification in Hegel and Marx, and any theories of production, action or expression based on need, desire or will. The common moment is human self-realization, from within outwards.

For Carpenter, emotion "brings the creature into conflict with its surroundings", and through exfoliation, it gains "satisfaction" (CC, p.140) - which suggests the kind of psychodynamic “elasticity” Freud (BP, p.30) attributes to creatures outside of civilization. Hegel and Marxian associate historical development with estrangement, which culminates in a social or species elasticity in a universal social conscience, bound by sensuous social activity or ethical life - a kind of generalised catharsis, one of social cohesiveness and connectivity. We could understand alienation as the “discontents” of Freud’s civilization (CD) - the anti-catharsis of instinctual frustration. While these views employ different idioms, emphases, standpoints and orientations, there are deeper existential correlations, which indicate a rootedness in the same kind of existential problems.

If Marx and Hegel were two ends of the stick, Nietzsche would be a third end; “it is enough to create new names and estimations...in order to create in the long run new “things”. Carpenter would be a fourth end of the stick;

“Change the feeling in an individual, and his...thinking will be revolutionised; change the...primary sensation...and the whole structure will have to be re-created. The current Political Economy is founded on the axiom of individual greed;...let a new axiomatic emotion spring up...and...a new construction [will follow]. (CC, p.85)

Yet this is not a stick, but points on a circle. Concept-object, feeling, emotion, estimation, being, reality, perceiving - all occupy the same existential space, and in the immediacy of experience are one. This paper has led me to see philosophy the opinion that philosophers attempts to grasp and resolve existentially real problems - and while the resolving is intellectual and conceptual, grasping is emotional and sensuous. The philosophy and the poem seem to me recognised only insofar as they are emotionally or existentially resonant, and this resonance is non-conceptual. It is for this reason that psychoanalytic and existential interpretation is favoured in this paper.

Empathetic recognition is instinctive, immediate, pre-conceptual, emotional, and non-conceptual, and is a capacity we find in young children. Things like posture, clothes, tenor, facial expressions, movements and so forth are confronted as a totality and produce a total emotional response - there is no detail on the emotional plane. “The body is a great intelligence a multiplicity with one sense” (2006, p.264), as Nietzsche writes.

For Nietzsche also, there is “more reason in your body than in your best wisdom” (Nietzsche 2006, p.265) Empathetic exploration - reconstruction recognition or imagination - is our only access to emotional or emotionally social reality, and indespensible in critical, social, psychological and cultural analysis. As Freud suggests it leaks out everwhere. “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore" Freud Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) Ch. 2 : The First Dream. Yet emotional and existential significance is crystallised in all human creations - when we read a work of philosophy we might call them prejudices, impressions or associations - but they prove to be a layer of insight that can see further than the intellect.

For Laing, in order to intuit an existential dynamic, one "has to be able to orientate oneself as a person in the other's scheme of things”, and make “an inference about the way the other is feeling and acting" (Date, pp.26-27). He suggests the same principle applies to the analysis of “ancient texts” which “will help us to understand...only if we can bring to bear what is often called sympathy, or, more intensively, empathy. We explain...by means of purely intellectual processes, but we understand by means of the cooperation of all the powers".

Adorno’s humane criticism, seeking to recognise and polemicise social suffering, is based on a similar principle; it understands emotionality as “the weight of objectivity on the subject”. Williams has a notion for social analysis - “the structures of feeling” - which suggests the manner in which empathetic and existential recognition can illuminate social and cultural dynamics. Existential insights are not weighted down by the difficulties of inferring between psychic, social and material life, because these orders of life are at most constituted existentially, and hence as one existential reality. The draw-back is that the insights cannot be ‘exposed’ or fixed conceptually; yet conceptual stability is often based on the conceptual it carries out quietly.

The profound differences in language, culture, and social organisation, and the important principle of cultural and historical relativism, may not be particularly relevant to emotional or existential interpretation. Freud's (CD, pp.5-6) argues that in the development of psychic life, "what is primitive is...preserved alongside...[any] further development". Vygotsky argues specifically that sensuous thought is the substructure of conceptual thought, the latter being added as "new layers over the old ones" (Vygotsky DATE? p.319). There is another strand of thought which udnerstands the development of mental life as a tablula rasa, though this is also valid, so long as we realise we are looking specifically at conceptual development, and not psychic development. There is plenty in our practical life that encourage us in the view that emotional empathy can undercut cultural and language obstacles. Carpenter's (AH, p.62) sketches a scenario of "two strangers, of different race and tongue", who "eye each other with suspicion" until a "slant of the brow", and "a glance of the eyes" reveals "a sense of age-long union". The "expressions, motives, emotions, in folk's faces" are the "knockings...on...the... door of ourselves", and "something from within descending to answer" (AC, p.73). We can at least afford to suspect that the 'language' of emotionality has not undergone the kind of development that intellectual and social life has, and like Carpenter and Freud suggest, retains its organic elasticity within the jugernaut of civlization - however retracted its sphere of activity has become.

I am firmly of the view that the whole sphere of emotional and empathetic hermeneutics is absolutely not to be understood as sharing the same problems and limitations as conceptual or rational analysis; we can read emotional significance in profoundly mediated ways. For example, if a couple had split up, and the one who was left behind finds a carefully folded coat, or a carelessly strewn coat, this might betray an emotional message as clear as any goodbye note; it might even correct the good bye note. When we have these kind of insights in historical, social or psychological analysis, the last thing we should do, in my judgement, is suppress them, because they are a particular kind of insight - a human, social, emotional and existential insight - that cannot be configured by concepts. This will be an important principle throughout this paper, and I find in the first chapter that it is only these kind of insights that can help us make any kind of sense of the pre-Socratic cosmology of Heraclitus.

I am not sure we need to agree with Laing that we lack a notion of existential wholeness - or if we do, the lack itself cuts a powerful presence. All critical narratives on alienation depend on an anteria, posteria or ideal wholeness of some kind, just as emancipatory thought strives for it, and utopian thought anticipates it. Romantic reflections on ancient or non-Western cultures and the "numerous traditions of the Golden Age, legends of the Fall" (Carpenter CC, p.11) are pine for something quite ambiguous - with a voice of lament and loss, as if it has been known somewhere emotionally or prehistorically. Psychologists and psychoanalysts rely on some kind of notion of integrity or autonomy; Hegel and Marx see it unfolding through history. Nietzsche sees it in aesthetic practice, and Adorno in aesthetic experience. Wagner tries to create it in the total artwork. Carpenter argues that "each human soul...bears...some kind of reminiscence of a more harmonious and perfect state" (CC, pp.10-11) from memories of "pre-natal days" (PC, p.138) and "the development of the race" (PC, p.139). Such a view is supported by Freud; "the process of human civilization" and "the development of...individual human beings...are...similar...if not the very same process" (CD, P.77). Art, pre-civilized tribal life, childhood, instinctual freedom, aesthetic exerience; the connecting factor is a sensuous or emotional totality, or autonomy, of experience. We note the loss of identity, consciousness, being and reality, and the dissolution into sensuous or emotional becoming in aesthetic, sensuous, sexual, intoxicated or emotional experiences. These all connect with the rolling back of mind, identity, society and so forth - a return to emotionality.

Many thinkers have referred to the existential dynamics of the child or the organic tribe to get closer to understanding of this sensuously associative psychic state. For Freud (CD, pp.3-4), the psyche of the very young child "does not as yet [p.4] distinguish his ego from the eternal world as the source of the sensations flowing upon him", while in the "primitive man", "wishes and impulses" are "fact" (TT, p.264), and "the sharp division between thinking and doing...does not exist" (TT, p.265). Stirner describes ancient and child awareness as having "receptivity only for...what is sensuous and sense-moving" (EO, p.107). Carpenter calls tribal consciousness "simple consciousness", in which there is no differentiation between "the knower, the knowledge, and the thing" (AC, p.37), and as such was "unformed and dream-like" (PC, p.149). Vygotsky suggests that children, scitzophrenic and 'primitive' thought is in sensuous complexes (Vygotsky DATE? p.316) and are sensuously, rather than conceptually associated. The emotional subject "does not...perceive isolated sensations" but "total conditioned emotional situations" (Vygotsky DATE? p.319), which is why the child narativises what they do, because they do not dissociate the sound from the image within the total sensuous complex (e.g. Vygotsky pp.chose a chapter). The common account here is a sensuous totality; sensuously and emotionally associative, connecting, cohesive - a total becoming which does not distinguish between appearance, essence, being and reality, object, concept and so forth. The sensuous totality to be contrasted with that splintered reality of forms forms.

The 'flowering' of Consciousness

I call it flowering, because consciousness is emotional life that inverts and fragments, in the shape of a flowering. A sensuous totality of being becomes and alienated, spacialised world of external things and processes - what I call "reality" without a prefix. Existential reality is that which is experienced immediately in apperception, and emotionality is that which does not know object and concept, but only sensuous reality, which in the dissociative psyche is at a conceptual remove.

If we unpack a short sentence by Nietzsche, we have a story of the emotional journey of psyche through civilization. The tale is of "the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid" (2006, p.119)."Fiery liquid" is the sensuous and emotional reality, it is "imagination"; but it cools and coagulates into "a mass of images" - into frozen, isolable things. Kant talked of the synthetic unity of apperception; but for us today the opposite problem has emerged; how to prize the concept of the sensuous experience. They are interlocked into the impregnable object, or its wired, impenetrable world - reality. Yet in a very literal sense, fire and liquid survive in their pure sensuousness. Flames, oceans, storms or natural scenes are too dynamic to be circumscribed conceptually - that is to be contoured so cleanly and deeply to become detachable objects of experience. In the ocean, there are whirrs, juts, crackles, dissipations and so forth - 'moments' - but no isolable moments. We will find that pre-Socratic thought intimates an experience of reality precisely in this fluid, associative, sensuous ecoming, which is intimated very strongly also in the philosophy of Nietzsche. Images of water, fire, storms and so forth are used throughout philosophic, theoretical and literary work, as do there movements of flowing, burning, flooding and so forth. I explore these as they emerge in the works we deal with, and find that they often signpost attempts to communicate the non-conceptual, and frequently achieves this with great efficacy.

We note that flowing and stasis has a relation to unmediated and mediated moments of being. Mediation is one of those existential problems intimated throughout modern thought. This is, Adorno and Horkheimer say, the "step from chaos to civilization, in which natural conditions exert their power no longer directly but through the consciousness of human beings" (DE, p.12). Stirners too argues that "the State...becomes - mediator" (EO p.337).For Hegel, it is the material world of objects that is the mediator, or "outer rind". All the dimensions of worker alienation in Marx envolve seperation or mediation; for Nietzsche we mistake the mediating conceptual order for the authoritative moment of the thing. Rousseau lamented mediation in sociality - the artificial mores and manners of civilization. For Hobbes, the animal human is mediated by the commonwealth; for Aristotle, the Pollis; for Locke, legitimate concent; for Kant, rational self-responsibility. For Heraclitus - we cannot find one. On the contrary, wisdom was the capacity to know that "all things steer through all things".

Carpenter which manages to evoke the strangeness of modern conceptuality - the sheer bottomlessness of the problem of dissociation in psychic life. We can appreciate the sense in which emotionality is like a hidden depth, or an other within. Yet if we look at the intelligence which has this judgement if we turn to the ego to see what, precisely, is judging emotionality as other - then the ego "becomes the Object, and the real Ego is found to be again at the hither end of the stick" (AC, p.41). The same peculiarity occurs with the object. "What is...behind it?...Zeus, or God, or Electricity...This habit of...positing a something behind...is apparently quite inveterate" (AC, p.35). However, we know at least that it is sense experience; that "one end of the stick is similar to the other" (AC, p.43) - that really, comehow, the stick is actually a circle; one which is broken by the concept-object. We will tend to analyse dissociative subjectivity at this level, but this is for analytical convenience. We could find dissociation as the basis for a particular concept. We could have, say, six ends of the stick - hither (apperception), the thither (sense experience), through (concept-object), and the under (emotionality), around (individual), outer (reality/externality), over (god/society) and all (earth/universe/heaven/infinity). And which is the speaking voice saying all this? Really we enter a conceptual maze here, one in which Kant built a philosophical system. All these dimensions come from questions, and from identifying. There are circumstances when dissociation is suspended, when the existential antimonies collapse into each other, or flatten - times of threat, depression, euphoria and so forth. Experience, structure, and reality are not merely conceptual hallucinations, but adaptive responses to situations - which open up and close aspects of our reality. These responses, however, are made possible and necessary by the social context. The only consistent axes of experience is that which flows beneath the social personality and its history, and as such it would seem inhuman to define the subject by one of its more transient moments.
Freud offers an illustration which indicates how consciousness is often understood in relation to instinct and the social order. Freud (BP, p.21) compares the ego to the modified surface of a micro-organism which, "as a result of the ceaseless impact of external stimuli", has developed a "crust", "'baked through' by stimulation...By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate". Here, the ego grows from without inwards, and mediates the emotional subject and social externality, producing the socialised subject. While this illustration has political appeal and some theoretical interest, we will recognise that the social order is driven by the emotional subject, and as such emotionality and ossification are well understood as mutually mediating moments - correlative to the form and movement in Hegel’s philosophy of history.

Another problem with the notion of mortification crust is that consciousness is as somatic and instinctual, and as living as emotionality. However, we are entitled to regard it as completely distinct, because they have become radically distinct through the social process. On the other hand, the Freudian illustration recognises the importance of sensuous inundation, and if we combine this with the view that consciousness is somatic, we find a view which accords with prosaic scientific explanation. The neurological structure is determined by the sensuous patterns apprehended in experience, and on this occasion I think science offers the more nuanced and appropriate model. Through it, we can immediately link the production of fungible social forms, and hence the radical multiplication of specific sense patterns, and hence a contouring of the neurological networks, of the structure of perception and mental organisation, and hence the structure of existential reality, and the thoughts, ideas and actions that respond. This would be a journey through the continuum of ossification.

The socialised mind and emotionality are radically different in their orientation, their aims and their experience of life. The socialised mind is hooked up into the process of social history - and is only explicable in the context of that history. Emotionality, on the other hand, is sensuously oriented and instinctually driven, and can only be understood existentially - without reference to past or future; immediately. Emotionality experiences life as a sensuous totality, and consciusness as a world of things. The important point for us is that they confront us completely different hermeneutic problems. The life of thought, language and reason requires that we understand things contextually, but existential interpretation requires we do so empathetically. I will argue that the empathetic insight cuts through cutural difference, but cannot be exposed conceptually. However, they are preferable to anachronistic conceptual models which offer an apparent stability at the cost of the quiet violence they impose on the analytical context. I now discuss the theoretical grounds of this approach.

My approach has been developed around the demand to understand the historical becoming of the dissociative subject of late modernity. The fundamental distinction I make in my analysis is between emotionality and ossification, which allows me to apprehend the Western tradition on the two levels of our subjectivity. The first is the history of competing philosophical systems - ways of responding, thinking, and reacting to the existential, social and political experience - to be understood in the social an historical context. The second level is the deep structural contours that run through the perspectives in Western thought, which have a very slow development, and indicates the existential structure of experience, and offers a kind of subaltern history of emotional life. The hermeneutic approach will seek empathetic insight into the structures and conflicts as they intimate themselves in theoretical and philosophical work, and in modern and modernist literature. The political and theoretical implications of the study will be discussed in the conclusion. We now turn to the thought of Heraclitus, who offers us an insight into the characteristics of existential wholeness.

[asphara]

Hi

I've just bee writing about emotion and ossification - I'll past some of it (buts have been chopped out so it might skip at points;

The etymological roots of 'emotion' are the Latin word "e" for 'out', and "movere" for 'to move' (Young 1963, p.450); that which moves from within outwards, often associated with catharsis or relief. We include instinct, emotion, sensation, the somatic drives and impulses, and the activities and productions they give rise to. Emotionality is sense-responsive and sense-oriented, and does not know no an object, because sensation is from beginning to end a somatic experience, becoming an object only through conceptualised apperception. Concepts, words and consciousness are socially ossified phenomenon, but when emotionality realises itself through them, we have subjectivity - that is, emotional sociality, or socially circumscribed emotionality.

Emotionality rides the crest of the immediate, experiencing life as a becoming totality of sensation, whereas social conscious experiences discrete forms and the abstract antimonies of time, space, identity and so forth - hence in modern consciousness, we are aware of a world beneath the world. Emotionality experiences progress reactively and antagonistically, and is essentially conservative, that is concerned with psychodynamic balance. From this point of view we can understand emotionality as something like what Adorno means by “life”, which “has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production" (MM, p.15). The "dissolution of the subject" would be the excision of emotionality; but we will be recognising this as an excision from social consciousness and life processes, not an extirpation (although this is arguable in the case of some socio-psychopathologies).

Social ossification is understood here as the accretion, sedimentation, and entrenchment of human forms including language, concept-objects, practices, commodities, consciousness, habits and so forth. The paper will challenge any approach to human production as discrete or semi-autonomous processes. Commodities, words, concepts, things, rituals, values, practices, habits, styles, our bodies, our minds and our genetic material - all develop through social reproduction, exchange, accumulation and differentiation, all gain social valuations in addition to sensuous qualities, and all creep forward incrementally and axiomatically. All production must pass through the body, consciousness and materiality; and as Hegel, Lukacs, Adorno and Castoriadis have found, totality is the only standpoint from which the development of human consciousness, and social experience, can be understood. Social reality is a social totality - a total social reality.

Adorno writes that thought is now just "petrified views of objects, the mental precipitate of social ossification" (MB, pp. 40-41). The important point here is that categories of mind are not merely developed through language, but of all sensuous patterns in social experience. Sensation, perception, thought, words, object society, state and so forth are not separate orders of reality but a continuum - moments in a becoming totality, as recognised most clearly by Hegel, Adorno and Castoriadis. Hegel offers a useful historical model; (from Lucaks, from philosophy of right) "the whole is sundered into the different concepts” which are “a fixed and permanent determinacy”; “not a fossilised determinacy but one which permanently recreates itself in its dissolution." This shape, which I think of as the ‘Hegelian Pattern’, is a view of existence which can be traced back to the pre-Socratic thought of philosophy, but which was submerged in medieval and early modern thought over the Platonic schema, which divides forces of order and disorder on the level of microcosm and macrocosm.

Marx wrote that it is not the "consciousness of men that determines their being, but...their social being that determines their consciousness". Yet he was the one who criticised thinkers for positing a “reflective connection in what constitutes an organic union" (2000. p.383) - and there are many grounds for questioning the division between consciousness and social reality. The latter is the sensuous world as apprehended by the former. In other words, social reality is conscious reality - a continuum, but not even that; the very same immanent moment. Consciousness is the very pathway of all fungible production - the closing moment in the pathological cycle that makes production cumulative. Carpenter hits on this when he says that civilization is "the selection and chiselling of thousands of minds through the centuries", eliminating all "defects, disproportions, inharmonious details" (AC, pp.145-146). All production - words, thoughts, things, actions and so forth - reproduce specific patterns of sensation. Labour shapes the sense patterns; the sense patterns shape mind; mind shapes labour; and indeed, are only separate insofar as we have come to separate them.

To sum up how we are viewing the production cycle, we have; emotionality, exfoliation, ossification, concepts-objects, consciousness, conscious thinking, saying and doing, social reality, emotional reality, and then round again through exfoliation - each revolution of this cycle furrowing its pathway a little deeper.
The social human is as much a socially produced thing as the commodity, in the sense that they are a "natural stratum" (Castariadis 1987, p.186) worked over by the production process. However, civilization is, at the same time, the work of human instinct. The question is how it gets caught up in the interstices of its own coaglulation.

Edward Carpenter (1844?-) offers a very simple and dynamic way of thinking about production, which is in harmony with important correlations in Western tradition. He describes production as emotional "exfoliation" - and we note the allusion to removal of dead skin. During this process, an emotion gathers "clearness and materiality", and "solidifies itself in organisation and structure" (CC, p.133). This view captures the structural characteristics of instinctual realization, wish fulfilment, objectification in Hegel and Marx, and any theories of production, action or expression based on need, desire or will. The common moment is human self-realization, from within outwards.

For Carpenter, emotion "brings the creature into conflict with its surroundings", and through exfoliation, it gains "satisfaction" (CC, p.140) - which suggests the kind of psychodynamic “elasticity” Freud (BP, p.30) attributes to creatures outside of civilization. Hegel and Marxian associate historical development with estrangement, which culminates in a social or species elasticity in a universal social conscience, bound by sensuous social activity or ethical life - a kind of generalised catharsis, one of social cohesiveness and connectivity. We could understand alienation as the “discontents” of Freud’s civilization (CD) - the anti-catharsis of instinctual frustration. While these views employ different idioms, emphases, standpoints and orientations, there are deeper existential correlations, which indicate a rootedness in the same kind of existential problems.

If Marx and Hegel were two ends of the stick, Nietzsche would be a third end; “it is enough to create new names and estimations...in order to create in the long run new “things”. Carpenter would be a fourth end of the stick;

“Change the feeling in an individual, and his...thinking will be revolutionised; change the...primary sensation...and the whole structure will have to be re-created. The current Political Economy is founded on the axiom of individual greed;...let a new axiomatic emotion spring up...and...a new construction [will follow]. (CC, p.85)

Yet this is not a stick, but points on a circle. Concept-object, feeling, emotion, estimation, being, reality, perceiving - all occupy the same existential space, and in the immediacy of experience are one. This paper has led me to see philosophy the opinion that philosophers attempts to grasp and resolve existentially real problems - and while the resolving is intellectual and conceptual, grasping is emotional and sensuous. The philosophy and the poem seem to me recognised only insofar as they are emotionally or existentially resonant, and this resonance is non-conceptual. It is for this reason that psychoanalytic and existential interpretation is favoured in this paper.

Empathetic recognition is instinctive, immediate, pre-conceptual, emotional, and non-conceptual, and is a capacity we find in young children. Things like posture, clothes, tenor, facial expressions, movements and so forth are confronted as a totality and produce a total emotional response - there is no detail on the emotional plane. “The body is a great intelligence a multiplicity with one sense” (2006, p.264), as Nietzsche writes.

For Nietzsche also, there is “more reason in your body than in your best wisdom” (Nietzsche 2006, p.265) Empathetic exploration - reconstruction recognition or imagination - is our only access to emotional or emotionally social reality, and indespensible in critical, social, psychological and cultural analysis. As Freud suggests it leaks out everwhere. “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore" Freud Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) Ch. 2 : The First Dream. Yet emotional and existential significance is crystallised in all human creations - when we read a work of philosophy we might call them prejudices, impressions or associations - but they prove to be a layer of insight that can see further than the intellect.

For Laing, in order to intuit an existential dynamic, one "has to be able to orientate oneself as a person in the other's scheme of things”, and make “an inference about the way the other is feeling and acting" (Date, pp.26-27). He suggests the same principle applies to the analysis of “ancient texts” which “will help us to understand...only if we can bring to bear what is often called sympathy, or, more intensively, empathy. We explain...by means of purely intellectual processes, but we understand by means of the cooperation of all the powers".

Adorno’s humane criticism, seeking to recognise and polemicise social suffering, is based on a similar principle; it understands emotionality as “the weight of objectivity on the subject”. Williams has a notion for social analysis - “the structures of feeling” - which suggests the manner in which empathetic and existential recognition can illuminate social and cultural dynamics. Existential insights are not weighted down by the difficulties of inferring between psychic, social and material life, because these orders of life are at most constituted existentially, and hence as one existential reality. The draw-back is that the insights cannot be ‘exposed’ or fixed conceptually; yet conceptual stability is often based on the conceptual it carries out quietly.

The profound differences in language, culture, and social organisation, and the important principle of cultural and historical relativism, may not be particularly relevant to emotional or existential interpretation. Freud's (CD, pp.5-6) argues that in the development of psychic life, "what is primitive is...preserved alongside...[any] further development". Vygotsky argues specifically that sensuous thought is the substructure of conceptual thought, the latter being added as "new layers over the old ones" (Vygotsky DATE? p.319). There is another strand of thought which udnerstands the development of mental life as a tablula rasa, though this is also valid, so long as we realise we are looking specifically at conceptual development, and not psychic development. There is plenty in our practical life that encourage us in the view that emotional empathy can undercut cultural and language obstacles. Carpenter's (AH, p.62) sketches a scenario of "two strangers, of different race and tongue", who "eye each other with suspicion" until a "slant of the brow", and "a glance of the eyes" reveals "a sense of age-long union". The "expressions, motives, emotions, in folk's faces" are the "knockings...on...the... door of ourselves", and "something from within descending to answer" (AC, p.73). We can at least afford to suspect that the 'language' of emotionality has not undergone the kind of development that intellectual and social life has, and like Carpenter and Freud suggest, retains its organic elasticity within the jugernaut of civlization - however retracted its sphere of activity has become.

I am firmly of the view that the whole sphere of emotional and empathetic hermeneutics is absolutely not to be understood as sharing the same problems and limitations as conceptual or rational analysis; we can read emotional significance in profoundly mediated ways. For example, if a couple had split up, and the one who was left behind finds a carefully folded coat, or a carelessly strewn coat, this might betray an emotional message as clear as any goodbye note; it might even correct the good bye note. When we have these kind of insights in historical, social or psychological analysis, the last thing we should do, in my judgement, is suppress them, because they are a particular kind of insight - a human, social, emotional and existential insight - that cannot be configured by concepts. This will be an important principle throughout this paper, and I find in the first chapter that it is only these kind of insights that can help us make any kind of sense of the pre-Socratic cosmology of Heraclitus.

I am not sure we need to agree with Laing that we lack a notion of existential wholeness - or if we do, the lack itself cuts a powerful presence. All critical narratives on alienation depend on an anteria, posteria or ideal wholeness of some kind, just as emancipatory thought strives for it, and utopian thought anticipates it. Romantic reflections on ancient or non-Western cultures and the "numerous traditions of the Golden Age, legends of the Fall" (Carpenter CC, p.11) are pine for something quite ambiguous - with a voice of lament and loss, as if it has been known somewhere emotionally or prehistorically. Psychologists and psychoanalysts rely on some kind of notion of integrity or autonomy; Hegel and Marx see it unfolding through history. Nietzsche sees it in aesthetic practice, and Adorno in aesthetic experience. Wagner tries to create it in the total artwork. Carpenter argues that "each human soul...bears...some kind of reminiscence of a more harmonious and perfect state" (CC, pp.10-11) from memories of "pre-natal days" (PC, p.138) and "the development of the race" (PC, p.139). Such a view is supported by Freud; "the process of human civilization" and "the development of...individual human beings...are...similar...if not the very same process" (CD, P.77). Art, pre-civilized tribal life, childhood, instinctual freedom, aesthetic exerience; the connecting factor is a sensuous or emotional totality, or autonomy, of experience. We note the loss of identity, consciousness, being and reality, and the dissolution into sensuous or emotional becoming in aesthetic, sensuous, sexual, intoxicated or emotional experiences. These all connect with the rolling back of mind, identity, society and so forth - a return to emotionality.

Many thinkers have referred to the existential dynamics of the child or the organic tribe to get closer to understanding of this sensuously associative psychic state. For Freud (CD, pp.3-4), the psyche of the very young child "does not as yet [p.4] distinguish his ego from the eternal world as the source of the sensations flowing upon him", while in the "primitive man", "wishes and impulses" are "fact" (TT, p.264), and "the sharp division between thinking and doing...does not exist" (TT, p.265). Stirner describes ancient and child awareness as having "receptivity only for...what is sensuous and sense-moving" (EO, p.107). Carpenter calls tribal consciousness "simple consciousness", in which there is no differentiation between "the knower, the knowledge, and the thing" (AC, p.37), and as such was "unformed and dream-like" (PC, p.149). Vygotsky suggests that children, scitzophrenic and 'primitive' thought is in sensuous complexes (Vygotsky DATE? p.316) and are sensuously, rather than conceptually associated. The emotional subject "does not...perceive isolated sensations" but "total conditioned emotional situations" (Vygotsky DATE? p.319), which is why the child narativises what they do, because they do not dissociate the sound from the image within the total sensuous complex (e.g. Vygotsky pp.chose a chapter). The common account here is a sensuous totality; sensuously and emotionally associative, connecting, cohesive - a total becoming which does not distinguish between appearance, essence, being and reality, object, concept and so forth. The sensuous totality to be contrasted with that splintered reality of forms forms.

The 'flowering' of Consciousness

I call it flowering, because consciousness is emotional life that inverts and fragments, in the shape of a flowering. A sensuous totality of being becomes and alienated, spacialised world of external things and processes - what I call "reality" without a prefix. Existential reality is that which is experienced immediately in apperception, and emotionality is that which does not know object and concept, but only sensuous reality, which in the dissociative psyche is at a conceptual remove.

If we unpack a short sentence by Nietzsche, we have a story of the emotional journey of psyche through civilization. The tale is of "the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid" (2006, p.119)."Fiery liquid" is the sensuous and emotional reality, it is "imagination"; but it cools and coagulates into "a mass of images" - into frozen, isolable things. Kant talked of the synthetic unity of apperception; but for us today the opposite problem has emerged; how to prize the concept of the sensuous experience. They are interlocked into the impregnable object, or its wired, impenetrable world - reality. Yet in a very literal sense, fire and liquid survive in their pure sensuousness. Flames, oceans, storms or natural scenes are too dynamic to be circumscribed conceptually - that is to be contoured so cleanly and deeply to become detachable objects of experience. In the ocean, there are whirrs, juts, crackles, dissipations and so forth - 'moments' - but no isolable moments. We will find that pre-Socratic thought intimates an experience of reality precisely in this fluid, associative, sensuous ecoming, which is intimated very strongly also in the philosophy of Nietzsche. Images of water, fire, storms and so forth are used throughout philosophic, theoretical and literary work, as do there movements of flowing, burning, flooding and so forth. I explore these as they emerge in the works we deal with, and find that they often signpost attempts to communicate the non-conceptual, and frequently achieves this with great efficacy.

We note that flowing and stasis has a relation to unmediated and mediated moments of being. Mediation is one of those existential problems intimated throughout modern thought. This is, Adorno and Horkheimer say, the "step from chaos to civilization, in which natural conditions exert their power no longer directly but through the consciousness of human beings" (DE, p.12). Stirners too argues that "the State...becomes - mediator" (EO p.337).For Hegel, it is the material world of objects that is the mediator, or "outer rind". All the dimensions of worker alienation in Marx envolve seperation or mediation; for Nietzsche we mistake the mediating conceptual order for the authoritative moment of the thing. Rousseau lamented mediation in sociality - the artificial mores and manners of civilization. For Hobbes, the animal human is mediated by the commonwealth; for Aristotle, the Pollis; for Locke, legitimate concent; for Kant, rational self-responsibility. For Heraclitus - we cannot find one. On the contrary, wisdom was the capacity to know that "all things steer through all things".

Carpenter which manages to evoke the strangeness of modern conceptuality - the sheer bottomlessness of the problem of dissociation in psychic life. We can appreciate the sense in which emotionality is like a hidden depth, or an other within. Yet if we look at the intelligence which has this judgement if we turn to the ego to see what, precisely, is judging emotionality as other - then the ego "becomes the Object, and the real Ego is found to be again at the hither end of the stick" (AC, p.41). The same peculiarity occurs with the object. "What is...behind it?...Zeus, or God, or Electricity...This habit of...positing a something behind...is apparently quite inveterate" (AC, p.35). However, we know at least that it is sense experience; that "one end of the stick is similar to the other" (AC, p.43) - that really, comehow, the stick is actually a circle; one which is broken by the concept-object. We will tend to analyse dissociative subjectivity at this level, but this is for analytical convenience. We could find dissociation as the basis for a particular concept. We could have, say, six ends of the stick - hither (apperception), the thither (sense experience), through (concept-object), and the under (emotionality), around (individual), outer (reality/externality), over (god/society) and all (earth/universe/heaven/infinity). And which is the speaking voice saying all this? Really we enter a conceptual maze here, one in which Kant built a philosophical system. All these dimensions come from questions, and from identifying. There are circumstances when dissociation is suspended, when the existential antimonies collapse into each other, or flatten - times of threat, depression, euphoria and so forth. Experience, structure, and reality are not merely conceptual hallucinations, but adaptive responses to situations - which open up and close aspects of our reality. These responses, however, are made possible and necessary by the social context. The only consistent axes of experience is that which flows beneath the social personality and its history, and as such it would seem inhuman to define the subject by one of its more transient moments.
Freud offers an illustration which indicates how consciousness is often understood in relation to instinct and the social order. Freud (BP, p.21) compares the ego to the modified surface of a micro-organism which, "as a result of the ceaseless impact of external stimuli", has developed a "crust", "'baked through' by stimulation...By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate". Here, the ego grows from without inwards, and mediates the emotional subject and social externality, producing the socialised subject. While this illustration has political appeal and some theoretical interest, we will recognise that the social order is driven by the emotional subject, and as such emotionality and ossification are well understood as mutually mediating moments - correlative to the form and movement in Hegel’s philosophy of history.

Another problem with the notion of mortification crust is that consciousness is as somatic and instinctual, and as living as emotionality. However, we are entitled to regard it as completely distinct, because they have become radically distinct through the social process. On the other hand, the Freudian illustration recognises the importance of sensuous inundation, and if we combine this with the view that consciousness is somatic, we find a view which accords with prosaic scientific explanation. The neurological structure is determined by the sensuous patterns apprehended in experience, and on this occasion I think science offers the more nuanced and appropriate model. Through it, we can immediately link the production of fungible social forms, and hence the radical multiplication of specific sense patterns, and hence a contouring of the neurological networks, of the structure of perception and mental organisation, and hence the structure of existential reality, and the thoughts, ideas and actions that respond. This would be a journey through the continuum of ossification.

The socialised mind and emotionality are radically different in their orientation, their aims and their experience of life. The socialised mind is hooked up into the process of social history - and is only explicable in the context of that history. Emotionality, on the other hand, is sensuously oriented and instinctually driven, and can only be understood existentially - without reference to past or future; immediately. Emotionality experiences life as a sensuous totality, and consciusness as a world of things. The important point for us is that they confront us completely different hermeneutic problems. The life of thought, language and reason requires that we understand things contextually, but existential interpretation requires we do so empathetically. I will argue that the empathetic insight cuts through cutural difference, but cannot be exposed conceptually. However, they are preferable to anachronistic conceptual models which offer an apparent stability at the cost of the quiet violence they impose on the analytical context. I now discuss the theoretical grounds of this approach.

My approach has been developed around the demand to understand the historical becoming of the dissociative subject of late modernity. The fundamental distinction I make in my analysis is between emotionality and ossification, which allows me to apprehend the Western tradition on the two levels of our subjectivity. The first is the history of competing philosophical systems - ways of responding, thinking, and reacting to the existential, social and political experience - to be understood in the social an historical context. The second level is the deep structural contours that run through the perspectives in Western thought, which have a very slow development, and indicates the existential structure of experience, and offers a kind of subaltern history of emotional life. The hermeneutic approach will seek empathetic insight into the structures and conflicts as they intimate themselves in theoretical and philosophical work, and in modern and modernist literature. The political and theoretical implications of the study will be discussed in the conclusion. We now turn to the thought of Heraclitus, who offers us an insight into the characteristics of existential wholeness.