How to feel things: Difference between revisions
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We feel through the senses. When we are sensing, we generate | We feel through the senses. When we are sensing, we generate different types of information: tactile, visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory. We feel the texture of an object, we perceive the qualities of its surface, an image of its contour, an idea of its material, an imagined colour. We compose these sources of information into experience. | ||
If one ponders on the question on how to feel things, one may land at a subsequent question: How to know things or how is that | One is waken up by the increasing sound of the bird song fading in into our sleeping unconscious. The texture of the sheets enters our awareness via our skin, we are reminded we are in bed. The smell of rain, its drizzle sound. The morning light filters into the eyes. One judges by its quality and intensity, if this is a cloudy morning. Proprioception or kinaesthesia is the sense of self-movement, force and body position.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception</ref> We know we are in bed, we feel our body is in an horizontal position. Our muscular system recalibrates while we feel the need of stretching. Our eyes gain sharper focus. | ||
A sensing experience can transport us to the realm of memory: we feel the present, the past and the future too. Depending on our personal memory, the experience of a rainy morning may bring up hopeful feelings of a pulsing Spring, or the cold sadness of grey days. We feel with the gut and the heart too, we create visceral information. Our nervous system extends through the intricate territories of our biological suit and collects data, which is later translated into different languages and layers of experience. | |||
We feel and sense at the same time. Sensing is organised into a complex experience which we call feeling. A "feeling" could be described as the intensified meta experience of juxtaposed sensing information. How can we approach the textural without giving primacy to our Western knowledge-eye? How can we stop "seeing" as both a visual act and a way of knowing, an open ourselves to feeling as an act brimming with knowledge, affect, and social and individual memory? <ref>Patricia Alvarez Astacio. Tactile Analytics. Touching as a Collective Act. p. 17</ref> | |||
If one ponders on the question on how to feel things, one may land at a subsequent question: How to know things or how is that we create knowledge about things? <blockquote>"Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It is concerned with the mind's relation to reality. What is it for this relation to be one of knowledge? Do we know things? And if we do, how and when do we know things?"<ref>https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/philosophy/research/themes/epistemology#:~:text=Epistemology</ref></blockquote> | |||
Revision as of 13:18, 10 May 2023
How to feel things?
We feel through the senses. When we are sensing, we generate different types of information: tactile, visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory. We feel the texture of an object, we perceive the qualities of its surface, an image of its contour, an idea of its material, an imagined colour. We compose these sources of information into experience.
One is waken up by the increasing sound of the bird song fading in into our sleeping unconscious. The texture of the sheets enters our awareness via our skin, we are reminded we are in bed. The smell of rain, its drizzle sound. The morning light filters into the eyes. One judges by its quality and intensity, if this is a cloudy morning. Proprioception or kinaesthesia is the sense of self-movement, force and body position.[1] We know we are in bed, we feel our body is in an horizontal position. Our muscular system recalibrates while we feel the need of stretching. Our eyes gain sharper focus.
A sensing experience can transport us to the realm of memory: we feel the present, the past and the future too. Depending on our personal memory, the experience of a rainy morning may bring up hopeful feelings of a pulsing Spring, or the cold sadness of grey days. We feel with the gut and the heart too, we create visceral information. Our nervous system extends through the intricate territories of our biological suit and collects data, which is later translated into different languages and layers of experience.
We feel and sense at the same time. Sensing is organised into a complex experience which we call feeling. A "feeling" could be described as the intensified meta experience of juxtaposed sensing information. How can we approach the textural without giving primacy to our Western knowledge-eye? How can we stop "seeing" as both a visual act and a way of knowing, an open ourselves to feeling as an act brimming with knowledge, affect, and social and individual memory? [2]
If one ponders on the question on how to feel things, one may land at a subsequent question: How to know things or how is that we create knowledge about things?
"Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It is concerned with the mind's relation to reality. What is it for this relation to be one of knowledge? Do we know things? And if we do, how and when do we know things?"[3]
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
- ↑ Patricia Alvarez Astacio. Tactile Analytics. Touching as a Collective Act. p. 17
- ↑ https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/philosophy/research/themes/epistemology#:~:text=Epistemology