The Stream of Consciousness: XXII. Apprehension and the Feeling Aspect

Abstract

The feeling aspect that, according to James, every state of consciousness possesses—what is it and what is its function? From a previous article, I continue here an effort to spell out how the feeling aspect and a cognitive aspect—which, too, was proposed to characterize all pulses of mentality—belong together to a single integral whole. Every state of consciousness is both a feeling and a mental apprehension of something, or at least as though of something. Although states of consciousness vary in veridicality, no state of consciousness is more or less cognitive than any other. Nor is any state of consciousness more abstract, less finite, than any another, less of a concrete feeling. Even an awareness of something universal or general is a “perfectly determinate, singular, and transient thing. … a perishing segment of thought's stream, consubstantial with other facts of sensibility.” The feeling aspect is the experiential, qualitative way in which—or form by which—a state of consciousness feels the totality of items, properties, events, relations, and so on, that it apprehends or seems to apprehend.