Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of FeelingStanley, Hiram Miner
Philosophy
Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling
Stanley, Hiram Miner
Emotions
earliest nerve structure—ganglion—was a pleasure-pain organ. However,
the sensory motor predominance is so early and complete that the current
theory, as the more objective, is the natural physiologic
interpretation.
Again, it has been maintained that pleasure-pain is not a definite state
of consciousness, but a quality like intensity, a _modus_ which must
belong to all states. But if we assign pleasure-pain to such a category
as intensity we must define just what we mean by this category. Is
intensity a mere objective quality which we as observers assign to all
psychosis, just as we do to electrical or luminous phenomena? or is it
inherent element, an actual constituent, of every psychosis? If a man is
angry and becomes more angry, intensity is increased; but we may
conceive that he simply is more angry without being aware of this change
of intensity, that is without every change of intensity being noted by
consciousness. As introspection avers, it often happens that a man is
both unconscious of his anger and unconscious of its increase. As I have
frequently had occasion to note, simple natures are wholly unconscious
of their emotions and of their intensity variations. That is, as matter
of fact, intensity of feeling is not feeling of intensity. If you feel
warm you feel differently than when you feel warmer, but this is no more
than saying that when the iron is hot it is in a different state than
when it is hotter. Intensity means the same in both cases.
Consciousness, primitively, at least, is not self-awareness of its own
changes in intensity. The feeling warm and the feeling warmer occur
simply as facts which are subjectively unrelated and unmeasured by the
consciousness which has the varying intensities. I strike a cow
hard—result, intense pain; harder, more intense pain; this is
correlative with, I strike iron, intense tremor; harder, more intense
tremor. The cow experiences more intense pain, but does not consciously
measure it off as such. I can say, “I feel hotter than I did,” but the
cow does not appreciate and express its own sense of its experience. The
language fallacy leads us astray. By our very use of terms, warm and
warmer, and by our discussion of the matter, we imply a consciousness of
intensity which is far from being primitive or general. It would
probably be an overestimate to say that the intensity of one in a
thousand psychoses makes itself felt as such in consciousness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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