What is Feeling?

The direct opposite of rational knowledge is feeling.

Feeling denotes a negative content, something which is present in consciousness.

It is not a concept, is not abstract rational knowledge.

Feelings are not abstract concepts.

The most diverse and even antagonistic elements lie quietly side by side in this concept.

Examples of feeling are:

• religious feeling
• sensual pleasure
• moral feeling
• bodily feeling, as touch, pain, sense of colour, of sounds and their harmonies and discords
• feeling of hate, of disgust, of self-satisfaction, of honour, of disgrace, of right, of wrong
• sense of truth
• æsthetic feeling
• feeling of power, weakness, health, friendship, love, &c.

Their common trait is that they:

• are negative quality
• are not abstract rational knowledge.

We feel something when we a priori perceive:

• space relations
• knowledge and truth intuitively but have not yet formulated in abstract concepts

Euclid says that we should make beginners in geometry draw the shapes before demonstrating.

In this way, they would already feel geometrical truth before the demonstration brought them complete knowledge.

In the same way Schleiermacher speaks in his “Critique of Ethics” of:

• logical and mathematical feeling
• the feeling of the sameness or difference of two formulas

Tennemann in his “History of Philosophy” (vol. I., p. 361) says,

“One felt that the fallacies are false but could not point out why.”

The concept of “feeling” leads us to misunderstanding and controversy because of its:

• one negative characteristic and very limited content which is determined in a purely one-sided manner
• excessive wideness of sphere

Ssensation is a subspecies of it as bodily feeling.

How did this concept of “feeling” originate?

All concepts alone are denoted by words.

They exist only for the reason, and come from it.

With concepts, therefore, we are already at a one-sided point of view.

But from such a point of view what is near appears distinct and is set as positive [defined?].

What is farther off becomes mixed up and is soon regarded as negative [undefined?].

Thus each nation calls all others foreign.

Reason is guilty of the same one-sidedness or the same crude ignorance arising from vanity.

It classes under the one concept, “feeling,” every modification of consciousness which does not immediately belong to its own mode of apprehension, that is to say, which is not an abstract concept.