Sensation is a what. What is a sensation? Part 1.
The “sensationalism” where something is amplified and promoted to people to be something more that it is such that people begin to feed into it as though it indeed is that “more-than-it-is” is a good starting point for finding out what sensation is, which is the what of sensation.
The whole problem really does have to do with this kind of sensationalism. For the question quickly heads straight into what is being more than it is, and that is so often what we call the “experience of ourselves”. We just figure, automatically, that we have a right (but that too is a strange experience) to our own experience.
If we add to this right that I also have a right to express myself according to the experience of what has been given to me to express, we have then just recalled 250-some years of political history, and outlined the domain of the modern subject. The Great Democratic Experiment that is The United States of America begins. Karl Marx is seen to go through his transformation from land and money to the experiencing of knowing this phenomena just as the rights of personal experience began tumbling the idealism that is aristocracy into the materialism of everyone having a right to own things, themselves as well as axes, houses, guns, lawns, water, jet skis, ideas, health, psychedelic healing, and so on.
Everything becomes sensationalized
Everything becomes sensationalized, it could seem, by the mere fact that a person has a right to their own experience. I don’t know if anyone has ever analyzed Kant in this light, but it seems he could have been just giving us a philosophy which justified sensationalism. I mean, what else is a fad or a fashion, and what is “going viral” which everyone covets so hard if it isn’t the personal marketing that is the World Wide Web nowadays.
When we take a breather from the air of complaint, we might have a certain justice in blaming Descartes for all this hoopla around the global problems of environmental change that humans are supposed to be causing. There might be something to say about dividing thinking from experience, the notion that thinking is being given things of which we have a personal experience and with which we should have a right in expressing the accordance that is who we are.
A good example is the water issue taking place in the Southwest United States. There seems to be a sort of necessity at work here that derides the notion that we have a right to our own experience; oddly enough, as I understand it the Feds ruled that the lower basin states have to get their shit together and that Colorado (the headwaters of the Colorado River) is already doing what it needs to do.
But in the attempt to back out of the want for complaint and control, we are actually asking about these phenomena that we call want and control. Arguably, with Descartes come the set of problems that we are still trying to come to terms with in philosophy, but I would say more poignantly and directly in mental health.
The issue is most pronounced practically in psychology (I use this general term to include neurology, and psychiatry as well, e.g., the empirical sciences supposed to be dealing with mental problems). This is the issue which arises to articulate what we understand (loosely) as “sense datum” and “personal experience”. These, now absolutized, given conditions coordinate modern science and phenomenalism respectively, and are the two basic categorical correlates of empiricism. There is hardly anything that can be discussed nowadays without relying upon these basic categories; either we lean into a sort of pure scientific view of supposed hard data, or we lean into a ‘spiritual’ view which often enough emphasizes the importance of feeling good as the great ideal of heavenly coordinated communion.
They work well together, for sure. Faced with the “hard facts” of the real world, we have experiences which don’t feel good, so we often resort to spiritual-type experiences to, in a way, counterbalance the hard knocks of lived reality. It really is an Existentialist-defined situation that appears (ironically) to offer no exit from, that we merely have to deal with the conditions of reality, suck it up, and learn to cope. (Phenomenalism is often organized around what appears: phenomena given to knowing.)
Such is the psychological mandate, the basic assumption of expressed reality, and the core of practices which emphasize mental health as being founded in feeling good, wellness, self-esteem, and so forth.
No one seems to understand this difficulty as given to them without their consent. What I mean by this, though, is not just this right I have to express my own experience. It is that the very notion of this kind of right has been given to us such that I am forced into a situation where I am supposed to understand my situation in this way. This is why I said it is ironic. I am not saying that we shouldn’t have this right, or that people are wrong because they believe this (whether they understand it overtly or not). I am saying, though, that I am made to view the difficulty in a certain light which grants me only certain conceptual routes or ways of understanding my situation which then offers me only specific and limited ways of responding.
The “thought-first” orientation
This problem I identify as a “thought-first” orientation. It is less a problem than it establishes conditions for which things become a problem to be solved in a particular way. This way is what I call phenomenalism because it stems from a theoretical license established by Kant, but he was merely attempting to reconcile what Descartes showed, which is to say, Kant was responding to the conditions of knowledge given to him to know. Place whatever name on it one wishes as all that will have happened is Kant’s license is not only vindicated, reified as though he was not merely giving license but indeed was only continuing a tradition of philosophy that is universal and ubiquitous. This is also the irony, because one Kant happens, then we can never get ‘before’ Kant; we only rely upon his license and repeat his maxims. You can test it yourself.
This License was revealed by the issues that were articulated by Husserl and Heidegger, and then with some awareness and notices through the 20th century, Alain Badiou shows us that modern phenomenology ‘proves’ itself in the event. The license itself, however, ultimately and ‘expired’ with François Laruelle. This is to say not that modern reality disappears or is proven wrong such that we can move beyond Kant, for that is just another Kantian move. Just as a person can still drive without a license, they will get in trouble if ‘caught’ without one, which is to say in our analogy here, operating in such a way to suggest that a person is able to drive without a license.
This metaphor can be quite useful in our quest for sensation.
What is a sensation?
What is a sensation? If I don’t put a question mark at the end then we have found out what it is. A sensation is a what, and a what is not only an idea. If I keep the question mark on there then I risk missing the sensation for the idea of it. The late-20th-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze explored this odd situation in his Difference and Repetition, through the notion of, what I call, a “founding term”. A founding term is a term which “falls out of” the (Kantian) propositional justification and forms the basis upon which the justification takes place. It is not the basis of the justification, as many philosophers might propose, but indeed is that which remains outside, or suspended within, the proposition to point to something else that is the justification. The justification here then operates as a means to establish transcendence as the ‘object’ of the justification. What actually occurs, as I think Deleuze brings to evidence, for which subsequent philosophies often misconstrue, is that knowledge is not forwarded. Progress then becomes a sort of ‘empty term’, an ideal, a way to keep things the same in the phenomenological sense.
From a mental health standpoint, this function is keeping the psychological ego intact despite all evidence which would challenge its epistemological basis with a right to one’s own experience. Here even the notion of an ego is a kind of sensationalism, since psychologically oriented people might counter one of two ways. First, without an ego there is only ‘animal’ or non-reason or irrational states. Second, transcendence, or what many sorts of traditional and esoteric spiritual teachings ‘communion’ with various things, such as God, universal consciousness, Oneness, or what have you. The evidence is thus presented of how the modern subject, oriented in a phenomenological essence, so to speak, only has limited options of how to think, i.e., empirically, either by reasoning facts of sense datum or by reasoning facts of person experience and what appears to thought. Whichever ‘makes sense’ to the person, it is ‘sensationalized’ in the social domain to reify what the person experienced.
So what can we say is sensation?
Returning (in the repetition) to back out of the sensational philosophical argument, we are left now with a simple mind-body problem. I try to avoid the typical debates because I very often get lost in the sensation of debating and asserting what is true.
So, for our instance, which is less about the truth of the being of subjects, or ontology, it is the sensory-thought problem.
No one is suggesting that we don’t have senses and thoughts. The questioning here is centered on how we understand the logistical route by which experience is known.
The general tradition we are caught within from the standpoint of mental health is that the mind organizes sensory experience. If this were not the case, then someone who was reasonably intelligent would never have a reason to be concerned with their mental health nor have any sort of psychological problem. We could make a very strong argument that psychology is derived from and is based within the effort for the maintenance of empirical knowledge. In this specific sense, all people must likewise be absolutely faithful to empiricism. And indeed, this is what we have automatically and evidently whenever anyone has a mental issue by virtue of the fact that we have the term to begin with, but as well what typically happens.
Even trying to talk about this is strangely difficult. One way could be to say that the usual ideal goes along a sort of continuum from “most empty” of meaning to “most full” of meaning. I asked the Interweb what ‘sense datum’ means:
A sense datum (plural: sense data) is the immediate content of a sensory experience, such as a color, sound, smell, taste, or sensation, as it appears to consciousness.
In philosophy, a sense datum is what is directly experienced through the senses, as distinguished from the physical object that may cause the experience.
What the Interweb gave me
See how even the definition argues itself unknowingly, creating a sort of circular reason with apparently no awareness of its circularity.
I’m not trying to get into a debate over definitions, though. I imagine we all know what the definition is saying — but this is our conundrum: What it is identifying? We are trying to find out what sensation is, itself, not really what the subject of sensation is. We already know what the subject is or else we would not have a way to even talk about it.
For many people, this answer is satisfactory, and it is because the founding term is operating as it is supposed to. However, it doesn’t really satisfy me. Founding terms for me are just ways to talk about things, which is fine and interesting. I am interested in how we are involved with the thing, because I feel that when we are oriented in merely talking about things we miss the thing itself, and that if my experience is being threatened, which is by definition a mental issue, then being fixated in subjectivity seems a highly risky way to try and help myself out of this problem.
The same method for knowing
The problem is likewise noticed to be located in the same method for knowing.
Sense data (empty of meaning) ←→ thought (full of meaning)
All knowledge this arises “full of meaning”, that is, in thinking, and the thinking is located in the mind. The mind is thus automatically comprehended as the site of interest, because the assumption is there is no ability to know sense datum outside of thinking.
Ok. I’m leaving you with this to roll around in.
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