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The Sensitive Aspect
The Sensitive Aspect
- "Feeling" (Dooyeweerd's rendering), but this must be understood in
Šthe fullness of what that means
- "Feeling and responding. Introduces Interactive engagement with
Š world" (Basden's intuitive rendering)
- Sentience
- Sensory and motor ability is part of it
- Emotion
rather than:
- Some studies that come under psychology go beyond Sensitive.
- Cognitive Psychology, for instance, relies on Distinction.
- Stimulus and Response
- Training (at a low level)
- Feeling
- Emotion
- Fantasy-conception, imagination, image [NC III:112-127]
Note that this includes stimulus and response but goes further.
Dooyeweerd's idea of sensitivity is a rich one.
- Psychology is shown to be non-absolute, to be self-limiting, by the
Šfact that psychology cannot do without the constructs 'I' and 'You' etc.
Šyet all attempts to explain these constructs from within psychology have
Šfailed.
- Against Hume, Reid said that sensation is not itself experience, but a
Šmeans to experience. So sensation is not absolute, but part of something
Šmuch larger.
Psychology and some of zoology.
- What this aspect enables: It is the sensitive / psychic aspect that
Šenables us to experience things around us. It is not the total or fulness
Šof experience, but is, if you like, the doorway to experience. For this
Šreason, maybe, there is a tendency to assume that our psychical experience
Šof things is the same as our everyday experience, a 'muddling' that
ŠDooyeweerd discussed in [NC, III:4].
- Hurting someone's feelings without good cause
- "I am a rock; I am an island." (Simon and Garfunkel)
The laws of the sensitive aspect depend on the proper functioning of the
laws of the biotic aspect.
Feeling is important in much of post-modern life, especially as an antidote
to rationalism, in which all is reduced to reason. But there are many
kinds of feelings, such as:
- Feeling we have when something is logically correct or incorrect,
- Feeling for justice,
- Feeling for harmony,
- The good feeling we have when we achieve.
And it has been suggested that these are actually centred in the aspects
concerned with an analogy to the sensitive aspect.
In behaviourism, that ruled the roost in psychology until the 1970s,
everything is explained in terms of stimulus and response. An entity
receives stimuli, which evoke a response. Much human and animal behavriour
was explained in these ways, and many methods of learning were based on the
assumption that learning was nothing more than training the entity to
respond in the right way to stimuli.
Now, in separating off of the sensitive aspect, as Dooyeweerd does, we do
acknowledge the validity of stimulus and response, but it is not the
ultimate explanation.
In reaction to a rationalism that emphasizes reason and tries to suppress
emotion, many since the 1960s have emphasized feeling. "If it feels good,
do it!" From this aspectual framework, such people are almost as
reductionist as the rationalists - they are just reducing everything to
feeling.
The stimulus-response idea emerged out of the idea that living organisms
were merely machines - you press one button and another bulb lights up, by
a physical causality. But, the
stimulus-response of living, sensitive organisms is not merely of this
kind. There is some degree of receptivity to the stimuli and some degree
of decision to respond. (The degree is probably less in primitive animals,
greater is higher animals.)
Stimulus-response and emotion seem to differ: the famous knee-jerk is S-R
while we feel strong emotion when in love or when let down, and this feels
very different from the knee-jerk. So do they belong to the same aspect,
or should we split the aspect into two?
It is not clear, and the above intuitive appreciation of a difference
between S-R and emotion might indicate that we should split them. After
all, intuitive grasp was one of the key indicators of the kernel of an
aspect.
Now, it is true that the functioning of emotion requires proper stimulus-
response functioning. So maybe there are laws of S-R on which laws of
emotion depend - and this could be an example of the law-dependency between
two aspects.
But, on the other hand, there is some similarity between S-R and emotion.
Consider, for instance, a politician who clamours for a tightening up the
law just after an horrific murder came on the news. We denounce him/her as
having "a knee-jerk reaction" (as opposed to the more reasoned reaction
that we believe should attend the case). Now, his/her "knee-jerk reaction"
is actually very similar to an "emotional reaction". Indeed, we could
equally denounce his/her reaction as "emotional" as "knee-jerk". So, maybe
there is some kernal similarity between them.
So the laws of S-R might be merely a subset of those of the whole sensitive
aspect, and emotion-functioning makes use of more of the laws.
The jury is still out on this one. Dooyeweerd wanted to give workers in
the special sciences a lot of freedom to explore their scientific area as
they saw fit, without being bullied by other sciences. And the laws of an
aspect are to be discovered by those scientists, along with people living
everyday lives, rather than by philosphers like himself. So it is up to
psychologists etc. to work this one out.
A very interesting site you've got here. I was just reading about the new
Šaspects. Splitting up the sensitive aspect into a percipient and an
Šaffective aspect isn't such a bad idea. Rather than calling them that I
Šwould call them:
- perceptive: to with sensing, reflexes (S-R) etc.
- sensitive: to do with affection, feeling and emotions
The point is, I think that this is just what discerns the higher animals
Šfrom the lower animals. Lower animals having te perceptive aspect as the
Šqualifying aspect, the higher animals having the sensitive apsect as
Šqualifying.
This is part of The Dooyeweerd Pages, which
Šexplain, explore and discuss Dooyeweerd's interesting philosophy. Questions or comments would be welcome.
Copyright (c) 2004 Andrew Basden. But you may use this material subject to
Šconditions.
Number of visitors to these pages: ![Counter](Š"http://www.personal.u)
. Written on the Amiga with Protext.
Created: by 27 April 1997.
Last updated: 30 August 1998 rearranged and tidied. 28 June 1999 added
Šnon-abs. 7 February 2001 copyright, email. 25 April 2002 added Reid refce.
Š6 November 2002 added Discussion section, and note from Ruben O. 8 October
Š2003 imagination etc. as themes. 27 May 2005 Shalom of experience. 24
ŠAugust 2005 .end, nav to aspects. 22 September 2010 Dooyeweerd's and
ŠBasden's rendering.