Head and Heart: Affection, Cognition, Volition, as Truine Consciousness (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

659 Pages·1997·1.74 MB·English

by  Andrew Tallon

Head and Heart : Affection, Cognition,
title:
Volition As Triune Consciousness
author: Tallon, Andrew.
publisher: Fordham University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0823217728
print isbn13: 9780823217724
ebook isbn13: 9780585171494
language: English
Emotions (Philosophy) , Intentionality
subject
(Philosophy) , Consciousness.
publication date: 1997
lcc: B815.T35 1997eb
ddc: 128/.37
Emotions (Philosophy) , Intentionality
subject:
(Philosophy) , Consciousness.
Page i
Head and Heart
Affection, Cognition, Volition As Triune Consciousness
by Andrew Tallon
Fordham University Press
New York 1997
Page ii
Copyright © 1997 by Fordham University Press
All rights reserved.
LC 97-12417
ISBN 0-8232-1771-X (hardcover)
ISBN 0-8232-1772-8 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in Publication Data
Tallon, Andrew.
Head and heart: affection, cognition, volition as triune
consciousness / by Andrew Tallon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8232-1771-X (hardcover : alk. paper).
ISBN 0-8232-1772-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Emotions (Philosophy) 2. Intentionality (Philosophy)
3. Consciousness. I. Title.
B815.T35 1997
128'.37dc21 97-12417
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
Page iii
for
Mary Beth,
Andrew, & Clare
Page v
Contents
Preface: Restoring Feeling to Consciousness 1
Introduction: The Structure of Consciousness 17
Chapter 1: Phenomenology, Intentionality, Embodiment 27
Chapter 2: Intentionality of Affection & Emotion 53
Chapter 3: Mood & Affective Tonality 75
Chapter 4: Emotional Presentation & Will 115
Chapter 5: Value & Affective Consciousness 137
Chapter 6: Affectability & Affective Response 155
Chapter 7: The Structure of Affective Intentionality 183
Chapter 8: Triune Consciousness 199
Chapter 9: Connaturality 221
Chapter 10: Habitude & Finitude 251
Conclusion 289
Bibliography 293
Index 311
Page 1
Preface: Restoring Feeling to Consciousness
Our hearts are uncircumcised; little will they believe.
Koran, ii, 82 (c. 622).
A faithless heart betrays the head unsound.
John Armstrong, The Art of Preserving Health, bk. 4, 1. 284 (1744).
The heart has its reasons, which reason doesn't know.
Blaise Pascal (1625-1661), Pensées, pt. 2, art. 17, no. 5 (1660).
Heart speaks to heart. (Cor ad cor loquitur.) (1879)
John Henry Newman (1801-1890), Motto of his cardinal coat of arms.
Head and heart have battled long enough.
1 It's time they got their acts together, literally. If heart means feeling,
and head means knowing, with both of these subject, directly or
indirectly, to willing, then triune consciousness would mean the union
of affection, cognition, and volition as an operational synthesis. This
thesis seems simple enough to state, and is even self-evident to
whoever places practice before theory, but philosophy questions
everything: a theory must be articulated clearly, argued successfully,
and defended against all comers. The dominant rationalist tradition
currently still holding the turf, even as we find new challenges to it
emerging, has methodically excluded one kind of consciousness from
this trilogy: affection. This
Page 2
book defends the fight of feelingmeaning the whole realm of passion,
emotion, mood, and affection in generalto be admitted to equal
partnership with reason and will in human consciousness. It does so
not only by proving the existence of affectivity as a distinct kind of
consciousness inseparable from the other two, but also by showing
precisely how affection works, how it operates in synthesis with those
two, and by offering a new concept of triune consciousness as a
paradigm for the human spirit.
The problem is, of course, that no theory of triadic or triune
consciousness (I use these terms interchangeably), as the higher
operational synthesis of head and heart through will, can be argued
successfully while the entire realm of affectivity is accorded
secondary status, in fact considered a mark of inferiority in some
speculative comparison of humans with supposedly higher
intelligenceslike Mr. Spock, Commander Data, or Lt. Tuvok of Star
Trekas though feelings reveal our evolution from animals and the
sooner we get over that the better. So entrenched is the prejudice
against accepting affectivity as part of consciousness that books like
Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (1995), Damasio's Descartes' Error
(1994), Turski's Toward a Rationality of Emotions (1994), Smith's The
Felt Meanings of the World (1986), Restak's The Modular Brain
(1994), and MacLean's The Triune Brain (1990),
2 to mention only a few recent works, continue to fight uphill to gain
recognition for affectivity as necessary for sound reasoning and
responsible decision making. The thesis that no feeling is just as bad
asand probably worse thantoo much feeling, is long overdue.
What has been lacking up to now is a single philosophical argument
that takes seriously the challenge of integrating head and heart from
start to finish on the basis of one consistent principle. That principle is
intentionality, the central thesis of any contemporary phenomenology
of consciousness. The question then becomes: Are some (not all)
feelings intentional (in the technical sense to be explained)? And
Page 3
the thesis would be that insofar as an affection is intentional, it merits
being included in human consciousness as a full and equal partner
along with cognition and volition. Once affective intentionality
(irreducible to either cognitional or volitional intentionality) has been
established as the best contemporary explanation of feeling (the
heart)and I need seven chapters to do so, constituting the
phenomenological "half" of this bookthen comes the task of taking
this phenomenology and interpreting it (the hermeneutical "half'), that
is, of proposing a theory to "cover the phenomena'' described in the
first seven chapters. The theory of triune consciousness becomes
possible only when affectivity has been shown to participate in
intentionality, which is the price of admission.
Admission is not enough, however: how affective intentionality itself
actually workssomething not explained by the sources I consult in the
first seven chapters (although Ricoeur provides the crucial clues with
the concepts of connaturality and habit [as virtue] )is a necessary step
in arguing the thesis of triune consciousness. In other words, in order
to integrate heart and head, I must show how human consciousness
without affection operates at a lower level of performance, or, put
another way, how affective intentionality raises human consciousness
closer to the paradigm that is both theoretically conceivable as the
natural goal of the human spirit in its vertical finality, and also fully
within the experience of persons who progress along a developmental
continuum in the value domains of truth, goodness, and beauty. The
clues, then, to showing that feeling is best understood in terms of
affective intentionality are (1) the ancient concept of connaturality,
sometimes called "affective connaturality," retrieved by Ricoeur,
Rousselot, Maritain, Lonergan, and others, and (2) to help understand
and update that somewhat esoteric idea, the concept of habit qua
virtue, also suggested by Ricoeur and developed by others like von
Hildebrand, Strasser, and Rousselot and Lonergan again.