Enjoyment as Enriched Experience: A Theory of Affect and Its Relation to Consciousness PDF
Preview Enjoyment as Enriched Experience: A Theory of Affect and Its Relation to Consciousness
PALGRAVE PERSPECTIVES ON PROCESS PHILOSOPHY Enjoyment as Enriched Experience A Theory of Affect and Its Relation to Consciousness Nathaniel F. Barrett Palgrave Perspectives on Process Philosophy Series Editors Wahida Khandker Dept of History, Politics and Philosophy Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester, UK Tim Flanagan Philosophy Murdoch University Murdoch, WA, Australia The aim of this series is to provide monographs, edited collections and Palgrave Pivots from both established and early career scholars in Process Philosophy, with particular reference (but by no means exclusively) to the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, William James, and Charles Hartshorne. The series aims to promote new writing in this area that is innovative, rigorous, and yet accessible to readers both within philosophy and beyond disciplinary boundaries. The expected focus of the books falls roughly into three areas, though it is likely that these areas will overlap: New readings of the major early twentieth-century process philosophers, Whitehead, Bergson, James, Hartshorne, et al, including studies of their influence on, or relevance to, contemporary philosophy The roots of process philosophy in ancient and early modern philosophy, as well as hitherto unexplored affinities with thinkers in these eras Future orientations: including cross-disciplinary explorations of the implications of process thought. We are particularly interested in studies of intersections with the arts, architecture, environmental humanities, and the sciences, but projects proposing other disciplinary intersections will be welcomed. Nathaniel F. Barrett Enjoyment as Enriched Experience A Theory of Affect and Its Relation to Consciousness Nathaniel F. Barrett Institute for Culture and Society University of Navarra Pamplona, Spain ISSN 2524-4728 ISSN 2524-4736 (electronic) Palgrave Perspectives on Process Philosophy ISBN 978-3-031-13789-1 ISBN 978-3-031-13790-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13790-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Para Diego y Telmo Que disfrutéis mucho Preface This book is the fruit of a long-standing interest in the question of how experience belongs to nature. My thinking about this question is deeply indebted to the tradition of speculative naturalism that runs through classical pragmatism and the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. The central idea of this book, that enjoyment is an enriched form of experience and a “culminating event of nature,” comes from the core of this tradition, although it did not originate there. It can be traced all the way back to classic texts of ancient Greece and China. The idea is not new, in other words. But its implications are now, if anything, more radical than ever before. Enjoyment is not generally accorded such importance in contempo- rary thought, to say the least. In the sciences of mind and brain, enjoy- ment is usually treated as if it were a secondary or even superfluous feature whose investigation should take a back seat to questions about perception and cognition. And when science pays attention to enjoyment, its expla- nations tend to be purely functionalist. Scientific theories generally do not address the question of what enjoyment is; they only tell us why we enjoy certain things and not others. Meanwhile, in the study of consciousness, sensory qualities like the color red take center stage, while enjoyment and other affective dimen- sions of experience are relegated to the background. Enjoyment hardly figures in the questions we ask about consciousness or in standard vii viii Preface formulations of the problem that it presents to understanding. When the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked us to ponder “What is like to be a bat?” in his hugely influential paper about the problem of consciousness, he was asking specifically about perceiving the world with sonar, not the joy of hunting gnats at dusk. Of course, for a bat, the joy of hunting involves the use of sonar, a special form of perception. But the readiness with which we ascribe enjoyment to other animals suggests that it is more basic to experience than any particular form of perception. Maybe if Nagel had asked about the enjoyment of bats, philosophy of conscious- ness would have gone down a different path. Even the scholarly literature most directly concerned with the nature of enjoyment tends to be tightly circumscribed in a way that downplays its importance. Over the last century and a half, philosophers have uncov- ered major problems in our understanding of pleasure and pain. But they have repeatedly framed these problems as if they pertained to a special class of feelings rather than the nature of experience per se. As a result, even where enjoyment is most closely examined, it is effectively marginal- ized. It does not belong to our basic concept of what experience is, let alone our understanding of how experience belongs to nature. This book is intended to challenge this way of thinking. It does this by calling attention to the special challenges presented by the affective nature of experience, and by showing how these challenges can be overcome by understanding affect as the causal enrichment or deterioration of experi- ence as a whole. As I have just indicated, this “enrichment approach” comes from Whitehead and the classical pragmatists Peirce, James, and Dewey, all of whom thought of enjoyment and suffering as fundamental to experience. However, although my debt to these sources is clear, what follows is not a close study of their writings on experience. As developed in pragmatism and process philosophy, the enrichment approach remains unfinished and incomplete. It is modeled too closely on certain types of aesthetic enjoyment and it cannot explain how negative feelings of pain and suffer- ing arise within a continuum of enrichment. In sum, the enrichment approach needs to be revised and expanded so that it can comprehend the full range of affective experience and engage with contemporary sciences of consciousness and affect. Preface ix For this task, I draw from recent scientific research that suggests that the dynamic repertoire of consciousness is constantly changing, effec- tively expanding and contracting our capacity to feel. Weaving these sci- entific perspectives together into a theory of causal enrichment, the book develops a theory of affect that accounts for its peculiar phenomenology and sheds new light on a diverse range of experiences, from everyday pleasures and pains to the special satisfactions of the arts and religious festivity. At the same time, it presents a fresh and distinctively affect- centered perspective on the nature of consciousness. Given this scientific orientation, readers may be surprised to find that I have so little to say about the physiological, cognitive, or behavioral aspects of affect. For instance, I do not enter into any detailed discussion of the neurological mechanisms of pain and pleasure. I am well aware that a complete theory of affect must include these mechanisms. But they are not where the philosophical work needs to be done. In my view, the capacity to feel pleasure and pain is intrinsic to the nature of conscious experience, and once we understand how this is so, we will be better pre- pared to understand how this capacity is shaped and enhanced by spe- cially dedicated mechanisms of affective regulation. In other words, the theory of affect to be developed in this book focuses on aspects of affect that most scientific theories leave out—everything having to do with the experience of affect and the role of affect in experi- ence. Moreover, it is the kind of theory that is intended to contribute to our understanding of how experience belongs to nature and, in some small way, to efforts to re-imagine the kind of nature in which experience is possible. This book had a long period of gestation during which I was fortunate to have the support of family, friends, and colleagues. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my teachers Wesley Wildman and Bob Neville, both exemplary persons and philosophers. Without the inspiration of your example, it would never have occurred to me to write a book like this. I also want to thank José Ignacio Murillo and other members of the Mind-Brain Group, as well as the staff of the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarre, for providing the kind of environ- ment in which adventures of ideas are possible. This book could not have been written anywhere else. x Preface Thanks to Giovanna Colombetti and to Donovan Schaefer for feed- back on parts of the book. Thanks to Brandon Daniel-Hughes for his steadfast companionship on the winding path of inquiry. And special thanks to Anderson Weekes for reading a draft of the entire manuscript and for many hours of painstaking critique. I could not have finished without your help. Finally, to Ariadna, thank you for being patient when I get lost in my thoughts, and for helping me find my way home. Pamplona, Spain Nathaniel F. Barrett
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