Le feeling, ou la faculté de sentir

Résumé 0

The paper attempts to elucidate the nature and action of feeling: a subject corresponding to the original conception of aesthetics by Baumgarten. It analyzes several different uses of the verb “to feel” in order to bring out the difference between simple perception and feeling. Feeling, it emerges, is an overtone given to a perception that has something particular, or ineffable, about it. With reference to Nelson Goodman’s notion of exemplification, and the Kantian conception of reflective judgment, feeling is defined as a resonance that arises spontaneously in us, in response to the perceptive stimuli of an object, from the depth of our memory as the store of past experience. Lastly, the paper explains the basis of freshness of feeling, and the individuality and universality of feeling.