CONFORMAL AND CONCEPTUAL FEELINGS There are three successive stages of feeling in Whitehead’s analysis: a phase of conformal feelings, one of conceptual feelings, and one of comparative feelings, which include propositional feelings. In response to the perceived object, the mind coordinates feelings derived from embodied experience to produce conformal feelings. Conformal feelings include responses to strains and other pre-organized, embodied experiences. For instance, the feelings of quiet sanctity that we experience in response to Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter (shown at top right) can include audition. In the Rijksmusuem I watched a woman, who had been spiritedly talking to a companion, lower her voice to a hush as she approached this painting, contracting her posture and sublimating her gestures. It was as if she had appetition to conform to a sense of quiet, sanctity and rarity projected by, and associated with, the painting. |
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| In addition to the stasis of the map pole, I can also feel its motion, as if the pole was a spear thrust across the canvas. Its abrupt stop has the impact of an exclamation point. Thus I realize a definite limitation of a conformal feeling that enriches the final phase of the concrescence. The motion and force implied by thrust is held in balance with feelings of quiet and stasis, and gives more efficacy to my propositional feeling of “time held at an instant.” | |
Vermeer often produces powerful feelings of arrest and movement, as in Girl in a Red Hat (shown at bottom right) included in my collage. We can attribute this to the Baroque ethos to express movement, and to Vermeer’s use of a light box to produce elongated perspectives and his uniquely flattened patterns. The contrasting strain feelings of elongation in perspective and of flattening in the same painting encourage us to transform our embodied experience of these feelings into conceptual feelings about arrest, movement, flatness and depth. For Whitehead, it is more important for a proposition to be interesting than for it to be true. Truth may add to the interest, but truth is relative and its mere statement may or may not lead to further productive action. For instance, in Hamlet’s Speech, “To be or not to be…,” it is not the truth condition that informs our interest, rather it is the suggested contrast among categories of life, death, action, and destiny. |
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