​Felt Meaning: Where Ideas Precede Words and Images

Coleridge, Barfield, and Whitehead on the Metaphysics of Meaning

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“Coleridge’s idea has nothing to do with images. It is, in his own words, ‘anterior to all images.’” So writes Owen Barfield in a footnote to his essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Romanticism Comes of Age. Barfield’s comment is worth pondering, because it challenges the way so many of us think. For many people, “ideas” are assumed to be either images in the mind or words silently spoken to oneself. Indeed, much of twentieth-century Western philosophy—especially in its linguistic turn—was devoted to showing that the mind is not independent of language, and that all thinking is mediated, if not by images then by language, whether spoken or written. Against this backdrop, Barfield’s remark invites us to consider whether there may be modes of thinking in which ideas are neither pictorial nor linguistic, but are instead directly felt.

Here Barfield points toward a deeper, more primordial level of experience—one in which an idea is encountered as a concrete reality prior to the division between subject and object. In this sense, an idea is not something the mind has so much as something the mind participates in. It is apprehended as a unity, an event of meaning in which knowing and being are momentarily fused. Such ideas are not abstract in the modern sense, nor are they reducible to mental representations. They are lived phenomena—intelligible yet preconceptual—grasped through a mode of awareness that precedes both imagery and language. To speak of ideas in this way is to recover an older understanding of thought itself, one in which meaning is not imposed upon experience from without, but arises through a direct encounter with reality as it discloses itself.

Whitehead’s philosophy offers a metaphysical articulation of this same intuition in explicitly process-relational terms. In Process and Reality, Whitehead insists that experience is fundamentally composed not of representations or sensations, but of feelings—prehensions through which actual entities take account of one another and of the forms (pure potentialities) that have been actualized in those entities. At the most basic level, these feelings are neither sensory nor linguistic; they are modes of grasping significance prior to conscious reflection. What Whitehead calls propositions function in a way strikingly consonant with Coleridgean ideas: they are “lures for feeling,” possibilities for the unification of experience that are felt before they are conceptualized, pictured, or named. A proposition is not primarily a statement, but an invitation—an offered pattern of meaning that may or may not be taken up in the concrescence of experience. In this light, ideas are best understood not as mental contents residing in a subject, but as relational potentials felt within the ongoing process of becoming. Meaning, on this view, is neither imposed by language nor constructed out of signs alone; it is already operative in experience itself, as part of the world’s own self-articulation. Language and imagery give form and durability to these felt meanings, but they do not create them from nothing. They articulate what is first encountered, more primitively, as a lived unity of feeling, significance, and aim.