The Tao of Emotional Sentience
A presentation by Katherine Peil Kauffman
Made available by the Center for Process Studies.
For many more presentations of this kind,
see the Center’s YouTube channel.
Introduction: Joy, sadness, courage, fear, gratitude, anger, disgust, delight, trust, mistrust, admiration, envy, love, and hate—along with other everyday emotions—are ways in which we prehend both the world around us and the worlds within us. Whitehead calls these emotions subjective forms. They are the very foundations of our mental, physical, and spiritual lives. As they arise, they are associated with subjective aims through which we—and other creatures—seek harmony and intensity, richness of experience. How we negotiate these feelings, moment by moment, while seeking richness of experience in relation to the world, richness for the world. is the Tao of our emotions.
This localized Tao is a window into a wider Tao: the Tao of nature itself and of the universe as a whole. This universal Tao is always becoming with us, seeking to nurture the universe into whatever forms of beauty are possible. These emotions—and indeed the Tao itself—can be explored scientifically as well as spiritually. In her talk given at the Revitalizing Biophilosophy conference sponsored by the Center for Process Studies, Katherine Peil Kauffman shows a way.
This localized Tao is a window into a wider Tao: the Tao of nature itself and of the universe as a whole. This universal Tao is always becoming with us, seeking to nurture the universe into whatever forms of beauty are possible. These emotions—and indeed the Tao itself—can be explored scientifically as well as spiritually. In her talk given at the Revitalizing Biophilosophy conference sponsored by the Center for Process Studies, Katherine Peil Kauffman shows a way.
"Katherine Peil Kauffman is the founding director of EFS International, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering “emotional wisdom.” Her work addresses the physical substrates and biological functions that undergird emotional behaviors, personal feelings, and emotion-driven social interactions. Kauffman reframes emotion as an ancient “self-regulatory” sensori-motor guidance system hardwired within every living embodiment; one delivering vital information and an evolutionary logic that have remained opaque to science. A former affiliate of Northeastern University and Harvard Divinity School, she speaks internationally on the role of emotional sentience in human development, cognition and decision-making, emphasizing implications for public health, moral reasoning, and natural spirituality. You can learn more about her work and mission at her website, emotionalsentience.com"
"The Tao of Emotional Sentience"
"The new science of emotion is presented, utilizing the Eastern metaphor of The Tao as placeholder for the deterministic “machinery” of the universe, the biophysical process of reality construction, but one honoring the participating, observing, “agent” as an essential component within the creative machinery. Emotional sentience is associated with the cyclic, transformative, dynamic, never-ending flow of active information between two ontologically real domains of Res Potentia and Res Extensa, integrated and realized at their overlapping interface by the resident agent. Akin to Whitehead, emotion is reframed as a vital informational and communicative component as patterns of potentia become actual events."
"The Tao of Emotional Sentience"
"The new science of emotion is presented, utilizing the Eastern metaphor of The Tao as placeholder for the deterministic “machinery” of the universe, the biophysical process of reality construction, but one honoring the participating, observing, “agent” as an essential component within the creative machinery. Emotional sentience is associated with the cyclic, transformative, dynamic, never-ending flow of active information between two ontologically real domains of Res Potentia and Res Extensa, integrated and realized at their overlapping interface by the resident agent. Akin to Whitehead, emotion is reframed as a vital informational and communicative component as patterns of potentia become actual events."
A Whiteheadian Postscript
Jay McDaniel
reflections after listening to
The Tao of Emotional Sentience
As a philosopher influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, I am naturally drawn to the title of Katherine Peil Kaufmann’s lecture, “The Tao of Emotional Sentience.” We in the Whiteheadian community, including Katherine, believe that all forms of sentience—perceptual, proprioceptive, recollective, anticipatory, individual, social, physical, and spiritual—are imbued with emotion, understood in Whitehead’s terms as subjective forms of experiential awareness, or prehensions. Among these subjective forms are what Kaufmann calls hedonic qualia, most fundamentally pleasure and pain.
From this same standpoint, we recognize within emotional life—human and more-than-human alike—a felt sense of purpose or subjective aim: an orientation toward survival, adaptation, and the ongoing negotiation between harmony and intensity. Kaufmann explicitly situates these intuitions within Whitehead’s process-relational framework, interpreting emotional sentience through the four phases of concrescence as the moment-by-moment process by which experience comes into being and takes shape.
Moreover, for those familiar with Chinese philosophical traditions, this account resonates strongly with Taoist understandings of nature as a dynamic process of balance and transformation. Emotional life, viewed in this light, is not a series of discrete or isolated states but a continuous negotiation between complementary polarities—yin and yang. The Tao itself is not a thing or substance but a flowing, generative pattern that operates through feeling, responsiveness, and attunement. Seen from this perspective, emotional sentience is not merely a feature of human psychology but an expression of a deeper cosmological rhythm at work throughout the natural world.
If this orientation already resonates with you, I invite you to listen to Katherine Peill Kaufmann’s lecture, “The Tao of Emotional Sentience,” presented at the Revitalizing Biophilosophy Conference sponsored by the Center for Process Studies in July 2025. In her lecture, Kaufmann does not seek to offer a comprehensive or fully systematized theory of emotion. Rather, her aim is to sketch what she calls the bare bones of a process philosophy of emotions—a conceptual framework intended to orient further scientific, philosophical, and interdisciplinary inquiry.
A brief cautionary note may be helpful at the outset. In developing this framework, Kaufmann draws upon a wide range of scientific and philosophical sources, especially from physics, biochemistry, systems theory, and philosophy, with a particular emphasis on Taoist thought. Some of these references may be unfamiliar. I encourage you not to be discouraged by this density of allusion. Rather than attempting to master every source, it may be best to follow the overall movement of her argument and allow its central intuitions to emerge gradually. To deepen engagement, I also recommend complementing the video with an exploration of her website, emotionalsentience.com, especially the papers she offers there (several of which are reposted on this page). These writings present many of the lecture’s core ideas in a more systematic and carefully articulated form, allowing for a slower and more reflective engagement.
A Whiteheadian Postscript
What I offer here, as a postscript to Kaufmann’s presentation, is a Whiteheadian response that highlights the relevance of several of her ideas to process philosophy—an intellectual tradition to which she briefly but explicitly alludes in the talk. Particularly salient are the concepts of concrescence, prehension, subjective form, potentiality, and decision. In Whitehead’s terms, concrescence is the act of experiencing a world from a particular standpoint, composed of prehensions—ways of taking account of what is given. Every such act includes subjective forms: emotional tones through which the world is felt, interpreted, and responded to. Emotion, on this view, is not an accidental accompaniment to experience but intrinsic to its very structure.
Emotions as Carriers of Meaning and Wisdom
Kaufmann’s work resonates strongly with this framework in its insistence that emotions are carriers of meaning and wisdom. Emotions, on her account, are ways of understanding both the world we inhabit and ourselves as participants within it—whether or not this understanding is conceptual or linguistically articulated. Her emphasis on balance—understood as the ongoing negotiation between polarized emotional states such as pleasure and pain—can be fruitfully interpreted in light of Whitehead’s notion of the subjective aim: the drive within each moment of experience toward harmony or equipoise.
Computational Models and the Dynamics of Emotion
A distinctive feature of Kaufmann’s work is her sustained use of computational and mathematical metaphors to illuminate the structure and dynamics of emotional life. Rather than reducing emotions to mechanistic processes, she employs computational models to show how emotions function as integrative, meaning-sensitive dynamics within complex systems. From a process-relational perspective, this is especially significant: it suggests that computation need not be opposed to lived experience or feeling, but can instead serve as a conceptual bridge between quantitative analysis and qualitative depth. Emotions, on this view, operate as orientational and informational processes through which organisms navigate their worlds, make decisions, and respond creatively to changing conditions.
Emotional Life as Relational and Shared
Equally important is her recognition that emotional life is inherently relational. Prehensions and subjective forms can be shared across organisms, giving rise to empathy and to what might be called collectively felt emotions within social and ecological communities. Such sharing can be destructive as well as constructive: anger, fear, and hatred can circulate, just as compassion, care, wonder, and delight can. Emotional life, therefore, is never merely private; it is woven into the fabric of social and ecological relations.
The Tao and the Cosmological Horizon of Feeling
Finally, Kaufmann’s invocation of the Tao situates emotional sentience within a wider cosmological context. The Tao, as she understands it, cannot be reduced to a formula or doctrine. It is fluid, dynamic, and ultimately ungraspable, yet everywhere operative. From a Whiteheadian perspective, this closely parallels the idea of a cosmic lure at work throughout the world, as well as the notion of a cosmic sympathy—the consequent nature of God—as the widest context within which the many experiences of the world are felt, held together, and woven into a unified whole. In this way, Kaufmann’s work resists any sharp dichotomy between science and spirituality, suggesting instead that they are complementary ways of engaging a single, living, emotionally textured reality.
From this same standpoint, we recognize within emotional life—human and more-than-human alike—a felt sense of purpose or subjective aim: an orientation toward survival, adaptation, and the ongoing negotiation between harmony and intensity. Kaufmann explicitly situates these intuitions within Whitehead’s process-relational framework, interpreting emotional sentience through the four phases of concrescence as the moment-by-moment process by which experience comes into being and takes shape.
Moreover, for those familiar with Chinese philosophical traditions, this account resonates strongly with Taoist understandings of nature as a dynamic process of balance and transformation. Emotional life, viewed in this light, is not a series of discrete or isolated states but a continuous negotiation between complementary polarities—yin and yang. The Tao itself is not a thing or substance but a flowing, generative pattern that operates through feeling, responsiveness, and attunement. Seen from this perspective, emotional sentience is not merely a feature of human psychology but an expression of a deeper cosmological rhythm at work throughout the natural world.
If this orientation already resonates with you, I invite you to listen to Katherine Peill Kaufmann’s lecture, “The Tao of Emotional Sentience,” presented at the Revitalizing Biophilosophy Conference sponsored by the Center for Process Studies in July 2025. In her lecture, Kaufmann does not seek to offer a comprehensive or fully systematized theory of emotion. Rather, her aim is to sketch what she calls the bare bones of a process philosophy of emotions—a conceptual framework intended to orient further scientific, philosophical, and interdisciplinary inquiry.
A brief cautionary note may be helpful at the outset. In developing this framework, Kaufmann draws upon a wide range of scientific and philosophical sources, especially from physics, biochemistry, systems theory, and philosophy, with a particular emphasis on Taoist thought. Some of these references may be unfamiliar. I encourage you not to be discouraged by this density of allusion. Rather than attempting to master every source, it may be best to follow the overall movement of her argument and allow its central intuitions to emerge gradually. To deepen engagement, I also recommend complementing the video with an exploration of her website, emotionalsentience.com, especially the papers she offers there (several of which are reposted on this page). These writings present many of the lecture’s core ideas in a more systematic and carefully articulated form, allowing for a slower and more reflective engagement.
A Whiteheadian Postscript
What I offer here, as a postscript to Kaufmann’s presentation, is a Whiteheadian response that highlights the relevance of several of her ideas to process philosophy—an intellectual tradition to which she briefly but explicitly alludes in the talk. Particularly salient are the concepts of concrescence, prehension, subjective form, potentiality, and decision. In Whitehead’s terms, concrescence is the act of experiencing a world from a particular standpoint, composed of prehensions—ways of taking account of what is given. Every such act includes subjective forms: emotional tones through which the world is felt, interpreted, and responded to. Emotion, on this view, is not an accidental accompaniment to experience but intrinsic to its very structure.
Emotions as Carriers of Meaning and Wisdom
Kaufmann’s work resonates strongly with this framework in its insistence that emotions are carriers of meaning and wisdom. Emotions, on her account, are ways of understanding both the world we inhabit and ourselves as participants within it—whether or not this understanding is conceptual or linguistically articulated. Her emphasis on balance—understood as the ongoing negotiation between polarized emotional states such as pleasure and pain—can be fruitfully interpreted in light of Whitehead’s notion of the subjective aim: the drive within each moment of experience toward harmony or equipoise.
Computational Models and the Dynamics of Emotion
A distinctive feature of Kaufmann’s work is her sustained use of computational and mathematical metaphors to illuminate the structure and dynamics of emotional life. Rather than reducing emotions to mechanistic processes, she employs computational models to show how emotions function as integrative, meaning-sensitive dynamics within complex systems. From a process-relational perspective, this is especially significant: it suggests that computation need not be opposed to lived experience or feeling, but can instead serve as a conceptual bridge between quantitative analysis and qualitative depth. Emotions, on this view, operate as orientational and informational processes through which organisms navigate their worlds, make decisions, and respond creatively to changing conditions.
Emotional Life as Relational and Shared
Equally important is her recognition that emotional life is inherently relational. Prehensions and subjective forms can be shared across organisms, giving rise to empathy and to what might be called collectively felt emotions within social and ecological communities. Such sharing can be destructive as well as constructive: anger, fear, and hatred can circulate, just as compassion, care, wonder, and delight can. Emotional life, therefore, is never merely private; it is woven into the fabric of social and ecological relations.
The Tao and the Cosmological Horizon of Feeling
Finally, Kaufmann’s invocation of the Tao situates emotional sentience within a wider cosmological context. The Tao, as she understands it, cannot be reduced to a formula or doctrine. It is fluid, dynamic, and ultimately ungraspable, yet everywhere operative. From a Whiteheadian perspective, this closely parallels the idea of a cosmic lure at work throughout the world, as well as the notion of a cosmic sympathy—the consequent nature of God—as the widest context within which the many experiences of the world are felt, held together, and woven into a unified whole. In this way, Kaufmann’s work resists any sharp dichotomy between science and spirituality, suggesting instead that they are complementary ways of engaging a single, living, emotionally textured reality.
Emotions as the Foundation of Mind
With the term “human emotion,” I mean such everyday feeling experiences as joy, sadness, courage, fear, gratitude, anger, disgust, delight, trust, mistrust, admiration, envy, love, and hate—familiar feelings, undergirded by common biological structures and processes across the human family. But until recently, science (and hence our educational system) has largely overlooked the crucial role the emotional system plays in the functioning of the living organism. We remain generally unaware that each feeling does something and means something, both moving the body and in-forming the mind in ways that keep us optimally integrated, balanced, and healthy. They are complex subjective servants of an ancient evaluative guidance system, one conserved across our vast evolutionary history, performing many of the same functions that the old Vitalists attributed to some nonphysical force or identity component such as spirit or soul. Together our pleasurable and painful categories of feeling serve as universal ecological biovalues; they encode an ancient evolutionary logic, undergirding all semantic language and human value systems. They, quite literally, build the deepest foundations of “mind” in living systems; they remain central to all aspects of human development, moral conscience and spiritual experience, ultimately delivering the collective “wisdom of the heart.”
- Katherine Peil Kauffman: "Human Values, the Biology of Emotion, and Innate Spirituality, January, 2017. In Emotional Sentience website. Click here.
- Katherine Peil Kauffman: "Human Values, the Biology of Emotion, and Innate Spirituality, January, 2017. In Emotional Sentience website. Click here.
Papers by Katherine Peil Kauffman
reposted from her website: emotionalsentience.com
1. Brief Introduction
2. Intro: Science of Emotion (for Public Health community.)
3. Intro Emotion Science (for the Psych community)
4. Intro: Emotional Sentience and Phenomenal Experience (for Consciousnesses community.)
5. Fractal Epistemology and the Biology of Emotion (for Complexity Science and Transpersonal Psych communities.)
6a. Emotion Science and Naturalistic Spirituality.
6b. Emotion Science Justice & Peacebuilding.
7. Mastering Emotional Intelligence (Self-help Workbook.)
2. Intro: Science of Emotion (for Public Health community.)
3. Intro Emotion Science (for the Psych community)
4. Intro: Emotional Sentience and Phenomenal Experience (for Consciousnesses community.)
5. Fractal Epistemology and the Biology of Emotion (for Complexity Science and Transpersonal Psych communities.)
6a. Emotion Science and Naturalistic Spirituality.
6b. Emotion Science Justice & Peacebuilding.
7. Mastering Emotional Intelligence (Self-help Workbook.)