"A felt sense is an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time–encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail." - Eugene Gendlin
“The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience.” - Alfred North Whitehead
“The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience.” - Alfred North Whitehead
Imagine that you are talking with a friend, each of you emerging, in the moment at hand, out of your felt interaction with the other. Consider your friend: is she a who or a what?
She is a who if she is a subject of her own experience, with a life of her own—having feelings, aims, and a desire for satisfaction. When you listen to her and look her in the eye, you are attending to her who-ness. She is speaking about her mother, who is gravely ill and about whom she is deeply worried. You sense that she may not be taking care of herself, and you ask, “How are you?” The you whom you are addressing is her who—a center of subjectivity who cannot be reduced to a what.
On the other hand, she is a what if, all things considered, she is better described in less personalist terms—as a process, a structure, a pattern of concrescence, or an instance of relational becoming. In this view, her self is not something to be addressed but something to be analyzed—best understood in impersonal or structural terms. Her who, if it exists at all, is an outcome, an epiphenomenal expression, of her what-ness. You probably wouldn’t say this to her in conversation, but you might quietly think that, deep down, who-ness is an illusion—that all that truly exists is what-ness.
It can seem, for Whitehead, that the self is both a who and a what: a who in the immediacy of the present moment—a living subject of experience characterized by subjective immediacy, feeling, and aim, seeking its own satisfaction—and a what once that satisfaction is achieved. The who becomes a what as the process of concrescence reaches completion and the subject perishes into objectivity. Indeed, Whitehead offers two complementary forms of analysis for these two modes of existence: genetic division, which explores the internal becoming of the subject, and coordinate division, which situates the completed occasion within the extensive continuum as an object among objects.
It is tempting to think that this way of speaking settles the issue of who and what, but the matter is more complicated. The momentary who can itself be considered from two points of view: a third-person and a first-person perspective.
The third-person perspective is an objectifying one, in which the “moment” is seen as an object in the mind’s eye—like a single frame in a motion picture, lasting only an instant, preceded by earlier frames and succeeded by later ones. In effect, the “moment” becomes a what when viewed from this detached standpoint, and the self is rendered as a series of such whats—a sequence of discrete occasions observed from without.
The first-person perspective is very different. It does not observe the frames as they pass before the mind’s eye from a distance, but rather inhabits each frame as it lights up. The self is thus different at every moment, yet always here-and-now. It is never truly an object to itself, except insofar as it remembers past frames. And yet, says Whitehead, it is "self-enjoying" and "self-creative" as it arises of its past. It has "feelings" and "subjective aims" and a desire for "satisfaction" and is, at its deepest level, an act of "decision," of cutting off certain possibilities for responding to its past actual world in the very act of "actualizing" others.
Such language is very existential, very 'who-like,' The self is a non-objectified who in the act of becoming itself—always already in this act of becoming. From this point of view, the who is not unlike the crest of a wave: changing from moment to moment, inheriting and influenced by a past that continues to grow through time, while bearing an as-yet undetermined future.
Interestingly, the more structural what language noted earlier can be used to illuminate aspects of this first-person who-ness. “Concrescence” becomes not a property of micro-events in the depths of atoms, but a phenomenological description of who-ness itself—and the same can be said for other Whiteheadian terms: subjective aim, subjective form, prehension, proposition, multiplicity, nexus, and contrast. Indeed, as I will suggest shortly, even pure potentials or eternal objects can be understood in this way—as features of lived experience rather than as abstract categories of cosmology. Yet this turn toward lived experience requires a shift from the third-person to the first-person perspective, and it is precisely here, I believe, that the philosophy of Eugene Gendlin proves especially helpful.
Gendlin’s philosophy invites us to approach experience from within rather than from without. Where Whitehead gives us a cosmological language of process, Gendlin gives us a phenomenological one. His concept of the felt sense—a bodily awareness of a situation as a whole, prior to and deeper than words or concepts—reveals the living immediacy of experience from the inside. The felt sense is not a mere sensation or emotion, but a tacit, embodied knowing that carries meaning forward.
In this light, several of Whitehead’s key notions can be reinterpreted phenomenologically:
Gendlin thus helps us translate Whitehead’s structural what-language into the who-language of first-person experience, grounding metaphysical categories in the living texture of awareness itself.
The Felt Sense of the Whole: Whitehead's Category of Subjective Harmony
As just noted, on aspect of Gendlin's thought that can be especially helpful is his notion of the felt sense of the whole in the immediacy of each situation. The International Focusing Insttute puts it this way.
She is a who if she is a subject of her own experience, with a life of her own—having feelings, aims, and a desire for satisfaction. When you listen to her and look her in the eye, you are attending to her who-ness. She is speaking about her mother, who is gravely ill and about whom she is deeply worried. You sense that she may not be taking care of herself, and you ask, “How are you?” The you whom you are addressing is her who—a center of subjectivity who cannot be reduced to a what.
On the other hand, she is a what if, all things considered, she is better described in less personalist terms—as a process, a structure, a pattern of concrescence, or an instance of relational becoming. In this view, her self is not something to be addressed but something to be analyzed—best understood in impersonal or structural terms. Her who, if it exists at all, is an outcome, an epiphenomenal expression, of her what-ness. You probably wouldn’t say this to her in conversation, but you might quietly think that, deep down, who-ness is an illusion—that all that truly exists is what-ness.
It can seem, for Whitehead, that the self is both a who and a what: a who in the immediacy of the present moment—a living subject of experience characterized by subjective immediacy, feeling, and aim, seeking its own satisfaction—and a what once that satisfaction is achieved. The who becomes a what as the process of concrescence reaches completion and the subject perishes into objectivity. Indeed, Whitehead offers two complementary forms of analysis for these two modes of existence: genetic division, which explores the internal becoming of the subject, and coordinate division, which situates the completed occasion within the extensive continuum as an object among objects.
It is tempting to think that this way of speaking settles the issue of who and what, but the matter is more complicated. The momentary who can itself be considered from two points of view: a third-person and a first-person perspective.
The third-person perspective is an objectifying one, in which the “moment” is seen as an object in the mind’s eye—like a single frame in a motion picture, lasting only an instant, preceded by earlier frames and succeeded by later ones. In effect, the “moment” becomes a what when viewed from this detached standpoint, and the self is rendered as a series of such whats—a sequence of discrete occasions observed from without.
The first-person perspective is very different. It does not observe the frames as they pass before the mind’s eye from a distance, but rather inhabits each frame as it lights up. The self is thus different at every moment, yet always here-and-now. It is never truly an object to itself, except insofar as it remembers past frames. And yet, says Whitehead, it is "self-enjoying" and "self-creative" as it arises of its past. It has "feelings" and "subjective aims" and a desire for "satisfaction" and is, at its deepest level, an act of "decision," of cutting off certain possibilities for responding to its past actual world in the very act of "actualizing" others.
Such language is very existential, very 'who-like,' The self is a non-objectified who in the act of becoming itself—always already in this act of becoming. From this point of view, the who is not unlike the crest of a wave: changing from moment to moment, inheriting and influenced by a past that continues to grow through time, while bearing an as-yet undetermined future.
Interestingly, the more structural what language noted earlier can be used to illuminate aspects of this first-person who-ness. “Concrescence” becomes not a property of micro-events in the depths of atoms, but a phenomenological description of who-ness itself—and the same can be said for other Whiteheadian terms: subjective aim, subjective form, prehension, proposition, multiplicity, nexus, and contrast. Indeed, as I will suggest shortly, even pure potentials or eternal objects can be understood in this way—as features of lived experience rather than as abstract categories of cosmology. Yet this turn toward lived experience requires a shift from the third-person to the first-person perspective, and it is precisely here, I believe, that the philosophy of Eugene Gendlin proves especially helpful.
Gendlin’s philosophy invites us to approach experience from within rather than from without. Where Whitehead gives us a cosmological language of process, Gendlin gives us a phenomenological one. His concept of the felt sense—a bodily awareness of a situation as a whole, prior to and deeper than words or concepts—reveals the living immediacy of experience from the inside. The felt sense is not a mere sensation or emotion, but a tacit, embodied knowing that carries meaning forward.
In this light, several of Whitehead’s key notions can be reinterpreted phenomenologically:
- Subjective form and subjective aim describe what it is like to be this living immediacy—to feel the pull of possibilities, the weight of the past, and the unfolding of a moment toward satisfaction.
- The withness of the body gains depth when read alongside Gendlin’s emphasis on the body as lived from within—as a source of knowing and insight, not merely a physical organism.
- Experience in the mode of causal efficacy finds resonance in Gendlin’s recognition that we are immediately affected by others and that our subjectivity emerges from these acts of being affected, often through bodily mediation.
- Propositions, understood not as linguistic statements but as non-linguistic lures for feeling, arise in the immediacy of the moment as implicit invitations to sense, imagine, or act in new ways—akin to Gendlin’s felt sense as an unformed yet directive awareness that seeks expression.
Gendlin thus helps us translate Whitehead’s structural what-language into the who-language of first-person experience, grounding metaphysical categories in the living texture of awareness itself.
The Felt Sense of the Whole: Whitehead's Category of Subjective Harmony
As just noted, on aspect of Gendlin's thought that can be especially helpful is his notion of the felt sense of the whole in the immediacy of each situation. The International Focusing Insttute puts it this way.
“The vague, not-yet-fully-articulated experiencing is called a felt sense. It is more than simply a gut feeling or an intuition, and it is more than thoughts or emotions. The felt sense is, rather, the sense of the whole of a situation. It can include thoughts, feelings, and intuitions, but a felt sense is somehow more than all of these.
Many times, if we don’t know how to listen to our felt senses, we might find ourselves asking, ‘Should I follow my heart or my head? My gut or my logical mind?’ In any given moment, our gut can say one thing while our mind insists on something else entirely.
The value of Focusing is that we learn to open ourselves to the whole of our body’s experiencing. In Focusing, we don’t choose between disagreeing parts of ourselves; rather, we ask what it is like to experience all of it. The felt sense is that fuzzy, yet-to-be-articulated awareness of the whole. Felt senses are full of our felt meaning of a situation.”
— The International Focusing Institute
In Whitehead's philosophy this felt sense can well be understood as an felt recognition that each moment of experience contains within it, in his words, a "preestablished harmony" by which the objects that are felt, even as manifold, partake of a unity in the making.