Feeling Is First

Abstract

Within the fields of aesthetics and psychology, there is a long tradition of arguing that affect precedes cognition. A verbalized thought following upon a feeling and associated with it does not translate the feeling precisely or adequately. In fact, as C. S. Peirce would argue, the thought itself projects its own affect, which is independent of its logic. The essence of affect or feeling will always elude linguistic capture. This essay argues that experiences of belief and doubt are affective sensations, and both can be graphed on a scale of sensuous intuition or cognitive guessing (which, again, projects affect). The failure of language to grasp what we refer to as instances of emotion, feeling, sensation, affect, belief, doubt, and the like is more of an intractable problem for philosophical aesthetics than it is for the aesthetics of the art experience. Examples of the art of Cy Twombly, Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Bridget Riley, and Katharina Grosse are invoked to argue through the gap between thought and feeling.