What is Feeling in the Context of Creativity?

How do we find our way through the world, not by calculation or detached observation, but by a kind of attuned, embodied sensing—a feeling? What is it to be pulled, nudged, or even unsettled by the world, and how does this underlie creative action? Feeling, in this context, is not merely an internal state, nor is it simply the sum of our emotions. It is the ongoing, relational, and embodied process through which we are moved by, and move with, the world in the making.

Feeling is the embodied, pre-conceptual, and relational experimental attunement to the world—a dynamic process of being affected and affecting, of caring and being concerned, that underpins all our actions and sense-making. It is not reducible to discrete emotions like joy or anger, nor is it simply a passive reception of stimuli. Rather, feeling is the active, enactive, and ongoing appraisal of situations: a primordial sense that things matter, that we are never indifferent, and that we are always, in some way, pulled by the affordances and solicitations of our environment. To feel is to be in the midst of a world that is always already in the process of becoming, where our actions, perceptions, and very sense of self emerge from cycles of meaningful engagement.

See Also: Enaction, Sensing, Emergence

Further Reading: Volume 182