Man’s World and Logos as Feeling

Abstract

Man’s relationship to the world is a perennial problem of philosophy. The problem is one of accounting for man’s experience of the world. Although man shares the world with other living beings, his experience of the world is radically different from theirs. In accounting for his experience of the world he also understands himself, he becomes self-aware, as it were. The experience of the world, it has been claimed is the experience of an articulated, structured reality. Otherwise, the human mind would simply be lost in the maze of the multifarious and discreet perceptions of what it encounters in the world. In the ancient Western philosophy, the source of the fundamental order in the cosmos as a whole has been traced to the logos. In modern philosophy, it is resurrected especially in the philosophy of Kant and Husserl. The logos or the rationality of there being an ordered world of experience is cognitive rationality. This paper explores feeling as a hidden modality of the logos. In feeling we have a fundamental awareness of the object as a unity. This is a primitive experience. Here, an attempt will be made to understand the logos from the angle of felt experience imposing order on the world.