Feelings

I realize by my prior posts that I've described personas and ethoi largely in terms of conversation or thought. In actuality, though personas and ethoi are constructed through social intercourse, they actually owe more to feelings than to reflection or conscious intention. Now, when I say "feelings" I don't mean emotions alone, though emotions - themselves complex phenomena - certainly play a role (perhaps major) in the construction of personas and ethoi. In addition to emotions, our personas and ethoi form largely as a result of feelings: we feel another's response to our personas, so that our personas become formed in response to things we feel in our interactions with other people. Conversely, our interactions with other people make them feel certain ways that in turn help form their personas. Call this nonverbal communication, if you will, but when we respond in such a way that we damp a characteristic or conviction, we do so not so often because someone has expressed disapproval, but because we feel reluctant or hesitant or "wrong" based on another's nonverbal cues.

More positively, our personas and ethoi are often affirmed by those around us. This affirmation, too, is primarily "felt": we feel positive and secure and endorsed and in consequence we form our personas to conform to these positive feelings. Groups, too, mold their ethoi through feelings - "group minds" if you will - that derive either internally or externally. When a group is positive and unconflicted, the group's members all feel quite well about themselves. The tendency is for a group (or a person) to keep doing those things until they become solidified (if we can speak of solidity in this regard) in its ethos. And when newcomers experience the group ethos, they in turn feel certain ways that either encourage or discourage them to "join" the group. By joining a group, a person places her persona into intercourse with the group ethos and in response to her feelings, her persona changes or, more concretely, her persona in relation to that group forms.

If this holds, then in the interaction between our personas/ethoi and the Spirit's persona our feelings become determinative. We begin to associate certain feelings with the Spirit's presence, and these may be quite trustworthy, i.e. each time we reflectively assert that the Spirit was in fact present, we remember how we felt during that experience and begin to expect that we'll feel similar in future congress with the Spirit. The most extreme example of this is religious ecstasy, a phenomenon historically associated with the Spirit's presence but which is greeted with some scepticism today. Yet for those who have experienced such ecstasy, its presence becomes a requirement for them to assert that the Spirit is/was present. Even for those who greet ecstasy with scepticism, other, milder feelings are just as prevalent: an uplifting of the breath into one's throat, chill bumps, tingling, peace, unity and self-expansion - all feelings - become just as stringently associated with te experience of the Spirit.

Historically, the Enlightenment cast a huge pall over feelings, particularly in the work of Descartes, who argued that one cannot really trust one's feelings at all: instead, one must examine one's mind and thoughts, for feelings cannot be trusted. And lest the rationalists become smug, Kant argued that rationality and thought also cannot be trusted unreservedly. So by the end of the Enlightment, we were left with severe scepticism about both thought and feeling (though not reason or logic, it must be admitted), leading eventually into our post-modern age and its scepticism about object referents, real truth and objective viewpoints.

However, personas and ethoi know nothing about all this. Instead, they still function and arise as they have for all of our long history as a species. In this I'm asserting that personas have played a significant role in our evolution as a social species (and, by extension, in the evolution of other social species). Consequently, the mental processes (and feelings are mental processes) that lead to the formation of personas have a long evolutionary history and, as such, are pervasive and persistent: they work across cultures and histories because they have biological roots whose history is much, much longer than those associated with critical thought, perhaps even language itself.

If personas and ethoi are fundamentally about feelings, then reading them is a matter of feeling (at least immediately) as well. Let me clarify: I can read historic narratives without using a great deal of feeling, yet authors know that their most effective work is that which elicits feeling. To become engrossed in a work of literature, engrossed to the point that one no longer realizes she's reading, is a matter of the work's engaging her feelings as well as her mind. And I have certainly wept and laughted while reading, as I suspect most of you have. But reading literature or documents, even though they may engage our feelings and personas, is one step removed from the immediate experience of other personas and ethoi. In immediate events, reading persona/ethos is always a matter of feeling rather than analysis, though analysis certainly contributes its part. In fact, the type of "reading" I'm discussing is actually more removed from the natural, organic reading we all do when we interact with others. I've often heard someone say, on meeting a stranger or newcomer, "I just can't read them" or "I don't know how I feel about them." Such comments point to the more organic reading that we all do, which is actually a mutual formation of personas. Thank you for reading.