Nature, consciousness and feeling: the therapeutic potential of process philosophy

The past few decades have witnessed a rapid expansion in Western culture of various self-help therapies and techniques, often underpinned by the outdated assumptions of mechanistic, reductionist science or lacking a theoretical base altogether. This thesis develops a theory of human experience and understanding which can reveal the possibilities for deeply altering experience. While the theory of metaphor developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is taken as a point of departure for this project, the inability of this theory to deal with deeper levels of experience is used to demonstrate the need to engage with questions of ontology. Conceptualising the coinfluence of experience and understanding can only be achieved, it is argued, by a paradigm shift to process philosophy, understood historically as the effort to move beyond the subject/object division. Based on the dialectical understanding of process and relation, and the related conception of causal principles involving inner and outer aspects, augmented by ideas from hierarchy theory and biosemiotics, process metaphysics is used to develop a view of consciousness as emerging from preconscious natural processes. On this basis the self is viewed as a semi-autonomous system in relation to both individual history and external circumstances, with consciousness deemed a unique process, the only process that each person is completely within. A discussion of action drawing on Suzanne Langer's analysis of forms of animal action, Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and Eliot Chapple's view of the uniqueness of individual rhythms of engagement, provides the basis for a hierarchical theory of consciousness that places the neuroscientific theories of Joseph LeDoux and Antonio Damasio in the context of process metaphysics. This provides the means to clarify Martha Nussbaum's work on the development of emotion. These theories support a view of feeling as the repetition of patterns of interaction in relation to current circumstances, which, it is argued, provides the most basic sense of the self in the world. It is suggested that actual situations the self encounters can be changed by altering beliefs about the causes of events, based on the process ontology presented herein, and observing how feeling changes in the context of this altered understanding. The possibility for changing experience is summarised in a basic set of principles that can then be used to evaluate the efficacy of a broad spectrum of selfhelp therapies and techniques.