Taking Heart and Making Sense: A New View of Nature, Feeling and the Body

Is feeling a phenomenon of the body or the brain? What do animals feel? How do living systems become conscious? Taking Heart and Making Sense takes on these and many more questions about the natural world and human experience, helping us to understand our feelings and emotions, and our sense of meaning in life.

Taking Heart and Making Sense takes readers on a conceptual adventure across many disciplines, presenting contemporary theories about feeling and emotion by major researchers in psychology, philosophy and cognitive science. Lindgaard points out themes as well as problems in these theories, and frames them in relation to our fundamental concepts about the world. Solving these problems requires nothing less than a profound shift in worldview.

This new worldview is based on the concepts of change, process and relation. It supports coherent explanations of feeling, consciousness and life itself. Feeling is understood as an inner sensing that arises from the whole body. Human beings are seen as unique and individualised as well as deeply interconnected, with each other and with the natural world.

This perspective stands as an alternative to prevalent views in contemporary neuroscience, which characterise consciousness as an isolated hallucination or a direct effect of neural processes alone, and feeling as a meaningless by-product of homeostasis. Taking Heart and Making Sense contends instead that consciousness emerges first as feeling at the level of the whole body.

Feeling is a mode of understanding in and with the whole body in the world.