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

Taking Heart and Making Sense argues that theoretical developments in the neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of feeling and emotion indicate a need to amend our most basic understanding of the world.

Lindgaard proposes a worldview based on the fundamental reality of change, best understood through the concepts of process and relation. This new metaphysics clarifies theories of feeling and the physical body, and validates concepts such as attunement, interaction and histories of functioning.

Her theory conceptualises feeling as the perspective from the inside of a certain kind of living system, which exists as a whole process over time. In relation to much longer trajectories of evolution, human feeling is prefigured in animal consciousness and meaning is immanent in nature.

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.