A Visceral World
The pre-empirical substrate that creates the physical core of experience at the first tier guides us toward choices that are largely governed by visceral processes even though our movements are necessarily sensory guided. The infant’s first priorities when encountering unknown realities in the immediate environment involve survival. Infants respond to these encounters with force and direction guided by visceral processes that ensure they meet their basic needs. The mother’s breast “shows up” for them in Heidegger’s terminology, and they thrust toward it. The visceral realities that guide them are not the entities that are later shaped and identified through sensory guidance. They are urgently sought after sources of nurturance that are “ready-at-hand” as Heidegger suggests in an otherwise undifferentiated landscape. Infants display a primitive, visceral force for survival despite their very limited repertoire of physical responses.
As infants develop, they learn to identify the critical features associated with meeting their needs as “ready-at-hand” aspects of the environment, and they move toward these identified features more efficiently. The significance of these features remains grounded in their visceral guidance as they gradually develop the form-based boundaries that differentiate features into recognizable entities. Visceral grounding involves qualities that overlap, blend and even merge as long as they serve similar personal needs.
Envision a world in which the familiar sensory-defined boundaries that differentiate entities at the verbal-symbolic tier of consciousness have not yet been identified. Our viscerally based experiences at the first tier have not yet been differentiated into the form-based entities they later become in our conscious version of the world. Sources of excitement, for example, all provide varying ways of meeting a similar visceral need. This would also be true for sources of safety and sustenance. Prior to the differentiation of entities, viscerally guided features of first tier experiences are distinguished primarily by the needs that they satisfy.
The viscerally based features in the realities we encounter at the first tier have not yet been defined by sensory guided contour and form. The equivalencies that result do not honor the form-based boundaries that differentiate the entities we recognize in our conscious version of the world. Features are not defined by contour and form but by preferences, inclinations and antipathies. A puppy dog and a brother, for example, might merge viscerally because they are similarly available for playful activities.
When visceral processes govern our responses, we function in a domain that revolves around ourselves, guided by a continuous, evolving flow of personal needs from one moment to the next. As we gain competence within this domain, we become better able to meet our needs. Infants learn to scream more loudly until the unavailable breast milk they need for survival is once again ready-at-hand. Once we identify the source of milk as our mother or primary caregiver and learn to recognize her, we develop a sense of stability and control. We learn how to meet our needs more reliably within the known and predictable realm we construct.
Those who have previously investigated first-tier experiences and tried to characterize them describe a primitive quality that distinguishes them from the descriptions we articulate in everyday thought. Freud analyzed the functioning of unconscious processes as primary process thinking, revealed in the merging of images and symbolic representations he discovered in dreams and called the “royal road” to the unconscious. Primary process thinking, directed by visceral processes, also dominates the disorganized thoughts of psychosis with merged ideas and images, symbolic representations and logical contradictions. Rorschach’s test reveals the perceptual distortions caused by viscerally based, primary process thinking in our responses to ambiguous inkblot images.
Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, described the grounding we establish through practical experience as the “habitus,” a largely undifferentiated realm with a “paradoxical logic” of “inverting, transferring, uniting, and separating” ideas in accordance with the physicality of the body. Freud, Bourdieu and Rorschach were all observing the visceral logic of the first tier of consciousness.
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