Creature Feeling

that strange and profound mental reaction to the numinous which we proposed to call ‘creature-feeling’ or creature-consciousness, with its concomitant feelings of abasement and prostration and of the diminution of the self into nothingness

Otto’s canonical definition of creature feeling as the specific numinous response of self-annihilation before the holy, carefully distinguished from ordinary experiences of weakness or dependence.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917thesis

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This kind of consciousness is sometimes called creature consciousness, and contrasts with state consciousness, or as we’ll call it here, mental state consciousness, which is the ability to be aware that one is experiencing something.

LeDoux appropriates the vocabulary of ‘creature consciousness’ to designate bare wakefulness, distinguishing it from higher-order mental state awareness — a functional redeployment that strips Otto’s term of its numinous valence.

LeDoux, Joseph, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety, 2015supporting

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Does the ego actually experience itself as a creature? Is that an actual ego experience for modern men and women? The answer to that question determines one’s religious position in relation to existence.

Edinger transposes Otto’s creature feeling into Jungian ego psychology, arguing that the capacity to experience oneself as creature — rather than as self-sufficient rational agent — determines the very possibility of individuation and genuine religiosity.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992supporting

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in the probing and analysis of such states of the soul as that of solemn worship, it will be well if regard be paid to what is unique in them rather than to what they have in common with other similar states

Otto argues methodologically for the irreducibility of numinous states — including creature feeling — against reductive psychological and sociological accounts that dissolve religious uniqueness into generic emotional categories.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting

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It stirred something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had something of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism — and yet the feeling was not pain so much as abhorrence.

James’s first-person phenomenological account captures a pre-theoretical analogue of creature feeling — a somatic-existential disruption before an overwhelming presence — that anticipates Otto’s formal concept.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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Basically there are three possible religious positions concerning these terms creature and creator. First is what I call credo containment. Second is secular, rationalistic alienation, usually accompanied by inflation. And third is ego/Self dialogue, or individuation.

Edinger maps the creature-creator polarity onto three existential stances, situating creature feeling as the experiential prerequisite for the third and most psychologically mature position — genuine ego-Self dialogue.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992aside

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