Did Schelling and Whitehead actually express a suspicion of “pure feeling”?

Not directly in the sense of outright critique—but yes, both were deeply attentive to the limitations and dangers of reducing experience to undifferentiated immediacy or pre-reflective affect. Let’s break it down:

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Schelling

In works like System of Transcendental Idealism and Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, Schelling is after a dynamic, living account of nature and subjectivity—not a static metaphysics of pure immediacy or brute feeling.

• He doesn’t dismiss feeling but treats it as one pole of a dialectic: the unconscious, dark ground of existence (Ungrund) is indeed affective, powerful, irrational—but it must be mediated through freedom, reflection, and art.

• Schelling’s view of aesthetic experience hinges on the unity of opposites—conscious/unconscious, nature/spirit, subject/object—not the dominance of pure feeling.

So, he isn't suspicious of feeling per se, but of leaving it unmediated—unworked through.

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Whitehead

Whitehead’s concept of prehension includes feeling at its most basic level: a non-conscious grasping of the world. But he explicitly differentiates between ‘pure feeling’ and higher forms of experience.

• He distinguishes between ‘physical feeling’, which is raw, causal, non-conceptual, and ‘conceptual feeling’, which involves valuation, pattern, anticipation.

• His metaphysics is processual, but not immediate. The concrescence of an occasion involves phases, including integration and contrast—it’s a movement from feeling to meaning.

Again, not a dismissal, but a commitment to relational depth. Pure immediacy or unmediated affect isn’t the telos—it’s only a moment in the process of becoming.

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So were they suspicious?

Not moralistically or dismissively. But they both refused to elevate undifferentiated immediacy—what we might now call “raw affect” or “visceral experience”—to the status of full understanding or meaningful relation.

In that sense, yes: both sought to show how feeling becomes thought, how affect becomes form, how nature becomes intelligible—not by losing its force, but by entering into structured relation.