Feeling together may mean knowing about something beyond any individual involved, if they feel a (literally present or imagined) third thing together. But each of these three things (individuals or self and other and objects or ideas) might be both known to some degree and created or co-created together. Your thoughts?

ChatGPT said:

Yes. Feeling together is not merely co-presence but a shared act of orientation toward a third thing—which is simultaneously felt, known, and made.

Let me unfold your thought a little further:

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🌿 1. The Triadic Structure of Shared Experience

You're describing a triadic relation:

• Subject A

• Subject B

• Shared Third (object, idea, moment, absence)

This echoes Peirce’s semiotics, Buber’s I-Thou-It, and even the psychoanalytic concept of the transitional object. But you’re pointing to a dynamic where co-feeling becomes an epistemic and ontological event—where relation doesn’t just reveal the third thing; it shapes it.

The third is not merely perceived; it's mutually constituted.

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🌌 2. Feeling as Knowing-as-Making

To feel something together is to open a shared field where:

• Perception is co-attuned

• Meaning is co-negotiated

• Reality is slightly rewritten by the act of mutual orientation

This “third” thing isn’t inert—it’s shaped by being known through two (or more) perspectives. It is felt into being through relational encounter.

This shifts epistemology toward inter-affective ontology:

Knowing isn't just about grasping what is—it's about being-with in such a way that something comes to be.

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🔁 3. Recursive Co-Construction

Each of the three (the two feelers and the felt-thing) is changed:

• A and B are not stable observers—they are reconstituted through the act of joint attention and shared affect.

• The third thing might have “existed” prior but becomes differently real in the act of being co-felt.

So, you don’t just know about the third thing—you participate in its relational emergence.

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🕊 4. Implications

This could be a foundation for:

• A relational epistemology (truth as felt-into-being)

• A co-constructive ethics (where accountability arises from shared orientation)

• A rethinking of reality itself (as something emergent from multi-subjective contact zones)

This process may also explain why:

• Shared grief feels clarifying

• Collective awe feels sacred

• Political solidarity can feel like ontological ground is shifting

Because in each case, a third thing (loss, beauty, injustice) is being co-felt into clarity—and everyone involved becomes more real through it.

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Would you like to explore this as a metaphysical model? Or apply it to therapy, art, or social formation?

You said:

I was thinking of Gilbert Simendon though not trying to mimic him.

ChatGPT said:

You’re working in that Simondonian register where the individual is not a pre-given substance, but rather a phase in an ongoing process of individuation—and where the relation is not secondary, but constitutive.

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🧩 Reframing Your Idea in Simondonian Terms (lightly)

What you’re describing is a situation in which:

• Two preindividual fields (two persons, not fully individuated but in process)

• Encounter a third pole (an object, idea, phenomenon—not fixed, also in process)

• And this triadic encounter becomes a milieu of individuation—a field in which all three elements are transformed.

In Simondon’s terms:

The “third thing” isn't just an object of shared focus; it is a metastable field that enables a new phase of individuation for each participant.

So feeling-together is not just affective synchronization. It’s transductive co-individuation, mediated by an object that is also becoming.

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🔄 Feeling-Together as Transduction

Your phrase—“feeling together can mean knowing about something beyond any individual involved”—maps well onto transduction:

• Transduction is the process where a structure propagates through a medium, transforming both.

• In your case, feeling flows across the relational field and induces structure—that is, knowing, being, meaning—within each participant and the third thing itself.

The third thing may be a song, a moment, an idea, or a pain. But once it is co-felt, it becomes ontogenetically real in a new way—not just for each subject, but as part of their individuation.

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✨ So Your Insight, in Simondonian Spirit:

To feel something together is to enter a shared process of co-individuation, catalyzed by a third term that is itself becoming through the encounter.
The third is not just known—it becomes a milieu in which each participant finds a new phase of themselves.