In my view, existence can be divided into three broad classes of phenomena: emotions, ideas, and sensations. Out of these three types of phenomena, emotions and sensations are directly relevant to the matter of the inner and the outer.
A sensation is equivalent to a passive encounter with the outer. This is true even in the case of so-called internal sensations; in reality, internal sensations are predicated on a partial division of the self from itself. For example, if I feel internal pain, this pain makes my body take on something of the character of an external object, without my entirely casting the painful body part off. I become aware, in the sensation of pain, as in the sensation of pleasure, of a body part as something partially exterior to my self.
Emotions are the opposite type of phenomenon. To experience an emotion is inherently and completely an act of expression. To experience great grief, for example, is to sob, to shudder with one's cries, to adopt a sorrowful facial expression. The grief is nothing but the expression of grief. To experience an emotion or, in other words, express oneself means, first of all: to exist in a certain fashion, to come into being in particular way. Emotion is the incarnation of the self. Expression is not self-centered; rather, it inherently expresses itself to another. It has already posited an audience at the very moment it comes to exist. This audience is outer and, in its most extreme form, equal to the Other as a radically strange and unknowable mystery external to oneself.
The act of opening oneself up to the other is always fundamentally motivated by love. First of all, it is a choice to posit the other, to make the other a possible reality for oneself. It is a selfless act in that sense, one motivated by a desire for the other to exist. Secondly, it is to suspend the absolute dominion that one possesses if one exists in isolation: suddenly there is a second entity who is capable of making choices that differ from or even clash with mine. In short, it is the opposite of a desire to dominate. Third, it is to put oneself at the service of the other, in the sense that, by incarnating myself, I make it possible for the other to do with me as he wishes. Fourth, the act of opening oneself up to the other entails a desire for reciprocation--that is, for the other to make his self known to oneself as another, independent self, which, as a self that has chosen to expose itself like I have, is also driven by love. Sensation is the means by which the self and other--the inner and the outer--make themselves known to each other. Sensation means not only an encounter with the outer, but a separation from the object of one's love. Sensation is always a kind of pain, then. To encounter the other is to encounter the one whom one loves but also the one who inflicts pain on oneself. Out of love, the self, which is nothing but love, willingly accepts the pain that attends this encounter. This would appear to make love a helpless victim of an unknowable, omnipotent Other, but in reality, love is the master, because the whole situation has been set up by love, and love always inherently embraces it. Love is not weak but rather the most powerful thing of all.
And that is my story, quite different from the original post's, about the inner and the outer.
