Husserl: Emotions and Feelings

In this study, I will first introduce Husserl’s analysis in Studien zur Struktur des Bewußtseins by emphasizing the reasons that motivate these analyses on descriptive psychology and their status in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in the late Freiburg period. I will then focus on the structure of acts, with particular emphasis on three aspects stressed by Husserl in Studien: intentionality, the taxonomy of acts, and Brentano’s principle of the Vorstellungsgrundlage. The last three parts of this study outline the characteristic features of (...) three fundamental aspects of affective life in Husserl’s phenomenology: emotions, sense feelings, and moods. I will conclude with some general remarks on the status of affects and values in Husserl’s phenomenology. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue in favor of a direct perception account of social cognition, focusing on the idea that we can directly grasp at least some mental states of others through their bodily expressions. I will investigate the way we should consider expressions and their relations to mental phenomena in order to defend DP. In order to do so, I will present Krueger and Overgaard’s idea of expressions as constitutive proper parts of the mental phenomena expressed and I (...) will show how this position can support DP. Then, I will present the way in which the authors seem to construe the relation of parthood between expressions and mental states – that is in terms of components of integral wholes, and I will introduce the possible issues that derive from this strategy. I will propose a different way to understand this parthood relation, referring to Husserl’s notion of moments as distinct from that of pieces. I will narrow my analysis to expressions of feelings, and I will try to argue that they can be described more aptly as moments of the feelings expressed. Finally, I will show how this account can support DP. (shrink)

In his late reflections on values and forms of life from the 1920s and 1930s, Husserl develops the concept of personal value and argues that these values open two kinds of infinities in our lives. On the one hand personal values disclose infinite emotive depths in human individuals while on the other hand they connect human individuals in continuous and progressive chains of care. In order to get at the core of the concept, I will explicate Husserl’s discussion of personal (...) values of love by distinguishing between five related features. I demonstrate that values of love are rooted in egoic depts and define who we are as persons, differ from objective values in being absolute and non-comparative, ground vocational lives as organizing principles, are endlessly self-disclosing and self-intensifying, and establish transitive relations of care between human beings. On the basis of my five-partite distinction, I argue that Husserl’s concepts of love and value of love reveal the dynamic character of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper, I sketch an account of emotion that is based on a close analogy with a Husserlian account of perception. I also make use of the approach that I have limned, viz., to articulate a view of the kind of “conflict without contradiction” which may obtain between a recalcitrant emotion and a judgment. My main contention is that CWC can be accounted for by appeal to the rationality of perception and emotion, conceived as responsiveness to experiential evidence. The (...) conflicts in question can be regarded as obtaining between different strands of evidence, and our perceptual and emotional experiences can be thus conflicted even among themselves, not only in the special case of a conflict with a judgment. (shrink)

The work of Anthony J. Steinbock on emotions―particularly moral emotions―and on religious experience is closely related to a methodological claim. This claim is that the concepts of “experience” and “manifestation” should be understood in a broader manner than that of classical phenomenology, particularly Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In this paper, I examine the way in which Steinbock understands and conceptualizes the kind of givenness to which he refers with the notion of “vertical experience”. I focus on his claim that vertical experiences (...) are irreducible to the kind of experiences that can be described in terms of what he calls “provocation”, “presentation” and the “noesis-noema structure”. Even though I make a criticism of his assertion that the latter implies that they should not be understood as forms of givenness founded on the above-mentioned structure, I agree with some major implications that he draws from them. In the last part of the paper, I discuss his suggestion that the Husserlian conceptualization of emotional givenness should be revised to set forward their structure in terms of what he calls “evocation” and try to give additional reasons, drawn from Husserl himself, to support this claim. The paper comes concludes by stressing the relevance of Steinbock’s analyses concerning what he calls “idolatry”. I argue that his analyses of attitudes that negate the vertical dimension of experience have far reaching implications that go beyond the field of philosophy of religion and open new, promising paths for phenomenological research on social and moral problems. (shrink)

What are fictional emotions and what has phenomenology to say about them? This paper argues that the experience of fictional emotions entails a splitting of the subject between a real and a phantasy ego. The real ego is the ego that imagines something; the phantasy ego is the ego that is necessarily co-posited by any experience of imagining something. Fictional emotions are phantasy emotions of the phantasy ego. The intentional structure of fictional emotions, the nature of their fictional object, as (...) well as the process of constituting the phantasy ego in representificational acts of consciousness are further elaborated to provide the groundwork for a phenomenological analysis of fictional emotions. (shrink)

This article examines how the interactive capabilities of companion robots, particularly their materiality and animate movements, appeal to human users and generate an image of aliveness. Building on Husserl’s phenomenological notion of a ‘double body’ and theories of emotions as affective responses, we develop a new understanding of the robots’ simulated aliveness. Analyzing empirical findings of a field study on the use of the robot Zora in care homes for older people, we suggest that the aliveness of companion robots is (...) the result of a combination of four aspects: 1) material ingredients, 2) morphology, 3) animate movements guided by software programs and human operators as in Wizard of Oz-settings and 4) anthropomorphising narratives created by their users to support the robot’s performance. We suggest that narratives on affective states, such as, sleepiness or becoming frightened attached to the robot trigger users’ empathic feelings, caring and tenderness toward the robot. (shrink)

El conocimiento es un bien necesario para el desarrollo de todo ser humano, deseamos comprender el funcionamiento de todo aquello que, de algún modo, nos afecta e implica. Nos es tan propio que llegamos a definir al ser del hombre como un ser preocupado y ocupado en y con el mundo, interesado por él, abierto mediante un gesto de arrojo cognoscitivo que no se da sino mediante nuestra capacidad de atenderlo, de verter nuestra vida de consciencia en él y alcanzar, (...) con ello, una pátina de consuelo frente al desasosiego que nos provoca lo desconocido, amenazante o indefinido. Ese mecanismo que pone en marcha nuestra atención, que nace precisamente para descubrir realidad, es el que aquí se pretende. Este trabajo busca conocer cómo, mediante la atención, realizamos ese trascendental engarce entre consciencia y realidad, cómo se da ese proceso de conocimiento –de descubrimiento– que permite nuestro desarrollo vital, qué lo genera, qué lo empuja, cómo se da y cuándo se considera consumado. (shrink)

We seem to have some knowledge of the value the things around us have. And some of our knowledge of value seems to be acquired through affective experiences, i.e., by our emotions. In this paper, I will give an account of the relationship between emotions and knowledge of values, largely based on Edmund Husserl’s theory of perception of value. First, I will give a pro tanto justification of the idea that affective cognition of value exists. Then, I will briefly introduce (...) two different accounts of affective cognition of value from early phenomenology: one account supported by Husserl, the other by Max Scheler. By comparing these two accounts, I will argue that the Husserlian account is more promising of the two. It deals with emotions in analogy with sense perception. Thus, it can be regarded as one form of a perceptual account of emotion, which is quite popular in the contemporary philosophy of emotion. I will argue for the plausibility of the perceptual account of emotion in general, and then, at the end of the chapter, I will argue that my own, Husserl-inspired version of the perceptual account is a valid way of explaining our cognition of values. (shrink)

Peter Goldie has argued for the view that the intentionality of emotions is inseparable from their phenomenology, but certain criticisms have revealed his argument as problematic. I will argue that it is possible to address these problems, at least in the case of the emotion of fear, thereby vindicating IPE, by appeal to a Husserlian version of the perceptual account of emotions, centered on the idea that the contents of perceptual experiences are fulfillment conditions. Fulfillment means the achievement of a (...) kind of immediate, or “full”, experience of an object or some of its aspects. In the case of visual perception, suppose you are looking at an apple. If you turn it around, you will find yourself in full view of its back side, which was previously anticipated “emptily”, fulfilling or disappointing some of your anticipations in regard to it. On the Husserlian view, the success or failure of a visual perceptual experience consists in such fulfillments and disappointments. If we can provide an account of the intentionality of emotions along similar lines, it will necessarily involve the phenomenal contrast between fullness and emptiness, enabling us to support IPE. (shrink)

In this paper, I wish to explore whether and how emotions build on a state of being motivated that is linked to character and requires the positive contribution of habit. Drawing on phenomenological accounts of motivation, I argue that the relation between emotions and character depends on the institution of an emotional space, which is responsible for our sensitivity to the values of the felt situation and yet it is open to changes and revisions.

RESUMEN Se interroga la atencionalidad propia del amor en cuanto que experiencia privilegiada y primordial del cuidado. En busca de un acceso al fenómeno del amor, se propone interrogarlo conforme al tipo de atención que promueve, asumiendo y discutiendo los recursos aportados por la fenomenología husserliana, así como por las fenomenologías contraintencionales, en particular la de Waldenfels. De este modo, si para describir este fenómeno es preciso dar cuenta del fundamento afectivo de la atención, también hay que reconocer que el (...) amor es vivido como un hecho original o un acontecimiento que implica para el amante una reorientación existencial y atencional. ABSTRACT The article inquires into the attentionality inherent to love as a privileged and primordial experience of care. Seeking access to the phenomenon of love, we suggest inquiring into it according to the type of attention it promotes, drawing on and discussing the resources provided by Husserlian phenomenology, as well as by counter-intentional phenomenologies, particularly Waldenfels'. Thus, while it is necessary to account for the affective grounds of attention in order to describe this phenomenon, it is also essential to recognize that love is experienced as an original fact or as an event that entails an existential and attentional reorientation of the lover. (shrink)

I argue that, on Husserl's account, affectivity, along with the closely related phenomenon of association, follows a form of sui generis lawfulness belonging to the domain of what Husserl calls motivation, which must be distinguished both (1) from the causal structures through which we understand the body third-personally, as a material thing; and also (2) from the rational or inferential structures at the level of deliberative judgment traditionally understood to be the domain of epistemic import. In effect, in addition to (...) recognizing a “space of causes” and a “space of reasons,” Husserl’s account of affectivity and the epistemology of passive synthesis in which it is situated suggest that we should recognize a separate “space of motivations.” Within this space, on Husserl’s phenomenological picture, we can isolate two different sorts of epistemic import, one belonging directly to the passive-synthetic content of experience, as explained in Husserl’s account of association and his closely aligned notion of nonlinguistic sense, and a second—my primary focus—affectivity, which is still relevant for that content, albeit indirectly, and holds epistemic import in its determination not of what that content is but of how it comes to matter for us. (shrink)

Phenomenologists are yet another group of philosophers who have also dealt with the problem of values and valuation. What do they have to say about it? Heidegger, to be sure, emphatically warned that we’d better stop approaching serious philosophical problems in terms of valuing and values. It is actually the result of all the efforts to the contrary, he claimed, that has brought nihilism into history and has continued to enhance it along with the accompanying despair. Values and nihilism are (...) in fact the outcome prepared by the dynamics of the traditional metaphysical dichotomy between a positing subject and a posited there-standing object with properties—valuing and values being just one of its latest expressions. Scheler and Hartmann, on the other hand, devoted their lives to the effort of elucidating valuing and values. However, here we will focus on the thoughts that Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement, developed regarding this problem. This is necessary if we want to deepen our understanding of the intensity and the breadth of the work that the phenomenologists he inspired developed on the possibility (or impossibility) of a philosophy of values. It is also necessary for an assessment of the real prospects of such a project, which today seems to attract progressively greater attention. To this effect, the structure of the present paper is as follows. In §2, I describe the basic features of the way Husserl carried out phenomenological-philosophical research. I will focus in particular on the meaning of “intentionality,” of “phenomenological method,” and of “intentional constitution.” In §3, I present Husserl’s idea regarding the possibility and meaning of a phenomenological critique of reason in general. The general outline and fundamental orientation of Husserl’s original project for a critique of the axiological and practical reason as well as of his essentialist-normative philosophy of valuing and of values is presented in §4. Section 5 contains an account of Husserl’s approach to emotive phenomena and to value-appearance in the Logical Investigations (1900/01) and in subsequent treatments of the issue along the lines of that original project. In §6, I present the key issue and the key problem in Husserl’s essentialist-normative Axiology. Finally, in §7 I sum up the conclusions and make some further critical remarks. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the unique value of a Husserlian phenomenological account of the affective (or “feeling”) dimension of emotional experience for realizing Aristotle’s vision of the cultivation of virtue. Through an analysis of envy, the author defends the claim that the affective dimension of self-assessment is central to the process of conceptualization by which we learn to apprehend our own emotional responses. Analytic conceptual analyses that dismiss the subjective, affective correlate of emotional experiences, therefore, fail to take seriously what is (...) involved in learning from one's mistakes. (shrink)

Es ist bekannt, daß Husserl Fichtes theoretischer Philosophie keine gute Seite abgewinnen konnte. In den 1917 vor Kriegsheimkehrern gehaltenen und 1918 wiederholten Vorträgen über Fichte spricht Husserl von »abstrusen Konstruktionen«, die in der Wissenschaftslehre Fichtes zu finden seien. Nichtsdestotrotz kann man sehen, daß beide Ansätze mehr als bloße Strukturanalogien aufweisen. Es wurde - wenn auch nicht häufig - darauf hingewiesen, daß sachliche Verweise beider Ansätze aufeinander möglich sind. Die Berührungspunkte in der praktischen Philosophie dagegen fallen eher ins Auge. In seinen (...) Vorträgen orientiert sich Husserl insbesondere an Fichtes populären und religionsphilosophischen Schriften und es ist inzwischen bekannt, daß sich Husserl in den 20er Jahren vermehrt der praktischen Philosophie im Sinne Fichtes zuwendet, über deren Verhältnis zu der seinen er in einem Brief an Adolf Grimme meint, »daß die religions-philosophischen Perspektiven, die mir die Phänomenologie eröffnete, überraschend nahe Beziehung zu Fichtes späterer Gotteslehre zeigen«. Ich möchte mich an dieser Stelle auf den theoretischen Zugang konzentrieren und dabei speziell den Begriff der Affektion bei Fichte und Husserl näher untersuchen. (shrink)