THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

PHENOMENOLOGY OF EMOTION

The emotions occupy a fundamental place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle.

However, the phenomenology of the emotions has until recently remained a relatively ne-
glected topic. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion is an outstanding guide and
reference source to this important and fascinating topic. Comprising forty-nine chapters by a
team of international contributors, this handbook covers the following topics:

• historical perspectives, including Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, Levinas and Arendt;

• contemporary debates, including existential feelings, situated affectivity, embodiment,
art, morality and feminism;
• self-directed and individual emotions, including happiness, grief, self-esteem and shame;
• social emotions, including sympathy, aggressive emotions, collective emotions and
political emotions;
• borderline cases of emotion, including solidarity, trust, pain, forgiveness and revenge.

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy studying phenomenology, ethics,
moral psychology and philosophy of psychology, The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology
of Emotion is also suitable for those in related disciplines such as religion, sociology and
anthropology.

Thomas Szanto is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Subjectivity Research,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Hilge Landweer is Professor of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

 ROUTLEDGE H A N DBOOKS IN PHILOSOPH Y

Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy are state-of-the-art surveys of emerging, newly refreshed,

and important fields in philosophy, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key
problems, themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research.
All chapters for each volume are specially commissioned, and written by leading scholars
in the field. Carefully edited and organized, Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy provide indis-
pensable reference tools for students and researchers seeking a comprehensive overview of
new and exciting topics in philosophy. They are also valuable teaching resources as accom-
paniments to textbooks, anthologies, and research-orientated publications.

Also available:

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF METAPHYSICAL GROUNDING

Edited by Michael J. Raven

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF COLOUR

Edited by Derek H. Brown and Fiona Macpherson

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY

Edited by Saba Bazargan-Forward and Deborah Tollefsen

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF EMPATHY

Edited by Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY

Edited by Kelly Arenson

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRUST AND PHILOSOPHY

Edited by Judith Simon

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Handbooks-in-Philosophy/book-series/RHP
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF PHENOMENOLOGY
OF EMOTION

Edited by Thomas Szanto

and Hilge Landweer
 First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Thomas Szanto and Hilge
Landweer; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Szanto, Thomas, editor. | Landweer, Hilge, editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook of phenomenology of emotion /
edited by Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Series: Routledge handbooks in philosophy |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019056589 (print) | LCCN 2019056590 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138744981 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315180786 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Emotions (Philosophy) | Phenomenology.
Classification: LCC B815 .R68 2020 (print) |
LCC B815 (ebook) | DDC 128/.37—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056589
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056590

ISBN: 978-1-138-74498-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-18078-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments x
Notes on contributors xi

PART 1
Historical perspectives 39

1 Franz Brentano 41
Michelle Montague

2 Edmund Husserl 53
James Jardine

3 Alexander Pfänder 63
Genki Uemura and Toru Yaegashi

4 Max Scheler 72
Matthias Schloßberger

5 Moritz Geiger 87
Alessandro Salice

6 Else Voigtländer 96
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

v
 Contents

7 Martin Heidegger and Otto Friedrich Bollnow 104

Gerhard Thonhauser

8 Dietrich von Hildebrand 114

Jean Moritz Müller

9 Edith Stein 123

Antonio Calcagno

10 Gerda Walther and Hermann Schmalenbach 133

Linas Tranas and Emanuele Caminada

11 Aurel Kolnai 144

Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

12 Aron Gurwitsch 153

Eric Chelstrom

13 Jean-Paul Sartre 159

Anthony Hatzimoysis

14 Emmanuel Levinas 168

Sophie Loidolt

15 Hannah Arendt 177

Judith Mohrmann

16 Simone de Beauvoir 187

Maren Wehrle

17 Maurice Merleau-Ponty 197

Joel Krueger

18 Frantz Fanon 207

Alia Al-Saji

19 Hermann Schmitz 215

Henning Nörenberg

PART 2
Systematic issues and contemporary debates 225

20 Affective intentionality and the reactive attitudes 227

Bennett W. Helm

vi
 Contents

21 The varieties of affective experience 239

John J. Drummond

22 Existential feelings 250

Matthew Ratcliffe

23 Emotional atmospheres 262

Tonino Griffero

24 Values, norms, justification and the appropriateness of emotions 275

Roberta De Monticelli

25 Morality and the emotions 288

John J. Drummond and Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl

26 Situated affectivity 299

Achim Stephan and Sven Walter

27 Feminism, embodiment and emotions 312

Luna Dolezal

28 Embodied interaffectivity and psychopathology 323

Thomas Fuchs

29 Art and emotion 337

Noël Carroll

PART 3
Self-directed and individual emotions 347

30 Shame 349
Dan Zahavi

31 Self-esteem, pride, embarrassment and shyness 358

Anna Bortolan

32 Humility, humiliation and affliction 369

Anthony J. Steinbock

33 Disgust 380
Sara Heinämaa

34 Fear, anxiety and boredom 392

Lauren Freeman and Andreas Elpidorou

vii
 Contents

35 Grief 403
Line Ryberg Ingerslev

36 Joy and happiness 416

Michela Summa

PART 4
Other-directed and collective emotions 427

37 Empathy, sympathy and compassion 429

Thiemo Breyer

38 Aggressive emotions: from irritation to hatred, contempt

and indignation 441
Hilge Landweer

39 Hetero-induced shame and survivor shame 455

Alba Montes Sánchez

40 Joint feeling 466

Héctor Andrés Sánchez Guerrero

41 Political emotions 478

Thomas Szanto and Jan Slaby

PART 5
Borderline cases of emotions 495

42 Forgiveness and revenge 497

Fabian Bernhardt

43 Gratitude 509
Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl

44 Trust 522
Nicolas de Warren

45 Feeling solidarity 532

Jan Müller

46 Pain 543
Fredrik Svenaeus

viii
 Contents

47 The uncanny 553

Dylan Trigg

48 Hate of evil 564

Hans Bernhard Schmid

49 Love 575
Angelika Krebs

Index 589

ix
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are very grateful to the excellent team at Routledge, and in particular to Tony Bruce and
Adam Johnson, for their keen interest in this project from its very inception, and their patience
and support throughout the editorial process. We appreciate the helpful suggestions of two
anonymous reviewers of the book proposal. We also wish to thank Jenny Stupka, who assisted
us at the final editorial stages. We are deeply indebted to Lucy Osler, Matthias Schloßberger,
and especially Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, who have read and commented drafts of the Intro-
duction. Thomas’ work on this volume was generously supported by a number of research
agencies, notably his European Union Horizon-2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual
Fellowship (655067): “Shared Emotions, Group Membership, and Empathy” at the University
of Copenhagen, Sara Heinämaa’s Academy of Finland research project: “Marginalization and
Experience: Phenomenological Analyses of Normality and Abnormality” at the University
of Jyväskylä, and his research project “Antagonistic Political Emotions” (P 32392-G) at the
University of Vienna, funded by The Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

x
 CONTRIBUTORS

Alia Al-Saji is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Montreal. Her work
brings together phenomenology, critical philosophy of race, and feminist theory, with an
abiding interest in questions of time, affect, and racialization. She is the author of “The
Racialization of Muslim Veils” (Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2010) and “Decolonizing
Bergson: The temporal schema of the open and the closed” (Beyond Bergson, SUNY 2019).
Al-Saji argues for the philosophical, political, and lived importance of affective hesitation,
notably in “A Phenomenology of Hesitation” (Living Alterities, SUNY 2014).

Fabian Bernhardt received his PhD from Free University Berlin, where he was part of the
research cluster “Languages of Emotion.” He has co-edited (with H. Landweer) a volume on
law and emotion (Recht und Emotion II. Sphären der Verletzlichkeit; Alber 2017) and published a
monograph on forgiveness (Zur Vergebung. Eine Reflexion im Ausgang von Paul Ricœur; Neofelis
2014) and on revenge (Rache. Über einen blinden Fleck der Moderne; Matthes & Seitz 2020).

Anna Bortolan is a Lecturer in Philosophy in the Department of Political and Cultural

Studies at Swansea University. Prior to this, she was a Lecturer in the School of Divinity,
History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and Postdoctoral Fellow at Univer-
sity College Dublin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of emotion,
phenomenology, and philosophy of psychiatry, and her work explores questions concerning
the role of affective experience in psychopathology, the relationship between affectivity and
moral experience, and the connection between emotions, self-consciousness, and self hood.

Thiemo Breyer is Heisenberg Professor for Phenomenology and Anthropology at the

University of Cologne. His research focuses on issues of perception, embodiment, and af-
fectivity. Among his publications are three monographs: On the Topology of Cultural Memory
(Königshausen & Neumann 2007), Attentionalität und Intentionalität (Fink 2011), Verkörperte
Intersubjektivität und Empathie (Klostermann 2015).

Antonio Calcagno is Professor of Philosophy at King’s University College at Western

University, Canada. He works on the early phenomenological movement and is a Member
of the College, Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of Giordano Bruno and the Logic of

xi
 Contributors

Coincidence (Peter Lang 1998), The Philosophy of Edith Stein (Duquesne University Press 2007),
Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and Their Time (Bloomsbury 2007), and Lived Experience from
the Inside Out: Social and Political Philosophy in Edith Stein (Duquesne University Press 2014).

Emanuele Caminada is Academic Archivist and Senior Researcher at the Husserl Archives
of the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. His main research interests and publications
include: phenomenological methods and movements, social ontology, interdisciplinary an-
thropology, the phenomenology of common-sense, aesthetics, philosophy of religion and
politics. He is on the editorial board of the journal Metodo. Recently, he published the
monograph Vom Gemeingeist zum Habitus: Husserls Ideen II. Sozialphilosophische Implikationen
der Phänomenologie (Springer 2019).

Noël Carroll is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City of
New York. He has written over fifteen books including, most recently Living in an Artworld
(Spectrum Press 2012), Art in Three Dimensions (Oxford University Press 2012), and Humour:
A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2014).

Eric Chelstrom is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University in San

Antonio, Texas, where he is also an Edward and Linda Speed Peace and Justice Fellow.
He is the author of Social Phenomenology: Husserl, Intersubjectivity, and Collective Intentionality
(Lexington 2013) and contributor to volumes on social phenomenology and collective inten-
tionality. His current research is on the relationship between systemic forms of injustice and
collective intentionality, as well as on topics in the history of early phenomenology.

Roberta De Monticelli is Professor of Philosophy at San Raffaele University of Milan and

Fellow of the IAS Paris. She is Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Phenomenology
and Mind, and Director of the Research Centre PERSONA. Her most recent book is The
Gift of Bonds (Berlin 2020). Previous monographs include L’ascèse philosophique: Phénoménolo-
gie et Platonisme (Paris 1997), L’avenir de la phénoménologie. Méditations sur la connaissance person-
nelle (Paris 2000) and El conoscimiento personal (Madrid 2002).

Nicolas de Warren is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State Univer-

sity. He is the author of Husserl and the Promise of Time (Cambridge University Press 2009)
and A Momentary Breathlessness in the Sadness of Time (Jonas ir Jokūbas 2018). He is also the
co-editor of New Approaches to Neo-Kantianism (Cambridge University Press 2015) and Phi-
losophers at the Front: Phenomenology and the First World War (Leuven University Press 2018).

Luna Dolezal is a Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities and Philosophy at the Univer-
sity of Exeter. Her research is primarily in the areas of applied phenomenology, philosophy
of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and medical humanities. Her publications include
the monograph The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body
(Lexington Books 2015), and the co-edited books Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of
Social Encounters (SUNY 2017) and New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (Palgrave 2018).

John J. Drummond is the Robert Southwell, S. J. Distinguished Professor in Philoso-

phy and the Humanities at Fordham University. He has authored A Historical Dictionary
of Husserl’s Philosophy (Scarecrow 2008) and Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational

xii
 Contributors

Realism: Noema and Object (Kluwer 1990). He has written extensively on Husserl’s theory of
intentionality, including evaluative and volitional intentionality, the emotions, value theory,
and ethics.

Andreas Elpidorou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the

University of Louisville who specializes in the philosophical study of the mind. In addi-
tion to having published numerous journal articles and book chapters, he is the author of
Propelled! How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Can Lead us to the Good Life (Oxford
University Press 2020) and the co-author of Consciousness and Physicalism: A Defense of a
Research Program (Routledge 2018).

Lauren Freeman is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville,

Kentucky, an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sex-
uality Studies, and a core faculty member in the MA in Health Care Ethics. She works
in the areas of feminist bioethics, analytic feminism, phenomenology, and philosophy of
emotion. She’s writing a book called Microaggressions and Medicine, coediting Microaggres-
sions and Philosophy (Routledge 2019), and is the Editor of the APA Newsletter on Feminism
and Philosophy.

Thomas Fuchs is Karl Jaspers Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry at Heidelberg

University, Germany. His main areas of research include phenomenological philosophy and
psychopathology, embodied and enactive cognitive science, and interactive concepts of so-
cial cognition. His most recent book is Ecology of the Brain. The Phenomenology and Biology of
the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press 2018).

Tonino Griffero is Professor of Aesthetics, University of Rome “Tor Vergata.” He directs

some book series (“Sensibilia,” “Atmospheric Spaces”) and an e-journal (“Lebenswelt”).
Latest books include Atmospheres. Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces (Routledge 2014); Il pensiero
dei sensi. Atmosfere ed estetica patica (Guerini 2016); Quasi-Things. The Paradigm of Atmospheres
(Suny 2017); Places, Affordances, Atmospheres: A Pathic Aesthetics (Routledge 2019). He recently
co-edited Atmosphere/Atmospheres. Testing A New Paradigm (Mimesis International 2018) and
Psychopathology and Atmospheres. Neither Inside nor Outside (Cambridge Scholar 2019).

Anthony Hatzimoysis is Associate Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at the

University of Athens, Greece. His main publications include the monographs The Philosophy
of Sartre (Routledge 2008), Fear (MIET), and the edited volumes Philosophy and the Emotions
(Cambridge University Press 2003), and Self-Knowledge (Oxford University Press 2011).

Sara Heinämaa is Academy Professor (2017–2021 Academy of Finland) and Professor of

Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She specializes in phenomenology, phi-
losophy of mind and history of philosophy, and has published extensively in all these fields,
especially on questions of embodiment, personhood, intersubjectivity, emotions and gender.
She is co-author of Birth, Death, and Femininity: Philosophies of Embodiment (2010) and author
of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir (2003). She has
co-edited several volumes in phenomenology and philosophy of mind, including Phenome-
nology and the Transcendental (2014), New Perspectives to Aristotelianism and Its Critics (2014), and
Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection in the History of Philosophy (2007).

xiii
 Contributors

Bennett W. Helm is the Elijah Kresge Professor of Philosophy at Franklin & Marshall
College. His work focuses on what it is to be a person and the role emotions and various
forms of caring play in our being moral creatures. He has received fellowships and grants
from the ACLS, NEH, NSF, Templeton Foundation, and Princeton’s Center for Human
Values. He is the author of Emotional Reason (Cambridge University Press 2001), Love, Friend-
ship, and the Self (Oxford University Press 2010), and Communities of Respect (Oxford Univer-
sity Press 2017).

James Jardine is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, where

he works within the Academy of Finland-funded ‘MEPA’ project, and was previously Irish
Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin. Jardine has published
on empathy and emotion in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie and Human Studies, and co-
authored a chapter for Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. He is author of Empathy,
Embodiment, and the Person (Springer 2020) and co-editor of Perception and the Inhuman Gaze
(Routledge 2020).

Angelika Krebs is Chair of Philosophy at the University of Basel. She was educated in
Freiburg, Oxford, Konstanz, and Berkeley. She did her PhD in Frankfurt with Friedrich
Kambartel, Bernard Williams, and Jürgen Habermas. Her research focuses on ethics, aes-
thetics, and the philosophy of emotion. Major books are Ethics of Nature (De Gruyter 1999);
Arbeit und Liebe (Suhrkamp 2002); Zwischen Ich und Du (Suhrkamp 2015). She is the editor
of Naturethik (Suhrkamp 1997); Gleichheit oder Gerechtigkeit (Suhrkamp 2000); and co-editor
(together with Aaron Ben-Ze’ev) of Philosophy of Emotions I-IV (Routledge 2017); and The
Meaning of Moods (Philosophia Special Issue, 2017).

Joel Krueger is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Exeter, UK. He works
on various issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of cognitive
science—particularly, 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) approaches to cogni-
tion, emotions, social cognition, and psychopathology. He also does work on comparative
philosophy and philosophy of music.

Hilge Landweer is Professor of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. Her areas of interest
include phenomenology, social philosophy, ethics, and interdisciplinary gender studies. Major
books are Scham und Macht. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Sozialität eines Gefühls (Mohr
Siebeck 1999) and, with C. Demmerling, Philosophie der Gefühle. Von Achtung bis Zorn (Metzler
2007). She co-edited among others Wie männlich ist Autorität? Feministische Kritik und Aneignung
(Campus 2018), the Yearbook for Eastern and Western Philosophy 2 “Embodiment. Phenomenology
East/West” (De Gruyter 2017), and Recht und Emotion, Vols. I and II (Alber 2016 and 2017).

Sophie Loidolt is Professor of Philosophy at the Technical University Darmstadt,

Germany, and a member of the “Young Academy” of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Her books include Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theorie des rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss
an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls (Springer 2009), Einführung in die Rechtsphänomenologie
(Mohr Siebeck 2010), and Phenomenology of Plurality. Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity
( Routledge 2017).

Judith Mohrmann is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Social Research,

Frankfurt. Her areas of interest include political theory, social philosophy, and aesthetics.

xiv
 Contributors

In her book Affekt und Revolution – Politisches Handeln nach Arendt und Kant (Campus 2015)
she explores the relationship of politics and emotions in the French Revolution.

Michelle Montague is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas

at Austin. She works primarily in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. She is the author
of The Given: Experience and its Content (Oxford University Press 2016) and co-editor of
Non-propositional Intentionality (Oxford University Press 2018) and Cognitive Phenomenology
(Oxford University Press 2011). She has also published many articles in philosophy of mind,
metaphysis, and philosophy of language.

Alba Montes Sánchez is an independent scholar, last employed as a Postdoctoral Re-

searcher at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her
research focuses on topics from the philosophy of emotions and moral psychology, with
an emphasis on shame and other emotions of self-assessment. Her contributions have been
published in journals such as the European Journal of Philosophy, Frontiers in Psychology, Journal
of Consciousness Studies or Etica e Politica / Ethics and Politics.

Jan Müller is Assistant Professor in philosophy at University of Basel, Switzerland. He works

primarily at the intersection of action theory, metaethics, and Critical Theory, currently fin-
ishing a book project on the relation of the second person and forms of life in metaethics. He
has published several articles and book chapters and co-edited two volumes on these issues,
Lebensform und Praxisform (mentis 2015), Praxis und “zweite Natur” (mentis 2017).

Jean Moritz Müller is a Research Associate at the University of Bonn, Germany. His gen-
eral philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind and related areas of meta-ethics.
He is the author of The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) as
well as of several articles and book chapters on the emotions.

Henning Nörenberg is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Philosophy in

Rostock, Germany. He has published on various topics in phenomenology, social ontology,
political philosophy, and philosophy of religion; his current work focuses on shared norma-
tive background orientations and their affective dimension. He is author of Der Absolutismus
des Anderen (Alber 2014).

Matthew Ratcliffe is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, UK. His recent
work addresses issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychiatry.
His publications include the books Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of
Reality (Oxford University Press 2008), Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology
(Oxford University Press 2015), and Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and
the Interpersonal World (MIT Press 2017).

Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Graz, Austria. Her

research focuses on Husserl’s phenomenology and its contributions to recent discussions in
metaethics, value theory, emotion theory and epistemology. She has published on a variety
of topics including first-person perspective, critique of psychologism, naturalizing subjec-
tivity, and the fact/value dichotomy. She is the author of Edmund Husserl. Zeitlichkeit und
Intentionalität (Alber 2000). With John Drummond, she has edited the volume Emotional
Experiences: Ethical and Social Significance (Rowman & Littlefield 2018).

xv
 Contributors

Line Ryberg Ingerslev is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Philosophy at

Julius-Maximilian University, Würzburg, Germany. She works on passivity, responsiveness,
habit, and on aspects of emotional distress that play a role in weaker forms of agency, where
knowledge of intention might not be present to oneself in the moment of acting. Her re-
search also focuses on how the temporal aspects of agency affect self-understanding and our
sense of responsibility.

Alessandro Salice is Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of University College

Cork. He has extensively published on a variety of topics related to phenomenology, philos-
ophy of mind and action, and moral psychology. His current work mainly addresses issues
concerning human sociality. Recently, he has edited The Phenomenological Approach to Social
Reality (Springer 2016) with Hans Bernhard Schmid. He is co-editor of the Journal of Social
Ontology.

Héctor Andrés Sánchez Guerrero works as a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the
University Hospital Münster, Germany. Currently, he is Postdoctoral Research Associ-
ate at the Research Training Group Situated Cognition, at Ruhr-University Bochum and
Osnabrück University, Germany. His research interests include the philosophy of emotion,
the philosophy of collective intentionality, and phenomenologically inspired philosophy of
psychiatry. He is author of Feeling Together and Caring with One Another: A Contribution to
Debate on Collective Affective Intentionality (Springer 2016).

Matthias Schloßberger works as a DFG Heisenberg Fellow in the Department of Philos-

ophy at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He mainly works on Scheler, philosophical an-
thropology, early phenomenology, social ontology, and the history of ideas. He is the author
of three books: Die Erfahrung des Anderen (Akademie 2005), Geschichtsphilosophie (Akademie
2013) and Phänomenologie der Normativität (Schwabe 2019).

Hans Bernhard Schmid is Professor of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of
Vienna. His areas of specialization include joint action, collective intentionality, and social
ontology.

Jan Slaby is Professor of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. His main research areas in-
clude philosophy of mind and social philosophy, with particular emphasis on affect and emo-
tion theory. With Suparna Choudhury, he was co-editor of Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook
of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience (Wiley 2012), and with Christian von Scheve
he edited Affective Societies: Key Concepts (Routledge 2019). Other recent publications are
“More Than a Feeling: Affect as Radical Situatedness” (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2017),
and “Affective Arrangements” (with R. Mühlhoff and P. Wüschner, Emotion Review, 2019).

Anthony J. Steinbock is Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University and Director,

Phenomenology Research Center. He works in the areas of phenomenology, social ontology,
aesthetics, and religious philosophy. Book publications include It’s Not about the Gift ( Rowman
& Littlefield 2018), Limit-Phenomena and Phenomenology in Husserl (Rowman & Littlefield 2017),
Moral Emotions (Northwestern University Press 2014), Phenomenology and Mysticism (Indiana
University Press 2007/2009), and Home and Beyond (Northwestern University Press 1995). He
is editor-in-chief of Continental Philosophy Review and general editor of the Studies in Phenome-
nology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) series of Northwestern University Press.

xvi
 Contributors

Achim Stephan is Professor of Philosophy of Cognition at the Institute of Cognitive

Science, Osnabrück University, Germany. His published work considers philosophical ques-
tions relating to human affectivity, philosophy of mind, and theories of emergence, includ-
ing Handbuch Kognitionswissenschaft, co-edited together with Sven Walter (Metzler 2013) as
well as Depression, Emotion and the Self, co-edited together with Matthew Ratcliffe (Imprint
Academic 2014) and Emergenz. Von der Unvorhersagbarkeit zur Selbstorganisation (mentis, 4th
ed., 2016).

Michela Summa is Junior Professor for Theoretical Philosophy at Julius-Maximilians

University Würzburg, Germany. She is the author of the monograph Spatio-temporal Inter-
twining. Husserl’s Transcendental Aesthetic (Springer 2014). Other recent publications include:
Imagination and Social Perspectives. Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, co-edited
with Thomas Fuchs and Luca Vanzago (Routledge 2018) and a special issue of the jour-
nal Phänomenologische Forschungen entitled “Modes of Intentionality. Phenomenological and
Medieval Perspectives,” co-edited with Jörn Müller.

Fredrik Svenaeus is Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Studies in Practical Knowl-
edge, Södertörn University, Sweden. His main research areas are philosophy of medicine,
bioethics, medical humanities, and philosophical anthropology. Current research projects
focus on existential questions in association with various medical technologies and on the
phenomenology of suffering in medicine and bioethics. He has published widely in these
fields; the most recent book is Phenomenological Bioethics: Medical Technologies, Human Suffering,
and the Meaning of Being Alive (Routledge 2017).

Thomas Szanto is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Subjectivity

Research, University of Copenhagen. He works at the intersection of phenomenology, so-
cial cognition, social ontology, and the philosophy of emotions. His publications include
the monograph Bewusstsein Intentionalität und Mentale Repräsentation: Husserl und die analytische
Philosophie des Geistes (de Gruyter 2012), and the co-edited volumes The Phenomenology of
Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’ (with D. Moran; Routledge 2015), and Empathy, Shared Emotions
and Group Membership (with J. Krueger; Topoi Special Issue, 2019).

Gerhard Thonhauser teaches philosophy at the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany.

He holds a PhD in philosophy and MAs in philosophy and political science from the Uni-
versity of Vienna. His research focuses on social and political philosophy, and theories of
emotion and affectivity from a phenomenological perspective.

Linas Tranas is a PhD Fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne,
University of Cologne. His research focuses on questions pertaining to collective intention-
ality, social ontology, and shared emotions.

Dylan Trigg is an FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow at University of Vienna, Department
of Philosophy. He is the author of several books, including: Topophobia: a Phenomenology of
Anxiety (Bloomsbury 2016); The Thing: a Phenomenology of Horror (Zero Books 2014); and The
Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny (Ohio University Press 2012). With Dorothée
Legrand, he is co-editor of Unconsciousness Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis (Springer
2017). His research concerns phenomenology, philosophies of subjectivity and embodiment,
aesthetics and philosophies of art, and philosophies of space and place.

xvii
 Contributors

Genki Uemura is Associate Professor at Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Okayama University, Japan. His research areas include Husserl’s phenomenology, early
realist phenomenology, and the opposition or mutual influence between them. He is also in-
terested in developing phenomenological approaches to some topics from the contemporary
metaphysics, philosophy of perception, and philosophy of action.

Íngrid Vendrell Ferran is a DFG Heisenberg Fellow in Philosophy at the Goethe Univer-
sity Frankfurt. Her research interests are phenomenology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics and
epistemology. Beyond a number of articles, she has published two monographs, Die Emotionen
(Akademie 2008) and Die Vielfalt der Erkenntnis (mentis 2018), and co- edited among others
Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur (with C. Demmerling, De Gruyter 2014);
Empathie im Film (with M. Hagener, Transcript 2017), and Empathy, Fiction, and Imagination
(with S. Schmetkamp, Special Issue of Topoi).

Sven Walter is Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition at the Institute of Cognitive
Science, Osnabrück University, Germany. His published work considers philosophical ques-
tions relating to mental causation, free will, and situated accounts of cognition, including
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, co-edited together with Brian McLaughlin and
Ansgar Beckermann (Oxford University Press 2009) as well as Kognition (Reclam 2014),
Illusion freier Wille? (Metzler 2016) and Grundkurs Willensfreiheit (mentis 2018).

Maren Wehrle is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

From 2012 to 2017, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Center for
Phenomenology, Husserl Archives, KU Leuven, Belgium. Her areas of specializations are
phenomenology, philosophical and historical anthropology, feminist philosophy and cogni-
tive psychology. Wehrle has authored the monograph Horizonte der Aufmerksamkeit (Wilhelm
Fink 2013), and co-edited (with M. Ubiali) Feeling and Value, Willing and Action (Springer
2015) and (with S. Luft) Husserl Handbuch. Leben–Werk–Wirkung (Metzler 2018). She has
published many journal articles and book chapters on the topics of embodiment, habit,
normality, and normativity.

Toru Yaegashi is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering, Hiroshima Institute

of Technology, Japan. His recent publications are Husserl ni okeru kachi to jissen (Husserl on
Value and Practice) (Suisei-sha 2017) and “A Husserlian Account of the Affective Cognition
of Value,” in New Phenomenological Studies in Japan (Springer 2019). His research areas are
classical phenomenology (Husserl, Pfänder, Reinach, Scheler, Otaka, etc.), ethics, and phi-
losophy of emotion.

Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen and University of

Oxford, and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen. Zahavi’s
primary research area is phenomenology and philosophy of mind, and their intersection
with empirical disciplines such as psychiatry and developmental psychology. His most im-
portant publications include Self-awareness and Alterity (Northwestern University Press 1999),
Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford University Press 2003), Subjectivity and Selfhood (MIT Press
2005), The Phenomenological Mind (with Shaun Gallagher, Routledge, 2008/2012), Self and
Other (Oxford University Press 2014), Husserl’s Legacy (Oxford University Press 2017), and
Phenomenology: The Basics (Routledge 2019).

xviii
 INTRODUCTION
The phenomenology of emotions—above
and beyond ‘What it is like to feel’

Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

1. The rediscoveries of the (phenomenology of) emotions:

a historical vignette
Following a brief period of marginalization, emotions are firmly back in the philosophical
arena. This is certainly not news. Indeed, just stating that there has been a ‘rediscovery
of the emotions in philosophy’ almost amounts to a platitude by now. What is a fairly
new development, however, is the recent surge of interest in phenomenological perspec-
tives on emotions. The decades-long jettisoning of the phenomenology of emotions, not
just within the still largely analytic orientated philosophy of emotions but also within the
phenomenological movement itself, is rather surprising. Over a century ago, early and clas-
sical phenomenologists such as Scheler, Stein, Husserl, Heidegger, Kolnai, and Sartre were
already engaged in intensive discussions about the nature and function of emotions. More-
over, they offered detailed, sometimes book-length, analyses of specific emotions such as
anxiety, fear or boredom (Heidegger), shame (Sartre, Scheler), disgust, hatred (Kolnai), or
Ressentiment (Scheler).
How did this rediscovery of the phenomenology of emotions come about, why (only)
now, and what exactly is ‘rediscovered’ in the first place? To address these questions, we have
to take a glance at the recent history of the philosophy of emotions in general, and the short
but rich history of phenomenological work on emotions in particular.1
Before doing so, a caveat regarding the very notions of ‘emotions’ and ‘rediscovery’ is in
order. First, our use of ‘emotions’ in the title, throughout this introduction, but also in many
of the chapters should be taken as an umbrella-term, encompassing a vast range of diverse
affective phenomena and, in particular, affects such as short-lived fear or disgust, distinct epi-
sodic emotions such as indignation or anger, sentiments, affective dispositions or affective at-
titudes such as Ressentiment or hatred, and affective character traits such as being disposed to
humility or jealously. Emotions, in the sense employed here, further include varieties of what
is sometimes subsumed under the concept of moods, and which phenomenologists in the
wake of Heidegger tend to further divide into moods and fundamental moods (Stimmungen,
Grundstimmungen) such as profound boredom, and other forms of affective disposedness or
attunement (Befindlichkeit) such as anxiety or the so-called existential feelings (see Ratcliffe’s
and Drummond’s chapters for details).

1
 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

Second, talking of a ‘rediscovery’ of emotions in philosophy is, in fact, highly misleading.

After all, emotions have never been completely ignored in the history of philosophy. Quite
the contrary, the nature of affectivity and the role of emotions in human existence and so-
cial reality as well as the notorious relation of emotions and rationality always been at issue
in philosophy—even where explicit discussion of the emotions is missing or is deliberately
relegated to the conceptual background. Moreover, the relation of philosophical reasoning
to emotions, and the role that emotions (ought to) play therein, has never been philosophi-
cally neutral. ‘What’s your take on emotion’ seems, then, to be the 64,000- dollar question
for philosophers, ever since emotions entered philosophical thinking (see L andweer and
Renz 2012).2
Affects and emotions have played a central role in Western 3 philosophy ever since they
were introduced by Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek and Roman (Neo-)Stoics (cf. Nussbaum
2001). They were extensively discussed as key factors in rhetoric, political life, moral psy-
chology, and social interaction. Most classical authors, such as Aquinas, Montaigne, Pascal,
Descartes, Malebranche, or Spinoza, up until the Scottish moralists, explored a panoply of
particular affects, sentiments, and emotions, taxonomizing the so-called ‘passions of the
soul’ (Descartes); many of these authors also offered general theories of emotions. It is,
however, also true that after Kant and Rousseau, starting roughly with the dominance of
German Idealism, emotions ceased to play any systematic role in philosophy.4 In this period
of relative marginalization, we find only a few isolated discussions of specific emotions, such
as compassion in Schopenhauer5 or anxiety and fear in Kierkegaard.
After this period of marginalization, the emotions found their way back to philosophy,
albeit through the side-door of the social and natural sciences and, in particular, the so-
called ‘empirical’ or ‘experimental’ psychology of the time.6 The initial step toward a new
systematic exploration of the nature and function of emotions set in with Darwin’s evolu-
tionary theory (esp. Darwin 1872) and James’ and Lange’s philosophical psychology ( James
and Lange 1885–1893). In the German-speaking world, specifically, it was the philosophi-
cally trained psychologists Brentano, Stumpf, and Lipps and their students from the Munich
Circle of Phenomenology, Pfänder and Geiger,7 and the Leipzig School of Gestalt psychol-
ogists, such as Krueger or Stern,8 who again developed general theories of our affective life.
Eventually, it was the successors, colleagues, or students of the Brentano School and of the
Munich Circle phenomenologists, such as Husserl, Scheler, Voigtländer, Haas, Stein, and
Walther, who put discussions about the nature of emotions on a broader philosophical basis
at the beginning of the 20th century.9
The detachment of psychology from philosophy and psychology’s eventual academic in-
stitutionalization in the latter half of the 19th century was not without friction. What philos-
ophers took issue with and which led to philosophy’s break was not so much psychology as an
empirical science as psychologizing assumptions. Various critiques of psychologism between
the 1880s and 1920s initially, and rather unexpectedly, united such philosophers as Frege,
leading Neo-Kantians such as Cohen,10 Husserl, and Wittgenstein, before their successors
parted ways in the so-called analytic-continental divide. They were allied in their rejection
of psychologistic reductions of meaning, truth, and epistemic rationality to the genesis and
psychological laws of reasoning. In the foundational text of classical phenomenology, Logical
Investigations, Husserl directed his sweeping criticism against the view that logic is founded
upon some psychological basis (Husserl 1900).
The controversy around psychologism is particularly noteworthy in the present context if
we consider the Janus-faced impact it had on the (phenomenological) rediscovery of emotions:
On the one hand, it was psychologists avant-la-lettre or philosophers-turned-psychologists

2
 Introduction

who, after the post-Kantian century of relative silence, first systematically explored human
affectivity; on the other hand, it was in reaction to the reductionist conception of
psychology—viz. psychologism—that the philosophical engagement with emotions was
placed on new grounds.
The catalyst of the latter development was arguably classical phenomenology. Husserl’s
establishment of intentionality as the defining mark of conscious mental acts—including,
notably, emotions—in the wake of Brentano, thus cannot be underestimated with regard
to the general philosophical rediscovery of the emotions in the 20th century. Clearly influ-
enced by Husserl, Scheler made the first systematic attempt since Hume’s tableau of affects in
the Treatise to present a metaphysically grounded and a priori order of emotions and values.
From the work of Scheler through Sartre to Goldie’s (2000) influential notion of emotions as
“feeling towards,” Husserl’s theory of intentionality has left its mark. Even in the tradition
of Heidegger, which is skeptical of the concept of the intentionality of emotions and refor-
mulates it in terms of spatiality, Husserl’s conception is alive as a matter of critique (Schmitz
1969; cf. Landweer 2011).
Certainly, what might be called the ‘first wave’ of the phenomenological rediscovery
of the emotions in the 20th century was not uninterrupted. The golden age of phenome-
nological research on emotions lasted from the early 1910s to the late 1930s, ending rather
abruptly with Sartre’s Sketch of a Theory of Emotions (1939). In the following decades, any
systematic engagement with emotions seems to have been banned from philosophers,’ and
even most psychologists,’ agenda. The few notable exceptions include the following work:
Bollnow’s neo-Heideggerian account of ‘moods’ in Das Wesen der Stimmungen (The Nature
of Moods) (1956/2017) (see Thonhauser’s chapter); Strasser’s Das Gemüt: Grundgedanken zu
einer phänomenologischen Philosophie und Theorie des menschlichen Gefühlslebens (1956) (Phenom-
enology of Feeling: An Essay on the Phenomena of Heart, 1977) from the same year (see more
below); and, finally, Schmitz’s project of establishing the so-called ‘New Phenomenology’
in his multi-volume System der Philosophie (1964–1980), whose core elements are a new con-
ceptualization of the felt body (Leib), of emotions and moods as atmospheres, and a sweep-
ing attack on any form of internalization of affectivity (see Nörenberg’s chapter). All three
works, however, represent solitary and internationally still hardly known work, and were
almost completely ignored by their more prominent phenomenological peers,11 not to speak
of mainstream analytic philosophy. In this, they share the fate of Sartre’s Sketch12 but also
Kenny’s Action, Emotion and Will (1963; see below).
The second break in systematically thematizing emotions in philosophy, marked by
World War II, seems to be due to a general suspicion of the role of emotions in society,
politics, and ideology after the two Great Wars and the Schoah. Indeed, around 1914, even
otherwise clear-sighted public intellectuals from France to the crumbling Austrian Empire
and Prussia were caught up in the general nationalist pro-war ideology, and phenomenolo-
gists certainly were no exception.13 This is best exemplified by Scheler’s fervent Anti-English
war-propaganda essay Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg (“The Genius of War
and the German War” 1915), but also permeates his more philosophically toned, but no less
ideological, essay Der Krieg als Gesamterlebnis (“The War as Communal Experience” 1916).
On the surface, the latter essay offers an analysis of the collective intentionality of shared
emotions and their role in facilitating the unification of nations; in fact, it’s not much more
than a piece of political ideology (see Schmid 2015). Though Scheler’s further systematic
work on shared emotions is far more sober and analytically sound, it is certainly not immune
to the political ideologies of the time. The same goes for Scheler’s contemporaries, Stein,
Walther, and Schmalenbach, whose work on communal experiences is also partly rooted

3
 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

either in Marxism (as for Walther) or ideas of the so-called “Conservative Revolution” of the
Weimar Republic.14 Hence, especially in Germany, it is no wonder that work on collective
emotions was banished from the curriculum, which was soon dominated by Adorno and
Critical Theory.15 If we add to this that key figures in the phenomenology of emotions were
either forced to emigrate from Nazi Germany or Austria, as Geiger and Kolnai, or murdered
in Auschwitz, as Stein, we can better understand the lapse of phenomenological engagement
with emotions after World War II. That some of the surviving authors who have focused
on emotions in postwar Germany, such as Bollnow and most prominently Heidegger, were
in ideological complicity with Nazism sadly completes this picture. It is, then, no wonder
that in this poisonous atmosphere, no unbiased reception of the traditional or phenom-
enological philosophy of emotions could flourish. In short, both the anti-Enlightenment
doctrines of the “Conservative Revolution” and of National Socialism seemed to justify the
intellectual distrust of emotion research after World War II, even beyond the borders of the
German-speaking world.
Viewed from this perspective, this second break in philosophical emotion research from
the 1940s to the 1980s and 1990s mirrors the first one between the late 18th and the latter
half of the 19th century: In both, what is more or less explicitly at issue is the relationship
of rationality and emotions. Thus, the first interruption is largely due to Kant’s authoritative
condemnation in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals of actions arising from desires
and inclinations. Kant famously excludes such actions, which arise from sensuality and are
merely in the pursuit of individual happiness, from playing a role in grounding morality,
and allows only the morality of “actions from duty.” Eventually, in the wake of war and
totalitarianism and under the guise of sociopolitical criticism, the second rupture in emotion
research seems to reestablish this allegedly Enlightenment-based dichotomy, as if reason can
only rule and lead to morality if freed from affectivity.16
Looking back on the history of philosophy from a bird’s-eye perspective, then, emo-
tions have been sidelined only for brief periods. This alone makes the use of the notion of a
‘rediscovery’ somewhat arbitrary. But there is another reason why we should be careful when
talking of a ‘rediscovery of emotions’—one that is probably more relevant in the context
of the present volume. It has to do with the fact that, as should have become already clear,
there is no one single rediscovery. Rather, we can only speak, if at all, of rediscoveries in the
plural. The rediscovery of the emotions in the analytic tradition in the latter quarter of the
20th century took a very different shape and had different motivations than its phenomeno-
logical counterpart. Moreover, these rediscoveries didn’t even happen simultaneously: For
the analytic tradition, we can trace it around 1980; in phenomenology, the rediscovery of its
own heydays (i.e., 1910s–1930s) is only a very recent development and started on a broader
international scale just a few years ago.

1.1 The rediscovery of the emotions in analytic philosophy

Let’s first look in more detail at the analytic discussions, as it gives us a contrast-foil to better
understand the story of the ‘phenomenological rediscovery.’ From its very inception with
Frege and Russell to Quine and Putnam, analytic philosophy has, broadly speaking, focused
on issues in philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of science, and metaphysics,
domains that seem to be, more or less, ‘purified’ of affectivity. There were only few prom-
inent exceptions to this general trend, most notably Wittgenstein (cf. Mulligan 2017), and
they haven’t had much influence on the mainstream debates. If affective states have figured
at all in mainstream analytic discussions, with rare exceptions, such as Bedford (1956/1957),

4
 Introduction

they were reduced to either erratic impulses, agitations, or dispositions to act, as in Ryle
(1949), or conceived of as nothing more than propositional states capable of entering rational
and causal mental connections as in Davidson (e.g., 1982).
But the disregard of the emotions is probably most telling in analytic work on practical
philosophy and moral psychology up until the last two decades or so of the 20th century. The
change starts in the wake of early virtue-ethical approaches, with feminist-inspired critiques
of utilitarian or deontological moral and contractualist political theory, as well as of rational-
ist trends in moral psychology.17 But the omission of emotions in these areas is particularly
curious. After all, emotions were at the forefront not just in Ancient Greek and Roman
moral and political philosophy and psychology,18 but in neo-Aristotelian (especially Aquinas)
and in early modern political and moral psychology (especially Spinoza); moreover, emotions
played a central role for the British and Scottish moralists, including Hume, Shaftesbury,
Smith, and Reid, but also political philosophers such as Hobbes—that is, for authors who
represent standard historical points of reference for analytic philosophy. The reason for the
disregard of emotions besides the general mistrust of emotions after World War II is prob-
ably to do with the influential ‘emotive theories of ethics,’ proposed by dominant figures
of the time (viz. around the 1940s) such as A. J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson. Ironically, the
discounting of emotions in this period resulted from the emotive theorists’ claim that the
entire domain of practical and aesthetic theory cannot be subject to rational assessment or
verification, but only to a subjective, affective-evaluative one, and hence cannot sensibly be
a part of philosophical discussions. Incidentally, it was some decades later, in meta-ethical
work on moral sentimentalism and projectivism, that emotions, sentiments, and passions
were discussed from fairly early on in this tradition, roughly coinciding with the otherwise
unrelated feminist critiques.19
Now, it has become customary to point to Kenny’s Action, Emotion and Will (1963) as the
start of the resurgence of interest in emotions in analytically oriented theoretical philosophy.20
But this is misleading. The book appeared in the Routledge and Kegan Paul series “Studies
in Philosophical Psychology,” which has become famous for its groundbreaking short mono-
graphs, but initially represented a niche outpost of a nascent post-behaviorist philosophy
of mind. The work was prominent but arguably not influential in the dominant strands of
analytic philosophy of its time. In fact, it was not until the late 1970s with the appearance of
Solomon’s The Passions (1976), Neu’s Emotions, Thought, and Therapy (1977), Lyons’ Emotion
(1980), and Rorty Oksenberg’s seminal edition Explaining Emotions (1980) that research on
emotions was placed on a broader philosophical footing.
The dominant thread within these earlier theories was a broadly cognitivist account of emo-
tions,21 challenging the traditional dichotomy between reason and passion, and highlighting
emotions’ intrinsic rationality. These ideas culminated in de Sousa’s The Rationality of Emotions
(1987), Elster’s Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (1999), and Nussbaum’s com-
prehensive treatment in The Upheaval of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001). Nussbaum
was also among the first within the analytic tradition to systematically engage with literary and
historical, especially ancient and early modern resources (Nussbaum 1990).22
Around the shift away from the cognitivist paradigm, Wollheim published On the Emo-
tions (1999), drawing heavily on Freudian psychoanalysis. Wollheim suggests that emotions
originate in desires and are, roughly, sedimented mental dispositions. It is worth noting
that, for Wollheim, emotions are more often than not unconscious. Somewhat paradoxi-
cally, even though Wollheim’s work can be seen as one of the most sustained projects of
‘re-psychologizing’ the mind and of refurbishing it with affective states within the analytic
tradition, he sidelines the experiential character of occurrent emotions, and indeed holds

5
 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

that occurrently experienced emotions are the exception. This, to be sure, stands in direct
opposition with most of the otherwise more or less congenial phenomenological accounts
(see more below).
One such account from the broadly analytic tradition deserves special attention, since it
has had an enormous influence both on the still-ongoing ‘second wave’ phenomenological
rediscovery of emotions and on the philosophy of emotions in general. This is Goldie’s (2000)
conception of emotions as “feelings towards,” or a “thinking of with feeling.” According to
Goldie, emotions have—above and beyond a number of other components, such as bodily,
motivational, expressive, or regulative—a sui generis kind of intentionality, which has also
become known as “affective intentionality.”23 The ‘intentionality of emotions’ and, what
Goldie calls, the “phenomenology of emotions,” or their experiential and felt quality, are
inextricably interlinked, as Goldie argues against the so-called “add-on” theory. More spe-
cifically, the affective phenomenology of emotions is not just a matter of their intentional
content but also “infuses” the very attitudinal aspect of emotions (Goldie 2002, 242). More-
over, affective intentionality also “infuses” the very “bodily feeling,” and “in turn, the feel-
ing towards is infused with a bodily characterization” (Goldie 2000, 57).
Goldie’s account at the turn of the millennium can be seen as the herald of the post-
cognitivist era in the philosophy of emotions. And today—as typically in any ‘post’ era—we
have a variety of alternative models on offer: multi-componential theories (Ben Ze’ev 2000),
concern- or value-based construals of emotions,24 neo-Jamesian perceptual and embodied
(Prinz 2004) and cognate perceptual accounts,25 narrative accounts (Goldie 2012), and most
recently the so-called ‘4E’-conceptions (embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended).26
These predominantly Anglo-Saxon discussions were eventually received in Germany
(Döring 2009; Berninger 2017) and enriched with an interest in historical and phenomeno-
logical contextualization.27
Above and beyond their contribution to a general theory of emotions, some have also
offered refined classifications of different types of affective states, such as dispositional emo-
tions, moods, and sentiments.28 Some have also contributed to the analysis of a rich roster of
particular emotions (esp. Ben-Ze’ev 2000; Roberts 2003), and especially social and moral
emotions, such as sympathy or compassion, jealousy, shame, envy, forgiveness, pride, or
self-esteem.29 Others have focused on specific key dimensions or functions of emotions,
such as their epistemology (Brady 2013; Candiotto 2019), or their moral and normative,30
and bodily dimensions (Prinz 2004; Maise 2011; Colombetti 2014) or their relation to law.31
In recent years, philosophers have also increasingly focused on the relation of emotions and
aesthetics, and in particular the issue of fictional emotions,32 as well as on discussions about
the truth, appropriateness, authenticity, or integrity of emotions,33 or the nature of shared
and political emotions.34

1.2 The second-wave phenomenological

rediscovery of emotions
To complete this historical vignette, let us now briefly turn back again to phenomenologists’
rediscovery of their own tradition, or what we have baptized the ‘second wave phenomeno-
logical rediscovery.’35 As we have seen, even among phenomenologists, with few exceptions,
systematic work on affectivity and emotions was buried for a number of decades. So why this
‘phenomenological affective turn’ now (again)?36 Obviously, the reasons are manifold, concern-
ing socio-historical and institutional shifts, as well as systematic conceptual changes, and we
list here only the most salient ones.

6
 Introduction

In the first place, in the past two to three decades, we see an increasing interest in various
issues relating to bodily dimensions of our being-in-the-world, from the role of kinesthesia or
motor-intentionality in perception to the so-called “drive-intentionality” (Husserl 1929–1935;
cf. 1908–1937) to the role of embodiment in empathy and affectivity.37 Embodiment is, of
course, a core issue of phenomenology ever since Husserl, and was elaborated in further detail
in the work of such post-Husserlian phenomenologists as Stein, Merleau-Ponty, Henry, and
Schmitz (see more below). In the wake of the establishment of gender and cultural studies and
their affective turn, as well as the so-called embodied and enactive approaches to cognition, ac-
tion, and emotion (see Stephan’s and Walther’s chapter), the connection between embodiment
and affectivity, which was always part and parcel of the phenomenological theorizing, found
its way back to the frontline of more mainstream philosophical discourse.38
Similarly, we can witness a veritable explosion on work on empathy in recent years,
which again always figured as a core concept of classical phenomenology. And even though
no phenomenologist holds that empathy is an emotion as such, or that it should be construed
as some form of emotional sharing,39 empathy and its related ‘forms of sympathy’ (Scheler)
do have important affective elements. Phenomenologists also long recognized that empathy
affords us with a more or less direct access to affective states of others, and hence plays a cru-
cial epistemic role not just regarding knowledge of other minds but also regarding emotions.
This brings us to the third key systematic factor, namely the abundance of work in the
last two decades on sociality and collectivity, in general, and social and collective emo-
tions, in particular. Classical phenomenologists from Husserl, Stein, and Walther, through
phenomenological sociologists such as Scheler, Schütz, and Gurwitsch, to existential
phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Sartre first systematically addressed not only inter-
personal forms of empathic engagement and intersubjectivity but also various forms of col-
lective intentionality, including collective affective intentionality (see Szanto 2020). Thus, it
should come as no surprise that they too were the ones to turn to for the analysis of the soci-
ality and collectivity of emotions.40 Moreover, the growing interest in affective atmospheres
(see Griffero’s chapter) also readily resonates with Heidegger’s or Bollnow’s conceptualiza-
tion of moods (Stimmungen), and in particular Schmitz’s (1969, 2014) radical conception of
emotions as atmospheres (cf. Krebs 2017).
Two further points of convergence between classical phenomenology and contemporary
philosophy of emotions should be noted: First, there has been a surge of interest in psycho-
pathological disturbances in empathizing, emotional experience and expression, for example
in patients with depression, autism spectrum disorders, Möbius syndrome, schizophrenia, or
Parkinson’s disease.41 Given their emphasis on the complex connections between emotional
experience, expression or regulation and embodiment, as well as the intrinsic link between
the lived body (Leib), affectivity, and the social environment,42 phenomenological accounts
have been particularly adept at accounting for these affective disturbances.
Finally, the themes found in the above-mentioned contemporary discussions concern-
ing the normativity of emotions—i.e. on how, when, why, and which emotions can be
appropriate or not, authentically or inauthentically felt, etc.—were foreshadowed in clas-
sic phenomenological discussions almost a century earlier, in particular in the work of
Voigtländer, Haas, Scheler, Stein, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.43
Above and beyond these systematic reasons, to a non-negligible degree, the phenomeno-
logical affective turn is also due to certain new meta-theoretical developments of intra- and
interdisciplinary reception. Thus, the resurging interest in early phenomenological accounts is
partly to do with developments within analytic philosophy and its turn to emotions, and espe-
cially the emergence of congenial affective-intentional accounts. Phenomenology has opened

7
 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

itself more to concepts and debates in analytic philosophy and also to neighboring disciplines
discussing emotions, above all psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and the cognitive sciences.44
A natural corollary of this methodological opening in phenomenology has been a decrease
of historical-exegetic work on past ‘grandmasters’; instead, we can witness an increased at-
tention on topical or systematic issues. And much of this topical and systematic work is now
focusing on emotions. Moreover, phenomenologists have lately become more integrative with
regard to sociocultural and political issues and social criticism (cf. Bedorf and Herrmann
2020). They have also shown a renewed interest in post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault
(Oksala 2016), and especially in recent discussions in cultural and gender studies, feminist
philosophy, and critical race theory.45 This has led to the emergence of the so-called ‘feminist
phenomenology’ (Fielding and Olkowski 2017), ‘queer phenomenology’ (Ahmed 2006), and
‘critical phenomenology’ (Salamon et al. 2019). And, again, in all these new directions of
phenomenology, the study of affectivity, and in particular of social emotions, and their nor-
matively and culturally shaped forms of corporeal sedimentation take center-stage.

2. The phenomenology of emotions—above and beyond

‘What it is like to feel’
As we have seen, phenomenological theories of emotions were simultaneously developed with
the establishment of phenomenology as a distinct philosophical tradition. Indeed, virtually all
phenomenologists up until 1940 systematically worked on some version of a phenomenology
of emotions. So why is it that many phenomenologists, who otherwise dealt with such theo-
retical issues as consciousness, intentionality, imagination, perception, time-consciousness, or
metaphysical and epistemological discussions on idealism versus realism, were not only inter-
ested in emotions but thought that affectivity ought to play a central role in phenomenology?
This is far from obvious, and was certainly not the case in the broader philosophical landscape.
The reasons for early and classical phenomenologists’ keen interest in emotions largely
overlap with those that motivated the second-wave phenomenological discovery just listed,
notably, phenomenology’s focus on the affective dimension of perception, of personhood, on
the felt body, on empathy and other forms of sympathetic stances, on social interaction and
shared experiences, as well as the normativity of emotions.
Above and beyond these, one crucial factor is also phenomenologists’ conviction that there
is an intrinsic link between emotions and evaluations or values. This conviction is shared by
most early phenomenologists from Pfänder, Geiger through Husserl to the so-called ‘realist’
phenomenologists such as Scheler, Reinach, Stein, and Hildebrand, while New Phenomenolo-
gists such as Schmitz focus on the evaluative aspects of atmospheres. Though phenomenologists
certainly do not agree on all details (see more below), they all emphasize the role of emotions
in disclosing values or the affective aspects of evaluations, and stress the intrinsic normativity of
emotions like shame or resentment. Accordingly, phenomenologists conceptualize emotions as
what today would be called “felt evaluations” or “evaluative feelings” (Helm 2001).
Viewed generally, the fact that affectivity plays a pivotal role in phenomenology reflects
the most fundamental ontological and epistemological tenets of phenomenology about hu-
man cognition, volition, and (inter)action, indeed about human nature and (social) existence.
Thus, almost all phenomenologists agree that any form of conscious experience has a core af-
fective dimension, even on the most basic level of a simple perceptual experience. As Husserl
first pointed out, before subjects take any active cognitive, epistemic, or evaluative stance,
their perceptual environment exerts a certain “affective allure,” which makes objects salient
and motivate subjects’ attentional modifications (Husserl 1918–1926, 1938; Heidegger 1927,

8
 Introduction

see also Merleau-Ponty 1945). Famously, Heidegger, and subsequent German and French phe-
nomenologists, such as Bollnow, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Schmitz, ontologically general-
ized this picture, arguing that our very being-in-the-world is always and already a way of being
affectively attuned to oneself, others, and the world (cf. Vendrell Ferran forthcoming). Accord-
ing to phenomenology, then, our very experiential fabric or being-in-the-world is affective
through and through, long before subjects take more complex evaluative or social stances.
Now, on the face of it, and especially if one is not already familiar with the core tenets of
phenomenology, it might seem that the reason for the co-emergence of phenomenology and
the phenomenology of emotions has something important to do with phenomenologists’ focus
on the first-personal, qualitative contents of experience, or, roughly what has become known as
‘qualia.’ This impression could also be vindicated by the fact that work on emotions found their
way into traditional publishing outlets of analytic philosophy around the same time as work on
philosophy of mind and phenomenal consciousness. Curiously, but certainly not coincidentally,
books with titles such as The Rediscovery of the Mind (Searle 1992) appeared just few years before
their philosophy of emotion equivalents, such as Rediscovering Emotion (Pugmire 1998).
But the impression that classical or contemporary phenomenology of emotions has any-
thing relevant to do with phenomenology in the notorious sense of ‘what is it like’ to have
conscious mental states, or qualia, or even just with ‘what it is like to feel’46 is simply false.
The primacy of the first-person perspective in phenomenology in no way limits the scope of
analysis to the qualitative ‘feeling’ aspect of emotions—be it their bodily, sensory, or any other
subjective ‘what is it like to undergo them’ aspect. One is prone to such reduction only if one
undercuts the intrinsic connection between affective, sensory, or bodily, on the one hand, and
intentional or evaluative components in emotions’ affective intentionality, on the other (see
again Goldie 2000, also de Monticelli’s chapter). We find a correlative pseudo-problem in
recent discussions on cognitive phenomenology in recent philosophy of mind, where the issue
of whether thoughts have a certain qualitative aspect, or ‘phenomenology,’ predominantly
arises by falsely dichotomizing the qualitative, conscious, on the one hand, and the cognitive,
propositional, and intentional dimension of mental states, on the other.47
Taking the subjective standpoint seriously when addressing emotions, for phenomenol-
ogists, means thematizing emotions in light of a whole series of relevant experiences and
evaluations of the affected subjects. From a phenomenological standpoint, emotions are only
meaningful in light of the conduct of subjects’ personal life and in the context of their life-
world. Importantly, this is not a private, inner-mental realm but essentially involves subjects’
interpersonal and sociocultural environment as well as their collective strivings and engage-
ments. This, by no means, implies that a phenomenological analysis of the nature of affectiv-
ity or of particular emotions has to stop short at the level of everyday emotional experience,
nor will descriptions suffice that only take into account folk-psychological or scientific pre-
conceptions about the sedimentation of emotions in ordinary experience. However, an ad-
equate phenomenological analysis must take these dimensions into account—along with
their bodily feeling, intentional-evaluative, etc. aspects—since they articulate a conceptual
background that is relevant for a proper understanding of emotions—or, of what they mean
for the subjects undergoing them (cf. also Steinbock 2014).

2.1 Main points of convergence within the

phenomenology of emotion
So far, we have spoken of ‘the phenomenology of emotion’ as if it is a more or less uni-
vocal account, and only alluded to differentiations regarding different topical foci among

9
 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

phenomenologists. This, of course, is a massive oversimplification and needs to be qualified.

First of all, just as there is no ‘analytic,’ or ‘cognitivist’ philosophy of emotion simpliciter,
there is no single account that could be taken as a paradigm of a phenomenological concep-
tion. To claim otherwise would only be applying strategic considerations, as it is, alas, too
often the case in academic turf-wars. So what are the major points of convergence and what
are the major fault lines among phenomenologists of emotions?
As we have already seen, most phenomenologists are in basic agreement with regard to the
following points: (i) The irreducibility of emotions to other mental or cognitive but also to
other bodily states; (ii) the fundamental role of the first-person (singular or plural) perspec-
tive in the study and description of emotional experiences, without ignoring the embedded-
ness of emotions in the life-world of individuals and social groups, which is shared and hence
can be accessed intersubjectively; (iii) the importance of taking the sociality of emotions
seriously; but also (iv) distinguishing empathy from sympathetic emotional stances toward
others, such as sympathy or compassion, as well as from various forms of affective sharing.
(v) Most, and in particular early and ‘realist’ phenomenologists, believe that emotions bear
important, broadly epistemic, relations to different types of values, and hence that axiologi-
cal considerations must be part of a systematic philosophy of emotions. (vi) Relatedly, many
hold that emotions can be appropriate/authentic or not, and hence normative considerations
play a fundamental role in a proper phenomenology of emotions.
There are further important points of agreement, some of which are already implied in
what we have said so far, but which are worth making explicit:
(vii) To begin with, phenomenologists not only stress the role of embodiment in emo-
tional experience in a general sense; ever since Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, they pay careful
attention to the distinction between the subjectively felt body (Leib) and the objective body,
or the body under some third-personal, physical description (Körper). This distinction, in
turn, must always be taken into account when thematizing emotions in phenomenology as
bodily feelings.48
(viii) Relatedly, virtually all phenomenologists take an anti-Jamesian stance regarding
the identification of bodily feelings and emotions. In contrast, they markedly distinguish
bodily sensations (such as itches, pains, etc.), purely bodily feelings, and sensations of bodily
changes (i.e., roughly Jamesian emotions), on the one hand, from emotions, moods, or sen-
timents, on the other. Moreover, some, and in particular Scheler, Stein, and Schmitz, also
emphasize the difference between the bodily feeling aspect of emotions and the more com-
plex experience of emotions, especially regarding their differing affective intentionality.
Building on and further developing these differentiations, some phenomenologists introduce
complex stratifications within our affective life and taxonomize affective states above and
beyond the standard classification of episodic emotions, moods, sentiments, etc. For exam-
ple, Scheler, Stein, or Kolnai discuss such affective states as vital feelings (Vitalgefühle) or
life-feelings (Lebensgefühle), while Schmitz distinguishes between stirrings of the felt body
(leibliche Regungen), bodily being-affected (leiblich-affektive Betroffenheit), and emotions as at-
mospheres (see more in the respective chapters).
(ix) According to most phenomenologists, emotions are not passive states that subjects
simply undergo and cannot control or regulate—emotions are not passions in this sense.
Rather, in contemporary terminology, they are ‘enactive,’ acting upon their environ-
ment, or, as Sartre would put it ‘spontaneous.’ Indeed, as we have seen, many hold that
the very experiential receptivity of subjects is always and already affective, or is a “being
affected” (Affiziertsein; Husserl 1908–1937). Arguably, many phenomenological analyses
of emotions can be viewed as undermining altogether any neat active/passive distinction

10
 Introduction

regarding emotions, and in particular Husserl’s, Sartre’s, Merleau-Ponty’s, or, more recently,
Waldenfels.49 Some, and in particular New Phenomenologists, such as Schmitz or Griffero,
go even further in this regard. They hold that any distinction between internal and ex-
ternal aspects of subjects’ “bodily being-affected” (leiblich-affektives Betroffensein) in expe-
riencing emotions is altogether inappropriate. Rather, their conceptions of being affected,
of emotions as having “bodily orientations” (leibliche Richtungen), or of emotions as socially
“extended atmospheres” aim to capture the sense in which even bodily feelings and at-
mospheres can interact in a shared “emotional space” (Gefühlsraum).50 Put more generally,
according to most phenomenologists, emotions are not simply ‘felt responses,’ registering
purportedly ‘internal’ (bodily) or ‘external’ (worldly, social, etc.) events; rather, they are
responsive to and disclosive of the world and others, as well as disclosive of oneself.
(x) In the latter feature, the self-disclosive nature of emotions, lies a further central
contention of phenomenological accounts, most prominently defended today by authors
such as Pugmire (2005) and Goldie (2000, 2012). Emotions stand in an essential relation to
what it is to be a person. According to some, such as Scheler or Stein, emotions indeed are
constitutive of personhood. Numerous phenomenologists, and notably Pfänder, Husserl,
Scheler, Voigtländer, Stein, Walther, Merleau-Ponty, or Schmitz, further hold that emo-
tions have certain depths, which correspond, roughly, to how they affect the core personal
evaluations of the emoters (see more in the respective chapters). An interesting, yet, in the
English-speaking world fairly little known, alternative account is provided by Henry, who
stresses the essentially bodily and affective dimension of one’s basic, pre-intentional and
pre-reflexive, relation to oneself, or what he calls “self-affection” (auto-affection) or “self-
feeling” (Henry 1963, 2003).51
(xi) Unsurprisingly, all phenomenologists in the tradition of Husserl and early phenome-
nology hold that emotions are intentional states, or states that are directed upon and present
their objects in certain ways (which is, to be sure, a view shared by virtually all philosophers
of emotion since Aquinas). Moreover, in the wake of Brentano’s original conception (see
Montague’s chapter), many, and most explicitly Pfänder, Husserl, and Stein, also hold that
emotions as intentional acts are dependent upon, though not reducible to, some kind of in-
tentional ‘presentation’ (Vorstellung) of the target object. The claim is sometimes expressed in
terms of a foundational relation between emotional and non-emotional acts. The idea is that
emotional experiences are founded upon certain cognitive acts, or, better, acts of intentional
acquaintance with the object that bears the value-properties that the emotion discloses. The
founding act is sometimes construed as an “objectifying act” (Husserl), such as a perception
or some other “intuitive” act, such as remembering or imagination.52 Furthermore, accord-
ing to this view, emotions derive their intentionality from those objectifying acts that they
are founded upon. Call this the ‘foundational thesis’ regarding the intentionality of emotions
(Drummond 2018). Phenomenologists in the tradition of Heidegger also accept a version of
the foundational thesis, but reverse the order of foundation. They argue that any represen-
tational, propositional, or properly speaking epistemic act, and in particular understanding
and discourse, is founded in one’s original attunement (Befindlichkeit).
However, many of the details of this foundational thesis are unclear or contested (see
below), though what is clear is that the phenomenological intentionality thesis does not
entail any form of emotional cognitivism, according to which emotions would be re-
ducible to the cognitive content of intentional representations, let alone to mere evalua-
tive judgments. Nor does any phenomenologist believe that the foundational thesis entails
propositionalism regarding emotional states, i.e., the claim that they necessarily have a
propositional structure (of the sort: ‘S fears that p’), or that they must at least be translatable

11
 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

to propositional attitudes. In contrast, many, if not most, phenomenologists would arguably

subscribe to the view that paradigmatic emotions such as fear, anger, envy, or jealousy
are more complex and more fine-grained than propositional attitudes and judgments,
but, somewhat paradoxically, also more ‘primitive’ in terms of their conceptual contents.
Consequently, also pre-linguistic humans, and presumably some non-human animals, are
capable of experiencing emotions.
The fact that the intentionality of emotions is more fine-grained than the cognitive con-
tent of propositional attitudes partly explains why emotions, in Goldie’s (2000) terms, are
“cognitively impenetrable”: That is to say, they are more or less unaffected by relevant beliefs
about their intentional objects, without necessarily being really irrational or unwarranted.
For example, I can be deadly afraid of the mere sight of a bee as an adult if I had a traumatic
experience as a child, having fallen into a bee nest and being repeatedly stung, even if the
memory of the pain is actually not bodily felt or eludes my occurrent consciousness (see
Drummond 2004).53
(xii) This links to a further point stressed by phenomenologists, namely that emotions
are structured and holistically embedded both in subjective, or personal, and objective, in-
tersubjective, or life-worldly contexts. The evaluative properties that emotions disclose are
not discrete instances but, due to the structure and experiential nature of emotions, embed-
ded in situations of certain types. Emotions are part of the personal situation of those who
have them—they have a history. This pre-history—or what Elster (1999) calls “antecedents”
and de Sousa (1987) “key scenarios”—is always idiosyncratic. Now, especially, though not
uniquely, in the case of traumatization, this can result in intersubjective conflicts of appro-
priateness: The involved emotions may seem inappropriate in their felt evaluation or ‘dispro-
portionate’ in their felt intensity (cf. Goldie 2000; Pugmire 2005) vis-à-vis a given situation
or, at worst, as irrational. This does not mean, however, that their motivation or personal
genesis cannot be, at least in principle, rationally reconstructed and understood by others;
the given emotion is then meaningfully fitted into the respective set of experiences of the
emoter. To conclude, according to most phenomenologists, emotions are subject to norms
of rationality, at least in the sense of a broad concept of rationality according to which there
must be some concordance between the motivational and personal backgrounds, the inten-
tional structure, and the experiential quality of emotions, on the one hand, and evaluative
features of situational context they disclose, on the other.
(xiii) As mentioned, some, if only a few, philosophers of emotion from the analytic tradi-
tion hold that emotions are not necessarily felt or consciously experienced. There are various
possible readings of this claim. One can construe unfelt emotions as unconscious dispositions
to feel something (e.g., Wollheim 1999) or as “emotions that pass unfelt, or are felt only on
the periphery of consciousness” (Roberts 2003, 80). Some suggest that on closer inspec-
tion, there is no outright inconsistency in claiming that there are unconscious emotions in
a Freudian, dispositional, or other sense, and that emotions are essentially felt (Deonna and
Teroni 2012; cf. Hatzimoysis 2007). In contrast, it seems that there is no phenomenological
sense in which emotions can be unfelt, where ‘unfelt’ is understood as not experientially
given. However, as we will see in the next section, it is true that according to some inter-
pretations of the distinction of the so-called ‘value-feelings’ and emotions proposed by early
phenomenologists, one can say that an emotion that corresponds to a given value-feeling is
not (adequately) felt. Obviously, there is another reading of the claim that most phenomenol-
ogists could readily endorse, namely one that builds upon the distinction between grasping
an emotion and being bodily or else affected by it. Thus, it seems perfectly possible, and quite
ubiquitous, to empathically grasp emotions of others or to simply perceive their expressions,

12
 Introduction

without feeling those emotions in any relevant sense of the term (cf. Landweer’s chapter).
Finally, some phenomenologists, such as Stein (1922), recognize cases in which a group of
individuals shares an emotion without each member experiencing or feeling it.54

2.2 Main fault lines

So much, then, for the broad agreements between phenomenological accounts of emotions;
what about the divergences? Some of the disagreements are systematic or metaphysical in na-
ture, relating, for instance, to: the role of emotions vis-à-vis values and the ontological status
of evaluative properties; the role and nature of affective intentionality; possible taxonomies
and the stratification of affective phenomena; the possibility of unfelt or not consciously
experienced emotions; or the issue of whether emotions should primarily be construed as
conscious mental or psychological states at all, or, for example, as spatial atmospheres.
There are also some meta-theoretical divergences: Whereas some phenomenologists are
more interested in general theories of the nature and structure of emotions (like Husserl or
the early Sartre), others focus on specific types of emotions, such as social, collective (Scheler,
Stein, and Walther), moral (Scheler; cf. Steinbock 2014), or hostile (Kolnai, Scheler); or on
emotions in specific socio-normative or political contexts (e.g., Arendt, Fanon, or Beauvoir).
Yet, others analyze particular emotions, such as love (Scheler), shame (Scheler, Sartre), anxi-
ety (Heidegger), hatred or disgust (Kolnai), or Ressentiment (Scheler); or, as notably Scheler
and Schmitz, they provide comprehensive accounts on all of the above. Lastly, some study
emotions and moods more in terms of their specific existential-ontological and world-
disclosing function (Heidegger and Bollnow; cf. also Ratcliffe 2014; Saarinen 2014, 2018).
Certainly, almost none of the 13 converging points sketched above are wholly uncontested
among phenomenologists (save, perhaps, the possibility of unfelt emotions). Without being
able to go through each in detail, we will only highlight the most significant controversies.
Let us start with the intentionality thesis. However broad the agreement regarding its
general contours—namely regarding the fact that emotions have a sui generis affective
intentionality—there are a number of moot points. For one, it is contested whether specific
types of affective phenomena are intentional phenomena at all, or at least in the standard
sense of object-directedness or mental ‘aboutness’; this concerns, first, sensory or bodily
feelings, such as pain or bodily pleasures (are they, for example, directed upon felt locations
in the body?) but, above all, it concerns Dasein’s affective attunement (Befindlichkeit), moods,
and in particular fundamental moods (Grundstimmungen), existential or the so-called “oce-
anic feelings” (Saarinen 2018) and affective atmospheres. Some, like Stein, argue that even
paradigmatic moods are intentional and have an “objective correlate” (as, e.g., the rosy shim-
mer that the world is submerged in when someone is cheerful; see Stein 1917, 108–109; 1922,
181).55 According to other radical proposals, and based on a general criticism of the concept of
intentionality, not even allegedly ‘ordinary’ emotions such as basic fear can, without qualifi-
cations, be properly conceived of as intentional phenomena (Schmitz 1969, 2011). Moreover,
as we have seen, phenomenologists in the Heideggerian tradition reverse the foundational
relation concerning emotions and objectifying acts. In contrast to the Brentanian-Husserlian
line of thought, they argue that telling (Rede) and understanding (Verstehen) are founded in
attunement (Befindlichkeit), and Schmitz traces self-consciousness back to one’s being bodily
affected (leiblich-affektive Betroffenheit). Indeed, New Phenomenologists defend the view that
emotions cannot be reduced to conscious mental or psychological states, but should rather
be conceived as spatially extended atmospheric phenomena, which are subjectively incorpo-
rated in one’s being bodily affected by them.56 In the broadest brush-strokes, in this respect,

13
 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

we can register a fault line between two broad paradigms in the phenomenology of emo-
tions: the affective-intentionalist paradigm, on the one hand, and the affective-bodily-impact or the
bodily being-affected paradigm of New Phenomenology, on the other.57
There is another aspect of this fault line which concerns the issue of embodiment.
Specifically, it concerns the claim that all affective phenomena are bodily felt, or in some sense
body-bound. Thus, key figures of the early phenomenology of emotions, and notably Scheler
and Stein, hold that not all affective phenomena are “body-bound.” The reason for this strik-
ing claim is that certain types of affective experiences, and in particular what Scheler and Stein
call “spiritual feelings” (geistige Gefühle), or “emotions in the pregnant sense,” do not always co-
vary with changes in bodily feelings or with any bodily feelings at all. For example, one can be
anxious about one’s hostile neighbors without any sensible heart beating or trembling of one’s
hand, or one can remain fearful after all visceral or other bodily felt sensations have ceased to
manifest themselves. New Phenomenologists would say in these cases that bodily contraction,
which characterizes anxiety, must be felt to speak of fear or anxiety at all. Notice, however,
that neither Scheler nor Stein, nor any other phenomenologist for that matter, would, there-
fore, simply give up on the distinction between Leib and Körper, nor would they no longer em-
phasize the role of the felt body for affectivity. Quite the contrary: Both Stein and Scheler, for
example, clearly accommodate the Leib/Körper-distinction, and further distinguish—within
the sphere of the lived body (Leib)—between purely “sensory feelings” (Gefühlsempfindungen)
and the so-called “vital” or “common feelings” (Vitalgefühle, Gemeingefühle). The former in-
clude sensations such as itching, bodily pain, the pleasure of tastes, or of the touch of a soft
texture, which are interoceptively perceived but concern specific sensations in specific bodily
locations, whereas the latter concern the overall “attunement of the lived body” (leibliche
Befindlichkeit; Stein 1917, 87), such as weariness, freshness, or irritability. In unprecedented
detail, these authors provide descriptions of the complex stratifications of bodily feelings and
their psycho-dynamic interaction (e.g., the affect of bodily weariness on the experience of
spiritual joy, etc.). They, thus, prefigure later conceptions of bodily attunement by Heidegger
and Schmitz.58 Moreover, in concordance with the affective intentionality paradigm, all early
phenomenologists still hold fast to the idea that—for all affective phenomena which, in fact,
have bodily components—their bodily feeling and their intentional-evaluative dimension are
inextricable and can only analytically, if at all, be distinguished.59
Coming back to the intentionality thesis, even among those who wholeheartedly sub-
scribe to the affective-intentionalist paradigm (in contrast to the affective-bodily-impact
paradigm), it is far from clear how exactly to spell out the affective or “emotional inten-
tionality” at stake (cf. Ratcliffe 2019). Is it a sui generis kind of intentionality, like the in-
tentionality of empathy according to Husserl or Stein,60 as Goldie (2000) argues? Relatedly,
the construction of the above-mentioned foundational thesis regarding the intentionality of
emotions is far from clear-cut: What does it mean to say that the intentionality of emotions
is ‘derived’ from the intentionality of acts of perception or imagination upon which emo-
tive acts are founded, as Husserl, for example, claims in some of his writings? Specifically,
it is unclear in what sense emotions are intentional presentations of values, i.e., so-called
‘value-ceptions’ (Wertnehmen), as Husserl, Scheler, Stein, and others construe emotive acts;
and in what sense do value-ceptions involve originary presentations of values, analogous to
perception (Wahrnehmen).61 In other words, it is a matter of dispute whether the emotive acts
of value-ception really constitute, in the Husserlian sense, the evaluative properties of their
intentional objects, or the ‘value-objects’ as such, or if it is the case that emotions are only
directed upon those objects and disclose their evaluative properties. If the latter, what, then,
does ‘disclosing’ here exactly mean?62

14
 Introduction

With this, we touch upon one of the central discussions of early phenomenology of
emotions, namely on the nature of values and the intricate relation between emotions and
values.63 This issue bears important connections to the above-mentioned appropriateness of
emotions. All early phenomenologists, including not only the so-called ‘realist’ phenome-
nologists, such as Scheler, Reinach, Stein, or Hildebrand, but also the transcendental-idealist
Husserl, hold, explicitly or implicitly, a form of value realism. (In the following, we will
discuss only this strand of the debate and leave aside the more general criticism of the con-
cept of values by the bodily being-affected-paradigm.)64 However, it is far from clear what
value realism exactly entails, or how to conceive of the ontological and phenomenological
status of values. To recap, the most important alternative conceptions on offer are these:
Either values and value-objects are first constituted by emotive acts, or values are indepen-
dent objects or properties of things, persons, or events. There is an admittedly problematic
middle-way that we can uncover implicitly in some phenomenological accounts, such as
Stein’s (1922).65 According to this view, though values are intentional correlates of emotions
qua acts of value-feeling (Wertfühlen), value-feelings still can appropriately or inappropriately
track those values and are thus sensitive to reasons ‘of the heart.’66 Values, thus, retain a cer-
tain ontological independency vis-à-vis the emotive acts that at the same time constitute and
disclose them. According to one interpreter, Scheler would also conceive of values as both
felt qualia and intentional objects (Theodorou 2018, 152f.). Values are not particular prop-
erties of concrete, existing objects, like the color of a concrete patch, hence do not depend
on the existence of concrete objects as their bearer; they are rather like “eidetic essences” or
“species” (cf., critically, Vendrell Ferran 2008a, 198f.). If this were so, we are at a “dead-end”
(Theodorou 2018, 153), since one could never directly access the values that one’s emotions
are supposed to disclose, at least not in ordinary affective experiences. Rather, value-feelings
would be some affective analogue of Husserl’s categorical intuitions, and values some sort
of higher-order categorical object or, even more confusingly, some “species of a felt quality”
(ibid.). But this would amount to an arch-cognitivist view of emotions, which doesn’t seem
to be true to the phenomenology of emotional experience and doesn’t square with Scheler’s
overall account of emotions either.67 What, then, are values? As none of this seems quite right
nor does it help illuminate the phenomenological nature of felt evaluations.
Probably, the closest one can get to an answer is by considering the early phenomenol-
ogists’ view on how emotions disclose values in the acts of value-ceptions or value-feelings
(Wertfühlen)—a view that is, in turn, unfortunately rather ambiguous.68 Without going into
too much detail, let us just highlight one contentious issue, namely whether or not emotions
should be conceived of as identical to acts of value-feeling. Some classical phenomenologists,
and in particular Scheler, Stein, or Kolnai, hold a non-identity view: Value-feelings belong
to a distinct type of intentional act and should be contrasted with feelings or emotions prop-
erly speaking (Mulligan 2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2017; Vendrell Ferran 2008a, 2015). According
to this view, it’s not feelings that present or disclose values, but precisely value-feelings. Thus,
I am not ashamed because my feeling of shame discloses the shamefulness of my behavior,
but rather because, in having a corresponding value-feeling, I become acquainted with its
shamefulness. And the feeling, viz. the emotional experience of shame, is a response to the
disvalue of shamefulness that the value-feeling is disclosing.
Value-feelings do not represent a distinctive type of feeling or emotional experience.
However, it is not unanimous whether they are just an aspect of a properly speaking emo-
tional experience, or instead some affective ‘knowledge by acquaintance,’ or as Mulligan
puts it, “acknowledgements” or “responses to acquaintance with values” (Mulligan 2010a,
2010b). For example, Stein does not contrast value-feelings with the feeling or the emotional

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 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

reaction that is motivated by those values; for Stein, they are precisely just two aspects of
the affective intentionality of emotions.69 In any case, the most promising way to approach
a resolution to this issue seems to conceive of the phenomenological relation between emo-
tions and values in terms of a double-aspect evaluative intentionality of emotions. Emotions, then,
are disclosing not only values but also something about the appropriateness and the depth of
the felt evaluation, or the emotional experience as such (see, again, for a similar account de
Monticelli’s chapter). Thus, when I have a feeling (e.g., joy over x), what is disclosed to me is
not only the evaluative property ( joyfulness) of x but that and how x matters to me or impacts
me in a certain way (as meriting a joyful response from me).
Yet, importantly, realist phenomenologists do not simply identify the act of value-feeling
and the experiential dimension or felt quality of an emotion. The reason for distinguishing
the two has to do with their claim that emotions can appropriately or inappropriately track
values, and, moreover, be appropriately and inappropriately felt. Only by distinguishing these
two aspects of emotions—their value-disclosing and their function of ‘affecting’ subjects—
can phenomenologists take into account cases in which a value is indeed appropriately dis-
closed but precisely doesn’t affectively (fully) impact the emoter (‘leaves one cold’) or is not
accompanied by a corresponding emotion at all (cf. Stein 1922, 133–136). In other words,
realist phenomenologists aim to accommodate the intuition that we can clearly—and also
emotionally—grasp values without necessarily being affected by them in a way, in which
others or we ourselves think we ought to. For example, we may grasp the appalling nature
of an injustice but instead of being outraged by it (even if only in the sense of a moral out-
rage), we remain in a state of slight indignation. According to this picture, the perceptual
and the moral world is more complex and more fine-grained than our emotional repertoire
(cf. Vendrell Ferran 2015).70
Others would claim that divergences between (alleged) values and those actually felt are
an indication that something is wrong not necessarily with the feelings but, rather, with the
moral norms and values to which one considers oneself to be committed. According to this
perspective, it is not an independent moral world which is too complex to be grasped by
emotions; it is the moral self-concept and self-image which are susceptible to self-deception
concerning one’s own commitments. Here, one would need to differentiate between (i) a
wider concept of value and (ii) the narrower concept of norms which are dependent on emo-
tions with strict normative demands like shame, guilt, and moral anger, which are emotions
of conscience and have moral authority for us (see Landweer 2007, 2013). How to resolve
this problem of a divergence, or even a conflict, between emotions and values—whether
emotions can ever be considered inadequate, inappropriate, or inauthentic in some sense, or
whether, in some cases, it is our moral ideas or normative framework that are too wooden or
prone to self-deception—is an open question that begs further phenomenological research.

3. Rationale and synoptic overview

Against the historical and meta-theoretical background just sketched, let us now say a few
words about the rationale of this volume, about our reasons for selecting the given authors
and topics and give a synoptic overview of the parts and chapters.
The volume consists of five interlinked parts which center around three focal aims:
(a) A more historical focus (Part I), (b) a systematic focus on the most important classical and
contemporary issues and debates (Part II), and (c) a focus on the analyses of specific types and
forms of emotions, notably self- and other-directed, collective and political emotions (Parts III
and IV ), as well as of affective phenomena that we call ‘borderline cases of emotions’ (Part V ).

16
 Introduction

Thus, first, the handbook critically, and in contemporary terms, re-evaluates the rich
historical resources that we can find in the phenomenology of emotions. Accordingly, in
Part I: Historical Perspective, the chapters offer state-of-the-art assessments of central pre- and
postwar, and also little-known phenomenologists of emotions. Some of the accounts are
systematically introduced to an English-speaking audience for the first time (e.g., Bollnow71
or Voigtländer). In presenting the views of classical as well as yet only marginally considered
authors, we certainly aim beyond a mere cultivation of the tradition; rather, we contend that
a historically informed gaze is better suited to detect and also to challenge conceptual and
methodological background assumptions and their implications for current philosophical
theorizing. Yet, anybody who seriously engages with the (pre-)history of the phenomenol-
ogy of emotions will realize that there is no one-dimensional, and much less teleological,
narrative. One will, of course, also discover that the conceptual repertoires, methods, and
claims of classical phenomenological accounts are not neatly reflected in current discussions
in the philosophy of emotions. Rather, we hope that what come into relief are both the con-
tinuities and divergences across these accounts, and hence an overall more balanced view on
the present state of emotion research.
In terms of the selection of authors, we aim to provide the most exhaustive treatment of
all those phenomenological thinkers who have significantly contributed to the philosophy
of emotions. Thus, 19 chapters give overviews of the theory of emotions of authors from the
pre-history or the very beginning of the phenomenological movement (see the chapters on
Brentano, Pfänder, Geiger, Husserl, Voigtländer, Scheler, Scheler, Walther, Schmalenbach,
Hildebrand, and Kolnai) to the most important Inter- or Post-war French (Sartre, Beauvoir,
Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and Levinas) and German-speaking phenomenologists (Heidegger,
Bollnow, Gurwitsch, Arendt, and Schmitz). Given their distinctive contribution to a sys-
tematic phenomenology of emotions, a special emphasis in this part is on the so-called early
or realist phenomenologists. Many of these authors are next to unknown within analytic
philosophy of emotions, and some even within phenomenological scholarship; yet, they
were not only highly influential for the establishment of the phenomenological movement
(see Spiegelberg 1994) but also offer numerous valuable insights for contemporary debates on
social, collective, and moral emotions (notably Voigtländer, Stein, Walther, Schmalenbach,
von Hildebrand, and Kolnai). Some of the contributions in this part not only present authors
individually, but, wherever it makes systematic sense, the respective work is considered in
light of mutual influences or criticism (see the chapters on Walther and Schmalenbach and
Heidegger and Bollnow).
Now, some might wonder whether all these authors can sensibly be listed among phe-
nomenologists. To be sure, in terms of traditional fault lines, we have endorsed a fairly liberal
notion of phenomenology. Thus, we have included authors who might, on first glance, not
immediately be recognized as belonging to the phenomenological tradition, such as Fanon,
Arendt, Beauvoir, or the forefathers of phenomenology Pfänder, Geiger, or Brentano. The
same goes for unquestionably phenomenological authors who, however, might not be readily
counted as phenomenologists of emotions (such as Schmalenbach, Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty,
or Levinas). Above and beyond our generally inclusive notion of what phenomenology
was, is, and should be in future research, our choice is motivated by more specific consid-
erations. In some cases, it is motivated by considering certain ‘conceptual constellations’
(Begriffskonstellationen, as Adorno or German historians of philosophy would put it) or in-
fluences that need to be taken into account to understand central authors and concepts. For
example, Husserl’s, Scheler’s, Stein’s, or Walther’s phenomenology, and their phenomenol-
ogy of emotions, cannot be fully appreciated without considering the theories of Brentano,

17
 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

Pfänder, or Geiger. The same can be said of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, who had a key
impact on both traditional and contemporary discussions on affectivity, even though they
have not provided systematic phenomenologies of emotions, or Arendt, Fanon, or Beauvoir,
who proved to be eminently influential on contemporary critical phenomenology. Similarly,
Schmalenbach or Gurwitsch were among the important voices for the development of a phe-
nomenology of collective emotions, which was fully developed only in the work of Scheler,
Stein, or Walther.
In terms of topical discussions, we were not only guided by what phenomenologists have
traditionally regarded as the central issues in the theory of emotions, such as intentionality,
values, appropriateness, the morality of emotions, or a taxonomy of different affective phe-
nomena; we were also guided by what we take to be equally essential for a comprehensive
phenomenology of emotions with a view to contemporary discussions (analytic or not), and
for the future phenomenological research generally speaking. This brings us to the second
aim of the volume, represented by Part II: Systematic Issues and Contemporary Debates. Here, the
chapters provide comprehensive overviews of both the central traditional and the recently
discussed issues in the philosophy of emotions from a phenomenological perspective. These
ten chapters offer lines of arguments that partly complement, partly challenge, current dis-
cussions on the ontology, epistemology, or morality of emotions and contextualize classical
phenomenological accounts of emotions with a view to current discussions on affective strat-
ification and taxonomies of affective states (Drummond), existential feelings (see Ratcliffe’s
chapter), trends in moral psychology and moral phenomenology (Helm, De Monticelli, and
Drummond and Rinofner-Kreidl), situated and 4E-approaches to emotions (Stephan and
Walter), the growing literature on emotional atmospheres (Griffero), the ph ilosophy of em-
bodiment and the relevant discussions in feminist thought (Dolezal), and psychopathology
(Fuchs), as well as the philosophy of art (Carroll).
In the remaining parts of the volume, 19 chapters provide detailed analyses of the central,
but also often sidelined or non-standard categories, types, and forms of particular emotions.
In these three parts, contributors investigate self-directed, other-directed, and collective
emotions, as well as discussions of particular ‘borderline cases’ of emotions.
With these analyses, we aim to close a gap in emotion research that still exists, despite
many dozens of texts published in recent years on particular emotions. Most philosophical
approaches were and still are devoted to formulating general theories of emotions, or have
the tendency to paradigmatically generalize certain features of particular emotions, from
which they then distill some general insights about the nature of certain types of emotions
(e.g., moral or aversive ones) or emotions in general.72 Cases in point, for example, are grief
for narrative theories (Goldie 2012; cf. Ryberg Ingerslev’s, and also Bortolan’s chapters), or
resentment and forgiveness for the morality of hostile emotions.73 Phenomenologists were
certainly not immune to this strategy. Just think of Sartre’s analysis of shame (cf. Zahavi’s
chapter), or Heidegger’s conceptualization of anxiety and boredom (cf. Thonhauser’s, and
Freeman’s and Elpidorou chapters). Obviously, this strategy has some shortcomings for
a phenomenologically adequate description of many emotions, as they do not readily fit
the paradigm cases. Consider, for instance, the problem of conceiving of the morality of
Ressentiment (in contrast to resentment) or of hatred (cf. Schmid’s, Landweer’s and Szanto’s
and Slaby’s chapter) or the arguably doomed attempt to construe a narrative theory of epi-
sodic forms of anger or joy.
In this volume, we pursue a multi-dimensional strategy, discussing general conceptions of
emotions and their role in our experiential, cognitive, moral, and social lives, as well as more
than 30 particular emotions. Moreover, in a number of chapters throughout the last three

18
 Introduction

parts, particular emotions are further differentiated, such as hate and hate of evil (see the
chapters of Landweer and Schmid), or shame, hetero-induced shame, and survivor shame (see
Zahavi, and Montes Sánchez), and various transformations and interlinked dynamics between
distinct but cognate emotions are elaborated upon (see Summa, Freeman and Elpidorou,
Landweer, Bortolan, Steinbock, Breyer, and Bernhardt). This also explains why some emo-
tions or types of emotions are discussed in more than one chapter, as they are considered from
different perspectives or in the context of different affective phenomena, or in the work of
different phenomenologists. This applies to forms of shame (see Zahavi, Montes Sánchez, and
Dolezal), and to various, distinctively social, antagonistic, and/or collective emotions, such as
Ressentiment or hatred (see Vendrell Ferran’s two chapters, as well as Landweer, Schmid, and
Szanto and Slaby), and forms of emotional sharing (see Calcagno, Schloßberger, Tranas and
Caminada, Fuchs, J. Müller, Sánchez Guerrero, Szanto and Slaby, and Krebs).
Part III deals with Self-Directed and Individual Emotions. The chapters, here, display dis-
cussions of central instances of emotions and affectively charged attitudes whose subjects
are typically—though not necessarily—single individuals and/or whose affective focus es-
sentially has a self-reference to the respective emoters, such as joy and happiness (Summa),
disgust (Heinämaa), fear, anxiety and boredom (Freeman and Elpidorou), pride and self-
esteem and its related contrast-phenomena embarrassment and shyness (Bortolan), and
shame (Zahavi). The emotions covered in this part also include often neglected but highly
pertinent feelings such as the affective reaction to humiliation or the feeling of humility and
affliction (Steinbock).
Part IV is dedicated to what we call Other-Directed and Collective Emotions. Under this
title, we subsume three different types of emotions: (i) Moral, antagositic, and (pro-)social
emotions, which all have an intrinsic social focus, or are intentionally directed at others,
such as grief (Ryberg Ingerslev), including: ‘pro-social’ sentiments, and in particular sym-
pathy and compassion (Breyer); hostile or ‘aggressive’ emotions, such as indignation, envy,
anger, jealousy, contempt, and hatred (Landweer); and the little-explored variants of shame,
namely survivor shame and shame felt in the face of something shameful being committed
by another with whom one socially identifies (Montez Sánchez); (ii) collective and/or polit-
ical emotions (Guerrero Sanchéz; Szanto and Slaby); (iii) in one case, namely empathy, a sui
generis intentional state that is, according to most phenomenologists, though not an affective
state as such (see above), indispensable for the grasp of emotions of others and lies at the basis
of ‘pro-social’ emotions (Breyer).
It is also in light of our multi-dimensional approach that we have included contentious
cases of affective phenomena, the so-called Borderline Cases of Emotions, in Part V— counting
on raised eye-brows and, indeed, welcoming skepticism as to whether these actually are
fully fledged emotions. We believe that only phenomenologically detailed analyses and on-
going conceptual refinements regarding any psychologically, morally, socially, or politically
relevant phenomena that potentially bear an affective dimension can determine—ever- ­­
inconclusively—the scope of the class of phenomena that we can rightly call ‘emotions.’
Accordingly, this concluding part is devoted to dispositional states, attitudes, or other
phenomena that may not be properly speaking emotions but have either important functions
for generating affective states or are themselves affectively ‘charged’ in one way or another.
Moreover, a number of contributions in this section return to issues and discussions from pre-
vious parts, in particular on bodily felt aspects of emotions, the morality of emotions, emo-
tions of aggression and destruction, or emotional sharing. Specifically, these chapters discuss
morally or socio-politically relevant attitudes, such as forgiveness and revenge ( Bernhardt),
gratitude (Rinofner-Kreidl), feelings of solidarity ( J. Müller), trust (de Warren), or the hate

19
 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

that is specifically directed at allegedly ‘evil’ agents, or its opposite, the complex dispositional
sentiment love (Krebs). But we find here also discussions of a central affective bodily afflic-
tion, such as pain (Svenaeus), or the affliction that befalls one in the loss of the sense of the
world as a locus of familiarity, as in experiences of the uncanny (Trigg).

4. Desiderata for future research

There probably exists no handbook in which something is not missing, no matter how com-
prehensive the collection may be. This is, of course, no different in the present case. So, who
or what is missing?
We have aimed for maximal comprehensiveness regarding the treatment of phenomenol-
ogists, presenting 20 authors from the phenomenological tradition. However, some little dis-
cussed or almost unknown but still important figures and their work could not be included.
The list comprises almost a dozen German-speaking, Spanish, French, and Hungarian
authors from the beginning to the late 20th century, notably: the Munich phenomenol-
ogists and Pfänder-students Willy Haas,74 Karl Konstantin Löwenstein-Freudenberg, and
Paul Kananow, but also figures such as Nicolai Hartmann, Hans Reiner, José Ortega y
Gasset, Helmuth Plessner, the already mentioned Stephan Strasser and Michel Henry, or Paul
Ricœur and Agnes Heller.
Let us say a few words on these authors, thus outlining potential avenues for future re-
search (for Henry, see above).
Haas published his essay Über Echtheit und Unechtheit von Gefühlen (“On the Authentic-
ity and Inauthenticity of Emotions”) in 1910, in which he develops an original framework
for the appropriateness of emotions. Roughly, the idea is this: There are no authentic or
inauthentic emotions as such; rather, the authenticity of emotions is correlative with the
strata of the ego or self in which they are realized. Authentic emotions are those which are
integrated into the “unity of the proper personality” (Einheit der eigentlichen Persönlichkeit) or
the “dominant affective orientations” (Grundrichtungen der Gefühle) of the relevant instance
of the self, i.e., the “ego that actually bears the given emotion” (das Ich, welches Träger des
Gefühls ist). For example, joyfulness is authentic if it is integrated into the actually dominant
background orientation of relaxation and blissfulness of the emoter and not into that of her
irritability or disgruntlement (Haas 1910, 352–356). Haas not only argues against correlating
the (in)authenticity of emotions with the diachronically fluctuating “phenomenal ego,” but
also warns us not to misidentify the relevant layer of the self with some personal character
or characteristics. Overall, Haas seems to echo Stein’s similar considerations, but also partly
prefigures recent accounts of emotional “soundness.” 75
Other work that has almost been completely forgotten are two dissertations from the
Munich school of phenomenology: the Pfänder-student Löwenstein-Freudenberg’s the-
sis Über das Gefallen (“On Pleasing”) (1913), which aims at a detailed “phenomenology of
the act of pleasure” (“Phänomenologie des Gefallensaktes”), distinguishing it from love and
partly drawing on Freud; and the Russian student Kananow’s dissertation Über das Gefühl
der Tätigkeit (“On the Feeling of Agency”) (1910), written under the direction of Pfänder
and Lipps, which elaborates a taxonomy of feelings of intentional agency, such as feelings of
excitement (Erregungsgefühle), of power (Kraftgefühle), or feelings accompanying intentional
decision (Entscheidungsgefühle). Both treatises deserve more attention, especially given their
focus on still wholly underexplored affective states.76
Nicolai Hartmann, in the second volume of his three-volume Ethics (1926), puts forth an
a priori axiology or a so-called ‘material ethics of value,’ in which he details different types

20
 Introduction

of emotional and moral evaluations and their relation to different types of values (see Poli
2017). Despite strong links between Hartmann’s axiology and Scheler’s (see Kelly 2011) and
Hartmann’s occasional references to other realist phenomenologists, such as von Hildebrand
or Reinach, he doesn’t endorse a phenomenological methodology, even broadly conceived.
Nevertheless, the Ethics contains many phenomenologically detailed descriptions of a range
of emotions, or what he calls ‘special moral values’ (e.g., happiness, courage, love, humility,
trust, modesty, or aloofness). Phenomenological reassessments of these or further compara-
tive research elaborating Hartmann’s and other phenomenologists’ take on particular emo-
tions could thus be fruitful (e.g., Kolnai’s ‘haughtiness’ (Hochmut) and Hartmann’s ‘aloofness’
(Wahrung der Distanz)).
In this regard, we should also mention Reiner’s alternative phenomenological account
of values (Reiner 1959; see also 1932). In a somewhat deflationary move, Reiner correlates
values with the valence of emotions (as do many classical accounts, such as Spinoza’s or
Aquinas’). Values and disvalues are simply what is either agreeable/pleasant or disagreeable/
unpleasant. He also explicitly cuts across the traditional divide between realist and idealist
conceptions of values (Reiner 1959) and provides a succinct critical discussion of Heidegger’s
Nietzsche-inspired rejection of the notion of value altogether (e.g., in Heidegger 1938).77
Ortega y Gasset is a better known, though today little read, author, who was educated in
the context of the Neo-Kantianism of Cohen and Natorp. However, in his earlier years, he
also intensively engaged with the broader phenomenological movement, in particular with
Pfänder, Husserl, and Scheler, and later, critically, with Heidegger (Pintor Ramos 1994;
Holmes 2017). Although Ortega y Gasset did not present any systematic work on phenome-
nology of emotions, his essays in On Love (1941) are noteworthy. Here, he follows Pfänder’s
theory of sentiments. He also agrees with Scheler that love and hate are dispositional acts, in-
sofar as they incline an “inner doing,” an active intention toward their objects (see Vendrell
Ferran 2008a).
Stephan Strasser’s work Phenomenology of Feeling: An Essay on the Phenomena of Heart (1956)
deserves special attention. In this systematic work, Strasser (a previous Husserl-assistant)
critically discusses Scheler and, probably for the first time in the German-speaking world,
also Sartre’s theory of emotions at length. Moreover, he deals with the first- and second-
generation Leipzig School Gestalt psychologists’ accounts of emotions. But Strasser is
certainly of more than mere scholarly interest as he attempts to develop an original and
comprehensive phenomenological “typology of feeling.” He also offers the most systematic
phenomenological account of happiness to date (see Summa’s chapter). Fortunately, Strasser’s
work has been translated into English decades ago, and Ricœur’s foreword and the trans-
lator Robert Wood’s comprehensive introduction provide a good starting point for a long-
overdue rediscovery.
The rich work of Paul Ricœur also contains interesting material for future work on af-
fectivity. For example, in The Fallible Man (a part of his monumental Philosophy of the Will)
(1960), he, too, discusses happiness in some detail. More importantly, he introduces the
notion of “affective fragility,” which refers to the phenomenon that humans are capable of
what one would today call ‘mixed feelings,’ 78 or, in Ricœur’s Freudian terms, a “dispropor-
tion between the principle of pleasure and the principle of happiness,” as when one expe-
riences “Joy in and through anguish” (ibid., 106). Relatedly, Ricœur discusses the alleged
“paradox” of affective intentionality, the phenomenon that the intentionality of emotions
grasps felt qualities pertaining to intentional objects, and, at the same time, “manifest[t] and
revea[l] the way in which the self is inwardly affected” (ibid., 84). As we have seen, the latter
point regarding emotions’ self-related and self-revelatory character is a central issue in both

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 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

phenomenological and analytic philosophy of emotions; it has also been discussed in terms
of the radically ‘passive’ intentionality of self-affection by Henry.
Another notion of the paradox nature of human existence and its relation to affec-
tivity was proposed earlier by one of the most eminent German-speaking philosophical
anthropologists, Helmuth Plessner. Plessner was a student of Husserl, Neo-Kantians, and
the sociologist Max Weber, but was also influenced by Scheler. Plessner’s core idea is that
the defining feature of humans, which distinguishes them from non-human animals and
inorganic matter alike, lies in their so-called “eccentric positionality.” Plessner means by
this a form of perspectival distance toward one’s organic and inorganic environments, as
well as to one’s own body. Importantly, for Plessner, this distance or transcendence vis-à-
vis oneself manifests itself not only in human’s linguistic capability but also, and indeed
distinctively so, their emotional expressivity. Specifically, eccentric positionality mani-
fests itself in the uniquely human expression of smiling (Lächeln), laughing, and crying
(Plessner 1941/1961, 1950). Plessner conceives of laughing and crying as “limit-cases of
human behavior,” as they express “the brokenness of man’s relation to his body,” which
is “the basis of his existence, the source, but also the limit, of his power” (1941/1961,
32). Plessner has had a considerable influence on German postwar philosophy, but has
not yet been sufficiently recognized in the English-speaking world. Both his original
existential-anthropological theory of laughter and crying and his analysis of shame and
vanity (Plessner 1924) await a broader discussion in the philosophy of emotions (see,
however, Berger 1997).79
Finally, let us mention the unduly little-known work A Theory of Feelings (1979) by the
Hungarian philosopher Heller, who later became the successor of Arendt’s chair at the New
School for Social Research. In this book, Heller provides an intriguing, explicitly phenom-
enologically founded, critical sociology of emotions. Heller was arguably among the first
to discuss the idea of culturally sedimented and internalized “emotional regimes” (Reddy
2001) or normative sets of affective practices. This is well reflected in her Marx-inspired,
historical, and conceptual elaborations on the “housekeeping of feelings.” For Heller, such
an affective “economy” is not just a matter of individual emotional “regulation” but, rather,
functions by means of internalized, socially stratified norms. Heller, thus, also prefigures the
influential conceptions of feminist sociologists of emotion such as Hochschild’s (1979, 1983)
“emotion management” and “emotion norms” or Illouz’s (2007) notions of “emotional cap-
ital” and “emotional habitus.”
As we have seen, the range of affectively relevant phenomena in our bodily felt, moral,
and social world is probably more complex than our (folk-)psychological, philosophical, and
phenomenological conceptual frameworks can capture. But some affective phenomena that
have, in fact, been conceptualized still lack their own treatment or are only partly covered
in the following chapters for reasons of space. Several are treated by the authors just men-
tioned, such as feelings of agency (Kanonow), courage (Hartmann), or laughing and crying
( Plessner); some are discussed across the chapters in the context of other affective phenomena
or dynamics, such as Ressentiment80 and feelings of powerlessness, frustration, or malicious
joy (see the chapters of Vendrell Ferran on Voigtländer, and Schloßberger, Landweer, and
Szanto and Slaby), regret (Bernhardt), feelings or a sense of justice (Rinofner-Kreidl, and
Landweer) or feelings of belonging and exclusion (Szanto and Slaby); some affective phe-
nomena, such as surprise or curiosity, that certainly deserve more attention from phenome-
nologists, are altogether missing.81 We hope, though, that the material in this handbook will
inspire future research on these and further emotions.

22
 Introduction

5. A final note
A final, general note on what—and what not—to expect from reading the contributions is in
order. Given the nature of a handbook, and the fact that there are as yet hardly any introduc-
tory sources or overview material available on the phenomenology of emotions, these being
especially scarce in English, all the chapters are devised so as to give a comprehensive and
accessible overview of the authors, topics, and discussions at issue. However, we believe that
it is illusory to think that philosophical analysis could ever be entirely neutral. Indeed, we
contend that while philosophy should be charitable and sensitive to opposing views and in-
terpretations, it is also, to some degree, always partial. Accordingly, throughout the volume,
the contributors’ own voices, conceptual preferences, and own research foci will be present,
but that, we trust, will be perceived as a benefit.

Notes

23
 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

on emotions, see esp. Stumpf (1928); on Pfänder and Geiger, see the respective chapters in this
volume.
8 See Strasser (1956, ch. 3).
9 For a concise discussion, see Vendrell Ferran (2015); cf. also Salice (2016).
10 In this context, it is worth mentioning that even an eminent figure of the allegedly ‘emotion-proof ’
Neo-Kantianism such as Cohen dedicated a comprehensive work to the theory of emotions, see
his Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls (1912) (“Aesthetic of Pure Feeling”).
11 An exception among these exceptions seems to be Strasser’s book Das Gemüt, whose English
translation, more than 20 years after its German publication, was introduced by Ricoeur, but
even this translation has not had any real effect on its reception, which—unduly—remains almost
nonexistent to this very date.
12 Straddling analytic and continental work on emotions, Solomon is the only notable exception
who, from early on in his work, repeatedly refers to Sartre’s work on emotions (see, e.g., Solomon
1976).
13 See Rutkevič (2014); de Warren and Vongehr (2018); cf. also Stein (1985). A noteworthy and
almost wholly unknown critical essay, albeit from the interwar period, is Voigtländer’s “Zur
Psychologie der politischen Stellungnahme. Eine massenpsychologische Studie” (1920). It is a sad
irony of history that Voigtländer, an early proponent of Freud in Germany, became a member
of the NSDAP in 1937, though her sympathies with Nazism remain unclear; see also Vendrell
Ferran’s chapter.
14 Cf. also Plessner (1935). On Stein, Scheler, Walther, and Schmalenbach, see the respective chap-
ters. In this context, it should be noted that there were some interesting and exceptional conser-
vative, catholic phenomenologists who were staunch critics of Nazism, such as Scheler, the Jewish
convert to Catholicism, Kolnai, and von Hildebrand; see also Gubser (2014, 2019).
15 Although see Heller’s (1979) neo-Marxist reassessment of emotions in the last section.
16 Against a one-sided reading of Kant as somebody who altogether expels emotions and affectiv-
ity from moral life, see, however, Mohrmann (2015). For general post-liberal rejections of this
picture, see the references in Szanto’s and Slaby’s chapter. Note also that this dichotomy between
emotions and morality, supposedly originating in Enlightenment thought is not as clear-cut as
often thought; just think of what Nussbaum (2013, 54) calls “Rousseau’s civic emotion culture.”
See also the powerful counter-narrative in Mishra (2017).
17 See, e.g., Rorty Oksenberg (1980), Baier (1986), Nussbaum (1990), and Jones (1996).
18 Rorty Oksenberg and Nussbaum were among the first to remind the Anglo-Saxon world of this.
19 See, e.g., Gibbard (1990), McDowell (1998), and Blackburn (2001).
20 Solomon (1984) also highlights the importance of Bedford’s paper “Emotions” (1956/1957), which
critically draws on Ryle (1949), though the impact of this paper seems quite marginal compared to
the monographs appearing only decades later.
21 Let us stress the qualifier ‘broadly’ given the diversity and indeed ambiguity of the concept of
‘cognitivism’ in relation to emotions. Caution should be applied even in relation to those philos-
ophers typically listed as ‘arch-cognitivists’; for a good discussion of this, see Solomon (2002).
22 Other influential work from this earlier cognitivist period includes Marks (1982), Deigh (1994),
Gordon (1990), and Greenspan (1988); cf. also Stocker (1983). Also, the use of literary examples
and their phenomenological analysis has become more customary within analytic work on the
emotions, most notably in the work of Wollheim and Goldie.
23 See also Slaby (2008a, 2008b) and Slaby et al. (2011); cf. also Helm’s congenial account in his
chapter.
24 Note that ‘concern or value-based construal of emotions’ is a fairly broad umbrella-term that
houses some still divergent accounts such as Helm (2001, 2017), Roberts (2003), Deonna and
Teroni (2012), or Tappolet (2016).
25 Mapping perceptual accounts is almost impossible by now, however young the field, as the label
has been used, more or less appropriately, to characterize (or self-applied to) such widely diverging
authors as de Sousa, Roberts, Goldie, Helm, Tappolet, Prinz, or Döring among many others; for a
useful, brief orientation in this conceptual minefield, see Döring and Lutz (2015); and for the most
sustained criticism to date, see Brady (2013). For a discussion of classical phenomenological (esp.
regarding Scheler and Sartre) and recent perceptual accounts, see Poellner (2016).
26 See Griffiths and Scarantino (2009), Colombetti (2014), De Jaegher (2015), Krueger and Szanto
(2016), and more references in Stephan’s and Walter’s chapter.

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25
Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

26
Introduction

27
 Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer

Psychischen),” which “attributes ‘psychological entities’ the ‘intuitive’ determination of extended-

ness, voluminosity or fullness and orders of depths (anschaulichen’ Bestimmtheiten der Ausgebreitetheit,
der Voluminosität oder Fülle und der Tiefenordnung). This doesn’t concern, of course, a form of physical
extension, etc., but are still phenomena that “stem from the form of space” (Binswanger 1922,
119). (Binswanger later on in the book also criticizes Haas’ and Pfänder’s “psychization” (Psychis-
ierung) of the depth of psychological states as a sort of psycho-affective ‘intensification’ of those
states (ibid., 333).) This is particularly interesting in light of the New Phenomenologists’, and espe-
cially Schmitz’s, similar conceptions of emotions decades later. However, in Schmitz’s view, what
is described as the spatiality of the soul are felt-bodily experiences which do not need an additional
‘inner space’ in any metaphorical sense; see above and Landweer’s chapter.
76 See brief descriptions of both Löwenstein-Freudenberg and Kananow in Spiegelberg and
Avé-Lallemant (1982).
77 See additional references to both Reiner and Hartmann in De Monticelli’s as well as Drummond’s
and Rinofner-Kreidl’s chapters.
78 For a recent overview of the discussion on mixed feelings, see Zaborowski, forthcoming.
79 Prütting has recently published a truly monumental, 2,000-page monograph Homo Ridens
(2013/2016) dedicated to the phenomenology of laughter, heavily drawing on Plessner, but even
more on Schmitz’s New Phenomenology.
80 For the most sustained and phenomenologically grounded treatment of Ressentiment published
recently, see Aeschbach (2017).
81 For a recent volume on “neglected” emotions, see Elpidorou (2020).

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Further reading
Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron, and Krebs, Angelika (Eds.) (2019). Philosophy of Emotion. 4 vols. London and New
York: Routledge.
De Monticelli, Roberta (1998). L’ascèse philosophique. Phénoménologie et Platonisme. Paris: Vrin 1998
Deigh, John (Ed.) (2008). On Emotions. Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldie, Peter (Ed.) (2010). The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Griffiths, Paul E. (2013). Current Emotion Research in Philosophy. Emotion Review 5(2), 215–222.
Hart, James G., and Embree, Lester (Eds.). Phenomenology of Value and Valuing. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Hatzimoysis, Anthony (Ed.) (2003). Philosophy and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Mickunas, Algis (1997). Emotion. In: L. Embree (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Dordrecht:
Springer, 171–176.
Mulligan, Kevin, and Scherer, Klaus R. (2012). Toward a Working Definition of Emotion. Emotion
Review 4(4), 345–357.
Osler, Lucy (forthcoming). Feeling Togetherness Online: A Phenomenological Sketch of Online
Communal Experiences. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. doi:10.1007/s11097-019-09627-4.
Scarantino, Andrea (Ed.) (forthcoming). The Routledge Handbook of Emotion Theory. London, New
York: Routledge.
Solomon, Robert C. (Ed.) (2004). Thinking about Feeling. Contemporary Philosophers of Emotion. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

37
. ( Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
 PART 1

Historical perspectives
. ( Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
 1
FRANZ BRENTANO
Michelle Montague

1. Introduction
In this chapter, I consider Franz Brentano’s theory of emotion. I focus on three of its central
claims: (1) Emotions are sui generis intentional phenomena, (2) emotions are essentially eval-
uative phenomena, and (3) emotions provide the basis of an epistemology of objective value.
(2) is intimately connected to (1) and (3) in that the evaluative nature of emotions not only
accounts for their sui generis status but also provides the basis for Brentano’s epistemology of
value.
In what follows, I will be concerned with only conscious emotion, putting aside attribu-
tions of emotional states or conditions that may be true even if the person is, say, in a dream-
less sleep. Brentano himself explicitly rejects the existence of unconscious mental states, and
therefore takes it that to give a theory of mind is to give a theory of consciousness.
In order to understand Brentano’s theory of emotion, one needs to know how it relates to
his overall theory of mind, particularly to his claims about the intentional nature of mental
phenomena, the self-intimating nature of consciousness, and the fundamental classification
of mental phenomena. A full treatment of these topics is not possible here, but I hope to say
enough to show how each relates to his theory of emotion.

2. Two senses of ‘phenomenology’

Most contemporary theories of emotion accept the idea that emotions ‘have a phenome-
nology’. Phenomenology understood in this way can be characterized in a familiar way as
the phenomenon of there being ‘something it is like’, experientially, to be in a mental state,
something it is like for the creature who is in the mental state. It is a matter of a state’s hav-
ing an experiential character. Consider tasting warm cornbread, or feeling sleepy, or faintly
uneasy, or finding something funny.
This contemporary use of ‘phenomenology’ should be distinguished from ‘phenomenol-
ogy’ understood as a method of theorizing about consciousness which studies it specifically
from the first-person perspective, the perspective of the experiencing subject. Husserl (1900,
1901), Sartre (1943), Heidegger (1927), Merleau-Ponty (1945), and de Beauvoir (1949) are
most commonly associated with phenomenology in this sense, but Brentano is arguably

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its founder. In his later work, he explicitly calls his method ‘descriptive psychology’ and
distinguishes it from ‘genetic psychology’ (1995[1887], 4). The aim of descriptive psychology,
he says,

is nothing other than to provide us with a general conception of the entire realm of
human consciousness. It does this by listing fully the basic components out of which
everything internally perceived by humans is composed, and by enumerating the ways
in which these components can be connected.
(1995[1887], 4)

In contrast, genetic psychology is concerned with contingent causal laws, laws governing
how mental phenomena arise and the connections between the mental and the physiological.
Brentano conceived of (descriptive) psychology as a ‘Cartesian science’ in the sense that it
had an epistemologically certain foundation.1 With Descartes (1641), Brentano argued that
we can know truths about our mentality with certainty. His conception of psychology was
at the same time fully empirical, not because it was based on experimentation that could be
repeated and observed from the third-person standpoint, but because its truths were based on
experience itself. Descriptive psychology, in short, was a first-person empirical science that
provided necessary truths about our mental lives.
Given this methodological approach to psychology, the connection between the two
senses of ‘phenomenology’ is not hard to see: Phenomenology qua phenomenological method
studies phenomenology qua the what it’s likeness or experiential character of conscious
experience.

3. Demarcating the field of psychology

One of Brentano’s main goals in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint was to demarcate the field
of psychology in a way that showed it to be a distinctive and unified discipline.2 He had two
central motivations. First, he believed that psychology contained the roots of aesthetics, logic,
ethics, and politics. Logic, he thought, was rooted in ‘immediately evident’ judgments, ethics was
rooted in ‘immediately evident’ emotions, and these immediately evident judgments and emo-
tions provided us with knowledge of the necessary truths that constitute the foundations of logic
and ethics.3 Second, he believed that a unified discipline could be established only by dispelling
the lack of clarity and disagreement among his contemporaries about psychology’s subject matter
and method. Much of the Psychology is dedicated to this second undertaking.4
All the sciences study phenomena, according to Brentano, where ‘phenomena’ is taken in
its original meaning of ‘appearances’. Physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology all study
appearances, appearances understood as the ‘data of consciousness’: What is given to con-
sciousness, what shows up in consciousness. “All the data of our consciousness are divided
into two great classes,” he says, “the class of physical and the class of mental phenomena”
(1874, 59/77), and it is in terms of these two great classes that the subject matter of the natural
sciences is distinguishable from the subject matter of psychology. The natural sciences study
physical phenomena. Psychology studies mental phenomena: It is, precisely, ‘the science of
mental phenomena’.
What are physical phenomena? What are mental phenomena? The first thing to do, per-
haps, is to note the fundamental respect in which both physical phenomena and mental
phenomena in Brentano’s sense are mental phenomena in our sense (i.e., our standard present-day
sense), simply because they are appearances.

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 Franz Brentano

Brentano’s examples of physical phenomena are color, light, sound, spatial location, and
heat. At first glance, this list seems like a familiar starting point for characterizing physical
objects and their properties. It seems to connect directly with our ordinary view of things,
according to which there is a world of mind-independent physical objects that have various
mind-independent physical qualities that are the proper objects of study of the natural sciences.
In asserting that physical phenomena are mere appearances, however, Brentano is not
advocating any kind of common-sense realism. On his terms, ‘physical phenomena’ are not
part of any experience-transcending mind-independent reality, but only signs of something
that is transcendent in this way. A physical phenomenon is an appearance created by our
causal relation to something independent of us. As such, physical phenomena cannot give us
knowledge of how things ‘really and truly are’:

The phenomena of light, sound, heat, spatial location and locomotion (…) are not things
which really and truly exist. They are signs of something real, which, through its causal
activity, produces presentations of them. They are not, however, an adequate represen-
tation of this reality, and they give us knowledge of it only in a very incomplete sense.
We can say that there exists something which, under certain conditions, causes this or
that sensation. We can probably also prove that there must be relations among these
realities similar to those manifested by spatial phenomena, shapes and sizes. But this is as
far as we can go. We have no experience of that which truly exists, in and of itself, and
that which we do experience is not true. The truth of physical phenomena is, as they
say, only a relative truth.
(1874, 14/19)

So the subject matter of the natural sciences, according to Brentano, is physical phenomena,
for example color, sound, warmth, and odor, all of which are appearances. Natural sciences
do not directly study ‘things in themselves’.
What about mental phenomena? Brentano’s examples include hearing a sound, seeing
a colored object, thinking a general concept, loving a dog, and judging that grass is green.
Since mental phenomena and physical phenomena are both phenomena, things ‘of the mind’
so to speak, to fully understand how psychology is distinguished from the natural sciences,
Brentano must distinguish mental phenomena from physical phenomena. Examples provide
a sense of their difference, but Brentano needs a principled way of distinguishing them.
Of the four distinct criteria for distinguishing mental and physical phenomena that
Brentano considers, his preferred and most well-known proposal is that all and only mental
phenomena have intentionality:

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages
called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though
not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is
not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental
phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in
the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed
or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on (…) This intentional
in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon
exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they
are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.
(1874, 68/88–89)

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 Michelle Montague

This passage has resulted in much debate, but for present purposes, we can put these aside
and accept the intuitive characterization of Brentano’s claim that all mental phenomena are
intentional phenomena in the sense of being ‘of ’ or ‘about’ something.

4. Psychology’s evidence and Brentano’s theory of consciousness

With Brentano’s criterion for determining the subject matter of psychology in hand, we can
now ask for more detail about its method and source of evidence. This requires turning to
his theory of consciousness.
The fundamental pillar of Brentano’s theory of consciousness is that conscious mental
phenomena are constitutively self-intimating. That is, in addition to any external phenom-
ena that may be its objects, a conscious mental act 5 or mental phenomenon takes itself as
object, not as the focus of attention, but only ‘in passing’ or ‘by the way’. Its taking itself
as object in this way is constitutive of its existence as a conscious mental phenomenon—
essential to its existing at all as a conscious mental phenomenon.6 One shouldn’t, therefore,
suppose that to say that a mental act takes itself as object only ‘in passing’ is to suggest that
this taking itself as object is unimportant or inessential.
Brentano calls this essential self-intimation ‘inner perception’ 7 and distinguishes it from
external perception. External perception is always of physical phenomena in Brentano’s
sense—color, sound, and spatial location. Inner perception is always of mental phenomena,
and it is in Brentano’s view immediate and infallibly self-evident (1874, 70/91). We can
know that mental phenomena are real and we can know their real nature through inner
perception: “The phenomena of inner perception (…) are true in themselves. As they appear
to be, so they are in reality, a fact with is attested to by the evidence with which they are
perceived” (1874, 15/19–20):

Psychology, like the natural sciences, has its basis in perception and experience. Above
all, however, its source is to be found in the inner perception of our own mental
phenomena. We would never know what a thought is, or a judgement, pleasure or pain,
desires or aversions, hopes or fears, courage or despair, decisions and voluntary inten-
tions if we did not learn what they are through inner perception of our own phenomena.
Note, however, that we said that inner perception (Wahrnehmung) and not introspec-
tion, i.e. inner observation (Beobachtung), constitutes this primary and essential source of
psychology. These two concepts must be distinguished from one another.
(1874, 22/29)

‘Inner perception’ is not what contemporary theorists typically call ‘introspection’, or what
Brentano and his contemporaries also call ‘inner observation’ (Beobachtung). Introspection or
inner observation is one mental act taking a distinct mental act as an object or as the focus of
attention. In contrast, inner perception is built into the very act it is perceiving.
For Brentano, there is a very tight connection between (1) what makes a conscious state
conscious, (2) the correct method of theorizing for psychology, and (3) psychology’s fun-
damental source of evidence. It is in virtue of what a conscious state is—a self-intimating
phenomenon involving inner perception—that it provides the best and most certain evi-
dence for our psychological theorizing. Since this unassailable evidence can only be deliv-
ered from the first-person perspective, the phenomenological method is the natural approach
for psychology.

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 Franz Brentano

5. Emotions are sui generis intentional phenomena

We can now consider how this applies to Brentano’s theory of emotion. Emotions, like the
other two fundamental kinds of mental phenomena, presentations and judgments, display
the essential mark of the mental: They have intentionality, object-directedness: “There is
no hoping unless something is hoped for, no striving unless something is striven for; one
cannot be pleased unless there is something one is pleased about (…)” (1969[1889], 14).
Brentano’s main consideration in favor of the intentionality of emotions seems to be the
simple phenomenological observation that all emotions appear to be object-directed.
The three fundamental kinds of mental phenomena are distinguished from each other by
the way in which they ‘mentally relate’ or ‘mentally refer’ to objects. All the finer distinc-
tions we make between mental acts, for example, between desiring, wondering, deciding,
entertaining, expecting, hoping, fearing, and so on, fall under one of these three fundamen-
tal headings.
By ‘presentation’, Brentano does not mean what is presented, but an act or event of
presentation. An act of presentation—an event of one’s being presented with something—is
required for anything to appear in consciousness at all. Acts of presentation, therefore, form the
foundation of every judgment and emotion. Just as judgments require antecedent presentations
of objects, so too loving or hating requires that an object be presented in a presentation:

This act of presentation forms the foundation not merely of the act of judging, but also
of desiring and of every other mental act. Nothing can be judged, desired, hoped or
feared, unless one has a presentation of that thing.
(1973[1874], 80)

Accordingly, we may say that the basic kind of ‘mental reference’, the basic way for a subject
to ‘mentally relate’ to an object, is to simply get that object into consciousness, to have that
object in mind.
Once an object is presented in a presentation, a judgment can either ‘affirm’ or ‘deny’
the existence of that object. Brentano has what can be described as an ‘objectual’ theory of
judgment, according to which judgment is a sui generis mental phenomenon in which we
either affirm or deny the existence of an object, but this is not to be understood as predicat-
ing existence of an object. We can represent the nature of judgment roughly as follows: For
some object o, one either Affirms (o) or Denies (o). In the case of a judgment about an object,
the mind is concerned with the object in a twofold way: Not only is the object presented,
but the mind now relates to it in a second way, by either affirming or denying its existence.
Brentano then goes on to explicate loving and hating in terms of “inclination or disin-
clination, being pleased or displeased” (1969[1889], 16)—what we may call ‘pro-attitudes’
and ‘anti-attitudes’. Very generally, pro-attitudes (love, joy, and worship) take an object to
be good, and anti-attitudes (anger, fear, and sadness) take an object to be bad. “Just as every
judgment takes an object to be true or false, in an analogous way every phenomenon which
belongs to this class takes an object to be good or bad” (1874, 154/199). By analogy with
judgment, we can roughly represent the nature of emotion as follows: For some object o,
in having an emotion toward o, one either takes the stance Good (o) or the stance Bad (o).
Accordingly, in the case of emotion, the mind relates to an object in a twofold way: Not only
is the object presented, but the mind additionally either loves it (takes a ‘good/pro’ stance
toward it) or hates it (takes a ‘bad/anti’ stance toward it).

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 Michelle Montague

The fundamental basis for this classification involves an appeal to inner perception:

Is there anything we can do besides appeal to inner experience which teaches us that
the relation of consciousness to its object is either exactly the same or similar in one set
of cases and a radically different one in the other? It would seem that no other means is
available. Inner experience is clearly the only arbiter which can resolve disputes about
the sameness or difference of intentional reference.
(1874, 154/200)

Brentano’s claim that emotions are intrinsically evaluative phenomena has gained wide ac-
ceptance in recent theories of emotion, although there is still a lot of disagreement about
what exactly the claim amounts to. Solomon (1976) and Nussbaum (2001), for example,
claim that emotions are evaluative judgments, while other contemporary philosophers claim
that emotions are evaluative perceptions.8 Part of what distinguishes Brentano’s theory from
both of these contemporary views is that he holds that emotions are sui generis intentional
phenomena that cannot be reduced to either judgments or perceptions.9
In the following passage, Brentano explicitly disavows a perceptual theory of emotion:

I do not believe that anyone will understand me to mean that phenomena belonging
to this class are cognitive acts by which we perceive the goodness or badness, value
or disvalue of certain objects. Still, in order to make such an interpretation absolutely
impossible, I explicitly note that this would be a complete misunderstanding of my
real meaning. In the first place, that would mean that I viewed these phenomena as
judgements; but in fact I separate them off as a separate class. Secondly, it would mean
that I would be assuming quite generally that this class of phenomena presupposes pre-
sentations of good and bad, value and disvalue. This is so far from being the case, that
instead I shall show that such presentations can stem only from inner perception of these
phenomena.
(1874, 186/241)

6. The foundation of Brentano’s epistemology of value: opposing

mental relations give rise to the possibility of correctness
and incorrectness
I now turn to Brentano’s epistemology of value. To begin, it is worth making two prelim-
inary points. First, Brentano is concerned with objective value, about whose reality he has
no doubt:

Is there a moral law that is natural in the sense of being universally and incontestably
valid—valid for men at all places and all times, indeed valid for any being that thinks
and feels—and are we capable of knowing that there is such a law? (…) My own answer
is emphatically affirmative.
(1969[1889], 6)

Second, although Brentano is concerned with objective value, he does not take this to mean
that objects or states of affairs have objective value properties like ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Accord-
ing to Brentano, the terms ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘better’ are syncategorematic. That is, when
they are used in sentences where they seem to be predicates, they aren’t really predicating

46
 Franz Brentano

goodness and badness of anything. Rather, a sentence like ‘insight is good’ translates roughly
as it is correct to love insight.
An epistemology of value aims to provide an explanation of how we can come to know
what value and disvalue are. This task is more difficult if one takes value to be objective, as
Brentano does. Brentano’s epistemology of value is based on an extended treatment of an
analogy he draws between judgments and emotions. He begins by noting that both kinds
of mental phenomena intrinsically involve the possibility of taking opposing relations to an
object. Judgments can either affirm or deny an object, and emotions can either love or hate
an object. The kind of opposition exhibited by judgments and emotions gives rise to the
possibility of their being either correct or incorrect. But opposition in and of itself doesn’t
give rise to the possibility of correctness or incorrectness. Neither does merely presenting
or thinking of opposing things. One can see this by considering oppositions such as black
and white, up and down, negative and positive charges, and thinking of such oppositions. It
is only when mental relations can take opposing stands on the same object that we get the
possibility of correctness or incorrectness:

In the case of judgement there is the opposition between affirmation or acceptance, on

the one hand, and denial or rejection, on the other. In the case of the emotions there is
the opposition between love and hate or, as we may also put it, the opposition between
inclination and disinclination, between being pleased and being displeased.
In the case of [ judgements], one of the two opposing modes of relation—affirmation
and denial—is correct and the other is incorrect, as logic has taught since ancient times.
Naturally, the same thing is true of [emotions]. Of the two opposing types of feeling—
loving and hating, inclination and disinclination, being pleased and being displeased—
in every instance one of them is correct and the other incorrect.
(1969[1889], 10–11)

The possibility of correctness and incorrectness in the category of judgment allows us to

ask: What does truth consist in, and what is the origin of our concept of truth? Similarly,
the possibility of correctness and incorrectness in the category of emotion allows us to ask:
What does goodness consist in, and what is the origin of our concept of goodness? And now
Brentano gives his answer. Just as

[w]e call a thing true when the affirmation relating to it is correct, [so too] we call a thing
good when the love relating to it is correct. In the broadest sense of the term, the good is
that which is worthy of love, that which can be loved with a love that is correct.
(1969[1889], 11)

To articulate the proposed analogy between judgment and emotion further, it will be
helpful to say something about Brentano’s views on the relationship between judgment
and truth. These views are most explicitly laid out in The True and the Evident (Brentano
1966[1930]), a book that consists of some of Brentano’s unpublished writings, mainly
taken from his notebooks for his lectures and letters from the years 1889 to 1916. A lthough
in his early work Brentano accepted the correspondence theory of truth—the idea that
truth consists in a correspondence between our judgments and reality—he later came to
reject it.
In lieu of the correspondence theory, Brentano offers an epistemic characterization of
truth. It is empiricist in the sense that according to Brentano, any “concept (…) has its origin

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in certain intuitive presentations” (1969[1889], 13). This means that all of our concepts must
be based in experience. For Brentano, the experiential element that gives us our fundamental
insight into what truth consists in, and so anchors our concept of truth, is the experience
of an immediately self-evident and infallible judgment. If a judgment is immediately self-
evident, it constitutes certain knowledge, and no reason can override it. So our concept
of truth, our concept of a correct judgment, is based on our experiences of self-evident
judgments.10
Following Chisholm (1986), it may be helpful to distinguish between a ‘loose’ and ‘strict’
sense of correctness. All self-evident judgments are correct in a ‘strict’ sense. However, not
all true judgments are self-evident, and sometimes Brentano refers to non-self-evident true
judgments as ‘blind judgments’. Blind judgments can be either true or false, and when they
are true, they are true because they are in agreement with self-evident judgments.11 True but
blind judgments are, therefore, correct in a ‘loose’ sense.
For human beings, there are two kinds of self-evident judgments. First, as mentioned
above, there are judgments of inner perception, affirmative judgments about our current
conscious mental acts. According to Brentano, all conscious experiences constitutively in-
volve a self-evident affirmation (non-propositional judgment) of their own existence. Since
the very existence of a conscious experience is partly constituted by an affirmation of its exis-
tence, one cannot possibly doubt its existence. That is, one cannot simultaneously affirm and
doubt a conscious experience’s existence. Second, there are apodictic judgments that arise
from negative judgments about what cannot exist and are the source of a priori knowledge.
For example, in making a self-evident judgment to the effect that all squares are rectangles,
one thinks of a square that is not rectangular and one rejects it ‘apodictically’. Apodictic
judgments are caused or motivated in a special way. The judgment is immediately caused by
the judger’s contemplation of the content of the judgment: “if this kind of motivation is not
present, the judgment is said to be assertoric” (Brentano 1966[1930], 128–129). In making
the judgment that all squares are rectangles, we consider a square-that-is-not-a-rectangle.
Our consideration of a square-that-is-not-a-rectangle causes (motivates) us to reject it, and
we perceive this causation (or motivation). This apodictic rejection is the source of our a
priori knowledge that all squares are rectangles, and so is a generalization from a single in-
stance. That is, in rejecting this instance, we see that any instance of such a square-that-is-
not-a-rectangle must be rejected.
It is one thing to have experiences of self-evident judgments, but how exactly do we ac-
quire the concept of a correct (true) judgment from them? According to Brentano, “concepts
are made manifest to us [when] we consider a multiplicity of things each of which exem-
plifies the concept and we direct our attention upon what these things have in common”.12
To begin to notice the commonalities between self-evident judgments, we can first com-
pare self-evident judgments to blind judgments or judgments that contradict self-evident
judgments, and by doing this, we notice that self-evident judgments are different from these
other kinds of judgments. Brentano describes this comparative process as follows:

The fact that we affirm something does not mean that it is true, for we often judge
quite blindly. Many of the prejudices that we acquired in our infancy may take on the
appearance of indubitable principles. And all men have by nature an impulse to trust
certain other judgements that are equally blind—for example, those judgements that
are based upon so-called external perception and those that are based upon memories
of the recent past. What is affirmed in this way may often be true, but it is just as likely
to be false. For these judgements involve nothing that manifests correctness. But they may

48
 Franz Brentano

be contrasted with certain other judgements which are “insightful” or “evident”. The
law of contradiction is one example. Other examples are provided by so-called inner
perception, which tells me that I am now having such-and-such sound or colour sen-
sations, or that I am now thinking or willing this or that. What, then, is the essential
distinction between these lower and higher forms of judgement? Is it a distinction with
respect to degree of conviction or is it something else? It does not pertain to degree of
conviction. Many of those blind, instinctive assumptions that arise out of habit are com-
pletely uninfected by doubt. Some of them are so firmly rooted that we cannot get rid of
them even after we have seen that they have no logical justification. But they are formed
under the influence of obscure impulses; they do not have the clarity that is character-
istic of the higher form of judgement. If one were to ask, “Why do you really believe
that?”, it would be impossible to find any rational grounds. Now if one were to raise the
same question in connection with a judgement that is immediately evident, here, too,
it would be impossible to refer to any grounds. But in this case the clarity of the judgement
is such as to enable us to see that the question has no point; indeed, the question would be
completely ridiculous. Everyone experiences the difference between these two classes of
judgement. As in the case of every other concept, the ultimate explication consists only
in a reference to this experience.
(1966[1930], 20; my emphasis)

By comparing a self-evident judgment with a blind (or non-self-evident) judgment or with a

judgment that contradicts a self-evident judgment, one can notice an experiential difference.
This experiential difference, namely the experience of the self-evident that accompanies a
self-evident judgment, allows one to acquire the concept self-evident (or as it was called
above ‘strict correctness’), and once one has this concept, whenever one makes a self-evident
judgment, one can know that one is making an evident judgment because one is able to
identify its experiential marker.
With this in place, we may turn to the case of the emotions. Based on the opposing relations
emotions can take to the same object, we have the idea that emotions can be correct, and with
this idea, according to Brentano, we have found the source of our concepts of good and bad:

And now we have found what we have been looking for. We have arrived at the source
of our concepts of the good and the bad, along with that of our concepts of the true and
the false. We call a thing true when the affirmation relating to it is correct. We call a
thing good when the love relating to it is correct. In the broadest sense of the term, the
good is that which is worthy of love, that which can be loved with a love that is correct.
(1966[1930], 18)

By identifying the source of the concept good, we now say what the good consists in—a
thing is good when the love relating to it is correct. (Recall, Brentano uses ‘love’ widely to
essentially mean any ‘pro-attitude’.)
But how do we know that a thing is good? How do I know whether I’m correctly loving
something? People love different things; what one person loves, another hates. Mere love is
not enough for something to be good, nor is it enough to know the good, and so Brentano
argues that there is an analogue of the experience of self-evident judgment in the sphere of
emotions. In a self-evident judgment, the evidence of that judgment is experienced. In the
case of a correct emotion (in the strict sense), the emotion is experienced as being correct. Ac-
cording to Brentano, therefore, we have two ways of experiencing correctness— experiencing

49
 Michelle Montague

the self-evidence of a judgment and experiencing the correctness of an emotion. (Brentano

only uses the term ‘self-evident’ with respect to judgments.)
From experiences of correct emotion, we can then acquire the concept correct emotion.
Brentano offers the following examples of emotions that manifest themselves as being correct:
Love of insight, Love of joy (that is not Schadenfreude), and Love of correct love.
Emotions experienced as being correct are not feelings of compulsion. But how are we to
distinguish a feeling of correctness from a feeling of compulsion? Compulsion has nothing to do
with correctness. According to Brentano, one only has to consider one’s own compulsions. I have
a feeling of compulsion to smoke cigarettes, but this is utterly unlike what it feels like to love in-
sight. Acquiring the concept of correct emotion is anchored in comparing correct emotions with
emotions that lack this experiential correctness. Brentano offers the following example:

Imagine now another species quite different from ourselves; not only do its members
have preferences with respect to sense qualities which are quite different from ours;
unlike us, they also despise insight and love error for its own sake. So far as the feelings
about sense qualities are concerned, we might say that these things are a matter of taste,
and “De gustibus non est disputandum”. But this is not what we would say of the love
of error and the hatred of insight. We would say that such love and hatred are basically
perverse and that the members of the species in question hate what is indubitably and
intrinsically good and love what is indubitably and intrinsically bad. Why do we answer
differently in the two cases when the feeling of compulsion is equally strong? The an-
swer is simple. In the former case the feeling of compulsion is merely instinctive. But in
the latter case the natural feeling of pleasure is a higher love that is experienced as being
correct. When we ourselves experience such a love we notice not only that its object is
loved and capable of being loved, and that its privation or contrary hated and capable of
being hated, but also that the one is worthy of love and the other worthy of hate, and
therefore that the one is good and the other bad.
(1966[1930], 22)
Our knowledge of what is truly and indubitably good arises from the type of experience
we have been discussing, where a love is experienced as being correct (…)
(1966[1930], 24)

Once I acquire the concept of correct emotion through this comparative process, I can know
the good, according to Brentano, because I can identify when I am experiencing an emotion
that manifests correctness. I know insight is good, because I experience my love of insight as
correct and I recognize the correctness, which is part of this experience.13
In conclusion, I have tried to show the way in which Brentano’s theory of emotion is
interwoven with his overall theory of mind, and to emphasize the way in which the phe-
nomenological character of conscious experience plays a central role in grounding his claims
about the emotions.

Notes

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 Franz Brentano

References
Brentano, Franz Brentano, Franz (1973 [1874]1973[1874]). Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.
Transl. by L. McAlister, A. Rancurello, and D. B. Terrell, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
——— (1995[1887]) Descriptive Psychology. Transl. by B. Muller. New York: Routledge.
——— (1969[1889]). The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong. Transl. by R. Chisholm and E.
Schneewind. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
——— (1966[1930]). The True and the Evident. Transl. by R. Chisholm, I. Politzer, and K. Fischer.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Chisholm, Roderick (1976). Brentano’s Theory of Correct and Incorrect Emotion. In: L. McAlister
(Ed.). The Philosophy of Brentano. London: Duckworth, 160–175.
——— (1986). Brentano and Intrinsic Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
de Beauvoir, Simone (1997[1949]1997[1949]). The Second Sex. Transl. by H. M. Parshley. London:
Vintage.
de Sousa, Ronald (1987). The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Deonna, Julien, and Teroni, Fabrice (2012). The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction. London, New
York: Routledge.
Descartes, René (1985[1641]). Meditations and Objections and Replies. In: The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, vol. 2, transl. by J. Cottingham et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frege, Gottlob (1974[1884]). The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquire into the Concept
of Number. Transl. by J. L. Austin. Oxford: Blackwell.
Heidegger, Martin (1962[1927]). Being and Time. Transl. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
Husserl, Edmund (2001[1900–1901]). Logical Investigations, vols. 1 and 2. Transl. by J. N. Findlay with
revised transl. by D. Moran. London, New York: Routledge.
Kriegel, Uriah (2009). Subjective Consciousness. A Self-Representational Theory. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962[1945]). The Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. by Colin Smith.

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Montague, Michelle (2016). The Given: Experience and its Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nussbaum, Martha (2001). Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Parsons, Charles (2004). Brentano on Judgment and Truth. In: D. Jacquette (Ed.). The Cambridge Com-
panion to Brentano. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1956[1943]). Being and Nothingness. Transl. by H. Barnes. New York: Philosophical
Library.
Solomon, Robert (1976). The Passions. Garden City: Doubleday.
Williford, Kenneth (2006). The Self-Representational Structure of Consciousness. In: U. Kriegel and
K. Williford (Eds.). Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Further reading
Gordon, Robert (1987). The Structure of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greenspan, Patricia (1988). Emotions and Reasons. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
James, William (1884). What is Emotion. Mind 9, 188–205.
Kriegel, Uriah (2018). Brentano’s Philosophical System: Mind, Being, and Value. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Lyons, William (1980). Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Montague, Michelle. (2009). The Logic, Intentionality, and Phenomenology of Emotion. Philosophical
Studies 145(2), 171–192.
——— (2014). Evaluative Phenomenology. In: S. Roeser and C. Todd (Eds). Emotion and Value.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 32–51.
——— (2017). A Contemporary View of Brentano’s Theory of Emotion. The Monist 100, 64–87.
Mulligan, Kevin (2004). Brentano on the Mind. In: D. Jacquett (Ed.). The Cambridge Companion to
Brentano. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Oakley, Justin (1992). Morality and the Emotions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Prinz, Jesse (2004). Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1994[1962]). Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Transl. by P. Mairet. London,
New York: Routledge.
Textor, Mark (2017). Brentano’s Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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 2
EDMUND HUSSERL
James Jardine

While Husserl is widely recognised as the founder of the phenomenological movement,

and as responsible for important positions on a number of central philosophical topics
(such as perception, intentionality, self-consciousness, and the tenability of naturalism), he
is frequently regarded, even within phenomenological circles, as having a fairly impover-
ished understanding of the emotions. And indeed, there is some validity to the observation
that, while essential roles are accorded to emotion in Husserl’s phenomenological analyses
of personhood, (axiological) reason, value-theory, and ethics (to name just a few exam-
ples), it emerges less frequently in his writings as a central theme of inquiry. The following
chapter offers the reader an opportunity to reconsider such an assessment, by highlighting
and explicating a number of key claims that emerge in those writings where Husserl deals
directly and thematically with the phenomenology of emotional life. Focusing mainly on
his most productive and significant period as a phenomenologist of the emotions—dating
between the publication of Logical Investigations in 1900 and Ideas I in 1913—I hope to in-
dicate that Husserl’s published and unpublished writings contain important contributions
to the phenomenological study of emotional life, and to our understanding of the emotions
more broadly.

1. Intentional and non-intentional feelings

in the Logical Investigations
While attempts to describe the peculiar character of emotional experience can already be
found in manuscripts dating from the early 1890s (cf. Husserl 2004, 163–167), it was not
until the turn of the century that Husserl first offered the reading public a sketch of his phe-
nomenology of the emotions. In the second volume of Logical Investigations, Husserl briefly
takes up the question of whether the phenomenologist ought to class feelings (Gefühle) as
intentional experiences (Husserl 2001, 106–111). In living through an occurrent feeling, are
we thereby experientially directed to an object or situation that is, in some way, consciously
given or referred to? Husserl argues that there is indeed a (broad and internally differentiated)
class of feelings that are experientially related to objects in this way, while at the same time
acknowledging that not everything typically described as a ‘feeling’ falls under this descrip-
tion, and he accordingly distinguishes between intentional and non-intentional feelings.

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 James Jardine

Non-intentional feelings are exclusively confined to what Husserl calls sensory feelings
(sinnliche Gefühle) or affective sensations (Gefühlsempfindungen). He focuses here on those feel-
ings which are located somewhere on a spectrum between pain (Schmerz) and pleasure (Lust),
encompassing not only the pain felt in a burnt hand but also the pleasure frequented by the
scent of a rose or the taste of a delicious meal, or the displeasure of “a pang in the heart”
(Husserl 2001, 109, 111; transl. modified). Husserl’s characterisation of such feelings as akin
to sensations has a twofold motivation. On the one hand, as the fusion of pleasure and ol-
factory sense in smelling a rose nicely illustrates, such sensory pains and pleasures are always
blended with various (exteroceptive or interoceptive) forms of sensory awareness. On the
other, such feelings exhibit a degree of homogeneity or similarity (Gleichförmigkeit) with the
sensations involved with sensory perception, and with touch in particular. In illustrating
this similarity, Husserl notes that tactile sensations are not yet intentional acts, only involv-
ing a non-objectifying awareness of certain sensory contents (such as ‘rough’ or ‘smooth’).
Nevertheless, such sensations constitute a form of bodily self-awareness, in that they are
experientially related to a “touching member” of the subject’s lived body (Leib). Moreover,
tactile sensations are able to function as presentative contents (darstellende Inhalte) in inten-
tional acts: It is through their undergoing perceptual apprehension or construal (Auffassung)
that the surface of a touched object appears (tactually) as rough or smooth. Like tactual
sensations, the sensory feelings are nothing more than an inarticulate awareness of certain
non-intentional contents (e.g., the non-objectified ‘pain’ felt in touching a hot pan). But
through their ‘blending’ with interoceptive and exteroceptive sensations, sensory feelings
also permit a more-or-less definite localisation in the lived body of the feeling subject (such
that, e.g., the pain is felt ‘in’ the burnt finger). And crucially, such feelings may themselves
provide presentative contents for intentional acts. For instance, if we now perceive or imag-
ine the event which has elicited an occurrent feeling of pleasure, then this act of presen-
tation (Vorstellung) will contain an additional intentional character which passes through
and animates the pleasure-sensations, such that the event now appears, not only as bearing
certain perceptible features, but also “as if bathed in a rosy gleam” (Husserl 2001, 109–110
[406–408]; transl. modified).
At this stage, one might expect Husserl to identify the intentional feelings with such
“affectively determined” (gefühlsbestimmt) apprehensions of objects and situations, in which
the affective sensations provide an additional source of contents for the (cognitive) acts of
presentation to assimilate. Indeed, to his evident frustration, a view of this kind was occa-
sionally attributed to Husserl by his contemporaries (cf. Geiger 1911, 139; Husserl 2018, 149).
And yet, in the Investigations, Husserl explicitly distances himself from such a move (which
he associates with Brentano), suggesting that the classification of such presentative acts as
‘ feelings’ is an error only made understandable by their essential intertwinement with af-
fective sensations (Husserl 2001, 110–111). Rather, intentional feelings in the strict sense
encompass that class of conscious acts in which, to adopt a more familiar parlance, we first
undergo emotional experience proper.
The key examples Husserl offers of intentional feelings in the Investigations are joy and
sorrow felt about an object or situation already consciously presented (vorgestellt) in some way
(Husserl 2001, 107 [402–403]; transl. modified). In explicating the intentional structure of
such feelings, Husserl sides with the Brentanian thesis that emotional acts are founded upon
acts of presentation (cf., e.g., Brentano 1995, 61–63; see Chapter 1; Drummond 2013). In
order to live through joy or sadness, in the sense of an intentional feeling that responds to and
targets a ‘joyous’ or ‘saddening’ situation, that situation must first be concurrently presented
to consciousness (by way of, for example, perception, memory, or imagination), and in some

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cases also conceptually and predicatively articulated in judgement (Husserl 2001, 107–109).
This is not to say that the intentional feeling is reducible to its underlying presentation, for
the latter is not yet a specifically emotional experience, but merely involves an apprehen-
sion of the situation which the feeling responds to and, in some cases, of those features of
the situation by virtue of which it ‘demands’ such a response from us (Husserl 2001, 109).
Moreover, Husserl maintains that intentional feelings must be regarded not merely as addi-
tional layers built upon underlying foundations but as “complex and eo ipso concrete” lived
experiences which “have” or incorporate within themselves the presentations to which they
owe their intentional object. In fact, the feeling of joy concerning some happy event includes
or appropriates not merely the base-level presentation of the event and its ‘factual’ features
but also the affectively determined mode of this presentation mentioned above: “The event
coloured by pleasure as such serves as the first fundament for our turning to the object in joy,
our being pleased or charmed by it” (Husserl 2001, 110, 108 [408, 404]; transl. modified).
Consequently, we can locate emotional intentionality, at least in its most primitive instance,
in a multi-layered experiential act that includes (a) an underlying presentation of the factual
object or situation to which the emotion responds, this ‘factual’ awareness being, in some
cases, augmented and articulated through attention and thought; (b) an affectively deter-
mined modality of this presentation which draws upon the non-intentional feelings elicited
by the object or situation; and (c) a higher-order component of intentional feeling, that is
directed towards and responds to, and in this sense intentionally appropriates, the object as
presented in (b).

2. Emotion and value in Ideas I

While the brief analysis of emotional life in the Investigations contains a number of important
claims concerning the phenomenology of emotion, one question left unanswered there is
whether emotive acts, rather than merely being directed towards and responding to worldly
objects and situations, might also disclose the latter in novel ways. This deceptively simple
question animates much of Husserl’s work on the emotions, and he explicitly grapples with
it in the book that announced his mature phenomenological project, Ideas I. With the newly
introduced methodology of epoché and reduction, Husserl is now able to furnish phenome-
nology with a delimited but demanding task: That of investigating the relations of correlation
and motivation holding between the manifold acts and act-strata of intentional consciousness
(or ‘noeses’) and the worldly matters just as they are intended and experienced in such acts
(or ‘noemata’). It is within this context that he attempts to clarify the noematic correlates of
the noeses specific to the emotive sphere, that is, the worldly objects and situations disclosed
in emotional experience just as so disclosed. Husserl focuses here on that specific kind of af-
fective experience in which the subject is emotionally “turned towards” the matter to which
it responds, such that the emotive act is not a mere “stirring” in the obscure background
of consciousness (which will already have its own unimplemented noeses and unthematic
noemata), but an intentionality in which the experiencing subject pre-eminently “lives,” or
in which its thematic interest primarily lies (Husserl 2014, 64–65, 226–227). Developing the
account of the Investigations, Husserl maintains that such “implemented” (vollzogen) emotive
acts necessarily include, as a fundamental component, an attentive “grasp” (Erfassung) of the
matter to which the emotion relates (Husserl 2014, 65 [76]; transl. modified). To vividly
and explicitly live through a joyful emotive response as such, it is necessary that the event
to which I respond joyfully is both presented to consciousness in some way, and “noticed.”
However, what I thereby have in “focus” experientially, as the “ full intentional correlate” of my

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thematic emotive consciousness, is not “the mere subject matter” which I grasp attentively,
but something more: What Husserl simply terms “the value” (Husserl 2014, 64–65).
With this talk of ‘values,’ Husserl does not mean to suggest that emotional experiences
are intentionally correlated with ideal entities (e.g., ‘goodness’ or ‘beauty’ as such), or even
with specific axiological properties of the worldly matters to which they relate (e.g., their
concrete goodness or beauty). Rather, a value in this (somewhat idiosyncratic) sense is sim-
ply the concrete object as disclosed in the underlying act, but now also furnished with “new,
inherent noematic aspects” (Husserl 2014, 229). In occurrently fearing someone upon noticing
their aggressive glare, my cognisance of their testy demeanour needn’t be accompanied by
any consideration of the ideal, nor by a separate act that simply intuits ‘threateningness’ as a
pure axiological property; rather, when frightened by someone’s behaviour as grasped in this
concrete situation, the person simply stands there for me experientially as threatening. While we can
legitimately speak of noeses specific to the emotive sphere that are uniquely correlated with
the ‘threateningness’ of the person’s behaviour, these are merely non-independent moments or
“inherent aspects” (Momente) of the concrete emotive experience, such that the “valuing (…)
encompasses the presenting” (Husserl 2014, 229–230, 65). And correlatively, the other’s threat-
eningness is not felt as a free-floating feature, but as “a new layer of the object,” in that “the full
‘sense’ of valuing includes What (das Was) it values, with the complete fullness in which there
is consciousness of it in the relevant experience of value” (Husserl 2014, 190–191). While we
may be able to single out specific features of the other’s behaviour which particularly strike us
as threatening (say, their stony glare, furrowed brows, and clenched fists), such “value-features”
(Werteigenschaften) are features of the concrete value itself and accordingly share its internal com-
plexity, being experienced simultaneously as factually present features of the person before us,
and as threatening or frightening (Husserl 2014, 190–191 [221]; transl. modified).1
In claiming that emotive acts are not only ‘related’ to presented objects but also inten-
tionally ‘correlated’ with concrete values, one might suspect that Husserl has now abandoned
his earlier emphasis on the difference between emotional experience and presentative acts.
Indeed, the account of emotive acts offered in Ideas I might initially recall those affectively
determined acts of presentation in which objects and situations appear bathed in an affective
colouration, that were explicitly distinguished from emotional intentionality proper in the
Investigations. And yet, a closer look at Husserl’s analyses reveals a more complex picture. To
begin with, and even with regard to explicit and thematic emotive consciousness, Husserl
maintains that the moment of evaluation operative here is not a form of attentive grasping, or
an apprehension or presentation of any kind. As he puts it, concrete values are only properly
presented to consciousness in an attentive and objectifying modification of emotive experi-
ence, but since such an objectification must occur if we are to bring felt values to expression
in thought and speech, we tend to overlook the non-objectifying way in which they are
first (emotionally) experienced (Husserl 2014, 65, 64). Rather than being a presentational
act, emotive evaluation is best characterised as a form of “position-taking,” and it is, in this
sense, analogous to the element of doxic positing or “belief ” contained, for instance, in all
“normal perception,” and the modifications of such belief in conjecture and doubt (Husserl
2014, 231–232, 205–206). To this extent, the noematic characters of ‘threatening,’ ‘beloved,’
or ‘joyful’ that worldly matters evince in emotive experience are non-identical, but structur-
ally similar, to the noematic characters of ‘being,’ ‘possibly being,’ or ‘doubtfully and ques-
tionably being,’ which are correlated with doxic positionality and its modal modifications
(Husserl 2014, 230, 207). Such noematic characters are not first experienced as apprehended
properties of a presented object: Feeling joyful about an event does not involve apprehending
it as ‘joyful,’ just as perceiving the event does not involve apprehending it as ‘existing.’

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However, Husserl significantly complicates matters by emphasising that “new kinds of ‘ap-
prehensions’ are also combined” with the new noematic characters that surface in emotional
experience, and that it is only by means of such apprehensions that the emotions are able
to function in the disclosure of “a totally new dimension of sense” (Husserl 2014, 227–228
[266–267]; transl. modified). Husserl’s claim here is that the objectification of concrete values
through which they become available for expression in thought and speech is not, after all,
something wholly alien to emotional experience. Fearfully experiencing a person as threat-
ening does not involve a presently actualised apprehension of their behaviour as ‘threatening,’
nor the actual doxic positing of their ‘being threatening.’ Nevertheless, Husserl maintains that
such doxic objectifications are essentially “prefigured as ideal possibilities” in all evaluating
consciousness. In this way, all emotive acts are implicitly objectifying, and harbour an im-
plicit doxic or logical component that is merely explicitly implemented when, for instance, we
occurrently apprehend and judge as ‘threatening’ a person previously merely feared (Husserl
2014, 234). One can detect two motivations for this move in Ideas I. First, Husserl claims that
all founded acts of emotional position-taking involve a tacit sense of certainty, uncertainty,
or doubt; while we are often (pre-reflectively) confident in our emotive attitudes, sometimes
this confidence slips away: “We are conscious of the value in valuing, the pleasing in being
pleased, the joyful in enjoying, but at times in such a way that, in valuing this or that, we are
simply not entirely ‘sure’” (Husserl 2001, 233). Husserl takes this to be direct phenomenolog-
ical evidence for an implicit doxic component in all emotive acts. A further motivation for
this thought is that it allows us to understand how the mode of value-consciousness specific to
emotive experience can be non-objectifying in character, while simultaneously enabling the
disclosure of a richly meaningful world that permits expression in logical thought and speech
(Husserl 2001, 65–66, 252).2 That is, Husserl regards such a fusion of explicit valuing and im-
plicit belief in emotional experience as a necessary precondition for our recognising worldly
matters as personally (and ultimately interpersonally and culturally) significant, rather than
as mere ‘things.’ Or as Levinas succinctly formulates Husserl’s view: “The intentionality that
runs through our affective and active lives confers the dignity of objective experience upon
all our concrete engagements; values belong to the real just as do ideal structures. The real is
human and inhabitable” (Levinas 1998, 132).

3. Themes from Husserl’s manuscripts: pleasure,

value-reception, and reactive emotions
In the intermediary period between the publication of Logical Investigations and Ideas I, Hus-
serl set aside time and effort to carefully reflect upon the life of the emotions. His thoughts
from this productive era were recorded and, one suspects, actively developed in a series of
five long manuscripts dating from 1909 to 1911, and in a significant body of shorter texts
written in those years and the preceding decade (Husserl 2018, 1–190, 263–507; cf. Melle
2012). These rich and somewhat experimental texts move far beyond the relatively narrow
focus on the generic intentional structure of emotive acts found in his published writings,
and in the following, I can only offer a hint of some of their more dominant and, to my
mind, especially promising themes.
In his published writings, Husserl only inadequately addresses a central issue for the phe-
nomenology of emotion: Namely, the role played by non-intentional feelings within emo-
tional intentionality itself. We saw earlier that Husserl raises this matter in the Investigations,
and responds by claiming that sensory feelings function in emotional experience merely
indirectly. On this view, sensory feelings can only participate in emotional intentionality

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by undergoing apprehension through a presentational act which is not itself a feeling of

any kind. In his manuscripts, Husserl attempts to sharpen his earlier position by contrast-
ing the intentional function of sensory feelings with the primary functional role of other
kinds of sensation, that is, their undergoing empirical apperception or apprehension (Husserl
2018, 4ff.). Empirical apperception, in this sense, is a structural feature of sensuous percep-
tion that configures sensibility in such a way that, at any given point in time, the currently
appearing profile of the perceptual object is taken to be accompanied by a horizon of profiles
which do not so appear at present. Husserl maintains that this configuration, rather than
being an inexplicable event, has a “motivational” structure or norm-governed intelligibil-
ity, and he emphasises two kinds of “motivational circumstance” that determine, in a law-
governed fashion, how empirical apperception functions in concrete perceptual situations.
On the one hand, empirical apperception is motivationally tied to the bodily motility of the
perceiving subject. The spatial profiles of the thing which do not currently meet the eye,
being merely “apperceived,” are delineated perceptually as what would appear, if I were to
enact the relevant course of movement. On the other hand, empirical apperception is also
motivationally conditioned by “associative” ties with earlier perceptual encounters. When
walking past something whose kind we are already familiar with perceptually, we anticipate
that the thing will progressively reveal certain perceptible aspects and properties that are
currently invisible. Husserl maintains that such an anticipation of perceptual reality, which
can, of course, be confirmed or frustrated by the actual course of experience, is configured
by the associative links to past perceptual episodes operative in empirical apperception itself
(see, e.g., Husserl 1997, 186, 252–253, 257–258, 319f.). The question now is whether non-
intentional feelings serve to disclose objects in new ways merely by providing an additional
field of sensory material for such empirical apperception.
Husserl acknowledges that, under specific circumstances, sensory feelings do enter into
empirical apperception in this way. For instance, the sensory pain lived through in touching
the metal handle of a hot pan informs our comprehension of this handle as not merely hot
but ‘burning hot,’ and our prior familiarity with burning pans motivates an apperception of
the entire surface of the pan as infused with the same quality. Sensory pain is drawn upon
in an (associatively and kinaesthetically motivated) empirical apprehension of the pan as
burning hot, and in such a case, we may even say that affectively disclosed qualities are ex-
perienced as properties which “belong to the object in the same way that colour and warmth
do” (Husserl 2018, 5; own transl.). However, Husserl now distinguishes between the ability
of sensory feelings to provide additional sensory materials for empirical apperception, and
what he maintains is their primary experiential function, namely that of suffusing the sen-
suously given with an “affective colouration” (Gefühlsfärbung, Gemütsfärbung). Importantly,
Husserl characterises such affective colouration as a primordial form of “valuing” (Wertung),
and he maintains that apperception can only legitimately be spoken of here if one recognises
a non-empirical kind of “affective apperception” that is oriented not towards mere things
but towards concrete values (Gefühlsapperzeption, Wertapperzeption) (Husserl 2018, 4–5, 9–10,
38–39). The most basic instance of such colouration occurs in the “tonation by affective
sensations” (Gefühlsempfindungsbetonung) of other sensory fields, a wholly passive and em-
bodied form of valuing that takes place irrespective of any form of intentional construal
which the sensations might undergo (Husserl 2018, 59, 61–62). For instance, the rhythm
of flavours lived through when chewing on a morsel of food involves, on the one hand,
the processual emergence and fading away of diverse sensory contents belonging strictly
to gustatory sense, and, on the other hand, the affective tonation of such contents through
which they acquire the characters of ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant,’ and perhaps even ‘indifferent’

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(Husserl 2018, 63–64). As Husserl notes, these two aspects of the unitary impressional ep-
isode are so intimately fused that any talk of discrete “layers” is not appropriate (Husserl
2018, 63). In a brief manuscript likely written in 1909 or 1910, he even proposes that, rather
than being bestowed by a distinct class of affective sensations, affective tones belong intrin-
sically to the content of all (first-order) sensations, such that episodes of sensory experience
are always and already experiential processes, not merely of ‘sensing,’ but also and simulta-
neously of ‘feeling’ (Husserl 2018, 420).
However, in these writings, Husserl extends the function of sensory feelings far beyond
such a pre-intentional tonation of the senses, emphasising that feelings of pleasure and pain
can also be oriented towards, and affectively colour or value, the transcendent objects and
situations of the world of experience. A particularly vivid example of this can be found in a
text from 1910, which describes the manner in which a passive form of “liking” or “being
pleased” (Gefallen) can be experientially intertwined with the progressive perception of a
beautiful rug, a form of affective experience which he also characterises as “‘[d]irect’ pleasure
(Lust), pleasure in an object for the sake of the object itself.” In entering an unfamiliar home
and seeing a radiant velvet rug, we may well have a ‘pleasant impression’ of the rug that is
irreducible to any complex of affectively toned sensations. What we are pleased with here is
the rug itself, and it is no mere sensory content but the “colour and pattern” of the appear-
ing thing which first “awaken” our liking. Moreover, this liking may even be responsive to
features of the rug that have not yet been originally perceived. The surface of the rug, seen
but not yet caressed, pleases us in part because it looks pleasant to touch (it is as if the velvet
fabric invites us to genuinely ‘feel’ it), just as its striking pattern inclines us to adopt a spatial
orientation in which it would look even more appealing (Husserl 2018, 395; own transl.).
‘Being pleased’ or ‘liking’ thus designates, in this context, an affective orientation towards a
perceived worldly matter that unfolds and develops over time. It is a pre-predicative form of
felt valuation that is, at any moment, motivationally responsive to the (apperceptively con-
figured) perceptual sense we have of the object as a whole.
But what role do feelings of pleasure play in such a dynamic experience of something
as ‘pleasant’? Is being pleased with a perceived object simply a matter of (non-intentional)
pleasure-sensations undergoing objectification, or are we rather dealing here with pleasure
as an intrinsically intentional feeling? Husserl’s response is unambiguous: “It is clear that the
feeling has its intentionality here, that is, its transcendence or transience, in total analogy with
the act of perception” (Husserl 2018, 396; cf. 16; own transl.). In the process of being pleased
with the velvet rug, we live through “individual feelings of pleasure and displeasure,” each
specifically “founded” upon an “inherent aspect” of the perceptual object (say, its purple
hue, velvety touch, or slightly stale odour). These individual feelings increase or diminish
in intensity as certain aspects of the object are given more or less optimally or emerge
from merely anticipatory to actual perceptual givenness. Accordingly, one can say that the
concrete experiential episode involves a specific “rhythm of feeling” whose contours map onto
the particular way that the object is temporally disclosed (Husserl 2018, 396; own transl.;
cf. 71, 176, 278). Now, the liking of the object which imbues every moment of this episode
is not reducible to the unfolding of this specific and actualised rhythm of feeling, since it
also involves the delineation of other possible affective rhythms as motivationally tied to
the pleasing object’s other possible courses of perceptual exhibition. As Husserl emphasises,
however, this “anticipatory” configuration of pleasure is not an achievement of the intellect,
nor can it be found in the underlying perceptual presentation qua empirical apperception.
Such configuration rather belongs to being pleased itself, which shows itself here as an
integrated totality of actual and potential individual feelings of pleasure that, at any point

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in time, functions as an affective valuation of the (ap)perceived object: “the ‘anticipation of

pleasure,’ the pleasure-interpretation, is not ‘presentation’ but feeling, and feeling fulfils itself
as feeling. The interpretation peculiar to the feeling is itself something affective, something
that belongs specifically to the feeling” (Husserl 2018, 397, 400; cf. 128; own transl.).
Husserl repeatedly highlights the close analogy with perception (Wahrnehmung) exhibited
here, describing such passively and dynamically object-responsive and object-oriented
feelings as instances of value-reception (Wertnehmung), and employing terms such as value-
givenness (Wertgegebenheit), value-apperception (Wertapperzeption), and even value-perception
(Wertwahrnehmung). Just as an object increasingly reveals its true nature as we bring to direct
givenness those of its aspects and features that were previously merely apperceived, so do we
acquire a gradual and intuitive acquaintance with a concrete value (e.g., the rug as pleasing)
through bringing more of its (perceptible and valuable) features explicitly into our affective
focus (cf., e.g., Husserl 2018, 28–29, 100–101, 400–401).
While feelings of pleasure and pain are relatively passive affective experiences that may
even be characterised as forms of sensibility—insofar as the latter is understood as affording
receptivity to the world of values and not merely to nature—Husserl acknowledges that many
emotions are more active and self-involving modes of comportment, in that they manifest a
kind of spontaneity or position-taking peculiar to the emotive sphere (Gefühlsstellungnahme,
Gefühlsspontaneität). This is not to say that such emotions are acts of judgement, nor that they
stand under our volitional control, but simply that anger, joy, fear, and the like are lived as
ways that we respond or react to experienced objects, rather than merely as new kinds of
affective receptivity (Husserl 2018, 101–102, 120–121). Such reactive emotions correspond
to what Husserl had earlier termed ‘intentional feelings,’ and he now reinterprets a cen-
tral claim of the Investigations by noting that they are typically motivationally responsive to
worldly matters, not merely as perceived, but also as felt in value-reception. For instance,
our “delight” over a beautiful picture will typically be motivated by and responsive to its
very beauty, while our recognition of such beauty already involves (occurrent or anticipated)
aesthetic feelings. In this sense, the “emotional position-taking reckons with the object in,
and ‘for the sake of,’ its value-character” (Husserl 2018, 121–122; own transl.; cf. 55). As his
research manuscripts document, Husserl became gradually convinced that the most vivid,
passionate, and explicitly intentional emotional reactions involve two intimately intertwined
experiential components. Firstly, an emotional response will only be lived as having an ex-
plicit intentionality if it, as a “totality of feeling,” has as its “core” an intentional feeling of
liking or disliking (Husserl 2018, 113–115; own transl.). Liking or being pleased, in this con-
text, is something more than the more receptive form of liking discussed earlier; it is not sim-
ply a matter of pleasure but is rather an intentional feeling of, say, “appreciation” (Wohlgefallen)
or “joy” (Freude), while examples of reactive disliking include “concern (Besorgnis) over an
imminent disaster” or “the displeased feeling of being disgusted (Abgestoßensein) by a suf-
fered insult” (Husserl 2018, 110, 115; own transl.). However, Husserl ranks both kinds of
intentional feeling under the generic heading of being pleased, simply because they are both
occurrent experiences in which we are “conscious of something pleasing” (Husserl 2018, 23;
own transl.). While feelings of this kind are motivated by the objects of sensory and affective
receptivity, and are lived most vividly when we attend to such objects, the rich variety of
value-characters that surface in their noematic correlates goes far beyond what the sensory
feelings alone are able to disclose. The second component of reactive emotions resides in the
‘streams of feeling’ that flow through the embodied self and manifest its passionate emotional
arousal, such as a specific rhythm of more-or-less localisable bodily feelings or a general
ambience of corporeal arousal (Husserl 2018, 111–112).

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Husserl regards it necessary to distinguish between these two components of reactive

emotions, if only because they frequently come apart. We sometimes experience an object
as agreeable without finding ourselves passionately moved by it, and equally a residue of the
feelings elicited in a passionate emotional arousal will remain, as a mere “affective state”
(Gemütszustand), even when the arousing object or situation is no longer attended to or pre-
sented in any way (Husserl 2018, 104–105, 121–123). However, in cases where we turn to-
wards some matter in appreciation or concern and simultaneously feel ourselves moved by it,
these two aspects function together as integrated components of a single emotional reaction.
In such optimally manifest cases of emotive intentionality, the “stream of aroused feelings”
is lived as a corporeal “expansion” (Verbreitung) and further articulation of the core act of
liking or disliking; and in correlation with this ‘fleshing out’ of the evaluative stance, so to
speak, the object as emotively experienced already acquires a richer axiological significance.
As Husserl puts it: “It is the delight, and not the liking without arousal, that directs itself to
the object, and the object does not merely stand there as pleasing, but rather (corresponding
to the modification of the act) as delightful” (Husserl 2018, 123; own transl.).
In his research manuscripts, then, Husserl supplements and sharpens the basic conception
of emotive intentionality found in Logical Investigations, and works out (while abundantly
transcending) the noematically oriented account of Ideas I. The overview here has high-
lighted one important strand of these probing analyses, tracing Husserl’s efforts to further
clarify the function of sensory feelings in emotional experience. While the Investigations
had understood this function merely in terms of the ability of sensory feelings to undergo
objectification in (non-affective) presentational acts, Husserl now locates their primary role
in directly affording an intuitive consciousness of value. While this already takes place in
the affective tonation of other sensory fields, integrated totalities of sensory feeling also
enable the objects and situations of the perceptual world to passively affect us as pleasing
or displeasing. Finally, sensory feelings contribute to the reactive emotions insofar as the
latter contain a dimension of sensory arousal, a dimension that “expands” our core emotive
stance towards the matter concerned and “modifies” or enrichens its affective and evaluative
character (ibid.). Indeed, Husserl suggests that this intertwinement of ‘active’ position-taking
and ‘passive’ sensory arousal is precisely what enables the reactive emotions to function
both as manifestations of the distinctive personality of the subject (see Chapter 21), and as
( higher-order) ways in which concrete values are intuitively given: “When I am angry, when
I am passionately aroused over the baseness of someone’s way of acting, then the seeing of this
baseness will reside in the emotional arousals themselves” (Husserl 2018, 128; own transl.;
cf. 62–63, 115, 130–131, 507–508).3

Notes

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 James Jardine

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86–97.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1998). Discovering Existence with Husserl. Transl. and ed. by R. A. Cohen and
M. B. Smith. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Melle, Ullrich (2012). Husserls deskriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse. In: R. Breeur, and
U. Melle (Eds.). Life, Subjectivity & Art: Essays In Honor of Rudolf Bernet. Dordrecht: Springer, 51–99.
Mulligan, Kevin (2010). Husserls Herz. In: M. Frank and N. Weidtmann (Eds.). Husserl und die Philos-
ophie des Geistes. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 209–238.

Further reading
Drummond, John J. (2006). Respect as a Moral Emotion: A Phenomenological Approach. Husserl
Studies 22(1), 1–27.
Mulligan, Kevin (2017). Thrills, Orgasms, Sadness, and Hysteria: Austro-German Criticisms of
William James. In: A. Cohen, and R. Stern (Eds.). Thinking about the Emotions: A Philosophical His-
tory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 223–252.
Parker, Rodney K.B., and Quepons, Ignacio (Eds.) (2018). Phenomenology of Emotions: Systematical
and Historical Perspectives. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XVI.
London, New York: Routledge.
Ubiali, Marta, and Wehrle, Maren (Eds.) (2015). Feeling and Value, Willing and Action: Essays in the
Context of a Phenomenological Psychology. Cham: Springer.

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 3
ALEXANDER PFÄNDER
Genki Uemura and Toru Yaegashi

1. Introduction
Alexander Pfänder is perhaps best known for his works on volition (cf. Uemura and Yaegashi
2012; Uemura forthcoming). But his discussion of emotions also merits attention. Like
many other early phenomenologists, he deals with emotions under the heading of “feelings
(Gefühle),” which may refer to a broader range of experience than “emotions.” For exam-
ple, when he attempts to analyze feelings in detail for the first time in his Einführung in die
Psychologie (1904), he does not confine himself to what many of us now would call emotions.
Later in his “Zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen” (1913/1916), however, he deals with a cer-
tain class of feelings called “sentiments (Gesinnungen),” which are certainly a class of emotions.
In the present chapter, after giving a summary of Pfänder’s early view on feelings (Section 2),
we reconstruct and assess his discussion of sentiments in the later period (Sections 3–6).

2. Feelings as states of mental subjects

In his early work Einführung in die Psychologie, Pfänder mentions the following examples
of feelings: Feelings of pleasure/displeasure, joy, annoyance (Unmut), moods of feeling
(Gefühlsstimmungen), aesthetic feelings, feelings of sympathy/antipathy, and feelings of satis-
faction/dissatisfaction (Befriedigung/Mißbefriedigung) (Pfänder 1904, 227). Obviously, they are
not limited to emotions in the narrow sense.
Pfänder’s early conception of feelings should be understood in its own context. In
Einführung in die Psychologie, he discusses feelings as one of the three fundamental classes
of mental reality (psychische Wirklichkeit). Feelings, together with what he calls “object-
consciousness” and “striving,” make up our mental life as a whole.1 Therefore, one way of
characterizing feelings is to compare them with the other two fundamental classes.
According to Pfänder, “feelings are, in a certain sense, ways in which the mental sub-
ject is attuned, or they are states (Zuständlichkeiten) of the mental subject or the I” (Pfänder
1904, 238). This characteristic of feelings becomes salient when contrasted with object-
consciousness such as sensation, perception, thought, and so on. While these experiences
have entities outside of mental reality as their objects (Pfänder 1904, 208), the same does not
hold true for feelings. According to Pfänder, therefore, feelings, as such, are intrinsic states of

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their subjects, which have nothing to do with external objects (however, this does not mean
that they are totally isolated from those objects; see below). It is most probably in reference
to such an idea that Pfänder later claims that those moods, insofar as they are feelings, are
objectless (Pfänder 1913, 354).
Another important characteristic of feelings is highlighted by their difference to strivings
such as desire and volition. “While feelings are in and for themselves simply static states
of the mental subject, strivings are rays of activity or force, as it were, emanating from the
mental subject” (Pfänder 1904, 251). In other words, there is a sense in which feelings are
passive, but strivings are active.
Note that the above characterizations should not be understood as a definition of feel-
ings per se. Denying the definability of feelings, Pf änder claims that the difference between
object-consciousness and feelings can be grasped only by “self-reflexion (Selbstbesinnung)”
(Pf änder 1904, 231–232). Therefore, the expressions he introduces to analyze feelings
could be understood as instructions for one to contemplate on those experiences by and
for oneself.
Even though Pfänder holds that feelings as such are intrinsic states of subjects, he does
not make them totally unrelated to objects outside of those subjects. Being based on object-
consciousness, they are states of subjects “with regard to objects (angesichts der Gegenstände)”
(Pfänder 1904, 229). This idea enables him to conceive of feelings in a broader sense in
which they are not necessarily purely sensational. Even though a paradigmatic case of feel-
ings is pleasure and displeasure based on sensation (Pfänder 1904, 228), he admits that there
are also “logical” or “intellectual feelings” (Pfänder 1904, 238–240). For instance, when I
doubt something, or my doubt has dissolved, he claims that I feel unpleased, or pleased in the
literal sense, even in the total absence of sensation related to my feeling.
As the above discussion suggests, feelings come in great varieties. Pfänder himself does
not fail to note this (Pfänder 1904, 241). How, then, are they classified? According to him,
different classes of feelings are organized not only in terms of polarity and intensity but also
other experiential characters called “features (Beschaffenheiten)” (Pfänder 1904, 241–242).
The same polarity and intensity may be found in two distinct feelings such as, to use his own
examples, a pleasure aroused by the taste of something or a joy with regard to a work of art.
Some may observe that they are differentiated by their objects (i.e. taste and the work of art).
Indeed, Pfänder himself admits that feelings are divided into groups also by their objects
(Pfänder 1904, 239). But he adds that such a division must be supplemented by the division
of those experiential features (Pfänder 1904, 242).
Pfänder acknowledges the importance of investigating the various feelings’ characteristics
(Pfänder 1904, 242), but he does not touch upon this issue in any detail in Einführung in die
Psychologie. It is in “Zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen” that he discusses the topic. As we will
see at the end of the next section, however, at that moment, he no longer holds that his earlier
view is universally valid for any form of feelings. Rather, he now admits that some feelings
have direction toward objects.

3. Sentiments as object-directed feelings

In “Zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen” (1913/1916), Pfänder devotes himself to a detailed
discussion of what he calls “sentiments.” His own examples of such experiences include love,
friendliness, liking (Zuneigung), favor (Gunst), benevolence, hate, hostility, dislike, disfavor,
and malevolence (Pfänder 1913, 334). As these examples show, sentiments have polarity;
they are either positive or negative.

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 Alexander Pfänder

To be more precise, Pfänder’s target here is not sentiments in general. Distinguishing

actual, virtual, and habitual forms of sentiments, he limits his discussion to the first one
(Pfänder 1913, 330–332). As he observes, a sentiment may not be actual, i.e., thematically
occurring in one’s mental life. Rather, it may occur only in the background of conscious-
ness (virtual sentiments), or it may remain in one’s mind without even occurring (habitual
sentiments). Given this distinction, it is natural for Pfänder to begin with actual sentiments.
For he writes:

Psychological knowledge of sentiments must necessarily begin with the phenomenology

of sentiments. The phenomenology of sentiments has to proceed toward a direct grasp of
the mental itself and then give a fully adequate description of the whole mental make-up
(psychischer Bestand) itself.
(Pfänder 1913, 328)

Arguably, describing sentiments phenomenologically would be quite difficult, if they are

virtual or habitual in the above sense. In what follows, unless otherwise noted, we use
the term “sentiments” to mean what he calls “actual sentiments” or “stirrings of sentiment
(Gesinnungsregungen).”
Pfänder’s initial characterization of sentiments points to three features of those experi-
ence: their embeddedness (Eingespanntheit) between subjects and objects, centrifugal direc-
tion toward objects, and centrifugal streaming from subjects toward objects (Pfänder 1913,
332–335).
To illustrate them, let us take Pfänder’s analysis of his own example, namely a subject
who, being interrupted by another subject, has a hostile sentiment. In this case, even though
only the first subject has the sentiment in question, it is not enclosed to her, as it were.
Rather, it bridges a mental distance between the two subjects; to the first subject, the second
one is no longer unrelated. In other words, the first subject’s hostile sentiment has the second
subject as an object of a certain sort (i.e., say, an enemy).
Such embeddedness between the subject and the object of a sentiment has a certain direc-
tion. The first subject is hostile toward the object (i.e., the second subject). It is to capture this
circumstance that Pfänder uses the term “centrifugal.”2
Embeddedness and centrifugalism are insufficient to characterize sentiments as actual ex-
periences. For, even though Pfänder is not explicit about it, they are also found in non-actual
sentiments. If you have hated someone for many years, the aforementioned connection with
centrifugal direction has been maintained; this person has been and remained an enemy
for you. But in this case, your hate may not always be actual. The actuality of sentiments,
therefore, is not due to its embeddedness and centrifugalism. What, then, makes a sentiment
actual? It is such a missing element that Pfänder calls “streaming” from subjects to objects;
actual sentiments stream from their subjects to objects, since they are “not something that
rest in themselves, but something that is moving within itself (in sich Bewegtes)” (Pfänder
1913, 334). While Pfänder does not say anything more on this point, we can make sense of
it by considering the following case. Suppose that you have habitual hate toward someone,
but usually you do not remember it. Someday, you happen to hear about the recent situation
of this person and, suddenly, a sentiment of hate actually comes upon you. Such a change of
your experience may well be described by the phrase “your hate suddenly begins to stream
toward the person you hate.”
Contrary to what one may assume from the above discussion, Pfänder, unlike Stein (1922,
245–246), admits that objects of sentiments are not limited to human persons. According to

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him, non-human animals and even plants can be objects of sentiments too, but he leaves it
open whether we take those creatures as if they were human persons when we have senti-
ments toward them (Pfänder 1913, 337). Be that as it may, he further claims that sentiments
can, and in fact are, directed toward lifeless, physical objects, social communities, cultural
objects, and superhuman beings such as God(s) (Pfänder 1913, 337–339). In this way, Pfänder
maintains that any sentiment has an object. Even if a sentiment does not seem to have any
object, he claims, it merely lacks any particular object and yet it has the world or “life in gen-
eral (Leben überhaupt)” as its objects (Pfänder 1913, 340).
While the centrifugal direction is characteristic of sentiments in general, they cannot
be identified with other types of centrifugal experience. According to Pfänder, attending
(Aufmerken), apperceiving, meaning something (Meinen),3 striving, and willing are also cen-
trifugally directed to their objects (Pfänder 1913, 341; note that he does not deal with the dif-
ference between sentiments and volition). Those experiences can occur without sentiments.
Let us reconstruct how Pfänder argues for this claim.
It is not difficult to see that one can pay attention to something without any love or hate
for it (Pfänder 1913, 341). The same holds for apperception, under which he classifies vari-
eties of (perhaps conceptual or intellectual) activity of articulating one or more objects, for
instance, grasping something as such and such or distinguishing one thing from something
else (Pfänder 1913, 342).
Pfänder’s discussion of meaning something and its difference from sentiments is a bit
more complicated. According to Pfänder, meaning something is an activity of taking some-
thing to have F, where F may be natural (i.e., non-axiological and non-moral) properties,
axiological properties, and moral properties. Arguably, we can and, in fact, do take some-
thing to have a property of the first type even if we do not have any sentiment toward it
(Pfänder 1913, 343). For instance, to take this statue to be white, you do not have to have any
love or hate for it. The situation might be different when it comes to axiological and moral
properties. Can I take the statue to be beautiful while not having any (positive) sentiment
toward it? According to Pfänder, we must accept such possibilities. We can take an art piece
to be of positive value even if we dislike it (Pfänder 1913, 343). We can take an action to be
morally good, even if we do not love it (Pfänder 1913, 344).
Pfänder distinguishes sentiments from strivings for two main reasons. First, they are differ-
ent in terms of polarity (Pfänder 1913, 350–351). If love is identical to the striving for promot-
ing well-being (Wohlförderung), its opposite, namely hate must be the reluctance (Widerstreben)
to promote well-being. But this cannot be the case. The opposite of the striving for promoting
well-being is the striving for harming well-being (Wohlschädigung). To put it differently, while the
polarity of sentiments is between two different types of experience, that of strivings is between
two different contents of type-identical experiences. Second, sentiments may not have “urges
(Drängen)” which Pfänder considers essential to strivings (Pfänder 1913, 351–352).
The above discussion has also shown that sentiments are neither intellectual (like apper-
ception or meaning something) nor conative (like striving). Thus, it may seem that we are
left with the idea that they are a peculiar kind of feelings. According to Pfänder, however,
such a move is phenomenologically unacceptable. The classification of the experience must
be grounded in the facts of the experience (Pfänder 1913, 353).
In fact, sentiments are not to be identified with feelings without any qualification.
According to Pfänder in 1904, the latter do not have direction toward objects. As we have
seen in the previous section, he keeps this view in 1913 when he claims that moods are ob-
jectless. Also, Pfänder points to two further differences between sentiments and feelings of
pleasure and displeasure. First, painful love and pleasant hate serve as counterexamples to

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the claims that love=pleasure and that hate=displeasure (Pfänder 1913, 357–358). Second,
feelings of pleasure and displeasure do not show centrifugalism even though they may be, to
borrow his expression in 1904, with regard to objects (Pfänder 1913, 359–360).
At the same time, Pfänder holds that sentiments have some similarities to the feelings
under discussion (Pfänder 1913, 363). They are qualitatively similar to each other. Also, they
originate from the same part of the self, which he calls, somewhat metaphorically, the “cen-
ter of feeling (Gefühlszentrum).” Thus, while he keeps his idea that feelings are intrinsic states
of the self (without explicitly mentioning the 1904 book), he is now in need of expanding his
notion of feelings. In this way, he comes to characterize sentiments as “centrifugal streams
of feeling (zentrifugale Gefühlsströmungen),” which are directed toward objects provided by
object-consciousness (Pfänder 1913, 363–364).4

4. The threefold structure of “deep and high” sentiments

Even though Pfänder takes the centrifugal stream of feeling as the essence of sentiments
(Pfänder 1913, 364, 372), these experiences often have two further characteristic components.
First, a sentiment contains either “inner unification (innere Einigung)” or “inner divi-
sion (innere Entzweiungen),” depending on whether it is positive or negative (Pfänder 1913,
366–367). When I have, say, a sentiment of love for someone, I feel myself to be closer to her
(“feeling of unification (Einigungsgefühl)”). In contrast, if I have a sentiment of hate against
her, I feel myself to be more distant from her (“feeling of division (Entzweiungsgefühl)”). In
this way, sentiments of love and hate not only bridge the mental distance between subjects
and objects, but they also determine its extent. It should be noted, however, that the distance
at stake is merely a felt relationship rather than intersubjectively valid one. My feeling myself
to be closer to her does not in itself imply my being closer to her.5
Second, a sentiment often contains an act of affirmation or denial (Bejahungs- oder
Verneinungsakt), depending on whether it is positive or negative (Pfänder 1913, 368–370).
While, according to Pfänder, I give someone a right to exist when I have a sentiment of love
for her, I deny that right when I have an opposite sentiment. It is such entitlement/deprivation
of the right to exist that Pfänder attempts to describe in terms of acts of affirmation/denial.
As with the case of inner unification/rupture, those acts do not, in themselves, establish that
objects of relevant sentiments do or do not have the right to exist.
Now, since Pfänder holds that the three components of sentiments—centrifugal stream,
inner unification/division, and the act of affirmation/denial—cannot be reduced to each
other (Pfänder 1913, 372), he has to explain what role each of them plays in a sentiment.
As we have already seen, centrifugal streaming is regarded as the essential feature of senti-
ments. It is because of this feature that an experience is a sentiment. What about the other
two? According to Pfänder, while inner unification lets a sentiment to go “deeper,” an act
of affirmation lets it go “higher” (Pfänder 1913, 373). His metaphorical claim is not easy to
understand, but it seems to be illustrated by the following examples. The closer I feel myself
to be to someone, the deeper my love gets rooted. The more seriously I give her the right to
exist, the higher my love for her reaches. In this way, Pfänder provides a multi-dimensional
analysis of degrees of sentiments.

5. Varieties of modified sentiments

After discussing the general forms of actual sentiments, Pfänder proceeds to four variet-
ies of modified sentiments, which he calls “non-genuine,” “floating,” “suppressed,” and

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“aesthetic,” respectively. In this and the following sections, we deal with Pfänder’s analysis
of those sentiment variants. Note, however, that our reconstruction is more like a spoiling
trailer of a movie than a recapitulation of its story. Pfänder’s lengthy discussion on those sen-
timent variants, which is conducted with rich and detailed descriptions of examples, resists
any attempt at summarization.
Non-genuine sentiments, which are opposed to “genuine (echt)” ones, are most typically
found in cases where sentiments emerge from playful behavior and lies. When, to take
Pfänder’s own example, an adult playfully threatens a child, the former has and expresses
a non-genuine, playful sentiment of hostility. Being just a “schematic imitation” (Pfänder
1916, 383) of the genuine hostility, such a non-genuine sentiment is nevertheless an actual
sentiment that is experienced by the subject as centrifugally streaming toward the other. We
will discuss the non-genuine sentiments in more detail in the next section.
Floating sentiments, which are opposed to “fully real (vollwirklich)” ones, are illustrated by
the following example (Pfänder 1916, 4). When an orator uses exaggerated words to express her
non-genuine sentiment in felicitations, she may lead to a genuine sentiment of, say, love for the
person she praises. Such a sentiment, however, still seems to lack something. It is not grounded
in the mental reality (seelische Realität/Wirklichkeit) of the orator. In other words, the sentiment
in question goes beyond the standards that fit to her ordinary way of living. Pfänder calls such a
floating sentiment “super-real (überwirklich)” or “transcendent” too (Pfänder 1916, 5, 9).
Floating sentiments are not limited to super-real or transcendent ones. According to
Pfänder, there are two other forms of floating sentiments: “Parallel-real (nebenwirklich)” or
“episodic” ones and “sub-real (unterwirklich)” or “provisional” ones. Episodic sentiments are
those one has when one is preoccupied with something else (Pfänder 1916, 19). You may have
such an experience when, for instance, you look at your beloved person while working hard
on various tasks you have to complete as soon as possible. Provisional sentiments are those that
stop short of fully real sentiments (Pfänder 1916, 33–34). For example, if you show friendliness
to someone with the hope that a certain wish be satisfied by that, your sentiment of friendli-
ness is provisional and thus not fully real yet as long as your wish remains unsatisfied.
The super-, parallel-, and sub-real characters of sentiments are not only found in non-
genuine sentiments. Genuine sentiments can also be floating, episodic, or provisional, as
Pfänder shows by several examples (Pfänder 1916, 14, 19). Therefore, these characters are
irreducible to non-genuineness.
As its name suggests, suppressed sentiments are characterized by second-order attitudes
that subjects take toward them. For example, Pfänder again takes the hostility of the subject
who is interrupted by someone else (Pfänder 1916, 43). In this case, the subject of the senti-
ment may try to keep her hostile episodic in the above sense by trying to concentrate on her
work. If this is successful, her hostility gains pressure (Zusammendrückung) as its experiential
feature, by which it is distinguished from merely provisional hostilities. In this case, the
second-order attitude toward the sentiment of hostility is negative, but that is not always the
case for any suppressed sentiment. Here, the second-order attitude toward a sentiment is ei-
ther affirmative or negative (Pfänder 1916, 44–45). If it is affirmative, the subject of hostility
keeps her sentiment provisionary but does not attempt to annihilate it. If negative, she not
only suppresses it; she also annihilates it.
Aesthetic sentiments are also characterized by second-order attitudes. A sentiment is aes-
thetic if it is evaluated as “beautiful” or “ugly” by its subject (Pfänder 1916, 46). Following
his teacher, Theodor Lipps, Pfänder holds that a subject grasps the object of such a sentiment
only aesthetically (Pfänder 1916, 47–48). In other words, the sentiments in question have
nothing to do with what the object in itself is.

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 Alexander Pfänder

6. More on genuine and non-genuine sentiments

In this section, we will evaluate Pfänder’s discussion of non-genuine sentiments, which has
an interesting implication for moral philosophy. We will also briefly consider the discussion
of non-genuine feelings by Willy Haas on whom Pfänder draws (Pfänder 1913, 382).
According to Pfänder, the genuineness of the sentiments does not depend on intensity
or other parameters (Pfänder 1913, 383–384). A non-genuine sentiment can be as intense
and persistent as a genuine one (e.g., the sentiments that method actors may have). It is only
artificial.
Even though artificial, these sentiments do not necessarily emerge from playful behavior
or lies. An intention to deceive may be absent (Pfänder 1913, 385). There are also non-
genuine sentiments that emerge from prosocial considerations. For example, some people
not only behave in a friendly manner but also have actual friendly feelings toward others
because they think it is better to be friendly in their social life. Their sentiments of friendship
are non-genuine, though they do not necessarily derive from an intention to deceive. They
may even be honest and serious. Nevertheless, Pfänder adds, such serious but non-genuine
sentiments are unintentionally deceptive, because others may confuse them with genuine
sentiments.
Importantly, Pfänder appreciates the moral value of non-genuine sentiments (Pfänder
1913, 397–399). Some moral principles demand us to have some sentiments: “Love your
neighbor,” “Be kind to others,” etc. They demand genuine sentiments. However, it is impos-
sible for human beings to directly control their genuine sentiments intentionally. Thus, the
above principles would seem to contradict the Ought-Implies-Can principle. But you can
intentionally come to have corresponding non-genuine sentiments, since they are artificial,
schematic imitations of genuine ones. And yet, non-genuine sentiments can make it easier
for the subject to have the corresponding genuine sentiments. This facilitating role of the
non-genuine sentiments can make such moral principles intelligible, even though it does
not sufficiently justify them. As Pfänder emphasizes, to call a certain sentiment non-genuine
does not imply underestimating it (Pfänder 1913, 382).
This idea bears on the issue of emotional education discussed in contemporary virtue eth-
ics. Rosalind Hursthouse emphasizes the need for emotional (self-)re-training of badly trained
people, for example persons with inculcated racism (Hursthouse 1999, 113–120). The methods
of such emotional training are widely discussed by moral philosophers, psychologists, and ed-
ucational theorists. However, the strategy of facilitating genuine, desirable sentiments through
non-genuine sentiments, suggested by Pfänder, may contribute to these debates.
Three years before the publication of the first part of Pfänder’s “Zur Psychologie der
Gesinnungen,” his student Willy Haas published his dissertation Über Echtheit und Unechtheit
von Gefühlen (On Genuineness and Non-Genuineness of Emotions).6 This work explains the dis-
tinction of genuine and non-genuine feelings in terms of their relations to the self. According
to Haas, the self has, in each moment, a certain basic direction (Grundrichtung), a general
tune of the mind. The feeling that corresponds to the basic direction of its time is charac-
terized as a genuine feeling. On the contrary, the feeling that does not is non-genuine (Haas
1910, 11–12). For example, if you are enjoying a party, yet simultaneously irritated by a long
speech, one of the two feelings may be genuine and the other non-genuine, depending on
which corresponds to your basic direction at that moment. If you are basically happy, i.e.,
your overall mind is colored by the feeling of happiness at that moment, your joy is genuine,
and your irritation is non-genuine. But if you are basically upset, your irritation is genuine,
and your joy is non-genuine.

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Note that the feeling’s relation to the basic direction of the self should not be confused
with its relation to the character of the person. If you are a happy person, always enjoying
the situation you are in, the joy you feel at the party is a characteristic feeling of yours. This
is not what Haas intends to illustrate by the above example. Since character is an essentially
diachronic property of the self, the subject must have a temporal, extended personal unity, in
order to have a characteristic emotion. However, having a genuine (and non-genuine) feel-
ing does not presuppose the diachronic unity of the personal self but only the synchronic unity
of the self. It may even be the case that a certain non-genuine feeling, not a genuine one, is
really characteristic of the subject (Haas 1910, 22).
Haas further claims that, for the subject to be conscious of her own genuine and non-
genuine feelings as such, she has to have still another feeling, the feeling of their genuineness
and non-genuineness. This experience of “explicit approval (or disapproval) from the depth
(of the self ) (ausdrückliche Zustimmung aus der Tiefe)” (Haas 1910, 19) constitutes the necessary
condition of subject’s knowledge of her own genuine and non-genuine feelings.
In sum, Haas explains the genuineness and non-genuineness of feelings as being con-
stituted by matching the relationship between the emotion and the basic direction of the
mind at the time. The subject might come to know her genuine and non-genuine feelings
through the feeling of inner approval or disapproval of her own emotions as corresponding
or contradicting her basic direction.
Haas’s theory of the genuine and non-genuine feelings complements his teacher’s ex-
planation of genuine and non-genuine sentiments. As Haas does for non-genuine feelings
in general, Pfänder also claims that non-genuine sentiments are not always recognized by
their subjects as what they are. The subject may even be unconscious of them (Pfänder
1913, 389). Though Pfänder does not further elaborate on the consciousness and recognition
of non-genuine experiences, he could have developed a theory based on Haas’s.

7. Conclusion
In the present chapter, we have explained the framework of Pf änder’s theory of feeling
in general and reconstructed his detailed discussion of sentiments in “Zur Psychologie
der Gesinnungen.” He provides a multi-dimensional analysis of sentiments, introducing
the concept of depth and height, and several modifications of sentiments such as being
non-genuine, floating, and suppressed. We have also briefly discussed an ethical impli-
cation of his theory of non-genuine sentiments. In conclusion, Pf änder’s work can be,
even though almost ignored in the contemporary philosophy of emotion, a rich source of
inspiration.7

Notes

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 Alexander Pfänder

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Geisteswissenschaften. In: E. Husserl (Ed.). Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und phänomenologische For-
schung, vol. 5, Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1922.
Uemura, Genki (forthcoming). Alexander Pfänder. In: T. Keiling and C. Erhard (Eds.). The Routledge
Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency. London, New York: Routledge.
Uemura, Genki, and Yaegashi, Toru (2012). Alexander Pfänder on the Intentionality of Willing. In:
A. Salice (Ed.). Intentionality. Munich: Philosophia, 243–247.
Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid (2008). Die Emotionen. Gefühle in der realistischen Phänomenologie. Berlin:
Akademie Verlag.
Walther, Gerda (1923). Zur Ontologie der soziale Gemeinschaften. In: E. Husserl (Ed.). Jahrbuch für
Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Forschung, vol. 6, Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1–138.

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 4
MAX SCHELER
Matthias Schloßberger

1. Introduction
Max Scheler is—horribile dictu—a system thinker. Ethical, epistemological, ontological, and
metaphysical issues are variously intertwined in his work. This renders an understanding of
any specific systematic topic he discusses, if approached in isolation, difficult. Scheler’s theory
of emotions provides a key to grasping those interconnections and some of his most central
philosophical claims.
Few other phenomenologists have dealt as extensively with the phenomenology of emo-
tions as Scheler. He developed a general account of emotions, suggested his theory of the
so-called ‘feelings of sympathy’ (Sympathiegefühle), but also discussed a number of distinct
emotions. His works on love and hatred, shame, suffering, repentance, and Ressentiment
are well known and considered the most influential parts of his theory of emotions. From
a systematic perspective, it should be emphasized that Scheler takes the point of departure
from the assumption that every human relation to the world is primarily an emotional one.
According to Scheler, things, people, and even ideas are not given to us first in a neutral,
objectifying way and only then—after we have applied some aesthetic or ethical criteria—as
bad, good, appealing, or appalling. Surprisingly, this crucial point is frequently overlooked
when it comes to the reception of important themes in Scheler’s philosophy. In the following,
I will try to show that only his theory of emotions renders some of these themes compre-
hensible. Thus, I will be considering Scheler’s epistemology, his moral philosophy, and his
theory of intersubjectivity—and the latter both in the narrow sense of the so-called problem
of other minds as well as in the broader sense encompassing social ontology, sociology, and
social philosophy.
Following Scheler, the traditional understanding of the nature of feelings must be funda-
mentally revised. Scheler explicitly formulates his opposition to the traditional understand-
ing of feelings and his theory. His main adversary here is the Kantian dichotomy between
the sensuality and pure reason, and the assignment of feelings to sensuality: According to
this Kantian account, feelings are considered mere physical states. If one follows Kant and his
ilk, when it comes to this assignment “our whole emotional life—even love and hate must be
assigned to ‘sensibility’. According to this division everything in the mind which is alogical,

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e.g., intuition, feeling, striving, loving, hating is dependent on man’s psychophysical organiza-
tion” (Scheler 1973a, 253ff.).
Scheler seeks to overcome this position by showing that there are certain kinds of feelings
which are indispensable functions of our mind. These kinds of feelings do not necessarily
depend on bodily sensations, and even if bodily sensations are involved, they are not the
determining factor.

2. The stratification of our emotional lives: four strata of feelings

A central idea of Scheler’s theory of emotions is the assumption of a stratified emotional life.
The initial question that leads to this assumption is the following: How can we understand
the two intertwined aspects of feelings in general: their intentional character (i.e., their being
feeling of something) and their nonintentional character (Empfindung)?
To understand Scheler’s approach, we have to question the ambiguity of the concept
of feeling. Scheler seems to follow Husserl’s remarks on the difference between feeling-
sensations (Gefühlsempfindungen) and feeling-acts (Gefühlsakte). In the Fifth Logical Investi-
gation on “Intentional Experiences and their Contents,” Husserl addresses the question of
what we mean when we speak of feelings. Discussing the example of joy, he distinguishes
the sensual quality and the interpretive act-character of feelings:

Joy, e.g., concerning some happy event, is certainly an act. But this act, which is not
merely an intentional character, but a concrete and therefore complex experience, does
not merely hold in its unity an idea of the happy event and an act-character of liking
which relates to it: a sensation of pleasure attaches to the idea, a sensation at once seen
and located as an emotional excitement in the psycho-physical feeling-subject, and also
as an objective property—the event seems as if bathed in a rosy gleam. The event thus
pleasingly pointed now serves as the first foundation for the joyful approach, the liking
for, the being charmed, or however one’s state may be described.
(Husserl 2001, 110; see Chapter 2 in this volume)

In Husserl’s example, the sensation of pleasure is interwoven with the feeling’s intentional
character (the joy about something). Together, both aspects constitute a complex emotional
experience. The first step of Scheler’s theory of emotions follows the Husserlian distinction:
The intentional feeling of something (das intentionale Fühlen von etwas) differs from mere
feeling-states (Gefühlszuständen) (Scheler 1973a, 261).
On the basis of this analysis, Scheler goes further: He aims to understand how some
feelings greatly differ from others when it comes to their dependence on sensuality. In other
words, how is it that we use the same concept for phenomena as different as amor dei, falling
in love, and the sensations of hunger or grumpiness?
This guiding question leads Scheler to distinguish four different strata of emotive life:
(1) sensible feelings (sinnliche Gefühle) or sensations, (2) vital feelings (Vitalgefühle) or feelings of the
lived body (Leibgefühle) (like tiredness) and life-feelings (Lebensgefühle) (like wariness), (3) psychic
feelings (seelische Gefühle) (like happiness, sadness, sorrow, grief, and anger), and (4) purely spiri-
tual feelings (geistige Gefühle) (like deep serenity or deep despair) (Scheler 1973a, 332).
Purely sensible feelings (for example, the sensation of a needle-prick) require additional
intentional acts to become meaningful.1 In other words, they lack intentionality: “There
is no ‘signifying’ in it, nor is there any immanent directedness in it” (Scheler 1973a, 257).

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Sensible feelings are characterized as being given in certain localizable places of the body.
They are isolated occurrences without any meaningful connection to the experienced con-
tinuum of sense.2 Their lack of meaning and intentionality becomes particularly evident by
the fact that one and the same sensory feeling can be felt quite differently, for example as
pleasant or painful (Scheler 1973a, 333f.). The needle-prick-sensation can be painful and an-
noying if one is mending a shirt or it can be part of an elaborate pleasure-scheme in an erotic
context.3 However, that by no means implies that sensations are passively received “material”
that must be somehow “interpreted” by active cognitive acts. It seems important to point out
that intentionality, in general, does not amount to active object-directedness for Scheler. It
is in a much broader sense the title for any kind of awareness of something in a certain way
and oscillates between activity and passivity. Active directedness toward something, prop-
ositional thinking, and conscious judgment make up just a few varieties of our intentional
life but surely not all.
The second and third strata of emotions lie in sharp contrast to the first. Vital as well as
psychic feelings are not localizable within body parts. They “participate in the total exten-
sion of the lived body” (Gesamtausdehnungscharakter des Leibes) (Scheler 1973a, 338). These
feelings are experienced in and with the whole body. However, this holistic experience is far
from being the result of a combination of bodily sensations on the one hand and cognitive
processing on the other, but rather stems from the original and inseparable unity of sensual-
ity, intentionality, and expressive behavior. Here lies one of the core arguments of Scheler’s
theory of intersubjectivity: The way we experience shame, for example, can be described
by three necessarily connected components. There is first the interoceptive aspect: We feel the
heat of shame spreading over our bodies, we feel it under our skin, on our face, and so on.
Then, there is the aspect of intentionality: We are ashamed of something and we are ashamed
that others perceive us in a certain way. Finally, this feeling is—although in varying degrees
of obviousness—a visible phenomenon, i.e., others can perceive it. Vital and psychic feelings
express themselves corporeally: This is the very condition of existing as a social being, a
human being living among other human and non-human beings. There is so to speak a
universal expression-grammar of vital and psychic feelings that renders living in a social
world possible in the first place: Based on the experience of our lived bodies, we are able to
share our feelings, to get to know our own emotional range and the feelings of others. Thus,
Scheler holds that the bodily expressions of joy or shame, for example, are not contingently
habitualized gestures which vary from culture to culture. Rather, they are inseparable from
the interoceptive and the intentional aspect of those feelings.
Scheler speaks of “intentional functions of feeling” (intentionale Fühlfunktionen) when he
refers to vital and psychic feelings that enable us to receive certain values (Scheler 1973a,
259). In the process of feeling (fear, hope, etc.), the world opens up to us in a very specific
way: We perceive the value-side of things. We perceive, for example, the encounter with
X as hopeful and the situation Y as dangerous. These intentional functions of feeling bring
advantages and disadvantages or outright dangers directly to our awareness—even before we
can grasp them intellectually or conceptually.
The third stratum of feelings, the so-called psychic feelings (seelische Gefühle), differs from
the second stratum in having a much clearer or deeper ego-quality. According to Scheler, a
deep feeling of sorrow, for example, does not have the same relation to corporeal sensations and
therefore does not participate in bodily extension to the same extent as feelings of wellbeing
and ill-being (Scheler 1973a, 342). Psychic feelings are much more “intimately attached to the
constellation of contents of the individual consciousness” (Scheler 1973a, 336). Finally, there is
a fourth stratum: spiritual feelings. They are distinguished from psychic feelings “by the fact

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that they can never be states. For in true bliss and despair, and even in cases of serenity (serenitas
animi) and ‘peace of mind,’ all ego-states seem to be extinguished” (Scheler 1973a, 343).
But is Scheler’s theory of the stratification of emotions plausible? One could argue that
the stratification serves as a means of elucidating the ambiguities of the concept of “feeling”:
The scope here reaches from fleeting corporeal sensations to a special kind of intentional-
ity, a kind of perception of something, which necessarily precedes all propositional or factual
knowledge. Scheler advocates the significant cognitive value of emotions. Another argu-
ment in favor of his stratification-theory lies in the fact that we can actually experience our
stratified emotional life. We can experience very different and separate kinds of feelings at
the same time: “A human being can be blissful while suffering from bodily pain” (Scheler
1973a, 330). Finally, there are various correlations between feelings and values that the the-
ory of stratification can account for: Different kinds of feelings make different kinds of values
experienceable (Zaborowski 2011; Geniusas 2015).

3. Ethics as epistemology of moral judgment

Scheler claims that there is such a thing as an a priori ethics of feelings. The argument for this
claim is connected to several assumptions about the intentional nature of feelings. Values are
not given to us through any other perceptual means than through feelings.
Why does Scheler hold that values have to be felt? His point of departure is the

ultimate principle of phenomenology (…) that there is an interconnection between the

essence of an object and the essence of intentional experiencing. (…) In other words,
according to their essence, values must be able to appear in a feeling consciousness.
(Scheler 1973a, 265)

Every kind of object corresponds essentially to a different mode of experiencing. This a

priori interconnection works the other way around as well: Corresponding to the theory of
the four strata of emotions, Scheler develops a theory of non-formal values (materiale Werte).
These values rank from morally neutral, primitive ones (corporeal pleasure or displeasure)
to aesthetic and moral values, upon which moral norms are based. They are all brought to
light through different emotional acts and functions. That allows Scheler to speak of “a priori
relations of rank among value modalities” (Scheler 1973a, 104).
Scheler describes the values of the agreeable and the disagreeable as belonging to the lowest
value-modality. They are sensually given (with their modes of enjoyment and suffering).
They correspond to the states that are perceived as sensual pleasure or displeasure/pain. The
values correlated with vital feelings (quickening, declining, weakness, strength) differ greatly
from the first modality. Scheler underlines that they are in no way reducible to the first
modality: They are values in their own right, and are encompassed by the noble and the vulgar
(and not by the agreeable and the disagreeable or by good and evil) (cf. Scheler 1973a, 105f.). The
third modality of values includes the beautiful and the ugly, the morally right and wrong. They
are given through spiritual acts and functions. The fourth modality consists of the values of
the holy and the unholy, which, according to Scheler, can be grasped only by a certain kind
of love. Scheler insists on the hierarchical structure of these values in the described order.
However, he does not provide any arguments for the hierarchy. For Scheler, due to their
evidential givenness, values are experienced in a certain hierarchy; thus, one cannot really
argue why, for example, the experience of beauty, while listening to a cantata by Bach, ranks
higher than the enjoyment of a nice cold beer on a hot day. Some philosophers reject Scheler’s

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hierarchy of values as dogmatic and phenomenologically unwarranted—or even as a telltale

sign of a conservative worldview (cf. Römer 2018, 15).4 To my knowledge, however, none
of his critics has yet argued for the equivalence of, say, hedonistic and moral values. Only a
staunch (moral) relativist would be able to consistently reject Scheler’s assumption that there
are lower and higher modes of value.
In any case, ethically relevant values are not dependent on sensually caused mental states;
in this respect, Scheler can certainly not be accused of grounding his non-formal values on a
naturalistic presupposition. According to Kant, feelings are attributed to a purely mechani-
cally functioning sensuality, while morality can only be based on pure reason. Scheler rejects
this basic assumption. In contrast to Kant’s pure practical reason, he develops the concept of an
“ideal ought” that is founded in love and renders actions of moral obligation motivationally
possible. Against the idea that we could ever act upon purely formal intellectual insight
(i.e., the Kantian imperative), he holds that only the emotional givenness of what is good,
i.e., of value, can deploy moral necessity and move us to action: “Values are never based on
the necessity of the ought! Thus, only what is good can become ‘duty’; or it is because it is
good (in the ideal sense) that it necessarily ‘ought’ to be” (Scheler 1973a, 75).

4. Forms of sympathy
Scheler has a well-developed theory of the crucial role of feelings in human interactions. In
this theory, he tackles (1) the basic problem of other minds: what renders our experience of
others as fellow human beings possible? (2) Scheler provides some lucid descriptions of the
phenomena of partaking in the emotional life of others and of shared feelings. In keeping
with the systematic impetus of his philosophy, he tries to shed light on the foundational re-
lation between different phenomena of intersubjective life.
Scheler starts with the assumption of the direct perception of other minds. All attempts
to reconstruct the experience of others as mediated through some kind projective process
necessarily fail, because they presuppose what they try to explain. They become mired in a
vicious circle: Any attempt to recognize others through inferential processes or conscious/
unconscious projections of one’s own mental states requires us to be already familiar with
the other as another human being. In other words, the sphere of intersubjectivity has to be
already fully established for us to be able to project or infer anything onto or about other per-
sons. Another important point of Scheler’s theory is his criticisms of the theory of empathy
(Einfühlung) prevalent among his contemporaries—and notably of Theodor Lipps’ isomor-
phic concept of empathic understanding. Lipps holds that in order to understand another’s
emotion, we have to synchronously feel the (qualitatively) same feeling as the other. Scheler
opposes this view.5 He characterizes the specific way in which we grasp what the other feels
with the term sensing the other’s feeling (Nachfühlen). The term means feeling the other’s feeling
without being immersed in the same emotional state.6 Scheler compares Nachfühlen to a kind
of remembrance: “The other’s feeling is given exactly like a landscape which we see subjec-
tively in memory, or a melody which we hear in similar fashion” (Scheler 2008[1954], 9). He
also clearly rejects theories which argue that we first experience the other’s body and grasp
their inner life through secondary acts of analogization and inference.

To say that our only initial datum is the body is completely erroneous. This is true
only for the doctor or the scientist, i.e., for man in so far as he abstracts artificially from
expressive phenomena, which have an altogether primary givenness.
(Scheler 1973a, 398)

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The first encounter with other human beings does not present us mere bodies (in the sense
of Cartesian res extensa) that we have to animate somehow (e.g., through mental acts of pro-
jection or analogization) to make lived bodies out of them. Our first encounter with fellow
human beings occurs long before we would even be able to accomplish such cognitively
demanding acts. Accordingly, Scheler holds that our first encounter with others occurs in a
so-called psychophysically neutral sphere. We experience them directly through their expressive
behavior:

Now to begin with, it only needs the simplest of phenomenological considerations to

show that at any rate there is nothing self-evident about this. For we certainly believe
ourselves to be directly acquainted with another person’s joy in his laughter, with his
sorrow and pain in his tears, with his shame in his blushing, with his entreaty in his out-
stretched hands, with his love in his look of affection, with his rage in the gnashing of
his teeth, with his threats in the clenching of his fist, and with the tenor of his thoughts
in the sound of his words. If anyone tells me that this is not “perception”, for it cannot
be so, in view of the fact that a perception is simply a “complex of physical sensations”,
and that there is certainly no sensation of another person’s mind nor any stimulus from
such a source, I would beg him to turn aside from such questionable theories and address
himself to the phenomenological facts.
(Scheler 2008[1954], 260)7

The basic experience of others as others is about understanding their emotions. This in-
volves neither the faculty of speech nor any other complex cognitive mental faculty. Scheler
is quite clear, however, in marking the fundamental difference between the givenness of
different strata of feelings. Only the so-called vital and psychic feelings are directly given in
the psychophysically neutral sphere of expressive behavior (e.g., grief, joy, shame), whereas
the other’s physical pain remains necessarily private. In the latter cases, we can only under-
stand what his or her experience contains per analogiam: In order to understand the other’s
toothache, I need to be familiar with this horrible sensation. The second stratum of feelings,
which we have no direct access to, are spiritual feelings, like true bliss or deep despair. Ac-
cording to Scheler, these feelings take over our whole being, so that they cannot be separated
from the person we are. We do not feel and express them anymore—we somehow are them
(Scheler 1973a, 344).
The two strata of feelings we can directly understand in the manner described above (v ital
and psychic feelings) are not known to us because they are innate or develop somehow inde-
pendently from any outer influences. According to Scheler, the very foundation for our abil-
ity to directly grasp the other’s feeling lies in a primordial form of sympathy he calls emotional
unity (Einsfühlung). During infancy, long before we are able to experience others as others—
that is, before any conscious act of emotional identification would be even possible8 —we can
share the others’ feeling in emotional unity. We would not grow into sociality unless we first
shared in other people’s feelings; moreover, we would not get to know our own emotional
life in the first place. The sphere of emotional unity is situated, as Scheler emphasizes, in an
“intermediate region of human nature,” distinguished from the “spiritual personality and
the physical body” (Scheler 2008[1954], 34). Neither purely sensual nor spiritual feelings
but only vital and psychic feelings, which are necessarily bound to expressional behavior
(e.g., grief, joy), can be shared in such a way. But what does the term “Einsfühlung” exactly
mean? Emotional unity plays a crucial role in early childhood development. However, it is not
confined to a developmental stage, nor is it limited to infants. According to Scheler, we can

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be drawn into the sphere of emotional unity and experience that peculiar feeling of oneness
with other persons, groups, nature, family, mankind, etc., at any stage of our lives. The de-
fining characteristics of this feeling are as follows:
(1) The shared feelings in question are always unconsciously initiated—one cannot freely
choose to enter a relationship of emotional unity.
(2) It all takes place in our “vital centre” (Vitalbewusstsein)—the cognitive, rational, and
spiritual spheres (personhood), as well as the sphere of corporeal sensation (animalitas), have
to be ‘empty,’ as it were, in order to enter the sphere of emotional unity. It means becoming
“something less than a human, being having reason and dignity, yet something more than
an animal of the kind that lives and has its being only in its physical circumstances” (Scheler
2008[1954], 35).
(3) When Scheler speaks of emotional unity, he always implies a sphere before or
beyond the I-Thou-difference. This applies to very different social phenomena. Some
of these phenomena of emotional unity can be considered as cognitively regressive,
for example: losing crucial aspects of one’s humanity by becoming part of a faceless
hateful mob (cases of emotional contagion). Other cases of emotional unity can even
serve as a source of metaphysical knowledge. Scheler’s example for such an experience
is “the truly loving sexual intercourse,” where the partners “relapse into a single life-
stream in which nothing of their individual selves remains any longer distinct” (Scheler
2008[1954], 25), rendering “a sense of cosmic unity” possible (kosmovitale Einsfühlung)
(Scheler 2008[1954], 110).
There is a founding relation between emotional unity and sensing the other’s feeling:
In the “timeless order of functional dependence as well as in that of genetic evolu-
tion,” sensing the other’s feeling is only possible on the basis of emotional unity (Scheler
2008[1954], 96; transl. modified). The subsequent form of sympathy, the so-called
fellow-feeling (Mitfühlen)—which includes compassion (Mitgefühl/Mitleid) and feeling-
with-one- another (Miteinanderfühen)—is only possible on the ground of sensing foreign
feelings. Scheler argues against the assumption that one must experience the other’s feel-
ing in order to feel compassion. He does not deny the possibility of such an emotional
experience, but refuses to acknowledge it as real compassion. After all, in such cases, one
remains within the confines of one’s own emotional life. The question: What would I feel
in the other’s place? rather prevents to reach out to the other person in her otherness than
really opening up a true connection. Real compassion requires an understanding of the
other’s otherness, it requires, as Scheler puts it, “an outreaching beyond the individual
self ” (Scheler 2008[1954], 52).
Compassion as a crucial form of sympathy entails sharing in the other’s suffering but at
the same time remaining separated from the other (cf. Chapter 37 in this volume). Scheler
speaks of a “twofold transcendence”: The other’s individuality and her absolute privacy. In
order to feel real compassion, the other’s feeling has to remain hers alone: “it must remain
absolutely inaccessible to any sort of community of experience.” We can never see right
into one another’s hearts, nor can we “even have full and adequate knowledge of our own
hearts [this] is given as an essential feature in all experience of fellow-feeling (not excluding
spontaneous love)” (Scheler 2008[1954], 66). Due precisely to this twofold transcendence,
compassion enables us to experience the other’s reality: “For fellow feeling essentially in-
volves the ascription of reality to the subject whose feelings we share. It therefore disap-
pears when the supposedly real subject is replaced by one which is presented as figurative
or fictitious” (Scheler 2008[1954], 98). However, despite the great ethical significance of
fellow-feeling, Scheler qualifies it as essentially “blind to value” (wertblind), because it cannot

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replace value-perception and ethical judgment (I can feel compassionate toward the wrong
people and sympathize with the wrong cause).
Apart from compassion, there is a second kind of fellow-feeling, the so-called feeling-with-
one-another (Miteinanderfühlen). The famous example Scheler gives is shared parental grief:

Two parents stand beside the dead body of a beloved child. They feel in common the
“same” sorrow, the “same” anguish. It is not that A feels this sorrow and B feels it also,
and moreover that they both know they are feeling it. No, it is a feeling-in-common. A’s
sorrow is in no way an “external” matter for B here, as it is, e.g. for their friend C, who
joins them, and commiserates “with them” or “upon their sorrow”. On the contrary,
they feel it together, in the sense that they feel and experience in common not only the
self-same value-situation, but also the same keenness of emotion in regard to it. The sor-
row, as value-content, and the grief, as characterizing the functional relation thereto, are
here one and the same. It will be evident that we can only feel mental suffering in this
fashion, not physical pain or sensory feelings. There is no such thing as a “common pain.”
(Scheler 2008[1954], 12)9

What applies to the conception of emotional unity (Einsfühlung) and the sensing of the other’s
feeling (Nachfühlen) applies here as well: Only the vital and psychic emotions are shareable
in the sense of a feeling-with-one-another (Miteinanderfühlen). Moreover, and importantly, to
collectively feel the same pain does not entail feeling the pain in the same way. The sensual
quality of an emotion (how grief feels in my stomach or ‘heart’ …) is nothing we can share
with another person. “Hence an identical sorrow may be keenly felt (though in one’s own
individual fashion), but never an identical sensation of pain” (Scheler 2008[1954], 255).
One crucial aspect of Scheler’s account of emotional sharing is his rejection of the tradi-
tional conception of consciousness: Traditionally, every psychic experience—be it a thought
or a feeling—is considered to be bound to one individual mind and every experiential con-
tent realized in one individual consciousness alone (cf. also Schmid 2009). Scheler questions
this assumption. Moreover, he casts doubt on the absolute authority of the experiencing ego
when it comes to the experience of feelings (see esp. Scheler 1911, 1912). Only purely sensual
or spiritual feelings are bound to the privacy of our minds, while psychic and vital feelings
can be shared with others in a variety of ways: (a) We can have feelings that are not genuinely
ours—in these cases, Scheler speaks of emotional contagion. If, for example, we enter a pub filled
with cheerful people, our grumpiness might involuntarily turn into a cheerful mood—that
is, until we leave the pub and leave our unwarranted cheerfulness behind as well. There is
also the above-mentioned (b) emotional unity (Einsfühlung)—the sharing of a feeling with oth-
ers before, and beyond, the experience of the distinction of mind and body, as well as of you
and me. And there is, not least, as we have seen, (c) the feeling-with-another (Miteinanderfühlen).
Thus, according to Scheler, whenever a couple or a group of people share an emotional state,
we have an emotional dimension that is not reducible to the fact that individuals involved
happen to feel the same feeling alongside each other.10

5. Love
According to Scheler, our very being toward the world is primordially emotional and
grounded in love. As he programmatically states, man is an ens amans even before he is an
ens cogitans or an ens volens. Scheler has an epistemological, a metaphysical, and an anthropo-
logical perspective on love.

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The well-known saying is wrong: Love does not blind us. Quite the contrary, love
makes us seeing and, therefore, has the most crucial epistemic role. For Scheler, the supposed
blinding character of love is a “bourgeois opinion” that reveals nothing but the widespread
assumption that the sphere of truth and knowledge has to be free from everything emotional
(Scheler 1992, 147). According to Scheler, love is creative when it comes to values, but it
does not create or somehow construct them. Rather, it discloses and actualizes new values.
However, love is nonetheless active—actio and not just reactio. It is not just an emotional reac-
tion to preexisting values but rather the decisive movens when it comes to the comprehension
of new values: “For love is that movement of intention whereby, from a given value A in an
object, its higher value is visualized. Moreover, it is just this vision of a higher value that is
of the essence of love” (Scheler 2008[1954], 153).
Scheler’s claim about the value-disclosing role of love is best understood by an example:
Children feel and understand the care and goodness of their parents “without having even
vaguely comprehended an idea of the good” (Scheler 1973a, 166). Later, they will be able
to make ethical judgments only because they are already familiar with how goodness feels,
long before they are able to grasp the corresponding concept. During infancy, where the
I/Thou-difference is not yet established (within the sphere of emotional unity), we enter the
realm of moral values through the sharing of love and care (Einslieben).
Love is an immediate emotional movement toward the “value-complex” (Wertverhalt) it-
self which precedes any value-judgment. It is not in our nature to love someone or something
based on a thorough evaluation and transparently communicable reasons. “Nothing shows
this better than the extraordinary perplexity which can be seen to ensue when people are
asked to give ‘reasons’ for their love or hatred” (Scheler 2008[1954], 149).11
For Scheler, all intentional feeling is ultimately founded in love. Love is not just a feeling
among other feelings but the one driving force when it comes to the perception of new val-
ues. Scheler holds that love extends our realm of values (whereas hatred narrows it). Other
kinds of feelings only receive what love has already disclosed:

I do not mean to say that the nature of the act of love is such that it is directed in a
“responding” fashion to a value after that value is felt or preferred; I mean, rather, that
strictly speaking, this act plays the disclosing role in our value-comprehensions, and that
it is only this act which does so. This act is, as it were, a movement in whose execution
ever new und higher values flash out, i.e., values that were wholly unknown to the be-
ing concerned. Thus, this act does not follow value-feeling and preferring but is ahead
of them as a pioneer and a guide.
(Scheler 1973a, 261)

For Scheler, love is the foundation of morality because of its spontaneity when it comes to
the disclosure of values: Ultimately, every ethical judgment is grounded in love because it
deals with the original comprehension of values. If there were no love, there would be no
ethical judgment properly speaking: There would only be appropriation and reproduction of
already existing social norms.
In Scheler’s metaphysical system, love is defined as participation. The following speculative
assumption is underlying this definition: Knowledge as a relationship of being (Seinsverhältnis)
presupposes whole and part. Knowledge is the participation of a being who participates in a
whole through acts of self-transcendence. ‘Love’ is the term Scheler uses to describe this
movement of self-transcendence within being (part) that is necessary to participate in being
(whole). All conscious knowledge is based on a kind of pre-reflexive ecstatic knowledge—
the participation of a particular being in being as a whole.

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There would not be knowledge at all without this tendency of every knowledgeable
being to surpass and transcend itself in order to participate in another being. I do not
know any better term for this tendency than ‘love’ or devotion when it means surpassing
the limits of one’s own being.
(Scheler 1980, 203; own translation)

Apart from his rather speculative metaphysics (and indeed ‘epistemology’) of love, Scheler
presents an anthropological theory of love, in which he distinguishes three forms of love (in
accordance with the upper three of the four strata of feelings): the vital or passionate love,
the psychic love which involves the ego, and the spiritual love which aims at the (spiritual)
person. In keeping with the a priori correlation between acts and given objects, every form
of love is essentially bound to a certain value as its correlate: The vital acts unearth values of
the vulgar and noble, the psychic acts are bound to values like beauty and knowledge, and
the spiritual acts aim at the holy and the unholy.
A purely sensual love, a form of love that would correspond (only) with the value of the
agreeable does not exist for Scheler—simply because such a feeling could not be rightfully
called love. We do not sensu stricto ‘love’ our favorite pasta dish, and we cannot call it ‘love’ if
we had similar feelings toward a person. “A purely ‘sensual’ attitude to a person, for example,
is at the same time an absolutely cold and loveless attitude. (…) This is an attitude wholly in-
compatible with any sort of intentional love for the other, as such” (Scheler 2008[1954], 170).
With regard to love, Scheler’s theory of stratification seems readily plausible: We can be
lovingly attached to a person in very different ways. It is possible to deeply love a person
without desiring him or her in a vital sense; and the opposite may also be the case: We pas-
sionately love someone without any spiritual relationship and finally, of course, both forms
of love can exist at the same time for the same person (Scheler 2008[1954], 170).

6. Shame
Scheler attaches an existential significance to the sense of shame: No other feeling is bet-
ter suited to express the unique position of human beings in the world. His approach is
quasi-transcendental: The first condition for the appearance of the sense of shame is our
need to appear in the social space as an embodied being. The expressive behavior of the lived
body makes us understand others’ feelings, and conversely, it makes them understand our
feelings—and this is, of course, vitally important for our constitution as persons. Through
the mutual understanding of expressive behavior, human intersubjectivity, i.e., the social
space, emerges, and human interaction takes place. The second condition consists in the fact
that we cannot completely control our feelings nor our expressional behavior, and this makes
us vulnerable—even if we learn to develop a public persona, which helps us hide our feelings
to a certain degree. The possibility of shame arises from this tension between the private
person and the public persona, between our need for proximity and our need for distance.
We cannot escape being seen by others but at the same time—in order to thrive as human
beings—we want to be seen and recognized.
Scheler explains this dynamics with an often cited (and often misinterpreted) example:
the case of a nude model and a painter. Initially, the woman is not ashamed of her nakedness,
even though she is exposed to the painter’s attentive gaze, even though—one could say—she
is liable to be objectified. In this situation, she knows that she is not a person for the painter
but an aesthetic object and that is exactly the reason why she is not ashamed. Now let us
imagine that the painter suddenly speaks with her and thereby addresses her as an individ-
ual. What is likely to happen is that she is suddenly ashamed of her nakedness. The painter’s

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behavior will appear to her inappropriate, even though he might be just trying to engage in
some small talk. According to some accounts of shame, the main reason for feeling shame
consists in being objectified; in this peculiar example, however, we encounter quite a differ-
ent situation. Of course, as Scheler points out, the contrary is equally plausible: If we sense
that our beloved partner does not see us as an irreplaceable and unique person, but as an ar-
bitrarily interchangeable object of sexual gratification, it could happen that we suddenly feel
ashamed. Scheler sums up what the two—in fact adverse dynamics—reveal about the nature
of shame: Shame requires a sudden and involuntary turn toward ourselves.

The “turning to” one’s self in whose dynamics shame has its origins, does not occur
if one is “given” to oneself as something general or as individual. It occurs when the
feelable intention of the other oscillates between an individualizing and generalizing
attitude and when one’s own intention and the experienced counterintention have not
the same but an opposite direction.
(Scheler 1987b, 16)

Both Scheler’s phenomenological description and his evaluation of the feeling of shame devi-
ate in some important respects from other well-known theories of shame (for example, that
of Sartre; see Chapter 30 in this volume). Indeed, for Scheler, shame has a crucial function:
It helps us to distinguish between the public and the private spheres (Scheler 1987b, 15).
Shame also has a crucial role when it comes to erotic love. According to Scheler, shame is the
“assistant of love”: “Shame is a shell, as it were, in which love grows until it genuinely breaks
this shell” (Scheler 1987b, 34). In other words, only when our love encounters the other’s
love does shame give way to intimacy.
Scheler rejects the claim that shame is nothing but a negative byproduct of our upbring-
ing and socialization. Theories claiming that shame is somehow unnaturally instilled into us
through contingent social norms mistake shame for prudishness. For Scheler, the opposite is
true: As humans are beings who can feel shame by nature, some social norms prove useful
and meaningful but they do not create shame. Tact and discretion, according to Scheler, have
the task of inhibiting us from prying into other people’s private sphere: “For discretion rests
on a [compassion] with the psychic shame of another person” (Scheler 1987b, 84; translation
modified).
Let us illustrate the importance of the separation between the two spheres (private and
public) with another example: If a teacher speaks to her student as if she were her best friend
and asks her about private matters, the student in question will probably feel ashamed. Why
is this the case? Because the student expects to be seen as a student and not as a friend. The
encounter of student and teacher happens in the public sphere and every participant of this
sphere is expected to act according to a certain social role. However, it is not a regrettable
social fact that we cannot be intimate friends with everybody, but a social necessity based on
our very nature and tangible through our sense of shame.

7. The reality of feelings and the feelings of reality

Scheler’s view on the ontological status of emotions deserves special attention. As already
mentioned, he rejects both the widespread assumption that emotions are private states of
isolated minds and that they are mere bodily states.12 Rather, they are intersubjectively ac-
cessible occurrences in the world. Along with Moritz Geiger (1921),13 Scheler represents a

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position that can be described as “psychic realism.” It is characterized by the following four
assumptions:
(1) Mental occurrences (Psychisches) (such as feelings, thoughts, and desires) are not only
or not necessarily the content of an individual consciousness. They can exist independently of
a particular consciousness in two ways: (a) They can be shared by several individuals, and (b)
they can transcend the consciousness they appear to: “Not the psychic experience itself but
its appearances are given to our inner sense (…) Psychic experiences are as little dependent
on our ‘brain’ or ‘senses’ as the sun, moon, and stars are” (Scheler 1911, 107; own translation).
(2) Mind doesn’t stand in opposition to matter, and hence psychic occurrences cannot be
characterized as essentially non-spatial—as we can clearly see when it comes to the experi-
ence of our lived bodies (Leiberfahrungen).
(3) There are phenomena that are neutral regarding the psychophysical dichotomy—
neither mind nor matter—such as expressive behavior.
(4) The experience of—others’ as well as one’s own—feelings is just as prone to error
as the experience of physical objects. There is no greater authority of the experiencing
ego when it comes to her feelings as when it comes to objects of perception. According to
Scheler, ‘reality’ and ‘illusion’ (Sein und Schein) are categories that not only apply to the realm
of facts and objects but also to emotions. It is only against the background of this assumption
that it becomes clear how emotional contagion works: We feel someone else’s feeling and
take it as our own, while eventually we are puzzled by the strangeness of what we have felt:
It turns out that this was indeed not our own feeling (Schloßberger 2019). Scheler illustrates
the fallibility of feelings by the example of love and hate:

There is a difference whether love and hate cease to exist, or whether the person
has been deceiving himself and mistook something for love and hatred, which
turned out to be not love or not hate. It makes also a difference, whether there
was no love from the beginning or one feels it only temporarily or whether one is
simply not able to admit one’s love. For cases of such great diversity it is impossible
to assert that all emotions (of love and hate) are equally real and that it does not
matter whether one was in love (or hate) for five minutes or three weeks, or that
any statement that one was mistaken expresses only that a certain expectation (...)
was not fulfilled.”
(Scheler 1911, 110; own translation)

Finally, it should be mentioned that emotions also play a fundamental role in Scheler’s
theory of the experience of reality—or what he calls “voluntative realism” (Scheler 1973b,
301). Reality itself becomes an “emotional problem” for him (Scheler 1976). “To be real
does not amount to being a permanent object [in time], i.e., the identical correlate of every
intellectual act—but rather being resistant against the original spontaneity” (Scheler 1973b,
363; own translation). Scheler assumes that the very first experience we have of the world
is an experience of the resistance of the world. We have neither special sensations nor some
kind of a supernatural sense of reality on top of our other senses, nor do we reflectively or
pre-reflectively infer that what we experience is indeed the so-called ‘exterior world,’ i.e.
the world of extended bodies, other people, etc. Quite the contrary, we are able to grasp re-
ality only because of our primordial experience of its resistance. Every quality ( jedes Sosein)
we experience, be it of objects or of other people, requires prior experience of their reality
(Dasein).

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Existence (=being real) is given to us in the experience of resistance of an already dis-

closed sphere of the world—and this resistance occurs only in our striving and drives,
in our central life impulsion. No inference can be made which could lead us to posit
the reality of the exterior world (whose sphere is also given in dreams); there is also no
concrete content of perception (as ‘forms’, ‘gestalts’), no objectiveness (which occurs also
in phantasy) (…) that could give an impression of reality. (…) The original experience
of reality, the experience of resistance of the world, precedes, therefore, any and all con-
sciousness (Bewusstsein); resistance precedes all re-presentation and perception.
(Scheler 2009, 38)

Reality only exists for a striving, desiring consciousness—only a being moved by its striving
(be it a human or otherwise) can experience resistance. There is no reality for a hypothetical
being which has no drive or no desire whatsoever. In some cases, the experience of resistance
manifests itself in anxiety. However, contrary to Heidegger, anxiety, according to Scheler,
is not the original or authentic way in which we come in touch with reality (Heidegger,
1962, 53; Scheler 1976, 267; cf. Chapters 7 and 34 in this volume). Anxiety only occurs when
desire meets an insurmountable resistance. If, conversely, resistance can be overcome, the
emotional outcome is joy and pleasure—but an experience of reality, nonetheless.

Notes

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References
Gallagher, Shaun (2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gallagher, Shaun, and Zahavi, Dan (2008). The Phenomenological Mind. London, New York: Routledge.
Geiger, Moritz (1921). Fragment über den Begriff des Unbewussten und die psychische Realität:
Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung des immanenten psychischen Realismus. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und
phänomenologische Forschung 4, 1–137.
Geniusas, Saulius (2015). Max Scheler and the Stratification of the Emotional Life. The New Yearbook
for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XIV, 355‒376.
Heidegger, Martin (1962). Being and Time. Transl. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Husserl, Edmund (2001). Logical Investigations. Transl. by J. L. Findlay. London, New York: Routledge.
Joas, Hans (2001). The Genesis of Values. Transl. by G. Moore. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
Krebs, Angelika (2011). The Phenomenology of Shared Feeling. Appraisal Journal 8(3), 6–21.
León, Felipe, Szanto, Thomas, and Zahavi, Dan (2019). Emotional Sharing and the Extended Mind.
Synthese 196(12), 4847–4867.
Massin, Olivier (2011). On Pleasures. Thèse de doctorat ès lettres. Université de Genève (unpublished dis-
sertation, University of Geneva).
Mulligan, Kevin (1998). From Appropriate Emotions to Values. The Monist 81(1), 161–188.
——— (2010). Emotions and Values. In: P. Goldie (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 475–500.
Römer, Inga (2018). Das Begehren der reinen praktischen Vernunft. Kants Ethik in phänomenologischer Sicht.
Hamburg: Meiner.
Rutishauser, Bruno (1969). Max Schelers Phänomenologie des Fühlens. Eine kritische Analyse seiner Untersu-
chung von Scham und Schamgefühl. Bern, München: Francke.
Sánchez Guerrero, Héctor A. (2016). Feeling Together and Caring with One Another: A Contribution to the
Debate on Collective Affective Intentionality. Dordrecht: Springer.
Scheler, Max (1911). Über Selbsttäuschungen. Zeitschrift für Pathopsychologie 1(1), 87–164.
——— (1912). Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. [Engl.:
Ressentiment. Transl. by W. W. Holdheim. New York: Schocken 1972].
——— (1973a). Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. A New Attempt toward the Foundation of
an Ethical Personalism. Transl. by M. Frings and R. L. Funk. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
——— (1973b). Idealism and Realism. In: Selected Philosophical Essays. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 288–356.
——— (1976). Zusätze aus den nachgelassenen Manuskripten [Idealismus, Realismus], Teil 5: Das
emotionale Realitätsproblem. In: Gesammelte Werke, Band 9, Späte Schriften, Bern, München:
Francke, 254–293.
——— (1980). Erkenntnis und Arbeit. Eine Studie über Wert und Grenzen des pragmatischen Motivs
in der Erkenntnis der Welt. In: Gesammelte Werke, Band 8: Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft.
Bern, München: Francke, 191–382.
——— (1987b). Shame and Feelings of Modesty. In: Person and Self-Value: Three Essays. Transl. by
M. Frings. Dordrecht: Nijhoff.

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——— (1992). Love and Knowledge. In: M. Scheler: On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing, Selected Writ-
ings. Ed. by H. J. Bershady. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
——— (2008[1954]). The Nature of Sympathy. Transl. by P. Heath. New Brunswick, London: Trans-
action Publishers.
——— (2009). The Human Place in the Cosmos. Transl. by M. Frings. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press.
Schloßberger, Matthias (2005). Die Erfahrung des Anderen. Gefühle im menschlichen Miteinander. Berlin:
Akademie.
——— (2019). Beyond Empathy: Compassion and the Reality of Others. Topoi. doi:10.1007/
s11245-019-09636-7.
Schmid, Hans Bernhard (2009). Plural Action: Essays in Philosophy and Social Science. Dordrecht: Springer.
Steinbock, Anthony (2014). Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press.
Tappolet, Christine (2016). Emotions, Values, and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid (2008). Gefühle in der realistischen Phänomenologie. Berlin: Akademie.
Zaborowski, Robert (2011). Max Scheler’s Model of Stratified Affectivity and Its Relevance for
Research on Emotions. Appraisal 8(3), 24–34.
Zahavi, Dan (2014). Self and Other. Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy and Shame. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Zhang, Wei (2009). The Foundations of Phenomenological Ethics: Intentional Feelings. Frontiers of
Philosophy in China 4(1), 130–142.
——— (2010). Die Intentionalität des Fühlens und die Schichtung der emotionalen Sphäre: Die funda-
mentalen Fragen in Max Schelers Phänomenologie des Fühlens. Bulletin d’Analyse Phénoménologique
6(5), 1–19.

Further reading
Mulligan, Kevin (2008). Scheler: Die Anatomie des Herzens oder was man alles fühlen kann. In:
H. Landweer, and U. Renz (Eds.). Klassische Emotionstheorien. Berlin: de Gruyter, 587–612.
Scheler, Max (1974). The Meaning of Suffering. In: Max Scheler: Centennial Essays. Ed. by M. Frings.
Dordrecht: Njihoff, 121–163.
Schloßberger, Matthias (2016). The Varieties of Togetherness: Scheler on Collective Affective
Intentionality. In: S. Salice, and H. B. Schmid (Eds.). The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality.
History, Concepts, Problems. Cham: Springer, 173–195.

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 5
MORITZ GEIGER
Alessandro Salice

1. Introduction
Emotions ubiquitously pervade, enrich, and color our mental life. They are complex,
multi-layered, and variegated mental phenomena. For instance, suppose you are informed
about a forthcoming event: Your friend will visit you in a couple of days, which makes you
feel joy about that. Even a cursory look at this only apparently simple emotion unveils its
fascinating and delicate complexity. To begin with, the joy acquires a determined position
in your mental life: Perhaps you were in a somewhat depressive mood before realizing your
friend’s visit, but now the emotion of joy helps you overcome that mood. Suddenly, you
begin to live in the pleasant expectation of your friend’s visit. Also, the emotion enters a
complicated network of relations with other experiences: You have been informed that your
friend will come, and it is based on your awareness of that future event that you elicit joy.
Not only are you aware of the forthcoming event, you can also become aware of feeling joy
about the visit. However, if you pay too much attention to the joy you are living through—
maybe because you want to find out why, precisely, the visit of your friend gives you joy—
the emotion may vanish. But this also reveals that joy—just as many other emotions—is
motivated: Generally, one has a motive for being joyful and this motive can be more or
less transparent to the subject. But this suggests that the object of your joy (the visit of your
friend), which the emotion is intentionally directed at, must be distinguished from its motive
(the reason why the visit of your friend generates joy in you).
The various relations that these mental phenomena enter with the world and with other
mental states have been made the topic of a series of important articles by the Munich phe-
nomenologist Moritz Geiger (1880–1937). These contributions aim at clarifying important
aspects of our emotional life by disentangling the intricate relations I briefly touched upon
above. This chapter reconstructs Geiger’s ideas about emotions by mainly focusing on two
articles: “The Consciousness of Emotions” (Das Bewusstsein von Gefühlen) from 1911 and
“Contributions to the Phenomenology of Aesthetic Pleasure” (Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des
ästhetischen Genusses) from 1913. However, it should be noted that Geiger’s work on emo-
tions is certainly not confined to the ideas discussed in these two essays. For instance, his
paper “On the Problem of Empathy regarding Moods” (Zum Problem der Stimmungseinfühlung)
(1911) represents one of the very first contributions to the philosophy of moods, although it

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is hardly discussed in the relevant literature. Furthermore, it should not be left unmentioned
that Geiger’s aesthetics—one of his long-standing main areas of research—heavily relies on
his view about emotions (see the collection of articles “Approaches to Aesthetics” (Zugänge
zur Ästhetik) (1928) and, in particular, the essay “On Dilettantism in the Artistic Experience”
(Vom Dilettantismus im künstlerischen Erleben).
The chapter is organized as follows: The second section discusses Geiger’s views on the
intentionality of feelings and on the forms of awareness that may accompany emotions,
which are the main topics of his 1911’s “The Consciousness of Emotions”. As we will see,
Geiger’s insights on these points have methodological importance for the study of emotions.
In the third section, I present Geiger’s theory of affective motivation, as this is developed in
his 1913 essay. One of the reasons why Geiger’s ideas on affective motivation are particularly
interesting is because they can be applied to describe cases of ill-motivated emotions, on
which I will briefly elaborate at the end of that section.

2. Emotions: intentionality and consciousness

Let us go back to the initial example. While going through your emails during the morning,
you find your friend’s message that informs you of his visit. You feel joy and, almost imper-
ceptibly, your worries and preoccupations wane: You now look forward to welcoming your
friend. One way to describe this situation is by saying that you now “live through (erleben)”
the emotion or that the emotion is in an “experiential position (Erlebnisstellung)”1 (Geiger
1911a, 133). Note that, more often than not, we are too deeply immerged in our daily life to
pay attention to our lived-through experiences. In fact, it could well be that, after reading
your friend’s email, you go back to work without even thinking of your emotion, while
living “in” or “through” it nevertheless (see also Pfänder 1904, 228).
Suppose now that, albeit your mental life has been colored by the emotion since the
morning (precisely because you are living through it), during lunch you ask yourself why
your emotional register has changed and, to answer your question, you direct your attention
introspectively. In this case, while still living through the emotion, you activate a conscious-
ness’ ray (Bewußtseinsstrahl), which is directed at the emotion: You have become explicitly
aware of your joy. The joy is now given to you as a unified experience (as a ‘whole’) in what
Geiger calls “simple attention (schlichte Aufmerksamkeit)” (Geiger 1911a, 130). Simple atten-
tion, Geiger claims, is basic for this form of attention and is presupposed by all other forms
(these are “qualitative” and “analyzing” attention, see below). Note that, clearly, the range of
simple attention is not limited to our mental life. Imagine you have to cross a street: There
are indefinitely many objects in your visual field, but your simple attention goes to one sin-
gle car that is waiting for the green light. Again, the car is given to you as a ‘whole’, which
means that—even if you know the car is composed of several parts—your attention is not
concerned with those parts.
Yet, this is precisely what “qualitative attention (qualitative Aufmerksamkeit)” is concerned
with. To slightly modify the example, imagine that you are crossing a street without traffic
lights or zebra crossings. In this case, you are not ‘simply’ attentive to the car, as you were
above, but rather you are paying ‘qualitative’ attention to it: What you are attentive to is
how fast the car is approaching (Geiger 1911a, 131f.). You need to retrieve that information
from the environment precisely because you want to cross the street without being hit. In
this case, a specific part or aspect of the object (its speed, in this example) is revealed to you.
Interestingly, some—but not all—emotions can be made object of qualitative attention,
while their subjects still live through those emotions. In the above case of joy, once you made it the

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thematic object of your attention, you are also able to determine how ‘deep’ or ‘superficial’
your emotion is—maybe depending on how close you are to your friend. (The idea of depth,
height, superficiality, etc. of emotions stems from Pfänder; see Chapter 3 in this volume.)
A similar consideration applies to many emotions, although not to all. Geiger (1911a) dis-
tinguishes between “sensory feelings (sinnliche Gefühle)” and “emotional feelings (emotionale
Gefühle)” or “emotions” tout court. Sensory feelings—a category Geiger adopts from Pfänder
(see Pfänder 1904, 236)—are all those emotions of pleasure or displeasure which are attached
to sensations (e.g., the pleasure one gains from drinking a nice pint of IPA). The subject,
Geiger contends, can direct qualitative attention to sensible feelings while having them. In fact,
while drinking one’s favorite beverage, not only can one be aware of the felt pleasure, one
can also appreciate it in its many nuances (think of the precise descriptions coffee tasters are
able to provide on the note and intensity of their pleasure).
The notion of emotional feelings is more complex as it encompasses at least two dif-
ferent kinds of emotions (Geiger 1911a, 128): emotions of pleasure and displeasure “in the
proper sense” and self-emotions or, perhaps better, self-conscious emotions (Selbstgefühle).2
In 1911, Geiger only offers ostensive definitions of these two kinds of emotions (see Geiger
1911a, 128f )—emotions of pleasure and displeasure “in the proper sense” include joy or en-
thusiasm, but also what Geiger calls “affects (Affekte)” like sadness or anger, and moods like
boredom or anxiety. Self-conscious emotions comprise pride, envy, humility, vanity, etc.
Although Geiger is not entirely clear on this point, it seems that all emotions have something
in common: They are motivated or have a motive. The next section will investigate this no-
tion in more detail, but for the time being, it suffices to say that an emotion has a motive if its
subject is at least in principle able to answer the question why she feels that particular emotion
(in a particular sense of ‘why’, which I will discuss in Section 3). By contrast, sensory feelings
may be aroused (erregt) by sensations, but do not have motives: We do not know why (in the
above sense of ‘why’) certain objects give us sensory pleasure and others do not.
As we have already seen, some emotions can be made the target of qualitative attention:
Joy or annoyance (Ärger), for instance, can survive qualitative attention without experiencing
modification (Geiger 1911a, 135). Moods, too, are not particularly affected by this form of
attention. However, affects dissolve or water down the moment in which the subject directs
his or her qualitative attention to them. This is particularly the case for affects like anger or
fear. Geiger contends that this is due to the particularly close link that binds these emotions
with their motives. The moment in which the subject makes them targets of qualitative
attention, that link is relaxed and a gap opens up between the emotional response and its
motive: The subject, by losing grip on the emotional motive, is not emotionally moved any
longer and thus stops living through the emotion.
Simple attention can also be at the basis of a third form of attention—this is “analys-
ing attention (analysierende Beachtung)”, which Geiger sometimes qualifies as observation
(Beobachtung). This sort of attention ‘analyses’ the object in the sense that it separates its
component parts to identify the species and genera under which the object falls. To put this
differently, the object is grasped as this or that. For instance, a melody is decomposed into
its constituents and those constituents are grasped as notes of the kind a, b, or c … Adopting
an analyzing stance toward a feeling, be it sensory or emotional, necessarily implies remov-
ing the emotion from its ‘experiential position’ mentioned earlier in order to theoretically
dissect it. For instance, a token emotion could be analyzed by identifying the kind of its
hedonic valence, of its intentional content, of its founding experience, etc. However, the
moment the emotion is dislocated from its experiential position, the subject does not live
through it anymore.3

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At this juncture, it should be noted that, when the subject pays simple attention (and, in
the cases mentioned earlier: Qualitative attention) to his or her emotion, the subject simulta-
neously is in two different mental states: The emotion and the attentional act directed toward
the emotion. Yet, this is not the only—or the most fundamental—way in which the subject
is ‘aware’ of her own emotions. Geiger contends that it is possible for the subject to be aware
of her emotion in virtue of merely living through that very emotion, without occupying any
other state. To understand how that is possible, however, one needs to do a short detour on
the intentionality of feelings.
Sensory and emotional feelings, Geiger maintains, are ‘about’ objects and facts in the
world: If I feel pleasure when drinking my favorite IPA, there is a sense in which my pleasure
is about something in the world. Similarly, the joy you feel is about the visit of your friend.
Accordingly, feelings certainly have an “intentional direction (Gegenstandsrichtung)”. But it is
interesting to remark that, while assigning “intentional direction” to feelings, Geiger, at the
same time, denies that they literally are intentional or literally have intentionality (“it does
not seem felicitous to qualify the joy about something as ‘intentional’” Geiger 1911a, 141). It
goes beyond the scope of this article to exhaustively elucidate this point, but it suffices to say
that Geiger aligns with many other phenomenologists (though, crucially, not with Husserl in
his Logical Investigations) in distinguishing different kinds of intentional directedness, which
do not have an overarching genus (see Salice 2012; Crespo 2015; and Salice 2015, for the
relation between Geiger and Husserl on this specific point). To put it differently, the sense
in which feelings are about objects, events, or facts is merely analogous, but ultimately dif-
ferent from the sense in which, say, beliefs or acts of thinking are about objects, events, and
facts. On this view, the term ‘intentionality’ captures only the (roughly) cognitive, but not
the affective sense of aboutness. Early phenomenologists do not settle on one technical term
for the non-cognitive sense(s) of aboutness—their expressions vary and include: “objectual
consciousness (Gegenstandsbewußtsein)”, the “(mere) having of an object (bloß rezeptives Haben
des Gegenstandes)”, etc. (see Salice 2015).
More importantly, this short detour on the intentionality of feelings enables us to clarify
another feature that typically characterizes these experiences: When living through them,
the subject can adopt two different attitudes or mental orientations. The first orientation is
called by Geiger “outer concentration (Außenkonzentration)”—when one adopts this orien-
tation, the subject is entirely absorbed by the intentional object of the feeling. The object is
the element on which the conscious accent is put (das Bewußtseinsbetonte). So, for instance, in
the moment in which you elicit joy, the focus of your emotion entirely gravitates around the
future visit of your friend. You do live through the emotion, but the thematic object of your
concerns is its object (not the emotion). However, this is not to say that you totally ignore
your emotion of joy: Crucially, even if you activate no simple or qualitative attention toward
your joy, you are still aware of your joy—albeit in a merely non-thematic or peripheral sense
(Geiger 1911a, 153).
Outer concentration contrasts with the other orientation the subject can adopt: This is
inner concentration (Innenkonzentration). In inner concentration, the qualitative aspects of
the emotion become salient to the subject. Here, the conscious accent is put on the emotion
rather than on the object: The emotion has qualitative features that the subject appreciates—
and sometimes savors—while living through it. Note that this happens, Geiger claims, with-
out the subject directing his or her attentional ray to the emotion. One particularly helpful
example to illustrate the distinction between outer and inner concentration comes from the
aesthetic domain (Geiger 1928, 14ff ): When a subject enjoys an artwork, the emotion can be
lived through in two different ways. The first one, which typically describes the attitude of

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the expert, is outer concentration: While being peripherally aware of his or her enjoyment,
the expert is concerned with the artwork itself, its features, values, etc. The second one,
which contradistinguishes the amateur, is inner concentration: The subject savors the quali-
tative aspect of aesthetic enjoyment itself and considers the object a mere instrument for the
elicitation of the emotion, thereby relegating it to the intentional background. However, and
to reinforce this point, even in inner concentration, the subject is not making the emotion
the thematic target of an additional cognitive act (simple or qualitative attention), for inner
( just as outer concentration) is a way of experiencing the emotion.
Geiger’s discussion of the manifold ways in which we can be aware of our feelings has
an important methodological implication. When it comes to investigating our emotional
experiences, the qualitative features of these phenomena can only be revealed to us when we
introspect our mental life. We have seen that what may be called “theoretical introspection”
(the introspection enabled by qualitative and analyzing attention) has clear limitations, inso-
far as adopting that stance—depending on the kinds of theoretical introspection and on the
kinds of feelings at stake—dissolves the very emotions the subject intends to pay attention
to. But Geiger identifies another form of introspection which is not essentially theoretical:
By simply living through our emotions, we are always peripherally aware of them and some-
times we can also delve into them and explore them in inner concentration. In this case, we
become acquainted with their qualities—we appreciate those qualities—even though this
appreciation is not theoretical in nature.

3. Emotions and motives

In his paper “Contributions to the Phenomenology of Aesthetic Pleasure”, Geiger addresses
the notion of motivation in a brief, but dense passage (1913, 584–591). Geiger’s investigations
on this topic are highly interesting for two interrelated reasons. First, on this view, motiva-
tion is not confined to volition, but it also applies to the affective dimension.4 Put another
way, emotions have motives and, as such, they are subject to certain norms of rationality.5
Second, this means that emotions, like actions, can be well-, but also ill-motivated. In fact,
Geiger’s theory of motivation can give fruitful indications on how to describe cases of emo-
tions that are ill-motivated, as we will see at the end of this section.
Now, in which sense can one say that emotions have motives? Suppose I see you enjoying
something, then it does not seem (at least rationally) inappropriate of me to ask you: ‘why
do you feel joy?’ And yet, this question is ambiguous as it may refer to disparate and partly
unrelated aspects. More precisely, Geiger identifies at least four different senses of this ques-
tion as applied to emotions—only one of which targets the proper motive of the emotion.
The first sense of the ‘why?’ concerns “real” causality (Geiger 1913, 590f.). Under certain
descriptions, emotions qualify as neurobiological states and, as such, they have (neurobiolog-
ical) causes. Against this background, the feeling of joy about your friend’s visit is related to a
complex chain of physiological reactions that, say, ends up by releasing serotonin. If joy, un-
der a certain description, coincides with or is related to serotonin, then reconstructing that
complex chain of reactions is to indicate the ‘real’ causes of the emotion. However, since this
level of causality is below the threshold of consciousness, it is phenomenologically irrelevant.
The second sense of the why-question as applied to emotions concerns their phenomenal
(not their real) causes (Geiger 1913, 590f.). Back to the example: You read the message of your
friend. Your conscious understanding of the message can then be said to be the phenomenal
cause of your emotion of joy. Another way of putting this is that the given cognitive state
(here: the conscious understanding) is the trigger that puts your emotional life in motion.

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Now, when I ask you “why do you feel joy?”, do I intend to ascertain the real or the
phenomenal cause of your emotion? Perhaps in some situations, these indeed are the relevant
causes at stake. But generally, and to paraphrase Anscombe (2000, 9), the sense of the ques-
tion ‘why?’ that applies to emotions does not concern its phenomenal or real cause, but rather
its reason or motive. In a similar vein, Geiger writes:

Why (weshalb) do you feel joy at his arrival? The answer could sound: because I like him
or: because he will act in my place at my office and hence I can go on the planned trip—
therefore I feel joy.
(Geiger 1913, 586)

Now, those answers clearly indicate the motive of the emotion (Gefühlsmotiv).
But then, what is the motive of an emotion? As a first approximation, Geiger tells us that
“the affective motive is an immediate experience” (1913, 589). And this experience is further
explained as follows: In great many cases, when you feel an emotion (say, joy), you are aware
of a peculiar relation that the intentional object of your emotion (the visit of your friend)
enters with other states of affairs (e.g., the fact that you like him or the fact that you can go on
vacation). That particular awareness is the experience of motivation and the other state of af-
fairs that is given to you in the experience is what Geiger calls “the motive” of your emotion.
So, when you answer the question “why?” by saying “I feel joy because I can go to vacation”,
the preposition “because” expresses the experience of motivation and the sentence “I can
go to vacation” the motive of your emotion. It is important to highlight that being a motive
(of an emotion) is a mind-dependent property: A state of affairs qualifies as a motive only to a
subject and insofar as this is given to the subject in the particular experience of motivation
(1913: 588). This implies that, without the experience of motivation, that very state of affairs
(the possibility to go on vacation) would not qualify as a motive of the emotion.
Sometimes, the experience of motivation can wane: The motive “evaporates (verflüchtigt
sich)” (1913, 587). This may happen in different ways. For instance, when the affective object
is constantly associated with the affective motive, the latter can volatilize, as it were, in the
sense that the subject cannot grasp the relation between affective object and motive anymore.
To illustrate, imagine that it has become a working routine that the visit of your friend
marks the fact that you go on vacation. When this happens, Geiger contends, the object itself
appears to the subject as having an emotional character: The visit of your friend assumes a
character that makes it immediately enjoyable, while the relation between the object and the
motive fades in the background. Obviously, such a relation can become salient again, e.g., if
another individual instead of your friend replaces you at your working place. In this case, you
realize: I am enjoying the arrival of this individual because I can then have my holiday (where
the ‘because’, here again, expresses the experience of motivation).
The lack of experience of motivation has an important consequence. Under these circum-
stances, the emotion can be said to be no longer motivated (motivlos), which means that the
subject is not able to formulate an answer to the why-question. But does that mean that the
emotion has become irrational? No. In fact, Geiger claims that the emotion’s ‘rationality’ can
be assessed in some other respect. It is at this juncture that Geiger discusses the fourth sense
of the why-question that can be raised with regard to emotions. Sometimes, by asking that
question, we do not refer to the motives of the emotion, but to its grounds (Begründungen),
and emotions that lack a motive can still have a ground. The main difference between these
two aspects is that motives are mind-dependent, whereas grounds are mind-independent.
In the example discussed above, the possibility to go on vacation—this very state of affairs

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(as distinguished from the experience of this state of affairs, which, as we saw, identifies the
motive of the emotion)—is the ground of the emotion of joy.
Precisely because the ground is mind-independent, Geiger maintains that it is not phe-
nomenologically evident: In fact, it is not immediately clear to us what grounds our emo-
tions and we generally need to engage in some (often counterfactual) reasoning to get a
grip on that. For instance, to identify the ground of the emotion of joy in the example, you
could reason as follows: If being replaced at my office by my friend would not open for me
the possibility to go on vacation, then I would not have a ground for rejoicing at my friend’s
visit. Generally, motives and grounds are closely related: The motive often is the experience
of a ground. When you report your emotional motive, you are reporting an experience that
is about its ground.
However, Geiger argues that motives and ground can also fall apart (cf. 1913, 589).
Although he does not develop this claim in any detail, his remarks provide indications for
how to assess cases of affective ill-motivation. It seems that one can draw the following
classification: A theory of ill-motivated emotions could start by considering (i) emotions
that have grounds, but no motives; (ii) emotions that have motives which diverge from
the grounds; (iii) emotions that have motives, but no grounds; and (iv) emotions that have
neither motives nor grounds.
Let us start with (i): As we have seen, Geiger describes grounded emotions lacking a
motive (maybe as a result of the constant association between emotional object and emo-
tional motive). Such emotions are ill-motivated in the sense that they suffer from phenom-
enological opacity: If confronted with the question ‘Why?’, the subject would not be able
to answer it. Yet, it appears that these cases escape the charge of irrationality. In fact, there
seems to be nothing rationally wrong in these cases: Provided the adequate psychological
circumstances are at place (e.g. if the subject reflects on the emotion), the subject would be
able to experience motivation again.
This gives us the opportunity to move to category (ii): The emotion is grounded and the
subject experiences motivation, but the object of the experience diverges from the ground of
the emotion. Suppose you feel joy about your friend’s arrival and you link this to the fact
that it is precisely your friend’s arrival that makes you happy because you like him so much. In
reality, however, what grounds your emotion is the fact that your friend’s arrival grants you
the possibility to go on vacation (such that the arrival of another individual would still make
you feel in a similar way). In this case, one may conclude, the emotion is ill-motivated—for,
if confronted with the question ‘Why?’, the subject would give an answer which misidenti-
fies the element that motivates the emotion. An implication that can be drawn from this is
that the experience of being motivated does not yet guarantee that the motivational struc-
ture of the emotion is transparent to its subject. In fact, as highlighted above, grounds are
not phenomenologically evident—that is, whether the object of a motive coincides with a
ground is not reflected in the phenomenology of our emotions, but has to be ascertained by
other means, e.g., by counterfactual reasoning.
Geiger does not explicitly discuss the possibility for emotions to entirely lack grounds.
But if such emotions were possible, then they would instantiate a more serious form of ill-
motivation, which can be possibly associated with certain forms of disturbed affectivity in
mental disorders. To briefly illustrate how this idea can be put to use: Category (iii) seems
apt to encompass phobias and the so-called ‘recalcitrant emotions’. The subjects of such
emotional reactions are able to identify their motives, although phobias do not have ex-
ternal grounds that motivate or, as in the case of recalcitrant emotions, rationally justify
them6: There is no danger that justifies the response. And finally, category (iv) may help

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conceptualize more severe syndromes like bipolar disorder: In fact, bipolar patients do not
seem able to indicate any motive for the manic and depressive episodes that accompany their
condition. Moreover, these emotional episodes or moods do not seem to be motivated by
grounds in the world.

4. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have reconstructed the main aspects of Geiger’s phenomenology of emo-
tions. The second section discussed Geiger’s ideas about the various senses according to
which a subject can be aware or conscious of his or her emotions. As we have seen, Geiger’s
views on this topic have methodological relevance as they ascertain the possibilities—but
also the limits—of introspection in the investigations of emotions. But his theory bears sys-
tematic relevance, too: In particular, his considerations about the motivational structure of
emotions seem very helpful to account for different forms of ill-motivated emotions.7

Notes

References
Anscombe, Elizabeth (2000). Intention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Averchi, Michele (2015). The Disinterested Spectator: Geiger’s and Husserl’s Place in the Debate on
the Splitting of the Ego. Studia Phaenomenologica 15, 227–246.

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Brady, Michael S. (2007). Recalcitrant Emotions and Visual Illusions. American Philosophical Quarterly
44(3), 273–284.
Crespo, Mariano (2015). Moritz Geiger on the Consciousness of Feelings. Studia Phaenomenologica 15,
375–393.
Geiger, Moritz (1911a). Das Bewusstsein von Gefühlen. In: A. Pfänder (Ed.). Münchener Philosophische
Abhandlungen. Theodor Lipps zu seinem sechzigsten Geburtstag gewidmet von früheren Schülern.
Leipzig: Barth, 125–162.
——— (1911b). Zum Problem der Stimmungseinfühlung. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft 6, 1–42.
——— (1913). Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und
Phänomenologische Forschung 1, 567–684.
——— (1921). Das Unbewusste und die psychische Realität. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenolo-
gische Forschung 4, 1–138.
——— (1928). Vom Dilettantismus im künstlerischen Erleben. In: Moritz Geiger: Zugänge zur Ästhetik.
Leipzig: Der Neue Geist Verlag, 1–42.
Helm, Bennett (2015). Emotions and Recalcitrance: Reevaluating the Perceptual Model. Dialectica
69(3), 417–433.
Lipps, Theodor (1903). Leitfaden der Psychologie. Leipzig: Engelmann.
Métraux, Alexandre (1975). Edmund Husserl und Moritz Geiger. In: H. Kuhn, et al. (Eds.). Die
Münchener Phänomenologie. Vorträge des internationalen Kongresses in München, 13–18 April 1971. Den
Haag: Nijhoff, 139–157.
Mulligan, Kevin (2008). Max Scheler: Die Anatomie des Herzens oder was man alles fühlen kann.
In: H. Landweer, and U. Renz (Eds.). Klassische Emotionstheorien: Von Platon bis Wittgenstein. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 587–612.
Pfänder, Alexander (1904). Einführung in die Psychologie. Leipzig: Barth.
——— (1911). Motive und Motivation. In: A. Pfänder (Ed.). Münchener philosophische Abhandlungen.
Theodor Lipps zu seinem sechzigsten Geburtstag gewidmet von seinen früheren Schülern. Leipzig:
Barth, 163–195.
Salice, Alessandro (2012). Phänomenologische Variationen. Intention and Fulfillment in Early
Phenomenology. In: A. Salice (Ed.). Intentionality. Historical and Systematic Perspectives. München:
Philosophia, 203–242.
——— (2015). The Phenomenology of the Munich and Göttingen Circles. In: Ed Zalta (Ed.).
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 Edition) http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
win2015/entries/phenomenology-mg/
Salice, Alessandro, and Montes Sánchez, Alba (2016). Pride, Shame and Group Identification. Frontiers
in Psychology 7(557).
Uemura, Genki, and Salice, Alessandro (2019). Motives in Experience: Pfänder, Geiger and Stein. In:
A. Cimino, and C. H. Leijenhorst (Eds.). The Ideas of Experience. Leiden: Brill, 129–149.
Voigtländer, Else (1910). Vom Selbstgefühl. Ein Beitrag zur Förderung psychologischen Denkens. Leipzig:
Voigtländer Verlag.

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 6
ELSE VOIGTLÄNDER
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

Else Voigtländer (1882–1946) provided one of the first substantial contributions to the phe-
nomenology of the emotions. Her writings, which unfortunately have remained mostly
unexplored, anticipate many of the issues that would become major focal points for later phe-
nomenologists working on the topic. Within the phenomenological movement, Voigtländer
was one of the first to study phenomena such as Ressentiment, inauthentic feelings and erotic
love. In her book Vom Selbstgefühl (On the Feeling of Self-Worth) (1910), she undertakes an
exhaustive study of the feelings of self-worth as part of a more ambitious project of elabo-
rating a study of character.1 Further discussions on feelings, emotions and their relation to
values can be found in a series of papers devoted to character traits, political emotions, erotic
love and the psychology of sentiments (Voigtländer 1920, 1923, 1928, 1933).
This chapter is divided into four sections. The first presents Voigtländer’s notion of feel-
ings of self-worth (Selbstgefühle). The remaining sections are devoted to her analyses of in-
authentic feelings, Ressentiment and other negative attitudes, and erotic love, respectively.

1. Voigtländer’s concept of the feeling of self-worth

Else Voigtländer’s main work on the emotions is Vom Selbstgefühl (1910) (which is identical to
her PhD thesis Über die Typen des Selbstgefühls published the same year). Originally written as
a dissertation under the supervision of Lipps and Pfänder, the book is embedded in the tradi-
tion of the Munich phenomenological circle (Smid 1982, 110), but Voigtländer also engages
with and develops arguments put forward by the likes of Nietzsche, Simmel and Klages.2
Her aim is to provide an analysis of a type of feeling that she calls “feelings of self-worth”.3
The concept of “feelings of self-worth”, which was first employed by Lipps, is used to
refer to an emotional phenomenon belonging to the family of self-regarding attitudes. More
specifically, it refers to those feelings in which we experience our own value. Phenomena
such as confidence, self-affirmation, pride, vanity, shame, cowardice, haughtiness, remorse,
embarrassment, ambition, self-abandonment or self-esteem belong to this class (Voigtländer
1910, 5). They all share a common feature: In them, we experience ourselves as elevated,
low-spirited, depressed, etc., and in them, we sense our own value with respect to the posses-
sion of certain features, abilities or achievements. As such, a feeling of self-worth is subjected
to changes that pertain to our failures, successes and accomplishments in our life experiences.

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Voigtländer defines the feeling of self-worth as follows: “an affective valuating consciousness
of one’s own Self which each of us has and which is subjected to fluctuations” (Voigtländer
1910, 19, own transl.). With this term, Voigtländer points to a specific emotional phenom-
enon whose reality we cannot doubt: There are some emotional experiences in which our
own sense of self-worth is given to us. Though there is no parallel discussion of this phenom-
enon in contemporary philosophy, some of the notions that circulate in current debates—
such as the notion of existential feeling as a background orientation of our experience (see
Chapter 22 in this volume), of the feeling of ability as a sense of one’s own capacities or of
self-conscious emotion as an emotion through which aspects of the Self are revealed (for an
overview of these concepts, see Chapter 31 in this volume)—seem to approach from different
angles the phenomenon that Voigtländer has in mind.
It is not easy to place the notion of “feelings of self-worth” within the standardly em-
ployed emotional categories. Voigtländer rejects any assimilation of these feelings to the class
of the emotions and she often refers to them as a form of mood (Stimmung). Emotions and
feelings of self-worth differ from each other in at least three respects: (1) While emotions
are mental states, feelings of self-worth are affective background orientations; (2) unlike the
emotions that are directed toward particular objects, feelings of self-worth are focused on the
Self; and finally, (3) emotions are responses to certain features of the objects toward which
they are directed, while in feelings of self-worth, it is one’s own value that is affectively given
(1910, 10, 19). These differences can be illustrated by way of an example: Grief (an emotion)
is a mental state directed toward an event or situation given to us as incarnating a disvalue,
while low-spiritedness (a feeling of self-worth) is a background affective orientation in which
we experience ourselves as depressed and worthless.
A central feature of feelings of self-worth is that they imply self-assessment, i.e., we are
aware of our own value or disvalue. Thus, inherent in them is a cognitive moment in which
the value of ourselves is given to us. Voigtländer speaks here of an “apprehension of value”
(Wertauffassung) (1910, 11). According to her, however, it would be a mistake to interpret
feelings of self-worth as mere judgments about our own value (1910, 13). Two arguments
speak against this reduction. First, a person might have knowledge about her own intelli-
gence, and yet this positive judgment about her own value does not necessarily lead to a
feeling of haughtiness or vanity. Second, one might be aware of one’s own virtues and never-
theless have a low feeling of self-worth. Now, while not reducible to each other, Voigtländer
states that judgments about one’s own value and feelings of self-worth might be related to
each other in at least two respects: (1) An objective stance taken toward oneself, which leads
to the consideration of one’s own talents, capacities and achievements, might prompt an ele-
vation or depression of one’s feeling of self-worth (in this case, a value judgment gives rise to
a feeling of self-worth); (2) on the other hand, it is possible that the experiencing of feelings
of self-worth gives rise to a certain value judgment (1910, 45–46).
Feelings of self-worth are characterized by three main features. (1) Qualitative Feeling:
They are characterized by a phenomenal, experiential or qualitative moment, i.e., they are
felt. Voigtländer uses the expression “affective moment” to refer to this aspect. Pleasure
and pain belong to our experiences of feeling uplifted or depressed. When our feeling of
self-worth is elevated, we have a pleasant experience, while a degradation in our feeling of
self-worth is unpleasant, but these experiences are not merely feelings of pleasure and pain.
(2) Value-Awareness: As already mentioned, a cognitive moment, involving an awareness of
our own value, is always active in feelings of self-worth. However, far from constituting a
judgment, such awareness is conceived as a non-conceptual grasping of one’s own worth.
Rather than being the product of an objective stance toward oneself that culminates in a

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self-evaluation, the form of self-assessment that Voigtländer has in mind here is an affective
valuating awareness of our Self. (3) Self-Awareness: Feelings of self-worth are also necessarily
accompanied by an awareness of the Self, which—depending on the feeling in question, the
personality, the activities in which we are engaged or the general concern for others—might
occupy a central or peripheral position (Voigtländer 1910, 54). For some people who tend to
affirm themselves and relate everything to themselves, it is difficult to adopt a stance without
involving oneself, while others are selfless and abandon themselves to the activities in which
they are engaged.
Generally, two main kinds of feelings of self-worth can be distinguished (Voigtländer
1910, 21–22).

a Vital feelings of self-worth (vitales Selbstgefühl) are instinctive, natural and innate. They
are unconscious and unrelated to an object or achievement, expressing a basic affective
background orientation that is characteristic for each individual. These, in turn, might
be classified in the following subclasses: (1) Feelings of courage, confidence and self-
affirmation and their opposites (faintheartedness, insecurity and self-negation), as well
as the feeling of vitality, health and buoyancy and their opposites (tiredness, decadence
and depression); (2) the feeling of the noble and the mean; (3) the feeling of superiority
and inferiority; and (4) the feeling of ability and incapacity (1910, 25–30). Such feelings
are primarily characterized by their qualitative feeling or “affective moment”. Rather
than by the awareness of our own value or of the Self, these feelings are chiefly shaped
by their qualitative moment. The latter is felt as either an uplifting (Erhebung) or a de-
pression (Depression) of the feeling, and it is linked to pleasure and pain (1910, 37).
b Conscious feelings of self-worth (bewusstes Selbstgefühl) are neither innate nor unconscious,
but fluctuate in accordance with our achievements, successes, failures and defeats. They
also depend on our attitude toward life. For instance, after having successfully com-
pleted a task, one experiences an elevation in the feeling of self-worth. Unlike vital
feelings, conscious feelings of self-worth depend on an objective appreciation of one’s
own talents and accomplishments. Thus, they imply what Voigtländer calls a “division”
or “split of the self ” (Teilung des Selbst) (1910, 21). As a result, the awareness of one’s own
value emerges, which is a precondition for a conscious feeling of self-worth (1910, 39).
Thus, the cognitive moment is predominant for this class of feelings: They are primarily
shaped not by the qualitative feeling, but rather by the value awareness.

Vital and conscious feelings of self-worth belong to different strata or layers of the person-
ality and, in some cases, they might exhibit contrary directions (1910, 40). A low-spirited
person with a weak feeling of self-worth might be able to elevate this feeling by focusing
on her achievements, and thereby generate a positive conscious feeling of self-worth. In the
same vein, the consciousness of one’s own failures might depress a person who by nature
has a strong vital feeling of self-worth. I will return to these differences between vital and
conscious feelings in the explanation of the phenomenon of Ressentiment.

2. Inauthentic feelings
An intriguing topic introduced by Voigtländer concerns the possibility for a feeling to be
inauthentic. Crucial in her book is the distinction between genuine feelings of self-worth
(eigentliches Selbstgefühl) and “non-genuine or mirror feelings of self-worth” (uneigentliche
oder Spiegelselbstgefühl) (1910, 22). Inauthentic are those feelings that arise by way of joking,

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make-believe, pretending, acting as if we are moved by an affect, posing, attitudinizing,

presenting oneself, boasting, as well as in imagining experiences, deceiving ourselves, l iving
a lie, and experiencing ourselves from the perspective of a possible other (1910, 94–95). As
employed by Voigtländer, the term is neither reduced to self-deceptive emotions nor to
intentional fraud, but rather embraces a wide range of phenomena that arise when we expe-
rience ourselves from the perspective of a hypothetical other. As she puts it: It is “a feeling
of self-worth experienced with regard to what one is in the imagination, in the opinion
of others, to what refers to an ‘image’ of oneself ” (1910, 76; own transl.). Inauthentic feel-
ings, rather than being anchored in the kernel of the self, are experienced as having their
origins in the image that one thinks others have of oneself. The underlying idea here is that
there are some feelings that are experienced as constitutive parts of us, which cannot be
manipulated or changed at will and which belong to the core of our person. Notice that the
term “non-genuine” (uneigentlich) does not have the negative connotation of being necessar-
ily something morally wrong.
With this characterization, Voigtländer is underscoring an important aspect of our af-
fective life, which directly reflects our intrinsically social nature. Non-genuine feelings of
self-worth presuppose that we are able to imagine how we are seen by a hypothetical observer,
and that we incorporate this image into our consciousness and experience ourselves from this
hypothetical perspective. The point here is that the awareness of the image that others might
have of us leads to fluctuations in our feeling of self-worth, intensifying or degrading it. This
process involves a special form of empathy with the image that we think others might have
of us (1910, 86). Here, we have a feeling which is rooted not in the actual life of the self, but
in the “external” perspective that we imagine others might have of us. Because they are not
rooted in the kernel of the self, i.e., but in its social image, they are experienced as distant, and
Voigtländer characterizes them as having a “coreless”, “airy” and “playful nature” (1910, 97).
According to her taxonomy, there are two main kinds of non-genuine feelings of self-
worth: (a) When we experience ourselves from the perspective of a hypothetical other, we
can focus on our own experiencing self, or (b) we can concentrate on the image that we
think others have of our self. To the first group belong the need for recognition, ambition,
honor or thirst for glory; typical cases for the second group of experiences include feelings
of vanity, smugness or those that arise when attitudinizing (the lack of such an experience is
characteristic of modest, straightforward and frugal personalities).
In a later paper entitled “Über die ‘Art’ eines Menschen und das Erlebnis der ‘Maske’”
(On the Nature of a Person and the Experience of the “Mask”) (1923), Voigtländer deepens
her analysis of these issues. More concretely, she investigates the relation between those fea-
tures that we attribute to others as a result of the impression we have of them (a phenomenon
that she calls Eindruckswerte) and the real qualities of their character.
Voigtländer’s account of non-genuine feelings highlights the fact that while feelings are
felt, not all feelings belong to the same dimension of existence. Some do not arise from the
core of our self and have their origins in one’s (social) image. In this respect, Voigtländer’s re-
search was groundbreaking as this issue of emotional authenticity would come to preoccupy
later phenomenologists such as Scheler (1972[1911/1915]), Heidegger (2008[1927]), Sartre
(2014[1939]) and Merleau-Ponty (2012[1945]). But looking no further, shortly after her work
was submitted, two other phenomenologists of the Munich circle published substantial ac-
counts that examined inauthentic feelings (curiously, none of them cited her work).4 Just one
year after her book appeared, Willy Haas—who was also one of Pfänder’s PhD-students—
published Über Echtheit und Unechtheit von Gefühlen (On the Authenticity and Inauthenticity
of Emotions) (1910). In this book, Haas develops a model according to which an emotion

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is authentic or inauthentic only in respect of the psychological frame in which it occurs.

Emotions are authentic when its general direction is coherent with the general affective ori-
entation of the self. Joy is authentic when it fits with an emotional background of positivity,
but it is inauthentic when the general orientation of the subject is dominated by bad humor
(1910, 12). In addition, Pfänder in his Psychologie der Gesinnungen (Psychology of Sentiments)
(1913/1916) developed an account of inauthenticity for the case of sentiments. Inauthentic
sentiments, in the moment of being experienced, are not in tune with other sentiments, feel-
ings, thoughts, etc. of the self. Though constituting part of the self, inauthentic sentiments
do not fit with other aspects of it (for instance, they are not supported by thoughts, percep-
tions, etc.). Using a terminology that recalls the one previously employed by Voigtländer,
Pfänder describes them as “schematic, hollow, thin, coreless or light” (1913/1916, 383).
These phenomena are “inauthentic” and are felt in a different manner, because they have
their origins in the social world, but—as already observed by Voigtländer— they might
come to form an essential part of our emotional life. They have the capacity to be converted
into authentic sentiments when the subject changes her general attitude, and the sentiment
that was not initially in tune with the rest of the psychic life is now felt as spontaneously
originating from the self.

3. Ressentiment and negative attitudes

One of the issues touched on by Voigtländer in her book (1910) is the phenomenon of
Ressentiment. Following Nietzsche, Voigtländer—like Scheler some years later—uses the
concept as a technical term to refer to a self-defeating hostile attitude, which implies a deg-
radation of values. For both phenomenologists, Ressentiment aims at reducing unpleasant
feelings (such as that of inferiority, impotence, etc.) that arise when one cannot achieve one’s
desired goals. More specifically, it consists in devaluating objects previously felt as worthy.
This adaptive strategy is best illustrated by the fable of the fox who, upon discovering that
he is unable to reach the grapes, exclaims that they are sour. The fox does not merely change
its judgment about the grapes, i.e., it is not the case that the fox first considers the grapes to
be sweet and then claims they are sour. The matter is more complex. It involves an inversion
of values. Thus, the fox now considers sweetness itself to be bad. Notice here the difference
to resentment, which is an emotional displeasure that arises from a sense of injury and is a
legitimate response to a moral wrong. In contrast, what is essential to Ressentiment, and
what makes it a morally wrong or, better, inappropriate reaction, is precisely the inversion
of values that it entails. However, despite these points of agreement regarding the general
nature of Ressentiment, there are also some striking differences between the Voigtländer’s
and Scheler’s accounts.
According to Voigtländer, Ressentiment originates from a negative feeling of self-worth
that arises from the awareness of a weakness and which motivates an exaggerated and un-
realistic positive evaluation of the Self (1910, 48). Ressentiment is an attempt to transform a
negative feeling of self-worth into a positive one. Once Ressentiment arises, the overrated
evaluation of the Self obfuscates the knowledge of the weakness which, though still in the
background, is not at the center of our awareness. In this regard, Ressentiment is akin to
self-deception: That is, it implies a psychological twist, which consists in elevating the feel-
ing of self-worth by devaluing what, in fact, one takes to be valuable. The person imbued
with Ressentiment cannot achieve the desired values, becomes aware of their own inferi-
ority and experiences a negative degradation of the feeling of their own value. As a result,
she tries to avoid this outcome by degrading those values that were once deemed worthy.

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The process involves two mechanisms. First, values once felt as worthy are deprived of their
value and, as a result, an “inversion of values” (Umkehrung der Werte) and a change of value
preferences occurs (1910, 50). Second, though still given, the awareness of their own inferi-
ority is pushed into the background of our consciousness and, consequently, a person with
feelings of Ressentiment experiences an elevation in their feeling of self-worth. However, as
is typical of self-deceptive mechanisms, a tension between the awareness of one’s own infe-
riority and the artificially uplifted feeling of self-worth remains. There is only one remedy
for this: the cultivation of love and benevolence.
The differences between Voigtländer’s and Scheler’s phenomenologies of Ressentiment
can be summarized as follows: (1) While Voigtländer underscores the feeling of inferiority
(a negative feeling of self-worth) as crucial in the formation of Ressentiment, Scheler sees its
origins in the feeling of impotence or inability to change an unpleasant and unbearable sit-
uation; (2) Voigtländer’s person of Ressentiment inverts values and changes her preferences,
but she does not replace the real values with illusory negative ones, since she is still capable
of perceiving the real positive nature of the values and their bearers. By contrast, Scheler’s
process of an inversion of values entails a much deeper process whereby the self-defeating
turn of mind leads to a change in the perception of values and a replacement of these values
with illusory negative ones (Scheler 2010[1912/1915], 25, 45–46; see also Vendrell Ferran
(2018) and Chapter 4 in this volume). (3) At the core of Voigtländer’s notion of Ressenti-
ment lies a tension between a vital negative feeling and a conscious positive feeling of self-
worth. In Scheler’s account, there is no such tension: He explains Ressentiment mainly as a
progression of negative feelings that cannot be expressed. When negative feelings—such as
revenge, hatred, malice, envy, rancor and spite—do not find expression and are sustained and
repressed, Ressentiment emerges as a hostile and self-poisoning attitude (2010[1912/1915],
45–46). (4) Finally, Voigtländer’s main interest is a study of character and, accordingly, she fo-
cuses on the psychological mechanism that is typical of individuals, while Scheler is interested
in showing that not only individuals but also collectives might be imbued with Ressentiment.
In a later text entitled “Zur Psychologie der politischen Stellungnahme” (Towards a
Psychology of Political Attitudes) (1920), Voigtländer explores the nature of negative atti-
tudes such as antipathy and hatred. One of the main aims of the text is to elaborate an anal-
ysis of hostile feelings and their role in politics (see also Chapters 38 and 41 in this volume.
More specifically, she is interested in establishing how aversive emotions might explain the
existence of different attitudes toward the phenomenon of war. The text should also be
considered within a broader socio-historical perspective: Like many other intellectuals and
phenomenologists of her time, such as Scheler, Voigtländer also seeks to attain a better under-
standing of World War I and how it affected political attitudes both in and toward Germany.

4. Love and sexuality

One of Voigtländer’s enduring interests is the nature of love and how, in love, the loved one
appears to embody the properties of the charming, lovely, attractive, etc. Her correspon-
dence with Johannes Daubert during the 1930s reveals that she was preparing a monograph
dedicated to the topic, but there are already crucial references to this phenomenon in her
first book.5 According to Voigtländer, love is not a reaction to certain values of the loved
person. After all, it is possible to love somebody despite their mistakes and imperfections
(and to hate somebody despite their virtues), but love is responsible for presenting the other
in a positive light. In her view, love is sentiment rather than an emotional reaction. This
distinction between the two kinds of emotional phenomena can be already found in her first

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book. Although there Voigtländer employs the term feeling (Gefühle) for both, according to
the terminology used in later publications, one can distinguish between emotional reactions
and sentiments (Gesinnungen). (a) Emotional reactions, such as grief, fear, joy, etc., are re-
sponses to an object or an event (e.g., in fear, we react to an object or an event given to us as
dangerous). (b) Sentiments, such as love, admiration or tenderness, make objects appear to
us in a certain light and present them as having certain qualities, such as charming, beauti-
ful, lovely, marvelous, etc. (which she calls Eindruckswerte; 1910, 111; for the use of the term
“sentiment” with explicit reference to Pfänder, see Voigtländer 1928, 1933).
Voigtländer’s interest in sexuality (she composed, for example, the entries on “gender
trait” and “neglect” for the Handwörterbuch der Sexualwissenschaft edited by Max Marcuse) led
her to explore the nature of erotic love in “Über das Wesen der Liebe und ihre Beziehung
zur Sexualität” (On the Nature of Love and its Relation to Sexuality) (1928). Her main thesis
is that erotic love, rather than being derived from the sexual instinct, is a sentiment (1928,
189). As such, it displays all of the three main features that, according to Pfänder (1913/1916),
are typical of sentiments: It streams from the subject to the object giving it support, with the
intention of uniting with it and accepting it (negative sentiments aim at destroying the ob-
ject, disunifying from it and rejecting it). Once identified as a sentiment, Voigtländer goes on
to determine the specific nature of erotic love. Erotic love is a subspecies of the sentiment of
love and as such it exhibits specific nuances for each of the three features mentioned above. It
is a warming movement of the heart that leads us to experience the loved one as personifying
certain properties (Verkörperungserlebnis), tends to melt with her (Verschmelzung) and aims at
creating a perfect unity with them (vollkommenen Einigung). The comparison with friendship
(another subspecies of love) is helpful as a clarification at this point. In using a metaphor,
Voigtländer maintains that while friendship is a bridge that unifies two poles, erotic love
is the convergence of two flows (1928, 193). The link between erotic love and sexuality is
explained as follows. First, she maintains that, like all emotions and sentiments, erotic love
is linked to expressive movements and expressive actions, which remain in a symbolic rela-
tion with the expressed phenomena. Then, Voigtländer contends that expressive movements
and actions intrinsic to erotic love converge with the already existing sexual impulse. She
concludes the text by identifying “attractiveness” as the main value of the erotic domain (she
distinguishes aesthetic from erotic values, since we might feel attracted to someone who is
ugly). In erotic love, the beloved person appears to the lover as charming, interesting, lov-
able, etc., and it is due to these qualities that we feel attracted to the beloved.
In “Bemerkungen zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen” (Observations on the Psychology
of Sentiments) (1933), published in the Pfänder Festschrift, Voigtländer discusses theories of
love developed by Pfänder, Scheler, Hildebrand and Hartmann. In so doing, she underscores
her original claim that love is not a response to the values of beloved, but a form of attrib-
uting values to her (Voigtländer 1933, 153). Rather than being an answer, a response or a
reaction, love is a creative force that discovers values in the person one loves.6

Notes

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 Else Voigtländer

that she prepared by commission of the ministry of Saxony on criminal women (cf. Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek München, Daubertiana B.I. Voigtländer, Else [letters from Daubert to Voigtländer
3.VIII.1930 (6 Bl.)]. Transcribed by Rodney Parker and Thomas Vongehr), written during her
time as the director of the women’s prison in Waldheim (1926–1945). Voigtländer was a member
of the NSDAP from 1937 onward (her relation with Nazism has still to be investigated). I thank
Kristin Gjesdal and George Heffernan for a lively exchange about Voigtländer’s later publica-
tions and activities in Waldheim.

References
Haas, Willy (1910). Über Echtheit und Unechtheit von Gefühlen. Nürnberg: Benedikt Hill.
Heidegger, Martin (2008[1927]). Being and Time. Transl. by J. Macquarrie, and E. Robinson. Being and
Time. New York: Harper & Row.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2012[1945]). Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. by D. A. Landes. London,
New York: Routledge.
Mulligan, Kevin (2006). Was sind und was sollen die unechten Gefühle? In: U. Amrein (Ed.). Das
Authentische. Referenzen und Repräsentationen. Zürich: Chronos, 225–242.
Pfänder, Alexander (1913/1916). Zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen. In: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und
phänomenologische Forschung I, 325–404, and III, 1–125. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (2014[1939]). Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Transl. by P. Mairet. London,
New York: Routledge.
Scheler, Max (1972[1911/1915]). Die Idole der Selbsterkenntnis. In: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3. Ed. by
M. Scheler. Bern: Francke.
——— (2010[1912/1915]). Ressentiment. Transl. by W. W. Holdheim. Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press.
Smid, Reinhold Nikolaus (1982). “Münchener Phänomenologie” – Zur Frühgeschichte des Begriffs.
In: E. Avé-Lallemant, and H. Spiegelberg (Eds.). Pfänder-Studien. Den Haag: Nijhoff, 109–154.
Szanto, Thomas (2017). Emotional Self-Alienation. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41, 260–286.
Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid (2008). Die Emotionen. Gefühle in der realistischen Phänomenologie. Berlin:
Akademie Verlag.
——— (2018). Phenomenological Approaches to Hatred: Scheler, Pfänder, and Kolnai. In: R. K. B.
Parker, and I. Quepons (Eds.). The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy,
176–197.
Voigtländer, Else (1910). Über die Typen des Selbstgefühls. Leipzig: R. Voigtländers Verlag.
——— (1920). Zur Psychologie der politischen Stellungnahme. Eine massenpsychologische Studie.
Deutsche Psychologie 3(3), 184–206.
——— (with Adalbert Gregor) (1922). Charakterstudie verwahrloster Kinder und Jugendlicher. Leipzig:
Barth.
——— (1923). Über die “Art” eines Menschen und das Erlebnis der “Maske”. Zeitschrift für Psychologie
92, 326–336.
——— (1928). Über das Wesen der Liebe und ihre Beziehung zur Sexualität. Verhandlungen des I. in-
ternationalen Kongresses für Sexualforschung, 10. bis 16. Okt. 1926. Berlin: Marcuse &Weber, 189–196.
——— (1933). Bemerkungen zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen. In: E. Heller, and F. Löw (Eds.). Neue
Münchener Philosophische Abhandlungen. Leipzig: Barth, 143–164.

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 7
MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND
OTTO FRIEDRICH BOLLNOW
Gerhard Thonhauser

Martin Heidegger and Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s essential contribution to the phenome-
nology of emotions is their discovery of the primordial role of Stimmung (attunement) for
human intentionality and the intelligibility of the world. In his characterization of Dasein’s
being-in-the-world, Heidegger introduces Befindlichkeit (the ontological condition of being
attuned) together with understanding and discourse as three equiprimordial existentiale of
Dasein. Bollnow builds on Heidegger in developing his main contribution to philosophical
anthropology: the introduction of attunement as the most primordial level of human life.1
I will begin by introducing Heidegger’s account of Befindlichkeit and attunement in B eing
and Time. Heidegger’s conception of Befindlichkeit has served as the kernel of a productive
philosophical perspective on affectivity (Ratcliffe 2008, 2013; Slaby and Stephan 2008;
Withy 2014, 2015). In contrast, the work of Bollnow has not received much attention. I will
use the second section to discuss his seminal work Das Wesen der Stimmungen (The Nature
of Attunements). In the third section, I will come back to Heidegger and discuss his idio-
syncratic understanding of fundamental attunements, which shows the close link between
Befindlichkeit and the core of his overall philosophical project.

1. Attuned world disclosure in Heidegger’s Being and Time

One of the ground-breaking insights of Being and Time is that our most primordial mode of
being is constituted by the way in which we find ourselves in the world.2 Heidegger introduces
Befindlichkeit as a general condition of an entity existing in the mode of being-in-the-world.
We experience Befindlichkeit by always being attuned one way or the other.
Attunements are ubiquitous and pervasive: We are never devoid of attunements; even
if our attunements change, that does not mean that we can free ourselves of them: “The
fact that attunements can be spoiled and change only means that Dasein is always already
attuned in a way”3 (Heidegger 1953, 134). Even the lack of attunement is a particular way
of being attuned: “The often persistent, smooth, and pallid lack of attunement, which must
not be confused with a bad attunement, is far from being nothing” (ibid.). Moreover, when
we influence or control an attunement, this is not done by “being free of attunement, but
always through a counter attunement” (ibid., 136). Attunements are not simply modes of
coloring our experience, but rather serve a fundamental disclosive function. Attunements

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play into the most basic disclosure of the world: “The prior disclosedness of the world which
belongs to being-in is co-constituted by Befindlichkeit” (ibid., 137). At the same time, at-
tunements disclose one’s own situation; they are modes of finding oneself: “Attunement
makes manifest ‘how one is and is coming along’” (ibid., 134). These two dimensions are
inextricable elements of the way in which attunements constitute being-in-the-world. Being
attuned is what constitutes world and self in their essential relatedness: “The attunedness of
Befindlichkeit constitutes existentially the openness to world of Dasein” (ibid., 137).
What does it mean that attunements constitute Dasein’s being-in-the-world? Being
attuned is first and foremost experienced in Dasein finding things and actions mattering to it.
The most primordial encounter with things has the character of “being affected or moved”
(Betroffenwerden) (ibid.). In other words, I encounter all entities as mattering to me one way
or the other; I always experience them with some kind of significance. Even if I experience
something as meaningless, this is just another mode of significance; in such a case, I do not
experience nothing; rather, I experience something as not speaking to me. Heidegger points
out that significance is always connected to my possibilities, i.e. my potential activities:
All my comportment presupposes a sense of things mattering to me, and the way in which
things matter to me depends on what I consider within my realm of possible comportment.
Moreover, Heidegger shows that the significance of a single entity cannot be seen in isola-
tion. Instead, he suggests a holistic view on significance according to which the significance
of an entity depends on a nexus of significant things. All particular meanings are established
against the background of a world as the realm of significance: “In Befindlichkeit lies existen-
tially a disclosive submission to world out of which things that matter to us can be encountered” (ibid.).
It is our Befindlichkeit that constitutes the sense of a meaningful world and the sense of our
belonging to this world.
To be sure, Heidegger does not claim that a meaningful world is constituted solely by
Befindlichkeit. Rather, the constitution of the world happens in an interplay of Befindlichkeit
with understanding (Verstehen) and discourse (Rede). Among these equiprimordial features
of being-in, understanding emphasizes the agential dimension, i.e., the possible ways of
interacting with entities against the background of our projects. Understanding is here
not conceived of as a mental ability in the vicinity of knowledge, but rather, along prag-
matist lines, as the way of encountering things as meaningful in everyday comportment.
For instance, the most ordinary way of understanding a door is by opening it. Accord-
ing to this pragmatist notion of understanding, the everyday mode of understanding an
entity does not consist in making assertions about it, but in using it properly. Discourse,
the third existentiale of being-in, is understood best with reference to the Latin origin
of articulation, articulare, which means structuring. Discourse is the “articulation of in-
telligibility” (Heidegger 1953, 161). On the basic level, this structuring does not need
to take conceptual form, but is articulated in differentiations of meaning that are not yet
cast in concepts, let alone written or spoken words. Within this tripartite constitution of
being-in, Befindlichkeit indicates the experience of always already being situated in mean-
ingful structures. Without such situatedness, entities would not matter to me, and hence,
they would not matter at all. Finding entities meaningful goes hand in hand with finding
oneself within meaningful structures.
Heidegger’s central claim is that the primordial sense of significance is constituted by
Befindlichkeit, i.e., affectivity, rather than cognition:

Indeed, we must ontologically in principle leave the primary discovery of the world to
‘mere attunement’. Pure beholding (reines Anschauen), even if it penetrated into the

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 Gerhard Thonhauser

innermost core of the being of something objectively present, would never be able to
discover anything [as mattering to me].
(ibid., 138)

The world-disclosure in and through attunements is prior to contemplation, deliberation,

or any form of propositional attitude: “The possibilities of disclosure belonging to cognition
fall far short of the primordial disclosure of attunements” (ibid., 134). To understand why
this is the case, we need to take a closer look at the status of attunements in comparison to
familiar mental states.
Attunements cannot be classified as an additional type of intentional states directed to-
ward something in the world. Rather, they set up a world in the first place. Attunements
are constitutive of a world within which we can experience concrete, object-directed
states, among them affective states like emotions. In Heidegger’s words: “Attunement has
already disclosed being-in-the-world as a whole and first makes it possible directing oneself toward some-
thing” (ibid., 137). Attunements thus constitute the background that structures our world-
relatedness as a whole. It becomes clear now that attunements are not a separate class of
affective states besides emotions, moods, sentiments, etc.; rather, all these affective states
presuppose attunement. Matthew Ratcliffe has carved out this thought in terms of “exis-
tential feelings”. Existential feelings “are not directed at specific objects or situations but
are background orientations through which experience as a whole is structured” (Ratcliffe
2008, 2). They are ‘ways of finding oneself in the world’, which establish both a ‘sense of
reality of the world’, and a ‘sense of one’s belonging to the world’ (cf. Ratcliffe 2008; see also
Chapter 22 in this volume).
It is central for Heidegger to emphasize that attunements cannot be properly conceived
of as ‘subjective’ or ‘psychic’ phenomena: “Prior to all psychology of attunements (…) we
must see this phenomenon as a fundamental existential and outline its structure” (Heidegger
1953, 134). Heidegger repeatedly emphasized the claim that, “Befindlichkeit is far removed
from anything like finding a psychical condition” (ibid., 136). “Being attuned is not initially
related to the psychical, it is itself not an inner condition which then reaches out and leaves
its mark on things and persons” (ibid., 137). Attunements are not elements to be found in
the psychological life of an individual, rather, they are constitutive features of being-in-the-
world. In other words, attunements are constituents of our relatedness with the world and
others, rather than experiences in concrete encounters.
By locating attunements in the complex structure of being-in-the-world rather than in
the ‘inner’ life of an individual or in the ‘outer’ world, Heidegger overcomes the dualism
between the experience of self and the experience of world. Attunements do not disclose
the self or the world; they rather make manifest self and world in their essential relatedness.
Jan Slaby and Achim Stephan have developed this account further in terms of their notion
of affective intentionality. Affective intentionality is at once a disclosure of world and of self:
Affective states are “an evaluative awareness of which goes hand in hand with a registration
of one’s existential situation” (Slaby and Stephan 2008, 506).
Heidegger’s account of attunement also implies an overcoming of the dualism between
activity and passivity. The self is neither an active creator nor a passive recipient of attune-
ment. Instead, “attunement assails. It comes neither from ‘without’ nor from ‘within’, but
rises from being-in-the world itself as a mode of that being” (Heidegger 1953, 136). In short,
the disclosure of world and self in attunements is neither active nor passive. Katherine Withy
(2014, 2015) has elaborated on this in terms of “disclosive postures”. Attunements encompass
modes of comportment (posture) and ways of encountering (disclosure).

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Finally, Heidegger’s account of attunement challenges the dualism of cognition and affect:

Existentially and ontologically there is not the slightest justification for minimizing
the “evidence” of Befindlichkeit by measuring it against the apodictic certainty of the
theoretical cognition of something merely objectively present. But the falsification of the
phenomena, which banishes them to the sanctuary of the irrational, is no better.
(Heidegger 1953, 136)

That attunements constitute the fundamental way of being oriented in the world implies that
we cannot push them aside with reference to their alleged irrationality. Since all significance
is co-constituted by Befindlichkeit, we cannot establish a separated realm of reason unaffected
by attunements. On the contrary, Heidegger urges us to see that the theoretical attitude also
presupposes a specific attunement, namely the attunement of letting things “come towards us
in tranquil staying” (ibid., 138). To sum up, attunements are a form of disclosure that outstrip
any cognitive grasp or mental representation, forming the world- and self-disclosing back-
ground for all object-directed mental states, may they be cognitive, conative, or affective.

2. Bollnow’s Das Wesen der Stimmungen

In Das Wesen der Stimmungen, Bollnow builds on Heidegger’s discussion of Befindlichkeit
while adopting a critical stance toward Heidegger’s overall project.4 Bollnow mentions two
Heideggerian claims as his major source of inspiration: (1) We are always already attuned in some
way. (2) Our entire psychic life builds on attunements; attunements shape all our experiences,
enabling some while disabling others (cf. Bollnow 1953, 54). Bollnow identifies as the main
weakness of Heidegger’s approach that he does not account for different types of attunements.
To be fair, Heidegger does mention several specific attunements in Being and Time. He refers
to “hope, joy, enthusiasm, and gaiety” as well as “sadness, melancholy, despair” (Heidegger
1953, 345). Moreover, he introduces other affective conditions without established names,
such as a “pallid lack of mood” (ibid.), an “undisturbed equanimity”, or an “inhibited dis-
content” (ibid., 134). However, he does not analyze them in any detail. Moreover, he does
not pay any attention to their potential differences. According to Bollnow, this is not simply
an omission, but based on the methodology of Heidegger’s existential analysis. Following
Bollnow’s interpretation, the existential analysis presupposes that the essential structures of
human existence can be obtained by analyzing one single example, since all examples lead
to the same invariant structures of existence. This presupposition leads Heidegger to focus
on a single attunement—angst in the case of Being and Time—for analyzing the structure of
attunement in general. In contrast to Heidegger, Bollnow suggests that philosophical anthro-
pology needs to account for human life in the plurality of its manifestations. Following this
approach, we should expect each type of attunement to make manifest new dimensions of the
human being and its relation to the world and others (Bollnow 1953, 27–28).
Despite these methodological differences, Bollnow, for the most part, follows the general
thrust of Heidegger’s account of Befindlichkeit. To begin with, he identifies “vital feelings”
(Lebensgefühle) or “attunements” as the most primordial level of psychic life (ibid., 33).
Bollnow speaks of basic attunements (Grundbefindlichkeiten or Grundstimmungen) as forming
the foundational level of human life. He provides a non-comprehensive list of basic attune-
ments: Cheerfulness and sadness; examples of high spirits like gaity and jollity, and examples
of low spirits like lassitude and stifling stubor; a calm and relaxed manner, or tense anxiety
and solicitude (ibid., 34).

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In line with Heidegger, Bollnow suggests an order of constitution according to which en-
compassing attunements are necessary to enable concrete emotions (and all other intentional
states). In contrast to Heidegger, Bollnow draws a sharp distinction between attunements
and emotions. Heidegger appears not to distinguish attunements and emotions. In §30 of
Being and Time, for instance, Heidegger discusses fear as a “mode of attunement”, although
what he describes is clearly an emotion. It seems that Heidegger wants to subsume all affec-
tive states under the term attunement. In my opinion, Heidegger’s radical anti-mentalism led
him to throw the baby out with the bath water, aiming to eliminate all psychological talk
about emotions. However, it seems more promising to follow Bollnow in drawing a sharp
distinction between attunements and emotions while maintaining both concepts: “Emotions
in a proper sense are always intentionally related to a specific object. (…) The attunements,
on the other hand, do not have a specific object. They are states of being (Zuständlichkeiten),
colorations of the entire human Dasein” (ibid., 34–35). Bollnow adds the qualification that
in specific cases, it might be difficult to determine whether something is an attunement or
an emotion. Consider the example of grief, which sometimes is a distinct, episodic emotion,
and sometimes becomes so encompassing that it shapes our entire orientation in the world.
Bollnow is again in line with Heidegger in attempting to overcome the dualisms of
world-experience and self-experience, activity and passivity, cognition and affect. First,
Bollnow suggests that basic attunements involve an evaluation of one’s situation. They are
forms of becoming aware of oneself. One can argue—as Slaby and Stephan (2008) have
done—that basic attunements are the most primordial form of self-awareness. Moreover,
Bollnow places attunements as the foundational level of psychic life prior to a sharp distinc-
tion of self and world: “The attunements still entirely live in the undivided unity of self and
world, both pervaded by a common coloration of attunement” (Bollnow 1953, 39). He also
speaks of a primordial “unity of human mind (Gemüt) and surrounding world” (ibid., 40).
Second, Bollnow addresses the question whether a regulation of attunements is possible. On
the one hand, we are overcome by attunements; this is most apparent in the way in which
we cannot voluntarily educe an attunement, at least not directly. On the other hand, we
are not totally at the mercy of our attunements; we can comport ourselves vis-à-vis our at-
tunement in different ways, and we can attempt to indirectly influence how we are attuned.
A dualistic understanding of activity and passivity cannot account for the complex ways in
which we are related to our attunements. Bollnow explores this further by discussing the
relationship of attunement to character and posture (ibid., 131–163). Third, the experience
of concrete objects and events within the world is pre-shaped by basic attunements: “Only
in an anxious attunement I encounter something threatening, and only in a cheerful state
of mind (Gemütsverfassung) I come across felicific experiences almost as a matter of course”
(ibid., 53). Similarly, the fearless person does not encounter anything fearsome, and the
deeply depressed person does not experience anything uplifting. As Bollnow writes, such in-
dividuals have become ‘blind’ for certain aspects of the world, which shows the “dependence
of all grasping on the state of attunement (Stimmungslage)” (ibid., 57). It would be wrong to
assume that an originally neutral experience is subsequently colored by attunement. Rather,
attunement frames all experiences. Attunement has always already ‘interpreted’ the world in
a certain way that guides concrete experiences.
Going beyond Heidegger, Bollnow explores in more detail how shifting attunements
transform our entire mode of being. First, attunements transform our awareness of commu-
nity (Gemeinschaftsbewußtseins), i.e., our relatedness to others. Chastened attunements tend
to close someone off and lead her into solitariness, as they direct her attention to her own
self. Elevated attunements, on the other hand, tend to open up a person and make her more

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sociable (cf. Bollnow 1953, 97–112). Second, attunements transform our sense of reality,
i.e., our relatedness to the world. Bollnow suggests that certainty about reality cannot be
gained by means of a theoretical operation, but only rises from basic affective experiences.
This anticipates the work of Ratcliffe, who draws on psychopathology to explore how the
sense of reality can be disturbed (cf. Ratcliffe 2008, 2014). Bollnow suggests that chastened
attunements lead us to experience the world as resisting and inhibiting, whereas it is experi-
enced as sustaining and fostering in elevated attunements (Bollnow 1953, 112–131). Third,
attunements transform our awareness of time. Our estimation of time is contingent upon
our affective state. In chastened attunements, time can become unbearably long, whereas in
elevated attunements, time tends to ‘fly by’ and it happens to us that we ‘lose track of time’.
German offers the terms langweilig and kurzweilig to express these experiences. When some-
thing is boring, time is experienced as long—langweilig literally means ‘a long while’. In con-
trast, when something is diverting, time is experienced as short—kurzweilig literally means
‘a short while’. Furthermore, Bollnow points to the intriguing fact that in retrospection,
the proportions turn around. In our recollection, an eventful time appears as long, while an
uneventful time appears as short. Thus, when having a great time, we experience it as short
and recollect it as long, whereas we experience a time of waiting as long and recollect it as
short (Bollnow 1953, 165–182). These examples are meant to show how our entire relation
to others, the world, and the flow of time is shaped and modulated by attunements, and how
exploring these nexuses requires us to consider a plurality of attunements and their contrast-
ing modes of disclosure.

3. Heidegger’s fundamental attunements and

the path to philosophizing
Whereas Bollnow contextualizes his investigation of attunements within philosophical an-
thropology, Heidegger denies any interest in anthropology, claiming that his existential
analysis of Dasein is prior to all regional ontologies, including anthropology as the regional
ontology of the human being. Heidegger drives at a very specific point with his account of
Befindlichkeit. He focuses on certain attunements that serve a crucial methodological role for
his ontological project. To understand this role, we need to consider the forth existentiale of
being-in-the-world: Falling (Verfallen). Falling implies that the existential features of Dasein
are usually not experienced and enacted as what they actually (eigentlich) are, but rather in
the mode of average everydayness, a modality in which Dasein avoids or misconstrues its
own ontological makeup. As all other features of Dasein, Befindlichkeit is also prone to fa lling.
Thus, the usual way in which we experience Befindlichkeit is an “evasive turning away”
(Heidegger 1953, 136), i.e., being attuned in a way that keeps us from seeing and grasping
the disclosive function of attunements: “For the most part Dasein evades the being that is dis-
closed in attunements in an ontic and existentiell way” (ibid., 135). If this is the case, however,
a methodological problem for Heidegger’s project arises: If it is true that falling is so perva-
sive as to constantly keep Dasein from genuinely (eigentlich) experiencing its true ontological
structure, how could we ever experience that structure, or even assume that such a structure
exists? Heidegger solves this problem by granting certain attunements a very specific status:
These attunements have the power to draw us out of average everydayness and set us on the
path to potential existential insights.5
In Being and Time, Heidegger focuses on ‘angst’6 as an attunement that is capable of dis-
closing the ontological structure of Dasein in particular clarity. Heidegger introduces
angst in contrast to fear. Fear refers to the familiar emotion in which we experience an

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entity as dangerous. In contrast, “that about which one has angst” is totally indeterminate, it is
“nothing and nowhere” (ibid., 186). In angst, we are not afraid of any particular entity, but
of “ being-in-the-world itself ” (ibid., 187). Angst is an attunement that radically unsettles
Dasein’s absorption in everyday activities and confronts it with the uncanniness at the bottom
of its being: “Angst (…) fetches Dasein back out of its entangled absorption in the ‘world’.
Everyday familiarity collapses. (…) Being-in enters the existential ‘mode’ of not-being-at-home.
The talk about ‘uncanniness’ means nothing other than this” (ibid., 189). What the experi-
ence of angst does is setting Dasein on the path of ontological inquiry: It takes Dasein from
the realm of entities (Seiendes)—the realm of everyday comportment—to the realm of being
(Sein)—the realm of ontological investigation. That Heideggerian angst primarily concerns
the possibility of ontology becomes particularly obvious in the lecture What is Metaphysics?
(1929). Heidegger claims here that certain attunements (he mentions profound boredom and
joy) manifest “being as a whole” (Heidegger 1998, 87). Angst goes beyond these attunements
in that it also “makes manifest the nothing” (ibid., 88). If questioning the nothing is a genu-
inely metaphysical question, as Heidegger claims, then angst is the access to this kind of ques-
tioning: “With the fundamental attunement of anxiety we have arrived at that occurrence in
Dasein in which the nothing is manifest and from which it must be interrogated” (ibid., 89).
Heidegger discusses the aforementioned attunement of profound boredom in his lecture
course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929/1930). He distinguishes three forms of
boredom: In the first form—‘becoming bored by something’—a specific entity or event bores us.
Heidegger’s example is waiting at a shabby train station in the middle of nowhere. In the
second variety—‘being bored with something’—a certain episode is experienced as emptied of
meaningful activity and thus as a lost portion of lifetime. Heidegger’s example is attending
a dinner party where we might outwardly participate in an engaged fashion but afterward
have to admit that we were bored throughout. In the third form—profound boredom or ‘it
is boring for one’—not one particular episode but our entire existence becomes utterly mean-
ingless: “Entities have—as we say—become indifferent as a whole, and we ourselves as these
people are not excepted” (Heidegger 1995, 208). Whereas the first two varieties of boredom
describe affective episodes that can be psychologically investigated, profound boredom ap-
pears to go beyond the realm of psychology. Heidegger claims as much when he instructs
his students that

it is not necessarily an objection to our claim of a fundamental attunement being there

in our Dasein if one of you, or even many, or all of you assure us that you are unable to
ascertain such an attunement in yourselves when you observe yourselves. For in the end
there is nothing at all to be found by observation.
(ibid., 60)

As the introduction to this part of the lecture shows, Heidegger is not concerned with the
psychology of boredom, but with the possibility of philosophizing. Boredom only becomes
relevant insofar as profound boredom is identified as a fundamental attunement enabling
philosophizing. In the case of boredom, as in the case of Angst, we can see that Heidegger
grants fundamental attunements a central role within his approach to philosophy. According
to him, genuine philosophical questioning has to arise “ from out of a fundamental attune-
ment” (ibid., 57). (For more on fear, anxiety, and boredom in Heidegger, see Elpidorou and
Freeman 2015a, 2015b, and Chapter 34 in this volume).
To wrap things up, I can only briefly mention that Heidegger continues to see such a
connection between philosophy and attunement in his later writings. In Contributions to

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Philosophy (1936–1938), he writes about the “grounding-attunement” of thinking: In con-

trast to “wonder”, which he identifies as the grounding-attunement of the first beginning
of philosophy in Greek Antiquity, Heidegger identifies “startled dismay” (Erschrecken),
“reservedness” (Verhaltenheit), “deep awe” (Scheu)—and a few pages later “deep foreboding”
(Er-ahnen) (Heidegger 1999, 15)—as the “grounding-attunement of thinking in the other beginning”
(ibid., 11).

4. Conclusion
We have seen that in Being and Time, Heidegger introduces Befindlichkeit as an existentiale of
Dasein that (in interplay with understanding, discourse, and falling) co-constitutes being-
in-the-world. Building on this framework, he continues to claim that certain attunements
do not simply contribute to the regular course of events, but rip Dasein out of everyday fa-
miliarity and confront it with the depth of its being. These attunements thereby serve a cru-
cial methodological function for Heidegger’s overall project by setting Dasein on the path of
existential analysis. In later works, Heidegger generalizes the methodological role of attune-
ments by claiming that all philosophizing has to arise from out of a fundamental attunement.
Bollnow’s book Das Wesen der Stimmungen is an attempt to systematically apply the gist
of Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit for the purpose of philosophical anthropology. Bollnow in-
vestigates attunement as the most basic level of human life, claiming that the primordial
disclosure of self and world happens in being attuned. Attunements are fundamental ways
of world-relatedness prior to a sharp distinction of self and world, activity and passivity,
cognition and affect. Although Bollnow’s work has not received much attention, he antici-
pated many aspects of current approaches to affectivity in a broadly Heideggerian framework
(e.g., those of Matthew Ratcliffe, Jan Slaby, and Katherine Withy). Thus, it would be worth
discussing Bollnow’s work within these contexts.
Whereas the discovery of attunements is a crucial deepening of our understanding of
affectivity, neither Heidegger nor Bollnow presents fully satisfying accounts. One particu-
larly obvious shortcoming is that they say very little about the role of the body with regard to
affectivity. Bollnow briefly mentions the body (Bollnow 1953, 42–43) and Heidegger offers a
few remarks in his Zollikon Seminars (Heidegger 2001), but both fail to systematically bring
together embodiment and affectivity. In particular, it remains unclear if and how attune-
ments are bodily felt. Moreover, the combination of neglecting embodiment and support-
ing strong anti-mentalism led Heidegger—and to a lesser extent Bollnow—to leaving the
relationship between attunements and other affective states underdeveloped. Finally, going
beyond locating attunements in the relatedness of self, others, and world, one can raise the
question whether attunements are individual phenomena or whether they are intertwined
with the intersubjective or collective realm.

Notes

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 Gerhard Thonhauser

is particularly present in his discussion of Befindlichkeit. In the 1996 edition of Being and Time,
Stambaugh translates Befindlichkeit as “attunement” (cf. Heidegger 1996). This is a suitable solution
accepted by most scholars. However, I suggest that it is more appropriate to use “attunement” as
translation of Stimmung. The term Stimmung is related to Stimme, which not only refers to voices,
but also to the score of an instrument. Instruments need to be gestimmt, i.e., tuned. If they are
tuned, they are also attuned to one another. “Attunement”, although taken from a mechanical reg-
ister, does well to capture the literal meaning of Stimmung. Meanwhile, several other translations
of Befindlichkeit have been suggested. Hubert Dreyfus, for instance, initially suggested “disposi-
tion” and “situatedness”, then suggested the unwieldy phrase “where we’re at-ness”, and finally
settled for “affectedness” (Dreyfus 1991, 168). Other suitable translations are “so-findingness”,
suggested by John Haugeland (2013) and “disposedness”, suggested by William Blattner (2006).
As no English translation will fully capture the meaning of Befindlichkeit, I decided to leave it un-
translated for the purpose of this text.
2 I borrow this phrase from Matthew Ratcliffe (2008, 2013).
3 As is common practice in Heidegger scholarship, all citations of Being and Time refer to the page
numbers of the German edition of Sein und Zeit published by Niemeyer. These page numbers can
be found in all English translations of Being and Time as well as in volume 2 of the Gesamtausgabe.
4 There is no English edition of Bollnow’s book; all translations are my own. Two chapters (chaps. 2
and 3) of the book, however, have recently been translated into English and published in Bollnow
(2017).
5 Ratcliffe draws on this thought without making the claim that only certain attunements play this
role. In his view, “changes in existential feelings serve to reveal structures of experience that are
ordinarily taken for granted” (Ratcliffe 2008, 10).
6 I leave the term Angst untranslated as it is doubtful whether what Heidegger drives at with it comes
close enough to what is meant by anxiety in colloquial English. In particular, it is important to
avoid reminiscences to psychological understandings of anxiety.

References
Blattner, William (2006). Heidegger’s Being and Time. A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum.
Bollnow, Otto Friedrich (1953). Das Wesen der Stimmungen. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
——— (2017). The Nature of Stimmungen. [Engl. Transl. of Chaps. 2 and 3 of Das Wesen der Stimmungen.
Transl. by A. Krebs, et al.]. Philosophia 45(4), 1399–1418.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1991). Being-in-the-World. A Commentary on Heidegger´s Being and Time, Division 1.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Elpidorou, Andreas, and Freeman, Lauren (2015a). Affectivity in Heidegger I: Moods and Emotions
in Being and Time. Philosophy Compass 10(10), 661–671.
——— (2015b). Affectivity in Heidegger II: Temporality, Boredom, and Beyond. Philosophy Compass
10(10), 672–684.
Haugeland, John (2013). Dasein Disclosed: John Haugeland’s Heidegger. Ed. by J. Rouse. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1953). Sein Und Zeit (7th ed.). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
——— (1962). Being and Time. Transl. by J. Macquarrie, and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell.
——— (1995). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitute, Solitute. Transl. by William
McNeill, and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
——— (1996). Being and Time. Transl. by J. Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press.
——— (1998). Pathmarks. Transl. by W. McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— (1999). Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Transl. by P. Emad, and K. Maly.
Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
——— (2001). Zollikon Seminars. Protocols – Conversations – Letters. Transl. by F. Mayr, and R. Askay.
Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Ratcliffe, Matthew (2008). Feelings of Being. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— (2013). Why Mood Matters. In: M. Wrathall (Ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s
Being and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 157–176.
——— (2014). Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Slaby, Jan, and Achim Stephan (2008). Affective Intentionality and Self-Consciousness. Consciousness
and Cognition 17(2), 506–513.
Withy, Katherine (2014). Situation and Limitation: Making Sense of Heidegger on Thrownness.
European Journal of Philosophy 22(1), 61–81.
——— (2015). Owned Emotions: Affective Excellence in Heidegger and Aristotle. In: D. McManus
(Ed.). Heidegger, Authenticity and the Self: Themes from Division Two of Being and Time. London,
New York: Routledge, 21–36.

Further reading
Hadjioannou, Christos (Ed.) (2019). Heidegger on Affect. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Krebs, Angelika (2017). Stimmung: From Mood to Atmosphere. Philosophia 45(4), 1419–1436.

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 8
DIETRICH VON HILDEBRAND
Jean Moritz Müller

It is sometimes alleged that the study of emotion and the study of value are currently pursued
as relatively autonomous disciplines. As Kevin Mulligan notes, “[t]he philosophy and
psychology of emotions pays little attention to the philosophy of value and the latter pays
only a little more attention to the former” (2010b, 475). Arguably, the last decade has seen
more of a rapprochement between these two domains than used to be the norm (cf., e.g.,
Roeser and Todd 2014). But there still seems to be considerable potential for exchange and
dialogue if the situation is compared with their intimate relationship in central strands of
early realist phenomenology. The philosopher perhaps most representative of this ecumeni-
cal approach is Husserl’s early student Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977). From the very
early stages of his philosophical career, Hildebrand has developed one of the most original,
comprehensive and nuanced accounts of emotions at whose core is a detailed examination
of their connection to value. While his central concern with the ethical significance of
our affective life is in many ways continuous with Scheler’s work1 and draws crucially on
Reinach’s philosophy of mind, Hildebrand’s own reflections considerably expand on and
substantially modify the picture of the ontology and normative role of emotions defended by
these authors. In the following, I reconstruct Hildebrand’s view of emotions with a particu-
lar focus on those aspects which represent his most distinctive contribution to this subject.2

1. Emotion and position-taking

Hildebrand, in fact, rarely uses the term “emotion” for the phenomena at the center of his
work on affectivity. This is, at least in part, in order to distance himself from metaethical
emotivists about value judgments who are seen as misconceiving these phenomena by as-
suming that what they call “emotions” is a non-intentional type of experience.3 However,
despite these terminological reservations, it is evident that his main concern is with phenom-
ena that are both in ordinary and philosophical discourses known as emotions. These include
affective phenomena such as joy, anger, sadness, fear, admiration, contempt, respect, grati-
tude, love and hatred. In order to highlight their specific intentional structure, Hildebrand
refers to these phenomena as affective position-takings or affective responses.4 In what follows,
I explicate this characterization in some detail. In doing so, I will, pace Hildebrand, keep
with common parlance and refer to them as emotions.

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 Dietrich von Hildebrand

It is worth adding that von Hildebrand distinguishes affective position-takings from

a further class of closely related intentional affective phenomena. This class comprises
experiences such as being moved by a piece of music or being wounded by an offensive
remark, which he groups under the heading “being affected” (cf. 1953, chap. 17).5 There is
an interesting question as to whether experiences of this kind are emotions, too (cf. Cova
and Deonna 2014), and whether Hildebrand is correct to distinguish them from position-
takings. In what follows, I shall, however, set these questions aside and focus only on those
paradigmatic emotions, which are in the center of Hildebrand’s work.

1.1 The intentional structure of position-taking

Within early phenomenology, the notion of a position-taking (Stellungnahme) first appears
in Reinach’s article “Zur Theorie des negativen Urteils” (1911). On Reinach’s account,
position-takings are mental occurrences that are characterized by an opposition between
positivity and negativity. More specifically, for Reinach, the mark of a position-taking is that
it has a polar opposite: Belief is opposed to disbelief, striving after something to struggling
against something (Widerstreben), pleasure to displeasure.6 Hildebrand applauds Reinach for
calling attention to an important and neglected type of intentional phenomenon. At the same
time, he gives it a considerably more detailed treatment and delineates the class of position-
takings in a different way.7 For Hildebrand, it is emotions that display most clearly its essential
features. As he notes at the start of his dissertation Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung (1969a, 11):

If we consider joy about something, enthusiasm, longing, love of something, then all
these experiences display a common character. Despite their qualitative differences, they
all constitute position-takings of mine towards the world of objects. The moment of
joy or the moment of enthusiasm are contents (Gehalte), which are embedded into the
experience on the subjective side, and which are directed at (gelten) a content (Inhalt) in
front of me.
(own transl.)

On Hildebrand’s account of position-taking, there is no explicit mention of polar opposites.

Instead, what is seen as essential to position-takings is the possession of a directed qualita-
tive content, which corresponds to the specific intentional mode (or, in Husserl’s terms, ‘act
quality’) of the respective phenomenon and ‘fills’ the mind of its subject (e.g., we can be full
of joy or conviction). Hildebrand describes the directedness of this content in terms of an
“intention”, which goes from the subject to the object (e.g., 1953, 196; 1969a, 13). Moreover,
in being directed at something, a position-taking constitutes a response (Antwort) to certain
features of its object: We are pleased about an object because or in light of some of its qualities
(1969a, 13). In being directed and responsive, position-takings are in a specific sense active,
that is, manifestations of spontaneity: In taking a stand, one is active inasmuch as one oneself
brings forth a specific qualitative content which is aimed at the world.8
To bring out more clearly these marks of position-taking, it is helpful to contrast this
account with his Hildebrand’s characterization of a different type of intentional phenome-
non, which he calls “apprehension” (Erfassen) or “coming to be acquainted with something”
(Kenntnisnahme).9 Paradigmatic cases of apprehension are sensory perceptions and other forms
of intuition (Anschauung). In these experiences, there is a content (Inhalt) on the side of
the object (we are conscious of something), but no qualitative content on the subjective
side (e.g., 1953, 196; 1969a, 11): One cannot be “filled with” perception. Correspondingly,

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although apprehension is of something and thus intentional, it is not directed at anything. In

visually perceiving an object, something is presented to us; here, the “intention” goes from
the object to the subject (1953, 196). Similarly, it makes no sense to suppose that we appre-
hend things in light of anything. Accordingly, apprehension is a case of receptivity rather than
spontaneity. While in feeling joy about a scene, we “make something” of the scene before us
by bringing forth a qualitative content that is aimed at that scene; in perceiving that scene,
aspects of it simply impress themselves on us.10
Since, in contrast to Reinach’s account of position-taking, Hildebrand’s considerations
focus on its intentional structure, he ends up recognizing many phenomena as position-
takings that do not count as such for Reinach. For example, surprise has a directed, qualita-
tive content, but no polar opposite.11 What is more, in arguing that paradigmatic emotions
exhibit this intentional structure, Hildebrand undermines a widely held misconception of
emotions as a type of apprehension. Both Husserl (e.g., 1989, 196) and Meinong (1972)
conceive of emotions as a kind of perception or intuition of value (cf. also Tappolet 2000;
Roberts 2003; Döring 2004; Deonna 2006). Yet, to suppose that emotions are apprehensions
of value is to ignore their character as position-takings.
Their assimilation to value apprehensions can be seen to conflict also with Hildebrand’s
view of what emotions are motivated by. While intellectual position-takings like belief are
responsive to truth, emotions and volitional responses are responsive to axiological prop-
erties. In joy, we respond to positive importance (goodness in some respect); similarly, in
indignation, we respond to negative importance (injustice). However, to respond to x, one
must be aware of x prior to responding. Thus, emotions presuppose grasp of importance.
Yet, in this case, they cannot themselves apprehend importance: What is already within one’s
ken can no longer be brought within one’s ken (cf. also Mulligan 2004, 2010a; Teroni 2007;
Müller 2017).12
Incidentally, Hildebrand does not give a substantial account of what it is for an action
or attitude to be a response or to have motivating reasons. This may seem surprising given
the centrality of this concept to his overall account. At the same time, Hildebrand offers a
detailed account of the types of axiological properties that emotions and volitions are re-
sponsive to and how these bear on their specific character as responses. I will address this
conception in some detail in the following section. Before turning to this issue, I shall,
however, complete the present outline of his basic account of affective position-taking by
specifying how Hildebrand distinguishes them from other types of position-taking.

1.2 The specific characteristics of affective position-taking

Hildebrand recognizes three basic classes of position-takings—intellectual, volitional and
affective—each of which possesses its distinctive marks. In characterizing affective responses,
Hildebrand’s main focus is on specifying how they differ from volitional responses, which
are likewise responsive to importance. One such difference concerns freedom and control:
Although volitional responses are motivated by importance, they can be freely engendered
and directly command our bodily activities, while affective responses are bestowed on us and
cannot be directly controlled. As we will see, this difference plays a crucial role for his account
of the moral significance of affective position-takings. The perhaps most telling difference for
Hildebrand, however, concerns their qualitative richness or plenitude. Hildebrand sometimes
proposes that, in affective responses, “the entire person in involved” (1953, 202), while the
will has a “one dimensional, linear character” (ibid., 202), which commits the entire person,
but nonetheless constitutes a stance taken exclusively by her “free personal center” (ibid., 203).

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At first sight, this proposal may seem counter-intuitive. When I am enthusiastic about
the result of the soccer match, I am taking a particular position insofar as I favour a particular
team. Similarly, in being indignant about funding cuts in the humanities, it is me inasmuch
as I value the humanities who is taking a stand. There is a straightforward sense in which it is
specific attitudes or concerns of a person,13 rather than the entire person, which shape the
respective response. To be fair, in his earlier writings, Hildebrand is sensitive to this point.
In Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis (1969b, 204–206), he acknowledges that affective
position-takings can have their source in specific attitudes of a person. Hildebrand denies
that this is true of all affective responses (e.g. annoyance and desire (Begehren) are supposed
to be exceptions). But he adds that even where there is no such foundation in particular at-
titudes, affective position-takings are still to some extent constrained by the person’s most
fundamental attitudes and her overall character or nature. For example, these may impose
constraints on which emotions it is possible for someone to feel in a given situation (1969b,
206). Moreover, this constraint is meant not to apply in the same way to volitional responses
(ibid., 206). In light of this, Hildebrand is perhaps best read as proposing that the distinctive
feature of affective responses is a specific kind of dependence on the person’s attitudes and
her overall character, which is not displayed by exercises of the will.

2. Responding to importance
Hildebrand’s most innovative claim about the emotions concerns a distinction between dif-
ferent kinds of axiological property to which they can be responsive. This distinction has im-
portant implications for his account of their normative significance and their connection to
personhood. It is indeed fundamental for his entire moral philosophy, including his proposal
that emotions can possess moral value.

2.1 Hildebrand’s taxonomy of importance

Put in simple terms, Hildebrand’s central axiological proposal is to recognize fundamentally
different ways in which something can matter (as opposed to being neutral or insignificant).
As he uses the term “importance” (Bedeutsamkeit), it denotes the specific respect under which
an object or event is apt to motivate specific emotional or volitional responses. Crucially, the
terms “value” and “disvalue” are reserved for one specific category of importance, which is
taken to sharply contrast with another axiological category which he terms the “subjectively
(dis)satisfying”.
For something to possess (dis)value is for it to be important in itself.14 For something to be
subjectively (dis)satisfying, on the other hand, is for it to be important relative to a person’s
interests and concerns. On Hildebrand’s account, the saving of another’s life is important in
itself, while the fact that some monetary deal comes out in one’s favor is subjectively satisfy-
ing insofar as it holds the potential to satisfy one’s concern to be materially well off. In both
cases, the respective importance of the event makes it apt to motivate a particular response
(e.g., joy or enthusiasm); yet, it does so differently in each case: While (dis)values demand
a certain response, the subjectively (dis)satisfying tempts us into responding in a specific
way. This has an immediate consequence for the normative assessment of the corresponding
response. To feel joy about another’s recovery in response to its value is to give this event its
due qua valuable (cf. 1953, chap. 18). In complying with this demand, a specific harmony is
established between the response and the value, which bestows value on the response itself.
No such value is bestowed on responses to the subjectively (dis)satisfying.

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To fully appreciate the theoretical significance of Hildebrand’s distinction between

responses to (dis)value and responses to the subjectively (dis)satisfying, it is helpful to high-
light how the type of importance to which an emotion or volition is responsive makes a
difference to the character of the response itself, as well as to relate his distinction to Kant’s
familiar opposition between the categorical and the hypothetical. Roughly, the phenome-
non that features on Kant’s ethical theory as the conformity with a categorical demand is
reconceived by Hildebrand in terms of responsiveness to value, while the systematic place of
Kant’s notion of conforming to hypothetical imperatives is occupied by the response to the
subjectively (dis)satisfying. As Hildebrand characterizes value responses, they display a spe-
cific aspect of self-transcendence. In giving a (dis)value its due (in contrast to being lured in
by the subjectively (dis)satisfying), we do not approach the bearer of the (dis)value from the
point of view of our own concerns, but move beyond our interests to engage with something
important for its own sake. There are strong echoes here with a Kantian notion of autonomy.
In a spirit similar to Kant’s recognition of autonomy as the mark of personhood, Hildebrand
goes on to claim that affective and volitional value responses reveal our most decisive feature
as persons. That said, there are also important differences between these respective strands
of Kant’s and Hildebrand’s thinking. Crucially, Kant does not recognize emotions as poten-
tial manifestations of the core of personhood. Moreover, for him, categorical demands are
not grounded in value; hence conformity with them is not a case of value response. But for
Hildebrand, it is crucial precisely to look beyond the demand to its axiological ground in
order to make proper sense of the opposition between the categorical and the hypothetical,
as well as to explicate the corresponding difference at the level of our conduct by substituting
responsiveness to this ground for simple conformity with a demand.15 It is this focus on value,
and the distinction between different species of importance, that brings emotions within the
purview of (broadly) Kantian considerations on personhood.16
Perhaps this picture will seem to come at a rather high metaphysical price, given that
Hildebrand conceives of (dis)values in strictly realist terms, i.e., as fully mind-independent
properties. It is worth noting, though, that one might develop a structurally similar account
of responsiveness to importance independently of Hildebrand’s notion of (dis)value. For ex-
ample, one might distinguish between different ways in which something may be important
relative to the subject’s concerns by identifying a subset of those concerns as constitutive of
her normative self-conception, i.e. of the person she finds worth being.17 A somewhat similar
contrast might then be seen between responses to what is important relative to concerns that
are integral to a person’s normative self-conception and responses to what is significant in
relation to concerns that fall outside it. Although these two types of responses do not con-
trast as sharply as responses to (dis)value and responses to the subjectively (dis)satisfying and
cannot be related in the same way to the contrast between conformity with categorical de-
mands and conformity with hypothetical demands, they can arguably be distinguished by an
aspect of self-transcendence that is specific to the former: In these cases, the subject distances
herself from her superficial interests and engages with objects under the respect of what
bears on whom she actually finds worth being. In fact, this proposal echoes a distinction that
Hildebrand himself draws in later work between the subjectively (dis)satisfying and what he
calls the objectively good (harmful) for a person (cf., e.g., 1953, chap. 3).18 This additional
category of importance is exemplified by things that (positively or negatively) bear on the
persons true interest. It is worth stressing, though, that responding to what is significant to
concerns that are integral to one’s normative self-conception is not the same as responding
to what is objectively good (harmful) for one since what is objectively good (harmful) for
one need not depend on one’s concerns: It may be in a child’s true interest to acquire moral

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virtues even if she has no concern to be morally virtuous. Relatedly, if something may be
objectively good (harmful) for a person independently of her mindset, this further axiolog-
ical category of importance is not obviously less objectionable to opponents of axiological
realism than the category of (dis)value.19 Certainly, it will seem no less contentious in light
of the fact that Hildebrand takes objective goods (harms) for a person to be grounded in (dis)
value.

2.2 The moral value of affective position-takings

Affective and volitional responses to (dis)value are themselves valuable. However, the value
conferred on an emotion which is responsive to (dis)value is not necessarily moral value.
Thus, to admire an artwork in response to its aesthetic excellence is valuable, but not mor-
ally significant. As the same time, it is Hildebrand’s declared aim to show that affective
position-takings can be bearers of moral value: To rejoice in the saving of another’s life—as
opposed to being indifferent toward it—can be morally worthy.20 Accordingly, Hildebrand
devotes a crucial part of his opus magnum Christian Ethics (1953) to specifying the condi-
tions under which paradigm emotions count as morally valuable (cf., e.g., 1953, part II, esp.
chap. 27).
One of these conditions is that the emotion be responsive to a morally relevant value.21
Morally relevant values include, for example, the value of a man’s life and his dignity. They
are not themselves moral values, but possess moral relevance since responding adequately
to them (e.g., in being glad that another’s life has been saved or by willing to save it) can
be morally valuable. Whether an affective response to a morally relevant value is actually
morally valuable crucially hinges on further constraints. Most importantly, it depends on
whether it is suitably related to our capacity for freedom. Hildebrand identifies the capacity
for freedom as an essential mark of personhood and takes great efforts to show that legitimate
ascriptions of moral value to a response are premised on its exercise. The exercise of freedom
is required since the presence or absence of moral value is necessarily a matter of a person’s
responsibility. Accordingly, we must be able to make sense of our being responsible for emo-
tions if they are to become intelligible as bearers of moral value. Yet, how is this supposed to
be possible if we can neither freely engender nor directly control them?
Hildebrand answers this question by introducing the idea of a cooperative freedom with
affective responses. This capacity constitutes for Hildebrand the core of human freedom
and allows us to sanction or disavow affective responses (cf., e.g., 1953, chap. 25). Like
willing, the higher-order position-takings of sanction and disavowal originate in our free
personal center. Crucially, they modify the respective first-order response “from within”
rather than affecting only its expression. In sanctioning a response, we identify with it, while
in disavowing position-takings, we dissociate from them and thereby revoke a certain kind
of implicit identification with them which is in place as long as we do not disavow them.
It is, in fact, only by sanctioning a response to (dis)value that it becomes a genuine case of
self-transcendence or conformity with the call of the (dis)value for its own sake (e.g., 1953,
323). Moreover, and crucially, when sanctioning an affective response to a morally relevant
value, the response is thereby itself accorded moral worth.22
Hildebrand’s notion of cooperative freedom is evocative of familiar higher-order views
of autonomy. On these accounts, for a desire or emotion to be autonomous, it must be the
object of a second-order attitude (typically, a second-order volition) which properly autho-
rizes it as one’s own. However, this analogy is imperfect. One important difference is that
Hildebrand recognizes an important “external” constraint on the second-order endorsement

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of first-order affective responses in that it is possible to sanction only responses which are
motivated by (dis)values.23 Moreover, unlike in the case of the higher-order endorsement
invoked on hierarchical accounts of autonomy, the primary significance of cooperative free-
dom is ethical. That said, Hildebrand’s conception suffers from similar difficulties as the
former. Chiefly, his notions of sanction and disavowal remain somewhat obscure.24 In which
sense precisely are these attitudes supposed to modify the affective response “from within”?
And what types of attitudes precisely are they? While actualizations of the free personal cen-
ter, they are not supposed to be acts of willing in the strict sense of the term, but a distinct
kind of position-taking which endorses or rejects extant responses.
In light of this, it is hard to disperse the impression that Hildebrand’s attempt at making
intelligible emotions as bearers of moral value remains less developed and perspicacious than
the underlying distinction between different kinds of responses to importance. However,
this is not to dismiss it as by and large failing its declared aim. Aside from the numerous
examples Hildebrand adduces to motivate this proposal, he helpfully focuses the problematic
on the connection between moral value and responsibility and thereby identifies the most
difficult obstacle to a plausible account of morally valuable emotion while also pointing
toward novel conceptions of the control we may exercise over our emotions. Hildebrand
thereby lays the grounds for further attempts to work out and defend such an account.

Notes

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References
Cova, Florian, and Deonna, Julian A. (2014). Being Moved. Philosophical Studies 169(3), 447–466.
Crosby, John F. (2002). Dietrich von Hildebrand: Master of Phenomenological Value-Ethics. In: J.
J. Drummond, and L. Embree (Eds.). Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook.
Dordrecht: Springer, 475–496.
Deonna, Julien (2006). Emotion, Perception and Perspective. Dialectica 60(1), 29–46.
Döring, Sabine (2004). Gründe und Gefühle: Rationale Motivation durch emotionale Vernunft.
Habilitationsschrift. University Duisburg-Essen.
Frankfurt, Harry (1987). Identification and Wholeheartedness. In: F. Shoeman (Ed.). Responsibility,
Character and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 27–45.
Heathwood, Chris (2016). Desire-Fulfillment Theory. In: G. Fletcher (Ed.). The Routledge Handbook of
Philosophy of Well-Being. London, New York: Routledge, 135–147.
Hildebrand, Dietrich von (1953). Christian Ethics. New York: McKay.
——— (1969a). Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung. In: D. von Hildebrand: Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung +
Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
——— (1969b). Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis. In: D. von Hildebrand: Die Idee der sittlichen
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Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.

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Meinong, Alexius (1972). On Emotional Presentation. Transl. by M.-L. Schubert Kalsi. Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press.
Müller, Jean (2017). How (Not) to Think of Emotions as Evaluative Attitudes. Dialectica 71(2), 281–308.
——— (2018). Emotion as Position-Taking. Philosophia 46(3), 525–540.
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G. Gigliotti (Eds.). Fenomenologia della Ragion Pratica: L’Etica di Edmund Husserl. Naples: Bibliopolis,
177–225.
——— (2008). Scheler: Die Anatomie des Herzens oder was man alles fühlen kann. In: H. L andweer
and U. Renz (Eds.). Klassische Emotionstheorien von Platon bis Wittgenstein. Berlin: de Gruyter,
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——— (2009). On Being Struck by Value. In: B. Merker (Ed.). Leben mit Gefühlen: Emotionen, Werte
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——— (2010a). Husserls Herz. In: M. Frank and N. Weidtmann (Eds.). Husserl und die Philosophie des
Geistes. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 209–238.
——— (2010b). Emotions and Values. In: P. Goldie (Ed.). Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 475–500.
——— (2013). Acceptance, Acknowledgment, Affirmation, Agreement, Assertion, Belief, Certainty,
Conviction, Denial, Judgment, Refusal and Rejection. In: M. Textor (Ed.). Judgment and Truth in
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 9
EDITH STEIN
Antonio Calcagno

In her Introduction to Philosophy, Edith Stein claims that “feeling is a multiply differentiated
form of consciousness” (Stein 2004, 13, own transl.). Undoubtedly, her understanding of
the emotions may be viewed as a particular form of feeling, but precisely what kinds of
feelings are they? I argue here that, phenomenologically speaking, emotion, for Stein, must
be understood as a capacity for an affective, expressive conscious experience that concom-
itantly operates within the domains of the lived body, the psyche, and the spirit. Emotion
coexists not only as a sign of some underlying corporeal or psychic affective reality but also
as a web or expression of meaning or coherence of sense (Sinn) that makes manifest the
unity of body, psyche, and spirit, what Stein calls the person. Emotions, then, can be under-
stood to permeate and draw upon different, complex aspects of our personhood, including
gender. They express the senses of different aspects of our person and they help us acquire
self-knowledge and knowledge of others and the world.

1. What is an emotion?
An emotion is a type of feeling that is distinguished from feelings that arise from sense
perception, sensual feelings like pleasure, moods, and life-feelings like fatigue. All feelings
have a noetic and a hyletic component (Stein 2000, 158). This means that all feelings have
a pre-conscious and conscious aspect to them. Unconscious or pre-conscious sensory im-
pressions (Empfindnisse), drives, instincts, and even some memories form, in part, the hyletic
building material for our conscious, lived experience of emotions.
In direct and immediate perception, we can experience some aspect of an object that is
before us; for example, we can feel the content of a visual or auditory perception. A loud
bang will not only be painful to the ears but may also startle us. Any sense perception comes
to consciousness as largely being lived in and through the body. Sense impressions, like all
perceptions, are intentional in two senses: We can draw our attention to the very object of
the sense impression that is part of a perception (noema) and can also turn our attention to
our very consciousness of the object (noesis) (Stein 2000, 155). We can analyse, therefore,
not only the elements constitutive of the sense experience itself, but we can also analyse what
it is for us to undergo or live a sense perception. Sensual feelings are described grosso modo

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by Stein as affects produced by certain experiences that include but also extend beyond the
organic operation of the senses and extend into the realm of psyche. She observes:

Sensations of feelings (Gefühlsempfindungen) or sensual feelings (sinnliche Gefühle) are in-

separable from their founding sensations. The pleasantness of a savory dish, the agony of
a sensual pain, the comfort of a soft garment are noticed where the food is tasted, where
the pain pierces, where the garment clings to the body’s surface. However, sensual feelings
not only are there but at the same time also in me; they issue from my “I.” General feelings
have a hybrid position similar to sensual feelings. Not only the “I” feels vigorous or slug-
gish, but I “notice this in all my limbs.” Every mental act, every joy, every pain, every ac-
tivity of thought, together with every bodily action, every movement I make, is sluggish
and colorless when “I” feel sluggish. My living body and all its parts are sluggish with
me. Thus, our familiar phenomenon of fusion again appears. Not only do I see my hand’s
movement and feel its sluggishness at the same time, but I also see the sluggish movement
and the hand’s sluggishness. We always experience general feelings as coming from the
living body with an accelerating or hindering influence on the course of experience. This
is true even when these general feelings arise in connection with a “spiritual feeling”.
(Stein 1989, 48–49)

Moods are described as a general feeling that is non-somatic in nature. Stein distinguishes
them from life feelings and notes:

Moods are “general feelings” of a non-somatic nature, and so we separate them from strictly
general feeling as a species of their own. Cheerfulness and melancholy do not fill the living
body. It is not cheerful or melancholy as it is vigorous or sluggish, nor could a purely spiritual
being be subject to moods. But this does not imply that psychic and bodily general feelings
run beside one another undisturbed. Rather, one seems to have a reciprocal “influence” on
the other. For instance, suppose I take a trip to recuperate and arrive at a sunny, pleasant
spot. While looking at the view, I feel that a cheerful mood wants to take possession of me,
but cannot prevail because I feel sluggish and tired. “I shall be cheerful here as soon as I have
rested up,” I say to myself. I may know this from “previous experience,” yet its foundation
is always in the phenomenon of the reciprocal action of psychic and somatic experiences.”
(Stein 1989, 49)

Finally, life feelings result from the work of the life force (Lebenskraft) in us (Stein 2000, 79).
If our lifepower is diminished, we will feel fatigue, but if it is strong and vibrant, we may
experience our living as full of vitality, and may feel ourselves energised or full of life. For
example, illness will bring about a feeling of lethargy.
The feelings produced by sense perception, sensuality, moods, and life feelings operate
within the realms of the lived body and the psyche. They are largely marked by psychic cau-
sality, which functions like the action-reaction, cause-effect, or if-then structure of physical
causality, although they all can come to impact the life of spirit. Though emotions can draw
upon the aforementioned types of feelings (Szanto 2015, 505–508), they are distinguished by
Stein as having certain unique spiritual aspects in addition to their bodily and psychic ones.
Emotions, then, are not to be understood merely as signs, but as operating within the frame-
work of meanings (Sinn); they spring from the depths of the I and, therefore, are personal;
they help make manifest values and have objects; they are gendered; they make manifest a
self; and they can be collective as well as individual.

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In her Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, Stein takes up the traditional Husserlian
critique against positivism and psychologism by claiming that emotions are not simply re-
ducible to manifest signs of an underlying physical or bodily stimulus. For example, anger
is not simply the result of the stimulation of certain nerves and organs (i.e., heart and lungs)
that produces responses traditionally associated with anger, including accelerated heart rate,
rapid breathing, constriction of the chest, flushed face, clenched jaws, etc. In this kind of
physicalist account, emotions become the signs of a foundational physical process. For Stein,
emotions are complex and also work at the level of meaning. She does not negate the under-
lying physical and bodily structure operative in all emotions, but maintains that emotions
are distinguished from other feelings in that they function within a framework of expressed
meaning or Sinn. Stein gives Lipps’ example of smoke and sadness (Stein 1989, 76–77). In the
direct perception of smoke, one can understand smoke as indicating the possibility of fire.
Smoke directly leads to an association with fire. But when one sees a sad face, one is not led
immediately to the cause of sadness: There is more to the appearance of the countenance
than what the face simply externally expresses. The sense of the sadness cannot come to full
expression in the same way that smoke and fire appear. To enter into the essence of sadness,
one requires empathy, Stein argues, in order to bring the mind of the other to some form of
givenness within the I. She remarks:

Both cases have something in common: An object of outer perception leads to something
not perceived in the same way. However, there is a different kind of givenness present.
The smoke indicating fire to me is my “theme,” the object of my actual t urning-toward,
and awakens in me tendencies to proceed in a further context. Interest flows off in a
specific direction. The transition from one theme to another is carried out in the typical
motivational form of: If the one is, then the other is, too. (There is already more present
here than mere association. The smoke reminds me of fire, even though this may also
lead us to association.) Sadness “being-co-given” in the sad countenance is something
else. The sad countenance is actually not a theme that leads over to another one at all,
but it is at one with sadness. This occurs in such a way that the countenance itself can
step entirely into the background. The countenance is the outside of sadness. Together
they form a natural unity.
(Stein 1989, 76–77)

Stein is applying here Husserl’s distinction between sign and expression taken up in the First
Logical Investigation (Husserl 2008, 183–188) in which meanings point beyond the representa-
tional nature of signs. To acquire the essence of sadness requires an understanding of internal
aspects like motivation (and not only causality), values, personality, self hood, etc., in order to
understand the full sense of the experience of the emotion, all aspects that transcend purely
physicalist accounts, according to Stein.
But how do these other aspects come to be situated within the structure of emotion? An
emotion first comes to expression in the lived body. Some event, words, or thought produces
in the body a reaction. We feel the body responding to such stimulus. As we have seen,
emotions cannot be reduced simply to the status of a caused sense experience. There is also a
psychic component. Stein gives the example of joy to illustrate her point.

Suppose that while I am hearing a report, and thus while this objectivity, “report,” is
developing for me into a series in the current of self-generating intellective acts, a joy at
this report is beginning to fill me up. “Joy,” this unity of experience, is oriented toward

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something “external” to the current. Indeed, it is joy “at” the report, therefore an “act.”
And something on the objective side corresponds to it: the joyousness of the report,
which attaches to it by virtue of its positive value. Like all experiences, the joy is causally
determined: it is duller or more lively according to the condition of the prevailing life
feeling. And it’s also possible that the life feeling doesn’t even let the joy in, that in its
place a feeble phantom enters, in which I very well apprehend the joyousness without
being able to “really rejoice”.
(Stein 2000, 75)

We can certainly understand the emotion of joy as having an intentional object (namely, the
report)—emotions have intentional objects perhaps with the exception of anxiety, under-
stood as free-floating fear—but the joy is not simply reducible to the report itself. The joy
begins to colour, Stein, say our life feelings, perhaps intensifying the very feeling of what
we are living as we listen to the report. We feel more vitalised, energised, and fresh (Stein
2000, 75).
The experience of the emotion of joy, however, not only has a bodily and psychic aspect
(i.e., its effect on the feeling of life produced by the lifepower), but also begins to move into
the realm of spirit, understood as the domain of reason, freedom, will, and motivation:

The feeling [of joy] is motivated by the object that it’s turned toward. The “depth” of
feeling is dependent upon the height of the felt value, and so is the strength of the feel-
ing. The specific coloring of the feeling is dependent upon the particular kind of value.
The feeling is insightfully and rationally motivated only insofar as it corresponds in all
its dimensions to the value. Accordingly, whatever there is about the feeling that is not
“owing” to the value (its greater or lesser strength, perhaps) is unmotivated, uninsight-
ful, and to be explained as merely the effect of the present life feeling. Now you can
designate the impact itself as motivated, inasmuch as the effect that the arising emotional
experience exerts upon the life feeling depends upon its specific character, its strength
and depth, which are rationally motivated; however it’s not possible to construe this
effect as motivation.
(Stein 2000, 76)

The emotion experienced expresses a value, that is, the joy expresses that we hold something
dear or valuable about the content of the report. It is not simply the news of the report that
affects us, but the joy is connected to a value that comes to expression in the report. For
example, the report can be about someone whom we love. Drawing from the work of Max
Scheler (Scheler 1973, 2008), values are objective for Stein, that is, they have intentional,
objective content that can be seized by a subject. Scheler, for example, maintains that love
and hate come to the fore in relation to a specific content: One loves and/or hates x or y
(Scheler 2008, 169–175). A person, and therefore a subject, consciously loves or hates x or y.
Love can generate a certain emotion, for example, the joy discussed above. The feelings that
values generate are different than the feeling of life, sensuality, or sense perception, for they
bespeak a different kind of relation than causality. Emotions can come to express certain val-
ues, but the affect of the emotion and the value itself may be freely subjected to the analysis
and activity of the reason and the will. So, we may understand that a certain value produces a
certain affect or emotion in us, but we can deliberate and either accept or reject (that is judge)
the accompanying emotion as valid or not, correct or mistaken, deceptive or true. Because
emotions can be evaluated and assessed, the affect they generate is not to be understood in

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terms of a strict causal relation of if-then or stimulus-response; rather, the emotion generated
must be understood as motivated insofar as one can rationally assess and judge whether the
emotion and/or value are legitimate or illegitimate. Moreover, one can freely decide to ne-
glect certain emotional responses in us, if we should so choose.
For example, a community can experience collective values or disvalues in the emotions
they generate in us. Values come to the fore as a lived experience of community wherein the
members live in the experience of others; the members experience solidarity: They share a
collective experience of value or disvalue. One can think of patriotic pride, and the ensuing
emotion of joy, for one’s home state as a collective value insofar as members of the community
share solidarity over love of their specific countries of national cultures. Likewise, a commu-
nity can experience collective hate, for example, hate of one’s enemies that seek destruction
of a particular community. History is replete with examples where collectivities describe
their collective loves and hates. Edith Stein often describes her love for Germany, especially
during World War I (Stein 1985, 245). Likewise, she describes the collective hate of Nazis
for Jews (Stein 1985, 25). Values have a markedly different motivational structure than drives
or instincts. In the case of the latter, reason, motivation, will, and judgement, all aspects be-
longing to the realm of spirit, do not come to bear on the expression and push of the drives.
Here, natural causality plays a key role. In the case of the former, reason, will, motivation,
and judgement come to condition and shape our values or disvalues. Motivation, Stein argues,
allows to experience ourselves within a whole web of sense (Stein 1989, 84). Also, it should
be noted that values can and do change as they come under the objectivating lens of spirit.
The foregoing discussion of value was meant to demonstrate how Stein conceives of the
relation between value, emotion, and motivation. The realm of spirit, understood as the law-
fulness of the work of reason, motivation, and will, comes to its fullest manifestation within
personhood. The human person is distinguished from other living beings precisely because
of the constituent role of spirit (Geist) in the life of human beings. Emotions, in addition to
being situated within the motivational structure of value, also express and manifest the very
personhood of a person, or what Stein calls the “core of personality” (Persönlichkeitskern):

Now we come to feelings [emotions] in the pregnant sense. As said earlier, these feel-
ings are always feelings of something. Every time I feel, I am turned toward an object,
something of an object is given to me, and I see a level of the object. But, in order to see
a level of the object, I must first have it. It must be given to me in theoretical acts. Thus,
the structure of all feelings requires theoretical acts. When I am joyful over a good deed,
this is how the deed’s goodness or its positive value faces me. But I must know about the
deed in order to be joyful over it— knowledge is fundamental to joy. An intuitive percep-
tual or conceptual comprehension can also be substituted for this knowledge underlying
the feeling of value. Furthermore, this knowledge belongs among acts that can only be
comprehended reflectively and has no “I” depth of any kind. On the contrary, the feeling
based on this knowledge always reaches into the “I’s” stability and is experienced as issuing
out of it. And this even takes place during complete immersion in felt value. Anger over
the loss of a piece of jewellery comes from a more superficial level or does not penetrate
as deeply as losing the same object as the souvenir of a loved one. Furthermore, pain over
the loss of this person himself would be even deeper. This discloses essential relationships
among the hierarchy of felt values, the depth classification of value feelings, and the level
classification of the person exposed in these feelings. Accordingly, every time we advance
in the value realm, we also make acquisitions in the realm of our own personality.
(Stein 1989, 100–101)

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The personal core mentioned earlier is experienced in two fundamental senses for Stein.
First, it is understood as a depth of the I. Emotions issue out of the I and manifest the depth of
the I. The values discussed previously form a hierarchy based on the importance or intensity
of specific values. For Stein, values that directly affect the person, for example, love, occupy
the highest place on the hierarchy. Second, the personality core is what lies at the centre of
the experience of personhood, which is understood to be the experience of a unity of the
body, soul, and spirit. The experience of these three aspects all working together is what
constitutes personhood. The personal core is the centre of this profound experience of per-
sonal unity. The relation Stein establishes between emotion and personhood means that the
personal is not only a source of emotion but also “colours” the very experience of the motion
in two senses: First, personality has the potential to colour the experience of the emotion
in certain ways. For example, the emotion of joy does not simply consist of the usual bodily
and psychic signs, but it also bears the stamp of the personality of the person experiencing
the joy. Hence, the way joy is expressed by each person also contains a unique colouration
brought to it by the personality. Second, the feelings that arise out of emotion can, in turn,
affect the expression of a personality. For example, a trauma may induce such deep emotions
that they alter personality in a dramatic way. One here thinks of lost love, betrayal, or even
death of a loved one and how the grief and sadness produced by such events permanently
alter a person. Furthermore, the connection between emotions and values, Stein notes, can
convey rationality and irrationality, and the lawfulness of rationality can assist in judgement,
especially in making moral judgements (Stein 1989, 101–102).
Finally, all emotions, for Stein, have intensity, depth, reach, and duration (Stein 1989,
105). Intensity refers to the force of the emotion, whereas reach and duration refer to the
extension and length of time of the emotion. Depth is the quality that belongs to the per-
sonal I. The experience of emotion is grounded in an ego-pole of experience. The I is
often described by Stein as a kind of centre or ground and even, borrowing from Husserl,
a zero-point of orientation. And though the I acts as a kind of base for all conscious expe-
rience, including emotions, the I can reflect upon itself as an ego. In reflection, one experi-
ences the I not only as a kind of centre of orientation but also as possessing a certain quality
of depth, that is, one experiences the very ground of the I as consisting of many aspects
and layers, all of which may not be readily accessible, including passive aspects of the I. For
example, Stein says that in reflection on the I, art of its depth consists of the experience of
self hood, which is understood as a positum of collected past experiences about one’s own
self and life. The self is a collection of memories that one has about one’s own I experiences
(Stein 2010, 111). The self is reflected back into conscious experience and consists of a series
of selected memories that manifest a sense of oneself at a moment in time or over time. It is
a formation of reflection of selected memories.

2. Others’ emotions and collective emotions

An understanding of the Steinian conception of emotion would be incomplete, if we did not
mention how we come to know the emotional experience of another in empathy or a group
of persons, in what Stein calls a Gemeinschaftserlebnis or lived experience of community.
Recently, much interesting work has been carried out on the aforementioned possibilities
(Zahavi 2010; Szanto 2015; Vendrell Ferran 2015). Empathy, according to Stein, is a partic-
ular act of mind that allows one individual to grasp the mind of another, which ultimately
yields knowledge about oneself and the other. Empathy is distinguished from other acts of
presentification, including memory and phantasy; while the latter do not necessarily require

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the content of the experience to be focused on the I, for example, I can remember a pleasant
city of past travels, empathy requires both the manifest presence of the I and the content of
experience of another person (Stein 1989, 10).
How does an act of empathy occur? When I encounter the other, certain presentations are
given to me and brought to my awareness. For example, I may notice details of the other’s
body or face. In an act of empathy, I grasp the content of what is given by the other and I
bring that content into relief, or I compare it, with what I know or perceive about myself.
Taking the place of the other, I compare what the other has presented with what I know
about myself. By bringing what the other presents into relation with my own knowledge,
I can analogously grasp that the other may be experiencing something I have experienced;
the sad countenance of another, for example, may indicate an emotion of grief. I understand
both that the other is sad and what a state of sadness means (i.e., its psychic causality, its con-
tent, the various feelings it produces, its temporality, values, and aspects of the personality
experiencing the grief ): Its sense is communicable in empathy. Dan Zahavi has argued that
empathy is not to be identified with or understood as mindreading or grasping a simulation
of the other’s mind (Zahavi 2010, 286). In empathy, though one cannot experience exactly
what the other is experiencing, one directly perceives and comes to understand the other’s
expressions and experiences. One is drawn into the place of the other and lives the experi-
ence of the other’s sense of sadness; empathy draws and leads one into the mind of the other
(Stein 1989, 10–11).
For Stein, empathy allows one to grasp what it is for another to experience herself as a
living body, a psyche (affectivity), and a spirit (free and/or motivated). In the lived experience
of community, however, Stein defines community as an intense social bond in which one
lives in the experience of another (Ineinandergreifen) in solidarity. Communal relations are
deeply personal, for in them, one grasps the meaning of living in and with another’s life as
persons. In a community, an individual not only understands what the sense or meaning of
the lived experience is in general, but also lives the experience of the group. Stein gives the
example of the death of a beloved troop leader. The members of the troop are deeply affected
by sadness and loss at their leader’s death. She claims not only that one can understand their
sadness in general as well as the individual sadness of individual members through empathy
but also that one can understand and experience the collective sadness of the troop. There
are three distinct forms of sadness that arise in this communal experience: Sadness in general,
the sadness of another troop member, and the collective sadness of the group as a whole. Each
of these forms is distinct and is experienced differently as it shifts from smaller to larger, more
encompassing social configurations. As Stein observes:

[t]he individual lives, feels, and acts as a member of the community, and insofar as he
does that, the community lives, feels, and acts in him and through him. But when he
becomes conscious of his experiencing or reflects upon it, the community does not be-
come conscious of what it experiences, but, rather, he becomes conscious of that which
the community experiences in him.
(Stein 2000, 140)

It is clear from the foregoing discussions of empathy and the lived experience of community
that Stein sees emotions as experiences either of another or of a group that can be grasped
or known. Many questions arise from Stein’s claims about emotions and how we know/
experience them in others and as a group. For example, Szanto addresses the normativity
of Stein’s argument and its implications for the mutual awareness required for collective

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emotional sharing (Szanto 2015, 523). I cannot take up in detail here the implications and
challenges presented by Stein’s views on emotion and its relation to empathy and commu-
nity. All I can do here is alert the reader to the communal and empathic aspects that come to
bear on Stein’s understanding of emotion and how it is experienced and lived through from
the first-person (singular and plural) perspectives.

3. Emotion and gender: Das Weibliche

Most of Stein’s more extensive philosophical writings on women have been assembled in
the volume Essays on Woman (Stein 2013), but it should be noted that one finds other of
her writings on women in her texts on religion and mysticism, in which she wrote about
female saints and mystics, particularly Carmelite women saints (Stein 1992). Much has
been written about Stein’s texts on women, especially by scholars such as Joyce Berkman
Avrech (2006a, 2006b), Sarah Sharkey Borden (2006, 2009), Angela Ales Bello (1992), and
Linda McAlister Lopez (2006). Though Stein often deployed phenomenological analysis
in her treatment of the nature, essence, ethos, or vocation of women, her conception of
women must not be understood in a narrowly essentialist manner: Stein saw the male and
the female as complementary beings that share a common human essence and whose dis-
tinct forms of sexuality constitute different expressions of that very human being; however,
one should be careful not to read her dualist anthropology in an essentialising manner.
Though, for Stein, there are male and female essences, they appear in a plethora of ex-
pressions and forms. Linda Lopez McAllister reminds readers that, taken together, Stein’s
notion of types and her discussion of personality provide ample room for differentiated and
multiple manifestations of humanity, masculinity, and femininity (McAlister Lopez 2006).
Stein also remarked that all human beings possess combinations of male and female traits
(Stein 2013, 118).
Stein’s writings on women focus on three broad questions: The essence of woman, vo-
cation, and education, and especially the education of young women. Stein describes the
essence or nature of woman (das Weibliche) in a variety of ways: As complementary to men;
as a helper; as more empathic than men; as possessing rich emotional lives that allow them
to experience themselves, others, and the world differently than men, who tend to compart-
mentalise emotion and reason; as potential wives and mothers; as unmarried persons; and
as religious persons (Stein 2013, 60–72). The capacity of the feminine for emotion is seen
as manifesting not only a wide range of feelings but also knowledge or insight that stems
from those emotions (Berkman 2015, 2016). For Stein, the unique features of women, es-
pecially in comparison to men, were not to be viewed as deficiencies. In fact, she regarded
these unique differences as empowering and meaningful. She also recognised that not every
woman necessarily possesses all of the essential characteristics she described. For example,
the distinct physical constitution of women predisposes them towards child-bearing, which
makes some women more inclined towards motherhood.
Stein’s view of female education was truly unconventional for her time, a time in which
women’s educational opportunities, as Stein’s own search for a university position in phi-
losophy demonstrated, were limited. She was an avid advocate for women’s equal educa-
tional opportunities. She maintained, however, that because women experienced the world
differently than men—for example, they tend to have richer emotional lives—part of their
education should be separate from that of men. She argued that, as the minds and bodies of
adolescent girls develop differently than those of boys, an all-female learning environment
would free adolescent girls from male expectations and dominance; they would thus be

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better able to focus on their unique attitudes and desires with respect to their future devel-
opment. Though deeply influenced by German liberal sensibility, Stein’s pedagogical model
left room for religion and the free practice of the professions. Her claims about gender and
emotion are philosophically provocative and, as in the case with her views on empathy and
communal experience, they raise certain challenges, especially about essentialism, that ex-
ceed the scope of this article.
Ultimately, Stein’s view of emotion touches upon various aspects of our being, including
the body, psyche, spirit, personhood, value, empathy, community, gender, and education.
Her discussion of emotion shapes a large part of her corpus, from her early writings to her
later ones. As her work becomes better known, the complexity of her thought about emotion
will become more evident.

References
Ales Bello, Angela (1992). Fenomenologia dell’essere umano: Lineamenti di una filosofia al femminile. Rome:
Città Nuova.
Berkman Avrech, Joyce (Ed.) (2006a). Contemplating Edith Stein. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press.
——— (2006b). Edith Stein: A Life Veiled and Unveiled. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
82(1), 5–30.
——— (2015). The Blinking Eye/I: Edith Stein as Philosopher and Autobiographer. In: M. Lebech
and J. Haydn Gurmin (Eds.). Edith Stein’s Phenomenology and Christian Philosophy. Frankfurt: Peter
Lang, 20–29.
——— (2016). Edith Stein and Theatrical Truth. In: A. Calcagno (Ed.). Edith Stein: Women, Socio-
Political Philosophy, Theology and Public Life. Dordrecht: Springer, 227–238.
Husserl, Edmund (2008). Logical Investigations. Transl. by J. N. Findlay. New York: Routledge.
McAlister Lopez, Linda (2006). Edith Stein: Essential Differences. In: J. A. Berkman (Ed.). Contemplat-
ing Edith Stein. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 201–211.
Scheler, Max (1973). Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Transl. by Manfred Frings and
Roger L. Funk. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
——— (2008). The Nature of Sympathy. Transl. by P. Heath. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Sharkey Borden, Sarah (2006). What Makes You You? Edith Stein on Individual Form. In: J. Avrech
Berkman (Ed.), Contemplating Edith Stein. Stein. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 283–300.
——— (2009). Thine Own Self: Individuality in Edith Stein’s Later Writings. Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press.
Stein, Edith (1985). Life in a Jewish Family: Edith Stein: An Autobiography: 1891–1916. Transl. by
J. Koeppel OCD. Washington, DC: ICS Publications.
——— (1989). On the Problem of Empathy. Transl. by Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publica-
tions, 48–49.
——— (1992). The Hidden Life: Hagiographic Essays, Meditations, Spiritual Texts. Transl. by W. Stein.
Washington, DC: ICS Publications.
——— (2000). Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Transl. by M. C. Baseheart and Marianne
Sawicki. Washington, DC: ICS Publications.
——— (2004). Einführung in die Philosophie. Ed. by C. Mariéle Wulf. In: Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe,
vol. 10. Freiburg i.B.: Herder.
——— (2010). Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person: Vorlesungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie. Ed. by
B. Beckmann-Zöller. In: Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe, vol. 10. Freiburg: Herder.
——— (2013). Essays on Woman, 2nd ed. revised. Transl. by Freda Mary Oben. Washington, DC: ICS
Publications.
Szanto, Thomas (2015). Collective Emotions, Normativity, and Empathy: A Steinian Account. Human
Studies 38(4), 503–527.
Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid (2015). Empathy, Emotional Sharing and Feelings in Stein’s Early Work.
Human Studies 38(4), 481–502.
Zahavi, Dan (2010). Empathy, Embodiment and Interpersonal Understanding: From Lipps to Schutz.
Inquiry 53, no. 3, 285–306.

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Further reading
Ales Bello, Angela (2007). The Study of the Soul between Psychology and Phenomenology in Edith
Stein. Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 4(2), 90–108.
——— (2010). Causality and Motivation in Edith Stein. In: R. Poli (Ed.). Causality and Motivation.
Heusenstamm: Ontos, 135–149.
Betschart, Christof (2009). Was ist Lebenskraft? Edith Steins erkenntnistheoretische Prämissen in
“Psychische Kausalität” (Teil 1). Edith Stein Jahrbuch 15, 154–183.
——— (2010), Was ist Lebenskraft? Edith Steins anthropologischer Beitrag in “Psychische Kausalität”
(Teil 2). Edith Stein Jahrbuch 16, 33–64.
Calcagno, Antonio (2014). Lived Experience from the Inside Out: The Social and Political Philosophy of Edith
Stein. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
——— (2018). Edith Stein’s Challenge to Sense-Making: The Role of the Lived Body, Psyche, and
Spirit. In: D. Zahavi (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Maskulak, Marianne (2007). Edith Stein and the Body-Soul-Spirit at the Center of Holistic Formation.
New York: Peter Lang.
Moran, Dermot, and Parker, Rodney (Eds.) (2015). Early Phenomenology. Special Edition of Studia
Phaenomenologica: Romanian Journal for Phenomenology 15, 11–26.
Szanto, Thomas, and Moran, Dermot (2020). Edith Stein. E. N. Zalta (Ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
Zahavi, Dan (2015). Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy and Shame. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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 10
GERDA WALTHER AND
HERMANN SCHMALENBACH
Linas Tranas and Emanuele Caminada

1. Introduction
We sometimes experience emotions as ‘ours’, not as ‘mine’: ‘we rejoice the victory’ as opposed
to ‘I rejoice the victory’. In the contemporary debate, a consensus has been that there is a
sense of ‘our’ that is stronger than and cannot be captured by “‘I (A) feel X’ and ‘I (B) feel X’
and we are mutually aware that both of us feel X”. Such experiences are called (genuinely)
shared or collective emotions. But what makes them ‘shared’ (in this strong sense) as opposed
to individual?
The German early phenomenologist Gerda Walther (1897–1977) proposed a rich anal-
ysis of such genuinely shared emotions, as part of her analysis of an intentional structure of
community membership. In this chapter, we will systematically reconstruct her proposal. In
addition, we will briefly discuss how, if at all, Walther’s analysis could benefit from another
German early phenomenologist and sociologist Hermann Schmalenbach’s (1885–1950) anal-
ysis of the basic sociological categories.
This chapter is structured as follows: After some preliminary remarks about Walther’s
understanding of the modes of experiential givenness and of the structure of the self (1), we
will introduce her analysis of communal emotions (2), distinguishing three kinds thereof
(3). Finally, we will introduce Schmalenbach’s analysis of the basic sociological categories in
order to address the question whether shared emotions are constitutive of a particular form
of social structure (4).

2. Modes of experiential givenness and

the structure of the self
To begin with, strictly speaking, Walther does not present a theory of collective emotions as
such. Her primary aim is to analyze the ontological structure of social communities, which
she—following Tönnies (2001)—conceives as one of the two basic sociological categories,
society being the other. Nevertheless, she characterizes community as essentially based on a
form of emotional participation (innere Einigung, Walther 1922, 34f.). On her account, ‘our’,
shared emotions are “communal emotions”. Participants in a society do not experience their
emotions as ‘our’ (ibid., 33).

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To properly understand Walther’s account, we need to briefly say who are the ones
sharing emotions. The subjects of communal emotions in Walther’s account are persons
(ibid., 13). There are two aspects of persons that are of great importance to our reconstruc-
tion of Walther’s account of communal emotions. First, a person can have lived experiences
(Erlebnisse) in three modes of givenness (Gegebenheitsweise)—actual-present (aktuelle), sub-
conscious (untererlebte, unterbewusste), and habitual (habituelle) (ibid., 12–13, 37ff.). Second, a
person is a unity of two parts—the I-center and the self—both of which are embedded in
her intentional background.
Actual-present experiences are conscious; they are, as it were, the lucid psychological life.
They occur in the I-center, which is the experiencing point of consciousness (der erlebende Kern),
and the locus of subject’s deliberate acts (ibid., 13). The I-center is exclusively individual, and
it is because of this I-center that we cannot talk about fusion of their consciousnesses. On the
other hand, not every experience is necessarily private: The self is not alone in the background
but intentionally and emotionally intertwined with its social environment (Caminada 2014).
As other early phenomenologists (see Vendrell Ferran 2008, 78), Walther argues
that actual-present experiences are only the tip of the mental life (das Psychische), part of
which exists inactually (inaktuell). Walther distinguishes between two modes of inactual
experiences—subconscious and habitual. Subconscious experiences are experiences that res-
onate in the I-center, while the I is filled with other actual-present experiences (Walther
1922, 12). These experiences occur at the fringes of conscious life but can still be thematized
by paying attention to them, like in the case of listening to music while doing something that
requires primary attention, for instance driving.
Both actual and subconscious experiences are present experiences. But present experi-
ences can sediment and transform into an intentional framework in the habits of the subject’s
intentional background, within which subsequent experiences of the same type are expe-
rienced (see Husserl, 1973). For instance, our perception is enacted on the basis of previous
encounters with similar objects of the same type. These encounters are “saved” in habits that
help us in dealing with new objects of the same type: We know that behind a door, there
is usually another room and our habits embody the implicit know-how of how to open it.
Habitual experience persists in the background of consciousness and, under certain circum-
stances, emerges as an actual or subconscious structure (Pfänder 1913, 330) of the horizon of
experience (Husserl 1973).
Following Pfänder, Walther understands the person as a unity of two parts—I-center
and the self. Whereas the I-center is the point of present conscious experiences, the inten-
tional background is the locus of the self and of her habitual experiences (Walther 1922, 14).
Importantly, the I-center is tightly embedded in the self and the relationship between the
I-center and the self is bi-directional: Whereas the experiences a subject presently has shape
herself, all of person’s present experiences are experienced within the context of her inten-
tional background. Thus, how I perceive and emotionally respond to a situation is shaped by
the intentional background I have.
To sum up, a person has an I-point and a self in her intentional background. To the lat-
ter belong also all her habitual experiences that can shape new actual experiences (and vice
versa).

3. Walther’s analysis of shared emotions

Walther argues that communal emotions are constituted by a complex web of reciprocal,
intentionally interwoven experiences (the parts of which are nevertheless not experienced as

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separate experiences, but as one unity). For emotions of two subjects to be communal emo-
tions, they have to satisfy the following four general conditions:

a Both subjects experience emotions that are intentionally directed at the same object in
the same or similar sense.
b They are mutually aware of one another’s emotions in question.
c They are mutually “unified” with one another’s emotions in question (and eventually
with one another).
d They are mutually aware of reciprocating one another’s unification with one another’s
emotions in question.

First, both subjects experience emotions that are intentionally directed at the same object
in the same or similar sense (a). Note that the same object towards which their emotions are
intentionally directed is different from an object as it is experienced, which is part of the
experience (Walther 1922, 25–26). To illustrate, this object is not a stone that is an object in
my experience, but the stone that my experience refers to.
While the object of emotions has to be the same for them to be shared, it is sufficient
that the senses of those emotions are only similar (ibid., 25). A sense of an experience is a
mode through which its object is presented to the experiencing subject. The same object
can be referred to in different senses (Moran and Cohen 2012, 297). What is crucial to
the ‘sufficient similarity’ of the senses of the participating emotions is their coherence. For
emotions to be communal (i.e., ’our’), their senses should be at least minimally coherent.
Specifically, they need coherent motivational backgrounds and ensue coherent actions
and expressions ( Walther 1922, 27). Thus, a team member and a fan of a football club can
rejoice the victory in different senses, but they experience their joy as being coherently
the same.
However, having emotions with the same intended object and coherent senses is not suf-
ficient for sharing them (ibid., 20). For the participating subjects—A and B—can be unaware
of one another’s emotions in question. And if that is the case, their emotions do not figure
in one another’s experiences and there is nothing that would make them conceive their
emotions as shared with others as opposed to their individual ones. Thus, for emotions to be
genuinely shared, the participating subjects have (b) to be aware of one another’s emotions
in question (ibid., 80–84). Subjects can be aware of one another’s emotion both directly, in
empathic acts (which are perception-like experiences of other subjects and their experiences)
or mediately, e.g., via testimonies (ibid., 82).
However, mutual awareness of one another’s experiences that are coherently directed at
the same object is still not sufficient to transform them into shared emotions (ibid., 73). Even
in the most direct experience of the other’s emotions—in empathic acts—a subject grasps the
other’s experience precisely as belonging to the other. Then, if both participating subjects
feel individual emotions with the same object and with coherent senses and if each is em-
pathically aware of one another’s emotion, each subject is aware of one another’s individual
emotions precisely as the other’s emotion and simultaneously feels one’s own emotion as an
analogous, parallel individual emotion (ibid., 74). For them, their emotions belong to two
separate subjects. Therefore, even though mutual empathy to some degree makes B’s expe-
rience part of A’s experience and vice versa, it is still not sufficient to integrate them in such
a way that they would belong to both of them and they would experience their emotions as
“our emotions”. So, what else is needed to integrate individual emotions in such a way that
they are experienced as “our” experiences?

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Walther proposes that a crucial element to the transformation of parallel individual

emotions to shared ones is an act of unification (Einigung). She borrows this notion from
Pfänder (1913, 1916) who presents it as one of the constitutive elements of positive senti-
ments ( Walther 1922, 34, 48; Caminada 2014). Sentiments (Gesinnungen) are affective in-
tentional attitudes towards the objects (primarily but not exclusively other persons) in the
world. Briefly, unification is an intentional, but not necessarily deliberate, act. Persons can
unify both with other persons and other objects, such as concerns, experiences, social com-
munities, material objects, etc. (Walther 1922, 49; cf. Pfänder 1913). Unification is given in
a feeling of unification and of belongingness (Walther 1922, 34, 47).
Walther argues that it is necessary for the constitution of a community that subjects
“unify” with one another. However, they do not have to unify directly with the other per-
son: Their unification may be mediated by unification with some other objects—they can
first unify with those objects and only then with the other subject. These different inten-
tional directions of unification found a basic distinction between two kinds of communities:
personal and objectual. So, here are two cases of unification, relevant to our discussion of
those emotions that are “ours” in the strong sense of the word: A is unified with a concern
or emotion X and B is unified with a concern or emotion X, A then unifies with B because
of B’s unification with the concern X and vice versa; A is unified with B as a person, which
somehow aligns their concerns and then they unify with one another’s concerns.
When a subject unifies with another’s emotion, she takes that other’s emotion (and the
subject of that emotion) into her inner realm (innerseelischer Bereich), her intentional back-
ground. She feels that this emotion now belongs to her, even though it is the other who
experiences that emotion. For instance, when A unifies with B’s grief, she feels that B’s grief
belongs to her; A now co-owns B’s grief. If this emotion endures in A, the object (or subject)
of unification will, under certain circumstances, emerge from A’s intentional background as
an actual or subconscious emotional pattern that will structure the horizon of A’s experience
also according to the sense of B’s grief.
Since unification is an individual, one-sided act, A’s unification with B’s emotion does not
entail that B also unifies and feels that A’s emotion belongs to him. Therefore, a genuine mu-
tual sharing of emotion requires that (c) B unifies with A’s emotion as well. Or, in general,
all participating subjects have to unify with the relevant emotions of all other participating
subjects (Walther 1922, 63).
However, even everyone’s unification with the relevant emotions of all relevant others
is not yet sufficient to constitute a genuine sharing of emotions, because this allows for sit-
uations where A unifies with B, B unifies with A, but neither of them knows that the other
reciprocates the unification. Such a unification of all with the emotions of all others would
amount to a sum of one-sided, subjective communities (Gemeinschaften für sich), but not to
one objective community (Gemeinschaft an und für sich) of subjects mutually sharing emotions
(ibid., 63). Thus, the constitution of genuinely shared emotions requires that the unification
of all participating subjects with the relevant emotions of all other participating subjects is
also experienced as a reciprocated unification (Wechseleinigung, Erwiderungseinigung) (ibid.).
That is, A has to experience that B has reciprocated her unification and unified with A’s
emotion and vice versa. Or, in general, every participating subject has to experience that
every participating subject unifies with all other subjects. Thus, participating subjects have to
be aware of one another’s unification with one another’s emotions (and them).
Reciprocal unification (Erwiderungseinigung) effects a peculiar transformation of the sense
of ownership of the emotions at hand by integrating the perspectives of the participating
subjects into one communal perspective—one now conceives of the other’s perspective as

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part of “our perspective”. Their emotions now entail a sense of belonging to both of them,
which is consciously experienced in a feeling of belonging together, i.e., of participating in
the same communal experiences.
Furthermore, this emotional intertwining affects the background of each participating
subject: On the basis of reciprocal unification the We exists in the intentional backgrounds
of the participating subjects and occurs and actualizes itself in the experiences of the indi-
vidual subjects, in their I-centers (that are exclusively individual) (ibid., 70). Communal
experiences manifest as emerging “in me from them and in them from me, from us” (ibid., 72).

4. Kinds of communal emotions

Walther’s four conditions for emotions to be communal ones can be satisfied in different
ways. Based on these differences, we can distinguish in her account between—at least—
three basic kinds of communal emotions: communal emotions in a narrow sense, communal
emotions in a broad sense, and emotions in the name of community.

4.1 Communal emotions in a narrow sense

Communal emotions in a narrow sense are emotions in situations when the participating
subjects are spatiotemporally immediately co-present to one another and all elements con-
stituting communal emotions are actual-present (ibid., 85). It is important to distinguish
between two ways of how subjects come to be aware of and unified with one another in
actual-present we-emotions. Our presentation above seems to imply that each person first
has individual, emotional response to the situation, then becomes aware of the other’s emo-
tion, then reciprocally unify with it, and then they both feel that their emotions belong to
them together. This is, for instance, the case in Walther’s example of two hikers who get
in touch with each other while enjoying the same landscape and on the basis of this mutual
experience feel that they can trust each other as (at least temporarily) hiking mates. However,
there seem to be cases of communal emotions in which persons experience their emotions as
‘our’ from the very beginning and as the expression of an extant community. One illustra-
tion of such sharing is Scheler’s classic example of grieving parents (Scheler 1954, 12–13; see
also Chapters 4, 40, 45, and 49 in this volume). Can Walther explain how such an immediate
sharing is possible?
The crucial element to her explanation of the immediacy of this grief is the habitual mode
of experiences that we have introduced above. Walther argues that unification can sedi-
ment in subject’s intentional background and persist as habitual (Walther 1922, 39). When
this happens, subjects’ related experiences stream from their intentional backgrounds. Their
backgrounds are interwoven by reciprocal unification with the others and therefore are
co-constituted by that subject and the others. Accordingly, communal experiences stream
“from me and the others in me”. Importantly for our purposes here, such experiences are
not preceded by individual emotional responses and are communal even prior to entering
subject’s I-center. As Walther puts it, “Well before these experiences come to the fore of the
I-point, before they are actualized, they are lived experiences of the community, because
they already arise as motions from me and the others in me” (ibid., 71). This notion of com-
munal emotions based on habitual unification helps Walther capture the aspect of immedi-
acy of sharing in Scheler’s example of the grieving parents.
Schmid (2005, 132–138) has argued that Walther’s (alleged “reductive individualist”) ac-
count is susceptible to the issue of the infinite regress: For individual emotions to become

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communal, persons will have to perform an infinite number of empathic acts about one
another’s unification, and therefore shared emotions will be impossible.
There seems to be a way to defend Walther’s account from Schmid’s objection. Schmid
(2018) notes that he is sympathetic to Walther’s notion of habitual, subconscious unifi-
cation. He takes it to be similar or even equivalent to his notion of plural pre-reflective
self-awareness. Moreover, he is sympathetic to Walther’s concept of communal experiences
based on habitual or subconscious unification, where participating persons are immedi-
ately and pre-reflectively aware of their togetherness. Given that actual we-experiences
can be based on habitual reciprocal unification, actualization of reciprocal unification is
needed only for the constitution of actual communal emotions. Therefore, Schmid must
be rejecting Walther’s actual we-emotions as constituted in the situation step-by-step.
Unfortunately, this response is only partly helpful, if habitual reciprocal unification is al-
ways based on actual reciprocal unification and actual we-experiences. However, Wa lther
distinguishes between two kinds of habitual unification. Habitual unification, as we have
discussed so far, is based on the sedimentation of actual experiences of unification. But sub-
jects can also unify subconsciously in merely growing together (bloßes Zusammenwachsen)
(Walther 1922, 36). When subconscious unification sediments, it founds habitual subcon-
scious unification. Subjects can be unified, live (act and experience) in accordance with
their unification, and become consciously aware of their unification (and community) only
later, when, e.g., their community is threatened (ibid., 36). Furthermore, Walther sug-
gests that it may be that subconscious growing together should be considered as the very
first kind of community the subjects enter (ibid., 99). Thus, it is not the case that Walther
argues that actual we-experiences necessarily lie at the foundation of shared experiences
(and emotions). On the contrary, she is stating that habitual unification is more important
in the constitution of communities than actual experience of unification. Thus, Walther’s
account of communal emotions is not susceptible to the infinite regress (Caminada 2014).
On the other hand, Walther requires subjects’ mutual awareness of one another’s unifica-
tion to ensure a bi-directional sense of sharing that makes up their community. Giving
up the condition of mutual awareness would risk failing to ensure the bi-directionality of
sharing and the communality of emotions. Schmid, who criticizes the mutual awareness
condition, would have to demonstrate how to ensure the bi-directionality of collectivity
without mutual knowledge.

4.2 Communal emotions in a broad sense

Walther argues that communal emotions are not restricted to the situations where
the participating subjects are immediately co-present to one another. First, subjects
may know about one another, or one another’s relevant concerns and emotions, only
indirectly—for example, by reading about them or hearing testimonies of the third par-
ties (Walther 1922, 82). Second, subjects do not have to be immediately co-present to
one another to reciprocally unify with one another’s emotions and one another, since
unification is “primarily based on intentionally grasping the shared object of appraisal”
(Szanto 2018, 97) and does not require direct emotional expressions and communica-
tion between the participating subjects. Thus, in virtue of their communal intentional
background, parents from Scheler’s example could grieve communally even if they had
learned about the child’s death in different locations or at different times, or even if one
of them was deceased.

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4.3 Feeling in the name of community

So far, in none of the intentional acts constituting communal emotions, community itself
has been an intentional object because actual-present experiences do not entail the subject’s
reflective awareness of the community as such: Subjects live in communal emotions in virtue
of being intentionally related in a certain way, without being aware of their community. It
is only when the participating subjects become reflectively aware of their communal expe-
riences and communal intentional relatedness that a new social object is constituted in their
experience: Their community “is objectified as a psychological, synthetic collective objec-
tivity of higher order” (Walther 1922, 97). When this happens, the participating subjects can
conceive themselves as members of a community in a strict sense. Persons can know about
it as a distinct object in the world, they can unify with a community as such, and they can
interact with it (ibid., 100).
The objectification of a community has two important implications for communal emo-
tions: First, it is only now that communal emotions are genuinely of a community as such.
The source of communal emotions in the intentional background is a community instead of
others with whom one is reciprocally unified. This also makes it possible to share emotions
with others without even having met them in person, as of “people who also” (Menschen, die
auch) belong to the same community. Second, based on reflective awareness of being part
of a community, a new kind of communal experiences is possible: Community members
can feel ‘in the name of ’ a community and represent it (ibid., 103). This is evident in every
institutional form of social life where persons are attributed a representative function and the
responsibility to take decisions for the whole community.

5. Shared emotions and the sociological categories

of community, society, and Bund
At the outset of our discussion, we have mentioned that Walther, following Tönnies (2001),
distinguishes between two social categories—community and society. Furthermore, she
argues that only members of communities can share emotions in proper sense (Walther
1922, 33). Let us now briefly look at whether this restriction of shared emotions to commu-
nity is tenable.
Walther argues that a society is constituted when several subjects are (1) intentionally
directed at the same object in a coherent sense (Sinnzusammenhang), (2) they know about
one another and their relation to the same intended object, and (3) they intentionally in-
teract with one another (Wechselwirkung) on the basis of this knowledge. “[Suppose several
persons] build a wall, some of them take the bricks, others pass them on to someone else and
give them to the brick layers, who apply the mortar and place the bricks one on top of the
other” (ibid., 31). Although satisfying these conditions is sufficient to constitute a common
life ( gemeinsames Leben) (ibid., 29–30), conditions (1)–(3) allow that its members are hostile
or indifferent to one another (ibid., 31). In comparison, according to Tönnies’ notion of
community, a feeling of belonging together and inner unification are essential elements of
community (ibid., 33). Thus, in a nutshell, Walther argues that the basic intentional struc-
ture of social communities is conditions (1)–(3) of society plus reciprocal and habitual inner
unification among the participating subjects.
Hermann Schmalenbach (1922) has criticized Tönnies for arguing that positive affective
experiences play a constitutive role in community. He argues that the absence of positive

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affective relationships does not withdraw one’s community membership. On the contrary,
brothers may become mortal enemies and yet they would remain members of the same
family community (ibid., 57). Thus, positive affective relationships cannot be a necessary
condition for the constitution of community, as it is presupposed by Walther.
However, Schmalenbach acknowledges that some groups are constituted by affective ex-
periences. He proposes to introduce a third social modal category “Bund” to capture such
groups.
“Bund” can be translated as ‘communion’, ‘union’, ‘bond’, ‘band’, ‘covenant’, ‘oath’,
‘league’, or ‘federation’ depending on the context. Schmid (2016) translates it with ‘social
bond’, Zahavi and Salice (2017) with ‘communion’. The main source of inspiration for
Schmalenbach’s description was the charismatic leadership of the poet Stefan George and the
movement of his disciples (that was also the blueprint for Weber’s classification of charismatic
groupings). George’s movement had a strong spiritual and religious connotation, which, ac-
cording to Schmalenbach, is due to the fact that a Bund, if taken seriously by its members, has
an affinity to religiosity, as a holy covenant, a sacred pact (Schmalenbach 1922, 41). On the
other hand, every religious grouping is, at its very foundation, based on the bond between a
spiritual leader and his disciples.1
According to Schmalenbach, the paradigmatic example of community is the family,
while the Bund is at best expressed in (male)2 friendships and discipleship: To enter adult-
hood means leaving the family and joining new friendships, i.e. becoming member of a Bund
(ibid., 41). A Bund is characterized by forms of common enthusiasm and effervescence which
are based on emotional waves of love (or hatred) that stream out of the heart, of the soul, of
its members (ibid., 45).
Schmalenbach’s main effort is to distinguish Bund from community. While the Bund is
based on conscious, actual-present emotions, the community is grounded in unconscious
growing together (ibid., 50). Communities are, in the awareness of their members, obvious;
they are given and simply extant. In an actual community, there is nothing like “experience
of feelings” (ibid., 53): On the contrary, something like a consciousness of the community,
an awareness of being a community is “expression of embarrassment” (ibid., 54) and occurs
only when the community is endangered or disturbed (ibid., 55).
There are, indeed, forms of communal consciousness such as the feeling of tenderness,
happiness in the awareness of solidarity, pride, gratitude, etc.; however, the naturally-being-
grown-together and the belonging together is prior to these feelings which are not to be
considered the ground of the community (ibid., 58). On the contrary, “feeling experi-
ences are constitutive for the Bund, they are its ‘basis’” (ibid., 59), the Bund is “made of ”
actual-present, “conscious experiences of feeling” (ibid., 62). For example, the followers,
passionately acclaiming their leader, unite in and are united by their actual emotions and
not on the basis of previous communality. Schmalenbach goes even further, saying that
the comrades do not have to be explicitly mutually aware of one another’s emotions in
question (ibid., 62). Their experience and feelings are firstly “individual” occurrences, not
communal ones, because they consciously choose to adhere to it.3 Whereas the Bund in this
respect is closer to society, once it is established, it brings the experiences of its members to
a grade of fusion (Verschmelzung) that is more intensive than in communal growing together
(Verwachsung) and that removes the kind of separation (Sonderung) of individual experiences
that is essential to society (ibid., 72).
Regarding their duration, whereas communities are characterized by their continuance
and society are guaranteed by contracts, lability, fragility, and discreteness are symptomatic to
the Bund: It consists only in individual, discrete actual-present acts, “in ecstatic, effervescent,

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emotional waves” (in rauschhaften Gefühlswogen) which are constitutively ephemeral. Though
they have the power “to deeply agitate the soul, to completely annihilate people or to drive
them to madness or even to death, [these elective affiliations called Bund] are not enduring.
Ecstasy blows over” (ibid., 73–74).
To sum up, Schmalenbach’s conceptual tripartition goes as follows. Community is based
on unconscious growing together, and it manifests itself as obviously extant and in the expe-
rience of continuance and belonging together. Society is a deliberate formation of individu-
als who associate for a clear goal and thus are temporary bound by a contract for their private
benefit without any emotional involvement. Bund is based on actual-present feelings; it is an
elective social formation to which its members devote themselves deliberately and in total
dedication and donation. This total commitment to and identification with the common
cause expresses itself in the alleged fusion of their experiences.
Comparing Schmalenbach’s and Walther’s accounts, we can say that while Schmalenbach
provides no detailed description of the experiential structure of either community or Bund,
Walther, highlighting the role of subconscious intentionality, depicts a vivid phenom-
enological account of the dynamics of habitual unification (habituelle Einigung) that, ac-
cording to her, are at the basis of shared emotions in the strong sense of the word, as
“we-experiences”.
If we consider again Walther’s four conditions for an experience to be “shared” (see
above), we can clearly state that these conditions, according to Schmalenbach’s own defi-
nitions, are neither constitutive of a community nor of a society. For if communal feelings
are an “expression of embarrassment” (ibid., 54), the occurrence of shared emotions would
be symptomatic of the transformation of the community into something else than an ob-
vious extant community of growing together. The same goes for a society: If the members
of a society, let’s say the wage workers of the above-mentioned example by Walther, build a
team spirit that makes of their collective work something more than the sum of what they
individually have to do to get their own wages but rather a collective enterprise to which
everyone identifies with, then this work team would become something more than a society
and would have some traits of a Bund.
On the other hand, the fulfillment of Walther’s four conditions occurs as soon as the
comrades of a Bund become mutually aware of their common enthusiasm or concern and re-
inforce it mutually. For instance, reflecting on religious grouping, Schmalenbach claims that

the ‘Bund’ blazes between individuals who separately experienced [the same] god as
soon as they meet each other, recognize the common and same direction of their ‘pas-
sionate feeling’ and ‘on the basis’ of it ignite each other (aneinander entzünden): the ‘Bund’
arises only here, and arises through such new ‘feeling’ that, now and only now is ‘social’
‘Bund’-feeling.
(ibid., 63)

These examples suggest that shared emotion is more than simply sharing an experience plus
“an elaborate structure of mutual empathy and identification” (Schmid 2016, 207) but is, as
Schmalenbach vividly depicts it, a shared passion that is inflamed and reinforced in mutual
awareness. It is a mutual igniting each other passions in one shared emotional wave.
It seems plausible that Schmalenbach would consider the emotional basis of what Walther
calls ‘community in a broad sense’ as a derivate from a former Bund. But how would his
account square with Scheler’s example of the grieving parents? Would they have to form a
Bund to share their grief?

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Schmalenbach does not address this example, but he lingers extensively on the example of
marriage (Schmalenbach 1922, 74–84) to show how the sociological categories of commu-
nity, society, and Bund work as ideal types that describe structures that are, in fact, intricately
interwoven. In the case of a married couple, marriage is, at first instance, a traditional form
of legal union. As such, it is a society. However, if marriage is based on genuine love, the
married couple, as lovers, are intrinsically a Bund and are characterized as such as long as they
can keep their passion alive. Moreover, living together, they grow together, thus becoming a
community as well. This means that parents can be, according to Schmalenbach, at the same
time a society, a Bund, and a community if they committed in a legal union and still love
each other genuinely. Nevertheless, being parents of the same child requires neither being
legally united nor (however unfortunate) mutual love. In Schmalenbach’s account, therefore,
parents can grieve together their own child only if they grew up together with that lost child.
According to Schmalenbach’s categories, a grieving can be a genuinely shared, conscious
feeling only within a Bund. This would imply that if the parents ceased to love each other or
are not friends anymore, they could not share such a grieving.

6. Concluding remarks
Both Schmalenbach and Walther, in their account of social community and of social Bund,
attempt to conceptually capture the elusive phenomenon of mutual excitement through
which a passion burns and beats in two or more hearts as in one. When this is the case, the
web of mutual awareness, which is a necessary condition for such a passion to occur, shifts in
the background of the experienced feeling of unity.

Notes

References
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Springer, 195–212.
George, Stefan (1984[1914]). Stern des Bundes. In: S. George: Werke. Ausgabe in zwei Bänden. Band I.
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. [Engl. Transl.: Poems. Transl. and ed. by C. North Valhope, and E. Morwitz.
New York: Pantheon 1946.]
Husserl, Edmund 1973[1938]. Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Transl. by
J. Spencer Churchill, and K. Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1975. [Orig.:
Erfahrung und Urteil. Ed. by L. Landgrebe. Hamburg: Meiner 1999.]
Moran, Dermot, and Cohen, Joseph (2012). The Husserl Dictionary. London: Continuum.
Pfänder, Alexander (1913). Zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenol-
ogische Forschung 1(1), 325–404.

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——— (1916). Zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen II. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische
Forschung 1(3), 1–125.
Scheler, Max (1954). The Nature of Sympathy. Transl. by P. Heath. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Schmalenbach, Herman (1922). Die Soziologische Kategorie des Bundes. Dioskuren 1, 35–105.
Schmid, Hans Bernhard (2005). Wir-Intentionalität. Freiburg: Alber.
——— (2016). Communal Feelings and Implicit Self-Knowledge. Hermann Schmalenbach on the
Nature of the Social Bond. In: A. Salice and H. B. Schmid (Eds.). The Phenomenological Approach to
Social Reality. Dordrecht: Springer, 197–217.
——— (2018). We-experiences with Walther. In: S. Luft and R. Hagengruber (Eds.). Woman Phenom-
enologists on Social Ontology: We-Experiences, Communal Life, and Joint Action. Dordrecht: Springer,
105–117.
Szanto, Thomas (2018). The Phenomenology of Shared Emotions: Reassessing Gerda Walther. In:
S. Luft and R. Hagengruber (Eds.). Woman Phenomenologists on Social Ontology: We-Experiences,
Communal Life, and Joint Action. Dordrecht: Springer, 85–104.
Tönnies, Ferdinand (1926). Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie. Berlin: Karl
Curtius.
——— (2001). Community and Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid (2008). Die Emotionen. Gefühle in der realistischen Phänomenologie. Berlin:
Akademie.
Walther, Gerda (1922). Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und
phänomenologische Forschung 6, 1–158.
——— (1960). Zum anderen Ufer: Vom Marxismus und Atheismus zum Christentum. Remagen: Otto
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Zahavi, Dan, and Salice, Alessandro (2017). Phenomenology of the We: Stein, Walther, Gurwitsch.
In: J. Kiverstein (Ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind. London: Routledge,
515–527.

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 11
AUREL KOLNAI
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

Aurel Kolnai (1900–1973) is best known for his political and moral writings, but he also
chiefly contributed to the phenomenology of the emotions. In a series of papers between
1929 and 1935 devoted to hostile and aversive emotions and, in particular, to disgust, haughty
pride, fear, and hatred, Kolnai presents his most comprehensive views on the affective life
and its ethical significance (Kolnai 2007; see also Kolnai 1998). Scattered discussions on the
emotions can also be found in an early paper written on Scheler and under the influence of
psychoanalysis (1925), in his dissertation Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit (Ethical Value
and Reality) (1927), which is his first phenomenological writing, and in later papers “On the
Concept of the Interesting” (1964) and “The Concept of Hierarchy” (1971).
This chapter is divided into four sections. The first reconstructs Kolnai’s general approach
to the emotions as embedded within the larger context of early phenomenology. Sections
2–4 present Kolnai’s analyses of hostile emotions by focusing on disgust, haughty pride, and
hatred.

1. Kolnai’s general approach to the emotions

“Max Schelers Kritik und Würdigung der Freudschen Libidolehre” (Max Scheler’s Criticism
and Praise of Freud’s Doctrine of the Libido) (1925), published in Imago, is the first writing in
which Kolnai directly approaches the topic of the emotions. The text was written during a
period in which Kolnai embraced psychoanalysis (he was trained in this movement by Ferenczi
and Rank). His aim here is to defend Freud’s theory of the libido against Scheler’s criticisms in
The Nature of Sympathy. Yet, anticipating his imminent turn to phenomenology, Kolnai ends
by praising the phenomenological concept of the mind, as well as its methodology and ethics.
Indeed, he even proposes to use phenomenology for a better understanding of psychoanalytical
issues around normality and pathology, psychic development, repression, and sublimation.
Like Scheler, Kolnai rejects in this early writing a simplistic interpretation of the libido,
according to which there is a single form of psychic energy able to generate the multifarious
manifestations of our mind. Both agree that such a simplistic interpretation would lead to a
flattening of our psychic lives. For instance, applied to the case of the emotions, it would im-
ply that all the different forms of love have their origins in the sphere of the libido and are de-
rived from sexual love and can be explained as such. The simplistic interpretation would also

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suggest that it is impossible to distinguish between levels of emotional depth according to the
hierarchy of the values toward which they are directed (1925, 143). That is, if all emotions
were derived from the same kind of psychic energy, then they would be blind to different
value-complexes and would intend the same type of value. These points of agreement with
Scheler are mentioned in this text only en passant, but they are crucial in light of Kolnai’s later
contributions to the phenomenology of the emotions (see below and Section 4).
Unlike Scheler, however, Kolnai claims that the Freudian concept of the libido already
entails the possibility of making such differentiations in the field of the emotions. Further-
more, still against Scheler, he also considers the possibility that some emotions might be
derived from others, observing that our emotions toward one and the same object might
change, and that in this change, one emotion is the source of the other. According to Kolnai’s
example, the love we experience for someone might transform unnoticed into hatred (or in-
difference). When this happens, the hatred conserves all the passion and energy of the previ-
ous emotion of love from which it emerged and which has now disappeared (1925, 143–144).
Furthermore, he takes the possibility of mixed emotions for granted. In fact, he considers
each transformation of an emotion into another to be a case of mixed feeling, claiming that
though nobody experiences green as the mixture of blue and yellow, green can emerge from
the combination of both. These topics will reappear in his analyses of the aversive emotions,
and one can assume here that it is the influence of psychoanalysis that explains Kolnai’s life-
long predilection for topics concerning negative, ambivalent, and mixed emotions.
Apart from this early writing at the intersection between psychoanalysis and phenome-
nology, throughout the rest of his philosophical work on the emotions, Kolnai embraces the
views of the early phenomenologists. This output comprises his three essays on the hostile
attitudes: “Der Ekel” (On Disgust) (1929), “Der Hochmut” (Haughty Pride) (1931), and
“Versuch über den Hass” (Essay on Hatred) (1935), as well as the later paper “The Standard
Modes of Aversion: Fear, Disgust and Hatred” (1998) written during the 1970s at the request
of David Wiggins as a summary of his key claims about phenomenology of the aversion and
posthumously published in Mind.1 In all these texts, Kolnai employs exemplarily the phe-
nomenological method (and, in particular, the eidetic reduction), distinguishing the analyzed
phenomena from cognate ones, identifying and describing their essential traits, and elaborat-
ing taxonomies. In his analyses of the hostile attitudes, Kolnai also endorses a specific view of
the emotions according to which they are intentional phenomena based on cognitions, which
are capable of disclosing the realm of values to us. In embracing this view, Kolnai echoes
the general idea of emotions as intentional phenomena put forward by Brentano’s followers
within early phenomenology and the Graz School: namely Scheler, Pfänder, and Meinong.2
However, in his texts on the aversive emotions, Kolnai only explicitly refers to such a
view on one occasion. More concretely, in his later text “The Standard Modes of Aversion”,
he refers to the emotions in terms of “emotive responses”, a concept that he describes as
follows:

[Emotive responses are] something closely germane I think to Meinong’s emotionale

Präsentation, meaning thereby acts or attitudes or conative states of consciousness which
on the one hand are clearly governed by an intentional object, and on the other hand
express something like a passion aroused in the self, an impact exercised upon it down
to its somatic sounding-board; in other words intention (Gegenständlichkeit) as linked
essentially, though not in a uniform or unequivocal or causally necessary fashion, to
condition (Zuständlichkeit).
(2004b, 94)

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There are two features of the emotions mentioned in this passage that I will take as a point of
departure to reconstruct Kolnai’s more general view using the references, observations, and com-
ments scattered among his other works. Kolnai characterizes emotions as having an intentional
and an experiential moment, which he refers to as “intention” and “condition”, respectively.
Regarding the moment of intentionality, Kolnai’s view might be characterized by way of
the following three aspects:
(1) First, he endorses a “cognitive model” according to which emotions require cognitive
bases in order to occur. More concretely, perceptions, thoughts, and beliefs present us the
objects toward which the emotions are directed. This view can be directly derived from
Kolnai’s examples: To feel fear requires a perception or a thought (2004a, 36), to feel disgust
toward an insect requires a perception of it, and to feel contempt requires a belief in anoth-
er’s inferiority (2004a, 82) (for similar views on the bases of the emotions, see, for instance,
Meinong 1968, 35).
(2) Yet, Kolnai does not conceptualize the intentionality of the emotions in terms of the
intentionality of these other states on which the emotions are based, but rather, like many of
Brentano’s followers, he understands such intentionality of the emotions as a sui generis form
of reference toward their objects (illustrative of this view is Scheler 1973, 256). In other words,
the fact that emotions require cognitive bases does not imply that emotional experience
might be reduced to them, nor does it suggest that emotions’ intentionality is derived from
their cognitive bases.
(3) To be precise, this original emotive intentionality consists in disclosing values. That is to
say, values can only be grasped or presented by our emotions. Emotions are unique not only
insofar as they are directed toward an object, but also insofar as they present this object to us
as having a certain quality. Kolnai defends this position already in his dissertation, but it also
appears in his text on disgust, in which he attributes to this emotion a cognitive and ethical
function (Kolnai 2002, 67; 2004a, 81). In this regard, Kolnai advocates a “perceptual model”
of the emotions (for a similar model, see Meinong 1968, 117; for a different idea of the re-
lation between emotions and values within early phenomenology, see Scheler 1973, 256).
These three claims should be interpreted within the boundaries of value realism. Value
realism is a term used to encompass a wide range of positions, which claim that values are
objective. Such value realism was widely accepted among early phenomenologists. In this
view, rather than constituting a projection of my emotional state onto the world, my disgust
reveals a certain quality of the object toward which it is directed. Kolnai’s commitment to
value realism is clear not only in his dissertation on the ethical values and in his texts on
the hostile emotions, but also in later texts such as in “On the Concept of the Interesting”
(1964). Here, he claims that while people are interested in different things, the concept of
“interesting” cannot be reduced to a mere sense of being interested in something. In con-
trast, Kolnai characterizes the interesting as that which evokes interest without appealing to
one’s interests (1968, 167–169).
It is in the frame of value realism that we have to understand Kolnai’s description of emo-
tions as emotive response. This idea implies that values are given to us with the sufficient
authority to “call”, “demand”, and “require” us to react emotionally in a certain way. In
this sense, the early phenomenologists spoke of the emotions as “responses”, “answers”, or
“reactions” to a certain kind of object, as “stances” or “act of position-taking” toward such
objects. Although he mentions Meinong here, this idea can also be found in early phenom-
enologists like Scheler, Reinach, or von Hildebrand (see, for instance, Scheler 1973, 256;
Kolnai employs this terminology in his dissertation: Kolnai 1927, 14).

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Related to the feature of intentionality is the idea of emotional depth, which Kolnai
already mentions in his earlier text. The idea of emotional depth, also known as the “strati-
fication thesis”, was originally proposed by Scheler, according to whom we can distinguish
between different levels, strata, or layers in our emotional life: sense feelings, vital feelings,
psychic feelings, and feelings of the personality. In Scheler’s view, each of these strata con-
stitutes a class and is responsible for being directed toward specific value-complexes, which,
according to Scheler, exist in a hierarchy (Scheler 1973, 330). In general terms, Kolnai will
take up this claim as is clear in his analysis of hatred as a phenomenon that is rooted in deep
strata of our personality. However, he will also introduce some refinements of his own.
In “The Concept of Hierarchy” (1971), Kolnai considers Scheler’s model as an expression
of a hierarchical and rigid form of thought, in which some aspects of life, which usually
appear merged together, are isolated, whereby some layers of values are overestimated over
others (for instance, he deems vital values to be inferior to the spiritual ones) (Kolnai 1971,
203–221; see also Kolnai 2004c, 56).
Besides intentionality, emotions are also characterized by an experiential moment. Kolnai
observes that emotions are linked to bodily responses, and that by virtue of these, some emo-
tions are more “bodily bound” (Leibgebundenheit) than others (2004a, 32). Although he does
not develop this point further, it is important to note that this idea of body-boundness is com-
mitted to a specific view of emotions according to which they are phenomena of the lived
body (Leib) and not just mental states accompanied by concomitant physical manifestations
of the physical body (Körper) (cf. Scheler 1973, 398). In this regard, he speaks of a “coloring”,
“accent”, and “quality” (2004a, 29), or of a “fundamental tone” that is characteristic of each
emotion (Kolnai 2007, 100). It is precisely by virtue of this feature that he claims that the
aversive feelings of disgust, haughty pride, and hatred share a similar coloration, namely a
refusal of their object (2007, 100).

2. On Disgust
The first of Kolnai’s writings on the hostile attitudes is “Der Ekel” (On Disgust) (1929). The
contribution is unique not only because, at the time of its publication, disgust was typically
dismissed as a topic of philosophical research, but also because, rather than treating disgust as
a biological reaction or an instinct, Kolnai’s approach signals that the phenomenon of disgust
performs an important cognitive and ethical function. More specifically, with differences of
coloring, all types of physical and moral disgust point to the same quality of the disgusting
and are reactions to certain objects, “which are constituted in such a way that they refer in a
determinate manner to life and to death” (2004a, 72).
Disgust is analyzed in the text by means of a comparison with fear (which, in Kolnai’s
view, comprises both fear (Furcht) and anxiety (Angst) (2004a, 36) (cf. Chapter 34 in this vol-
ume). Disgust and fear are associated with strong bodily reactions; both have the character
of a response toward an aspect of the world; and both display “psychic depth” in the sense
of being able to mobilize central aspects of the person who experiences them. Furthermore,
both display a twofold intentional reference toward their objects: They intend the object or
state of affairs that provokes them and, at the same time, they intend the well-being of the
subject who experiences them (2004a, 36).
Despite these similarities, Kolnai also notes significant differences between fear and dis-
gust. Fear is intentionally directed toward an object that concerns the survival of the subject.
As Kolnai puts it, it is inseparable from the concept of “threat, danger, rescue and need of

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protection” (2004a, 37). Disgust displays an intentionality of a different kind, which, accord-
ing to Kolnai, is more “uniform”, i.e., focused more on the object and less on the survival of
the subject, in part because the feeling of disgust does not affect the totality of the subject’s
existence (2004a, 40). In short, unlike fear, disgust is more outwardly oriented toward the
object and it is not directed toward the self in the same way. Relatedly, there is a second key
difference. According to Kolnai’s perceptual model of the emotions set out above, while in
fear we become aware of a danger, in disgust it is not just that we become aware of some
object as disgusting, but we are also able to grasp specific moments and features of the dis-
gusting object. Disgust is directed toward the intrinsic constitution of the object, which is
grasped in its details. Thus, Kolnai attributes to disgust a cognitive dimension that is lacking
in fear.
A further common feature concerns the mode in which both emotions are experienced.
Both fear and disgust appear to be connected to strong bodily reactions and bodily move-
ments that suggest the avoidance of their respective objects. However, also in this respect,
there are interesting differences. While the evasive behavior of fear culminates in flight,
disgust avoids its object while remaining attached to and captured by it. As a result, Kolnai
identifies a further essential feature of disgust: the paradoxical and ambivalent relation
to its object. This claim—namely that in disgust there is a moment of desire—has clear
psychoanalytical resonances, but Kolnai, at the same time, distances himself from this tra-
dition: While psychoanalysis understands disgust as a consequence of a desire suppressed by
civilizational norms, Kolnai attributes to this emotion a cognitive function that cannot be
explained as an expression of internalized social norms.
On the basis of this characterization, Kolnai elaborates a typology of disgust concerning its
objects and functions. In terms of its objects, he distinguishes between a physical and a moral
disgust. Physically disgusting are phenomena associated with the process of putrefaction, ex-
crement, bodily secretions, materials that adhere to the subject (such as dirt), some animals
(such as insects and rats), the unwanted nearness of the human body, an exuberant fertility,
disease, and bodily deformation.3 Moral disgust appears in cases of satiety, of an unfurling vi-
tality that is misplaced or excessive, in cases of lies, falsehoods, and moral weakness. Both types
of disgust differ in their respective objects, but according to Kolnai, they both share a similar
structure: There is an isomorphism between the physically and morally disgusting. In this
vein, he describes the phenomena of lying and mendacity—which for him are paradigmatic
cases of moral disgust—as phenomena that display a slimy and dirty vitality, which is analo-
gous to the disorganized vitality characteristic of the objects of physical disgust (2004a, 69).
Regarding their function, he distinguishes between disgust aroused by breaking a norm
and disgust aroused by satiety (2004a, 59). The first type emerges after the violation of a rule
that forbids putting us in contact with certain objects that are dirty, rotten, or that might
endanger us. The idea of a surfeit disgust, which is one of Kolnai’s original contributions in
this paper, refers to an experience that in normal circumstances is pleasurable, but in being
constantly repeated, its object and its enjoyment become disgusting (2004a, 63). This might
happen, for instance, when over a long period of time, we are offered our favorite cake every
day, but after a while, we come to think that enough is enough.
The most striking claim of the paper concerns Kolnai’s attribution of an ethical function
to disgust. Kolnai ascribes to disgust the capacity of indicating the presence of an unethical
quality: the morally putrid or putrescent (2004a, 81). The subject of disgust experiences in
this sense a visualization of the process of moral putrefaction of the person. Thus, although it
is not a primary experience of evil, the experience of disgust might point to it. In addition,

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from another perspective, disgust can also play a role in one’s moral life: Disgust can give
rise to moral judgments. These judgments, however, can never be sufficiently grounded to
determine our general attitude toward an object. Moral judgments based on disgust might
be inappropriate, since they tend to lead to an incorrect stigmatization of its object. By the
end of the paper, Kolnai touches on the topic of love as the only means at our disposal to
overcome the strong aversive emotion of disgust.

3. On Haughty Pride (Hochmut)

“Über den Hochmut” (On Haughty Pride) (1931) is the second of Kolnai’s papers devoted
to the phenomenology of the hostile.4 The term Hochmut is used to refer to a specific phe-
nomenon whereby the subject remains self-centered and is unable to recognize the values of
others. The main features of this phenomenon are fleshed out by means of a comparison with
feelings of self-worth, pride, vanity, conceit, individualism, and haughtiness, as well as with
attitudes such as the epistemological subjectivism.
One of the text’s main achievements consists in establishing a distinction between two
different phenomena, which in lieu of a better expression in English I will refer to as
two variants of “pride”: intentional pride (Stolz) and haughty pride (Hochmut). On the one
side, according to Kolnai, there is a kind of pride (Stolz) that is intentional in nature. It is
directed toward an object, another person or oneself. In this regard, we can be proud of
something we possess or something we have achieved, we can be proud of someone and
of ourselves. In either case, this pride is based on the value of the object toward which it
is directed. On the other hand, there is the phenomenon of Hochmut in which, rather than
being directed toward an object or a person, the subject remains self-centered. This kind
of pride is grounded not on objective values, but rather on an accentuation of one’s own
self. Kolnai also observes that this self-centeredness is not reflected in the English term of
“haughtiness” (2007, 67). Haughty pride is characterized by blindness toward the values of
others and by an impoverishment of the nexus between the human being and the interper-
sonal world. Kolnai determines the difference between the two phenomena by observing
that someone who feels proud of something (Stolz) enjoys the splendor of his valuable
things, whereas in the case of haughty pride, the subject experiences herself as the source
of magnificence.
The differences between the two phenomena make it impossible to interpret haughty
pride as derived from or as an extension or generalization of intentional pride. Haughty pride
is not a form of intentional pride directed toward oneself. The two emotional phenomena
differ in their structure. First, as already mentioned, to be proud of something (Stolz) has an
intentional structure, i.e., it is directed toward something or someone, while haughty pride
remains focused on oneself. Second, intentional pride presupposes that we have grasped the
values of the object or of the person we feel proud of. Thus, intentional pride might fulfill a
positive function in our lives, making us aware of the values we care for. Haughty pride, by
contrast, does not result from a comparison between the values of the subject with the values
of the objects and the others; rather, it is an a priori attitude of the subject, which considers
the world to be lacking value (2007, 77, 92). From this, we can conclude that intentional
pride exhibits the typical features of an emotional response: It is intentionally directed to-
ward its objects, based on cognitions, it grasps values, and it is bodily felt, while haughty
pride has the character of an emotional attitude, is deeper rooted in our personality, and
affects how we encounter the world.

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Kolnai elaborates a typology of some of the manifestations of haughty pride. (1) Isolating
pride (Abschließungshochmut) denies the value and the reality of all things that are not one’s own
self, which leads the subject to being isolated and lacking an interest in the world. This attitude
becomes manifest when the subject focuses only on those few things that represent one’s own
self or when one has only a practical interest in them (2007, 77). (2) Haughty pride also be-
comes manifest in the demands of domination and success (Herrschafts- und Leistungsansprüche)
(2007, 80). Think, for instance, of the tyrant whose attitude toward his subordinates is one
of contempt, or those types of the arriviste who fight to achieve their goals just because they
are theirs. (3) Kolnai also considers certain forms of pantheism as cases of haughty pride.
(4) He analyzes forms of haughty pride derived from a person’s ‘inner’ (in)security. (5) In
respect of the value objects of pride, he establishes a distinction between internal and external
pride. And finally (6) Kolnai analyzes some nuances in the conduct of the person pervaded by
haughty pride by attending to how this attitude is related to contempt and inattention.
Haughty pride, as a human attitude, can be combated only with the cultivation of hu-
mility (Demut), which Kolnai deems to be an affective attitude in which the human being,
in comparing herself with an ideal, recognizes and accepts her own finitude, fragility, and
imperfection (2007, 96).

4. On Hatred
Kolnai’s “Versuch über den Hass” (Essay on Hatred) (1935) can be considered the first attempt
to give hatred a place of its own in the phenomenology of the emotions.5 Like other forms of
hostility—such as enmity, rejection, antipathy, disgust, and contempt—hatred is also charac-
terized by a negative tone (Grundtönung) (Kolnai 2007, 100). But unlike those others, hatred
represents and involves the entire person. Thus, Kolnai attributes to hatred “depth” as well as
“centrality” (2007, 101), which means not only that hatred is rooted in those strata of our per-
sonal life that cannot be controlled at will, but also that it fills these strata to a maximal extent.
Typically, hatred is associated with an annihilating action tendency toward its object.
This destructive impulse might be real or symbolic (e.g., humiliation, insult) (2004b, 105;
2007, 105). In contrast to other forms of destructive behavior, the annihilation inherent to
hatred is always for its own sake. Thus, when in fear we destroy the dangerous object, we do
so only because we consider this to be the only way to ensure our own safety, not because
there is an intrinsic destructive impulse inherent to fear. In addition, all the manifold forms
of destructive behavior motivated by hatred are univocal in intention: All aim at the destruc-
tion of their respective objects.
Hatred appears when there is a situation of fight and rivalry with someone to whom we
attribute responsibility and ethical consciousness. The hated object must be apprehended as
significant, powerful, and dangerous. According to its intentional structure, hatred is expe-
rienced toward what threatens and harms us and toward that which we consider to be evil.
As Kolnai puts it,

The intention of hatred is inquisitive, aggressive, propulsive. It impinges not only on the
object as such but on its existential status in the world and thereby on the world itself,
with an eye on its finiteness: the world is, as it were, ‘too narrow a place to hold us both’.
(2004b, 107)

In Kolnai’s view, hatred is accompanied by a demonization of its object, which reveals

what we take to be evil in the world (Kolnai refers to this as the “worldview of hatred”

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(Weltbild des Hasses) (2007, 132). Furthermore, the object of hatred is influenced by biograph-
ical elements. Thus, while disgust is a reaction to an aspect of the world, hatred is not a
response toward a felt value because there is no such hypothetical quality of the “odious”
(cf. also Schmid’s contribution to this volume).
There are two important questions regarding the relation between love and hatred that
Kolnai addresses in his texts on the phenomenology of aversion. First, while the term love
refers to the entire sphere of pro-attitudes, hatred has a much narrower scope (2004b, 105).
In Kolnai’s text, we can find two important observations in favor of the “asymmetry thesis”
according to which love and hatred are not symmetrical opposites: (1) There are more objects
that can be loved than objects that can be hated. One reason for this claim is that hatred can
only be experienced toward persons and spiritual entities, but not toward physical objects.
A second reason is that when we experience pleasure in something—when we like it and
we affirm it—this might lead more easily to love than a dislike might lead us to hatred.
(2) There are also more forms of love than forms of hatred. The ways in which we can engage
with others are multiple and manifold, but the scope of our antagonistic relations to others
is more limited. Only when the interpersonal nexus with others and/or oneself is broken
might hatred appear. The entire web of life, however, is mostly dominated by love (2004a,
35; 2004b, 105; 2007, 128).
A further question concerns the possibility of emotional ambivalence (2007, 125). Kolnai
vigorously rejects the possibility of simultaneously loving and hating the same object and
denies emotional ambivalence. However, he acknowledges that both attitudes (love and ha-
tred) might appear intertwined in the phenomenon of hatred. Whereas we can experience a
love free of hatred, there is no hatred free of love. Love is a far more primary and pervasive
attitude than hatred, since the latter only appears where and when the positive bonds with
the world are broken. This observation already gives us an idea of the possible ways of over-
coming hatred: the cultivation of an attitude of love.

Notes

References
Balázs, Zoltán, and Dunlop, Francis (Eds.) (2004). Exploring the World of Human Practice. Readings in and
about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai. Budapest, New York: CEU Press.
Dunlop, Francis (2002). The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Honneth, Axel (2007). Nachwort. In: A. Kolnai: Ekel, Hochmut, Hass: Zur Phänomenologie feindlicher
Gefühle. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 143–175.

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Kolnai, Aurel (1925). Max Schelers Kritik und Würdigung der Freudschen Libidolehre. Imago.
Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften XI, 135–146.
——— (1927). Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit. Freiburg i.B.: Herder.
——— (1968). On the Concept of Interesting. In: H. Osborne (Ed.). Aesthetics in the Modern World.
New York: Weybright and Talley, 166–187.
——— (1971). The Concept of Hierarchy. Philosophy 46(177), 203–221.
——— (1999). Political Memoirs. Ed. by F. Murphy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
——— (2002). Early Ethical Writings of Aurel Kolnai. Ed. by F. Dunlop. Aldershot: Ashgate.
——— (2004a). On Disgust. Ed. by B. Smith, and C. Korsmeyer. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court,
29–92.
——— (2004b[1998]). The Standard Modes of Aversion: Fear, Disgust and Hatred. In: A. Kolnai: On
Disgust. Ed. by B. Smith, and C. Korsmeyer. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 93–108.
——— (2004c). A Note on the Meaning of Right and Wrong. In: Z. Balázs, and F. Dunlop (Eds.).
Exploring the World of Human Practice. Readings in and about the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai. Budapest,
New York: CEU Press, 45–58.
——— (2007[1929, 1931, 1935]). Ekel, Hochmut, Hass: Zur Phänomenologie feindlicher Gefühle. Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn, and Smith, Barry (2004). Visceral Values: Aurel Kolnai on Disgust. In: A. Kolnai.
On Disgust. Ed. by B. Smith and C. Korsmeyer. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1–28.
Meinong, Alexius (1968). Über emotionale Präsentation (1917). In: A. Meinong: Gesamtausgabe III. Ed. by
R. Haller, and R. Kindiger. Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1–181.
Miller, William Ian (1998). The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pfänder, Alexander. (1913/1916). Zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen, I und II. Teil Jahrbuch für Philoso-
phie und phänomenologische Forschung I und III, 325–340, 1–125.
Scheler, Max (1973). Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values. A New Attempt Toward the Foun-
dation of an Ethical Personalism. Transl. by M. S. Frings, and R. L. Funk. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press.
Wiggins, David (2004). Afterword by David Wiggins. In: A. Kolnai: On Disgust. Ed. by B. Smith and
C. Korsmeyer. Chicago, La Salle: Open Court, 108–109.

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 12
ARON GURWITSCH
Eric Chelstrom

Aron Gurwitsch is an important figure in the historical development of phenomenology.

What he has to contribute to the phenomenology of emotion is limited but interesting.
Gurwitsch ultimately denies that emotion is a necessary constituent of consciousness.
However, the claim means only that emotion is not formally necessary for consciousness;
it may be materially necessary for embodied beings like ourselves. Even then, one should
recognize the possibility of cognitive deficits. The present work intends to locate emotion’s
place in Gurwitsch’s understanding of consciousness. After briefly commenting on what he
says about emotion, this essay reconstructs Gurwitsch’s view of emotions in the light of his
general theory of consciousness. Central to Gurwitsch’s mature understanding of conscious-
ness are his functional categories of theme, thematic field, and margin. Finally, I shall also
respond to Giovanna Colombetti’s critique of Gurwitsch’s view of emotion.
In an appendix to the originally unpublished An Outline of Constitutive Phenomenology,
Gurwitsch writes:

That is the world in which we find ourselves, in which we act, react, and work. It is in
that world that we encounter our fellow human beings, to whom we are bound by the
most diverse relationships. All our desires and hopes, all our apprehensions and fears, all
our pleasures and sufferings (in short, all our affective and emotional life) are related to
that world; all our intellectual activities, both practical and theoretical, also refer to it.
(Gurwitsch 2009a, 411–412)

This establishes two things for present concerns. First, Gurwitsch recognizes that emotion
and affect play an important role in the natural attitude. Second, Gurwitsch understands
emotions in relation to perception. For Gurwitsch, perception is the key to understanding
consciousness.
What Gurwitsch says that directly concerns emotions includes his work on expressive
phenomena and his criticisms of Maurice Pradines. Neither is of substantive interest, so
succinct comment is sufficient. The former deals with phenomena that express or indicate
something other than or beyond what their perceptual qualities entail, e.g., a hand gesture
that expresses one’s anger, or a movement expressing the living nature of the being moving
(cf. Grathoff 1989, 232, 236; Zahavi and Salice 2017, 522; Gurwitsch 1979, 30ff. and 53ff.).

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That one expresses to another that they are angry does not itself necessarily involve anger. It
is indicative of anger, or perhaps only an intention to indicate said state of affairs, in the event
one is being disingenuous or speaking of the past.
Gurwitsch also criticizes Pradines’ idiosyncratic understanding of “passions.” Pradines
defines passions as “passive impressional states” out of which perceptual experiences are con-
stituted (Gurwitsch 2009a, 212). They are distinguished from emotional responses to per-
ceptions, which Pradines believes are additive of experience, where passions are constitutive
of experience (ibid., 218). Gurwitsch ultimately rejects Pradines’ claim that all perceptions
are composed of passions. Such a view is not only misguided regarding the constitution of
experience, but also has trouble understanding the identity of objects with multi-modal
qualities (ibid., 229ff.) and fails to grasp the adumbrated nature of experience (ibid., 233ff.).
What’s more, experience does not depend on eventual affective contact, as Pradines’ account
requires; one might never directly interact with objects in the far distance (ibid., 225).
It is necessary to briefly outline Gurwitsch’s view of consciousness in order to situate
emotion within his thought. Gurwitsch rejects the claims that contents of consciousness are
either strictly externally determined or strictly built up internally from a pre-interpreted
ground; instead, “the percept depends upon both external and internal conditions” (Gurwitsch
1964, 95). Consciousness is understood in field terms, not solely in terms of its object. The
field of consciousness is a product of the interactions between the agent and her context. The
significance of any part of a Gestalt contexture is determined by its functional role. Hence,
Gurwitsch argues, “any part of a Gestalt may then be said to be determined as to its existence by its
functional significance in the sense that the part only exists in, and is defined by, its functional signifi-
cance” (ibid., 121).
Organization is an internal feature of each experiential field.

A constituent of a Gestalt contexture is phenomenally defined and made to be what it is

by the role which it plays for, and the function which it has within, the Gestalt contex-
ture as a whole, that is, with respect to the other constituents.
(Gurwitsch 1974, 252)

What constitutes a part–whole relation depends on a given contexture and is variable and in
a dynamic relation that is subject to modification. Part and whole are defined in functional
terms without statically defined relations. This involves that experience is interpreted within
a subject’s socio-historical context (Gurwitsch 1964, 1; 1974, 8; 1979, §9; 2009b, xxiv).
Gurwitsch understands each moment of consciousness to involve three distinctive kinds of
functional roles relative to the organizational principles at play in a given experience: theme,
thematic field, and margin. The theme is “that which engrosses the mind of the experiencing
subject, or as it is often expressed, which stands in the ‘focus of his attention’” (Gurwitsch
1964, 4). Through focusing on some thematic content, a given conscious whole takes shape.
The thematic field is the “totality of those data, co-present with the theme, which are expe-
rienced as materially relevant or pertinent to the theme and form the background or horizon
out of which the theme emerges as the center” (ibid.). It includes that which is “experienced
to be of direct concern to, and of immediate bearing upon, the theme” (ibid., 381). Finally,
there is the margin, “data which, though co-present with, have no relevancy to, the theme”
(ibid., 4). The margin is also identified by Gurwitsch as “a domain of irrelevance (…) a domain
of contingency” (Gurwitsch 1985, xliv). He stresses that marginal consciousness as such is nec-
essary; what serves that functional role in an experience is contingent in relation to thematic
relevancy (ibid., xlv, 29). Gurwitsch employs the metaphor of a circle to think about these

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relations: The theme is the center, the thematic field is the interior of the circle, and the
margin what lies outside the circle itself (Gurwitsch 2009b, 296).
Imagine that I am grading logic homework at a local café. The thematic field is all of that
which bears immediate relevance to that focus: problems assigned, and instructions; princi-
ples or rules students have at their disposal; proof procedures they are to work with; grading
rubric, etc. The theme is whichever problem I am presently grading. Everything else is in
the margins, the café, its inhabitants, and any other thoughts that might enter my mind as I
grade, for example remembering to pick up my kids after school. If I neglect my grading to
focus on one of those thoughts at the margin, the conscious field is reorganized, rendering
that thematic with grading falling into the margins. What is marginal may become thematic,
“in the margin itself there are structured and unified wholes which can become themes”
(ibid., 270). As such, “marginal consciousness must not be misconstrued as an amorphous,
chaotic accumulation of contents utterly lacking form, structure, and articulation” (ibid.).
Context in mind turns into emotions. Giovanna Colombetti puts it correctly when she
notes that Gurwitsch “does not discuss emotions,” but that one might infer parallels between
what he does say about bodily awareness with what he should or could say about emotion
(Colombetti 2013, 124–125). Colombetti takes this to mean that, for Gurwitsch, emotions,
like bodily awareness, will almost always be in the margins of consciousness (ibid., 125; cf.
Colombetti 2011, 299–300). Given his general view of consciousness, Gurwitsch would have
to allow that emotion may potentially occupy each of the three functional domains of expe-
rience. There is nothing in principle preventing one from making one’s emotion the theme
of experience, but it would not be the norm. One might reflect on an emotion as the theme
of experience. One might experience emotion in relation to the theme of experience, thus
occupying the thematic field. Or one might experience emotions unrelated to the theme of
experience, i.e., emotion in the margins.
Why does Gurwitsch contend that bodily awareness is generally in the margins? He
argues,

we are aware of our bodily condition and of eventual changes that may occur in this
condition. However, this bodily condition pertains in no sense whatever to the problem
situation with which we are confronted and no change in our bodily condition affects
the problem situation. No feature, tinge, or aspect of the theme derives from the actual
bodily condition or is modified by an alteration of this condition.
(Gurwitsch 1985, 29)

All everyday muscular and motor actions are marginal, as are all bodily and kinesthetic mo-
ments. However, he is also clear that

there is no moment in conscious life when we are completely unaware of our bodily
posture, of the fact that we are walking, standing, sitting, lying down, etc., however ab-
sorbed we may be in our mental activity, e.g., our reasoning about a scientific problem.
(ibid., 31)

The body provides a constant backdrop for and orientation towards objects of experience;
it is generally not of thematic relevance as such. For example, we perceive a bird in flight,
not our eye and head movements that correspond to that experience (ibid., 32). While one
might reflect on those bodily moments, they are not typically part of experience. The body
may be rendered thematic, though that is not typical in everyday experience (ibid., 34).

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In sum, Gurwitsch argues, “every particular bodily experience appears, so to speak, with an index
of appurtenance to the realm of corporeity and is thus given as a somatic fact” (ibid., 35). The body is
experienced for the most part in relation to other things: a strain in one’s eye in relation to
reading; the tightening of one’s calf muscle in relation to running, etc.
Further contextualizing the margin as a functional role, Gurwitsch argues that awareness
of the natural world is marginal (Gurwitsch 2009b, 296). Thoughts about the natural world
as a thing, even of most of the things encountered in the natural world, are not prevalent in
everyday experience. They are a byproduct of a certain kind of thematization of conscious
life, i.e., a modification of experience in a reflective attitude. The “natural world” itself is
not generally one’s theme, nor is most of what one calls the natural world generally relevant
to one’s theme. Even if the body is in the margins of experience, that doesn’t diminish its
importance.
Colombetti overstates the analogy with bodily awareness. Emotion cannot generally be
just in the margins for Gurwitsch. Emotions are thematically relevant in any case where
they are responsive to the theme of experience. This is unlike somatic bodily awareness,
which underlies experience but which may lack immediate thematic relevance. The body is
critically important and is ever present to experience, even if it doesn’t always carry thematic
relevance. If I am able-bodied and my body does what I need it to, it will not assert itself into
experience. My emotions, on the other hand, are generally intentional, i.e., about something
I am experiencing, and assert themselves as modifications of thematic content.
A further issue with Colombetti’s analysis concerns her example of danger, given as a
counter-example to her interpretation of Gurwitsch (Colombetti 2011, 299–300; cf. 2013,
125–126). Consider being afraid of a dog while riding one’s bike. Colombetti claims that
Gurwitsch’s view would overlook that “the theme, in the example, is not just the noises
made by the dog, but the danger they signify for me” (Colombetti, 2011, 300). She argues
on that ground that this is “not indifferent to how I feel my body in the background” (ibid.).
Given that, she believes that one’s fear is relevant to the theme.
In responding to Colombetti’s criticisms, one should be careful to note that Colombetti
is avoiding the mistake of claiming that fear of the dog is the theme of experience, even if
she mistakenly identifies noises in the background as thematic in their own right and not
parts of the thematic field. Her assertion has to be that the fear is relevant and not marginal,
given that escaping danger is the theme of experience. In fearful or frightening experiences,
we experience fear or fright in response to something else, and that generally comes with an
aversive reaction to the fearful thing. Fear itself is not the theme of fearful experiences, as
fear is a response to something else. If one finds oneself driving in very dangerous circum-
stances, one will experience fear. But one is still primarily focused on driving the vehicle in
the circumstances that provoke the fearful response. The claim that danger includes fear as
part of the thematic field further makes sense if one considers that danger or fear involves
worry about possibilities, even if felt with a kind of urgency since they are experienced as
near possibilities to avoid. If the above reconstruction is correct, however, this is just what
Gurwitsch’s own position would have to be in the first place. Colombetti is correct to claim
that bodily feelings and emotions “can affect the theme,” but wrong if she contends that they
are themselves the theme in cases like these.
Additionally, Colombetti fails to account for Gurwitsch’s crucial distinction within the
margin between the halo and the horizon. The halo includes that which may have rele-
vance to the theme, but presently lacks actual relevance. The horizon includes that which
lacks potential relevance to the theme (Gurwitsch 2009b, 296). The halo includes broader
possibilities, including the possibility that one might reflect on the object of experience.

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A felt experience of emotion is not the same as a reflective consideration of that emotion,
nor generally does the former include the latter as part of experience. The possibility for
that noetic modification remains, even if it is remote from experiential relevance generally.
One might distinguish between actual relevancies and potential relevancies in distinguishing
those things that are “in” the thematic field from those that are just “outside” in the halo of
the margin. The horizon of the margin includes everything beyond that potential relevancy
in relation to the present theme.
It’s worth remembering that, for Gurwitsch, being in the margin is a function of gestalt
and carries no global implication of significance. Being in the margin of consciousness is a
functional role something inhabits at a given moment. It is not a blanket claim about rele-
vancy, nor a claim to unintelligibility.
Gurwitsch’s distinction between halo and horizon represents a problem for Colombetti’s
criticisms of Gurwitsch’s position on bodily awareness. If Gurwitsch’s view is that for the
most part the body is of marginal concern, he can readily acknowledge that some bodily
moments are in the halo, some in the horizon. The feel of one’s fingers while typing is not
thematically relevant to what one is typing, but may be of potential relevance. Contrast
this with the somatic feedback of my autonomous functions and general body posture, or
the feel of my toes while typing. Those can readily be in the horizon of that experience.
True, circumstances may change, but Gurwitsch acknowledges that throughout. His
understanding of how this might work is akin to Heidegger’s understanding of tool-being
and readiness-to-hand. Thus, if Colombetti wants to argue against the position that the
experience of the body was always in the margins, she is correct. But Gurwitsch gives us a
reason to think that while that’s true of much of everyday experience, there may be a range
of everyday experiences for which the body’s state of affairs presents itself in the thematic
field, e.g., attending to hygiene. In either case, Gurwitsch gives strong reasons to think the
body is not generally thematic in experience.
To conclude, Gurwitsch’s understanding of emotion must be understood in relation to
how he understands the functional roles that constitute the field of consciousness. Generally
speaking, emotions will either occupy the thematic field or the margins of experience, de-
pending on their relation to the theme of experience, and it will be unusual for emotion to
be the theme of experience, except perhaps where one reflects on emotions in experience. If
I’m focused on teaching in order to set aside my grief for a tragic personal loss at the moment,
I render my grief to the margins. That doesn’t mean it lacks importance or won’t return to
my attentions later. Similarly, consider how some task requires us to do this. I might have to
focus on my driving and push strong emotions aside so as not to present a danger to myself
and others. If I cannot do so, I should acknowledge that my emotion’s urgency is such that
I ought not attempt driving or teaching. None of that is problematic in any global sense.
Emotion while perhaps not necessary for consciousness itself may be a necessary feature for
beings like us. Its place in our lives varies according the significance it bears in relation to the
thematic concern of our experience at a given moment, and that thematic concern is subject
to modification at any time.
It should be noted that Gurwitsch is not only concerned with emotion in the individ-
ual case but also offers some contribution to our understanding of emotion in collective
cases. Contrary to Gerda Walther (Walther 1923; see Chapter 10 in this volume), Gurwitsch
does not accept that all forms of community with others are founded on positive sentiment
(Gurwitsch 1979, 119–122). And yet, contrary to Margaret Gilbert (Gilbert 1996, 18f.; see
Chapter 40 in this volume), Gurwitsch also rejects the idea that emotional or affective con-
tent plays no constitutive role in forms of sociality (Chelstrom 2016).

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Gurwitsch accepts that there is a plurality of possible social forms of life. Each form has
its own constitutive character; in some, emotional content plays a co-constitutive role in
the formation of that form of sociality; in others, emotional content plays no constitutive
role. Forms of togetherness like friendships will be constituted, in part, by shared positive
emotional content that is directed towards the other party to the relation. While a group
might come to collectively experience negative emotions towards others, as happens in cases
of xenophobic reactions groups associated with traumatic events, groups can also be consti-
tuted by or around negative emotional contents directed toward others, e.g., hate groups (see
Chapter 41 in this volume). Again, Gurwitsch also argues that not all forms of sociality are
constituted with emotive content, for example being co-workers in a business environment.
One need not feel any particular way about one’s co-workers, or the group that is a com-
pany, particularly about those whose roles in the group do not intersect with the functional
dimensions of one’s own role within the group.
These positions are consistent applications of his general understanding of the functional
roles constitutive of conscious life. Emotions may be thematic of our collective experiences,
as in a case where our collective attention is on our shared feeling. Emotions may be part of
the thematic field, where it is materially relevant to the object of our shared experience, but
not itself the object of our shared experience. Or they may be shared in the margins, func-
tioning as background dimensions of our experiences that lack immediate relevance to the
thematic focus of our collective intention or action.

References
Chelstrom, Eric (2016). Gurwitsch and the Role of Emotion in Collective Intentionality. In: T.
Szanto, and D. Moran (Eds.). Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’. London, New York:
Routledge, 248–262.
Colombetti, Giovanna (2011). Varieties of Pre-Reflective Self-Awareness: Foreground and Background
Bodily Feelings in Emotion Experience. Inquiry 54(3), 293–313.
——— (2013). The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gilbert, Margaret (1996). Living Together. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Grathoff, Richard (Ed.) (1989). Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron
Gurwitsch, 1939–1959. Transl. by J. C. Evans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gurwitsch, Aron (1964). The Field of Consciousness. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
——— (1974). Phenomenology and the Theory of Science. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
——— (1979). Human Encounters in the Social World. Ed. by A. Métraux, and transl. by F. Kersten.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
——— (1985). Marginal Consciousness. Ed. by Lester Embree. Athens: Ohio University Press.
——— (2009a). The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901–1973), vol. I. Ed. by J. García-Gómez.
Dordrecht: Springer.
——— (2009b). The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901–1973), vol. II. Ed. by F. Kersten.
Dordrecht: Springer.
Walther, Gerda (1923). Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und
phänomenologische Forschung VI, 1–158.
Zahavi, Dan, and Salice, Alessandro (2017). Phenomenology of the We: Stein, Walther, Gurwitsch. In:
Julian Kiverstein (Ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind. London: Routledge,
515–527.

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 13
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Anthony Hatzimoysis

1. Introduction
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) wrote one of the first philosophical treatises of the 20th
century to bear the word ‘emotion’ on its title. Published in 1939, the Sketch for a Theory of
the Emotions culminates in an extended “Outline for a Phenomenological Theory”, whose
aim is to do justice to the signification of the emotion, by revealing which aspects of reality
are signified, in what way, and to what purpose, when one is emotionally engaged with
the world.
I shall offer an overview of the Sartrean theory of emotion, focusing mainly on the
account delineated in the Sketch. My overview will draw as well on certain texts imme-
diately preceding and following that monograph, so as to provide a more rounded pic-
ture of the Sartrean theory. Those texts, as their subtitles emphasize, are placed under the
heading of phenomenology. They include three books: The Transcendence of the Ego: Outline
of a Phenomenological Description (1937), The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the
Imagination (1940), and Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (1943). To
those books, we should add a seminal article, composed around 1934: “A Fundamental Idea
of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality”.
Reading the Sketch in the midst of those works might help us avoid two misunderstand-
ings. One is to think that Sartre overlooks affective phenomena which could not be easily
identified as emotions. The other is to assume that what Sartre says about emotions is in-
tended to apply to all types of affective phenomena.
Another preliminary remark is due regarding the relation of the Sartrean theory to
the phenomenological tradition. It might be thought that Sartre’s interest in emotion
arose through his reading of some classic phenomenological texts, which include im-
portant ideas about the nature of affective experience. Given that Sartre begun drafting
his views about emotion around the time of studying those texts, it is not unreason-
able to hypothesize that his theory builds upon the views encountered in Husserl’s
texts, elaborated with a pragmatist twist, found in Heidegger’s work; that hypothesis,
though, is i naccurate. Let me recount some pertinent facts about Sartre’s reception of
phenomenology.

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2. Sartre’s encounter with phenomenology

The Sketch is a product of Sartre’s systematic work on conscious activity in its perceptual,
conceptual, imaginative, and affective exemplifications. That work began to acquire its shape
around 1934, when Sartre studied in the original Edmund Husserl’s published monographs,
including the Logical Investigations, the Lectures on Inner Time Consciousness, the Ideas, and
the Cartesian Mediations. However, Sartre’s reading of Husserl should be placed in a proper
context, if we are to appreciate both Sartre’s serious debt to the Husserlian opus and the
originality of Sartre’s reconception of the practice and range of phenomenological inquiry.
My understanding of that issue is that while Sartre’s encounter with phenomenology was
an eye-opening experience, the way he read—or, arguably, misread—Husserl’s own work,
depended heavily on the intellectual concerns that occupied Sartre before that encounter,
and which subsequently flourished thanks to Sartre’s unique talent of making lived experi-
ence resonate through even some of the most demanding pieces of philosophical writing (the
“Introduction” of Being Nothingness is a case in point).
From September 1933 to June 1934, Sartre is a visiting researcher at the Institute
Français in Berlin, with a view to explore, as stated in his candidature dossier, “the rela-
tions of the psychological to the physical”. That project was to develop an issue already
discussed in Sartre’s 1927 dissertation on “The Image in Psychological Life: Its Role and
Nature”. Hence, when Sartre embarks on the study of Husserlian phenomenology, he is
already familiar with some of the research in the analysis of consciousness, mainly from
three sources. The first is the attendance to the fluid character of human experience,
intuitively given to the first-person perspective, as detailed in Bergson’s writings. The
second is the field of cognitive psychological experiments, especially on perceptual and
imaginative processes, for which Sartre would frequently volunteer as a subject. The third
is the domain of pathological phenomena, about which he read in Karl Jaspers’ Allgemeine
Psychopathologie, and in which he kept a live interest during the 1930s, as testified by his
regular visits, as an observer, at a major clinic in Paris, St Anne’s Psychiatric Hospital.
Even more prominent than the scientific approach to psychological events, though, was
Sartre’s preoccupation with the narrative understanding of human experience. That preoccu-
pation bared two fruits. The first was a series of essays on the work of Sartre’s favorite novelists:
“With the American writers, with Kaf ka and with Camus in France, the contemporary novel
has found its style” (1947, 220). The theme that runs through those essays is how consciousness
lives its body through one’s interaction with both the human and the inanimate world.
The second fruit was the completion of Sartre’s first novel—and one of the most widely
read works of 20th-century literature—whose subject matter is an affective phenomenon:
Nausea (1938).

3. Affectivity in Nausea
Although it used to be taken as the entry point to Sartre’s thought, Nausea does not figure
large in contemporary discussions of Sartre’s philosophy. That is to an extent justified by the
need to keep separate things which should not be confused, such as prose fiction and rigorous
argumentation. However, when it comes to the Sartrean view of emotion, Nausea remains
an invaluable source of insights into the phenomenology of affective experience. We may
restate, in summary form, some of those insights as follows.
As experienced by the subject, the qualities characteristic of an emotional experience are
not freak mental occurrences, sprung up without reason, and which are then spread out onto

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a neutral world; rather, during an affective experience, it is a value loaded world that comes
in contact with the affected subject:

Now I see; I remember better what I felt the other day on the sea-shore when I was
holding that pebble. It was a sort of sweet disgust. How unpleasant it was! And it came
from the pebble, I am sure of that, it passed from the pebble into my hands. Yes, that’s
it, that’s exactly it: a sort of nausea in the hands.
(1938, 22)

The affective state is not some internal affair, cut off from the external world, since it en-
compasses elements of the experienced environment. Two features of surrounding objects
are particularly pronounced in the affective experience recounted in the novel: colors and
contours—here is a characteristic extract: The bartender

is in shirt-sleeves with mauve braces (…) which can scarcely be seen against the blue
shirt; they are (…) buried in the blue, but this is false modesty; in fact they won’t
allow themselves to be forgotten, they annoy me with their sheep-like stubbornness,
as if setting out to become purple, they had stopped somewhere on the way without
giving up their pretensions (…) His blue cotton shirt stands out cheerfully against a
chocolate-colored wall. That too brings on the nausea. Or rather it is the nausea. The
nausea isn’t inside me: I can feel it over there on the wall, on the braces, everywhere
around me.
(1938, 34–35)

Sartre appears to push that thought to its anti-subjectivist extreme. In a reversal of traditional
priorities, the novel’s hero denies that the affective state dwells inside himself: Nausea “is one
with the café, it is I whom am inside it” (1938, 35).
Of particular significance for the subsequent development of Sartre’s theory of emotion is
the way that the novel’s hero responds to the onset of nausea:

It is out of laziness, I suppose that the world looks the same day after day. Today it
seemed to want to change. And in that case anything, anything could happen (…) An
absolute panic took hold of me (…) [But] as long as I could fix objects nothing would
happen: I looked at as many as I could (…) my eyes went rapidly from one to the other
to catch them out and stop them in the middle of their metamorphosis (…) I tried to
reduce them to their everyday appearance by the power of my gaze.
(1938, 114–115)

It might be thought that trying to affect the constitution of things, or to halt oncoming
events “by the power of one’s gaze”, is not sensible, since it is nothing sort of relying on
magic. And yet, as we shall see, that involvement of magic into the constitution of an emo-
tional experience is a crucial aspect of the phenomenological account of emotion that Sartre
will draw in the Sketch.
Another phenomenon explored in the novel is that of feeling something as felt by others,
even when that is as unusual an intentional object as a particular stretch of time:

I could feel the afternoon all through my heavy body. Not my afternoon, but theirs, the
one thousand citizens of Bouville were going to live in common. At this moment, after

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their long copious dinner, they were getting up from the table and for them something
had died. Sunday had spent its light-hearted youth.
(1938, 76–77)

The narration of such experiences brings to the fore the elusive character of what—in con-
temporary philosophical literature—goes by the name of ‘atmosphere’:

I don’t like these peculiar days: the cinemas put on matinees, the school-children have
the day off; there is a vague holiday feeling in the streets which never stops appealing for
your attention but disappears as soon as you take any notice of it.
(1938, 91)

It is worth mentioning, finally, one out of the several instances of the narrative’s attention to
certain aspects of cognitive phenomenology: “if only I could stop thinking, that would be
something of an improvement. Thoughts are the dullest things on earth (…) They stretch out
endlessly and they leave a funny taste in the mouth” (1938, 144).
Nausea offers a vivid narration of affective phenomenology, in the sense of what it is like
for a subject to have an affective experience. However, Sartre is also intent to articulate
a phenomenology of the affective, in the sense of a systematic analysis of the structure of
consciousness during an emotional episode. Let us see the main elements of that phenome-
nological analysis.

4. Aims and methods of phenomenological analysis

The philosophy of Sartre is characterized by certain methodological and conceptual distinc-
tions, which inform his analysis of emotions. Methodologically, Sartre highlights the im-
portance of the perspective from which an affective phenomenon is approached, for example
whether our outlook is that of an involved agent, or of a disengaged observer. Conceptually,
he works with different modalities of conscious awareness, such as unreflective versus reflec-
tive, positional versus non-positional, and thetic versus non-thetic, whose distinct character
helps us capture what is distinctive about the different ways in which one is affectively related
to the world.
Blurring the limits between different notions of consciousness, or running together meth-
odological standpoints that are clearly different, is an error whose frequency in the history
of philosophy is not coincidental. According to Sartre, that theoretical error has important
practical implications, since it sustains a picture of the human being as a passive spectator
of psychological events for which he cannot hold himself accountable. On the contrary,
Sartre brings questions of accountability to the forefront of his phenomenological agenda,
by approaching affectivity in terms of how one responds to the demands and affordances of
a situation; he thus invites us to look at an emotional episode in light of a subject’s affective
project. To take a rather simple case: In having a headache, “I can discover in myself an in-
tentional affectivity directed toward my pain in order to ‘suffer’, in order to accept it with
resignation, or in order to reject it, in order to value it (…) in order to escape it” (1943, 356).
What constitutes the emotional aspect of each of those experiences, what the subject himself
experiences as an instance of resignation, or of despair, or of pride—or, more accurately, of
proud suffering—is not the ache as such, localized in the head, but how one engages with
it; and that engagement is part of (and thus can only be made intelligible in light of ) the
subject’s fundamental project—what he makes himself to be in and through the way he

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responds to the givens of his situation (1943, Part I, chap. 2; Part II, chap. 1; cf. Barnes 1984;
Cabestan 2004).
The normative character of each person’s fundamental project is evident not only in
the way the person responds emotionally to his situation, but also in the way he himself
conceives of that response. The traditional conception of emotional response is as the
manifestation of psychical forces that live in mind’s netherworld. Affective states sup-
posedly lie dormant in one’s psyche, waiting for an external trigger that would let them
loose, hence the grammar of passive voice (‘my anger was triggered …’, or ‘my hate was
awakened …’, etc.), and the literature on the human heart as a field of untamed forces,
which move independently of each other, pushing around the human subject, which is
sometimes successfully, sometimes vainly, trying to resist their power; the most a subject
can do is watch, record, or ruminate about the upheavals, the turbulences, and the trib-
ulations of those states. That conception casts affectivity as an internal, self-referential
occurrence, disengaged from the world: It, thus, results in a misrepresentation of lived
experience, which is actually an unceasing engagement with a value-laden world (cor-
recting that misconception is one of the primary aims of existential psychoanalysis; cf.
Sartre 1943, 578–595). A phenomenological account needs to reestablish our connection
to reality, by achieving two explanatory ends: (i) It ought to show how exactly in an
emotional episode our consciousness finds itself out there, in a welcoming, or menacing,
in a joyful, or horrible world (Sartre 1934, 44), and (ii) it should do justice to the ways
we are both affected by, and effecting changes to a situation (Sartre 1939, 40–52). That
double aim partly accounts both for the richness and the tensions that characterize the
Sartrean approach.

5. Consciousness and the structure of the affective domain

Sartre’s phenomenological account begins at the plane of affective experience before one’s
reflection upon, and theorizing about, that experience takes off. Pre-reflective consciousness is
the ordinary consciousness of objects in the world; reflective consciousness is the conscious-
ness of being conscious of an object. Pre-reflective consciousness is a positional consciousness
of a certain object, in the sense that consciousness posits, sets before itself, the object as a
target of its intentional activity. However, when one is positionally conscious of a particular
object, one is non-positionally conscious of being conscious of that object. Pre-reflective
consciousness is thus non-positionally aware of itself as being directed towards its objects.
For Sartre, every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional
consciousness of itself (1937, 9–16; 1943, 9–12).
When we think and talk about our experience, the life of consciousness is represented
under certain headings, such as ‘qualities of character’, ‘physical acts’, and ‘affective states’
(1937, 21–26). Those headings impose some order into past conscious experience, trans-
forming continuous instances of conscious activity into isolable states. However, according
to Sartre, this picture presents conscious experience the wrong way round. In reality, what
comes first is the conscious activity directed at the world; the psychological state follows,
as the outcome of grouping—by means of reflection—several activities under one heading.
That grouping generates psychological categories that transcend consciousness, in the sense
that those states appear as fixed entities with set boundaries, which share nothing of the fluid
and luminous character of conscious experience. Those transcendent psychological states
are then erroneously conceived as pre-existing members of one psychological whole, which
embraces and governs every aspect of our conscious life.

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Sartre asserts that affective states make their appearance when one reflects on one’s past
mental or physical activities, on one’s actions, judgments, or feelings. Take, for instance, the
relation between the feeling of lust and the state of love. Feeling lust at the sight of a partic-
ular person is an experience absorbed with the attractive qualities of that individual. Expe-
rienced as a direct engagement with the world, the upheaval of a particular feeling towards
someone marks the intentional connection between my consciousness and that being. The
feeling of lust is a conscious activity occurring instantaneously or through a limited time
span, and one that meets Sartre’s absolute principle of consciousness, i.e., to be an instant of
lust and to feel as an instant of lust are one and the same thing: There is no gap within the
‘consciousness (of ) lust’ between appearing and being (1937, 22–23).
The genitive construction ‘consciousness (of ) lust’ might give the impression that in
the course of ordinary encounter with the world, there is a thing called ‘lust’ to which
consciousness pays attention. That interpretation is misleading. Lust is not an object for
consciousness; it is consciousness itself as it experiences its intentional object. The genitive
participle ‘of ’ is put in brackets so as to signal that the grammatical construction purports
to characterize what a particular consciousness is (namely, lust), not what the consciousness
is about (its intentional object, the particular person who has arrested my sexual attention).
However, if we were to move from the level of emotional encounter with the world, to
the higher level of reflection upon that type of encounter, our consciousness could take in its
purview the emotion-consciousness. At that level, lust or other emotional experiences would
themselves become an object of conscious examination and, thus, the locution ‘conscious-
ness of lust’ (free of internal brackets) would denote the second-order activity of (reflective)
consciousness focusing upon its (pre-reflective) conscious activities. The confusion of the
first-order level of the (lustful, despairing, or joyous) experience of the world, with the
second-order level of the consideration of such an experience by the (reflective) subject is a
major source of difficulties for the adequate analysis of affective phenomena.
A feeling, according to Sartrean phenomenology, is a distinct manner in which con-
sciousness is directed at the world, while a state is the reflective product of consciousness’
taking purview of its past activities. To the activity of feelings, we may contrast the passivity
of states. Affectivity is first and foremost a consciousness, and all consciousness is directed at
an object. Sartre’s account of feeling is premised on those two claims. “Feelings have special
intentionalities”, they represent a way of consciousness’ transcending itself toward the world.
“To hate Paul is to intend Paul as a transcendent object of consciousness” (1940, 69). Or, as
Sartre put it in his very first essay on phenomenology, affective consciousnesses are ways of
“discovering the world” (1934, 45).

6. Emotion, meaning, and function

Feelings and psychical states form an important part of our affectivity. They have not, though,
attracted as much attention, nor have they enjoyed so detailed philosophical exploration, as
emotional episodes. Sartre’s account of emotions is justly celebrated for the original and in-
genious way it attempts to account for the significance of emotion. Emotion for Sartre is not
an optional clog of mental machinery that can be added to, or subtracted from the traditional
list of psychological faculties; nor is emotion an aggregate of various parts—physiological,
conceptual, perceptual, volitional—each of which has a fixed meaning, identifiable inde-
pendently from what goes on in the rest of the agent’s conscious engagement with reality.
Rather, emotion for Sartre is the synthetic totality of a human being in a situation: “it is that
human reality itself, realizing itself in the form of ‘emotion’” (1939, 12).

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In the Sketch, Sartre presents emotion as the conscious transformation, by means of one’s
body, of a situation: What changes is how the world is experienced by the subject and, con-
sequently, how the subject responds to a thus transformed world (1939, 34–61). The world
is understood as a totality of phenomena linked in a network of mutual references. The way
in which each phenomenon relates to others defines the type of world encountered by the
subject. We should, thus, distinguish between at least two worlds: the world of action and
the world of emotion (1939, 74–78). In the former, we experience reality as a combination
of demands and affordances; the link between them is itself perceived as governed by deter-
ministic processes between causes and effects. The instrumental world of action is captured
in the pragmatic intuition of the situation that makes certain moves available for the subject,
while denying him others. The emotional apprehension of the world, on the other hand,
hooks on to those qualities or aspects that carry affective meaning for the agent. The joyful,
hateful, or bleak world, far from being identical to the word of action, is clearly distinguished
from the instrumental world. What appears to bring forth the emotional stance towards the
world is that the situation presents the agent with demands that he is unable to meet—and
his emotional response (be it joyous, angry, or sad) consists in a pattern of cognitive and
physiological changes which reduce the urgency, lower the intensity, or neutralize the force
of those demands.
The Sketch purports to analyze affectivity in terms of the functions served by our emotive
reactions to a situation: “We cannot understand an emotion unless we look for its signifi-
cation. And this, by its nature, is of a functional order. We are therefore led to speak of the
finality of emotions” (1939, 28). Faced with a situation that makes strong or unbearable
demands, the agent responds not in order to effect changes in the world (that would be a
practical response), but with a view to alter the evaluative parameters of the situation, so that
the demands raised by the situation are diffused:

We can now conceive what an emotion is. It is a transformation of the world. When
the paths before us become too difficult, or when we cannot see our away, we can no
longer put up with such an exacting and difficult world. All ways are barred and nev-
ertheless we must act. So then we try to change the world; that is, to live it as though
the relations between things and their potentialities were not governed by deterministic
processes but by magic (…) Emotional behaviour seeks by itself, and without modifying
the structure of the object, to confer another quality upon it, a lesser existence or a lesser
presence.
(1939, 39–41)

At the center of this transformation is the living body—or what in Being and Nothingness
Sartre calls “the body as being-for-itself ” (1943, 330)—“during emotion, it is the body
which, directed by consciousness, changes its relationship with the world so that the world
should change its qualities” (1939, 41). Our bodies are the “instruments of incantation”
(1939, 47), and that is why “to believe in magical behavior”—as opposed to merely feigning
an emotion—“one must be physically upset” (1939, 50).
Emotional consciousness lives the new world it has thereby constituted, “lives it directly,
commits itself to it, and suffers from the qualities that the concomitant behavior has out-
lined” (1939, 51). Within that emotionally transformed world, the qualities that make up
one’s social environment are not recognized as one’s projections, but as genuine features of
the situation, which exercise a pull on the agent: “the man who is angry sees on the face of
his opponent the objective quality of asking for a punch on the nose” (1943, 248).

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7. The emotional transformation of the world

Since the changes effected in an emotional episode do not alter the material constitution of
things, nor do they concern a prudential choice of some alternative course of action, which
would result in different practical outcomes, Sartre calls the transformation brought about
by emotion ‘magical’. Relatedly, in the final section of the Sketch, emotion is characterized
as a fall: “an abrupt fall of consciousness into the magic” (1939, 60).
The exact role of magic in Sartre’s theory has recently been at the center of an intense
scholarly debate. In spelling out his conception of emotional world as a world of magic,
Sartre appears to offer two different, and at a first reading, equally compelling, accounts of
how a subject may experience affectively a situation. On the one account, that is prevalent in
most of the Sketch, it is the emotive subject which transforms the world through the transfor-
mation of his non-reflective consciousness of the world; an emotion is thus understood as a
process of constitution of a magic world, by making use of one’s body as instrument of incan-
tation (1939, 47). On the other account, during an emotional episode, the subject apprehends
the world as already magical: “the magic and the meaning of the emotions came from the
world and not from ourselves (…) magic [is experienced as] as a real quality of the world (…)”
(1939, 58). The difference between the two accounts is crucial, as it concerns how and why
the relations between objects are changed. According to the former account, “it is we who
constitute the magic of the world to replace a deterministic activity which cannot be re-
alized”; according to the latter account, “the world itself is unrealizable and reveals itself
suddenly as a magical environment” (1939, 57). Whether, and if so, how exactly the two
accounts can be rendered compatible is a matter of some controversy (Hatzimoysis (2014a)
makes a case for the coherence of Sartre’s different remarks, whose consistency is astutely put
into question by Richmond’s (2010) seminal discussion of magic in the Sartrean corpus; cf.
Richmond (2014). Hartmann (2016) and Elpidorou (2016) purport to resolve that debate, by
offering alternative detailed readings of Sartre’s conception of emotion; cf. Vanello (2019)
and Chapter 34 in this volume).
It might facilitate the analysis of that issue to draw certain distinctions, which might lead
to an approach that is perhaps more complicated, yet also more faithful to the phenomenol-
ogy of affective experience.
One distinction concerns the emotions upon which each of the two Sartrean accounts
applies: Hence, the first account (where magic is effected by bodily consciousness) might be
taken to concern only cases of fear, joy, and sadness, while the second account (where magic
is encountered as being already in the world) may apply to cases of horror and wonder. That
division among emotion types sounds reasonable, and enjoys textual support, as indicated by
Sartre’s claim that the “there are two forms of emotion” (1939, 57, emphasis added). However,
it is not obvious that it also enjoys phenomenological support—at least, it is not clear that a
subject would himself distinguish his pre-reflective experiences of fear, horror, panic, or ter-
ror, in anything other than intensity of feeling, or the amount and imminence of perceived
threat (see Hatzimoysis 2014b for related psychological research).
Another distinction that deserves our attention is between two aspects of the Sartrean
theory, that Sartre himself tends to present at one breath: the transformation of the world,
on the one hand, and the arising of emotion as a distinct way of resolving a problem faced by
the subject, on the other. It might be argued, for instance, that, in contradistinction to most
emotions, horror and wonder consist in experiences of a magic world; yet, no attempted
solution of a practical problem takes place. However, although that proposal sounds inde-
pendently plausible, it seems to be in tension with Sartre’s explicit insistence on the finality

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of emotions. If there are affective phenomena, which, according to that proposal, serve no
end, then it is hard to see how their occurrence should be accounted for in the functional
terms singled out as the hallmark of emotion (1939, 28).
Perhaps the above difficulties, encountered in the interpretation of the Sketch, are indica-
tive of the character of Sartre’s classic text as a work in progress. They also point to Sartre’s
gradual transition from delineating a phenomenological psychology of emotions (1939, 62),
toward articulating a full-blown phenomenological ontology of the human way of being
(1943, 18–23). Hence, the questions raised through the study of Sartre’s highly original take
on affective phenomena may help the reader appreciate the significance of the remark, placed
near the beginning of the Sketch, about the enormity of the task involved in articulating a
systematic theory about the facts that we encounter in our research into emotions: “they, in
their essential structure, are reactions of man to the world: they therefore presuppose man
and the world, and cannot take on their true meaning unless the two notions have first been
elucidated” (1939, 7–8).

References
Barnes, Hazel E. (1984). Sartre on the Emotions. The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
15(1), 71–85.
Cabestan, Philippe (2004). What is it to Move Oneself Emotionally? Emotion and Affectivity Accord-
ing to Jean-Paul Sartre. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3(1), 81–96.
Elpidorou, Andreas (2016). Horror, Fear, and the Sartrean Accounts of Emotions. The Southern Journal
of Philosophy 54(2), 209–225.
Hartmann, Martin (2016). A Comedy We Believe In: A Further Look at Sartre’s Theory of Emotions.
European Journal of Philosophy 25(1), 144–172.
Hatzimoysis, Anthony (2014a). Consistency in the Sartrean Analysis of Emotion. Analysis 74(1), 81–83.
——— (2014b). Passive Fear. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13(4), 613–623.
Richmond, Sarah (2010). Magic in Sartre’s Early Philosophy. In: J. Webber (Ed.). Reading Sartre: On
Phenomenology and Existentialism. London, New York: Routledge, 22–44.
——— (2014). Inconsistency in Sartre’s Analysis of Emotion. Analysis 74(4), 612–615.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (2010[1934]). A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality. In:
J.-P. Sartre. Critical Essays (Situations I). Transl. by J. Fell. London: Seagull, 40–46. [Orig.: Une Idée
fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: L’intentionnalité. In: Situations I. Paris: Gallimard,
1947, 31–34.]
——— (2004[1937]). The Transcendence of the Ego. Transl. by A. Brown. London, New York: Routledge.
[Orig.: La transcendence de l’ego. In: Recherches Philosophiques (1937)].
——— (2000[1938]). Nausea. Transl. by R. Baldick. London: Penguin. [Orig.: La Nausée. Paris:
Gallimard 1938.]
——— (2004[1939]). Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Transl. by P. Mariet. London: Routledge.
[Orig.: Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions. Paris: Hermann 1939.]
——— (2004[1940]). The Imaginary: a phenomenological psychology of the imagination. Transl. by J.Webber.
London, New York: Routledge. [Orig.: L’Imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination.
Paris: Gallimard 1940.]
——— (2003[1943]). Being and Nothingness. Transl. by H. Barnes. London, New York: Routledge.
[Orig.: L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Édition corrigée par A. Elkaïm-Sartre.
Paris: Gallimard 1976].
——— (2010[1947]). Critical Essays. Transl. by C. Turner. London: Seagull Books. [Orig.: Situations:
Critiques Littéraires, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard 1947].
Vanello, Daniel (2019). Sartre on the Emotions. In: M. Eshleman, C. Mui, and C. Perrin (Eds.). The
Sartrean Mind. London, New York: Routledge.

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 14
EMMANUEL LEVINAS
Sophie Loidolt

1. The role of emotions and affectivity in the work

of Emmanuel Levinas
Many central terms of Levinas’ philosophy have a clear emotive connotation, such as desire,
enjoyment, indolence, horror, love/eros, sensibility, proximity, and obsession. But are these
emotions? And does this make Levinas a “phenomenologist of emotions”? The answer must
be “no” if emotion is understood in the classical phenomenological sense: That is, either as a
certain class of acts or intentional directedness that reveals certain properties and values of a
given, or as a mood that is a mode of Dasein’s existential understanding—of Being, of itself,
of the world, or of others. It must also be “no” if this would lead to subsuming Levinas’ ethics
under the dualism of rationalist and sentimentalist ethics. Levinas neither attributes con-
ventional cognitive nor hermeneutic functions to emotions, nor does he advocate that it is
rather “moral feelings” than reason that make us morally responsive and responsible beings.
Instead, Levinas is concerned with showing that the orders of (cognitive as well as emotive)
intentionality, visibility, and intelligibility build on and answer to a primary affective ex-
posedness. He describes this exposedness as a radical passivity of “sensibility” that is ruptured
and imbued by an ethical imperative. In this sense, Levinas generally conceives subjectivity
in affective terms. And in this sense, the answer to the question if he plays an important role
in the phenomenology of emotions can be “yes.”
I will use the terms “affectivity” and “emotion” often interchangeably in this chapter;
Levinas prefers to talk about the former and only seldomly uses the latter.1 There is certainly
a conceptual differentiation to be made between “emotion” and “affectivity”: Affectivity
describes the overall disposition of being able to be approached and touched. It is being
susceptible, receptive, sensitive, and open to touch. Emotions arise as specific feelings and
modes of being of the subject on the basis and background of affectivity. For Levinas, sub-
jectivity is essentially affectivity, which, as we shall see, means that subjectivity is essentially
“for the other.” Furthermore, Levinas is eager to point out that affectivity is anchored in the
lived body and conditioned by its “sensibility” (cf. Tengelyi 2014, 259). As the latter term
indicates, the sensible “makes sense” before or beneath intentional consciousness. As such,
affectivity is essentially “sensible,” and the sense it makes, as it were, is “being for the other”
before any mode of thinking or understanding can take place.

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Let us first take a look on Levinas’ break with traditional philosophy and its movement
of understanding as a return to the self. Against the paradigmatic Greek figure of Ulysses,
finally returning to his home after years of war and adventure, Levinas mobilizes the Judaic
tradition in the story of Abraham. Abraham follows God’s call to a foreign land never to
return to his home again. Levinas reads both stories as tales of the structure of subjectivity
and ontology. While Hegel philosophically epitomizes the themes of “Odysee” and “home-
coming” in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, and Heidegger finalizes the immanence of ontol-
ogy in Being and Time, Levinas takes an Abrahamic path into philosophy—and that means:
setting out to leave the self and escaping the suffocating return to the self (cf. Levinas 2003).
By following the call of the other, Levinas looks for the fissures and ruptures in experience
that open up the self to transcendence. This happens up to the point where these ruptures
have always already pervaded “home” with the primacy of the other, beyond ontologically
conceivable structures. This is how Levinas conceives of ethics as “first philosophy,” tran-
scending the translucent structures of Being, in my world- and self-relation.
Hence, the primacy of the other is conceptualized from the outset as contesting the
Western philosophical primacy of the theoretical, of understanding, of light and visibility,
and of distance. An alterity that is understood loses its otherness. It remains only “different”
within a system of totality. But what Levinas is after is what moved Abraham without know-
ing. Affectivity, being approached in darkness, without being able to distance and see, and
without being able to swallow and digest, are thus the states where he looks, maybe surpris-
ingly, for traces of transcendence—a transcendence that never ceases to inscribe itself in our
most basic sensibility. This perspective makes Levinas a radical and original philosopher of
sensibility and affectivity, one who grants utmost importance to the dimension in which the
encounter with alterity actually happens. And this happening has always already taken place
without ever being able to be assimilated into an analytic language—a paradoxical trait for a
philosophical method, which is reflected in the very style of Levinas’ writing.
The central point for understanding the role and phenomenology of emotions and affec-
tivity in Levinas’ work is thus:
(1) First, to see how he subverts Husserl’s concept of intentional consciousness, as well
as Heidegger’s tool-handling and project-orientated Being-in-the-world. While Dasein
“understands” something even in the peaks of anxiety, namely itself and always only itself 2
(e.g., in the call of conscience), Levinas’ subjectivity is literally torn apart and pointing be-
yond its self-relatedness. To put it in Husserlian terms: Instead of an act of putting in question,
this is an experience of being put in question, which, according to Levinas (1986, 353), can-
not be conceived in the framework of an intentional correlation—not even that of a non-
objectifying emotion and a value. Levinas makes a fundamental phenomenological claim
here: This sort of affectivity, of proximity in darkness, beyond intentionality, which he calls
“the social relation,” for Levinas, is “experience preeminently” (Levinas 1969, 109), and thus
a “truer” or more original form of experiencing than any intentional experience, be it ob-
jectifying or non-objectifying. Affectivity and emotionality, at least in the sense in that they
are relevant for Levinas’ work, must be conceived along these lines.
(2) Second, none of what has been said is meant to imply that Levinas would position
this approach simply against or in competition with an ethics of practical reason (cf. Craig
2010, 104).3 Rather, Levinas would argue that the rigor of practical reason, as we see it in
Kant, can only be drawn from the social relation. Universality in itself means nothing and
commands nothing. This is why the moral law and reason can only be understood as an
answer to a deeper, unintelligible withdrawing law that has cut through my affectivity with
its ethical imperative. Like Kant’s “fact of practical reason,” this is not an empirical fact to

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be examined. Instead, it describes the arrival and installment of the normative dimension in
the subject, namely through its affectivity (cf. Crowell 2015, 579). Thus, Levinas connects
sensibility/affectivity and reason, but reverses the order. He neither construes a hierarchical
and commanding relation between “irrational inclination” and “rational activity” (like Kant
or Plato), nor a continuity between the two, where passive affectivity is taken up and gov-
erned in active position-taking (like in Aristotle or Husserl), nor a transition from a “dark”
to a “clarified existential understanding,” where the normative measurement is always and
only my authenticity (Heidegger and Sartre). Levinas’ alternative to all these approaches is to
conceive reason, theory, and the intellect in the service of the “higher truth” of “proximity.”
All these capacities are needed in the wake of the “third,” i.e. alterity in the plural, which
equals the call for justice. Reason, therefore, has its genesis in the call for justice and in the
rigor by which subjectivity is imperatively addressed and affectively obsessed by the other
(cf. Levinas 1991, 157–162).
(3) Third, as has become already clear, emotionality and affectivity are deeply tied to
sensibility and the lived body. For Levinas, it would not make sense to differentiate between
“bodily” and “spiritual feelings,” and even less would he demand to “purify,” for example,
sensuous feelings of love toward more “personal” ones in order to climb to a higher order
of values (as Scheler, for example). The “spiritual” is right there in the most sensuous. It is
there in the sense that the erotic experience is enjoyment but at the same time transcends
my enjoyment and my need. What makes it erotic is this ambivalence that is heightened by
the naked presence, but withdrawing otherness of the other: That which caressing hands
and lips passionately seek, but can never find. Desire, a term so metaphysically loaded in
Levinas, a hunger that lives of its hunger (Levinas 1969, 179), is not at all unrelated to the
erotic encounter.
But the ethical relevance of affectivity is rooted even deeper. As we will see below, sub-
jectivity rises in enjoyment, in a basic sensibility. And only thanks to this condition, which
makes the subject feel itself and consummate its nourishment, can it be a separate, self-
enjoying self that can be ruptured by transcendence: The bread I tear from my mouth is the
bread I need and enjoy myself.
In the following sections, I will give a rough portrait of subjectivity, described in ethical
terms in Levinas, focusing on the role that affectivity and particular emotions play in the
genesis of the self/other relation.

2. The rise and rupture of the self in affectivity and emotion

2.1 I enjoy, I am
From his early work onward, Levinas develops what one could call a dialectical genesis of
subjectivity. This genesis proposes a relation between Being and Beings4 that is not dominated
by Dasein’s understanding of Being but rather by its “ownness” ( Jemeinigkeit), its “thrownness”
(Geworfenheit), and the burden of being (Lastcharakter)—all Heideggerian terms from Being
and Time that Levinas appropriates, rethinks, and thereby accentuates differently. To find
myself “thrown” into existence means, in the Levinasian reformulation, that I experience
myself as having been “established” within an anonymous Being, which has become my own.
A Being that I—since I exist—have to be. Having to be is having taken a position, a stand
within Being. Levinas calls this “hypostasis,” an equivalent for subjectivity. The pre-state of
anonymous Being, within which this positioning has taken (its) place, glimpses up in expe-
riences of horror, insomnia, and indolence. Levinas calls this pre-state the “there is” (il y a).

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Instead of making anxiety the central existential feeling in which Dasein encounters its own
finitude and death like in Heidegger (see Chapter 34 in this volume), Levinas stresses the
horror of the indeterminate, the anonymous noise and murmur of the il y a, of pure Being
equaling senselessness. In this context, we find one of the most significant and most explicit
passages on emotion in Levinas’ work. It speaks of the disintegration of subjectivity, which,
for Levinas, is a central trait of emotion:

The antithesis of position is not the freedom of a subject suspended in the air, but
the destruction of the subject, the disintegration of the hypostasis. It is announced in
emotion. Emotion is what overwhelms. Physiological psychology, which started with
emotional shock and presented the emotions in general as a disruption of equilibrium,
seems to us here to have grasped the true nature of affectivity, despite its rudimentary
language, more faithfully than the phenomenological analyses, which after all keep
something of the character of comprehension, and consequently of apprehension, in
emotions (Heidegger), and speak of emotional experience and of objects clothed with
new properties (Husserl, Scheler). Emotion puts into question not the existence, but
the subjectivity of the subject; it prevents the subject from gathering itself up, reacting,
being someone. What is positive in the subject sinks away into a nowhere. Emotion is
a way of holding on while losing one’s base. All emotion is fundamentally vertigo, that
vertigo one feels insinuating itself, that finding oneself over a void. The world of forms
opens like a bottomless abyss. The cosmos breaks up and chaos gapes open—the abyss,
the absence of place, the there is.
(Levinas 1978, 68)

“Holding on while losing one’s base”—the ontologically overthrowing role of emotion is

evident here, and it will be even further extended to a force that transcends the ontological
realm itself. It is not a subject that has an emotion but an emotion that has a subject. It even
threatens to destroy or to dissolve the subjectivity of the subject. In this sense, Levinas’ con-
cept of emotion is fundamentally conceived through the lens of passion,5 and of something
that transcends the subject.
Yet, subjectivity itself is also characterized as a basic affective mode, namely one of im-
manence. Levinas conceptualizes the origin of subjectivity not in intentional consciousness
but in a sensual world-relation, which is, at the same time, a self-relation that coincides with
the opening of the “inner space” and “interiority” of consciousness. According to Levinas,
the basic form of how we encounter the world is not the “in-order-to” but the world as
nourishment. The mode of “living of …” is hence more fundamental than intending and
tool-handling. “Living of …” is experienced as enjoyment. And this constitutes the basic
structure of subjectivity:

The self-sufficiency of enjoying measures the egoism or the ipseity of the Ego and the
same. Enjoyment is a withdrawal into oneself, an involution. What is termed an affec-
tive state does not have the dull monotony of a state, but is a vibrant exaltation in which
dawns the self.
(Levinas 1969, 118)

It is clear from this passage that “living of…” and “enjoyment” for Levinas have an onto-
logical and ethical relevance which surpasses any biological or psychological, even psycho-
analytical approaches to these phenomena. “Subjectivity originates in the independence and

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sovereignty of enjoyment” (Levinas 1969, 114). This self-constitution in enjoyment is the

“egoism of life,” which is questioned in and by the face of the other. On the other hand, en-
joyment is separation from the il y a, from an anonymous totality. It is the birth of an interiority,
which, in its enjoyment, is the paradigmatic structure of all forms of return to the self. It is
pure affective self-feeling as self-relation. In Totality and Infinity and earlier works (cf. Levinas
1978, 1987, 2003), Levinas sees this primary movement of “involution” as the condition
for the metaphysical relation with the other. The relation with the other as an inter-locutor
presupposes a separate being, one that can be addressed. This fundamental separation from
Being (through the beings we consume) happens in enjoyment.
So far, we have encountered two modes of affectivity: one which the early Levinas calls
“emotion”—a term he does not continue to use—which dissolves and questions the subjec-
tivity of the subject. The other is a mode which founds and grounds this very subjectivity.
“Life is affectivity and sentiment; to live is to enjoy life. To despair of life makes sense only
originally because life is happiness” (Levinas 1969, 115).
This double-structure within the concept of affectivity is reflected in the structure of the
self–other relation. This relation needs the immanence of a self that holds on while losing its
base. And both “holding on” and “losing one’s base” happen in “vibrant exaltation,” which
is far from being a “state” the subject is “in.” Rather, it must be described as “vertigo” that
gives and questions the very subjectivity of the subject.

2.2 Pure future: eros and caress

We also find such an ambivalence of “holding on while losing one’s base” in Levinas’
“phenomenology of eros.” Levinas construes this complex piece of his theory around the
heterosexual couple and the future dimension of fecundity: “Sexuality, paternity, and death
introduce a duality into existence, a duality that concerns the very existing of each subject.
Existing itself becomes double. The Eleatic notion of being is overcome” (Levinas 1987, 92).
I cannot dwell upon this complex issue nor on the problems regarding the gender issue, that
Levinas introduces at this point. My focus, instead, is on the affective state in erotic desire
which is enjoyment, “vibrant exaltation,” but essentially reaches beyond it. Therefore, even
if this is surely over-simplified, I take the affective structure as essentially the same for who-
ever encounters the other erotically.6
Erotic desire expresses itself in caress. Certainly, a caress is not an emotion. But it is also
hard to imagine it not being permeated by various emotions and emotional states: love,
voluptuosity, passion, compassion “for the passivity, the suffering, the evanescence of the
tender” (Levinas 1969, 259), shame, and shamelessness. Hence, the caress is carried and sus-
tained by an emotionality and affectivity which is specific to it. Levinas denies that caressing
would be something we do in the sense of an act (Levinas 1969, 259). The caress “does”
nothing and it does not aim at anything. It rather loses itself in its search for nothing, in “no
man’s land” (Levinas 1969, 256), becoming more and more an experience of passivity and,
again, of vertigo, where the “I can” continuously ceases. In a famous passage from Time and
the Other, Levinas describes the caress as a “mode of the subject’s being, where the subject,
who is in contact with another, goes beyond this contact” (Levinas 1987, 89).

Contact as sensation is part of the world of light. But what is caressed is not touched,
properly speaking. It is not the softness or warmth of the hand given in contact that
the caress seeks. The seeking of the caress constitutes its essence by the fact that the
caress does not know what it seeks. This “not knowing,” this fundamental disorder, is

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the essential. It is like a game with something slipping away, a game absolutely without
project or plan, not with what can become ours or us, but with something other, always
other, always inaccessible, and always still to come (à venir). The caress is the anticipation
of this pure future (avenir), without content. It is made up of this increase of hunger,
of ever richer promises, opening new perspectives onto the ungraspable. It feeds on
countless hungers.7
(Levinas 1987, 89)

What constantly withdraws in caressing becomes pure future, a future that is not mine
and not my projection. Being and Time’s carefully elaborated ekstatic time-structure is tran-
scended here toward the time of the other, happening beyond “Being” and my time. Strictly
speaking, this is a time-dimension I cannot anticipate. It is not one of my “possibilities.”
Still, I encounter it—as withdrawal, enigma, as “less than nothing” (Levinas 1969, 258).
This is why Levinas calls it “pure future,” an anticipation of something I cannot anticipate.
The continuous decline of the “I can” announces the ethical relation. But it is not yet taken
up in the erotic encounter. According to Levinas, eros takes place “beyond the face,” and
in ambivalence. Yet, it is a personal encounter, and as such “presupposes the face” (Levinas
1969, 262). In this sense, eros discovers something that refuses it, and becomes “profanation”
(Levinas 1969, 260) which is always near to obscenity, shame, and laughter. An exorbitant
indiscretion. And, again, destabilizing for the subjectivity of the subject: “An amorphous
non-I sweeps away the I into an absolute future where it escapes itself and loses its position
as a subject” (Levinas 1969, 259). Like in the vertigo of emotion before anonymous Being,
we have an affective state here that tears the subject into a “night,” extending alongside the
night of the “there is” (Levinas 1969, 258). But the erotic encounter leaves subjectivity intact,
even if Being is transcended here toward a future beyond the self: “Love is not a possibility,
it is not due to our initiative, is without reason. It invades and wounds us and nevertheless
the I survives in it” (Levinas 1987, 88f.).

2.3 The other in me: proximity and obsession

Finally, the ethical relation in itself has no more erotic components that would lead into
ambivalence. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas speaks of the “face-to-face” as an asymmetrical
encounter with infinity. Along the lines of his critique of the primacy of the theoretical,
Levinas makes clear that what he means by “the face” is not “given” in intuition or vision
(Levinas 1969, 187). Hence, the face of the other—at least that which is ethically relevant
about it and decisive for Levinas’ use of the term—is not graspable in an intentional relation.
Instead, the face speaks. This dimension of language, of being spoken at and appealed to,
equals experiencing the dimension of the imperative or normative. And again, this experience, the
“work of language” itself, is affectively loaded: “Discourse is (…) the experience of some-
thing absolutely foreign, a pure ‘knowledge’ or ‘experience,’ a traumatism of astonishment”
(Levinas 1969, 73).
Subjectivity is once more, and now in an ultimate way, destabilized, put in question. But
this time it is called to respond, and that means to be and to speak as this first person, the
“only” first person. However, these new demands do not imply a shift to the grown-up, mas-
culine imperative to “finally take responsibility” and “pull oneself together.” What happens
is rather an even deepened encounter with one’s absolute passivity in responding. It amounts
more to losing oneself to the act of responding than to pulling oneself together. This re-
sponse is never to “return home” in order to understand, but extends into infinity. This is

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what Levinas calls “infinite responsibility” for the other, a responsibility I do not decide for
or take over, but a responsibility that has taken over me.
The sense of the imperative comes with the experience of a “height,” of an asymmetrical,
traumatizing directness, a “nudity,” by which the face addresses me and commands (cf. Crowell
2015, 578). As meaning in and by itself, not dependent on a context of “understanding,” the
nudity of the face appears not as a privation but “as an always positive value” (Levinas 1969, 74).
At the same time, I experience the other as foreign to the world, and this foreignness becomes
a destitution. The nudity of the face flips and extends into “the nakedness of the body that
is cold and that is ashamed of itself ” (Levinas 1969, 75). Here, the sensible and affective are
deeply intertwined with the rise of the imperative and normative dimension:

To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. But
it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches as ‘You’ [‘Vous’] in
a dimension of height.
(Levinas 1969, 75)

In his later work, Otherwise than Being, Levinas’ language becomes even stronger in terms
of interrelating the affective and the sensible with the ethical imperative. In fact, it becomes
painful and violent (cf. Tengelyi 2009, 411). This is because Levinas now focuses more on the
interruption of the self that has always already taken place. Levinas conceives this in terms of
a diachrony I cannot remember, but that is sensibly felt, affectively given as a non-givenness.
Alterity is thereby not conceptualized as an “exteriority” anymore, but becomes inscribed
in an incarnated subjectivity, constituting a fundamental category of its experience. Subjec-
tivity is “for the other” before ever being a “self,” and this is primarily shown by analyzing
the intrinsic relation between “sensibility” and “proximity.” In these analyses, subjectivity
is described as a “hostage,” as “obsessed” by the other, “exposed like a bleeding wound”
(Levinas 1991, 161): “It is to be like a stranger, hunted down even in one’s home, contested
in one’s identity and one’s very property (…). It is always to empty oneself anew of oneself,
to absolve oneself, like in a hemophiliac’s hemorrhage” (Levinas 1991, 92).
It would be wrong to speak of “emotions” here. However, “incarnation” and its affec-
tivity are so crucial for describing subjectivity in ethical terms that the systematic relevance
of how to conceive this affectivity can hardly be underestimated. Levinas does not change
his position in this respect. He still criticizes that the “content called affective in sensation”
is conceived as a “modality of manifestation” in phenomenology, “a light ‘of another color’
than that which fills the theoretical intentionality, but still a light” (Levinas 1991, 66):

The affective remains an information: about oneself, about values (as in Max Scheler),
about a disposition, an understanding of essence (as in the Stimmung of Heidegger), an
ontology, whatever be the modalities and structures of existence that overflow all that
the intellectualist tradition understood by thought, but which are nonetheless packed
into a logos of being.
(Levinas 1991, 66)

Against this dominant conception, Levinas holds on to another order, an “outside-of-order”

we experience in affectivity: “Here the blow of affection makes an impact, traumatically,
in a past more profound than all I can reassemble by memory (…)” (Levinas 1991, 88).
Affectivity as an always past “affection” by the other overwhelms us with transcendence,
within and beyond ourselves. And what we feel in this encounter, or rather, this state of

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being overwhelmed, is certainly not a “natural” feeling. Levinas reminds us that his concept
of “obsession” goes way beyond the conventional feelings of “benevolence” and altruism:

If obsession is suffering and contrarity, it is that the altruism of subjectivity-hostage is

not a tendency, is not a natural benevolence, as in the moral philosophies of feeling. It
is against nature, non-voluntary, inseparable from the possible persecution to which no
consent is thinkable, anarchic.
(Levinas 1991, 197)

3. Conclusion
We have seen that Levinas repeatedly uses affective vocabulary in order to establish his new
approach to “ethics as first philosophy.” As he states in an interview with Philippe Nemo,
his goal is not to develop a normative theory, but to “describe subjectivity in ethical terms”
(Levinas 1985, 95). To this end, affectivity and emotionality are so central that one could
even claim that Levinas describes subjectivity in affective terms. However, this is not just a
shift of perspective within the ontology of the subject. Levinas explicitly wants to go beyond
ontology. For this enterprise, the reconceptualization of affectivity/emotionality is crucial.
Instead of conceiving it as “another mode of light” or understanding, Levinas makes it the
point of entrance for transcendence, for the “otherwise than Being.” Emotion for Levinas
is essentially “vertigo,” passivity, and passion. It interrupts a subjectivity that dwells in its
affective mode of enjoyment, either by exposing it to the horrors of the il y a, to the future
of the other in eros and fecundity, or by calling it to its infinite responsibility, inscribed in
its basic sensibility.

Notes

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 Sophie Loidolt

lasting, exclusive, shared, and does not fill a pre-existent lack. Among the “passions”, Lingis counts
“vehement wonder, lust, rage, courage, or terror, jealousy, grief ” (Lingis 2017, 6). These distinc-
tions, however, as helpful as they are, cannot be mapped directly on Levinas, who remains rather
blurry in his respective terminology.
6 I am aware that this is already a strong interpretation. For an instructive collection of discussions
on this topic, see Chanter (2001).
7 By contrast, the peak of orgasm is a return to the self. It is not the fulfillment of the encounter with
the other, but a different fulfillment that leaves me alone in my immanence of enjoyment. This, as
it were, is the Levinasian version of the proverb “post coitum omne animal triste.”

References
Bergo, Bettina (2011a). The Face in Levinas. Angelaki 16(1), 17–39.
——— (2011b). Emmanuel Levinas. In N. E. Zalta (Ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall
2017 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/levinas/
Chanter, Tina (Ed.) (2001). Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press.
Craig, Megan (2010). Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Crowell, Steven G. (2015). Why is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context.
European Journal of Philosophy 23(3), 564–588.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1969). Totality and Infinity. Transl. by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press.
——— (1978). Existence and Existents. Transl. by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
——— (1986). The Trace of the Other. Transl. by A. Lingis. In M. C. Taylor (Ed.). Deconstruction in
Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 345–359.
——— (1985). Ethics and Infinity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Transl. by R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press.
——— (1987). Time and the Other. Transl. by R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
——— (1991). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Transl. by A. Lingis. The Hague: Nijhoff.
——— (2003). On Escape. De l’évasion. Transl. by B. Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lingis, Alphonso (2017). Aconcagua. In: R. C. Wheeler (Ed.). Passion in Philosophy. Essays in Honor of
Alphonso Lingis. Lanham: Lexington, 3–16.
Tallon, Andrew (1995). Nonintentional Affectivity, Affective Intentionality, and the Ethical in Levi-
nass Philosophy. In: A. Peperzak (Ed.). Ethics as First Philosophy. The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas
for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. New York, London: Routledge.
Tengelyi, László (2009). Self hood, Passivity and Affectivity in Henry and Levinas. International Journal
of Philosophical Studies 17(3), 401–414.
Tengelyi, László (2014). Die Rolle der persönlichen Freiheit in der Antwort auf fremde Ansprüche.
In: I. Römer (Ed.). Affektivität und Ethik bei Kant und in der Phänomenologie. Berlin: de Gruyter,
253–268.
White, Richard (2012). Levinas, the Philosophy of Suffering, and the Ethics of Compassion. The
Heythorp Journal 53(1), 111–123.

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 15
HANNAH ARENDT
Judith Mohrmann

Arendt’s approach to emotions is novel not so much for her phenomenology of emotions,
but for the phenomenology of the connection between politics and emotions: Instead of
establishing and maintaining a taxonomy of (political) emotions, Arendt distinguishes
systematically between emotions in the political sphere and emotions in the private sphere.
While she highly values certain emotions in the private sphere, she argues that the same
emotions are bound to wreak havoc in the political sphere. Thus, Arendt’s critique of
emotions is a critique in the original sense of the Greek word krinein: to distinguish. She
refrains from evaluating emotions by either praising them for their humanistic potential or
condemning them as condescending or irrational gestures. (To be sure, for Arendt, emo-
tions generally are irrational, but that is not her primary concern.) Instead, she distinguishes
between emotions that occur in the political domain and those that occur in the private
sphere, judging them accordingly. Compassion is her prime example: In Arendt’s view,
it is pivotal whether compassion occurs in the private realm, where she values it highly,
or in the political realm, where she considers it entirely destructive. Herein lies Arendt’s
originality. To Arendt, it makes no sense to condemn emotions per se, as Nietzsche does.
Neither does it make sense to label certain emotions as “political” and others as “apoliti-
cal”, like Nussbaum (Nussbaum 2015) does. Instead, she explores the interconnectedness
of emotions and the political in On Revolution (Arendt 1963): If emotions appear in the
political field, this affects the emotion and the political alike. Her analysis, however, rests
upon very specific and arguably idiosyncratic preconceptions of emotions that ought to be
revised.1 This article explores Arendt’s critique of political emotions, taking compassion in
the French Revolution as its vantage point.

1. Compassion in the French Revolution

Initially, Arendt differentiates between compassion and pity. For her, compassion entails
empathy with others, the ability to feel someone else’s pain like one’s own (see Chapter 37 in
this volume). Typically, this emotion arises in situations in which one person is confronted
with the suffering of another and acts instantaneously to alleviate this pain: For example,
one person is hurt and someone else tries to help. Structurally, this situation is bound to

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two individuals interacting with one another: One particular person is confronted with the
pain of another individual, and this configuration excludes third parties, bystanders, and the
public. To Arendt, genuine compassion has astounding qualities, as the empathy it involves
allows one person to ease someone else’s pain by feeling it like their own.
Yet, when compassion manifests itself in the political sphere, it becomes corrupted: It
turns into a sentimentalized version of itself that Arendt calls “pity”. It is not only the emo-
tion that is corrupted, however, for the political side is affected as well. According to Arendt’s
critical assessment, if and when compassion enters the political realm, both are transformed
into deprived versions of themselves: The political realm is destabilized to the point of its
eventual demise, and the emotion is perverted to kitsch.
Most salient to Arendt’s theory of the connection between politics and emotions is her
account of the role compassion played in the French Revolution. While in Kant’s percep-
tion, the French Revolution successfully established a legacy of political freedom, Arendt
makes the opposite argument, claiming that the French Revolution failed in its attempt to
create a new political order based on democracy and freedom (cf. Mohrmann 2015). Hence,
in her view, the narrative about and the analysis of the French Revolution ought to be re-
vised. Arendt maintains that systematic rather than contingent reasons caused the French
Revolution to fail—its revolutionary leaders chose an inadequate strategy for political le-
gitimization. Arendt considers the American Revolution the one successful democratic
revolution, because in her view, emotions played little to no role. In the absence of pity
for those in dire need, the American founding fathers focused upon establishing proto-
democratic structures, such as town hall meetings. The town hall meetings of the American
Revolution provided a place for debate, where people deliberated and found a consensus.
In France, however, the French revolutionaries were confronted with pauperized masses,
whose situation was too miserable to allow for the somewhat tedious democratic processes.
Therefore, the French revolutionaries tried to circumvent establishing these foundations of
democracy and instead substituted democratic processes for compassionate identification
as a political tool. Emotions and the role they played in the French Revolution were thus
paramount to its failure.
The relationship between politics and emotions is crucial in the situation of the rev-
olution, Arendt explains, because it is closely intertwined with the signature question of
democratic revolutions: How to act democratically if the mechanisms of democratic legiti-
mization are, by definition, not yet in place? For Arendt, the new beginning for a potential
democracy after a seizure of power is always coupled with the problem of legitimization: The
revolutionary leaders claim to act in the name of the people, albeit without their democratic
consent. The French revolutionaries faced a dual conundrum: First, they had to legitimize
their action democratically, even more so as they strikingly resembled their predecessors:
“The magic of compassion was that it opened the heart of the sufferer to the sufferings of
others, whereby it established and confirmed the ‘natural’ bond between men which only
the rich had lost” (Arendt 1963, 76). Second, they faced a starving and impoverished Parisian
population. Due to the dire needs of the Parisian people, forming town hall meetings was
not an option, since supplying food was the most urgent task. Compassion provided an al-
legedly adequate solution to both of these problems. It allowed for identification with those
in whose name the revolutionaries claimed to act—le peuple—when at the same time no
formal and procedural way of generating debates and consensus could be established. As a
substitute for consent, the revolutionary leaders felt the emotions of those in whose name
they claimed to act.

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2. The underlying assumptions about politics

and emotions in Arendt
For Arendt, substituting compassion for the process of debate and deliberation is by no means
an innocent change of parameters. It proves fatal for the political, as it marks a t ransformation
of the framework that defines political legitimization. In her view, this is intertwined with
the Rousseauian notion of the volonté générale, a concept Arendt deems disastrous. She sees
the compassionate imitation of an apparent will of the people as a tool for executing the
volonté générale. According to Rousseau’s volonté générale, the general will of the people is the
governing principle of a democratic society. The volonté générale differs from the Roman no-
tion of an established consent, which represents each and every one in their arguments and
thus establishes common ground. In this notion of consent, Arendt argues, the plurality of
individual opinions remains intact, and so the volonté générale indicates a shift: The general
will, unlike an established consensus, is indivisible and erases the traces of individuals and
their different interests and opinions.

It was of greater relevance that the very word ‘consent,’ with its overtones of deliberate
choice and considered opinion, was replaced by the word ‘will’, which essentially ex-
cludes all processes of exchange of opinions and an eventual agreement between them.
The will, if it is to function at all, must indeed be one and indivisible.
(Arendt 1963, 71)

The image of one general will is modeled upon the image of one homogenous individual
with such a will:

The outstanding quality of this popular will as volonté générale was its unanimity, and
when Robespierre constantly referred to ‘public opinion,’ he meant by it the unanimity
of the general will; he did not think of an opinion upon which many publicly were in
agreement.
(Arendt 1963, 71)

In Arendt’s understanding, this will is homogenous and so runs counter to her central con-
cept of plurality as a constitutive element of politics. Furthermore, it is volatile and unstable:
Just as one person can shift her will, so the masses shift theirs. “Rousseau took his metaphor
of a general will seriously and literally enough to conceive of the nation as a body driven by
one will, like an individual, which can also change direction at any time without losing its
identity” (Arendt 1963, 71). That the volonté générale struck a chord among the revolution-
aries was a result of the picture the Parisian people presented and embodied, Arendt argues.
The masses unified by impoverishment and the “unison cry for bread” moved through the
streets of Paris in a way that created the image of one person and one body with a single
will. Hence, the mere sight of the people of Paris in the streets made the Rousseauian no-
tion of one people governed by a single volonté générale more plausible. As the need for bread
and shelter was too urgent and prevented proto-democratic structures from flourishing,
compassionate identification with the will of the people seemed to offer a possibility to act
in their name.
Yet, the problem is this: Arendt considers the volonté générale an antidemocratic idea
in itself. It promotes the idea of one formed will, which bears no traces of the discursive

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 Judith Mohrmann

process of deliberating and shaping consent. This consent always remains informed by the
heterogeneity of those who participated in the process. The idea of a homogenous will as
the foundation for the political is antidemocratic for Arendt, because it is unifying and leaves
no room for plurality. Here, it is crucial to note that underlying these assumptions is a very
particular, Arendtian notion of the political, for which plurality is constitutive. To her, the
political is the realm of persuading, debating, deliberating, and reaching consent. Only for
this specific Arendtian notion of the political is the conflict between the political and emo-
tions that Arendt stages possible. To Arendt, the volonté générale is an antidemocratic concept.
If the revolutionaries’ actions link this concept with pity, the general will is acted out in an
antidemocratic manner. Volonté générale and pity are fatally intertwined: The volonté générale
suggests a homogenous unified will, and pity, with its immediate tendency to action, creates
the impression that this will requires only immediate execution.
Democracy, as Arendt argues, needs the checks of the publicly reached consensus. If the
revolutionaries want to monitor whether their actions are democratic, they need an external
mode of correction like the debates and decisions of the town hall meetings in the American
Revolution. Yet, politically, the lack of an external yardstick results in an escalation to terror
and paranoia: The yardstick for political action is not a mutual process of decision-making
that leads to certain decisions, providing checks and balances for the action of the revolu-
tionary leaders. Instead, the only yardstick for political action that serves the interest of the
Parisian population is if one feels correctly, if compassionate identification conforms to what
the masses feel and want. Thus, the yardstick for democratic processes is the revolutionary’s
own emotional landscape, disconnected from public interaction. According to Arendt, this
internalization causes the revolutionaries to feel mistrust and paranoia: This mistrust con-
cerns their own doings first and foremost, because the question as to what they did was right
and democratic is subject to their own inner turmoil of ever-shifting emotions. Without
any external means of measurement, however, there is no possibility of proving if one’s
opinion about one’s own actions is correct. Since to Arendt, the individual’s inner world is
perpetually shifting and unstable, it cannot serve as an instrument of evaluating one’s own
deeds. Exclusive trust in one’s own inner landscape necessarily engenders distrust of oneself,
as the inner self is unreliable in its instability. This distrust of oneself is then projected into
the outside world, heightening paranoia amidst the revolutionaries and unleashing terror in
their own ranks. Arendt argues that the revolutionaries are additionally driven by a very par-
ticular yearning marked by the zeitgeist: the need to cultivate a large and differentiated scope
of emotions. This zeitgeist, partly represented by the advent of the literary novel, provoked
an entirely new cultivation of the self and its inner motifs and emotions. The revolution-
aries sought any outside occasion that would enable them to unleash their inner potential
of moods and feeling. This sentimentalized version of self-stimulation became increasingly
incompatible with susceptibility for real suffering:

Since the days of the French Revolution, it has been the boundlessness of their senti-
ments that made revolutionaries so curiously insensitive to reality in general and to the
reality of persons in particular, whom they felt no compunctions in sacrificing to their
‘principles’, or to the course of history, or to the cause of revolution as such.
(Arendt 1963, 85)

This process fueled a dynamic in which the revolutionaries’ actions were accompanied by
increasing paranoia, unleashing a spiral of terror within the revolutionaries’ own ranks.

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In addition, Arendt argues, compassion almost always tends to glorify the suffering of
those who are pitied. As a result, pity is unwilling to erase this suffering, because by eras-
ing suffering, pity (and compassion) would undermine their own base of existence. This
sounds like an odd argument at first, as though compassion was a rational agent, unwilling
to eradicate the base of its existence for the sake of self-interest. Hence, the status of this
argument seems to be somewhat unclear. At second glance, however, Arendt’s claim can
be reconstructed as follows: If the revolutionaries used compassion/pity as the (rhetorical
or actual) base for their legitimization, they would lose the principle of their legitimization
once misery and poverty ceased to exist. Thus, if the revolutionaries succeeded in abolishing
poverty—in this way executing the will of the people—they would simultaneously abolish
their base of legitimization.
Arendt’s analysis and conclusion of the fatal connection between emotions and pol-
itics rest on specific premises about the political and about emotions. Since Arendt is a
political philosopher, her premises about the political are much clearer than her premises
about emotions. In terms of emotions, her description unfolds from quotidian observa-
tions and is congruent with familiar (folk-)psychological notions about emotions. But
closer inspection demonstrates that this phenomenology of emotion is deeply rooted in
intellectual history. The phenomenological observation is overtly or covertly modeled
upon powerful ideas of Descartes and, more importantly and in Arendt’s case surpris-
ingly, of Rousseau.
For Arendt, compassion means to feel somebody else’s feelings and emotions like one’s
own. In this regard, what is at stake is not so much a distinct emotion but rather a meta-
emotion: empathy towards the emotions of another person.2 Hence, we may understand
Arendt’s account of compassion and the relationship it entertains with the political as repre-
sentative of her account of the relationship between emotions and the political in general—
Arendt herself deduces more general claims about emotions from her analysis of compassion
(Arendt 1963, 90). Three elements are paramount to Arendt’s analysis of compassion in
its relation to politics: Compassion is (a) linked to direct action rather than to speech,
(b) boundless, and (c) particular and unable to make abstractions. These characteristics ren-
der compassion incompatible with the realm of the political.
(a) In Arendt’s view, compassion entails feeling the pain of another person like one’s
own. In doing so, compassion strives to offer an immediate remedy to the sufferer. It
shows itself rather in gestures and deeds, Arendt argues, than in speech. It is an immediate
reaction and is not mediated by speech; it is a mute interaction. “Passion and compassion
are not speechless, but their language consists in gestures and expressions of countenance
rather than in words” (Arendt 1963, 81). To Arendt, its immediate character is incom-
patible with verbal communication and more akin to direct action and ultimately to vio-
lence. Compassion has an urgent and pressing quality, in contrast to the political, which,
as Arendt puts it, relies heavily on the tedious and laborious practices of persuasion und
negotiation:

As a rule, it is not compassion which sets out to change worldly conditions in order to
ease human suffering, but if it does, it will shun the drawn-out wearisome processes of
persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics,
and lend its voice to the suffering itself, which must claim for swift and direct action,
that is, for action with the means of violence.
(Arendt 1963, 82)

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This hostility toward speech and communication and its kinship with violence make
compassion incompatible with politics. In Arendt’s view, violence and politics are op-
posites: Violence is not a political means, but rather destroys the political. This is what
makes compassion dangerous for the political, even if it appears in its authentic and
uncorrupted form.
(b) To Arendt, emotions are also boundless, as she considers them a sweeping force. Since
they are not mediated, they cannot be handled as political forces but are unruly, cannot be
reckoned with, and are as such hostile to plurality, to Arendt one of the cornerstones of the
political:

The direction of the American Revolution remained committed to the foundation of

freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions, and to those who acted in this
direction nothing was permitted that would have been outside the range of civil law.
The direction of the French Revolution was deflected almost from its beginning from
this course of foundation through the immediacy of suffering; it was determined by the
exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but from necessity, and it was actuated by
the limitless immensity of both the people’s misery and the pity this misery inspired.
The lawlessness of the “all is permitted” sprang here still from the sentiments of the heart
whose very boundlessness helped in the unleashing of a stream of boundless violence.
(Arendt 1963, 87)

The interest of the people is constitutive to the realm of the political in Arendt’s view.
She understands “interest” etymologically: The condition for interest between people is
the inter-esse, the space between them. This is no mere pun. As Arendt also argues in The
Origins of Totalitarianism (1976), it is one of the trademarks of totalitarian societies that they
abolish every space between people, refusing all plurality. “Because compassion abolishes
the distance, the worldly space between men where political matters, the whole realm of
human affairs are located, it remains, politically speaking, irrelevant and without conse-
quence” (Arendt 1963, 81). Emotions in their boundlessness have the very same quality
of erasing the space between people, according to Arendt. Thus, they are counterproduc-
tive to this in-between, which is the precondition for any interaction and mediation of
interests.
(c) Third, Arendt argues, emotions can only address particular individuals and are unable
to abstract or to generalize. One can only feel compassion towards the suffering of one par-
ticular person, since it means to feel someone else’s pain like one’s own. Facing “mankind
as a whole”, an abstract and general notion, this concrete and particular quality vanishes.
To feel compassionate towards the people of Paris or the suffering of humanity would mean
to lose the compassionate identification with one other person. In doing so, compassion is
stripped of its defining characteristics, and it is this generalization and abstraction from one
particular person and their situation that turns compassion into something else: pity. “Pity”,
to Arendt, is the sentimentalized version of compassion, something that occurs if one rids
compassion of its constitutive particular nature and deploys it for large, abstract groups of
people:

For compassion, to be striken with the suffering of someone else as though it were con-
tagious, and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are not only the same,
they may not even be related. Compassion, by its very nature, cannot be touched off by

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the sufferings of a whole class or a people, or, least of all Mankind as a whole. It cannot
reach out farther than what is suffered by one person and still remain what it is supposed
to be, co-suffering. Its strength hinges on the strength of passion itself, which, in con-
trast to reason, can comprehend only the particular, but has no notion of the general and
no capacity for generalization.
(Arendt 1963, 80)

This means that if emotions enter the realm of the political, it is detrimental not only to
the political but also to compassion. If and when compassion enters the political sphere,
it is bound to become corrupted. For in Arendt’s definition, compassion is bound to the
interaction between two people and thus to the private realm. If it is applied to a larger
group of people, it needs to generalize individual suffering, and it must also abstract from
the suffering of the individual. Thus, it is no longer the suffering of one particular person
that is at stake.
This process takes place independently of the actors’ intentions. Even if the revolution-
aries of Paris were truly driven by compassion, Arendt argues, what they felt towards the
Parisians as a large group could not manifest itself as compassion but only as pity. Confronted
with a large number of people, the other ceases to be the object of compassion and turns
into the trigger for a different kind of affection—the affection of the self. To Arendt, this
movement satisfies the desire for nuanced stimulations of the soul: Emotions are used in their
literal sense of e-movere, to move. In order to feel internally stimulated, the revolutionaries
created self-stimulation, using the suffering of the other as pure means. Arendt claims that
emotions in the political realm ought to be replaced by principles, and in the case of pity, the
principle is solidarity (see Chapter 45 in this volume). “For solidarity, because it partakes of
reason, and hence of generality, is able to comprehend a multitude conceptually, not only the
multitude of a class or a nation or a people, but eventually all mankind” (Arendt 1963, 84).
In the case of compassion, the emotion ought to be replaced by solidarity, because solidar-
ity is a principle and as such part and parcel of reason. Reason, unlike emotions, can abstract
and generalize, and so it can relate to large groups or even humanity as such, Arendt argues.
Although plausible at first sight, this argument seems to rest on wrong assumptions about
the nature of emotions. Most theories of emotions suggest not that reason and emotions are
opposites, but to the contrary, that they are closely intertwined. To give just one prominent
example, Martha Nussbaum (2003) has argued that emotions are evaluative and contain
judgments in an emotive form. Thus, very little today points to the fact that Arendt’s sug-
gested dichotomy between reason and emotion can be maintained.
Whether or not emotions concern someone else’s suffering or serve as a means of
self-stimulation, to Arendt, it is crucial that they are, in some sense or another, “inner”
entities. The talk of emotions as “inner” entities, however, seems somewhat dubious and
unconvincing—and points to central weaknesses in Arendt’s argument. Her conception of
emotions as inner entities is hard to maintain, even if it is only used metaphorically, and
certainly not without alternatives, as I shall explain later. She states that “they certainly are
located in the human heart” (Arendt 1963, 91) and as a result are not subject to interper-
sonal verification:

The heart, moreover (…) keeps its resources alive through a constant struggle that goes
on in its darkness and because of its darkness. When we say that nobody but God can
see (and, perhaps, can bear to see) the nakedness of a human heart. “Nobody” includes

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one’s own self—if only because our sense of unequivocal reality is so bound up with the
presence of others that we can never be sure of anything that only we ourselves know
and no one else.
(Arendt 1963, 92)

Only I myself—not other people—can determine what my emotions are or know what I
feel, Arendt claims. But since to Arendt, only things that are visible to the public can per-
sist and be subject to verification, emotions, which are only subject to introspection, are,
by definition, unverifiable. Throughout her work, Arendt stresses the idea of emotions as
inner, solipsistic states, to which no conditions of truth can be applied. In a letter to Mary
McCarthy about a lover who seemed to have a rather liberal notion of truth, she writes,
“What belongs to this charm is that their lies usually only concern only facts which will
come out and show them to be liars no matter what they do. (Whereas if one lies about his
‘feelings’, he is really safe, who can find out?)” (Arendt and McCarthy 1995, 49). If emotions
are inner, private entities, which are accessed by the individual’s introspection, it is impossi-
ble to apply truth conditions to them, regardless of whether or not the individual is sincere or
insincere. Their internality is another factor that makes emotions and politics incompatible
in Arendt’s view: Politics must be illuminated by the public and its discourse, whereas emo-
tions need the shelter of privacy.
With their immediate tendency to action, their boundlessness, their muteness, and their
private quality, emotions are antidemocratic. In the French Revolution, Arendt argues, they
helped bring to life the antidemocratic qualities of the volonté générale in an antidemocratic
manner. It is in this twofold way that emotions were fatal to the political in the French Rev-
olution: They possess antidemocratic qualities in and of themselves and help execute the
antidemocratic idea of the volonté générale.
Arendt derives her critique from, arguably loosely, phenomenological observations of how
people react when they are driven by emotions. This phenomenology might seem persuasive
at first glance, as it resonates with how ordinary folk-psychologically theorizing thinks about
emotions. Yet, Arendt’s phenomenology of emotion remains heavily influenced by Rousseau
and Descartes, and this seems, from the perspective of contemporary conceptualizations
of emotions, and political emotions in particular (see Chapter 41 in this volume), a serious
shortcoming of her theory. Arendt ignores philosophical traditions, which paint a more
complex picture of emotion. For example, the entire tradition of aesthetic emotions, starting
with Aristotle (2006), is left out in her considerations. Including these strains of philosoph-
ical thinking would have allowed her to draw a more complex picture, in which emotions
are, by no means, “inner” unmediated entities provoking direct action—quite the contrary.
In this tradition, aesthetic theory endorses the claim that emotions do not entail a tendency
to action, but are highly context-sensitive, can be judged as adequate or inadequate, and are
intertwined with reason rather than being opposed to it. More importantly, they are, by no
means, ‘inner’ entities subject to personal introspection only. On the contrary, they can only
be conceived of as depending on social norms and interaction (cf. Mohrmann 2015).
Although Arendt’s observations and descriptions of emotions remain within the broader
perspective of Rousseau and Descartes, she never makes this underlying theoretical frame-
work explicit and, consequently, debatable. Descartes, however, develops the notions of
internality and infallibility of emotions in The Passions of the Soul (Descartes 1649), in an
attempt to find the foundations of knowledge: I can be wrong about the object of my fear,
Descartes elaborates, but I cannot be wrong about the fear I felt myself. Rousseau then
followed this trajectory not in order to epistemologically ground knowledge but so as to

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establish the foundations of a less morally corrupt society. In the Second Discourse (Rousseau
1755), and in Émile, or On Education (Rousseau 1762), Rousseau presents emotions as one
prime natural resource for re-establishing human bonds that he deems have been corrupted
in aristocratic society. There, he suggests that emotions are unmediated, inner, and uncor-
rupted entities, impulses that need to be pursued. In his view, emotions are natural reactions
to pain or injustice. An individual is confronted either with injustice inflicted upon him, like
Émile, his apprentice in the book of the same name, or with the pain of a fellow citizen, as
described in the Second Discourse. As natural, inner, and unmediated entities, emotions prove
ideal to Rousseau as an antidote to aristocracy’s overly mannered and conventional style.
Although Arendt virtually despised most of Rousseau’s theory in particular, she ulti-
mately remains heavily influenced by both the Cartesian and Rousseauian conceptions of
emotions.

3. Conclusion
In The Human Condition (Arendt 1998), Arendt draws her famous distinction between the
private, the social, and the political. This appears like an exact differentiation, in which each
realm can be separated neatly from the next and trouble arises especially when the social
starts to permeate the sphere of the political. Arendt scholars have repeatedly criticized this
distinction (e.g., Benhabib 2003), as it seems that she is depoliticizing a very important field,
that of the social, which ought not to be depoliticized. Her discussion of pity and compassion
in On Revolution sheds a different light on this matter, however. The revolutionaries are not
accused because they blur the lines between the social and the political realms. Arendt argues
that the political requires certain preliminary conditions for the decision-making process.
In conditions of extreme poverty, the urge to find food and shelter will—necessarily—be
more pressing than establishing discursive and thus proto-democratic structures. Her argu-
ment is not ontological regarding the essence of the political and the social, but it concerns
Arendt’s theory of democracy. If proto-democratic structures like town hall meetings must
be established in order to legitimize revolutionary action, the “social question”—that is, the
supply of the population with food and shelter—is “pre-political”. Thus, the relative absence
of poverty is the precondition for proto-democratic institutions to flourish. If matters of
food and shelter are too urgent, “the political” as a realm that depends on discursive struc-
tures cannot be founded. Consequently, strategies of legitimization that bear resemblance to
proto-democratic structures, such as the compassionate identification deployed by the rev-
olutionaries, seemingly circumvent political stabilization and lead to the escalation of terror
and paranoia described above.
Arendt is highly original in establishing a phenomenology of emotions resting on the
distinction between the private and the political. She aims to explain why it only makes
sense to talk about emotions in the political if one presumes that this differs from an analysis
of emotions in the private sphere (otherwise, the intrinsic structures of the political remain
ignored and very little is being said about politics and emotions). Arendt forges a theory of
the mutually destructive relationship between emotions and the political that does not rest
on a taxonomy of (political) emotions but instead determines why emotions must clash
structurally with the political. Their defining qualities are mutually exclusive to Arendt.
The elaboration of this trajectory hinges on her particular notion of the political, and more
surprisingly, on a Rousseauian and to a lesser extent Cartesian notion of what emotions are.
In Arendt’s definition, emotions are private, inner entities, and since she sees the private
and the political as oppositions, emotions must be bound to the private realm. If the private

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and the political are opposites and emotions are private entities, however, the apolitical
quality of emotions is not explained but rather presupposed in the analysis itself. Although
Arendt sets out to structurally define why politics and emotions are incompatible, her argu-
ment seems indeed to rest on a petitio principii: The private, apolitical nature of emotions is
nothing that is “discovered” in phenomenological analysis of the political but is presumed
instead. Broadening the horizon of her discussion of emotions would have allowed Arendt
to offer an account of emotions and politics in which both can be conceived as constitutive
for one another; Kant, to cite a classic whom she knew by heart, offers just such a theory in
The Conflict of the Faculties (Kant 1992) in terms of enthusiasm and the French Revolution.

Notes
1 For an alternative conceptualization of the relation between politics and emotions, see Chapter 41
in this volume.
2 This is an idiosyncratic conceptualization of empathy by Arendt and quite different from current
phenomenological conceptions of empathy. See Chapter 37 in this volume for a broader view on
the phenomenology of empathy.

References
Arendt, Hannah (1963). On Revolution. London: Faber and Faber.
——— (1976). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.
——— (1998). The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Arendt, Hannah, and McCarthy, Mary (1995). Between Friends. The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and
Mary McCarthy 1949–1975. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt.
Aristotle (2006). Poetics. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett.
Benhabib, Seyla (2003). The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Descartes, René (1989[1649]). The Passions of the Soul. Transl. by S. H. Voss. Indianapolis, Cambridge:
Hackett.
Kant, Immanuel (1992). The Conflict of the Faculties. Lincoln, London: Nebraska University Press.
Mohrmann, Judith (2015). Affekt und Revolution. Politisches Handeln nach Arendt und Kant. Frankfurt,
New York: Campus.
Nussbaum, Martha C. (2003). Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
——— (2015). Political Emotions. Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1992[1755]). Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Transl. by D. E. Cress.
Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett.
——— (1979[1762]). Émile, or On Education. Transl. by A. Bloom. New York: Basic Books.

Further reading
Chiba, Shin (1995). Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political Love, Friendship, and Citizenship. The
Review of Politics 57(3), 505–535.
Hall, Cheryl (2005). The Trouble with Passion: Political Theory beyond the Reign of Reason. London,
New York: Routledge.
Kingston, Rebecca (2011). Public Passion: Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice. Montreal: McGill
Press.
Nelson, Deborah (2004). Suffering and Thinking: The Scandal of Tone in Eichmann in Jerusalem. In:
L. Berlant (Ed.). Compassion. The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. London, New York: Routledge,
219–244.
Tevenar, Gudrun von (2014). Invisibility in Arendt’s Public Space. In: M. Ure and M. Frost (Eds.). The
Politics of Compassion. London, New York: Routledge, 37–50.

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 16
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Maren Wehrle

What, if anything, could Simone de Beauvoir contribute to a philosophy of emotions? At

first glance, emotions don’t play an important role in her philosophy. She never explicitly
formulated the role of emotions in either her existentialist ethics or feminist thought; neither
can one find detailed descriptions of specific emotions or a systematic evaluation of the role
of affectivity in general. Nonetheless, emotions in terms of affectivity and feelings are at the
heart of her existential thinking. Without a fundamental bodily sensitivity, no engagement
with the world or others would be possible; without passion, joy and fear, as primary feelings
of the human condition, there would be neither freedom nor violence and domination.
From the start of her philosophical and novelist work until her last writings, Simone de
Beauvoir was concerned with existential problems like singularity, absolute freedom and re-
sponsibility. These are the problems that accompany the temptation of bad faith, and tensions
in relation to the other. Although her thought developed out of the intellectual environ-
ment of Paris before, during and after World War II, along with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and
Levinas,1 as well as influenced by Husserl and Heidegger (Kruks 1990; Heinämaa 2003;
Bauer 2006; Gothlin 2006; Langer 2006; McWeeny 2017; Wilkerson 2017),2 de Beauvoir
transforms their concepts to develop a genuine existential ethics based on the ambiguity of
the human condition.3
As Sartre, Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, de Beauvoir was a philosopher and philo-
sophical novelist.4 In her autobiography, de Beauvoir emphasizes how her novels and her
autobiography contribute to her ethical analysis of the paradoxies of human existence and to
a philosophico-political account of women’s condition. This includes ethical philosophical
discussions of human finitude, the self–other relation, repetition and the relation between
individuals and universals (de Beauvoir 1960, 625–629; 1963, 92–98, 367). Especially, the
novels She Came to Stay (1984)5 and the Mandarins (1955) focus on topics of emotions and
motivations that are central to her philosophical thinking. Although she did not build a
system in which a theory of emotions would have its proper place, she reflected on emotions
philosophically in the form of fiction and autobiography. The most central emotions that
de Beauvoir discusses thereby are: (a) Love in its many forms (She Came to Stay, Mandarins),
(b) envy (She Came), (c) courage and fear, and (d) friendship, loyalty and disappointment.
Her first novel She came to Stay (1984), about a ‘love triangle’ between the characters
Pierre, Xavière and Françoise, begins with Hegel’s statement that ‘each consciousness seeks

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the death of each other’ and ends with Françoise’s murder of Pierre. But instead of confirm-
ing the mere theoretical antagonism, where each consciousness wants to objectify or even
kill the other to claim its freedom, de Beauvoir dives deeper into the complex intertwine-
ment of the metaphysical with the concrete: the stickiness of interrelations and emotional in-
volvements between subjects. In the subsequent essay Pyrrhus and Cinéas (2004), de Beauvoir
explicitly addresses the philosophical and political questions of differentiating between
ethically correct or incorrect realizations of singular freedoms and projects. In this context,
she shows that individual freedom is necessarily related to the freedom of others. Her reflec-
tions on the emotion of love in Mandarins (1955) further elaborate on and illuminate crucial
philosophical problems like emotive motivation, repetition and variation of love, and the
contextuality or situatedness of emotional experiences in general (cf. Heinämaa 2017).
The issues raised in her early novels return again in her non-novelist philosophical writ-
ings: the ambiguity of our existence; the responsibilities and limits of freedom; our singu-
larity and intertwinement with others; and how all of these give rise to feelings of passion
expressed in joy, and fear, as well as violence. De Beauvoir further explored the existential
problems posed by ethical situations in more systematic and theoretical terms in her Ethics
of Ambiguity (1976[1947]). Her thinking is then applied to concrete situations in The Second
Sex (2011a[1949]) and “Must we burn Sade” (2011b[1953])? By focusing on these latter three
works here, I will carve out the role of affectivity and emotions in her existential ethics. I
claim that her approach can be interpreted as an affective or responsive ethics, in which freedom
and vulnerability, mind and body are necessarily intertwined.

1. The ambiguity of freedom: passion, joy and fear

‘Ambiguity’ refers to the fact that we are objects and subjects alike, and that we are a part
of this world of which we are conscious.6 Although we assert ourselves as an “internality
against which no external power can take hold”, we simultaneously experience ourselves as
a “thing crushed by the dark weight of things” (de Beauvoir 1976, 7). The existential condi-
tion breaks through at any opportunity, “the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my
bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sover-
eign importance of each man and all men” (ibid., 9). In this regard, humans can never be a
thing as such, nor a pure subject, but are free and bounded, infinite and finite, subjects and
objects, i.e., find themselves situated within these paradoxical poles of being and have the
existential task to deal with their essential ambiguity (see also Kierkegaard 1843). In other
words, we are both subjective agents that freely project themselves into the world, a world
that appears there for us, as well as material, visible and vulnerable objects within that world.
In this ambiguous situation, humans must will and perform their freedom. Freedom is made
manifest by the constant possibility of failure. To embrace one’s freedom, then, one must
face their ambiguity. This demands the assumption of oneself not as a fixed existence, rather
a “lack of being” (cf. Sartre 1956), to elicit a space for being to unfold.
The ambiguity of life is not something we think or reflect on, but primarily some-
thing we feel—and are anxious about. According to de Beauvoir, existentialism is the only
philosophical approach that tries to face and accept this ambiguity. In fact, the ambiguity of
life is the precondition for real ethics. This involves granting the concept of ‘evil’ a genuine
role in one’s ethical considerations and accepting the fact that there are real risks (both of
danger and failures), but also moments of joy and success: “Nothing is decided in advance,
and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win”
(de Beauvoir 1976, 34).

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Such a lack or indefiniteness of existence is what makes the disclosing of the world and
transcending of the subject onto this world possible. For de Beauvoir, it is this movement that
lies at the heart of every human existence and is accompanied with a certain feeling, the joy
of existing. The primal condition of existence is thus a “free generosity” that expresses itself
in vitality, curiosity, activeness and creativity.7 Joy is the primordial mood of existing: “in
this movement even the most outcast sometimes feel the joy of existence. They then mani-
fest existence as happiness and the world as a source of joy” (ibid., 41). As such, not only the
physical, but also the lived body becomes central. We experience joy because of the affective
and responsive connection we have with the world and others: de Beauvoir describes the body
that feels and its sensitivity as a presence, “which is attentive to the world and to itself ”
(ibid., 42). In this regard, the body is not only determined by physiological conditions, but
also the condition and expression of our affective relation with the world. It can be thus an
object of sympathy or repulsion.
In this context, de Beauvoir introduces Husserl’s concept of intentionality, which she
transforms into a two-staged affective intentionality.8 Joy is what accompanies the first stage
of intentionality, which is defined as an operative mode of disclosure or discovering (of the
meaning) of the world. The second stage comprises the explicit act of fixating or creating
meaning whereby one posits oneself as an author of this meaning. The latter can be accom-
panied with the dual mood of hope or domination. Depending on which mood prevails,
this can ground a movement of liberation (from a constraining or oppressive situation) or
an act of exploitation (of the world and others), respectively. According to de Beauvoir,
the human condition is thus characterized by a passion for meaning or a drive towards being, a
passion that can never be completely fulfilled, because we are unable to disclose the abso-
lute meaning of the world or become its autonomous authors. Therefore, this drive “always
misses its goal” (ibid.).9
The passion thus remains dissatisfied and comes with an experience of contingency,
finitude and lack of control. The joy of existence is thus necessarily interwoven with or
even overshadowed by an existential anxiety. As de Beauvoir describes, this fear typically
manifests itself at adolescence, upon leaving the protected universe and playful disclosing of
the child’s world. Adults are forced to make choices and assume responsibility. They are not
only confronted with the contingency, but also the irreversibility of their actions. The joy
of disclosing and transcending is no longer easily playful as it is now always paired with fear
and the risk of potential failure.

2. Responsive intersubjectivity: passion and the appeal to others

Not everyone is able to face this contingency and responsibility, and thus fulfill one’s
freedom. De Beauvoir characterizes various modes of escaping or misinterpreting this free-
dom, which, in turn, results in a lack of passion or, better, indifference. Such indifference
is the cause of all evil. De Beauvoir describes five characteristic types that all withdraw or
escape their freedom in different ways; the first three are the sub-man, the serious man and the
nihilist. All of them are characterized by a fundamental apathy, indifference or lack of vitality,
motivated by the fundamental fear of existence. They restrain from the original movement
of disclosing the world and numb, in turn, their original sensitivity and openness to it.
The one with the lowest vitality is termed the sub-man: “in the face of risks and tensions,
the sub-man rejects the passion, which is the human condition” (ibid.). In a sense, he does
not will his freedom. But because there is no real escape, neither from freedom nor from
passion manifest, such a rejection of existence is “still another way of existing” (ibid., 43).

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Therefore, he masks his anxiety and indifference and takes refuge in the ready-made values
of the social world, easily follows leaders or succumbs to ideologies. But behind this mask,
there lures his indifference. The negation of himself shows in his boredom and lack of
meaningful interactions with the world (ibid., 45). Because the sub-man cannot escape his
freedom and needs to find a way to engage it, his attitude toward the world manifests as one
of rejection and so, he becomes the serious man.
The serious man also denies himself, but through the focus on an external object or social
value in which he attempts to lose himself. In order to negate his subjectivity, he subordi-
nates his freedom under a “great” cause or esteemed value that is reified in some form of
objective being like nature, God, state, humanity or spirit. The appropriation of these values,
in turn, confers a “stable” value on himself. The serious man is thus guilty of a denial of
freedom; he refuses to recognize “that he is freely establishing the value of the end he sets
up” (ibid., 48). He thus escapes his personal responsibility and instead acts without question
as a member of a herd or gives himself over to something supposedly higher than himself.
The sub-man and the serious man deny their freedom and thus lack passion. De Beauvoir
stresses that such indifference is, in fact, dangerous and eventually lead to evil in that they
systematically neglect responsibility for one’s own role in value constitution (cf. Heinämaa
2017). Indeed, with their attitude, one can easily become a tyrant: They ignore the desires
and values of concrete subjects in favor of an absolute object or goal, thus instigating a kind
of fanaticism.
If the serious man fails to achieve this object or goal, his disappointment leads to nihilism:
effectively, the desire to be nothing. But, this is a paradoxical desire as it belies itself: Even
the will to negation has to “manifest itself as a presence at the very moment that it displays
itself ” (de Beauvoir 1976, 54). Although the attitude of the nihilist expresses the truth of the
ambiguity of the existence—that is indeed a lack, nothingness, as well as radical finitude—
he fails to live his ambiguity. Instead of defining its lack as an opportunity for becoming, such
death is not integrated into life, but appears the only truth of life.
The second class of types, who betray the human condition, are the adventurer and the
(wrong-headed) passionate. At first glance, the adventurer seems to affirm his freedom, lives
through passion and enjoys the incomplete character of all disclosure and meaning. If exis-
tentialism would be solipsistic, the adventurer would be its perfect hero. But, for de Beauvoir,
existentialism is always an intersubjective endeavor—freedom can never be embraced or per-
formed alone, but with and among others. The adventurer, who wants to be free without
willing the freedom of others, is thus not able to genuinely realize his freedom. Each of our
actions is intertwined and ultimately depends on others; therefore, we must declare ourselves
to others. To will one’s freedom actually means give oneself over to an open future, and
that, in turn, necessarily inheres to an intertwinement with and appeal to fellow men. The
adventurer is not able to fully realize his freedom, because it has no content. In a sense, his
passion is empty: He does not take the desires and needs of others into account; rather, he
uses others as means for his own leisure and adventure. De Beauvoir leaves no doubt that
such an “external availability” is not freedom. Quite the contrary, the adventurer is also dan-
gerous insofar as, in order to keep his privileges, he either has to submit to influential masters
or make himself supreme master or dictator (ibid., 62). In this manner, he is dependent on
others: not only with regard to his privileges but also because he needs the recognition of others:
“His fault is believing that one can do something for oneself without others and even against
them” (ibid., 63).
The same fault holds true for the passionate man, although he stands as the antithesis of the
adventurer. While the adventurer fails in affirming his existential condition, i.e., the content

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of his freedom, the passionate man fails to fulfill freedom’s need for subjectivity. Instead,
the latter sets the object of his passion as absolute. Such an inauthentic or manic passion is
not generous or open toward the other, but rather wants to possess its object. Although the
passionate man succeeds in making himself a lack of being, he does so not with the intention
of acting freely as such, but to simply just be (ibid., 65).10
De Beauvoir concludes that existentialism cannot be solipsistic. We are not living in a
world where everyone creates their own values and tries to impose them on others, or where
there is only a conflict of opposed wills enclosed in their solitude (ibid., 72). An existential
ethics must condemn these “inauthentic” ways of living, not in the name of an abstract law,
but because these forms neglect the intersubjectivity that lies at the heart of every ambiguous
existence.11 If it is true, as de Beauvoir argues, that every project emanates from subjectiv-
ity, it is also true that these subjective movements must surpass their subjectivity. Neither
a project nor a choice or norm can be realized or last without the recognition, belief and
support of others: “Man can find a justification of his own existence only in the existence of
other men” (ibid.). Therefore, oppression is an inauthentic form of existence for “a freedom
will itself genuinely only by willing itself as an indefinite movement through the freedom
of others” (ibid., 90). The existence of others defines my situation and is even the condition
of my freedom (ibid., 91).
We are bound up with others in the most fundamental way, namely, in an existential
(ontological), volitional and affective manner. Existence is an “urgent interrogation”, as
soon as one exists one has to “answer”. Existence as affectivity, transcendent movement
as well as vulnerability, means that “I concern others and they concern me” (ibid., 72).
Therefore, intentionality as the disclosing and constituting of meaning must be affective
as well as intersubjective. In disclosing the world, we connect to others affectively; in
constituting meaning or engaging in projects together, we establish the basis for a proper
form of we-intentionality. Genuine or “authentic” passion and joy is thus only possible
when it is shared.

3. In/Authentic love: control

and emotional intoxication
In the feminist classic, The Second Sex (1947), de Beauvoir explains why a patriarchal society
distorts an authentic (ethical) performance of freedom as well as an authentic love relation
between men and women. To this end, she interprets the binary gender order that comes
with a strict separation and asymmetric valuation of labor (domestic vs. salaried), spaces
(private vs. public) and roles (serving and caring vs. leading and producing), as an attempt
to escape our ambiguous human condition—this time not merely on a personal psycho-
logical but also on a societal level. Ambiguity, i.e., that existence is both, subject/object,
transcendent/immanent, active/passive, is resolved within patriarchal societies by assigning
each of these poles to one of the supposed two sexes or genders.12
The first betrayal of ambiguity (and, therefore, freedom and passion) is the preemptive
attempt to fixate and stabilize a female (or male) essence. Female (or male) existences do not
have the chance to make and shape their essence through their own doings (as the existen-
tial relation to being requests). While masculinity supposedly embodies rationality, control,
agency, transcendence and culture, the myth of the “eternal feminine” (de Beauvoir 2011a,
19f., 158, 163ff.) ascribes to them an intimate closeness to nature, passivity, irrationality and
emotion, and perceives their main function in “immanent” processes like preserving, repeat-
ing and caring. While ‘the man’ represents the absolute autonomous subject that transcends

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itself into the world and shapes this world through his projects, women are identified only
in relation to them as ‘the other’.
The second betrayal of ambiguity is the reduction of a large group of members of human
existence to immanence. In de Beauvoir’s context of post-World War II, many women in
Western societies still faced evident oppression—they did not have equal rights and were
highly dependent economically, socially and politically on men. Women are thus bound
to men if they desire to partake in acts of transcendence (world disclosing and shaping).
This situation of immanence is enforced spatially as women’s daily activities are confined
to the domestic sphere, and characterized by a routine and repetition, that hinders them to
authentically embrace their freedom. Because of their bodily as well as social situation as
mothers and caregivers, they are rendered dependent and bound to bodily vulnerability and
finitude (cf. Groenhout 2017, 77). In contrast, man, with his emphasis on transcending and
producing, hides his vulnerability and contingency behind the illusion of agency, control
and rationality. Indeed, as de Beauvoir shows, the projection of a rational universe of human
(masculine) mastery is only possible because all the contingent and ‘sticky’ aspects of our
existence (i.e., materiality, emotions, nature, passivity, finitude) are outsourced to one half
of human mankind.
Although de Beauvoir rightly criticizes woman’s situation as oppressive in contrast to that
of man’s, she leaves us in no doubt that both parties reap certain rewards (at least, in the context
of the 1940s France). In this patriarchal order, women are not overtly concerned by the fears,
responsibilities and risks that accompany freedom and transcendence (the subject position),
while men retain their position of superiority and strive to ignore their dependence, passivity
and finitude (the object position). Although this order is “dialectically unstable” (cf. Bauer
2017, 151), because no one can only ever be a subject or an object, merely immanent or tran-
scendent, it sometimes appears to work out for both. But, in this manner, both fail to face their
ambiguity. They are thus unable to fulfill their freedom: Instead of accepting their existential
singularity, they hide behind the predefined essence of a ‘group’; instead of actually facing one
another as individuals, one just labels the other according to typified characteristics.
In such a patriarchal order, passion or ‘authentic’ love is deformed as both women and
men are unable to fulfill their genuine human potential. In order to experience a less dis-
torted and more authentic love, humans (whatever gender) must affirm their ambiguity,
make oneself vulnerable and take the risk of an intimate encounter, rather than stick to pre-
defined roles and conventions. Authentic love is only possible when one respects the other
as a ‘real other’, i.e., in their singularity, equality and difference, and together try to enact a
“relational autonomy” (cf. Petterson 2017).
What is needed for such an authentic love as well as freedom is the acceptance of one’s
vulnerability and affective openness or empathy for the other, and correspondingly the free-
dom of the respective other. In Must we burn Sade (1951/1952), de Beauvoir describes this as
“emotional intoxication”. According to de Beauvoir, Sade fears and thus rejects his ambi-
guity and vulnerability and thereby lacks the ability of being emotionally intoxicated. She
describes him as someone who “mistook power for freedom and misunderstood the erotic
desires of the flesh” (Bergoffen 2011, 42).13
De Beauvoir acknowledges the importance of Sade’s writings and experiences as they con-
front us with the singularity of the subject, and the tensions between me and the other. Sade was
authentic in that he tried to develop an existential ethics and criticized the hedonistic and despotic
order of its time, the “resigned hypocrisy that we decorate with the name of virtue” (ibid., 84).
Against the organized criminality of the state that masks itself as ‘virtue’, he puts the brutality of

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nature and the honest cruelty of man. He claims that the former, the hypocrisy of virtue, is the
real evil, while cruelty is the only possibility to establish a real connection between people.
De Beauvoir agrees that cruelty can indeed create an affective relationship with another—
it reveals in us the ambiguity of our bodily existence in that it breaks down the barriers of
flesh that separates us. She denies, however, that there can be real passion without affirming
one’s ambiguity. In a careful analysis of his transcribed sexual experiences and criminal acts,
de Beauvoir shows that Sade, who argues for the spontaneous and violent forces of nature, is
unable to get rid of his own singularity and consciousness: “Not for one instant does he lose
himself in animality” (de Beauvoir 2011b, 59). Quite the opposite: His sexual encounters
are carefully planned; he needs imagination and philosophical discourse as preparation and
aphrodisiac; and he remains lucid until the very end. His sensual pleasure is never spontaneous,
“self-forgetting” or “swooning”. De Beauvoir concludes that Sade and sadism itself is neither
a natural force nor an ethical act, but it actually tries to compensate for an absence, that is,
the inability of “emotional intoxication”. Only through such an emotional intoxication can
existence be “grasped in oneself and in the other as at once subjectivity and passivity” (ibid.,
59–60), and so achieves an “ambiguous unity, in which the two partners merge”, and “each
is delivered from its self-presence and attains and immediate communication with the other”
(ibid., 60).
Sade’s escape of emotional intoxication “rejoin[s] the other only via representation” as his
“autism” prevents him from forgetting himself and “from ever realizing the presence of the
other” (ibid.). It is this missing presence and connection that he tries to substitute with the
other’s pain and suffering (ibid., 65). Sade remains enclosed in the solitude of his conscious-
ness. He is a cold lover and needs to affirm himself as the author of the feelings of the other
because he has “no other means of attaining his own fleshly condition” (ibid., 60).14

***

Clearly, for de Beauvoir, although some of us are unable to live this ambiguity and affec-
tively connect to others, one must still continue to find ways to achieve recognition from
and support others. After all, our existences are intertwined bodily and emotionally, and
our freedom is tied to the freedom of others. In all of the mentioned works, the necessary
and inescapable bond between individuals comes to the fore. This bond can either lead to
evil and violence (i.e., conflicts, denials or misinterpretation of freedom) or to a (shared)
passion and love as when we pursue our freedom together in joined projects or connect
affectively and achieve an “ambiguous unity” in intimate relationships. Existence thus com-
prises the challenge to keep, establish and share passion, that is, to accept the fear of finitude,
contingency and our dependence on others, and take the risk to appeal to their freedom.15

Notes
1 Levinas also guided her reading of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology, cf. Levinas (1930,
1947, 1979).
2 For her reading and application of Hegelian concepts as master/slave dialectics, etc., cf. Hutchings
(2017), Direk (2017), Gothlin (1996), Bauer (2001), and Green and Roffey (2010); for influences
from Marx, see Kruks (2017).
3 For the genuine collaborative character of the work of de Beauvoir and Sartre, see Sartre’s ethical
notebooks from the 1940, published in 1980 (Sartre 1983), and therein De Beauvoir’s letters to
Sartre and Algren.

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——— (2011a[1949]). The Second Sex. Transl. by C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier. New York:
Vintage.
——— (2011b[1953]). Must We Burn Sade? Transl. by K. A. Gleed, M. J. Rose, and V. Preston. In:
M. A. Simons and M. Timmermann (Eds.). Political Writings. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Direk, Zeynep (2017). Simone de Beauvoir’s Relation to Hegel’s Absolute. In: L. Henghold and
N. Bauer (Ed.). A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Oxford: Wiley, 198–211.
Goldie, Peter (2000). The Emotions. A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gothlin, Eva (1996). Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”. London: Athlone.
——— (2001). Simone de Beauvoir’s Existential Phenomenology and Philosophy of History in Le
Deuxième sexe. In: L. Embree and W. O’Brien (Eds.). The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de
Beauvoir. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 41–51.
——— (2006). Reading de Beauvoir with Heidegger. In: C. Card (Ed.). The Cambridge Companion to
Simone De Beauvoir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 45–65.
Green, Karen, and Nicholas Roffey (2010). Women, Hegel and Recognition. The Second Sex. Hypatia
25(2), 376–393.
Groenhout, Ruth (2017). Beauvoir and the Biological Body. In: L. Henghold, and N. Bauer (Eds.). A
Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Oxford: Wiley, 73–83.
Heinämaa, Sara (2003). Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference. Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
——— (2006). Through Desire and Love: Simone de Beauvoir on the Possibilities of Sexual Desire.
In: E. Mortensen (Ed.). Sex, Breath and Force: Sexual Difference in a Post-Feminist Era. Lanham:
Lexington, 129–166.
——— (2008). Simone de Beauvoir. In: H. R. Sepp and L. Embree (Eds.). Handbook of Phenomenolog-
ical Aesthetics. Dordrecht: Springer, 41–44.
——— (2012). Sex, Gender and Embodiment. In: D. Zahavi (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Contempo-
rary Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 216–242.
——— (2017). Ambiguity and Difference Two Feminist Ethics of the Present. In: A. Parker, and A.
van Leeuwen (Eds.). Differences: Rereading Beauvoir and Irigaray. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
137–173.
Husserl, Edmund (1973). Experience and Judgment. An Investigation in a Genealogy of Logic. Transl. by
J. S. Churchill, and L. Eley. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Hutchings, Kimberly (2017). Beauvoir and Hegel. In: L. Henghold, and N. Bauer (Eds.). A Companion
to Simone de Beauvoir. Oxford: Wiley, 187–198.
Kierkegaard, Søren (1959[1843]). Either/Or Volume I. Transl. by D. F. Swenson, and L. M. Swenson.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kruks, Sonja (1990). Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society. London: Unwin
Hyman.
——— (2017). De Beauvoir and the Marxism Question. In: L. Henghold, and N. Bauer (Eds.). A
Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Oxford: Wiley, 236–249.
Langer, Monika (2006). Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on Ambiguity. In: C. Card (Ed.). The Cambridge
Companion to Simon de Beauvoir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 87–106.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1995[1930]). Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Transl. by A. Orianne.
Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
——— (2001[1947]). Existence and Existents. Transl. by A. Lingis. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press.
——— (1987[1979]). Time and Other. Transl. by R. A. Cohen. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press.
McWeeny, Jennifer (2017). Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. In: L. Henghold, and N. Bauer (Eds.). A
Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Oxford: Wiley, 211–224.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1992[1948]). Sense and Non-Sense. Transl. by H. Dreyfus, and P. Dreyfus.
Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
——— (1968[1964]). The Visible and the Invisible. Transl. by A. Lingis. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press.
Petterson, Tove (2017). Love – According to Simone de Beauvoir. In: L. Henghold, and N. Bauer
(Eds.). A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Oxford: Wiley, 160–174.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1956[1943]). Being and Nothingness. A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Transl. by
H. E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1992[1983]). Notebooks for an Ethics. Transl. by D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

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Wehrle, Maren (2015). “Feelings as the Motor of Perception”? The Essential Role of Interest for
Intentionality. Husserl Studies 31(1), 45–64.
Wilkerson, William (2017). Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on Freedom and Ambiguity. In: L. Henghold
and N. Bauer (Eds.). A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Oxford: Wiley, 223–236.

Further reading
Lennon, Kathleen, and Wilde, Anthony (forthcoming). Alienation and Affectivity: Beauvoir, Sartre
and Levinas on the Ageing Body. Sartre Studies International. doi:10.3167/ssi.2019.250104.

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 17
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
Joel Krueger

1. Introduction
Phenomenologists have long argued that emotions play a central role in framing our
experience of the world. Scheler, Stein, and Levinas, for example, insist on the centrality of
emotions in shaping our empathic engagement with others (Krueger 2008; Jardine 2015).
For Heidegger and Sartre, moods and emotions are core structures of our being-in-the-
world insofar as they disclose the significance of our worldly projects and future possibilities
(Hatzimoysis 2009; Elpidorou and Freeman 2015).
Merleau-Ponty is an outlier. He spends little time explicitly addressing emotions—and
when he does mention them, it’s often in the service of another topic such as language, ges-
ture, sexuality, or aesthetics (Cataldi 2008). The main objective of this chapter is, therefore,
the following: I will bring together some of Merleau-Ponty’s scattered remarks about emotions
and integrate them with his more general claims about embodiment, mind, and self to illu-
minate his view of emotions. I will argue that Merleau-Ponty defends an externalist approach
anticipating current debates in philosophy of emotions.1 For Merleau-Ponty, emotions are
not exclusively head-bound; rather, they are styles of bodily comportment or “variations of
being in the world” realized not only by the dynamics of our embodied agency but also by the
objects and institutions around us. Merleau-Ponty’s externalism is philosophically interesting
because it challenges some traditional assumptions about the ontology of emotions. It can also
enrich current debates by highlighting under-investigated themes worthy of further attention.

2. Embodied emotions
For Merleau-Ponty, emotions are embodied. This amounts to more than the trivial claim
that emotions depend upon our brain and central nervous system. And it’s an even stronger
view than approaches which argue that emotions are perceptions of bodily changes tracking
features or events in our environment (e.g., the presence of threats) (Damasio 1994; Prinz
2004). Instead, Merleau-Ponty endorses an embodied constitution thesis: the claim that some
emotions are partially made up of bodily processes beyond the brain.
We find versions of this thesis in embodied cognitive science. Embodied cognition the-
orists reject the idea that cognitive phenomena such as seeing a bottle of Belgian beer or

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solving a mathematical problem are constituted entirely by computational processes in the

brain. For example, sensorimotor or “enactive” approaches argue that perception is a mode
of action, and the bodily processes that comprise the latter (e.g., movements of the eyes and
head; focusing and refocusing attention; reaching, grabbing, manipulating, etc.) are thus
constituents of the former (Noë 2004). Similarly, some embodied cognition theorists argue
that gestures can be part of cognitive processes like mathematical reasoning or working
memory (Clark 2008) (see also Chapter 26 in this volume).
What is Merleau-Ponty’s constitution claim about emotions? Simply put, for
Merleau-Ponty, emotions are constituted not only by brain processes but also by bodily
processes and the dynamics of our embodied agency. Merleau-Ponty’s view is, therefore, a
kind of embodied externalism in that the vehicles of emotions span neural and extra-neural
bodily processes. They are realized not just in but also across the body’s “expressive space”
(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 147).
To further clarify this view, we can first consider Merleau-Ponty’s general rejection of
Cartesian “intellectualism”. This is a picture of mind that “by definition, eludes the ‘outside
spectator’ and can only be recognized inwardly” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 391). Merleau-Ponty
instead argues that mental phenomena are not hidden inside our bodies like marbles in a
container. Rather, our body as a whole is constitutive of subjectivity. I don’t simply have
a body—“I am my body” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 205). Elsewhere, he summarizes his core
thesis:

The perceiving mind is an incarnated mind. I have tried, first of all, to re-establish the
roots of the mind in its body and in its world (…) the insertion of the mind in corpore-
ality, the ambiguous relation which we entertain with our body and, correlatively, with
perceived things.
(Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 3–4)

For Merleau-Ponty, my awareness of myself as a locus of experience and action is inextrica-

bly bound up with my body and the way I bodily engage with the world. As a consequence,
“the body, then, is not an object” but instead a being with “an ambiguous mode of existence”
(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 204). My body is a physical object with properties like size, weight,
color, shape, and texture, but it is also and at the same time a subject, something I experience
and live through from the inside as I interact with the people and things around me.
For example, I can unthinkingly reach for and grasp my coffee mug while focusing on the
newspaper, or tenderly stroke my daughter’s cheek as I kiss her goodnight, because I have an
immediate proprioceptive and kinesthetic sense of where my limbs are in space and what sort
of bodily actions are possible within that space. I possess a prereflective sense of myself as an
embodied and situated subject. To be a body for Merleau-Ponty is thus to exist within the ten-
sion of this “ambiguous” existence where subjectivity and objectivity are interwoven within
the dynamics of everyday life. And acknowledging this structural ambiguity of the embodied
mind shows us that we are “no longer dealing with a material reality nor, moreover, with a
mental reality, but with a significative whole which properly belongs neither to the external
world nor to internal life” but simultaneously to both (Merleau-Ponty 1963, 182).
A consequence of this view is that it rejects a picture of mind as a private inner realm that
only the owner of that mind has direct access to:

We must abandon the fundamental prejudice according to which the psyche is that
which is accessible only to myself and cannot be seen from the outside. My psyche is

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not a series of “states of consciousness” that are rigorously closed in on themselves and
inaccessible to anyone but me. My consciousness is turned primarily toward the world,
turned toward things; it is above all a relation to the world. The other’s consciousness as
well is chiefly a certain way of comporting himself toward the world. Thus it is in his
conduct, in the manner in which the other deals with the world, that I will be able to
discover his consciousness.
(Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 116–117)

For Merleau-Ponty, we see mind directly in action (Krueger 2012). As fundamentally em-
bodied and animate beings, we are open and responsive to our environment; this open-
ness is constitutive of our bodily being-in-the-world. Accordingly, mind is continually
externalized—and thus directly available to others—via the integrated suite of skills, capaci-
ties, and habits that enable us to act on and respond to the people and things around us. These
features of our embodiment and agency are constitutive of mindedness. And “the mental
thus understood is comprehensible from the outside” (Merleau-Ponty 1963, 183).
Merleau-Ponty argues that emotions are similarly embodied and externalized; they are
styles of bodily comportment or “variations of being in the world” (Merleau-Ponty 2012,
372). This means that emotions should not be thought of as discrete states that arise in-
side of us, fully formed, only to pass away after some time as a new emotion takes its place
(i.e., the common view of feelings as “a preordination, of a nature calling forth a feeling”
(Merleau-Ponty 2010, 28)). As styles of bodily comportment, emotions are inextricably linked
with our agency (Colombetti 2014; Slaby and Wüschner 2014; Hufendiek 2017). They are en-
acted over time—not things that just passively happen to or in us but rather things that we do:

We can, for example, see quite clearly what is shared between the gesture and its sense in
the expression of emotions and in the emotions themselves: the smile, the relaxed face,
and the cheerfulness of the gestures actually contain the rhythm of the action or of this
joy as a particular mode of being in the world.
(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 192)

A substantive consequence of this view is to see emotions as concretely articulated in what

we might refer to as an individual’s “affective style”: their habitual way of moving, acting,
expressing, and regulating emotions (Colombetti and Krueger 2015).2 Other remarks sup-
port this externalist reading. They affirm that, for Merleau-Ponty, the bodily dynamics of
our affective style—gestures, facial expressions, idiosyncratic mannerisms, mimicry, etc.—
are not merely expressions of hidden feelings but instead outwardly visible parts of the emo-
tions themselves:

I perceive the other’s grief or anger in his behavior, on his face and in his hands, without
any borrowing from an “inner” experience of suffering or of anger and because grief
and anger are variations of being in the world, undivided between body and conscious-
ness, which settle upon the other’s behavior and are visible in his phenomenal body.
(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 372)
Consider an angry or threatening gesture (…) I do not perceive the anger or the threat
as a psychological fact hidden behind the gesture, I read the anger in the gesture. The
gesture does not make me think of anger, it is the anger itself.
(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 190)

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Since emotion is not a psychic, internal fact but rather a variation in our relations with
others and the world which is expressed in our bodily attitude, we cannot say that only
the signs of love or anger are given to the outside observer and that we understand others
indirectly by interpreting these signs: we have to say that others are directly manifest to
us as behavior.
(Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 53)

To be clear, Merleau-Ponty is not endorsing a brand of crude behaviorism according to which

mental phenomena like emotions are reducible to their behavioral expressions. Rather, they
have a kind of hybrid reality—“a significative whole which properly belongs neither to the
external world nor to internal life”—that cuts across that “old antithesis” between a hid-
den inner realm of mental phenomena and an observable outer arena of behavior and action
(Merleau-Ponty 1963, 182). Merleau-Ponty has no desire to explain away the experiential
character of emotions as we live through them from our first-person perspective. He notes that
“[t]he other’s grief or anger never has precisely the same sense for him and for me. For him,
these are lived situations; for me, they are appresented” within his behavior (Merleau-Ponty
2012, 372). Merleau-Ponty acknowledges an asymmetry with respect to my emotions and
those of others. When I experience an emotion, I feel it immediately “from the inside”; I
know it directly as mine. But I lack this sort of first-person access to other’s emotions, as they
do mine. This asymmetry is phenomenologically constitutional for intersubjectivity.
Nevertheless, acknowledging this asymmetry does not entail accepting the ontological
assumption generating the “old antithesis” that cleaves inner (mental) from outer (behav-
ioral) realms. Asserting the irreducibility of the first-person perspective, which is necessary
to preserve this asymmetry, is compatible with the embodied constitution thesis. And the
take-away point, then, is that for Merleau-Ponty, minds—including emotions—are hybrid
entities. They are constituted by both internal (neural, physiological, phenomenal) and
external (behavioral, expressive) parts and processes, integrated into a unified whole.
While space precludes an in-depth survey, we can briefly note that this view receives
support from different streams of empirical work in current emotion science. For example,
there is evidence that moods are partially constituted by an array of integrated extra-neural
processes looping throughout the body and operating at multiple timescales, including fluc-
tuating rates of blood glucose in the bloodstream, hormonal processes (released by endocrine
glands in the brain and body), and even mood- and behavior-influencing gut microbiota
(Colombetti 2017). Other work indicates that the ontology of emotions is not exhausted by
neural components but may also include expressive and behavioral components ( Niedenthal
2007). People who receive Botox injections inhibiting facial expressions (Baumeister et al.
2016), cases of acquired (temporary) facial paralysis such as Bell’s Palsy (Cole 1998), or in-
dividuals who suffer severe spinal cord injuries (Chwalisz et al. 1988) report less-intense
feelings of emotions. A similar effect is found in the narratives of people with Moebius
Syndrome, a congenital form of bilateral facial paralysis (Krueger and Henriksen 2016). This
and other evidence lends support to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the ontology of emotions
cuts across both inner and outer components, integrated into a unified expressive whole.

3. Scaffolded emotions
An embodied constitution thesis about emotions flows from more general discussions of
embodied cognition. However, a family of recent views push this brand of externalism even
further. They argue for a kind of environmental externalism according to which our cognitive

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capacities are realized not just by our brains and bodies but also by the complex ways our
embodied brains interact with our material and social environments. For these externalist
approaches, the tools, technologies, and social resources we use to “scaffold” (i.e., set up,
drive, and regulate) our thinking play such a crucial cognitive role that this beyond-the-
head scaffolding ought to be considered a literal part of cognition (Clark 2008)—or more
conservatively, as at least contributing environmental support essential for understanding its
character and functional integrity (Sterelny 2010).
Versions of this environmental externalism are found in recent debates about the scaffolded
nature of affectivity and emotions (Colombetti 2014; Krueger 2014; Slaby 2014; Stephan
et al. 2014; Colombetti and Krueger 2015; Colombetti and Roberts 2015; Greenwood 2015;
Carter et al. 2016; Krueger and Szanto 2016). Proponents observe that we routinely manip-
ulate our emotions by actively manipulating things, places, and people around us. These
manipulative processes loop back onto us and scaffold our emotions by synchronically and
diachronically shaping their temporal and phenomenal development, often in a fine-grained
way. And they may even help realize experiences and self-regulative capacities that we might
not otherwise be able to achieve without their ongoing input.
Merleau-Ponty appears amenable to at least two varieties of a scaffolded approach to emo-
tions. We can make this clearer by looking at his remarks on emotions and incorporation, and
emotions and institutions.

3.1 Emotions and incorporation

For Merleau-Ponty, our embodiment is dynamic and open-ended. As lived bodies—
“ambiguous” beings constituted by a synthesis of subjectivity and objectivity—we are open
to various forms of structural augmentation (i.e., scaffolding) which reconfigures how we
experience and use our bodies. More precisely, our bodies can be scaffolded by processes
of “incorporation”: the ability of our lived body to take something else into itself. For ex-
ample, we routinely incorporate new skills and habits that alter the configuration of our
embodied agency. This is a process of “habit-incorporation” (Colombetti 2016). Learning
to walk down the stairs, play a musical instrument, adopt new gestures, dance the waltz,
ride a bicycle, or become a skilled rock climber all involve the development of unique skills
that expand the range of things we can do with our bodies in different contexts. Incorpo-
rating these skills into our bodily-affective style thus has functional significance insofar as this
process structures “our typical and cultivated ways of integrating and interacting with the
environment” (Cuffari 2011). But habit-incorporation also has phenomenological (i.e., affective
and emotional) significance, too. Once I acquire the skills needed to play the guitar, for
instance, I now encounter guitars and guitar-playing contexts with a new-found confidence
and attentive focus. Processes of habit-incorporation establish an “affective frame” (Maiese
2016) through which we orient, focus, and skillfully integrate with the things and spaces
of our environment in new ways. And since we acquire—and also lose—skills and habits
throughout our life, part of the ontological ambiguity of our lived body stems from the fact
that it is constantly undergoing this kind of development and change.
But bodily incorporation is not restricted to skills and habits. Merleau-Ponty is also at-
tuned to a second sense of incorporation—“object-incorporation”—which occurs when we
integrate material objects into our lived body. From birth, Merleau-Ponty observes, we
are situated in a world of things—not just natural things but also cultural things, objects
that the child, with a sense of wonder, finds “around himself at birth like meteorites from
another planet” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 370). Soon, however, their novelty fades and the

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child “takes possession of them and learns to use them as others use them”—both through
observation and mimicry, and also because these cultural objects, designed by other embod-
ied subjects, are crafted to invite specific forms of bodily manipulation and incorporation
(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 370).
Merleau-Ponty offers several examples: a woman instinctively ducking when walking
through a door to avoid damaging the feather in her hat, carefully negotiating a tight space
while driving by feeling how close we are to obstacles, and a blind person skillfully ex-
ploring and responding to the environment with their cane. In these and other cases, the
objects “have ceased to be objects whose size and volume would be determined through a
comparison with other objects. They have become voluminous powers” (Merleau-Ponty
2012, 144). In other words, we incorporate these objects into the dynamics of our “ambigu-
ous” lived body. When we skillfully use a cane to explore our environment, for instance, that
cane becomes experientially transparent. It is no longer experienced as an object but instead
becomes the perceptual vehicle through which we access the world in new ways Processes of
object-incorporation, which occur throughout everyday life, likewise scaffold our emotional
experiences. For example, wearing the right kind of hiking shoes while making our way
down a slippery path—instead of walking the same path in flimsy flat-soled tennis shoes—
directly modulates our emotions. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the lived body
and incorporation, Colombetti (2016) argues that we are not directly aware of the shoes
themselves as thematic objects of experience. We focus instead on the path. But our shoes
are nevertheless experientially present as scaffolding through which we experience the path, in
that they become transparently integrated into our bodily-affective style. And the continual
feedback we receive from our shoes regulates our emotional engagement with that envi-
ronment; it specifies the “affective frame” regulating both how we feel and how the world
shows up for us via this feeling (i.e., as affording confident walking vs. a nervous descent).
Similar scaffolding occurs when, for instance, a blind person learns how to explore and nav-
igate their environment with a cane, a devout Catholic down-regulates their anxiety before
an important job interview by praying the Rosary and habitually manipulating their prayer
beads, or an individual riding a crowded bus listens to their MP3 player to elevate their
mood and occlude the outside world. These and many other cases like them are examples
of emotional object-incorporation. For Merleau-Ponty, the dynamics of the “ambiguous”
body mean that embodied subjects are always poised and ready to enact these habit- and
object-incorporations—and in so doing, enact “the simultaneous articulation of their body
and their world in the emotion” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 195).

3.2 Emotions and institutions

Merleau-Ponty can make another contribution by emphasizing themes that have not yet
found a prominent place in current discussions of scaffolded emotions. This can be seen by
looking at Merleau-Ponty’s claim that emotions are “institutions”. This idea is first presented
in the following quote:

[T]he gesticulations of anger or love are not the same for a Japanese person and a Western
person. More precisely, the difference between gesticulations covers over a difference
between the emotions themselves. It is not merely the gesture that is contingent with re-
gard to bodily organization, it is the very manner of meeting the situation and of living
it. When angry, the Japanese person smiles, whereas the Westerner turns red and stamps
his foot, or even turns pale and speaks with a shrill voice. Having the same organs and

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the same nervous system is not sufficient for the same emotions to take on the same signs
in two different conscious subjects. What matters is the manner in which they make
use of their body, the simultaneous articulation of their body and their world in the
emotion. The psycho-physical equipment leaves so many possibilities open, and here
we see that—just as in the domain of instincts—there is no human nature given once
and for all. The use that a man makes of his body is transcendent with regard to that
body as a mere biological being (…) Just like words, passionate feelings and behaviors
are invented. Even the ones that seem inscribed in the human body, such as paternity,
are in fact institutions.
(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 195)

There is much to unpack here. One interpretive challenge is that this topic is not really
developed until nine years later, in Merleau-Ponty’s 1954 lecture-course on institutions
(Merleau-Ponty 2010; cf. Maclaren 2017). But in light of what we’ve already considered,
there are at least two points worth noting. First, this passage reaffirms Merleau-Ponty’s
embodied externalism about emotions. We cannot understand the ontology of emotions
without also accounting for their realization in our “psycho-physical equipment”, our
bodily-affective style. However—and this is the second point—our bodily-affective style
is not fixed by features of our embodiment alone. What we do with our psychophysical
equipment, the bodily-expressive dynamics by which we “invent” emotions, also matters:
“psycho-physical equipment leaves so many options open”. And this process of inventing
emotions is scaffolded not just by features of our embodiment and agency—or even the
cultural objects we incorporate into our embodiment—but also by sociocultural institutions
that regulate our embodiment.
For example, consider how our emotional expressions and habitual dispositions (i.e., ele-
ments of our affective style) are regulated by the interaction routines distinctive of our local
subcultures: corporate workplaces, social web-based groups, academic circles, the world of
sports, fashion, or police and military cultures. Over time, as we inhabit these domains, they
exert an increasing top-down influence on the dynamics of our affective style; they scaffold
and regulate ways of speaking, gesturing, moving, interacting, experiencing, and expressing
emotions that are normative in the domain in question. This may even happen without our
full awareness or consent. Slaby (2016) argues that the “presence bleed” of contemporary
knowledge work—the tendency to be online and available for work-related communica-
tion via email or instant messaging software, night and day, 365 days a year—erodes the
boundaries of work time and leisure, with significant emotional consequences. Ever-present
communication technologies like smartphones, which are transparently incorporated into
the routines of everyday life, along with the institutional expectations and practices they
support (e.g., persistent availability, rapid-fire responses), scaffold an array of emotions opera-
tive in contemporary white-collar work: feelings of guilt, responsibility, fears, and anxieties,
along with the excitement of being part of corporate culture or glimpsing internal drama
unfolding in real-time via these technologies. This case study highlights the emotional insti-
tution of modern white-collar work—socially instituted “structures of feeling”, as Slaby puts
it, that are scaffolded by technological infrastructures, interaction routines, and normative
practices distinctive of that subculture.
Emotional institutions organize our social world and regulate our affective style from
the moment we are born. For the first few months of life, newborns lack the ability to
self-regulate attention and emotion. Accordingly, they rely upon close bodily contact of
caregivers to help scaffold their cognitive and emotional function. Within these exchanges,

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caregivers employ a range of expressive strategies—mimicry, smiles, exaggerated vocaliza-

tions, singing, caressing, etc.—to arouse and regulate infant emotion (Krueger 2013; Ta ipale
2016). For our purposes, what is significant about these early dyadic exchanges is that they
are already culturally saturated institutions. In other words, they are from the start infused
with the norms, scripts, and patterned practices distinctive of their sociocultural milieu. For
example, within Zulu culture, children are expected to be less socially prominent than in
North American or European culture—and the regulatory strategies that Zulu women use
to engage with their babies and regulate their emotional displays differ accordingly (Spurrett
and Cowley 2010).
The important point is that even these early emotional institutions teach infants
about “the simultaneous articulation of their body and their world in the emotion”, as
Merleau-Ponty puts it. Our habits of emotional experience and expression—our bodily-
affective style—are not fixed by our embodiment alone but are rather “transcendent with
regard to [our] body as a mere biological being”, insofar as these habits are scaffolded and
shaped by the regulatory institutions in which we develop and connect with others. These
emotional institutions regulate experience and expression throughout our life—often with
profound political consequences, such as the way that emotional experiences of women,
minorities, or society’s “untouchables” are constrained and regulated by the institutions of
the dominant class (Cataldi 1993, 137–149). With few exceptions, however, these cultural
and political dimensions of emotional scaffolding have not been a prominent part of current
discussions.3 Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of emotions as “institutions” thus reminds us
of the need to broaden the scope of these debates.

4. Conclusion
As we’ve seen, emotions for Merleau-Ponty are not exclusively head-bound entities. They
are styles of bodily comportment or “variations of being in the world” that are scaffolded not
only by the dynamics of our embodiment and agency but also by the objects and institutions
around us. So where does this leave us?
This externalist picture can impact several philosophical debates. First and most obvi-
ously, it suggests that Merleau-Ponty has much to contribute to ongoing discussions of em-
bodied and scaffolded emotions—currently an active area of philosophical research. As we’ve
seen, more attention should be paid to cultural and political (i.e., “institutional”) dimensions
of these debates.
Second, this view can fruitfully impact debates about social cognition and other minds.
Several theorists have recently argued that if mental phenomena like emotions are external-
ized via the expressions, skills, capacities, and habits that comprise our bodily-affective style,
there is no problem of other minds. We see minds (or at least parts of minds) directly, within
another’s bodily-affective style (Krueger 2018a). Of course, this does not settle the debate;
there are many “problems of other minds”, some of which remain untouched by this claim
(Overgaard 2017). But it does suggest that perception is not as indirect a path to other minds
as it’s often thought to be.
Finally, Merleau-Ponty’s view of emotions can help shed light on affective disturbances
in psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, severe depression, and autism. Many psychiatric
disorders involve disturbances of an individual’s bodily-affective style—e.g., depersonaliza-
tion, diminished expressivity, motor difficulties with habit-incorporation, etc.—which leads
to global disturbances in their emotional life (Fuchs and Koch 2014). One of the important
lessons of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis is that our emotions are deeply regulated, at multiple

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timescales, by scaffolding provided by the objects and institutions around us. This scaffolding
constrains our bodily-affective style, but more positively, it also brings regulative stability
and predictability to the lived spaces we move through and inhabit on a daily basis. How-
ever, some individuals with psychiatric disorders lose reliable access to this scaffolding and its
regulative potency, which may help explain some of the difficulties they have managing their
emotions on both a moment-to-moment and long-term basis. The interrelation between
material culture and affective disorders in psychopathology has not received much focused
attention, however, an oversight which may impede a fuller understanding of the phenom-
enon (Krueger 2018b). Once again, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis can point the way toward new
and promising lines of inquiry.

Notes
1 For two book-length treatments of Merleau-Ponty on emotions that cover themes I lack space to
discuss here, see Mazis (1989) and Cataldi (1993).
2 These observations can help clarify Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “The body cannot be com-
pared to a physical object, but rather to the work of art” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 152).
3 Although see Slaby (2016) and Merritt (2014).

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 18
FRANTZ FANON
Alia Al-Saji

1. A phenomenology of racialization: spectacle and affect

Late in Peau noire, masques blancs, Frantz Fanon says: “we need to touch all the wounds that
score the black livery (toucher du doigt toutes les plaies qui zèbrent la livrée noire).”1 And then,
citing Aimé Césaire: “for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, for a
man who screams is not a dancing bear” (PN 181/187/164; Césaire 2017, 94). While Fanon
often deflects questions of formal method (PN 12/12/xvi), to touch the wounds of racial-
ization, to make them felt and to dwell in them, brings us closest to his phenomenological
method. This allows us to understand why a phenomenology of racialization is a phenom-
enology of affect, and not primarily a phenomenology of (visual) perception or the visible.2
At stake is affectivity that remains beneath the level of intentional sense-giving (even as it
motivates perception and emotion), more atmospheric or thalassic than object or act.3 Yet,
this Fanonian approach also questions and reconfigures phenomenology—just as his work,
in its irreducible methodological plurality, questions psychoanalysis, psychiatry, political
philosophy, and ontology. The challenge is not only that of “expressing” or “inventorying
the real” (PN 134/137/116; 181/187/164), when Fanon has insisted on the multiplicity of
racialized and colonized experience and on the differential positionalities within Blackness
(PN 14/14/xviii), and when that “real” has been repressed through the spectacle staged in
its place (Hartman 1997, 39). I argue that the difficulty for phenomenology is threefold: the
risk of specularization (Section 1); how racialization structures affect, calling into question
immediacy (Section 2); and the failure of phenomenological reductions to account for the
weight of colonization (Section 3).
First is what I would call the methodological trap of specularization—the tendency to take
phenomenology to be equivalent to making experience visible. Even when the invisible
workings of the flesh are revealed in their activity as well as their passivity (to use Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s vocabulary), their being rendered a spectacle introduces not only the dan-
ger of “thingification” (“Chosification”; Césaire 1955, 23), but also the circumscription and
elision of the very affectivity that I am trying to describe. For a phenomenology of racial-
ization, this is doubly problematic, since it means converting the experiences of racialized
subjects—suffering, enjoyment, reaction, redress, and resistance, even the “feeling of nonex-
istence” (PN 135/139/118)—into phenomena available to a racializing and surveilling gaze.

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More so, it exposes and spreads out the racialized body: “my body was returned to me
spread-eagled, disjointed, recoated, draped in mourning on that white winter’s day,” says
Fanon (PN 111/113/93). Not only does this spatialization elide the nonlinear temporalities
of racialized experience, it also distorts lived space, pulling and projecting the body onto a
spatial grid wherein experience can be seen, grasped, and measured.
This repeats the logic of racialization that fixes and dissects the body (for “white looks”),
cuts instantaneous cross-sections of its experience, making it again the slave of an appear-
ance (PN 113/116/95).4 But this appearance has itself been constructed—recoating and
wearing out the body (rétamé), plunging it in mourning (endeuillé) as Fanon says—through
a process of colonization which has recalcitrantly rephrased and adapted itself in a longue
durée.5 What is at stake here is the assumed transparency and self-evidence of experience
that is given in the immediacy of affect. Neither is affect unmediated, since colonization
structures it from within, nor can it be made externally perceptible without loss. Eschewed
is the density, opacity, temporality, and ambivalence of racialized affect that cannot be
easily expressed in visual or discursive terms (because these dimensions are also overdeter-
mined by colonization).
As Saidiya Hartman has argued—in refusing to reproduce the scene of the beating of
Aunt Hester from Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass—the
routine and repeated display of the slave’s pained body at once reinforces “the spectacular
character of black suffering” and circumscribes and naturalizes that suffering (Hartman
1997, 3, 20). While scenes of violence claim to give evidence of black sentience, they
instrumentalize suffering and make it legible and familiar. This immures the witness to
that pain, while inviting them to projectively grasp and measure it, opening it to voyeuris-
tic repulsion and enjoyment (3–4). For Hartman, the hypervisibility of racialized bodies
risks reproducing the affective economy of slavery—where the fungibility of the slave
body as commodity makes it an “empty vessel,” dispossessed and vulnerable to projection
and prosthesis (21). Even empathetic accounts repeat this specularization and projective
reduction (Hartman 1997, 17–19). Through the spectacle that defines their pain and puts
it in its place, racialized subjectivity comes to be selectively seen as limited sentience—as
circumscribed humanity, person, and property (Hartman 1997, 35). In a move that uses
the subjectivity and sentient embodiment of the racialized as instruments against them,
the very spectacle—exposure and assumed transparency—of black affectivity becomes a
tool to intensify subjection.
This risk of specularization looms large when Peau noire, masques blancs is read as explic-
itating the sense, and shedding light on the constitution, of racialized and colonized suffer-
ing through the application of a predefined phenomenological method—a reading I resist
here. Instead, I argue that Fanon works to interrupt specular and spectacular renderings
of suffering and colonial violence. What he puts his finger on, and puts us in touch with,
are the structuring and destructuring times of colonization, in their quotidian and pathol-
ogizing normalcy; Fanon’s memory of the child on the train saying “Tiens, un nègre!” is a
terrorizing example in its repetition and everydayness (PN 109/112/91). “Toucher du doigt”
(PN 181/187/164) means both to touch with one’s finger and to put one’s finger just there at
the source of the wound and flaring of the pain. The touch that Fanon advocates is neither
optimal grip, violent grasp, nor uniform pressure, nor can it be predicted in advance. His
writing touches colonial wounds; by palpating these wounds and dwelling in them, it resus-
citates colonial wounds as feelings that are flesh, and does not leave them behind as if their scar
tissue was merely a numb object of the past.

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2. Touch and affective memory

Fanon seems to reiterate here Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological discovery in Ideas II that
the hand that touches the surface of a table, as it moves across it, also feels itself touched.
Husserl describes touch-sensings (Empfindnisse) given through the dynamic and fluid inter-
twining of kinestheses (sensations of the movement of my own body) and sensations of
being-touched (Husserl 1998, 146). Rather than being intentional, sensings are reflexive and
non-objectivating, founding the lived-through sensibility of my own body—indeed, the
possibility of having a lived body (Al-Saji 2010, 18–19). Since touch is not a compartmen-
talized sense, sensings happen anywhere where the body is touched. The whole body is a
touch-surface, but skin also folds in on itself and flesh has felt depth (Husserl gives the ex-
ample of the heart (1998, 165)). Thus, the body can also touch itself, as in Husserl’s famous
example of one hand touching the other (1998, 144–145). This self-perception doubles and
localizes sensings on the skin and gives the body as a field of sensings—appearing to itself as
living body (Leib) and not mere extended physical body (Körper).
Yet, Fanon’s method of touch is at once more painful and more temporally complex—in
at least three ways. First, that upon which Fanon’s method touches has already been touched
and wounded by colonial violence, recursively in a longue durée. This past and ongoing colo-
nial (de)structuration cannot be bracketed to focus on a domestic scene of innocuous touch,
as Husserl does6; there is no flesh that has not been touched, reconfigured, through colo-
nial duration.7 For the colonized, the very sensibility of flesh registers the weight of this
duration—as memory immanently woven into its texture—and responds to the instituted
violence of the colonial world. Colonized flesh is “susceptible” (PN 114/116/96), Fanon
notes, “sensitive” (PN 117/120/99)—hypersensible and prickly.
Thus, second, that which Fanon’s method touches feels itself touched not only in the
present but also in its wounded and misrepresented past, remembering and reliving the
wounding, in a mode of affect-memory (which is more than recollection). This past weaves
through Fanon’s nonlinear phenomenological account.8 It can be felt in the affects of pun-
ishments from Le Code Noir that flare up, spasmodically, within the present: “I tried to
escape without being seen, but the Whites fell on me and hamstrung me on the left leg”
(PN 126/130/109), says Fanon, living through the punishment for a fugitive slave who has
tried to escape a second time.9 The immediacy of affect, assumed in the Husserlian picture
of touching-touched, is interrupted and deferred. Fanon makes us feel the colonial glue
(past and present) that mediates sensing and structures the auto-affective interval between
touching and touched.10
So much so that, rather than discovering one’s own living body (Leib) through self-
touch, as Husserl does, what Fanon often encounters is a carcass—the living death of
the enslaved (Hartman 1997, 106), the famished body-as-fodder of the colonized, their
hollowed-out stereotypes—that touch needs to warm back to feeling, if not to life (PN 9/9/
xiii). There is an unpredictable temporal interval between touching and a wound coming
back to feeling; phenomenological touch finds its tonality and texture in the wound and
the colonial duration that it holds, but this needs preparation and waiting. Moreover, the
interval is overloaded with foreboding, stifling, and taut (PN 136/140/119); and much of
our “sensitivity” as colonized subjects may be oriented to protecting against reliving colo-
nial violence— shuddering and contracting so as to avoid its touch (PN 114/117/97). Rather
than moving away or moving on, Fanon’s “toucher du doigt” advocates other modes of wait-
ing and dwelling in the interval, and with colonial wounds, without inscribing a teleology

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of healing or hope.11 Elsewhere, Fanon describes this as descent into “le grand trou noir”
(PN 14/14/xviii, PN 189–90/195/172; citing Césaire 2017, 148).
If Fanon escapes the trap of specularization, then it is by inventing a different phenom-
enology. Rather than applying a “neutral” phenomenological method to racialized bodies,
this critical and anticolonial phenomenology of affect takes its point of departure within expe-
riences of racialization, in their colonial durations, creating concepts as responses to their
calls. Indeed, Fanon’s phenomenology holds together affects of racialization in a temporal
palimpsest that plunges us into differential temporal rhythms of colonization, without giv-
ing us a position from which to survey them. As “socio-diagnostic” (PN 11/11/xv), this
phenomenology is not mere description; for by making us feel social structures, it makes
possible other ways of existing and changing them (PN 97/100/80).12

3. The affective weight of colonization

While Peau noire, masques blancs can be read as a phenomenology of colonized experience
(Antillian, Malagasy, Arab, African), once we attend to how colonization works, it becomes
clear that there is no dimension of “modern” life, no region of being, that is left untouched
by it. Colonization cannot be compartmentalized or reserved to the “colonies,” nor can
it be circumscribed as a layer added to societies being colonized, a supplement that leaves
the rest intact. In arguing that French colonization of Madagascar provoked “an absolute
wound”—that Madagascar “underwent destructuralization” (PN 94/97/77)—Fanon’s ar-
gument has ontological dimensions. Fanon’s aim is not simply to calculate the destructive
effects of colonization, against arguments for its partial “civilizing” benefits.13 Rather, Fanon
insists that there is colonization of being—destructuration, corrosion, pathology, and rot on
multiple levels and through differential temporalities—which is why Les damnés de la terre
aims to decolonize being (Fanon 2002, 40). Indeed, this is not only an “existential deviation”
(PN 14/14/xviii) on the individual level, which transmutes both the body schema and its
emotional and physiological reactions (PN 17/19/3); it is also a structural transformation of
the social, economic, and political sphere. More precisely, we can understand the corrosive-
ness of colonization to be at work within the individual and the social, in literal, imaginary,
and metaphorical senses inseparably.
Of the civilizing colonial mission, Fanon notes: “It is utopian to expect the black man or
the Arab to exert the effort of embedding abstract values in their Weltanschauung when they
have barely enough food to survive (alors qu’ils mangent à peine à leur faim)” (PN 93/95/75).
Because, he adds, they “lack the possibility” (PN 92–93/95/75). Here, material, embodied
conditions and foreclosed possibilities, eating and thinking, are held together in the affect of
hunger. The overall point is that hunger is an obstacle to conceptual creation. But Fanon is
also making the more subtle point that colonization wants to block imagination and inven-
tion, and uses all material and affective means to do so, including turning the bodies of the
colonized into instruments against them and into material resources to be exploited—kept
barely alive while being digested, “walking manure ( fumier ambulant)” he says citing Césaire
(PN 95/98/78; Césaire 2017, 114). The affect of colonized hunger calls for more than nutri-
tion; it calls for inventing sociality and ways of living and dying, on one’s own terms, from
the reconfigured ruin of foreclosed and dead possibilities.14
It is worth emphasizing that there is no affect that escapes the violence of colonization.
Both colonial and colonized bodies undergo “aberrations of affect” (PN 8/6/xii)—“become
abnormal” (PN 141/143/122)—condemned to non-relationality and the repeated failure of
intersubjective reciprocity, if sought along a white–black axis. It is through such aberrant

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affect, I argue, that colonialism and racism expose the limits of the phenomenological reduc-
tion (in its Husserlian and even Merleau-Pontian formulations). Neither can colonization be
bracketed to reveal a core of sense, as if racism were an afterthought; nor can it be put out of
play to conceive a universalizable subject free of historical violence. Critical phenomenol-
ogy cannot stay at the level of constitution of sense, for colonization already structures the
phenomenological field of sense and draws the borders that differentiate sense from nonsense
(PN 9/9/xiii). In Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, Husserl points to affection
as a level that precedes the constitution of objects, where passivity is on the verge of turning
into activity. Affection can be understood from two sides: As the “pull” of the world on
my body, or my body “turning toward” that which is affecting it (Husserl 2001, 151). The
perceptual field has an “affective relief ” that differentially motivates meaning-making: What
is noticed, what comes to matter, from that which stays in the background (unconscious
“tendencies toward affection” (2001, 149)). But affective relief is shaped by diachronic and
synchronic contrast, that shifts contextually and with the direction of bodily desire and
sensibility (2001, 150). More deeply than Husserl’s method admits, however, how contrast
comes to be felt (and by whom) is a function of the colonial duration that structures the
phenomenological field.
While Husserl’s account allows for differentially mapped affective reliefs, it insists on the
leeway that consciousness feels in relation to the affective pull of “objects”—without which
the free practice of phenomenological bracketing would not be possible. Merleau-Ponty’s
description of the phenomenological reduction as “loosen[ing] the intentional threads that
connect us to the world in order to make them appear” (2012[1945], 14) relies implicitly on
a concept of “scope of life.” Such “scope of life” allows the subject to step back and distance
itself from, or rupture its familiarity with, the world—and, following Eugène Minkowski,
allows “leeway (Spielraum)” and room to breathe (2012[1945], 338). While Fanon may agree
on “the impossibility of a complete reduction” for reasons different than Merleau-Ponty’s
(Merleau-Ponty 2012[1945], 14), he may wonder at the familiarity and comfort of a world in
which such spatiotemporal leeway is norm, and from which Merleau-Ponty begins.
If we put affect back in its place and time, as Fanon asks (PN 101–2/104/84), we ex-
perience a world that stifles and weighs on racialized bodies—bogs them down (engluer)
(PN 32/35/18)—without a feeling of leeway. Here, the phenomenological reduction as sus-
pension of theoretical and natural attitudes, as putting out of play the object-in-itself and the
particularity and habituality of the ego, is not only incomplete but fails to begin or be moti-
vated. Thus, we encounter split modes of affectivity: While colonial affectivity is “ankylosed”
and insensitive, colonized subjects are hypersensitive and risk being “tetanised.” But this is
not merely a subjective difference; we live split worlds, with starkly different affective relief.
It is from a different affective territory that the project of phenomenological reduction be-
comes imaginable: One that compartmentalizes racism to a surface layer of existence, where
colonization can be treated with indifference. Fanon calls this “affective ankylosis (ankylose af-
fective),” one of the more puzzling socio-diagnostic neologisms he invents (PN 119/122/101).
Ankylosis should be read in medical, anatomical, and metaphorical senses at once; it describes
a condition where joints become fused and coalesce, so that articulations are restricted and
movement is no longer possible between them. Fanon associates affective ankylosis with an in-
ability to make the past fluid,15 to reconfigure, rearticulate, or feel that past differently. What
is ankylosed is colonial affectivity—a “white” world that excludes and dominates racialized
subjects through gluey formations of time. This is not simply a question of fixity; as an or-
ganic pathology, ankylosis diagnoses a past that coalesces and adheres, repeatedly over time,
but that may also numb and gangrene.16 This temporal schema highlights both the recalcitrance

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and disregard that structure colonial affectivity. (And it can be contrasted to the sensitivity of
colonized affect, described earlier.)
Racialization is a peculiar form of othering that cultivates, as its infrastructure, forgetting
and disregard of the “others” who are its objects. Racism is affectively ambivalent. Its recal-
citrance, Fanon shows, relies on adapting to its social time and place, taking on the guise of
prevailing norms (2006, 40). But racism also covers over this rephrasing; it represses the his-
tories and operations of power, which constitute it, and blames its victims (PN 188/194/170).
Disavowed is the very guilt and corrosive destructuring that colonization brings about—
projected onto its colonized others.17 Racialized bodies are, at once, the material and affective
labor, the disposable lives that colonization exploits—the “fertilizer” that nourishes colo-
nialism, says Fanon (PN 209/216/190)—and they are the scapegoats upon which the need
for colonization and its constitutive violence are projected. Thus, racialization has more to
do with drawing lines of domination—policing the borders of “whiteness” and Eurocentric
modernity—than with the concrete colonized lives who are its ostensible objects and which
it actively misrepresents. More than “active ignorance” (Medina 2013, 39, 57), then, key to
understanding the recalcitrance of racism is affective disregard.18
Colonial duration weighs lightly on colonial citizens and heavily on colonized subjects, a
differential weighting that translates temporal and spatial leeway. By calibrating the affective
relief of the perceptual field, racism already operates at the level of passivity and habituality
(for which we remain responsible). It motivates and circumscribes the ways in which contrast
is felt in the phenomenological field, what makes sense and what remains nonsense. That
which colonized bodies feel most sensitively and acutely, that toward which they turn, often
cannot find a way to register its weight within the ankylosed affective field of colonialism
(for colonial citizens). In this way, colonized affect and agency are flattened; appearing not
only unreasoned but temporally unmotivated, they do not matter (and are only recognized
within the stereotypical terms that colonization sets out in advance).
Phenomenology is symptomatic of this differential weighting. Fanon’s socio-diagnostic
shows how phenomenology needs to redress and decolonize social structures, to be world
transformation, in order to create the leeway to reflect. It cannot assume a transparent, unob-
structed interval. Racialized subjects are stuck in a colonial past that makes them perpetually
late (PN 118/121/100), so that their meaning-making lacks traction. With a past impossible
to bracket, a future sheared off, the interval in which colonized subjects live is affectively
overloaded, sensitive, and “tetanised.” Fanon diagnoses “affective tetanisation” as the useless
spasming of the muscles of the colonized.19 If colonization is tetanus, then it is an infection
that penetrates colonized bodies through colonial wounds; it leads to spasms that may look
externally like paralysis but that hide, in their depth, intense activity and (appropriate) sen-
sitivity to the violence of the colonial world.
I have argued that Fanon invents a phenomenology from dwelling in this affective inter-
val, from touching the wounds of colonial duration that constitute it.

Notes

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Frantz Fanon

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 Alia Al-Saji

Fanon, Frantz (1952) [=PN]. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. [Engl. Transl.: Black
Skin, White Masks. Transl. by C. Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press 1967. / Black Skin, White
Masks. Transl. by R. Philcox. New York: Grove Press 2008].
——— (2002[1961]). Les damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte. [Engl. Transl.: The Wretched of the
Earth. Transl. by C. Farrington. London: Penguin 2001.]
——— (2006[1964]). Pour la révolution africaine. Paris: La Découverte.
Hartman, Saidiya (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Husserl, Edmund (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy:
Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. by R. Rojcewicz, and A. Schuwer.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
——— (2001). Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Transl.
by A. J. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2012[1945]). Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. by D. Landes. London,
New York: Routledge.
Medina, José (2013). The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and
Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mills, Charles W. (2007). White Ignorance. In: S. Sullivan, and N. Tuana (Eds.). Race and Epistemologies
of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Morrison, Toni (2004). Beloved. New York: Vintage Books.
Slaby, Jan (2020). The Weight of History: From Heidegger to Afro-Pessimism. In: L. Guidi, and
T. Rentsch (Eds.). Phenomenology as Performative Exercise. New York, Leiden: Brill.
Stoler, Ann Laura (2011). Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture
23(1), 121–156.

Further reading
Al-Saji, Alia (2013). Too Late: Racialized Time and the Closure of the Past. Insights 6(5), 1–13.
——— (2014). A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing. In: E. Lee
(Ed.). Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 133–172.
Bernasconi, Robert (2007). On Needing Not to Know and Forgetting What One Never Knew: The
Epistemology of Ignorance in Fanon’s Critique of Sartre. In: S. Sullivan, and N. Tuana (Eds.). Race
and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 231–239.
Fanon, Frantz (2001[1959]). L’an V de la révolution algérienne. Paris: La Découverte.
——— (2018). Alienation and Freedom. Ed. by J. Khalfa, and R. Young. Transl. by S. Corcoran. L ondon:
Bloomsbury.
Gordon, Lewis R. (2015). What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Keeling, Kara (2003). “In the Interval”: Frantz Fanon and the “Problems” of Visual Representation.
Qui Parle 13(2), 91–117.
Macey, David (2012[2000]). Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London: Verso.
Spillers, Hortense J. (1987). Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics
17(2), 64–81.

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 19
HERMANN SCHMITZ
Henning Nörenberg

The German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz belongs to the postwar-generation of

philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, both of whom he studied with
under Erich Rothacker. The focus of Schmitz’s work, however, is not so much on the ratio-
nal of public reasoning but on questions of personhood and bodily existence. According to
Schmitz, the latter aspects are crucially involved in the way in which something emerges as
a compelling reason or as demanding one’s respect.
Schmitz’s claims about the central, though often neglected role, of the bodily dimension
draw on an investigation of a plethora of phenomena pertaining to the feeling body (Leib).
Bodily, in this sense, is whatever someone feels as “belonging to themself in the vicinity—
not always within the boundaries—of their material body without drawing on the five
senses and the perceptual body schema parasitic on them” (Schmitz et al. 2011, 253). The
stirrings of one’s own body (e.g., pain), as well as meaningful aspects in the environment
(e.g., another person’s glance), are felt through various instances of contraction, tension,
pulsation, or expansion (Schmitz 1965, 73–98). Unlike the so-called neo-Jamesian accounts
of bodily feeling, Schmitz does not assume that these felt contractions or pulsations primar-
ily tell us about our organs and limbs and are only indirectly or secondarily representing
the significance of what is going on in the environment in terms of the organism’s well-
being ( Damasio 2004; Prinz 2004). For Schmitz, the piercing gaze or the serene landscape
communicates a feeling of contraction or expansion directly, as the body is fundamentally
attuned to the world and thus sensitive to movement-related cues and intermodal aspects in
the perceived environment (Schmitz 1977, 622–636).
Schmitz’s account of the feeling body provides the ground for his theory of pre-personal
subjectivity and also for his complex theory of affectivity. It is only in terms of actual—or
protended or retended—instances of bodily felt contractions, pulsations, etc., that the subject
is affectively involved or engaged with states of affairs, programs, and problems (Schmitz
et al. 2011, 248–251). And it is the body that is the working point for emotions that are
conceived of as “atmospheres poured out spatially” (Schmitz et al. 2011, 247).
While it may not seem that controversial to relate atmospheres to, for instance, the notion
of existential feelings as pre-intentional bodily orientations toward the world (cf. Ratcliffe
2008, and Chapter 22 in this volume), a claim about emotions actually being atmospheres
may appear implausible. The latter, however, is precisely the view that Schmitz proposes.

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He distinguishes between feeling (Fühlen) as undergoing an emotion and the emotion itself
(Gefühl) as an atmospheric force that is either felt or merely perceived. In Schmitz, this claim
is systematically connected to the rejection of views which view emotions as internal states
of the psyche that are closed off from the rest of the world (Schmitz 1969, 6ff.; 1993, 33;
1994, 17ff.). As a first approach to what his claim implies, we might acknowledge that we
sometimes refer to emotions as seizing forces with a more or less explicitly stated spatial
dimension. We say, for instance, that someone is depressed, agitated by fear, drunk with
joy, seized with remorse, awe-struck, grief-stricken, falling into despair, filled with rage,
wonder, or anxiety. According to Schmitz, such metaphors do not come out of the blue, but
seek to articulate the specific way in which the relevant emotions are experienced. The con-
ception of emotions as spatial atmospheres that seize, stir, or move the feeling body is sup-
posed to capture precisely that experiential dimension of emotional life. On this perspective,
it makes an important methodological difference whether we set out to account for emotions
as something we undergo or as something we simply have, for we will go on highlighting dif-
ferent structural relations and arrive at different models. According to Schmitz, the notion of
emotion as something we have is an abstracted view that is derived from an implicit, though
insufficient, understanding of what it means to undergo an emotion.
In the following, I will sketch some of the central claims and main arguments by which
Schmitz arrives at this view, which he has developed in his 1969 book Der Gefühlsraum
(The Space of Feeling) and refined in later writings. In particular, these claims concern the
bodily dimension of emotions, the spatial dimension of feelings, the motivational force that
emotions as atmospheres have, the distinct ways in which we sense atmospheres, the thematic
center around which an atmosphere may form, and the ontological status of atmospheres.
Moreover, I shall contextualize these claims, as Schmitz only seldom does, with a view to
ongoing discussions in the philosophy of emotion.

1. The atmospheric model highlights the spatial

dimension of feelings
Atmospheres, according to Schmitz, are “complete occupation[s] of a surfaceless space in the
region of experienced presence” (Schmitz et al. 2011, 255). They are specific ways in which
the surrounding space, insofar as it is accessible to or rather resonating in the feeling body,
is experienced. Similar claims have been made in pragmatism, existential phenomenology,
and enactivism. Dewey, for example, suggests conceiving of emotions as particular types of
what he calls “pervasive qualities” and which are felt rather than thought by us: “When, for
instance, anger exists, it is the pervading tone, color, and quality of persons, things, and cir-
cumstances, or of a situation” (Dewey 1931, 99). Sartre holds that, whenever we undergo an
emotion, our environment ceases to appear in terms of our usual orientations toward things
and, in turn, reveals itself as “magical” (Sartre 2002, 57f.). He illustrates this with the horror
induced by a face suddenly appearing at the window: the subject’s usual orientation within
the environment breaks down; the window does not appear as an “object that must first be
broken” by the other nor is the spatial environment experienced in terms of some measurable
distance (“ten yards”) that must first be covered (ibid., 59f.). Rather, the face “annihilates
the distance and enters into us” (ibid., 57). Last but not least, Colombetti describes the situ-
ation on a delayed, slowly proceeding train to the airport, just before a flight, as “tight and
confined”. This trait is also manifested in the subject’s orientation to objects and events in
the environment such as “the time indicated by my watch, the speed of the train, the con-
ductor’s announcements” (Colombetti 2014, 122). In all these examples, the surrounding

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space is experienced in a manner distinctively related to the emotional episode—and the

atmospheric model of emotions is supposed to capture precisely this as a central feature.
Beyond such descriptions, however, some authors, such as Sartre, also suggest that atmo-
spheric feeling is merely some form of projection unto the world originating in the relevant
person’s mind (Sartre 2002, 49ff.). In contrast, Schmitz argues that atmospheres are ontolog-
ically prior to such projections (Schmitz 2014, 53); rather than skewing the reality in which
we find ourselves, atmospheres help disclose it.

2. Atmospheres engage the body

Schmitz further elucidates the spatial nature of emotions as atmospheres by conceiving of
them as holistic syntheses of kinesthetic forces and intermodal qualities affecting the feeling
body. Compare the respective impacts of a sticky weather and a clear morning on the body. If
we abstain from more or less convincing hypotheses about the physiological underpinnings
of our experiences, Schmitz claims, our body senses impacts of a similar kind in the context
of grief and joy, for instance. Grief comes as a contractive tendency in the form of a down-
ward pressure (Schmitz 1969, 120ff.; 1989) that has an echo in expressions such as “bowed
with grief ”, “my heart sinks”, “heavy at heart”, or “depressed”. Grief also manifests as an
encompassing void with the environment receding into distance. The surrounding space
affords rumination and fewer possibilities of engaging with others. Joy, on the other hand,
is felt as an expansive tendency with an upward vector and a sense of surrounding, elevating
repletion (Schmitz 1993, 50f.) echoed in idioms such as “flying high” or “filled with joy”.
Indeed, this claim is not too removed from other accounts in the philosophy of emotions:
Sartre’s example of the face behind the window “entering into us”, as well as Colombetti’s
description of the situation on the delayed train as being “tight and confined” seem, for in-
stance, to articulate particular instances of the very same contractive tendency that Schmitz’s
account refers to and contrasts with other tendencies such as expansion.
When it comes to describing emotions, this account seems more informative than a
somewhat “naturalistic” perspective on sensations and symptoms such as twinges and pangs,
sweating in the armpits, accelerated heart rate, hairs going up on the back of one’s neck, etc.
Schmitz has worked out a complex conceptual apparatus that allows us to distinguish, for
instance, the entire gestalt of the downward pressure in grief from intimidation even though
we might use superficially similar metaphors in everyday talk (e.g., “my heart dived”) in
order to articulate it (Schmitz 2011, 16–19). In this regard, Schmitz’s atmospheric model is
an interesting alternative to both naturalistic, neo-Jamesian perspectives and those that reject
the former but marginalize the role of the body in emotions (cf. Roberts 2003, 152, 162ff.).

3. Atmospheres induce programs for conduct

Emotions move and motivate. In a variety of accounts, emotions—or central traits of them—
are described in terms of felt “action readiness” (Frijda 1988, 351) or as bodily felt tendencies
“to move away, towards or against a given object (…), to attend to an object, to submit or to
be drawn to it, to disengage from it, or even to suspend any inclination to interact with it”
(Deonna and Teroni 2012, 80). For instance, “in joy, I may feel the urge to run, jump, and
throw my arms up in the air; in anger, I can feel like hitting the desk, grabbing and shaking
objects around me” (Colombetti 2014, 119). Schmitz links this widely acknowledged claim
with the atmospheric nature of emotions. In the case of grief, for instance, the depressing
kinesthetic force is manifest in the griever’s slumped posture as well as in the sluggishness

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of all their movements. The grieving person takes up the impulse of the relevant force and
moves along with it (Schmitz et al. 2011, 254). The affordances of rumination and the shrunk
possibilities of engaging with others as characters of the surrounding space create a backdrop
against which the other person’s initiatives of bringing comfort, say, sometimes appear as
out of place or even intrusive. This implies, Schmitz argues, that emotions as atmospheres
communicate or at least enforce specific norms such as, for instance, devoting oneself to
engrossing the theme of one’s grief (Schmitz 1989, 125–134; 1993, 64) or, in the case of
anger, a cathartic discharge channeled toward a specific target in the immediate or mediate
environment (Schmitz et al. 2011, 254; Schmitz 2012a, 63f.). In this regard, Schmitz ascribes
a certain “authority” to emotions (Schmitz 1973, 131ff.; 1993, 63ff.)—a view with many
implications worthy of discussion but that I must pass over in this chapter (cf. Griffero 2014).
Initially, the normative impulse is achieved on a pre-personal level at which the person
has no distance to the impulse in question so that she simply goes along with it for some time:

Before the person can intentionally take a stance towards it, they always find themself
already situated in a stance one way or another and can no longer confront it in an un-
biased way [as would be possible with regard to mere corporeal stirrings such as hunger
or pain which are not atmospheres; H.N.].
(Schmitz et al. 2011, 254)

Only later is a genuinely personal response possible in terms of, say, resisting the impulse of
the seizing force, further succumbing to it, or converting it, for instance, from shame to envy
(Schmitz 2015). Certainly, this claim does allow for various ways in which we can actively
shape, regulate, cultivate, or even emancipate ourselves from our affects (Schmitz 1993,
81ff.; 2012a, 60; Schmitz 2014, 104f.). However, it also highlights an irreducibly passive
dimension of our emotional life that is underexposed by claims such as “What we currently
feel is shaped by what we are—individually or jointly—doing in the world, especially by
language” (Krebs 2015, 217; own transl.). Schmitz’s theory has its main focus on precisely
that phase of an emotional episode in which critical distance, strategies of emotional self-
regulation and actively shaping one’s feelings are not (yet) at play.

4. We sense atmospheres in two distinct ways

The atmosphere model allows for two distinct ways of being bodily engaged by an emotion.
The first and most obvious way is the one I have referred to above, i.e., being “seized” by
atmospheric forces of joy, grief, shame, anger, anxiety, etc. Sometimes, this “seizure” is
conscious, for instance, if a person feels their anger rising. Sometimes, however, we become
aware of our being in the grip of an emotion only later, for instance, when we suddenly
realize our anxiety in that delayed train as something that has conditioned our conduct for
quite some time. In all these cases, the subject becomes directly involved in the impulses and
affordances defining the relevant atmospheric force.
Another way of being bodily engaged by an emotion roughly amounts to a mere percep-
tion of the atmosphere in question. In such cases, the subject is not seized by but is bodily
communicating with the surrounding atmosphere in a more dialogue-like manner. We may
illustrate such cases with a party guest who clearly notices the jolliness around them, but just
cannot or does not want to go along with it—perhaps because they are too grief-stricken
(Schmitz 1993, 31). The possible outcome of their feeling of grief actually being intensified
in this situation seems to imply that the person in question does not only “feel” their own

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grief as an atmosphere, but is also sensitive to the kinesthetic impulses and affordances com-
municated by the surrounding jolly atmosphere—obviously without being seized by the
latter themself. In a similar manner, a person may very well be sensitive to an atmosphere
of embarrassment around them precisely in terms of kinesthetic impulses, affordances, etc.,
and may feel somewhat irritated though not embarrassed themself. Some forms of social
cognition by which we are immediately acquainted with the other person’s emotion may be
regarded as special cases of being touched-though-not-seized by an atmosphere emanated
by that person.
According to Schmitz, there can be transitions from merely perceiving an atmosphere to
being seized by it (Schmitz et al. 2011, 257). Under certain conditions, a person’s grief may
not only be mitigated by the surrounding jolliness, but even be replaced by it. Among the
many factors that should be taken into account, emotional contagion is only one (Scheler
1973, 25ff.). The person who senses the atmosphere of embarrassment around them may
eventually be seized by it once they become aware of what it is that is warranting the emo-
tion in the situation in question. Though the transition from perception to seizure may
involve different cognitive mechanisms in these two examples, on the level of our bodily
orientation toward the world, the description would be this: first, mere perception and then,
actual seizure by the atmosphere in question. Since Schmitz takes this level of description as
his point of departure, the possibility of such transitions, regardless whether it comes about
by emotional contagion or by identifying and sharing the reason of the other’s emotion, has
an important ontological implication: the atmosphere as a percept and the atmosphere by
which one is seized are one and the same entity (Schmitz et al. 2011, 257). That is, there is a
sense in which the jolliness, the embarrassment, anxiety, etc. perceived in others is the same
by which the subject finds themself seized later on. Thus, Schmitz seeks to circumvent a
conception of emotions as individual mental states that are ascribed to the respective subjects
(Schmitz 1969, 83ff.).

5. Atmospheres can have a thematic center

One may wonder why the account presented so far has not yet focused on what most ac-
counts consider to be the central feature of emotions: intentionality. Emotional states are
about something, they are related to things or events in the world, and they have an intentional
structure. Are my fear, anger, or joy indeed best described as seizing atmospheres to the force
of which I am exposed, when there is no mention of what it is that I am afraid of, angry or
happy about? Isn’t it more adequate to conceive of emotions as a particular class of intentional
states rather than atmospheres?
Schmitz is highly skeptical if not polemical regarding the concept of intentionality. In his
view, the identification of an intentional object is a problematic abstraction from the more
holistic traits of experiencing.1 According to him, taking the intentional structure as the
point of departure will result in difficulties in accommodating more pervasive phenomena
such as atmospheres. One might conclude that Schmitz’s critique is only plausible if directed
against a too-narrow conception of intentionality. However, at least when it comes to moods
and pervasive atmospheres, even current propositions of a considerably broader notion of
intentionality are of limited help when they describe these as “not without a reference to the
world” and somehow “taken up into the intentional structure of our experiences” as they
“articulate or modify our existential possibilities” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, 133). The
specific relation between seizing forces and the intentional structure of emotional states is far
from being self-evident.

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On the basis of intentionalist accounts of emotions, it is possible to regard the atmo-

spheric feeling as the implicitly co-intended, but nevertheless irreducible bodily, dimension
of the so-called “formal object”. The latter denotes the specific evaluative property attributed
to the target of the relevant emotion (Deonna and Teroni 2012, 78). So, for instance, in
fearing the dog you evaluate it as being dangerous and in joy you evaluate your birthday
party as being delightful, etc. In the current discussion on the philosophy of emotion, this
technical distinction between target and formal object is broadly accepted and accounts that
conceive of emotions as “felt evaluations” (Helm 2002) seem convincing. Furthermore,
approaches that more systematically take the bodily dimension into account suggest that
there is a constitutive link between the evaluative quality (the formal object) and bodily felt
tendencies. From this perspective, shame of oneself, for instance, “is an experience of oneself
as degraded, precisely because it consists in feeling one’s body ready to act so as to disappear
into the ground or perhaps from the view of others” (Deonna and Teroni 2012, 81). We
have already seen how Schmitz links such bodily felt tendencies to the atmospheric nature
of emotions (Section 3). In this case, the centripetal kinesthetic vectors that make up the
atmospheric feeling of shame engage the body and induce a tendency to “disappear into the
ground”. And, according to Schmitz, as well as to other authors such as Deonna and Teroni,
Colombetti, etc., this would not only be a negligible epiphenomenon but part and parcel of
evaluating oneself as degraded in the context of shame.
Schmitz himself, however, is not overly keen to connect his view to the intentionalist
framework. Rather than interpreting a seizing atmosphere as the bodily dimension of the
relevant emotion’s formal object, he regards values or evaluative properties as a more abstract
“substitute for the atmospheric and its meaningfulness” (Schmitz 1994, 304; own transl.).
Schmitz also insists that the atmosphere itself is what we mean by “emotion”, whereas the
intentional state or feeling roughly corresponds to what he calls “affective involvement”
with states of affairs, programs and problems. Thus, he suggests accommodating what is usu-
ally called the intentional object of a feeling in his atmosphere model of emotions with the
gestalt-psychological notion of “centeredness” (Zentrierung): The surrounding space commu-
nicated in terms of atmospheres is not necessarily unstructured; like in other cases of gestalt,
it can appear as formed around a specific thematic center. Taking up a proposal by gestalt
theorist Wolfgang Metzger (1975, 178f., 181–183), Schmitz distinguishes the “condensation
area” (Verdichtungsbereich) of an emotion from its “anchor point” (Verankerungspunkt) (Schmitz
1969, 314ff.). On the level of bodily orientation, the condensation area is the equivalent to
what an analysis of the intentional structure would call the “target” of an emotion (Helm
2002, 15), say the teeth-baring dog you are afraid of, the birthday party you rejoice at or the
person you feel embarrassed for. While the condensation area is something atmospherically
salient, the anchor point roughly correlates with what other accounts regard as the typically
unthematic object in the “focus” of the relevant emotion (cf. Helm 2002): In the case of
fearing the dog, the focus would be on my cared-for physical integrity, whereas the anchor
point would be the anticipated harm. In general, the background object in the focus of an
emotion is someone or something the subject cares for, while the anchor point is a particular
state of affairs in terms of which the object is presented.
However, such correspondences between emotions as atmospheres and intentional feelings
only hold with respect to a certain group of phenomena. According to Schmitz’s atmosphere
model, we may also be seized by emotions having a thematic center that cannot be differen-
tiated in terms of condensation area and anchor point or having no thematic center at all. A
sudden, groundless joy may be “unwarranted” in terms of normative accounts of emotions
or regarded as a mood rather than an emotion as it lacks the specific intentional structure.

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In the framework presented here, however, it would count as an emotion since it has the
relevant kinesthetic impulses characteristic of joy. Once more, Schmitz justifies this claim by
pointing to phenomena of affective transitions and arguing that structural distinctions be-
tween emotion and mood, target and focus, etc., can be accounted for in terms of additional
modifications of one and the same atmospheric feeling (Schmitz 1993, 53f.).
Consider, for example, a very effective narrative technique in thriller movies or, say,
fairy tales: When entering her grandmother’s cottage, little Red Riding Hood immedi-
ately feels uneasy in the form of a diffuse fear. This uneasiness, then, centers on the alleged
grandmother who appears somehow strange. The relevant atmosphere now has an area of
condensation, but not yet an anchor point. The fear is eventually furnished with such an
anchor point when Red Riding Hood realizes that the figure is a wolf intending to eat her.
Another ideal-typical modification of one and the same atmospheric feeling would be
an instance of embarrassment that begins with noticing the gazes of others and sensing that
there must be something wrong with what one does or how one appears. Obviously, the
atmosphere of embarrassment has a condensation area, that is, the person who suddenly
finds themself awkwardly exposed to the look of the others. However, the concrete anchor
point—An open fly? Something said?—is not (yet) present to that person, though obvious
to the others. The possibility of such transitions and diffusions suggests that the intentional
structures pointed out in often cited emotional episodes, such as fearing the dog, may refer
to additional, sometimes even quite unstable, modifications of a more pervasive atmospheric
feeling.

6. Atmospheres and their ontological status

The previous arguments have important ontological implications which, taken together,
amount to the following point: We need to distinguish clearly between the process of feel-
ing something and the emotion as a phenomenon that is felt as an atmospheric force beyond
and other than the subject. The atmosphere, and thus the emotion, is an entity prior to the
process of feeling.
However, it would be a misunderstanding to conceive of atmospheres as some sort of
invisible cloud hanging in the environment (Schmitz 2009, 84). Emotions are “half-entities”
(Halbdinge) (Schmitz et al. 2011, 256; cf. Andermann 2011) or “quasi things” (Griffero 2017;
cf. also Chapter 23 in this volume). “Full-entities”, such as stones, exist continuously and
without interruption; with regard to them, causality is divided into cause (e.g., falling stone),
mode of influence (e.g., thrust) and effect (e.g., damage to the object hit). The duration of
half-entities, in contrast, can be interrupted and, with regard to them, cause and mode of
influence are unified (Schmitz et al. 2011, 256). One of the many examples Schmitz cites is
the characteristic voice of someone: Bracketing naturalistic assumptions about sonic waves
and neurology, that voice simply “resounds, falls silent and resounds again” (ibid.), whereby
it is pointless to ask what it did or where it was in the meantime. Moreover, its resounding
is both the cause and the mode of influence on the hearer. Likewise, being a half-entity,
the very same atmosphere of grief with its specific thematic center can seize you at different
occasions, being cause and mode of influence at the same time.

7. Concluding remarks
Schmitz arrives at his conception of emotions as seizing atmospheres by proceeding from
the idea of a feeling body in communication with its environment. However, even those

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sympathetic to Schmitz’s theory often deem his conception of emotions as atmospheres a

misleading metaphor (Schmid 2014), misty (Krebs 2015), a contra-intuitive exaggeration
(Slaby 2010, 2011), or doubtable (Demmerling 2011). Although I cannot address these crit-
icisms in detail here, the main concern seems to be that conceiving of emotions as atmo-
spheres would imply an implausible reification of emotions in relation to which, in turn, the
subject is construed as too passive. I have explicitly dealt with the question of passivity in this
chapter and we have also seen how Schmitz would defend his view against the reification
charge by referring to the notion of half-entities.
I hope to have shown that Schmitz’s atmosphere model should be taken seriously when
it comes to grounding emotions in the bodily dimension; moreover, it can accommodate
important insights from competing accounts such as the intentional structure of emotions,
the evaluative qualities to which they respond and the felt action-readiness they involve.2

Notes
1 At the root of the matter, one of the most central worries seems to be this: Schmitz takes the talk
of intentionality to imply what he himself rigidly denies, namely the claim that there would be
single, potentially even unrelated portions of meaning prior to the holistic meaningfulness of situ-
ations in which the subject finds themself (Schmitz 1994, 136f., 214; 2004, 220; 2012b, 14f.). I have
to bracket the question of to what extent this view is fair, precisely because it deserves a broader
discussion.
2 This chapter was written as part of the DFG-project “The embodied affective dimension of col-
lective intentionality” (NO 1148/1-1).

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——— (2017). Quasi-Things. The Paradigm of Atmospheres. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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Schmitz, Hermann, Müllan, Rudolf Owen, and Slaby, Jan (2011). Emotions Outside the Box: The
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. ( Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
 PART 2

Systematic issues
and contemporary debates
. ( Taylor & Francis
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http://taylorandfrancis.com
 20
AFFECTIVE INTENTIONALITY
AND THE REACTIVE
ATTITUDES
Bennett W. Helm

How should we understand the phenomenology of emotions? One standard way is to

distinguish sharply between the intentionality and the phenomenology of emotions, un-
derstanding their phenomenology in terms of something like “bodily sensations”, which are
simply added on to an independent account of their intentionality (cf. Goldie 2000, 40–41).
Thus, according to cognitivist accounts of emotions, in feeling fear I am not only aware of
the presence of a danger of some sort, but also have a certain sensation in my gut, where it is
this bodily sensation that accounts for the phenomenological experience of fear. In an earlier
paper (Helm 2011), I argued that this strategy fails, that we cannot separate out the intention-
ality from the phenomenology in this way. Rather, emotions are what I call “felt evaluations”:
phenomenological feelings with evaluative content or, alternately, a distinctively affective
form of intentionality. This chapter repeats those arguments and extends them to thinking
about the reactive attitudes: emotions like gratitude, resentment, approbation, and guilt.
While I shall provide an initial argument for this account in the context of relatively
simple emotions like anger and fear (Sections 1 and 2), the motivating intuition is perhaps
clearer when we consider the phenomenology of more complex emotions like the reactive
attitudes. For with the reactive attitudes, it becomes quite clear that appealing to bodily sen-
sations to make sense of their phenomenology, which might have seemed to work for simpler
emotions like fear or anger, is inadequate. While anger and resentment are closely related
emotions, the phenomenological difference between them is surely not intelligible merely
in terms of bodily sensation. It will not do, for example, to say that this difference is merely
a difference in intensity, say. Rather, that phenomenology itself has a complexity to it that
cannot be neatly distinguished from the thought that you are responsible for wronging me (as
distinct from the thought in anger that you are an obstacle to accomplishing my ends). This
suggests that the “affectivity” or “phenomenology” of emotions cannot neatly be separated
from their intentionality—that emotions have a distinctively affective form of intentional-
ity. Others who have offered versions of this affective intentionality thesis include: Stocker
(1983), Goldie (2000, 2002, 2009), Roberts (2003), Ratcliffe (2005a, 2008a), Döring (2007),
and Slaby (2008).
Even if we grant such affective intentionality, in which we cannot pull apart the inten-
tionality and the phenomenology of emotions, precisely how we understand that intentional
content is important. Here, I differ from other proponents of affective intentionality. For, as

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I shall argue, we cannot understand emotions primarily as cognitive perceptions (with mind-
to-world direction of fit) of an independently existing world (Goldie 2002; Döring 2007);
nor can we understand them primarily as conative strivings (with world-to-mind direction
of fit) projecting value onto the world (Roberts 2003; Prinz 2004). Rather, the evaluative
objects of emotions, or their “import” as I shall call it, are both that to which emotions are
properly responsive and that to which we commit ourselves in such a way as to constitute
that import. Inasmuch as mind-to-world and world-to-mind directions of fit are supposed to
be mutually exclusive and exhaustive, such simultaneous responsiveness to and constitution
of the objects of emotions by the emotions themselves reveals that their affective intention-
ality cannot be understood in terms of the notion of a direction of fit. And yet that emotions
are responsive commitments to import is crucial to understanding their phenomenology, for
understood this way our felt, committed awareness of emotional objects as good or bad in
some way just is a matter of our being emotionally pleased or pained by these objects. There
is, of course, a kind of circularity implicit in my rejection of the notion of direction of fit,
but, as I shall argue, such circularity is not vicious given the holistic nature of affective inten-
tionality, a holistic nature that is missed by alternative accounts of emotions.
My aim in Section 1 is to provide an account of emotions as felt evaluations, an account
in which we can recognize this implicit holism. In Section 2, I shall turn to draw out the
implications this account has for understanding the affective nature of emotional intention-
ality. Finally, in Section 3, I shall apply this account of affective intentionality to the reactive
attitudes, arguing that this account can make apparent commonly ignored aspects of the
affectivity of the reactive attitudes, whereby they bind us together through our having shared
values and communal norms.

1. Emotions as felt evaluations

Emotions, I have long argued (Helm 1994, 2001, 2002, 2015), should be understood as felt
evaluations: feelings of pleasure or pain that are essentially evaluations of their objects. Thus,
to feel fear is to be pained by danger, where the evaluation of the object of fear as dangerous
is implicit in the feeling of pain; similarly, to feel satisfaction is to be pleased by success. Such
feelings are not mere phenomenal states insofar as they are intentional and evaluative. How
is it possible for feelings of pleasure or pain to be evaluative and intentional? And how is it
possible for such feelings to be not merely components of emotions but actually identical
with emotions? In responding to these worries, I shall first discuss the intentional charac-
ter of emotions before turning in Section 2 to show how this intentionality is distinctively
affective.
It is commonplace to argue that emotions have several kinds of intentional objects. In
particular, the target of an emotion is the object at which the emotion is intuitively directed:
In feeling fear as I look out of my house to see some thugs approaching my car, baseball bat
in hand, they are what I fear. In feeling emotions, we implicitly evaluate the target in some
way, though each emotion type involves a different evaluation that distinguishes it from other
emotion types. The kind of evaluation characteristic of a given emotion type is an emotion’s
formal object. Thus, roughly, the formal object of fear is dangerousness, for in feeling fear of the
thugs, I am implicitly evaluating them as dangerous; likewise, the formal object of anger is
offensiveness. The warrant of the fear or anger, therefore, depends on whether its target really
is (or intelligibly seems to be) dangerous or offensive (see, e.g., D’Arms and Jacobson 2000).
What is not widely recognized in the preceding example is that the warrant of my fear of
the thugs depends on whether (and how) the car matters to me—on the import it has to me.

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Thus, if the car was the 1957 Chevy that my father and I lovingly restored before his death,
then it is reasonable to think that I care about preserving and protecting it, so that my fear
of the thugs would be warranted. On the other hand, my unscrupulous twin, who has an
old clunker that he is trying to have totaled for the insurance money, fear of what the thugs
might do would be unwarranted; rather, we might think, he ought to hope they do a good
job bashing it up. Finally, someone might not care about the car at all (since it’s not hers, say),
and her utter indifference would mean that no emotional response would be warranted in
the circumstances. The possibility of these other cases points to the idea that understanding
my fear in this case and assessing it for warrant requires understanding the relationship be-
tween the thugs (the targets of my fear) and my car as something I care about, for it is only
in terms of this that we can see how the thugs are intelligibly dangerous. This suggests that
we should understand my fear to involve not only a formal object (i.e., dangerousness) and
a target (i.e., that which gets evaluated as dangerous: The thugs), but also a focus: That back-
ground object having import in terms of which, given the circumstances, the formal object
intelligibly applies to the target.

1.1 Emotional commitment to import

Some cognitivist theories of emotions try to make sense of how emotions evaluate their
objects by providing a reductive account of emotions in terms of beliefs and desires (e.g.,
Marks 1982). Thus, anger is understood in terms of the belief that its target is offensive and
the desire to lash out at it, and fear is understood in terms of the belief that its target is dan-
gerous and the desire to avoid or mitigate that danger. Of course, as cognitivists recognize,
to have an emotion is more than just to have such a belief and desire, for one can clearly have
the belief and desire without having the emotion. So something more needs to be added to
the account to specify the distinctively affective character of the overall intentional state that
is the emotion.
The trouble is, many attempts to account for the distinctive affective nature of emotions—
in terms of an appeal to a special kind of desire (e.g., Marks 1982), to a special kind of belief
(e.g., Nussbaum 1994, especially Chapter 10; Solomon 1973, 1976), and to bodily pleasures
and pains (e.g., Lyons 1980)—simply fail.1 After all, how is it possible to cash out the special
kind of desire (as being especially “strong”) or of belief (as involving “full assent”) without
making what in this context would be a viciously circular appeal to the emotions? More fun-
damentally, to understand the distinctive affectivity of emotions in terms of bodily pleasures
and pains (caused in the right way by the relevant beliefs and desires) is to diminish the im-
portance of emotions in our everyday lives in a way that misunderstands emotional pleasure
and pain. For emotions do not merely involve some pleasant or painful sensation among
other components, as cognitivist theories require. Rather, they are pleasures and pains and
can be redescribed as such: To be afraid is to be pained by danger (and not by one’s stomach);
such a pain is not a component of, but is rather identical with, one’s fear. This means that
emotional pleasures and pains, namely what one feels in having the emotion, are essentially
intentional and evaluative, a sense of how things are going—whether well or poorly; this is
the root of affective intentionality. Understanding this will require understanding the sense
in which emotions are feelings more generally.
Phenomenologically, when we are afraid that something might well happen, we feel the
dangerousness of some object impressing itself on us in feeling, in something like the way
colors impress themselves on us in perception. In this way, the capacity for emotion is a kind
of receptivity to evaluative content, to import, and particular emotions are passive exercises

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of that receptivity. This implies that the import to which our emotions respond must have a
kind of objectivity as that which our emotions apprehend (or misapprehend) and so as that in
terms of which particular emotions are to be evaluated for warrant.
Nonetheless, that very import to which our emotions ought to respond is itself relative to
the individual, constituted by our cares and concerns, as is clear in the difference in attitude
between my unscrupulous twin and me with respect to our cars. Indeed, import cannot be
understood as independent of emotions in general, for someone’s not being affected emo-
tionally by something no matter what happened to it is pretty solid evidence that it does
not have import to them. In short, import is both objective, as rationally prior to particular
emotions, and subjective, as conceptually dependent on the shape of one’s emotions gener-
ally. The problem, therefore, is to make sense of this objectivity of import and how it can
impress itself on us in a way that is consistent with its also being subjective and so somehow
constituted by us, and to do so in a way that can make sense of the distinctive kind of affec-
tive intentionality emotions involve. The key to solving this is to appeal to the notion of an
emotion’s focus.
Emotions are not simply responses to some apparent import in one’s situation; they are
commitments to the import of their focuses. Such a commitment to the import of the focus is
a commitment to feel other emotions with that same focus in the relevant actual and coun-
terfactual situations. As I have argued elsewhere (Helm 2001), when one feels these related
emotions in response to such a commitment, the resulting pattern of such emotions itself
constitutes the import of that focus. This may seem puzzling: How can it be both that our
emotions are responses to import impressing itself on us and that our emotions are commit-
ments that constitute that very import? After all, it might seem that such commitments must
be either cognitive, with mind-to-world direction of fit, or conative, with world-to-mind
direction of fit; insofar as these directions of fit are mutually exclusive, nothing could have
both. Nonetheless, I think that the very notion of direction of fit does not apply to these
emotional commitments. (See Helm 2001 for detailed arguments.)
For something to have import is for it to be a worthy object of attention and action. That
is, other things being equal, if something has import for you, you ought to pay attention to
it and act on its behalf when otherwise appropriate. This requires that you be consistently
vigilant for its being affected favorably or adversely and prepared to act on its behalf; to fail in
general to exhibit such vigilance and preparedness undermines the idea that it really has
import to you—that you care about it. Of course, it is consistent with this requirement
that you sometimes fail to attend to it or act on its behalf when this is called for; the point
is that, absent some legitimate excuse—as when something more important demands your
attention—such failures cannot be the rule if it is to be intelligible that you genuinely care
about it.
Now, the relevance of emotions to constituting import becomes clear. The kind of
commitment to import that emotions essentially are is precisely that which constitutes the
relevant vigilance and preparedness to act.

Vigilance
The commitment to the import of my car that is a part of my anger at the thugs for van-
dalizing it is in part a commitment to feel a pattern of other emotions with the same focus
in the relevant actual and counterfactual situations. Thus, it is a commitment to feeling
fear at the approach of a hailstorm (and to being relieved when it passes by leaving my car
unscathed), to be worried about the effects of road salt on its finish, to be pleased with how

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easily the salt comes off now that I’ve applied the fancy wax finish, and so on. In this way,
having a particular emotion commits me to feeling a broad pattern of other emotions with
the same focus. Indeed, other things being equal, it would be hard to make sense of my ini-
tial response as that of anger if I were indifferent to the subsequent fate of the car and so felt
no fear, relief, worry, pleasure, etc., precisely because the purported commitment I make to
the import of the car in feeling the anger would then be shown to be no commitment at all:
Being in general responsive to the import of the focus of one’s emotions is a condition of the
intelligibility of having the capacity for emotions in the first place. Consequently, genuine
commitments to import are not merely intellectual assents to an evaluation but also dispose
one to be vigilant for what happens to this focus, where this vigilance consists in the broader
pattern of emotions with the same focus projecting into the future.
Actually, to have such a projectible pattern of emotions with a common focus, then, is to
be vigilant in a way that is necessary for that focus to have import. Moreover, such a pattern
of emotions also makes intelligible the idea that its focus is worthy of attention. For the pat-
tern, once it is in place, is no mere disposition to attend; it is rather partly definitive of the
warrant of its elements as a rational response to their common focus. For example, given the
pattern it would be rationally inappropriate not to be sad when I am forced to sell the car
by my financial circumstances, for such a failure would be a failure to attend to my circum-
stances as I ought, precisely because of the pattern of commitments these emotions focused
on the car involve. Conversely, it is the presence of that pattern of other emotions that makes
intelligible the warrant of my current anger. In short, the pattern of emotions with a com-
mon focus is not merely projectible, but it is rational as well; this rationality makes the focus
of that pattern intelligible as worthy of attention.

Preparedness
Of course, emotions are not merely ways of attending to the import of one’s circumstances,
for they also, in many cases, move us to intentional action. (Emotions can move us to mere
non-intentional behavior as well, as when we tremble from fear; such non-intentional be-
haviors are arational expressions or evincings of the emotions, and I shall simply set them aside
here as not relevant to the kind of preparedness for action that is partly constitutive of im-
port, though see Helm 2016 for some details.) Thus, fear might lead us to escape the danger,
and anger or jealousy to seek revenge. In such cases, the emotion explains the action by
motivating it in such a way as to make it intelligible within a broader context of rationality:
The evaluation implicit in the emotion’s formal object justifies the action by revealing it to
have a point, to be (other things being equal) worthwhile in the present circumstances. Such
a point can be an end to be achieved, as in the examples just provided, but it need not be.
Jumping for joy and crying out of sadness are not goal-directed activities. Nonetheless, each
has a point: The point of jumping for joy is to celebrate a success, and the jumping just is that
celebration; likewise, the point of crying out of sadness is to mourn a loss, and the crying just
is that mourning. In each case, this point is made intelligible by the specific kind of import
to which joy and sadness are properly responsive. For this reason, I understand such non-
goal-directed intentional actions given a point by an emotion to be rational expressions of that
emotion and so of one’s commitment to the import of its focus.
We can now see that to have not merely a single emotion but a whole pattern of emotions
to which one is committed by virtue of each emotion’s commitment to the import of its
focus involves not merely a kind of vigilance for what happens to that focus but also a pre-
paredness to act on its behalf when otherwise appropriate. As before, such a pattern makes

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intelligible that focus as worthy of action: It would be rationally inappropriate, other things
being equal, for me to fail to lash out at those who intentionally seek to damage my car,
precisely because the more general pattern of emotions of which this anger is a part, each of
which is itself a commitment to import, is essentially a rational pattern.

1.2 Constituting import

The upshot is that these projectible, rational patterns of emotions with a common focus con-
stitute that focus as being worthy of attention and action and so as having import. In short, to
have import is to be the focus of such a pattern of emotions, and it is these patterns that make
intelligible the subjectivity of that import. To emphasize this subjective aspect of import, I
shall sometimes speak of the subject’s caring about something, intending by this the overall
evaluative attitude of the subject constitutive of the import things have to her.
Nonetheless, these patterns also make intelligible the objectivity of import. For to have
such a pattern of emotions is to be disposed to respond to situations of a certain kind, where
we cannot specify that kind of situation except in terms of the import of the focus of that
pattern. Hence, the pattern of emotions is in effect an attunement, a habituation of one’s
sensibilities, to that import. Given the rationality of the pattern, any particular emotional
response (or even failure of emotional response) is assessed for warrant in terms of whether
it fits into this pattern as an intelligible projection of it—as, that is, a proper or improper re-
sponse to the import of its focus. (Of course, there is the further question about whether it is
rational to have the whole pattern—whether it is rational for the focus of that pattern to have
import for one. This further question is about a richer kind of objectivity I cannot discuss
here. See Helm (2000, 2001) for details.) And given the projectibility of this attunement of
our sensibilities, we can make sense of that import as impressing itself on us: It is situations of
this kind—i.e., those involving import—that engage our emotions because these emotions
are already attuned to that import by virtue of the broader projectible, rational pattern of
which they are a part. Import, therefore, impresses itself on us by not only grabbing and
holding our attention but also priming us to act appropriately.
In short, particular emotions are feelings of things going well or poorly, the result of im-
port impressing itself on us. This is possible only because these emotions are commitments
to the import of their focuses, commitments which, when they are non-defective, define
and institute a broader projectible, rational pattern that both constitutes that import and
makes possible its impressing itself on us, grabbing our attention and motivating us to act.
Thus, I shall say, emotions are felt evaluations insofar as they are commitments of this kind:
Commitments that both are passive responses to attend to and be motivated by import and
are simultaneously constitutive of that import by virtue of the broader rational patterns of
which they are a part and which they serve to define. (This account of import as constituted
by projectible, rational patterns of felt evaluations is developed in more detail in Helm 2001,
in the context of a more general account of value.)

2. Affective intentionality
In light of this account of emotions as felt evaluations, we can understand the sense in which
they are pleasures and pains, thereby confirming the phenomenological description of emo-
tions presented above (Section 1.1). Emotions are pleasant or painful—they feel good or
bad—precisely because, as felt evaluations, they are feelings of positive or negative import,
where such feelings are modes of caring about something as a proper focus of one’s concern.

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Thus, to feel fear is to be pained by danger, this distinctive kind of import, in the sense that
the danger impresses itself on one, grabbing one’s attention and motivating one to act; the
emotional response, the feeling of this danger, just is the pain. Likewise, to feel joy is to be
pleased by some good in the sense that the good impresses itself on one in feeling and mo-
tivating celebration. This account of pleasure and pain as felt evaluations, therefore, both
reveals how pleasures and pains intrinsically motivate and explains the intuition that pleasure
and pain have a special connection to import.
Notice that this understanding of the phenomenology of emotions does not have anything
to say about bodily sensations that may accompany the emotions. This is intentional: The
phenomenology that is distinctive of emotions, I have argued, is to be understood in terms of
a distinctive kind of evaluation now revealed to be felt evaluations. What it is like to feel emo-
tional pleasure or pain is to have one’s attention gripped by the goodness or badness of some-
thing in such a way that one thereby feels the pull to act appropriately. Of course, we often do
feel accompanying bodily sensations which themselves contribute to the overall phenomenal
experience. Indeed, insofar as our human responsiveness to import takes place by means of the
ways our body responds to the environment, it would seem that James (1884) is right to point
to the way our bodies are a kind of “sounding board” for significance (for an interpretation
of James along these lines, see Ratcliffe (2005b, 2008b), and Slaby (2008) is right to point to
this as central to our human-affective intentionality. However, while such bodily sensations
are central to our human experience of emotions, I do not see that this is essential for affective
intentionality: There is nothing incoherent about the thought that a disembodied creature
or someone anesthetized and unable to feel their body might nonetheless have distinctively
emotional pleasures and pains of the sort I have described. (In his postscript, James (1884,
204–205) discusses the case of someone “entirely anaesthetic, inside and out, with the excep-
tion of one eye and one ear” who nonetheless, it is claimed, “had shown shame on the occasion
of soiling his bed, and grief, when a formerly favourite dish was set before him, at the thought
that he could no longer taste its flavour”. James argues that this case does not refute his theory;
I read it as further evidence for the account of felt evaluations I have offered.)
The upshot is that the affective character of emotions, their phenomenology, cannot be
separated from their evaluative character. Indeed, this points us to the idea that emotions
have a distinctive affective intentionality: pleasant or painful feelings involving a characteris-
tic evaluation (via the formal object) of the target in light of its bearing on the focus. Such
affective intentionality, I have argued, is made intelligible in terms of an understanding of
emotions as felt evaluations.
Two features of affective intentionality are worth drawing out explicitly here. First, this
sort of emotional feeling of import is neither a response to an antecedently existing object
nor a response that simply projects its object onto the world: It has neither mind-to-world
nor world-to-mind direction of fit. Rather, our affective intentionality is simultaneously
both responsive to and constitutive of import, and it—this single, indecomposable mental
state—is simultaneously both perceptual and motivating. Such an account of affective in-
tentionality is fundamentally at odds with that offered by cognitivist theories of emotions,
which presuppose the notion of direction of fit and, therefore, understand the perceptual
and motivational aspects of emotions to be distinct. Moreover, this is at odds with the still
common understanding of mental states as propositional attitudes, which supposes that such
propositional content is independent of any attitude we might take toward it. Rather, affec-
tive intentionality cannot be understood as attitude-independent in this way. Consequently,
we must reject what Goldie (2000) calls “add-on” theories of emotions, including cogni-
tivist accounts.

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The second feature of affective intentionality is made intelligible by the first: Affective
intentionality is essentially holistic. By this, I mean not merely that a felt evaluation in one
circumstance is rationally connected to felt evaluations in other (actual and counterfactual)
circumstances by virtue of their commitment to the import of a common focus. In addition,
this rational pattern of emotions involves a commitment to import that constitutes that very
import, thereby making intelligible how such import can impress itself on us in feeling
particular emotions. That one, in general, exhibits such a holism of affective intentionality,
therefore, is a condition of the possibility of one’s having the capacity for affective intention-
ality at all. (Of course, it is possible to have emotions that are isolated from such a general
pattern of emotions; in such a case, the emotions will be responsive to something that does
not, in fact, have import and consequently will be unwarranted. Such unwarranted emotions
cannot be the rule, or we would be unable to make sense of the subject as having the capacity
for emotions: Rationality is the constitutive ideal of the mental (Davidson 1980; Dennett
1987). This is why I have understood the sense in which holism is necessary for affective
intentionality at the level of the capacity for it, rather than the exercise of that capacity in
particular cases.)
This understanding of affective intentionality as having neither mind-to-world nor
world-to-mind direction of fit and as essentially holistic is at odds with alternative accounts
of affective intentionality that understand that intentionality in quasi-perceptual terms
(Goldie 2000, 2002, 2009; Roberts 2003; Prinz 2004; Döring 2007). As felt evaluations,
emotions are not merely a registering of how our concerns bear on the world, of import,
for to understand them merely in these terms is wrongly to understand these concerns to
be independent of and prior to our emotions themselves. While it is correct to understand
import to impress itself on us pleasantly or painfully in our having particular emotions, this
is intelligible only insofar as those emotions themselves are simultaneously commitments to
that import, commitments that partially constitute it. In this way, the feeling of import just is
a feeling of one’s commitment to the emotion’s focus, a dimension of affective intentionality
that alternative accounts miss.

3. Phenomenology of the reactive attitudes

The distinctive affective intentionality of emotions, I have argued, is intelligible in terms
of the idea that emotions are felt evaluations: feelings of pleasure or pain simultaneously
responsive to and constitutive of import, of one’s caring about something. I now want to
consider how this account of affective intentionality applies to the reactive attitudes, which
are much richer and more complex emotions and whose phenomenology is, therefore, more
challenging to understand.
The notion of the reactive attitudes was introduced by Strawson (1962); they are emotions
like resentment, gratitude, indignation, approbation, guilt, and pride whereby we hold each
other responsible, or ourselves take responsibility for certain actions. Part of what is distinc-
tive of the reactive attitudes is that they are interpersonal not merely in the sense that they are
responsive to the actions of persons but more fundamentally in the way in which the reactive
attitudes of different people are interpersonally linked. For example, if I elbow you out of the
way as I jump into the buffet line, you ought to feel resentment, I ought to feel guilty, and
others ought to feel disapprobation or even indignation. It is no accident that these all occur
together. Indeed, part of what coordinates our emotional responses is that your resentment
and their indignation are not merely private emotions but amount to blaming me, such that
my feeling of guilt will often be a response to the sting of that blame.

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There are two puzzles here that an account of affective intentionality can resolve. First
is a phenomenological puzzle concerning the “sting” of blame (or the “warm glow” of praise):
How is it that your responding to the negative (or positive) import of my norm violation (or
upholding) other things being equal ought to cause me a distinctive kind of pain (or plea-
sure)? Why should your expressing a negative (or positive) attitude toward what I have done
have this sort of effect on me? Note here that it is not good enough to say that it is because I
care about what you think of me, for part of the question is what that caring consists in and,
crucially, what motivates it. As will become apparent, resolving this puzzle requires simulta-
neously resolving a second puzzle: the intentionality puzzle. To what are we each responding
that can motivate our concern for each other and that can thereby explain why our respective
reactive attitudes are non-accidentally coordinated?
We can begin to see how to resolve the intentionality puzzle by considering first your
resentment. In resenting me, you are responding not merely to the fact that I have harmed
you with my sharp elbows, but also to the fact that in doing so, I have violated the norm
of taking turns, and your resentment expresses your caring about that norm—expresses
the import it has. Yet to make sense of the blaming character of your resentment, we must
recognize that your concern is also with me as having a certain standing as someone who is
bound by this norm, as well as with yourself and others—certain witnesses—as having the
authority to hold me responsible to it. After all, if you were a visitor to my community or
culture, one in which we do not have norms of taking turns but instead normally use our
elbows to jockey for position, you would not have the authority to hold me to norms from
your community, nor would I have the standing as being bound by your norms; in such a
case, your resentment would be unwarranted. This suggests that for your resentment to be
warranted, you and I must both be members of the same community one of whose norms I
have violated in a way that harms you. Likewise, others’ indignation will be warranted only
if they are also members of this community.
This points us to a common object that can resolve the intentionality puzzle. Central to
the reactive attitudes is that the concern they manifest is for these norms as communal norms
and for standing and authority as communal statuses. From the subjective perspective, this
means that the commitment you have is to the import these things have not merely to you
but rather to us: It is a joint commitment to our norms, our standing and authority. In this way,
your resentment addresses me and calls on me to feel guilty and on others to feel disapprobation
and thereby to reaffirm our shared commitment to the communal norm and to each of our
communal status. It is in virtue of this call that I ought to feel guilt and that they ought to feel
disapprobation, for it is a call you make from your position of authority as one of us and it
is through this call that you blame me and thereby hold me responsible for what I have done
(Helm 2017, 2018). Consequently, the relevant rational patterns constitutive of the import of
these norms and of our standing and authority are an essentially interpersonal pattern in virtue
of which we jointly care about the norms and about our standing and authority.
So far, I have described the reactive attitudes from the subjective perspective from which
we can appreciate the distinctively interpersonal form of intentionality these emotions in-
volve. In particular, the interpersonal nature of the focus of the reactive attitudes is never
far from the surface through our joint commitment to its import, through our holding each
other responsible, and through the recognition this involves of the communal status we
each have as being bound by the communal norms and as having the authority to enforce
them. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere (Helm 2017), we should understand the focus of
the reactive attitudes ultimately to be the community to which we belong, so that we are
committed to the import of the norms and of our standing and authority only as a part of that

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broader commitment to the import of the community itself. This distinctively interpersonal
form of intentionality found in the reactive attitudes thus depends on the essentially holistic
nature of that intentionality and on the way this makes sense of how the reactive attitudes
both constitute the import of their focuses and are responsive to that very import. Such res-
ponsiveness brings us to the objective perspective on import from which we can resolve the
phenomenological puzzle about why I feel the sting of blame expressed in your resentment.
As discussed in Section 1.2, particular emotions are a kind of attunement to import such
that in feeling an emotion, one feels this import impressing itself on one pleasantly or pain-
fully, thereby making sense of the affectivity of emotional intentionality. The same is true of
the reactive attitudes, though the essentially interpersonal character of the reactive attitudes
somewhat complicates the resulting phenomenology. When I elbow my way into line, the
negative import of my violation of this communal norm ought to impress itself on us pain-
fully: on me in being pained by the wrong I have inflicted on you (a pain that is identical
with my guilt), on you in being pained by my culpability in thus harming you (a pain that is
identical with your resentment), and on witnesses in being pained by that same culpability
(a pain that is identical with their disapprobation). Of course, even though I ought to feel the
pain of guilt, I may not: I may not recognize that I have just violated a communal norm,
being inadequately attuned to the import this norm has for us. It is in part here that the
interpersonal nature of the affective intentionality of the reactive attitudes shows through.
When you express your resentment, what you express is something’s having not merely
private import but communal import: the import this norm violation has to us. In this way, you
are doing something to impress—you are pressing—that import on me. (The same is true of
witnesses’ pressing that import on me through the expression of their disapprobation.) That
is, you (and they) are not merely calling my attention to the import of my norm violation,
something I should have noticed all along. In addition, your reproach and your authority as
one of us press on me your pain and my role in causing it: This is the “sting” of blame. (The
same holds true, mutatis mutandis for your gratitude pressing on me the positive import of my
notably upholding a communal norm, giving rise to the “warm glow” of praise.) Moreover,
the interpersonal character of the affective intentionality of the reactive attitudes is not con-
fined to just praise and blame. My guilt likewise presses on you both the negative import
of my norm violation and my recognition of your authority to hold me responsible for this.
(This indicates that what explains the coordination of our reactive attitudes cannot simply
be the fact that I feel the sting of blame from your resentment because I somehow have an
antecedent concern for what you think of me: The concern is for mutual standing and au-
thority of each other, and it is a concern I ought to manifest even prior to your resentment’s
pressing that import on me.) In each case, what impresses itself on us is the joint import not
only of someone’s notably upholding or violating a communal norm but also of the standing
and authority we each have as bound by the norm and able to hold each other responsible to
it. That such joint import can do so depends on our emotional capacities already being a kind
of attunement and receptivity to that joint import of both the relevant norms and of others
as fellow members of a community.

4. Conclusion
My aim in this chapter has been to present an account of the richness and depth of affective
intentionality and thereby to argue against alternative accounts that understand emotions to
be much less rich and interesting. We cannot assimilate the affective intentionality of our
emotions to some non-affective intentionality of other mental states or to non-intentional

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affectivity of anything like “raw feels”, an all-too-common thought that makes emotions out
to be relatively uninteresting mental states. Rather, the picture of emotions I have presented
here is of something much more interesting and far more complex than is often allowed. The
holism of affective intentionality not only is a central part of the capacity for emotions quite
generally; it also grounds our deepest interpersonal connections. We ought not ignore the
potential for such complications in initially formulating a more general theory of emotions
and affective intentionality.2

Notes
1 Of course, the few brief remarks I provide here are far from a knock-down argument against cog-
nitivist theories of emotions. (For more fully worked-out arguments, see Helm (2001, especially
Chapter 2). My aim here is merely to suggest that a different tack might prove fruitful: In order to
understand the nature of affective intentionality, we need to understand the sense in which their
implicit evaluations are pleasures or pains.
2 This chapter derives from Helm (2011), updated slightly to extend the point to my recent account
of the reactive attitudes. Thanks to mentis for permission to reprint a modified version of §§1–2 of
the original article.

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 21
THE VARIETIES OF AFFECTIVE
EXPERIENCE
John J. Drummond

1. Introduction
Affective experience broadly construed encompasses several related and interwoven, but
non-identical, kinds of experiences and states. These different kinds overlap, mixing with
one another in various ways. Moreover, each is itself a complex phenomenon requiring de-
tailed analysis. Consider, for example, Peter Goldie’s description of an emotion as “complex,
episodic, dynamic, and structured” (2000, 12). An emotion is complex insofar as it contains
many elements: perceptions, thoughts, or beliefs; bodily changes; feelings; and a variety of
dispositions (2000, 12–13). It is episodic and dynamic insofar as elements come and go as the
emotion waxes and wanes (2000, 13). And it is structured, on Goldie’s view, in that it is part
of a narrative in which it is embedded (2000, 13, see also 144).
Whether one agrees with the details of Goldie’s analysis, his brief description of jeal-
ousy provides an example of how characterizing one affective state—an emotion—points to
others, in this case, a character trait:

If you are a jealous sort of person, then you are a person who, in some sense, is disposed
to be jealous in your relationships. And when you become jealous of Jane’s relationship
with John, then you are actually having the emotion. And this emotion—your jealousy
of that relationship—can itself involve all sorts of episodes and dispositions regarding
that specific relationship. Thus, both the character trait of being jealous and the emotion
of being jealous involve dispositions, but the latter are more specific than the former. So,
to say, for example, that James is jealous can, according to context, mean one of three
things: it can mean that he is a jealous type (the character trait); it can mean that he is
jealous of this relationship (the emotion); or it can mean that he is currently experienc-
ing a particular jealous thought or feeling (the emotional episode).
(Goldie 2000, 13–14)

Goldie also notes that emotions are distinguished from moods in having more specific ob-
jects than moods (2000, 17); they are distinguished, in other words, as specific and non-
specific emotions (2000, 144). But, despite their difference, emotions and moods can morph
into the other (2000, 148).

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Taking Goldie’s distinctions as a starting point, this chapter will investigate the different
kinds of affective experience. I shall, like Goldie, consider an emotion to be the compound
of emotion-episodes and emotion-states. I shall, however, construe the specifically disposi-
tional character of an emotion as an affective trait, and I shall distinguish this, in turn, from
a character trait. Finally, I shall distinguish sentiments from both affective and character
traits and also from moods. The limitations of space mean that these distinctions can only
be sketched, but the discussion will serve to illuminate both the differences between and the
relations among affective phenomena.

2. Emotions
My discussion will focus on the intentional structure of the emotions. Let us briefly consider
an emotion-episode. When a subject encounters a situation as affectively and evaluatively
charged—a fearful subject experiencing a dangerous situation, say, or an indignant sub-
ject experiencing an unjust situation—there are “facts of the case” in terms of which we
understand what it is about the object of the emotion that motivates it. To put the matter
another way: Objects affect us and evoke feelings in us such that we apprehend the object
as (dis)valuable just insofar as we apprehend it as having certain non-axiological properties.
There are two philosophical claims embedded in this description: (1) Valuing an ob-
ject involves intentional feelings or emotions, and (2) this feeling or emotion is rooted in
what Franz Brentano (1995, 60–61) calls a “presentation” or what we might more gen-
erally call a cognitive state (perception, memory, imagination, judgment) that grasps the
object’s non-axiological features. The early phenomenologists—those working (roughly) in
the first third of the 20th century, such as Edmund Husserl (see 1988, 2004), Adolf Reinach
(1912/13), Edith Stein (1989, 2007), Max Scheler (1973), Nicolai Hartmann (1963), and
Dietrich von Hildebrand (1916, 1922, 1953)—agree with the first claim. There is, however,
significant disagreement regarding the second claim, a disagreement best exemplified in the
difference between Husserl and Scheler.
Husserl claims that an intentional feeling-act is founded on an act, e.g., a perceiving or
judging, that presents an object (Husserl 1970a, 569–576; 1988, 252). I have elsewhere ar-
gued for three modifications to the Husserlian view, although the modifications are to some
extent motivated by Husserl’s own texts. First, I stress the fact that mind is essentially an
openness to the world, that mind is an intertwining of cognitive-theoretical, axiological,
and practical aspects and interests, and that intentionality is first predicated of the directed-
ness of mind as a whole, by virtue of intentionality’s temporal and horizonal character, to
the world as a whole (Drummond 2012, 115, 125; 2013, 251). Second, this entails that our
original encounter of the world is a complex mixture of these aspects and interests, a point
that becomes clear in Husserl’s description of the natural and personalistic attitudes (Husserl
1989, 183–210; 2014, 48–52); hence, “pure” perception and judgment are abstractions from
concrete experience rather than founding experiences (Drummond 2013, 251). Third, this,
in turn, entails that the foundational relations belong primarily to the significance an object
has for us; the axiological significance of the object is founded on the cognitive sense of the
non-axiological properties that motivate the intentional feeling or emotion (Drummond
2013, 252). This last is my version of claim (2) above.
Scheler (1973), by contrast, affirms a feeling-intentionality through which value-objects
are directly apprehended a priori. The prior apprehension of the value-object (typically an
ideal value-characteristic) underlies the grasp of the object bearing the value as good or
bad. Said another way, the experience in an emotion-episode of the object as good(bad)

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apprehends the instantiated value as the good(bad)-making characteristic of the bearer.

The (dis)value does not depend on any non-axiological properties of the bearer or any
psychological features of the subject experiencing it. As Scheler puts it,

We know of a stage in the grasping of values wherein the value of an object is already
very clearly and evidentially given apart from the givenness of the bearer of the value.
Thus, for example, a man can be distressing and repugnant, agreeable, or sympathetic to
us without our being able to indicate how this comes about; in like manner we can for
the longest time consider a poem or another work of art “beautiful” or “ugly,” “distin-
guished” or “common,” without knowing in the least which properties of the contents
of the work prompt this. Again, a landscape or a room in a house can appear “friendly”
or “distressing,” and the same holds for a sojourn in a room, without our knowing the
bearers of such values (…) Clearly, neither the experience of values nor the degree of the
adequation and the evidence (…) depends in any way on the experience of the bearer
of the values. Further, the meaning of an object in regard to “what” it is (whether, for
example, a man is more “poet” or “philosopher”) may fluctuate to any degree without
its value ever fluctuating. In such cases the extent to which values are, in their being,
independent of their bearer clearly reveals itself.
(Scheler 1973, 17–18)

Hence, the feeling-apprehension of the value remains divorced, as it were, from the experi-
ence of the bearer’s non-axiological features.
This divorce leads to some paradoxical results. Consider an episode of fear, as when a
growling Doberman Pinscher is charging you with its teeth bared. We would ordinarily
think that this fear is directed at the charging dog taken as dangerous. The dog is the proper
object of the fear, the danger its “improper” object (see Mulligan 2017, 233). On Scheler’s
view, however, the value-characteristic is the proper object of the intentional feeling; that is,
we fear danger itself (rather than the dog). That does not, however, fit the phenomenology of
particular emotion-episodes in which we are directed to objects. Moreover, insisting on the
independence and priority of the value-apprehension makes it difficult to understand how
one would answer the question, why are you fearful?
Consider now the first example that Scheler mentions: Taking an immediate dislike to
someone you have never before met but now see entering the room where a lecture is to be
delivered. Suppose, however, that someone who knows the person and to whom you report
your dislike challenges you because she thinks your dislike is unjustified. You respond, “I
don’t know; there was just something about the way he walks and surveys the room—kind
of haughty.” Your interlocutor might then seek to change your judgment by evoking a dif-
ferent sense of the person. She will attempt to lead you to “see” the person in a new way,
to conjure a new understanding, highlighting aspects previously absent from your view and
thereby leading you first to see and then to feel differently about the person. To successfully
“persuade” you, she must evoke a different feeling grounded in a different understanding of
the person (Drummond 2005, 368). These appeals to reasons—more specifically, to non-
axiological features of the object or situation motivating the emotion—are precluded by
Scheler’s view. They also clearly point in the direction of the second claim: That feelings
or emotions are rooted in cognitive states grasping the object’s non-axiological properties.
Consider also Scheler’s claim that “the meaning of an object in regard to ‘what’ it is
(whether, for example, a man is more ‘poet’ or ‘philosopher’) may fluctuate to any degree
without its value ever fluctuating.” This claim points even more fundamentally toward the

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need for a cognitive basis for evaluation. The problem arises from the difference between
logically predicative adjectives and logically attributive adjectives (Geach 1956; see also
Williams 1993, 38–47; Drummond 2005, 2013). Adjectives that name properties predica-
ble of different species and transferable from species to genus are logically predicative, e.g.,
yellow lemon, yellow banana, and yellow fruit. By contrast, those adjectives that cannot be
transferred from species to genus are logically attributive, and evaluative terms belong to
this class.
The problem can be put this way. Logically predicative adjectives determine a substantive
without regard to the kind of substantive determined and without regard to the subject ex-
periencing them. They name a property-species, one that can be instantiated without equiv-
ocation in objects of different kinds. Logically attributive adjectives are related differently
to their substantives. They determine the sense of an object only in relation to a particular
(natural or non-natural) kind; they attribute something to the object as an instance of a kind.
There is no single property-species ‘good’ that is unequivocally instantiated in both houses
and persons or in both poets and philosophers. When the adjective “good” is used in relation
to a house, it means one thing, and when it is used in relation to a hammer, it means another;
when used in relation to a poet, it means one thing, when used in relation to a philosopher,
it means another, and when used in relation to a person, yet another.
That the logically attributive adjective does not name a property-species is the reason why
inferences permissible with logically predicative adjectives are impermissible with logically
attributive adjectives. One cannot validly infer ‘Jones is good’ from ‘Jones is a good poet.’
Being good does not necessarily belong to Jones both as poet and as person. Similarly, were
Jones to abandon poetry for philosophy, we cannot infer from ‘Jones is a good poet’ that
‘Jones is a good philosopher.’ The good that belongs to Jones as a poet is not the same good
that belongs to Jones as a philosopher. An identical value-attribute ‘good’ will not transfer
if one is more a poet than a philosopher or vice-versa, unless Scheler is suggesting that Jones
is a good person regardless of whether poet or philosopher. However, if this is all Scheler
means, then his point is simply irrelevant in establishing the independence of the value-
characteristic across different kinds.
The fact that value-attributes make sense only in relation to a kind underscores the
claim that our evaluation of things is rooted in the non-axiological sense that belongs to the
presentation of an instance of a particular kind. We can say, for example, that Jones is a good
poet or a good philosopher or a good person only if we have general beliefs about what it is
to be a poet or a philosopher or a person as well as particular beliefs regarding Jones’ charac-
teristics relevant to the kind under consideration (Drummond 2005, 365–367).
These arguments against the Schelerian view support my understanding of the second
(foundational) claim mentioned at the outset of this section. Turning to Husserl’s view of
the role of feelings in affective experience, we note first that Husserl’s notion of feeling is
multi-faceted. He distinguishes bodily feelings—feeling-sensations, as he calls them—from
feeling-acts (Husserl 1970a, 569–576). A bodily feeling is a sensory state of the organism, the
sensory awareness of physiological changes undergone in the emotional experience, such as
changes in facial expressions, skeletal muscles, vocal expression, and the autonomic nervous
system as well as changes underlying the hedonic valence of the emotion. A feeling-act, by
contrast, is an intentional feeling directed upon an object.
This distinction is best understood, in my view, non-ontologically. A single set of feelings
is considered in two different respects, in relation to the body and in relation to the object.
While feeling-sensations are distinct awarenesses of, say, the tightening of abdominal mus-
cles and the horripilation on the back of the neck characteristic of fear, intentional feelings

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arise insofar as the distinct feeling-sensations “are typically aspects of a whole pattern that
constitutes a world-directed attitude,” a “bodily attitude” as Julien Deonna and Fabrice
Teroni call it (2012, 79). This feeling-Gestalt is what I am calling the intentional feeling
(but cf. Claparède 1928, 128), although I do not accept Deonna and Teroni’s view that the
emotion is exhausted by a bodily attitude. The intentional feeling is motivated by the object’s
non-axiological properties and rooted in the feeling-sensations, but it is also informed by the
subject’s experiential history, interests, concerns, and commitments. When these elements
come together, the intentional feeling or emotion discloses the object, broadly speaking, as
(dis)valuable.
Intentional feelings and emotions lie on a continuum, where the place on the contin-
uum is a function of the degree of determination in our sense of the object’s underlying
non-axiological properties. An intentional feeling alone intends “thin” axiological attributes
(unpleasant or distressing), whereas the emotion-episode intends “thick” axiological attri-
butes (dangerous or unjust). Think of the difference, for example, between disliking (and
disvaluing) a steak’s taste (an intentional feeling) and experiencing disgust in seeing that the
steak is infested with maggots (an emotion). The episode of disgust is grounded in a more de-
terminate cognitive content—the meat being maggot-infested (the example is from Goldie
2004, 97–98)—than is disliking the taste. Or recalling Scheler’s first example, we can say
that the sense of the non-axiological features underlying your intentional feeling of dislike
directed toward the person entering the room is highly indeterminate. Supposing your ac-
quaintance fails to persuade you, and as the person’s continued behavior confirms your view
of him as pompous, boastful, dismissive of others, and so forth, your dislike “thickens” into
contempt. Your initial indeterminate intending is now more determinate; the indeterminate
intention has been, as Husserl puts it, more precisely determined (Husserl 1997, 49–50). You
now have more reasons supporting your view of the person.
To summarize: the emotion-episode is inclusive of the following intertwined elements:
(1) A (more or less determinate) cognitive grasp of the object; (2) physiological changes
caused by the object (some of which are also expressive of the emotion); (3) the sensory
awarenesses of those changes (feeling-sensations); (4) a Gestalt-like felt attitude rooted in the
feeling-sensations and directed toward the object of the emotion (intentional feeling); and
(5) the influence of the subject’s physiological constitution, experiential history, interests,
concerns or cares, and commitments. All these contribute to the evaluative appraisal of the
object in the emotion-episode.
There is no emotion without at least one emotion-episode. As noted above, however, an
emotion can extend beyond the initiating episode. Suppose I become angry at a colleague for
a false and defaming remark at a department meeting. Such anger might endure for several
days (or more) even though my attention has turned to other matters and the physiological
changes and feeling-sensations associated with anger have dissipated. A second episode of
this anger might be triggered by encountering the offending faculty member in the hallway
two days later, only to have the anger subside again as I move on and once again attend to
other matters. The anger ceases only upon sinking far enough into the past to be forgotten
(although even then the anger can be rekindled), or when the offense is forgiven, or when
the offender apologizes, or when a decision is made to put it aside.
The emotion as enduring beyond and between emotion-episodes is the emotion-state.
The emotion-state, however, does not possess all five elements of the emotion-episode.
When attention is turned to other matters, although I continue to be angry, the anger be-
comes, as it were, unconscious. It is experienced (erlebt) unthematically. More importantly,
since the motivating experience of my colleague’s remark is no longer perceptually present

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to me and the anger has become non-thematic, the characteristic physiological changes cease
and, along with them, the feeling-sensations. How does the emotion continue in the absence
of these features?
Husserl’s notion of retention provides the key. Retention is the holding-in-grasp of an
experiential moment that has elapsed (Husserl 1991, 29–36). Husserl’s classic example is the
retention of a musical tone as it slips into the past and is replaced by a new tone. The reten-
tion, Husserl notes, is as present as the hearing of the new tone, but the elapsed tone is present
only in an extended sense; it is present as fading way. The present phase of an experience is
an extended present that encompasses not only the presently sounding tone and the elapsed
tone, but also an anticipation (protention) of yet-to-come tones.
In the case of an emotion, the cognitive base of the emotion-episode is retained in a
continuing experience of the emotion. And while the physiological changes and feeling-
sensations cease, the felt Gestalt, the bodily attitude, that presents the object as (dis)valued is
also retained. Consider again the case of anger directed at my colleague. When the meeting
is over, the offense is done, and I am physically separated from my colleague’s presence, the
motivating source of the anger—my colleague and his actions—is no longer perceptually
available, and I no longer undergo physiological changes and feeling-sensations. My inter-
ests, concerns, and commitments draw my attention to other things, and my anger, while not
ceasing, becomes non-thematic. When I see my colleague two days later or when an associ-
ated interest or commitment turns my memory to the original remarks (the retained cogni-
tive base), I experience another emotion-episode. Although the offending remarks re-occur
only as remembered, as past, the retained intentional feeling as a bodily stance toward my
colleague and his actions is reawakened and organizes my physiological states as though the
offending remarks were themselves re-actualized. My bodily attitude toward my (perceived
or memorially present) colleague re-presents him as having offended.
In this way, the emotion cycles through periods of emotion-episodes. Throughout the
emotion-state, the intentional feeling stands ready to recognize as (dis)valued the thing that
was originally presented in the cognitive base of the initiating emotion-episode and is now
re-presented in the continuing course of experience. It is my whole being, as embodied
mind, that experiences the emotional response to the object upon which the emotion is
directed.

3. Traits
Emotions can be either appropriate or inappropriate. An emotion is appropriate when (1) its
cognitive base is true and justified; (2) its cognitive base, given a subject’s physiological
condition, experiential history, interests, concerns, and commitment, rationally motivates
the emotion; and (3) the emotion is rationally justified (Drummond 2017, 156). We can
rephrase (2) and (3) to say that the cognitive base provides both (a) motivating reasons for
a subject having a particular physiological constitution, experiential history, interests, con-
cerns, and commitments to have an emotion that attributes a (dis)value to its object and
(b) epistemically justifying reasons for the attribution of the value. The justification presumes
an acquaintance with the relevant emotion- and value-concepts so that one can determine
whether the emotion experienced is fitting given the circumstances and whether the inten-
sity and duration of the emotion are fitting to the provocation. The determination that an
emotion is not a fitting response involves a second-order emotion directed to the first and
evaluating it as inappropriate. For example, my anger at my colleague might have been an
overreaction, and experiencing embarrassment, regret, or shame will signal that fact to me.

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Moreover, the acquaintance with the relevant emotion- and value-concepts is necessary to
determine whether the justifying reasons, in fact, support the valuation or instead support
some other valuation of the object (Drummond 2017, 156–160).
When a subject experiences an object and, as is true in ordinary experience, believes in
the existence of that object as experienced, the subject acquires a “conviction” that becomes
an enduring part of that subject’s experiential life (Husserl 1970b, 66). The subject believes
that the above-mentioned conditions for appropriateness are satisfied and that the experience
is truthful. When the subject’s experience takes the form of a judgment and the judgment is
confirmed, the conviction gains strength and is understood as a conviction to which the sub-
ject can and does return again and again. The more continuous and consistent the confirma-
tion is (or the subject takes it to be), the more the conviction determines future experience.
It takes on the character of an “abiding habitus” (Husserl 1970b, 67).
The same pattern for developing convictions is true for the emotions (whether they have a
non-propositional or propositional content) and their value-correlates. I adopt an emotional
attitude toward things and the world, and this emotional attitude takes the form of a convic-
tion, an abiding habitus that affectively shapes subsequent experiences. Such “habitualities,”
as Husserl calls them (1970b, 66), are dispositional in character. They dispose me to experi-
ence the world in ways that conform to the convictions I hold. It is in this context that we
should understand the notion of traits.
Imagine, for example, that my colleague who angered me regularly angers me. Meeting
after meeting, I come away experiencing anger and judging that this colleague has offended
me or others in the department. These continued judgments regarding the wrongdoing of
my colleague form a habitus that disposes me to feel anger when dealing with this colleague.
This emotional disposition is what I am calling an affective trait.
A character trait differs from an affective trait. The affective trait disposes me to feel one
emotion—anger—and to feel it in relation to only one person—this colleague. This is not
to say, of course, that I do not occasionally get angry at other people. It is to say only that if
I possess the affective trait only in relation to my colleague with whom I am regularly angry
and disposed to get angry, then my occasional anger at others does not manifest the trait. I
am not irascible in general. Of course, it is clear that some people are accurately described as
hot-tempered, quick-tempered, or irascible. If I were to get angry regularly in my interac-
tions with other people, I would be such a person, and my irascibility would be considered
not merely an affective trait but a feature of my character, a character trait.
Similarly, if someone were to react with fear to a broad range of things and situations—
whether or not the fear is appropriate, the subject believes it is—then that person could be
described as fearful or timorous. Here, again, the disposition to experience fear—the char-
acter trait—is limited to the one emotion, but the object of the fear is not limited to any one
object or even one type of object. The character trait—fearfulness or timidity—disposes the
subject to fear many different and many different kinds of things and situations. Affective
traits and character traits are similar in that they involve one emotion, but they differ in that
the affective trait targets one object, whereas the character trait targets many.
It is important to note that traits—whether affective traits or character traits—are not
natural dispositions characteristic of a kind of substance. Solubility in water is a natural dis-
position of salt and sugar, but irascibility and timidity are not natural dispositions of persons.
Traits are acquired over a course of experience, and, as such, they are personal and normative
in character insofar as they reveal to us what a person “ought” to do. This “ought” is not
deontic (Goldie 2000, 142); it is a way of stating what we can expect the person to do given
his or her traits.

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4. Sentiments and moods

Two kinds of affective experiences—sentiments and moods—have a broader scope than
emotions and the affective and character traits associated with them. Sentiments are like
emotions in that they involve emotion-episodes and -states. However, the dispositional char-
acter of the traits rooted in an emotion differs from that of a sentiment. The dispositions
associated with traits are dispositions to experience one emotion; they are what Deonna and
Teroni call “single-track dispositions” (2012, 8). The dispositions associated with sentiments,
by contrast, can motivate different kinds of emotional experience; they are “multi-track
dispositions.” The most obvious example of a sentiment is love (and, conversely, hatred).
Love manifests itself in emotions such as affection, admiration, pride (in the beloved’s ac-
complishments), grief (at the loss of the beloved), fear (of the loss of the beloved’s affection),
jealousy (of the beloved’s relations with a rival—supposed or real—for the beloved’s affec-
tion), and anger (at the beloved’s supposed or real betrayal). Similarly, hatred manifests itself,
for example, in episodes of enmity, anger, resentment, loathing, and joy at the misfortune of
the hated (Schadenfreude).
Moods are a more complicated matter. Moods can be distinguished from emotions in
a variety of ways: (a) Emotions have specific objects and moods have non-specific objects
such that “mood can ‘focus’ into emotion and emotion can blur out of focus into mood”
(Goldie 2000, 8), which indicates that their difference is a matter of degree (Goldie 2000,
17–18, 143ff.); (b) emotions have specific or particular objects; moods do not and, therefore,
are not intentional (Deonna and Teroni 2012, 4, 105); (c) moods are the unity of feelings as
manifested in a dominant affective attitude directed toward the world as a whole, and they
provide the horizon for particular, individuated emotional experiences (see, e.g., Husserl
[1900–1914] Ms. M III 3 II 1, 29–30; [1931] Ms. A VI 34, 19–22); and (d) moods are the
manifestation of the transcendental structure of disposedness (Befindlichkeit), and they “first
make possible directing oneself toward something” such that “things that matter to us can
be encountered” (Heidegger 2010, 133–134).
Each of these suggestions has something to recommend it. I shall, however, focus briefly
on (c) and (d) because they represent the two most significant phenomenological alterna-
tives, although I shall at least comment on their relation to (a) and (b). The major differences
between (c) and (d) concern the grounding of moods and their relation to emotions.
Disposedness (Befindlichkeit), along with understanding and discourse, is for Heidegger
an ontological structure of Dasein (i.e., of being-in-the-world). Disposedness, like under-
standing and discourse, is not an intentional act in the Husserlian sense of being directed to
a worldly entity; it is pre-intentional (Crowell 2013, 70). Disposedness manifests itself in
Dasein’s affective life and, in particular, in moods. In structuring Dasein’s Being-in-the-
world, mood further makes possible the disclosure of things in the world. Mood accounts,
in particular, for the disclosedness of the world as a whole (Heidegger 2010, 133), and mood
underlies emotions, which are directed to particular entities within the pattern of meaning
structured by mood. To this extent, Heidegger agrees with (b)—moods do not have partic-
ular objects—and rejects (a).
For Husserl, by contrast, a mood is a unity of intentional feelings (Gefühlseinheit), which
Husserl conceives as a “passive association of feelings” (Husserl [1931] Ms. VI 34, 19). This
unity can be viewed as a Gestalt that organizes the varied feelings of a subject into a dominant
affective attitude toward the world as a whole, i.e., what Husserl later specifies as the life-
world (Lee 1993, 36). Recalling my modifications to the Husserlian view outlined above,
we can say that mood is the affective dimension that belongs to intentional mind as a whole.

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Stated so simply, the view seems similar to Heidegger’s, but there are important differences,
for on the Husserlian (and my) view, intentionality is a basic notion, whereas it is not for
Heidegger.
A mood arises from an emotion whose defining characteristic informs—Husserl uses the
well-worn metaphor “colors”—a subject’s entire outlook on the world:

If I am in a good mood, then it propagates itself easily, as long as contrary tendencies or

opposite affects do not intervene (…) In the process the mood always retains an “inten-
tionality.” I distinguish between what is given, its value-character, and what, motivated
by them, serves as my mood. This is a unitary feeling (Gefühlseinheit) that lends a color,
a unitary color, to everything that appears—a unitary glow of joy, a unitary darkness of
sorrow (…) Is this cheerful mood itself intentionally directed? We must affirm this (…).
(Husserl [1900–1914] Ms III 3 II 1)

Moods not only arise from emotions; they are distinguished by the emotions from which
they arise. A pattern of joyful experiences gives rise to a cheerful mood, and a pattern of fear-
ful experiences gives rise to an anxious mood. In this, Husserl agrees with (a) that emotions
can transmute into moods, although he differs with Goldie’s view that the transformation
reflects only a matter of degree in the specificity of the object. Moreover, while Husserl, here
agreeing with Heidegger, thinks moods underlie emotions, they do not transform them-
selves into emotions by specifying their object. Instead, a positive mood disposes me to pos-
itive emotions, while a negative mood disposes me toward negative emotions. A person in
a cheerful mood is likely to more frequently and fully experience emotions such as serenity,
gratitude, kindness, contentment, and enthusiasm than someone who is not in a cheerful
mood. Similarly, someone who is depressed is more likely to experience negative emotions
such as worry, frustration, hopelessness, and despair. In this way, a mood and the individual
emotions from which the mood arises and which it underlies are inseparable. The emotions
and the bodily comportments belonging to them are manifestations of mood.
Heidegger stressed the fact that moods reveal Dasein’s thrownness. “Mood assails,” says
Heidegger (2010, 133), thereby disclosing Dasein to itself “before all cognition and willing
and beyond their scope of disclosure” (Heidegger 2010, 132; Heidegger’s emphases). The view
of mood I am developing here runs counter to this view. It claims instead that moods arise
out of the emotional experiences of particular objects. Does this mean that moods do not
assail us? No. Recalling that emotions are rooted not only in non-axiological properties of
their objects but also that an object’s relation to a subject’s physiological constitution, expe-
riential history, and interests, concerns, and commitments, it is possible to recognize that all
these subjective conditions can contribute to a mood’s assailing us.
The passive constitution of a unitary feeling directed to the world as the horizon of all our
experience can, precisely because it is passive, force itself upon us. For example, a person’s
genetic inheritance (physiological constitution) can dispose one to depression or, at the least,
make one vulnerable to it. Medical conditions (e.g., physical conditions such as paraplegia,
substance abuse, cancer) can all occasion depression. Childhood experiences (experiential
history) can motivate depression, or a previous, strongly negative emotional experience as-
sociated with a place can, upon returning years later to that place, motivate a sad or angry
mood, or if the earlier experiences were positive, a nostalgic mood. Continuing and per-
manent frustration of the satisfaction of one’s interests, concerns, or commitments—current
stressors, as it were—can occasion irascibility or depression. And so on. In such cases, the
mood is not motivated by the separate emotional experience of an object. Rather, the mood

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is motivated by a multiplicity of experiences having a similar hedonic valence passively

associating with one another such that they form the Gestalt, the unitary feeling character-
istic of moods.
This notion of mood as a kind of universal affective state is the frame for all our affective
experience. As the affective dimension of mind as a whole and its world-directed intention-
ality, and given its dispositional character, it is central not only to mind’s disclosure of an
affectively charged world but to our affective experiences of particular objects.

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Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Transl. by R. Rojcewicz, and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
——— (1991). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Transl. by
J. Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
——— (1997). Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Transl. by R. Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
——— (2004). Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1924. Ed. by H. Peucker.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
——— (2014). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book:
General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Transl. by D. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett.

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Lee, Nam-In (1993). Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Mulligan, Kevin (2017). Thrills, Orgasms, Sadness, and Hysteria: Austro-German Criticisms of
William James. In: A. Cohen, and R. Stern (Eds.). Thinking about Emotions: A Philosophical History.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 223–252.
Reinach, Adolf (1989[1912/1913]). Die Überlegung: ihre ethische und rechtliche Bedeutung. In:
K. Schuhmann, and B. Smith (Eds.). Sämtliche Werke. Textkritische Ausgabe. München: Philosophia,
279–312.
Scheler, Max (1973). Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the
Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. Transl. by M. Frings and R. Funk. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press.
Stein, Edith (1989). On the Problem of Empathy. Transl. by W. Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications.
——— (2007). An Investigation Concerning the State. Transl. by M. Sawicki. Washington, DC: ICS
Publications.
Williams, Bernard (1993). Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 22
EXISTENTIAL FEELINGS
Matthew Ratcliffe

1. What are existential feelings?

For all of us, there are times when the world seems somehow distant, not quite there, when
we feel strangely dislodged from everything and everyone. On other occasions, we feel
unusually at home in the world, secure, at peace, even ‘at one’ with our surroundings.
Such experiences are not localized; they concern an all-enveloping sense of reality and of
being rooted in a world. For most of us, most of the time, this changes only in subtle ways.
However, more pronounced changes, which can be fleeting or enduring, are phenome-
nologically conspicuous and often remarked upon. They are usually described in terms of
‘feelings’, rather than ‘moods’ or ‘emotions’. My attention was first drawn to these feelings
in 2005. I was writing a paper and thought about calling it ‘The Feeling of Being’. So I did
a Google search to check whether anybody had already used that title. I was immediately
struck by the variety of feelings that appeared among the results, most of which did not
feature in standard inventories of moods and emotions. To illustrate this, I selected the fol-
lowing examples from the first 50 hits:

The feeling of being: ‘complete’, ‘flawed and diminished’, ‘unworthy’, ‘humble’, ‘separate
and in limitation’, ‘at home’, ‘a fraud’, ‘slightly lost’, ‘overwhelmed’, ‘abandoned’, ‘stared
at’, ‘torn’, ‘disconnected from the world’, ‘invulnerable’, ‘unloved’, ‘watched’, ‘empty’,
‘in control’, ‘powerful’, ‘completely helpless’, ‘part of the real world again’, ‘trapped and
weighed down’, ‘part of a larger machine’, ‘at one with life’, ‘at one with nature’, ‘there’,
‘familiar’, ‘real’.
(Ratcliffe 2005, 45)

This list encompasses considerable diversity. Even so, most of the above have two features
in common: They are ‘feelings’ (in some sense of the term) and they also amount to ways
of relating to the world as a whole. Some established ‘emotions’ and ‘moods’ share these
characteristics, but most do not. To be more specific, some tokens of some emotion- and
mood-types are like this, while others are not, an observation that applies to hope, guilt,
and despair (Ratcliffe 2015). However, most of the ‘feelings of reality and belonging’ that
feature in everyday discourse and other contexts are not referred to as moods or emotions
at all. Some do not even have established names and are instead conveyed through elaborate

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experiential descriptions, of a kind that can be found in good literature. In other cases,
successful reference is achieved without recourse to description. For instance, one can appeal
to familiar causes with which certain experiences are reliably associated, as when feeling jet-
lagged or hung-over. In other cases, we rely on metaphors and analogies. A feeling is often
said to be ‘like’ something more localized and concrete, such as like looking at the world
from behind a sheet of glass, being on a different planet from everyone else, or having a head
full of cotton wool.
To distinguish these experiences from a wider range of affective phenomena, I introduced
the term ‘existential feeling’ (Ratcliffe 2005). It is a technical term, intended to single out a
distinctive and philosophically neglected aspect of human experience that cuts across estab-
lished categories of phenomena. In short, existential feelings are variants of a non-localized,
felt sense of reality and belonging, something that all intentionally directed experiences and
thoughts presuppose. When I have an emotional experience of p, perceive q, or think about r,
I already find myself in a world, situated in a realm where it is possible to direct oneself towards
entities, events, and situations in these and other ways.
Two characteristics are jointly necessary and together sufficient for distinguishing exis-
tential feelings from other kinds of experience (Ratcliffe 2008, 2012a, 2015, 2017a). First of
all, they are ‘feelings’, meaning that they are essentially bodily experiences. Nevertheless,
they are not exclusively bodily. Rather, they are relational—a feeling of the body is also that
through which one experiences something else. This observation is not specific to existen-
tial feeling, and others have plausibly argued that a wider range of feelings are not merely
‘bodily’. For instance, Goldie (2000) distinguishes ‘bodily feelings’ from ‘feelings towards’,
where the latter are intentionally directed experiences with objects external to the body. In
later writings, he makes clear that the two are not mutually exclusive; some but not all bodily
feelings are also feelings towards (Goldie 2009).1 Existential feelings comprise a distinctive
subset of those feelings that are not exclusively bodily. What singles them out is a second
characteristic: They also constitute a sense of how one finds oneself in the world as a whole. Other
feelings involve experiencing and relating to something more specific, against the backdrop
of this wider relationship with the world.
In addressing what it is to ‘find oneself in the world’ in one or another way, I have drawn
on the work of several philosophers. For instance, my account of existential feeling is in-
fluenced by Heidegger’s discussion of ‘mood’ (Stimmung) and ‘attunement’ or ‘moodedness’
(Befindlichkeit) in Being and Time (Heidegger 1927). Several works by William James (e.g.,
1902, 1912), which describe how felt relationships with the world shape all experience and
thought, also provide valuable insights. And one could draw on numerous other historical
sources when investigating this aspect of experience, including discussions of ‘self-feeling’
(Selbstgefühl) in philosophy and psychiatry, from the 18th century onwards (Rzesnitzek 2014).
One might worry that talk of a ‘felt sense of reality and belonging’ or a ‘way of finding
oneself in the world’ is too vague and suggestive. I have, therefore, sought to provide a more
specific and discerning account of what existential feelings consist of, by emphasizing the man-
ner in which we experience possibilities. Drawing on phenomenologists such as Husserl (1948,
1952, 2001) and Merleau-Ponty (1945), I maintain that our experiences of things include a
sense of various practical and perceptual possibilities involving them. For instance, the visual
experience of a drinking glass ordinarily incorporates possibilities such as touching it, picking
it up, and drinking from it. These possibilities are inextricable from a range of felt, bodily
dispositions, such as the inclination to reach out towards something or retreat from it. Both
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty add that localized experiences of possibility presuppose a more en-
veloping orientation, a sense of belonging to the world. When I see or think about something,

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when I am afraid of something, and when I am in a bad mood about a wider situation, I already
find myself in the world, in a way that differs in kind from intentional experiences in one or
another modality (e.g., imagining, perceiving, or remembering something). This ‘world’ is
presupposed by intentional states of whatever kind with whatever content. We can think of it
in terms of a possibility space, a receptivity to types of possibility. Different existential feelings, I
suggest, involve differences in the types of possibility to which one is receptive, differences that
are integral to experience rather than consisting of non-experiential dispositions.
Things are experienced as significant to us, as mattering to us, in different ways, something
that involves a sense of the possibilities they offer. For instance, something might appear
threatening in one or another manner, or immediately useful in the context of a project.
Alternatively, it might offer the possibility of hope or disappointment, security or insecurity.
The interpersonal realm includes a host of further possibilities, such as communion, rejec-
tion, admiration, and shame. We can specify a type of possibility independently of any con-
tingent experiential content. A hammer may appear practically significant in a certain way in
relation to a particular project, such as assembling a bookcase. However, the type of practical
significance it has can be considered without reference to a specific tool, project, or capacity of
the tool (e.g., hitting nails). All manner of things can be experienced as immediately relevant
to furthering one’s aims in the context of one or another goal-directed project.
Types of possibility can be further differentiated in terms of (a) whether they involve
encountering something as certain, possible, likely, or doubtful; (b) whether something ap-
pears significant to me, to us, to her, or to them; and (c) whether they concern something to
be brought about through one’s actions, the actions of others, or by others’ means. There
is also a broad distinction to be drawn between a sense of being able to do something and
a sense of its mattering. Something can appear pressing but unachievable or, alternatively,
achievable with ease but of little consequence. These possibilities hang together as a cohesive
whole, involving various relationships of implication and mutual implication. Even so, types
of possibility are to some extent dissociable from each other.
We can understand all-enveloping changes in the sense of reality and belonging as changes
in the types of possibility one is open to. A world in which everything appeared bereft of its
usual tangibility would be a world where everything appeared distant, ‘not quite there’.
A world bereft of possibilities for communion with others would involve a different kind of
disconnectedness and unreality, a sense that I am not ‘there’, not part of a consensus realm.
The question of exactly which types of possibility our experience incorporates and how they
interrelate remains open. My proposal is that we seek to chart the possibility space and dis-
tinguish the types of change it is susceptible by interpreting various ‘existential changes’ that
people describe, rather than first getting our house fully in order and only then applying the
analysis. In the process, we can also further explore how various bodily feelings contribute
to one or another variant of existential feeling (Ratcliffe 2015).

2. Applications
The concept of existential feeling can serve to cast light on experiences that are other-
wise elusive. For instance, people with psychiatric diagnoses such as ‘major depression’ and
‘schizophrenia’ often report profound experiential changes, which are sometimes described
in terms of ‘inhabiting a different world’ or having lost something fundamental to life. Some
add that their inability to adequately express these experiences, along with an inability or
unwillingness on the part of others to understand, can exacerbate feelings of distress, isola-
tion, and helplessness that are central to the experiences in question.

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Time and time again, those with diagnoses of severe psychiatric illness either explicitly
refer to a loss of possibility or offer descriptions that are plausibly interpreted in these terms.
For instance, those who write about their experiences of ‘depression’ often state that it
seemed inconceivable to them that they would ever recover, that the world of depression was
experienced as inescapable, eternal. This can be understood in terms of erosion or loss of the
ability to experience and contemplate certain types of possibility. In the most extreme case,
the world is bereft of the possibility of ‘anything changing for the better’. It is not simply that
one ceases to hope for p or for q but that the world appears devoid of the possibility of hope.
As the prospect of positive change is altogether absent, one cannot contemplate the more
specific possibility of recovering from depression. So, what might look like a propositional
belief of the form ‘I do not believe that p’ is actually the expression of a more encompassing
existential predicament (Ratcliffe 2015).2 One could thus say that an appeal to existential
feeling contributes towards the explanation of various types of experience. Accounting for
an experience in terms of existential feeling does not amount to a causal explanation, but
it does involve identifying relationships of phenomenological dependence and implication,
which can be understood as ‘explanatory’ in a more permissive sense of the term (Sass 2010).
This approach also facilitates more fine-grained and discriminating analyses, which ac-
commodate forms of experience described in terms of the body, time, the interpersonal
realm, and the ability to act (Ratcliffe 2015). So it can contribute to the task of providing
more principled classifications for one or another purpose, thus informing research and treat-
ment. For instance, suppose one seeks to investigate the neural correlates of experience x.
One will not get very far if the initial sample of x includes a range of quite different ex-
periences, x, y, and z, which one has failed to distinguish from one another. Likewise, the
efficacy of one or another pharmacological treatment cannot be adequately gauged if one is
unable to distinguish its effects on different populations.
In addition, recognizing the possibility of ‘existential differences’ between people can
aid empathy, in the clinic and more widely. In assuming that the world of another person is
fundamentally like one’s own and that any differences concern experiences that arise within a
common world, one will remain oblivious to profoundly different forms of experience. An
initial openness to potential existential differences can facilitate a better understanding of
someone else’s experience, an understanding that may be recognized as such by that person
(Ratcliffe 2012b, 2015). Therapeutic responses can also be informed by an appreciation of
how existential feelings constrain self-regulation and self-interpretation, and of when and
how those constraints might be circumvented. The ‘prison’ of depression is a case in point;
asking someone to entertain a future scenario involving positive change will be unhelpful
if that person is incapable of doing so. To complicate matters, what a person experiences as
impossible need not be impossible for him, even at the time. For instance, while he might
be unable to entertain the possibility of self-transformative interpersonal interactions, of a
kind that could rekindle the possible and restore feelings of connectedness, he might remain
capable of such interactions, at least with some individuals in some environments. The study
of existential feeling can thus be combined with that of self-regulation and its interpersonal
context, in a way that has potential implications for practice (Stephan 2012a, 2012b; Varga
and Krueger 2013; Ratcliffe 2018).
Employing the concept of ‘existential feeling’ to understand anomalous experiences can
serve not only to illuminate the experiences in question but also to corroborate, elaborate,
and refine our analysis of existential feeling, by (a) drawing attention to a substantial and
diverse body of testimony, which consistently points to the conclusion that experience incor-
porates a sense of the possible, and (b) indicating how this sense of the possible is malleable,

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enabling us to further explore the diversity of existential feelings and to make more precise
distinctions between them. One does not simply apply phenomenological research; one also
does original phenomenological research in the process.
Psychiatric illness is not the only circumstance in which existential feelings undergo
marked change. Similar points apply to illness and healthcare more generally (Carel 2013).
The concept of existential feeling has also been put to work in other contexts. Various au-
thors have discussed how it can be integrated into a broader account of affective phenomena
(see, e.g., Slaby et al. 2011; Fingerhut and Marienberg 2012).3 There is also the question
of how existential feeling might feature within a wider social and cultural perspective on
affectivity (Slaby 2012, 2019). Other areas where the concept has been used to illuminate
otherwise elusive forms of experience include art and aesthetics (Saarinen 2014) and cinema
(Eder 2016). There is even a discussion of how existential feelings are conveyed by children’s
picture books (Mallan 2017). The concept may prove especially fruitful in the study of reli-
gious experience and belief. For instance, it has been proposed that religious conversion be
understood in terms of changed existential feeling. Along with this, it has been suggested
that ‘belief in God’ sometimes consists not in endorsement of the proposition that a specific
entity exists but in the expression of a type of existential feeling, a way of inhabiting the
world that lends itself to religious interpretation (Wynn 2012, 2013).4 The concept of ex-
istential feeling is not something that we first have to accept and only subsequently apply in
one or another of these domains. It is something that we can come to better appreciate and
further explore by using it as a lens through which to interpret various experiences.

3. Interpretations
So far, I have focused on my own understanding of ‘existential feeling’. However, the term
is not always used in quite the same way. For example, McLaughlin (2009) takes existential
feelings to be experiences with intentional contents that can be veridical or otherwise. He
further suggests that they operate as evidence in some instances of delusional belief, via an “ac-
ceptance” route from feeling to belief. We are, he says, poorly equipped to handle “affective
illusions” and the force of a feeling often overrides other relevant factors. McLaughlin notes
that our uses of the term are “very close” (2009, 152). However, there is also an important
difference. According to my account, existential feelings comprise a possibility space within
which McLaughlin’s ‘existential feelings’ arise. For example, one might have an overriding
intentional feeling that is expressed propositionally as the feeling that recovery is impossible.
At the same time, this feeling is symptomatic of a wider background of existential feeling, of
a world bereft of certain possibilities. So the difference between us is a terminological one.
Even so, some of McLaughlin’s points apply equally to existential feeling in my sense
of the term. For instance, I accept that existential feelings of ‘control’ and ‘safety’ can be
appropriate or inappropriate to a given situation, revealing or deceptive. However, if we
think of existential feeling as a changeable possibility space, it is often difficult to determine
whether or why an existential feeling is situation-appropriate or otherwise, especially when
it comes to the question of whether it is ‘world-appropriate’. It is plausible, I have suggested,
that certain recalcitrant philosophical disagreements have their source in subtly different and
often unacknowledged ‘ways of finding oneself in the world’, something that is repeatedly
emphasized by William James (Ratcliffe 2008, chap. 9; 2017, chap. 10). Here, it is far from
clear how to arbitrate between conflicting feelings, as one’s intuitions concerning what is
and is not an appropriate or adequate philosophical engagement with the world are partly
symptomatic of those same feelings.

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There are also different approaches to the individuation and classification of existential
feeling. Slaby and Stephan (2008) endorse a conception of existential feeling that is consis-
tent with my own. Nevertheless, we part company when it comes to classification. They
distinguish different “levels” of existential feeling, involving varying degrees of “situational
specificity” and “conceptual impregnation” (510). There is a basic level of “pure” existential
feeling, which includes being alive, having a body, a sense of the world’s existence, and a sense
of being situated within a world. At the next level, there are feelings of familiarity, unfamil-
iarity, homeliness, and security. Then come feelings of anxiety, control, and vulnerability, or
lack thereof. Finally, there are feelings of being watched, unloved, abandoned, and the like.
One concern I have here is that different ‘levels’ of feeling sometimes look more like dif-
ferent ways of describing the same feeling. A pervasive feeling of abandonment can add up to
a sense of lacking control and, with this, of facing a strangely unfamiliar world. Furthermore,
a combination of abandonment, passivity, and unfamiliarity can amount to an experience of
being dislodged from the world, of inhabiting a realm where nothing seems quite real. We
can better see how these aspects of experience interrelate once we analyze them in terms of
a possibility space.
However, it is plausible to suppose that different feelings incorporate different degrees
and kinds of ‘conceptual impregnation’. I regard existential feeling as an inextricable constituent
of our wider experience, rather than a separable component. It is something we can fruitfully
think of in isolation from conceptualization and self-narrative. But, in practice, existential
feelings (at least when they are phenomenologically salient) are indeed conceptualized in
one or another way and often bound up with more elaborate self-interpretations. In addi-
tion, how one interprets an existential feeling can play a role in regulating and altering that
feeling. Nevertheless, if we want to distinguish and classify existential feelings, I think it is
more fruitful to restrict ourselves to the structure of the possibility space, to a single phe-
nomenological ‘level’. When we talk of more or less deep or profound existential feelings,
what we are actually referring to is the profundity of a shift from one existential feeling to
another, the extent to which the possibility space is altered (Ratcliffe 2015, chap. 5). To
include conceptual content as a criterion for individuation would be to risk an endless pro-
liferation of feeling-types. Suppose we admit, say, “the feeling of ‘belonging to the elite’”
(Slaby and Stephan 2008, 510). This opens the floodgates to all manners of conceptually
enriched feelings, such as a ‘post-Brexit feeling of estrangement and helplessness’ or a ‘feeling
of being lost in the electronic age’. Having said that, I acknowledge that more fine-grained
classifications are useful for some purposes. For instance, references to Brexit or to a political
elite can serve to identify a more specific focus of concern that is relevant to the causation,
self-interpretation, and regulation of the feeling in question. So, to some extent, the classifi-
catory choice here is a pragmatic one, with one or another degree of specificity being better
suited to a given area of inquiry or practice.5
There is also the wider issue of how existential feelings relate to various other affec-
tive phenomena that do not feature in standard lists of emotions and moods. For exam-
ple, Stern (2010) discusses the experience of “vitality”, something that is usually “hidden
in plain view”, permeating experience and activity without being explicitly acknowledged
or remarked upon. His emphasis is slightly different from mine, as he is interested in the
“dynamic qualities of the experience” in contrast to “background feelings”. However, there
is clearly overlap, given Stern’s emphasis on the “feel” of “being alive”, something I would
not want to regard as separate from existential feeling (Stern 2010, 45–46).6 As I will make
clear in the final section, existential feelings are also inseparable from what we might call an
overarching ‘dynamic quality’ of experience.

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Other close relatives of existential feeling include what Gendlin (1978) calls the “felt
sense” of a problem or situation, and the “background feeling” described by Colombetti
(2014, chap. 5), which she regards as “very close” to my “existential feeling”. We could seek
to get our shared terminological house in order. On the other hand, it would be a lot easier
to endorse pluralism, not only about the range of affective phenomena but also about how
they should be classified for one or another purpose. Even if we settle for this, it is important
that terminological differences are acknowledged by all parties concerned and—where a
lack of clarity remains over whether we are talking about the same thing—further clari-
fied. Otherwise, there is the risk of confusing terminological differences with substantive
disagreements.
To illustrate how this can happen, consider the relationship between Heidegger’s discus-
sion of ‘mood’ in Being and Time and my account of existential feeling, which is strongly
influenced by Heidegger. Fernandez (2014) argues that if we are to understand phenomeno-
logical changes in psychiatric illness, we should draw on Heidegger in a different way. He
proposes that experiences of ‘depression’ sometimes involve disturbances of ‘situatedness’
that are more profound than alterations of existential feeling. To make his case, he dis-
tinguishes between ‘structure’ and ‘mode’. While Heidegger’s ‘moodedness’ (Befindlichkeit)
refers to an invariant structure of human existence, moods (Stimmungen) of whatever kind
are its contingent modes. Depression, according to Fernandez, can involve a diminution
of structure, rather than a mere shift in the moods that depend upon it. He maintains that
Heidegger’s own analysis fails to capture this, given that it does not acknowledge the possi-
bility of structural changes. As my ‘existential feeling’ corresponds roughly to Heidegger’s
‘mood’, I am guilty by association; I likewise assume that “everyone must have the same
basic structure of human existence” (Fernandez 2014, 601–602).
At first, I took this to be a substantive disagreement and, given this, the criticism struck
me as misplaced. I explicitly state that changes in existential feeling are changes in the types of
possibility to which one is receptive. In so doing, I emphasize how the sense of being situated
in a world can be profoundly diminished. The main difference between my approach and
that of Fernandez is that I seek to discern a range of qualitatively different disturbances, and
reject a simple diminution-loss model as too crude. It is not enough to postulate a “whole-
sale leveling-down of sense and meaning” (Fernandez 2014, 606); the sense of being situated
in a world can be eroded in all sorts of different ways. So, if an appeal to existential feeling
does not accommodate ‘structural changes’, it is unclear what a ‘structural change’ actually
amounts to.
However, I now suspect that the disagreement is terminological in origin. I doubt that
Heidegger has a consistent account of what changes in and differences between ‘moods’ con-
sist of. His various remarks strongly indicate that at least some ‘moods’ correspond to changes
in the types of significant possibility to which one is receptive. But his discussion of ‘fear’,
for instance, suggests that others involve more superficial changes in the salience of one or
another possibility-type. When one becomes afraid, threat is a more conspicuous feature of
one’s experience. Even so, one’s world already incorporated that type of possibility (Kusch
and Ratcliffe 2018). The relationship between Befindlichkeit and Stimmung is no less murky. If
we accept that different ‘moods’ can involve being open to different types of possibility, it is not
clear how we can sustain a conception of Befindlichkeit as an unchanging, underlying struc-
ture. Rather, we might say, certain ‘moods’ involve different configurations of that structure,
quite different ways and degrees of being situated in the world (which can be more or less
recalcitrant to change). As Heidegger’s use of terms is open to different interpretations, it is
easy to slip into a practice of ‘Heidegger-laundering’, where you take something inspired by

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Heidegger, put it back through Heidegger, and pull out something different at the end. This
confuses matters, and ‘existential feeling’ should be evaluated on its own terms rather than
annexed to one or another interpretation of Heidegger.

4. Outstanding issues
Setting aside terminological quagmires, I acknowledge that the concept of existential feeling
requires further clarification and elaboration. To conclude, I will briefly consider some open
questions and sketch how one might start to respond. I will focus on several concerns raised
by Saarinen (2018), in a detailed, specifically focused critique of my work. Saarinen questions
the manner in which existential feelings are ‘felt’. More specifically, he argues that my ac-
count is phenomenologically problematic in suggesting that a generalized existential feeling
and a localized emotion can both be felt at the same time: How does the body simultaneously
generate two distinct types of feeling? Along with this, there is the question of how a bodily
feeling of whatever kind could add up to a complex possibility space. And how, exactly, is the
possibility space as a whole experienced, given that not all of it is salient on a given occasion?
In response, I think it is helpful to emphasize that existential feeling consists not in an ab-
stract, static sense of the possible but in an anticipatory structure, something Merleau-Ponty
(1945) refers to as an overarching “style” of experience. In essence, this structure is fairly sim-
ple. But this is easily obscured by the complexity of the language needed to make it explicit
and describe it. Consider the analogy of losing confidence in a particular domain. Suppose
that, after a few weeks of mishaps, one starts to doubt one’s competence as a lecturer. What
one experiences upon entering the classroom could be described in terms of a number of
localized experiences, occurring simultaneously or in succession. But we can also discern an
overarching structure, a pervasive sense of unease in the context of which these more local-
ized experiences arise. This unease amounts to what we might call a style of anticipation and
fulfillment, a cohesive, dynamic way in which events are anticipated and in which they unfold.
In place of a more usually confident style of anticipation, there is unpleasant uncertainty,
which is not felt in any particular part of one’s body or at any particular moment but manifests
itself more widely in one’s engagement with the environment. This style of anticipation has a
degree of consistency and coherence that warrants our calling it a distinctive kind of ‘feeling’.
We can think of existential feelings in much the same way: They are styles of anticipation
that permeate one’s engagement with the world as a whole, which can open up or shut down
types of possibility. A world where everything is anticipated in the guise of dread and where
other people fail to offer the prospect of communion or support is a world in which goal-
directed projects are unsustainable and where things are no longer experienced as practically
significant in the ways they once were. Thus, a pervasive, dynamic style of engagement with
the social world can also be described in terms of a possibility space. To inhabit this space
is not to grasp the relevant types of possibility in an abstract way, but to be immersed in
an all-encompassing pattern of anticipation and fulfillment, which is susceptible to various
kinds of alteration (Ratcliffe 2017a, chap. 5 and 6). Thus, at any given time, it is not that one
simultaneously experiences a vast inventory of different types of possibility, including the
possibility of, however, many variants of hope, fear, joy, and so forth. Rather, one’s dynamic
experience of the possible allows for certain kinds of emotional response and not others. This
is distinct from the stronger claim that a sense of what, exactly, it allows for must be a constant
ingredient of existential feeling. To put it in another way, one can be open to possibilities
of type p without having an additional, continuous experience of being open to possibilities
of type p.

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Given this perspective, the relationship between localized feelings and temporally
co-incident existential feelings is not so mysterious. To return to the analogy of losing con-
fidence, one might experience a specific incident as especially troubling in some way and,
in so doing, have a localized, intentional feeling. However, this arises against the backdrop
of a more enveloping feeling, a way of engaging with one’s surroundings that disposes one
towards such feelings and upon which their possibility depends. Were exactly the same feel-
ing to arise without warning in the context of previously effortless, confident engagement
with one’s surroundings, it would be experienced as odd, discrepant, puzzling. In fact, it
would not be quite the same feeling, given that the nature of the relevant experience is in-
separable from its relationship to a wider style of anticipation. We can thus come to better
appreciate the relationship between existential feelings, intentional feelings, and possibilities
by emphasizing the dynamic nature of feeling, the role played by patterns of anticipation,
and the fact that these feelings are not localized, freeze-framed qualia that an introspective
gaze can lock onto (Ratcliffe 2017a).7
One might also wonder, with Saarinen, about the manner in which existential feelings
are felt. In some cases, the feeling operates as pre-reflective background to experience, while
in others, such as pronounced, generalized anxiety and unsettling feelings of unfamiliar-
ity, the feeling itself is salient. Such contrasts need not imply that the relevant feelings are
fundamentally different in kind. For example, cases where everything unfolds as habitually
anticipated and where everything appears utterly surprising can both be understood in terms
of an overarching anticipation-fulfillment dynamic, even though one is phenomenologically
salient and the other not. Even so, I am inclined to concede that existential feelings can in-
volve different kinds of phenomenological access. Along with this, there are varying degrees
of insight into their nature. Again, this becomes easier to accept once it is acknowledged that
the feeling amounts to a kind of ‘style’ that is manifested in one’s experiences, thoughts, and
activities (or lack of activities), rather than a singular psychological entity that reveals itself in
one or another way. Given this, there is no clear line to be drawn between accessing the feel-
ing itself, recognizing it through its pervasive effects, and somehow inferring its presence.
I further acknowledge that more work is needed to clarify what ‘phenomenological access’
consists of and what qualifies something as ‘phenomenologically accessible’. However, this
concern is not exclusive to my own account and applies much more widely.
Another outstanding issue concerns the relationships between existential feelings and
conceptual thought. I regard existential feeling as a phenomenologically distinctive aspect
of experience, which can be analyzed independently of any conceptual ‘overlay’. However,
as Saarinen points out, this seems questionable in cases such as ‘existential guilt’ (Ratcliffe
2015). Can we really extricate an existential feeling of guilt from its further conceptualiza-
tion in terms of reprehensible deeds or personal characteristics? My position is that certain
existential feelings lend themselves to interpretation in terms of guilt, worthlessness, or self-
hate (Ratcliffe 2015, chap. 5). Furthermore, they are frequently experienced in these terms,
at least in certain cultures. However, as Saarinen observes, guilt has an essentially evaluative
dimension to it; it involves recognition of wrong-doing. If this is not intrinsic to the exis-
tential feeling, then surely that feeling is far-removed from an actual experience of ‘guilt’.
And, if the feeling does incorporate normativity, this seems to imply an additional evaluative
ingredient. But an existential feeling can, I think, include a sense of what we might call
‘wrongness’, ‘lack’, or ‘failure’. The world as a whole can appear somehow lacking, missing
something, ‘not quite how it was or how it ought to be’. There can also be a sense of one’s
being unable to actualize certain possibilities, however pressing they might appear, and thus a
pervasive sense of ‘I can’t do what this situation, or this world, demands of me’. Indeed, the

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whole possibility space can appear in the guise of one’s failing to achieve anything, to effect
change, to realize possibilities that present themselves as in one or another way as salient,
important. So it is plausible that existential feelings can themselves include some form of
‘normativity’. This does not add up to a fully rich grasp of moral norms and some conceptual
input is needed for an existential feeling to crystallize into a specifically ‘guilty’ feeling. But
this may involve taking a small step, rather than a giant leap.
To summarize, the theory of existential feeling requires refinement in several respects,
and some of the outstanding issues apply to the study of human experience more generally.
Among other things, there is still a need for (i) a comprehensive account of the various types
of mood, emotion, and feeling, and of the relations between them; (ii) a synchronic and
diachronic analysis of the relationships between feelings and conceptual thought; and (iii) a
clear statement of what it is for something to be phenomenologically accessible, one that
distinguishes between different degrees and types of access.

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Hilge Landweer, Jussi Saarinen, and Thomas Szanto for their helpful comments
on an earlier version of this chapter.

Notes
1 Adopting a slightly different approach, Slaby (2008) also emphasizes that bodily feelings are not just
bodily, focusing on diffuse bodily dispositions that admit considerable variety. For complemen-
tary claims concerning bodily feeling and emotional intentionality, see, for example, Colombetti
(2014) and Deonna and Teroni (2015).
2 See also Jacobs et al. (2014) for a lengthy discussion of existential feeling in depression.
3 See also several of the essays in a recent special issue of the journal Philosophia, on ‘The Meaning
of Moods’ (Volume 45, Issue 4, 2017).
4 See also Andrejč (2012) for an account of how the concept of existential feeling might apply to
certain religious feelings, helping us to appreciate how they dispose one toward religious belief.
5 Stephan (2012a, 2012b) proposes a simpler classification scheme, consisting of elementary, non-
elementary, and atmospheric existential feelings. My concerns apply equally to the elementary/
non-elementary distinction. However, I agree that certain ‘atmospheric’ experiences are distinct
from existential feelings. When we speak of the atmosphere of a place or situation, we refer to
something that is experienced as specific, contingent, and potentially escapable, rather than to a
space of possibility within which such atmospheres are anticipated and experienced. On emotional
atmospheres, see also Chapter 23 in this volume.
6 See also Fingerhut and Marienberg (2012) for discussions of the ‘feeling of being alive’.
7 Even so, a clean phenomenological distinction between intentionally directed emotions and ex-
istential feelings seems doubtful in some instances. For example, profound grief involves both
specifically directed emotions and all-enveloping changes in one’s relationship with the world.
Furthermore, it is implausible to conceive of the two as separate. The recognition that a particular
person is gone from one’s world is at the same time a disturbance of the world that one previously
took for granted, given the many ways in which that person was implicated in one’s habitual con-
cerns. I discuss such experiences in detail elsewhere (Ratcliffe 2017b).

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 23
EMOTIONAL ATMOSPHERES
Tonino Griffero

1. Introduction
An atmospheric feeling is almost omnipresent, even though at times unnoticed and ephem-
eral. One speaks of atmospheres continuously, describes them and calls them into question
every time that some invisible effects seem to be out of proportion with respect to their vis-
ible causes and not fully perceivable through standard sense organs. When a person speaks,
for example, of a political wind blowing in the country or of the mood specifically suggested
by a certain weather, etc., they are referring to a social or natural atmospherisation. One
has always known what “there is something in the air” means (tension or relaxation, for
example). Western culture has been feeling for at least a century the increasing need for
atmospheric concepts (such as aura, ambiance, Stimmung, etc.), and even marketing has been
understanding for at least half a century that “in some cases, the place, more specifically the
atmosphere of the place, is more influential than the product itself in the purchase decision”
(Kotler 1973–1974, 48). But it is only for about 20 years that the notion of atmosphere has be-
come a philosophical theme (cf. Thibaud 2015, 13–43; Runkel 2016; Griffero 2018) precisely
since the New Phenomenology, founded by Hermann Schmitz, uses atmospheric feeling as
a leverage to wipe away that dualism, both Christian-Platonist and Cartesian, that makes it
impossible to explain how the subject is then able to get outside and acquire a reliable knowl-
edge of the external world.1
One could welcome this situation as a real atmospheric turn (Soentgen 1998, 72–73)2
based on a stance that borders the Deleuzian-metaphysical affect theory (affects as ubiqui-
tous and anonymous intensities) as well as the more detailed and applicable affect studies
(affects as bodily relational relationships with the world). This turn is, however, ontologically
much more ambitious than today’s widespread cognitive rehabilitation of feelings in func-
tional, narrative and even evolutionary-adaptive terms, as such however obliged to choose
between the devil (the subpersonal-neuronal dimension) and the deep blue see (the highly
personal-cultural side). By stating that “feelings are the most important thing in life, because
only they bring power and delicacy, brightness and opacity into the world; the only thing
that, generally, makes something important to men” (Schmitz 1969, XII; own transl.), the
new phenomenologist paves the way for a philosophical approach to reality based on a radical
de-psychologisation of emotional life.

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But what does “atmosphere” precisely mean? The term derives from the Greek
(ἀτμός=vapour and σφαῖρα=sphere) and denotes in meteorology the gaseous envelope sur-
rounding our planet. It relies on a metaphorical use since the 18th century, but it has boomed
only recently in areas of humanities that, bypassing positivist conventions and strictly func-
tional parameters, pay attention to the vague and qualitative “something-more” (Tellenbach
1968, 47), more to expressive qualia and phenomenal nuances of appearing reality (the pathic
“how”) than to detailed material reality (the cognitive “what” and the aetiological “why”)
(Straus 1963). As a colloquial term, however, “atmosphere” is largely dependent on the
context. Without the usual addition of qualifying adjectives,3 it works as a neutral title (the
atmosphere of London, for example, does not mean anything precisely per se) or refers to an
only decorative background (“there is an atmosphere, but…”); sometimes, it means an ipso
facto favourable feeling (“what an atmosphere!”) and even defines, as inferential psychology
well knows, the persuasive effect of syllogisms (Woodworth and Sells 1935) based on partic-
ular and affirmative premises.
Being philosophically interesting not despite but precisely because of its (de re) vagueness,
an atmospheric perception never has to exit from its vagueness, but it must learn to stay in it
in the right way, first of all by acquiring that specific competence which is able to partially
immunise from the media-emotional manipulation which the aestheticisation of politics and
social life in the late capitalistic “scenic” economy results in (see, from last, Böhme 2017c).
Generally speaking, today atmosphere means a feeling, more or less distinguished from
emotion, affect and mood, that is not private and internal but objectively diffuses in the
space and works as a qualitative-sentimental prius of every sensible (and later differentiated)
encounter with the world. Regardless of whether it is tense, relaxed, gloomy, etc., an atmo-
sphere tonalises the situation in which perceivers find themselves and sometimes involves
them to the point that they are unable to escape from it. And if one does not say “I feel
sadness around me”, it is only because of the extreme proximity of that gloomy atmosphere
and the introjectionist prejudice emphasising the possessive (and not adverbial) sense of the
personal pronoun.4

2. Atmosphere makes a career

In its new (theoretical) sense, the notion is introduced independently of each other by both
the psychiatrist Hubertus Tellenbach (1968) and the philosopher Hermann Schmitz (1969,
1998, 2007, 2014; see also Chapter 19 in this volume). Tellenbach makes of atmosphere an
elusive but essential quality of intersubjectivity, generated especially through oral sense as
sense of proximity (olfaction and taste) and in particular through smell as a favoured medium
of the atmosphere defined as what is eternal of the past.5 A positive neonatal atmospheri-
sation would ensure the newborns the trust which is required for a correct development of
their personality, and would provide the psychiatrist an effective diagnostic tool for psychic
diseases whose symptom is some atmospheric aberration of oral sense.
Schmitz develops a wide antireductionist (new) phenomenology of the felt body (Leib)
aiming at reformulating the concept of philosophy in terms of a self-reflection of persons
regarding the way in which they feel and orientate within their environment. Hence, he
conceives feelings as atmospheres in a revolutionary way, partially restoring, in line with
Ludwig Klages’ science of elementary souls,6 the Ancient Greek concept of feelings as pow-
ers (demons) poured out into a non-localisable space. Schmitz goes against the dominance of
the psychologist–introjectionist–reductionist paradigm from the 5th century BC onwards,
consisting of a reduction of the world to single quantifiable entities without any affective

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character and of the decision, in order to emancipate human beings from the diktat of
involuntary impulses, and that all feelings one feels coming from outside are nothing but
inner states (psychic introjection) thereafter projected onto the outside (projection). Because
of this paradigm, the very idea of the atmospheric, subject-independent nature of feelings
disappeared: a “repression” that also involves both the felt body as irreducible to the physi-
cal one and the perception as ubiquitous felt-bodily communication with the world. From
the neo-phenomenological point of view, therefore, atmospheres are no longer subjective
psychic states projected outside but affective powers that authoritatively fill and qualify a
surfaceless spatial situation and whose qualitative expressions (through suggestions of move-
ment and synaesthetic qualities) one can experience through one’s own similar felt-bodily
qualities.
This anti-introjectionist and therefore also anti-projectivist conception of atmospheric
feelings, however, reaches its maturity only within Gernot Böhme’s New Aesthetics
(Aisthetics), understood as a general theory of perception, i.e., as an affective and involving
experience.7 He departs from the intellectualism of classical aesthetics and its exclusive focus
on art and, while incorporating some of the neo-phenomenological key points (externality
and felt-bodily action of atmospheres), conceives of the production of atmospheres as the
tacit core of the “aesthetic work” (art in a strict sense, but also cosmetics, advertising, de-
sign, scenography, interior decoration, acoustic furnishing, etc.); the latter’s best paradigm
is, according to Böhme’s purely descriptive approach, stage design, especially in a late capi-
talist aesthetic economy increasingly interested in stage-values rather than more traditional
use- and exchange-values. As a primary object of perception, the atmosphere is responsible
for our emotional well-being in a certain environment and, as an “in between” mediating
subject (bodily feeling) and object (environment) and attesting their co-presence, it is a
quasi-objective being, intersubjectively present in the space. Even if, strictly speaking, it is
nothing without a subject feeling it, it is something you can enter into and be caught by, a
sensuous experience of things and ecstatic qualities they radiate (cf. Böhme 2017b, 37–54).
Understanding the different generators of atmosphere (movement impressions, synaesthesia,
scenes, social characters, etc.) and their potentially manipulative power might then give rise
to a real atmospheric “competence”, conceived of as a critical theory of aestheticisation.
By emphasising the skills through which aesthetic workers know well, although often
tacitly, how and what “making” atmospheres means, Böhme obviously makes the successful
career of atmospheres in humanities possible. “Atmospheres are involved wherever some-
thing is being staged, wherever design is a factor—and that now means: almost everywhere”
(Böhme 2017a, 29). But this “making” atmospheres is somewhat also for Böhme “confined
to setting the conditions in which the atmosphere appears” (Böhme 2017a, 31), in other
words to just establishing the generators through which atmospheric phenomena “could”
possibly emerge.

3. Can atmospheres be produced? The mother of all problems

Despite Böhme’s caution, the idea that one is able to intentionally generate atmospheres
has led to a dispute with Hermann Schmitz, whose anti-intentionalistic warning may be
summarised as follows (cf. 1998; 2003, 243–261). First of all, by “making” atmospheres, our
societies manipulate those “actual impressive situations” through which they try to escape
from solipsism. Furthermore, by developing an impression engineering (Eindruckstechnik),
they mimic the golden season of European art and stabilise atmospheres for propagandistic
or advertising superficial purposes (Plakatsituation). Finally, accepting that atmospheres are

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the result of ecstasies of things means accepting two false assumptions: Both that situa-
tions are radiated primarily by single objects (singularism) and not by a chaotic-multiple
significance, and that an atmospheric perception can be explained through a dualistic
sender–receiver model.
This ontological contrast between Böhme’s and Schmitz’s accounts also refers to a differ-
ent assessment of everyday life’s aestheticisation: It is stigmatised by Schmitz as a misleading
propaganda, while it is analysed by Böhme as the unavoidable reflection of a more general
“theatricalization of our life” (Böhme 2017a, 33). Although Schmitz’s criticism should be
taken seriously, it may be argued that it conflicts with his own assumption that it would be
possible to cultivate atmospheric feelings in a closed space (dwelling and church, garden and
Japanese tea house) in a non-manipulative way; it wrongly downgrades the rhetorical coté
of aesthetics to something superficial and anti-educational, and, finally, by assuming that
impression engineering generates only fake atmospheres, it relies on an external-normative
axiology clearly conflicting with his descriptive phenomenological approach.
In order to really do justice to atmospheres’ ubiquity, I suggest to use a distinction
among three kinds of atmospheres and consequently of spatiality. On the basis of their
decreasing objectivity (and typically their intensity, too) and their increasing objectual
focalisation,8 they can be prototypic (objective, external, unintentional, sometimes lacking
a precise name and space and related to vastness),9 derivative (objective, external, intention-
ally produced and related to directional space) and even quite spurious in their relatedness
(subjective, projective and related even to local space) (cf. Griffero 2014, 144). To give
some examples: The groundless and unfocused boredom felt all around us is a prototypic
atmosphere, whereas the fact of becoming bored by something is a derivative one and
getting bored (for strictly personal reasons) during a party when others are enjoying it as
a spurious-idiosyncratic one. This makes it possible to accept both Schmitz’s idea of freely
floating atmospheric feelings (that I understand as the prototypical ones) and Böhme’s
effort to mitigate their overly random nature and to bind them as tightly as possible to
objectual poles (that I understand as the derivative ones). If there were only prototypical
atmospheres, partly overlapping with Stimmungen, it would be hard to understand how
aesthetic works could successfully produce an atmosphere and why the humanities success-
fully apply this concept.

4. A modest atmospherological proposal

My atmospherological approach, that highlights affective appearance qua talis over both the
genetic question (“in what series of events does this feeling occur?”) and the causal one
(“what is the cause of this feeling?”), defines atmospheric feeling as the “first impression” of
what surrounds us and acts on us as quasi-things (see espec. Griffero 2017a). As an example
of an (also Husserlian) intersubjective and holistic passive synthesis, that precedes analysis
and influences from the outset the emotional situation of the perceiver, resisting moreover
any conscious attempt at projective adaptation, an atmosphere constitutes an influential and
(in exemplary cases) numinous “presence”.10 Inextricably linked to the felt body (Leib) and
characterised by a qualitative microgranularity, which is opaque to a third-person epistemic
perspective, it is more a “spatial” state (in a non-metaphorical sense) of the world than a
private psychic state, a feeling that is not circumscribed to specific senses but that is almost
always synaesthetic.11 The atmospheric “coldness” of a room, for example, is due to the fur-
niture type or sound quality, the colour of the walls or the temperature, the unlived order,
lights, the sound of the voice of those who are there, etc.

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 Tonino Griffero

While sometimes an atmosphere unites and allows for a productive tuning, it sometimes
divides, generating “numerous invisible, yet selective and efficacious, frontiers” (Tellenbach
1968, 56; own transl.), and may even be responsible of brutal social exclusions. It gives thus
life to a natural-cultural segmentation, which also provides an intersubjectively communica-
ble repertory of different atmospheric situations.12 Through their pervasive quality, they act
as situational constraints accessible not to a representative–ocular–distal perception, but only
to an ambulatory one, to that first-person felt-bodily involvement in chaotic-multiple situa-
tions that is more a being-perceived than an active perception. They are phenomena beyond
whose appearance it is meaningless to proceed and whose excessive (semiotic, hermeneutic)
focalisation would represent a flat rationalisation ex post or even a reifying pathology betray-
ing the Goethian principle of the immanence of theory in phenomena themselves.
Perceiving atmospheres neo-phenomenologically means felt-bodily communicating with
meaningful impressions, suggested by animate and inanimate forms. Unlike the physical
body (stable, extended, divisible, etc.), the felt body is surfaceless and occupies an “absolute”
and non-geometrical space. It is capable of self-auscultation without organic mediations and
exceeds the skin contour, being articulated not into discrete parts but into “corporeal isles”
of variable duration and configuration (see Schmitz 1965 onwards; Griffero 2016a; 2017a,
53–77; 2017b, 2017c). Thanks to its polarised rhythm (contraction or narrowness/expansion
or vastness), it acts as a real sounding board for atmospheres, thus reacting to their felt-bodily
qualities (motor suggestions and synaesthetic qualities) in a way that is the more perfect the
less one thinks about it. Hence, there is a wide, yet not well investigated range, of possible
states (positive or negative) according to the shape of the intertwining between the men-
tioned poles of the whole vital dynamics.
Far from being an exceptional event, atmospheric perception is thus a variant of ordinary
perception of environmental affordances, of affectively rich ecological invites, which are
not restricted to the visual and pragmatic-behavioural dimension.13 Like climate conditions
preceding the subject/object distinction, they authoritatively modulate the lived and pre-
dimensional space whose presence we feel and as a consequence also our personal mood.
They are, moreover, extraneous to any (epistemic) criterion of truth or falsity, because aes-
thetic workers may clumsily generate unwanted atmospheres, but one cannot properly make
mistakes in perceiving them, since there is no difference between feeling fake (or apparent)
and real atmospheres.

5. Ontologically heterodox suggestions

Developing to some extent a neo-phenomenological ontology, it could be said, in summary,
that atmospheres as quasi-things, unlike things, (a) are not edged, discrete, cohesive, solid,
perduring in time, normally inactive, without concealed sides, and for this reason, they co-
incide with their appearance. (b) Not having inherent real tendencies, they have no history
(they do not get old), are radically event-like in character and not merely a trace of some-
thing other. (c) Without being the property of something or universally predictable genera,
they coincide with their own phenomenal and “actual” “character”. (d) More immediate,
intrusive and demanding than things, they arouse incorporations and excorporations by vir-
tue of an authority that is sometimes so absolute as to be irreducible to culturally emotional
norms14 and to win any critical distance.15 (e) They have an intermittent life, in the sense that
they come and go, without there being any point in asking what they did in the meantime.
(f ) But along with transient atmospheric qualities, there are also more persistent atmospheric
qualities: The sublime atmosphere of an alpine landscape, for example, is relatively stable

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despite changing weather conditions. (g) They do not act as the separate causes of the in-
fluence but are the influence itself, exactly like the wind, that does not exist prior to and
beyond its blowing. (h) Although they do not properly have a whence or a where, they “oc-
cupy” surfaceless lived spaces characterised by blurred boundaries.16 (i) They are relatively
(perceptually) amendable, if only on the level of common sense. ( j) They must have yet some
kind of identity, as is well shown by the fact that one can be mistaken in producing them,
for example trying and arousing an atmosphere of euphoria in a dreary day, or rightly imag-
ine the (even counterfactual) conditions under which it could be produced. (k) They never
properly exist as purely potential (thinkable) states. Nevertheless, an atmosphere, especially
the prototypical one, cannot be completely reduced to its subjective perception. (l) There
are things and situations that stably arouse certain atmospheres, and others that occasionally
take charge of them, as it happens when a wild atmosphere, for example, ceases to be such,
sensorially perceived components being equal, when its origin is ascertained to be artificial.
(m) They are mostly an “in between” made possible by the (felt-bodily but also social and
symbolic) co-presence of subject and object.
The last point should now be specified: The inter-corporeal “in between” must not be
reified to the point of counting as “a third element which, as a membrane, is interposed
between the two margins” (Schmitz 2002, 71), because this would lead to the dualism that
atmospherology actually tries to avoid. A joyful atmosphere, for example, is not the mere
outcome of isolable parts (me and the situation) but rather a holistic relationship17 that is
prior to its relata18 and hard to understand because of the dualistic tendency inherent to our
ordinary way of thinking.

6. Atmospheric interplay
The relationship between the perceiver and the already mentioned three types of atmospheres
(cf. Section 3) may result in many different emotional interactions. Roughly put, (a) an atmo-
sphere can overwhelm a perceiver (ingressive-antagonistic encounter), completely reorient
their emotional situation and be refractory, as a real antagonist, to a more or less conscious
attempt at a projective, reflective and amending interpretation. (b) It can find perceivers at-
tuned with it (syntonic encounter), to the point that whereas others may even remain upset,
they do not realise they actually entered it. This apparent absence of atmosphere can be ex-
plained by a (gestaltic) insufficient contrast between figure and background, thus causing in
them an embarrassing affective and social inadequacy, but also by a felt-bodily disposition so
compact as to prevent them from abandoning themselves to the situation. The most powerful
atmospheres, however, are exactly those which lie in the background and provide the tacit
and non-thetical contextual conditions of transitive perceptions.19 (c) Sometimes, one clearly
recognises an atmosphere in its “objective” roots (mere contemplation), but without being
really felt-bodily involved. This emotionless recognition, while showing the failure of the
projectivist thesis again, also raises the controversial question (that cannot be addressed here)
of how exactly emotion and cognition overlap or interact. (d) An atmosphere can also elicit
a resistance (mood protest) and the very intensity of this emotional reaction is indeed the
best proof of the objective effectiveness of the atmosphere one reacts to. (e) An atmosphere,
which as such is supervenient on its (material and immaterial) generators, may sometimes
be aroused by elements normally expressing completely different moods, such as when our
self-disdain is strengthened by the (however suggested) beauty of a landscape. (f ) Although
the prototypical atmosphere is that suggested by the first impression,20 the subsequent ones
may give rise to relatively different atmospherisations (however influenced by the very first

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one). There are various reasons for this: perceptual and climatic changes, end of sensory il-
lusions, change in the perceiver’s physiological conditions, contrast between the atmosphere
and its unwanted sub-atmospheres, additional and divergent cognitions, purely idiosyncratic
experiences, focusing over time on misleading fields of condensation (thus also involving
or even, so to speak, infecting objects that are not directly responsible for that feeling, such
as when the fear of the dentist also spreads a negative atmosphere on every visible object in
their waiting room, etc.). Even if the non-prototypical atmosphere can, therefore, change
over time and be filtered through new evaluations of the perceiver, this does not mean
that projectivistic relativism must be embraced. And pour cause: If persons always perceive
something as merely subjective, no atmosphere could ever overwhelm and affect them. (g)
An atmosphere, finally, might elicit an active feedback loop to the extent that perceivers,
for example, the spectators of a performance, coordinate themselves with it such that they
reinforce the staged atmosphere.

7. To be continued
These ontological and phenomenological classifications are surely not exhaustive and yet
too abstract, but they should at least provide the necessary framework for some controversial
problems that can only be mentioned here.
That an atmospherisation could be generated by language does not reductionistically
mean that it is nothing but the result of an illegitimate (metaphoric) use of language if only
because the very condition of a metaphorisation, i.e., the distinction between the proper
(literal) and the improper (figurative), is totally missing here.
Although my comprehensive definition of atmospheres allows including a stronger sub-
jective component in some of them, the quasi-objective externalisation of the prototypical
ones cannot be condemned as a dangerous reification, if only because their space is not the
metrical but the pre-dimensional one and they do not belong to things but to quasi-things
(cf. above §5). Stressing that “usually (…) the perceiving subject is not struck by a feeling,
rather his getting struck is the feeling itself ” (Hauskeller 1995, 26) implies an excessive fear
of ontology, which I understand simply as the catalogue of all existing “entities”. Also the
risk that “all the feelings should be constantly present in the given space” (Fuchs 2000, 227;
own transl.) should not be overestimated if it is true that atmospheres are only intermittently
present in a certain space. The fact that a certain atmosphere ceases to exist, however, as soon
as one leaves a certain situation proves how a particular situation is clearly responsible for
that atmospheric feeling, while the subject is only its sounding board. One must not, more-
over, confuse evaluation differences with the subjectivity of atmospheres: The atmospheric
narrowness, for example, is quasi-objectively felt by everyone, regardless of whether it is an-
noying or attractive (children, for instance, prefer closed spaces like nests or caves). In other
terms, the diversity of moods in two different perceivers does not prove the subjectivity and
privacy of the atmosphere at all. Usually, different moods result from a different “filtering”
process—which, according to New Phenomenology, is based on different felt-bodily dispo-
sitions and degrees of personal emancipation—of the “same” atmospheric quality.
One must also avoid the misleading tendency to attribute to an “atmosphere” (without
specifications) an automatically positive value. As seemingly non-atmospheric situations turn
out to be simply impersonal and anonymous atmospheres, so, too, bad situations are not less
atmospheric only because they do not arouse a positive attunement.
Regarding atmospheric “competence”, it should involve the ability of feeling atmospheres
(having a sense for them), of staging them, but also of not being seriously manipulated

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by them. Now, the problem is that one’s responsiveness to external atmospheric impres-
sions, usually helped by a certain passivity (tiredness, half-focalisation, crepuscular state,
etc.), surely conflicts with the reflective distancing required by a more critical approach.
What matters for me is to abandon the illusion of subjects’ full autonomy in favour of their
sovereignty, understood as “a certain willingness to expose oneself, so that human beings
may be trained to accept the fact that they are hetero-determined” (Böhme 2008, 197; own
transl.). Adults, in short, are those who do not neurotically remove the passivity to which
atmospheres force them but are able to both pathically immerge themselves into, and to ra-
tionally re-emerge from them later.

8. Interdisciplinary dissemination
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give a reasonable account of the various inter-
disciplinary areas of application of atmospherology.21 Suffice to highlight that philosophy
enhances the intriguing vagueness of this approach and makes it the kernel of a pathic aes-
thetics, which puts into question aesthetics understood as a philosophy of art and its cate-
gories (beauty, sublime, etc.) (see Griffero 2014, 2016b) or of a theory focusing both on the
sensory-affective engagement with the world (see Hauskeller 1995; Hasse 2005) and on the
specific intertwining of environment and feeling (cf. Rauh 2012).
Moreover, various humanistic fields must also be mentioned 22: First of all, architecture
(see at least Zumthor 2006; Böhme 2006, 2017b; Hahn 2012) and urban studies, whose
aim is to clarify how cities, buildings, streets, traffic, etc., experienced through “parcours
commenté”23 a “peripheral unfocused vision” (Pallasmaa 2005) and first-person lifewordly
micrologies (e.g., Hasse 2016), pathically modulate the felt-bodily space, offering, in the best
cases, a possibility of attunement for people’s actions and habits (Pérez-Gòmez 2016).24 As
regards arts, atmosphere has been applied especially to theatre (see Rodatz 2010; Schouten
20112), photography, literature and poetry, film and media,25 discussing both the limits of
its intentional production and its greater or lesser discontinuity with everyday life. While
intercultural and classical studies focus on ancient or Eastern atmospheric concepts (like
the Japanese ki) (Rappe 1995; Hisayama 2014; Rouquet 2016), pedagogy questions to what
extent atmospheres can be more educative than methodological solutions,26 musicology,
psychopathology,27 organisation and marketing studies (see Julmi 2015, 2017; Julmi and
Rappe 2018), sociology,28 ecological anthropology,29 etc. investigate the pervasive (and pos-
sibly therapeutic) quality of social situations and structures. Finally, Sloterdijk has aimed to
(onto-)atmospherologically explain chaotic foams as the current form of immunity after the
collapse of metaphysical all-encompassing monospheres (bubbles and globes) (1998–2004).

9. Conclusion
In order to legitimately speak of atmospheric feelings rather than generically of emotions
and feelings, one must refer to feelings that are poured out into a certain space30 and that
one experiences as coming from the environment, thus overturning our culture’s dominant
introjectionism. This neo-phenomenological “campaign” of de-psychologisation (external-
isation) of the emotional sphere31 is undeniably provocative and counterintuitive if sum-
marised by saying that atmospheres are “no more subjective than highways (…), only less
easy to fixate” (Schmitz 1969, 87; own transl.).32 Yet, it has the great merit of updating (cum
grano salis) the archaic view of the emotional as a “demonic” extra-personal sphere (thymos)
against the dominant post-Cartesian dualism; it also has the merit of questioning a purely

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projective-empathetic (or worse, associationist and conventionalist) explanation of external

affective qualities, based on the hydraulic model of psychic filling of the extra-psychic world,
as such unable to explain why a fully subjective projection is projected exactly into that spe-
cific space. However, the aim is certainly not a regression to a pre-introjectionist way of life,
but simply a re-balancing of the predominant psychic and dualistic ontology.
In conclusion, one may submit that any strategy excluding atmospheres from the onto-
logical catalogue seems doomed to failure. Atmospheres resist all kinds of reductionist and
reistic strategies: for example, the eliminativistic tendency to downgrade them to collective
deceits, the inclination to make them mere dispositional elements, and the need to declass
them to qualities of objectual poles rather than quasi-things. Like other elusive qualitative
entities (holes, shadows, clouds, etc.), atmospheres must be taken seriously, both aesthetically
and ontologically, regardless of their more or less precise location.33 Atmospherology is not
deterministic, but it puts precisely to good use the fact that one is not entirely the master in
one’s own house.

Notes

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 24
VALUES, NORMS,
JUSTIFICATION AND
THE APPROPRIATENESS
OF EMOTIONS
Roberta De Monticelli

I find myself in an immeasurably vast world of sensible and spiritual objects which set my heart
and passions in constant motion. I know that the objects I can recognize through perception
and thought, as well as all that I will, choose, do, perform, and accomplish, depend on the play
of this movement of my heart. It follows that any sort of rightness or falseness and perversity
in my life and activity are determined by whether there is an objectively correct order of these
stirrings of my love and hate, my inclination and disinclination, my many-sided interest in
the things of this world.
(Scheler 1973a, 98)

These opening lines from Max Scheler’s essay “Ordo Amoris” bring the subject matter of
this contribution nicely into focus, namely, the relation between emotion and reason. They
also raise the main question addressed here: Do right and wrong in matters of emotion exist?
The quotation begins by noting the primacy of emotional experience. Thought and ac-
tion “depend” somehow on emotion. The study of emotional life, which has been curiously
neglected by most modern philosophers, is introduced as a crucial domain of philosoph-
ical research. This is one of the merits of classical phenomenology, whose founders very
early recognized not only the role played by the body in shaping the mind and cognition
(Gallagher 2006), but also the role played by emotional life in shaping agency and person-
hood. The continent of emotional experience—as a mode of consciousness endowed with
its own intentionality and internal lawfulness—was opened up and explored by many within
the first generation of phenomenologists, long before the recent anti-Cartesian turn in cog-
nitive science or the emergence of embodied approaches to cognition. Nowadays, emotions
are indeed privileged objects of research for phenomenology, particularly of the “4e”-variety,
where it is assumed that no satisfactory account of the mind can be offered without consider-
ing the mind’s embodiment, the environment in which it is embedded, the way in which life
is enacted within that environment, and the extra-bodily extensions of mind which make
up the cultural layer of a human, and indeed social, life-world. Yet, strangely enough, the
question of the sources of normativity within the realm of emotional sensibility has yet to
receive the attention it deserves.

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 Roberta De Monticelli

As is suggested by our initial quote, a phenomenological approach to human emotional

life promotes a redefinition of reason and rational agency, questioning the traditional opposi-
tions between emotion and reason while integrating emotional sensibility as a part, and even
a fundamental part, of rationality. This contribution attempts to show how this can be done.
By rational agent, I mean an agent capable of performing as well as responding to inten-
tional actions. Responsibility in this sense, though, does not imply a disposition to act on
good, let alone moral, reasons. A rational agent is capable of highly irrational and harmful
actions, including those inspired by politically charged forms of hatred or racism. Only ra-
tional agents—that is, persons—act based on value judgments. These are often motivated by
underlying emotions that, of course, are fallible. Only persons can become criminals. Only
persons, moreover, can go mad in the psychiatric sense. This is why the questions about
the appropriateness of emotions, their standards of correctness, and their susceptibility to
correction and self-correction are so vital for contemporary philosophy, especially practical
philosophy, including ethics, legal, and political theory and the foundations of education.
Last but not least, if emotions are among our most common reasons for action, emotional
sensibility is bound to shape not only practical rationality but the agent’s personality as well.
Hence, the ultimate ambition of this chapter is to highlight the crucial contribution of emo-
tional life to the constitution of our personhood and individual personality.
The traditional, poorly grounded opposition between reason and emotion was questioned
by classic phenomenology much earlier than by analytic philosophy and the contemporary
philosophy of mind, where it became a more and more popular target for critics (de Sousa
1987; Greenspan 1988; Helm 2001). The appropriateness/inappropriateness of emotions—
an opposition familiar from everyday language—seems to bring the affective life under the
jurisdiction of reason, revealing the issue of normativity of emotions. Appropriateness itself
has been further analyzed in terms of fittingness (correct presentation of a value-laden state
of affairs) and rightness/wrongness (e.g. envy can be fitting without being right, cf. D’Arms
and Jacobson 2000).

1. Methodology: a bottom-up approach

A recent introduction to the philosophy of emotions points out three fundamental features
of emotions that any account should address: their phenomenology (experiential, felt quali-
tative character), intentionality (directedness toward objects), and epistemology (the standard
of appropriateness to which they are answerable) (Deonna and Teroni 2012, 1). While ac-
cepting this tripartition as a useful set of desiderata for theories of emotional experience, we
should further insist on the inseparability of these aspects in any given emotional experience.
In terms borrowed from Husserl’s theory of wholes and parts (Husserl 1900/1901, vol. II,
1–46), these three aspects (or “moments”) “hold together” through a relation of “unitary
foundation”.
The best way to grasp this unity is by “going back to the things themselves”. Phenomeno-
logical philosophy is ruled by the principle of the priority of the given over conceptual construction,
as expressed in the familiar motto just quoted. This motto invites us to adopt a bottom-up
approach to the philosophical problems, which can be made more explicit through the fol-
lowing methodological rule:

(M) No theoretical problem about a type of thing S should be addressed without re-
course to the intuitive presence of some token or instance, s, of S.

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To illustrate, imagine you have been assigned an important contribution for an important
handbook, such as the present one. While trying to carry out your task, you might well find
yourself having an episode of discouragement.
Discouragement is an especially trying emotional state. It is usually task-related, whether
the task is assigned or self-imposed, and is felt as overwhelming. This feeling of being over-
whelmed does not “cause” discouragement; it is its very core. I could not “perceive” a task
as overwhelming without (i) feeling that the task is somehow required of me as something I
“ought to do”, and (ii) feeling myself inadequate to the task. A feeling of inadequacy in the
absence of a commitment of some sort, whether privately to yourself or in some social set-
ting, would not be (or cause) discouragement. It would be only an emotionally indifferent
sense of extraneousness concerning relevant sphere of activity. I am doubtless unable to
write a treatise in economics, and awareness of my incompetence would “discourage” any
temptation to get involved in such an undertaking. Yet, “being discouraged to do so” would
simply amount to lacking any reason and indeed any motivation to do so. I would certainly
not feel discouraged. My self-confidence wouldn’t be reduced in the least. There wouldn’t be
that oppressive feeling of an unbearable burden on my heart, taking my breath away and reduc-
ing me to a state of inertia, an oppression that turns to depression and a sense of failure if I
give up the task, giving up a part of my hope, lowering my self-esteem. Discouragement is a
challenge to one’s very self hood and future.
The first observation we can make based on this (hopefully accurate) description is that
the existence of a lived experience of discouragement is beyond doubt. This emotion has a feel;
there is something that being discouraged is like. The second observation is that this feeling
has an intentional object, which may be a task or, perhaps, a contractual obligation, and hence a
social object. And the object is given in a mode of presence, for example, as overwhelmingly
hard or oppressive. Third, this mode of presence is a felt quality of a very specific sort: It is a
value quality. The discouraging task is arduous, which is a peculiar kind of hardship or diffi-
culty, intuitively related to what is “highest” among the values that bear on your ambitions.
But even the mode of presence of the subject is a value quality: inadequacy.
This description highlights the intertwining in emotion of those three moments we called
phenomenology, intentionality, and epistemology. How are we to conceptualize the “uni-
tary foundation” that binds them into one typical emotion? Let’s start from the last feature.
Discouragement, recall, may or may not be appropriate and proportionate. It could not be either
without an intentional object—in this case, a well-defined and genuinely exciting project—
and no committed subject. More specifically, discouragement cannot be inappropriate unless
it makes the task feel more arduous than it actually is, given the subject’s abilities, and, thus,
if there were nothing correctible in the way the object is presented to the subject (as too
arduous) or in the way the subject is presented to herself (as inadequate). But these modes
of presence are in both cases value qualities. In short, discouragement involves the subject’s
experience of not living up to the required value standards. To generalize, every emotion
is an experience of (some) value (or disvalue) that encompasses both poles of the intentional
relation. Value experience is the unitary foundation of the subjective and objective poles of
any emotion. In other words, emotions have an intrinsically evaluative, twofold intentionality.
Is this generalization plausible? Although the relation between emotion and value is much
discussed in contemporary philosophy, what still seems missing is a general theory of feeling
as (fallible and correctible) value experience, and one aiming, moreover, to provide a unitary
foundation for the dazzling variety of human emotional experiences, as well as for the count-
less forms experienced values take on. Outlining such a theory is our next task.

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2. The perceptual model of emotions: a false start?

Are emotions like sensory perceptions, with values—instead of, say, colors or other secondary
qualities—as their intentional objects? Our everyday language encourages that view, insofar
as value qualities are labeled with adjectives such as “fearful”, “disgusting”, “admirable”, or
“amusing”. What else would feeling fear, disgust, admiration, or amusement be, if not “per-
ceiving” a positive or negative value quality of something? (Deonna and Teroni 2012, 67)
A version of this “perceptual theory of emotions”, presenting Wertfühlen (value feeling) as
an “epistemic contact” with value (Mulligan 2009, 154), has been attributed to classical phe-
nomenologists (Husserl 1900/1901; Hildebrand 1916, 1922; Hartmann 1932; Reiner 1932;
Scheler 1973a; Geiger 1986; Stein 1989, to cite but a few of them). Versions of it have more re-
cently become popular among analytical philosophers as well (McDowell 1985; D’Arms and
Jacobson 2000; Goldie 2000, 2004; Tappolet 2000, 2015; Mulligan 2009). For a sustained—
but sympathetic—criticism of the perceptual theory, see Brady (2009), who distinguishes
literal (such as in Prinz 2004) from non-literal variants of it (such as in de Sousa 1987).
Now, the idea that classical works of phenomenology contain a perceptual theory of
emotions oversimplifies things to the point of getting them wrong. Consider the following
claim (E):

(E) Emotions are essentially perceptions of things’ value-qualities, whether positive or

negative.

I will explain why this thesis has no place in classical phenomenology in the next section.
Prima facie, (E) seems a promising way to cash out the idea of an intrinsically evaluative inten-
tionality of the emotions, and this would explain its relative popularity in recent times.
Several critics have raised objections against more recent incarnations of the idea (Deonna
and Teroni 2012; Bagnoli 2013; Dokič and Leymarie 2013). Emotions, the objection runs,
are not to value qualities what visual perceptions are to colors or auditory perceptions are
to sounds.
Admittedly, the analogy is supported by an analysis of the intentional contents of percep-
tions and emotions and of their common properties. So, perceptions and emotions have the
same mind-to-world direction of fit. They are like cognitive states such as beliefs, and do
not exhibit the typical world-to-mind direction of fit of desires and intentions. This differ-
ence in direction of fit explains the difference in satisfaction conditions enjoyed by cognitive
and conative states. There is a further experiential feature distinguishing direct or immediate
cognition. Perceptions and emotions share causal self-reference, i.e., they are about what is
(experienced as) causing them (redness, danger).
On the side of phenomenal consciousness, the analogy can be spelled out in terms of the lived
“affection”—for example, in sweating or trembling—of suffering as it were the impact of
reality, through the bodily feeling in which the emotion is lived, much as seeing can be felt
in dazzlement or hearing in near-deafening loudness.
On both sides, however, fleshing out the analogies immediately reveals important differ-
ences, which lead us directly to the critical objections against the perceptual model.
From the standpoint of psychology, objects are only envisaged as stimuli. By stimuli,
I mean whatever triggers experiences, whether the latter are taken to be qualia, mental
representations, images, or otherwise—in short, whatever transpires in the theater of con-
sciousness. The trigger-experience model of perception (Noë 2015, 97) accounts for the
experience of colors and shapes only on the basis of the retinal input, thereby leaving the

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“felt” sweetness—the value quality—and the “feeling” itself without a specific organ. This is
the first dissimilarity between perception and emotion. Perception is associated with certain
sensory modalities and their specific organs and emotion is not. So, if the red tomato is not
there to cause my visual experience of it, I only seem to see a red tomato (i.e., the experience
is an illusion). On the contrary, not being appropriate does not make the emotion “illusory”:
I may genuinely feel afraid of a barking dog, even if it is not, in fact, dangerous.
All subsequent objections of this sort emphasize the relative objectivity (i.e., the more
or less universal accessibility) of (stimulus-based) perceptual information in contrast to the
subjectivity of emotional responses.

1 Intersubjectivity/Idiosyncrasy: Unlike perceptions, emotions are highly dependent on

the subject’s motivations, beliefs, and character traits. You fear the barking dog, I don’t.
2 Transparency/Self-affection: Unlike perceptions, emotions are not “transparent”. They
seem more to induce qualitative states in the experiencing subject, than to reveal quali-
ties (e.g., color, shape) of their object.
3 Cognitive Grounding: Emotions stand in need of justification (“Why are you indig-
nant?” “What are you afraid of?”), unlike perception, which serves as a source of justifi-
cation for judgments (“Why do you say he is a thief?” “I saw him steal your necklace”).
Emotions always seem to need a cognitive basis (perceptions, memories, beliefs, imag-
ined situations), whereas perception provides such a basis for other states.

To conclude, the analogy doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Emotion and perception are signifi-
cantly dissimilar.

3. Feeling as the unitary foundation of the emotional life

Can anything be salvaged from the perceptual theory, notwithstanding these objections? In
this section, I respond in the affirmative, drawing on and further developing a view found in
some classical phenomenologists. We must first see how that view squares with the percep-
tual model of emotion.
To see that it can, let’s consider the vagueness and ambiguity of the notion of emotions in
the context of (E). In current literature on emotion, the concept of emotion is used some-
times in a very broad and comprehensive way as synonymous with “affective state” (Goldie
2000, 51), thus including affective sensations, bodily feelings and moods, or even affective
dispositions, like character traits. It is also used in a narrower way that distinguishes emotions
from other affective states like (some) moods and bodily feelings. Yet, the criteria of applica-
tion for the narrower use are not clear. Peter Goldie, contrasting emotions with “brute feel-
ings like toothache, which we cannot make sense of ” (Goldie 2000, 20), seems to propose
meaningfulness or intelligibility, a criterion that would be both too inclusive (is esteem not
meaningful, without being an emotion?) and too exclusive (as a way of becoming aware of
part of one’s body, or of one’s fragility or poor health, even a toothache can make sense, and
likewise for physical pleasures, bodily feelings, moods).
More recent treatments seem to land in the same predicament. “Considering how emo-
tions contrast with other affective phenomena and, more generally, other psychological
states” (Deonna and Teroni 2012, 1) would require a general theory of the feeling core of
any affective phenomenon, “bracketing” any aspect of it exceeding that core. What does
in a way resemble perception is the core of emotions as well as of any affective state, namely,
feeling. Let’s take this as a claim that does not concern emotions only but rather any affective

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phenomenon, including emotions, thus highlighting the unitary foundation of the entire
affective life of the person:

(F) Feeling is essentially a perception of the value-qualities, whether positive or nega-

tive, of things.

Exploring the essentially evaluative twofold intentionality of feeling is indeed necessary for a
theory of the emotional life of a person in all its richness and complexity, as it is conceived in
some classical texts (Pfänder 1913/1916; Scheler 1973a; Stein 2000). In fact, we need a ratio-
nale for distinguishing, ordering, and connecting such distinct yet related phenomena as those
lumped together in the conceptual hodgepodge one finds in the literature, where one can
find toothaches and the pleasures of the flesh, so to speak, along with, say, the sin of pride or
the passion for truth. A taxonomy is needed for such a broad range of emotional phenomena.
Indeed, included under that heading are local sensory feelings, like pleasure and pain in every
sensory modality; global bodily feelings, like feeling ill or well, being tired, hungry, sleepy;
moods and states of mind, like anxiety, depression, euphoria; emotions of different kinds and
levels (basic, like fear, anger, disgust; non-basic, like shame, regret, guilt, indignation; and,
more generally, social, moral, aesthetic, political, religious); personal sentiments (such as love
and hate, esteem, respect or contempt, devotion); affective dispositions charged with definite
conative habits (which are often called “passions” (like gambling addiction, passion for truth);
habitual but changeable dispositions/attitudes (e.g., trust or mistrust, sympathy, reliance on
others); attitudes of personality (self-esteem, confidence, humility, curiosity); and existential
feelings (feeling at home, feeling lost, at one with nature, helpless) (Ratcliffe 2008).
Such a general theory, though, requires a full-fledged phenomenology of the emotional
life, which the classical phenomenological works on the topic at least partly provide. By
a “full-fledged phenomenology”, I mean something more than what is often understood
by “phenomenology” in contemporary philosophy of mind, where this term is commonly
taken to refer to the analysis of “phenomenal consciousness”, leaving intentionality for sep-
arate treatment. A full-fledged phenomenology of feeling is supposed to highlight the way
feeling presents the world. It turns out that the felt world is the world under the aspect of
value and disvalue, as a world of goods and ills/evils. Only if feeling is a kind of direct cogni-
tion, fallible but capable of self-correction, like perceptual experience, can value judgments
be justified. The ultimate foundation of practical rationality, prudential and moral—contra
skepticism and naturalistic or postmodern disenchantment (Dworkin 2011)—depends on the
question of whether we can take the experience of feeling seriously as a cognitive experience.
Is there a place for values in a world of facts? (Köhler 1966)
At this point, a terminological remark may be helpful. The word “experience” can be
used in two senses. Quite broadly, it designates what-it’s-like-ness, roughly equivalent to the
German Erlebnis (often translated “lived experience”). More narrowly, it designates a mode
of immediate presence of reality as a boundless source of information, roughly equivalent to
the German Erfahrung. Only on this second understanding does it make sense to say that
we “learn” from experience, i.e., we can always further explore the given and correct illusions
and errors. That is, in experience so understood, we may get reality right or wrong. No
such immediate hold on reality figures in remembering or thinking, let alone daydreaming.
Granted, daydreaming or remembering and even propositional thinking do have a what-it’s-
like-ness of their own, after all, as a number of authors have recently maintained (Baine and
Montague 2011), and thus count as Erlebnisse, but that is not sufficient for them to also count
as Erfahrungen as not every lived experience is an encounter with reality.

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4. Outline of a general theory of feeling as value experience

Feeling, like perception and unlike daydreaming, is a way of encountering reality under its
axiological aspect, or so I argue. This section offers a defense of (F) based on a full-fledged
phenomenology of feeling. A full-fledged phenomenology of feeling is an analysis of feeling
experience in the narrow sense, as a type of direct presence of objects to a subject. Such a
mode of presence is what Husserl used to call an “originally giving” consciousness (Husserl 1983,
§ 67, 154), a type of experience best exemplified by (external) perception. Yet, external
perception is hardly the only instance of originally giving consciousness. Further instances
include indeed feeling as well as that direct mode of social cognition that phenomenologists
usually call empathy.
As in classical phenomenology, (F) should be shown to apply to the feeling core of any
emotional experience, while “bracketing” whatever aspect of it exceeds pure feeling.
We shall hence embed claim (F), expressing the intrinsically evaluative intentionality of
feeling, into the framework of a full-fledged phenomenological approach. (F) will then fig-
ure as the first of three basic claims or principles that, I argue, constitute the foundation of a
phenomenologically acceptable theory of feeling:

(F1) Feeling is essentially a perception of things’ value-qualities, whether positive or

negative.
(F2) All affective phenomena are founded on, but not reducible to, feeling.
(F3) The disposition of feeling, or affective sensibility, has a layered structure (“strat-
ification”) corresponding to both a hierarchy of value spheres and a matching hierarchy
of levels of self-experience as the two are encountered in occurrent feeling experiences.

4.1 Bracketing motivational components

Claims F2 and F3 go against the grain of the current literature, though I contend they
alone do justice to the complexity of emotional phenomena and their essential relation to
values and norms. More specifically, F2 clarifies the relation that holds among all affective
states and dispositions in the taxonomy outlined above and identifies their common feeling
core, which, in Husserlian terms, is the unitary foundation of all emotional experience. F2
articulates two “moments” characteristic of most emotional phenomena:

a Being affected by: This denotes their receptivity, “passivity”, as when being “struck” by
or having an “impression” of something; in short, it names the receptive component of an
emotional episode, marking it as a kind of perception.
b Being inclined to: This refers to their quality of being “moved”, as impulses or desires,
highlighting, in short, their conative or action-motivating component.

The founding relation is a relation of ontological dependence. That the receptive component
provides the foundation for the conative means, first, that the latter cannot exist without the
former, while the former can exist without the latter. There are many examples that illustrate
the idea. Think of aesthetic experience, for example, listening to music and discriminating
its aesthetic and expressive qualities, or think of the way a mother lovingly contemplates her
sleeping child, or, again, of states like blissfulness, calm, despair, surprise, or amazement.
Conversely, we can hardly conceive of a conative urge lacking any feeling. So, far from be-
ing reducible to excitability, emotional experience is based upon sensitivity (“being affected by”),

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and excitability (“being inclined to”), when the former is in effect, tends to be conditioned
by it and not directly by the “stimulus”.
This claim goes against a prominent tradition, according to which what is essential and
ineliminable in affectivity is its conative component. This tradition is exemplified by the-
orists like Freud, but can be traced back to Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas,
Descartes, and Hume, among others. Even Franz Brentano remains completely faithful to
this tradition.
Hence, F2 represents a revolutionary innovation in philosophy of mind and personhood
as well as a genuine discovery on the part of phenomenology and justification for its cogni-
tivism in axiology (Mulligan 2009, 154).
According to this theory, emotions are not mere feelings, i.e., perceptions of value. They
are personal responses and re-actions to such perceptions. F2 allows one to “bracket” the
motivation-component of affectivity as distinct but dependent on the latter and thus making
possible a thorough analysis of “pure feeling”, that is, of its peculiar intentionality. Further, F1
and F3 shed light, respectively, on the objective and subjective poles of the intentional relation,
explaining what is essential to any mode of consciousness involving feeling.

4.2 Originally giving consciousness and

positionality: the foundations of normativity
Recall Husserl’s technical term for our “epistemic contact” with a perceptual object. He calls
it an “originally giving” consciousness, or a presence of the object “in flesh and bones”. This
involves a mode of presence requiring further experience on the “noematic” side, i.e., on the side
of the object. In the paradigmatic case, an object of perception is given as further explorable,
indeed, as an infinite source of further experience. There is much more than intuitive presence
to “original” presence. If you doubt it, try to count the pillars of the Parthenon just by re-
calling it in memory. Unless you already knew the number of the temple’s pillars, you won’t
be able to count them on your imagined temple.
One might think that this difference is captured by a standard (Searlian) analysis of the
mental state’s content in terms of direction of fit plus causal self-referentiality (enjoyed by
perception, but not by imagination). But how could causal self-referentiality alone account
for the possibility of illusion and correction, “learning from experience”, which is constitu-
tive of perception? Illusion and correction would be impossible if experience were only a
causal impact of reality on sensory organs. There is a tacit claim of validity (veridicality) to
any genuine perception that no sheer causal impact of things on organs can produce. What
“bears” the implicit claim of validity is a feature of perception, which makes an act out of
it—rather than a state (De Monticelli 2000, 88; 2018). We “take notice” of the (apparent)
existence of the perceived object, or “take a position” concerning it. Doxic positionality, inde-
pendent of any propositional attitude, thought, or conceptually articulated belief, is the no-
etic correlate of the perceived object’s original givenness and further explorability (Husserl
1983, §103, 250). It is a recognition of something being there or happening, and this is not at
all subject to the will. That’s why radical doubt is impossible when it comes to actual per-
ceiving. This taking a stance, in which the embodied subject “lives” while experiencing, is
subject to the “jurisdiction of reason”, though. That is, it can turn out to be wrong, and may
be “cancelled” in favor of a new position or suspended in hesitation, uncertainty, or further
exploring, all of which take place at a pre-linguistic level (the level of the “pre-reflective
cogito”, as Merleau-Ponty would have it).

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Positionality involves a claim of validity, which may be right or wrong, that is, subject
to epistemic evaluation within the “jurisdiction of reason”. Perception thus contrasts with
imagination, in which, because veridicality is not an issue and positionality is “neutral”,
there is no claim of “validity”. I’m perfectly free, for instance, to imagine flying donkeys.
This two-sided “noematic-noetic” analysis of perceptual intentionality is the background
against which an analysis of feeling intentionality can be now outlined.

4.3 Values in the flesh. Feeling as self-revealing

experience of the world
In a footnote to a manuscript on emotional life, Husserl quotes William Hamilton, who
“says that in feeling we are in a peculiar way one and the same with its content” (Husserl
2005, 165).
This observation is the cornerstone for a phenomenology of feeling. It highlights a key
point of contrast between feeling and “pure” perceiving. The intentionality of feeling is both
a valued presence of objects to a subject and a valued presence of the subject to herself. Just as
you can hardly separate your vision of the golden glare of the Pisan Hills from your senti-
ment of their beauty, so also any measure of proprioception involved in ordinary perception
includes a sense of how you are faring bodily. The two poles of feeling are, as noted above,
the targets of F1 and F3, respectively.

The feeling dimension of breadth: the plurality of values

Noematic description highlights our receptivity to an infinite variety of value qualities be-
longing to things, capturing how things are experienced as, in a way, good or bad. Recep-
tivity is the phenomenon of “being struck”, grounding emotional responses which are more
or less appropriate and in principle correctible. Axiological positionality, which may be posi-
tive, negative, or neutral, is as much “under the jurisdiction of reason” as doxic positionality.
So far, the analogy with perception is fitting and at least to an extent the “perceptual model”
of feeling is justified.
I may feel the unpleasantness of a sting, the bodily or psychological discomfort associated
with a state of illness or weariness, or the agreeable nature of an arrangement of colors. But I
may also sense the nobility of a gesture, the vulgarity of an attitude, the wickedness of an act,
or the beauty of a masterpiece. The harmonious way a tool or a piece of furniture fits one’s
body, the placid shape of a teapot—these and many other examples illustrate how we also
characterize objects in terms of their “affordances” (Gibson 1986). Feeling is similarly essen-
tial in the “perception” of these qualities. It is, as the German language has it, a Wertnehmen.
To summarize, feeling reveals a neglected yet pervasive feature of the life-world, namely,
the richness and variety of positive and negative value qualities that “color” things, events,
states of affairs, and situations in the surrounding world. Indeed, it is hard to find descriptive
terms, adjectives, that do not refer to some value quality. Axiology is in a sense the ontology
of adjectival language.

The depth dimension of feeling: exploring the self

“Noetic” description takes into account another feature of feeling, the one noticed by
Hamilton and explored by many classic phenomenologists (Hildebrand 1971; Scheler 1973a;

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Stein 2000). Phenomenologically, experience is always also experience of oneself at least

as a “minimal self ” of agency and ownership (Zahavi 2010). Theoreticians of the minimal
self, though, may have overlooked the extent to which feeling, however intensely directed
toward other objects, is always self-revealing. The scope of self-experience far exceeds the
limits of minimal self hood but is not subject to the vagaries of a “narrative” self either, as
exemplified by a captivating view of narrative self-constitution, not so clearly distinguishable
from self-deception (Goldie 2004). The emotionally experienced self sets limits to “creative”
self-narrative.
Noetic analysis reveals a further dimension of feeling’s intentionality, which we can call
its depth. Value experience is always self-experience as well, to the extent that it concerns us.
Doubtless, not all feeling experiences are on a par. There are differences in importance or
weight, or, we might say, in rank of value, as well as differences in motivating power (i.e., the
felt goods and bads). It is as if the experience of different values belonged to different layers
of sensibility (Scheler 1973a, 330).
Intuitively, we realize that a feeling can touch a person more or less “deeply”, depending
on the degree of personal involvement. For instance, the pleasure of a good massage can be felt
by most of us as much less involving than the joy of discovering Shakespeare. This joy will
likely have a greater degree of motivational power than the pleasure of the massage, and it might
even motivate a choice to study English literature rather than something else, a turn of events
with significant consequences for the rest of my professional life.
Is it possible to give, if not a way to measure depth, at least a rationale for the putative
ordering of layers of sensibility concerned, respectively, with the pleasure of a massage and
the joy of reading Shakespeare? Scheler suggests that a feeling’s “depth” is proportionate to
the importance of the values concerned (Scheler 1973a, 331). Feelings are modes of presence
of values at different levels of an axiological hierarchy.
Many are dubious of the sort of objective value hierarchy that Scheler offers in his Formal-
ism, with its four spheres of value, i.e., the sensory, the vital, the personal, and the divine. But
to fully appreciate it, one must understand its phenomenological grounding, which is inti-
mately bound up with our self hood, as experienced through all the different states of feeling.
By “self hood”, I mean the being of a person as she is given to herself, in that quite peculiar
and irreducible way in which she is not given to anybody else, that is, from a first-person per-
spective (Baker 2013). Any value experience is at the same time an experience of self hood,
though in varying degrees of centrality, or of wholeness, so to speak. This seems phenom-
enologically undisputable. The relatively localized pleasure of a massage is an experience of
those parts of the body, the ones being touched, as parts of my (bodily) self. The pain I feel
when you step on my foot teaches me the boundaries of my bodily being. Similarly, any
global, the so-called “vital” (Scheler) comfort or discomfort—hunger, drowsiness, fatigue—
informs me of how I am, what condition I am in, as well as what I need insofar as I am in a
constant state of vital self-regulation. They inform me, too, of my finitude, my dependence
on the material and social environment. I am always in some global felt state, which is ex-
actly what basic emotions alter, by flagging threats and advantageous opportunities in the
surrounding world. Moods are also indicative, both for myself and others, of how I am. They
can reveal what I lack or need, often without realizing it.
But only encounters with what kindles sentiments in me—whether of admiration and
contempt, love and hate, political passions, religious or artistic devotion will, over time, tell
me who I am. By sentiments, I mean those relatively abiding dispositions to assent to or dissent
from the very being and value of someone or something. The peculiarity of sentiments is
to present their objects to us as domains of axiological discovery. They instigate a kind of

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search as exciting and fallible as any search for truth. They motivate higher-level emotions
that would not arise in their absence; in addition to motivating choices, actions, and behav-
iors. Throughout our personal growth—and humans in some respects never cease to grow
as persons—our sentimental dispositions lead us to discover, wonder about, change, estab-
lish, or disrupt our individual scales of value priorities. Sentimental life, as a ground for our
long-term desires, passions, intentions, choices, and actions, is what first awakens what we
may call the personal layer of our sensibility, an individual style of feeling and acting, over
and above the relatively typical or uniform ways of feeling rooted in more basic sensory and
vital layers. A person’s sentiment is always indicative of the state of the growing core of their
self hood or personal identity: “In many ways the heart is more the real self of a person than
his intellect or will” (Hildebrand 1971).
Recall the list of affective phenomena given above, a sampling out of the hodgepodge
of familiar emotional experiences. We can now discern a clear order to them, the rationale
for this order being their place and role in the self-experience we have in exploring the
axiological aspect of reality, from sensory pleasures and pains to global bodily feelings and
moods, and on to basic emotions, sentiments structuring our axiological scales, and nourish-
ing higher emotions, will-shaping passions, and even personal vocations. It should thus be
apparent now that (F3) is the organizing principle grounding all of the preceding analysis.

References
Bagnoli, Carla (Ed.) (2013). Constructivism in Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baine, Tim, and Montague, Michelle (2011). Cognitive Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baker, Lynne R. (2013). Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brady, Michael S. (2009). Emotional Insight. The Epistemic Role of Emotional Experience. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
De Monticelli, Roberta (2000). L’avenir de la phénoménologie – Méditations sur la connaissance personnelle.
Paris: Aubier Flammarion.
——— (2018). Sensibility, Values and Self hood. For a Phenomenology of the Emotional Life. The
New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 16 195–211.
D’Arms, Justine, and Jacobson, Daniel (2000). Sentiment and Value. Ethics 110(4), 722–748.
De Sousa, Ronald (1987). The Rationality of Emotions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Deonna, Julien A., and Teroni, Fabrice (2012). The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction. London,
New York: Routledge.
Dokič, Jerôme, and Lemaire, Stephan (2013). Are Emotions Perceptions of Value? Canadian Journal of
Philosophy 43(2), 227–247.
Dworkin, Ronald (2011). Justice for Hedgehogs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gallagher, Shaun (2006). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geiger, Moritz (1986). The Significance of Art. Ed. and transl. by K. Berger. Washington, D.C.: Center
for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America.
Gibson, James J. (1986). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Goldie, Peter (2000). The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— (2004). Emotion, Feeling, and Knowledge. In: R. C. Solomon (Ed.). Thinking about Feeling.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 91–106.
Greenspan, Patricia S. (1988). Emotions and Reasons. An Enquiry into Emotional Justification London,
New York: Routledge.
Hartmann, Nikolai (1932). Ethics. Transl. by S. Coit. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Helm, Bennett W. (2001). Emotional Reason: Deliberation, Motivation and the Nature of Value. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hildebrand, Dietrich von (1916). Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänom-
enologische Forschung 3, 126–252.
——— (1922). Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische
Forschung 5, 462–602.

285
 Roberta De Monticelli

——— (1971). Das Wesen der Liebe. Regensburg: Josef Habbel.

Husserl, Edmund (2001[1900/1901]). Logical Investigations. Transl. by J. N. Findlay. London, New York:
Routledge.
——— (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book:
General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Transl. by F. Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
——— (2005). Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912). (=Husserliana
37). Ed. by T. Vongehr, and R. Giuliani. Dordrecht: Springer.
Köhler, Wolfgang (1966). The Place of Values in a World of Facts. London: Mentor Books.
McDowell, John (1985). Values and Secondary Qualities. Reprinted in J. McDowell (1998), Mind,
Value and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 131–150.
Mulligan, Kevin (2009). On Being Struck by Value: Exclamations, Motivations and Vocations. In:
B. Merker (Ed.). Leben mit Gefühlen – Emotionen, Werte und ihrer Kritik. Paderborn: Mentis, 141–162.
Noë, Alva (2015). Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill and Wang.
Pfänder, Alexander (1913/1916). Zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänom-
enologische Forschung 1, 325–404 and 3, 1–125.
Prinz, Jesse J. (2004). Gut Reactions. A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ratcliffe Matthew (2008). Feelings of Being. Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality. Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Scheler, Max (1973a). Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Transl. by M. Frings and
R. L. Funk. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
——— (1973b). Ordo Amoris. In: D. R. Lachterman (Ed.). Selected Philosophical Essays. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 98–135.
Stein, Edith (1989). On the Problem of Empathy. Transl. by W. Stein. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications.
——— (2000). Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Transl. by M. C. Baseheart and M. Sawicki,
Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications.
Tappolet, Christine (2000). Émotions et valeurs. Paris: PUF.
——— (2015). Value and Emotions. In: I Hirose, and J. Olson (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Value
Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 80–95.
Zahavi, Dan (2010). Minimal Self and Narrative Self. A Distinction in Need of Refinement. In:
T. Fuchs, H. Sattel, and P. Henningsen (Eds.). The Embodied Self: Dimensions, Coherence, and Disor-
ders. Stuttgart: Schattauer, 3–11.

Further reading
1. More classics of phenomenology
Hildebrand, Dietrich von (1977). Ästhetik. 1. Teil. Gesammelte Werke, Band V. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
——— (1984). Ästhetik. 2. Teil. Gesammelte Werke, Band VI. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Husserl, Edmund (1973[1907]). Ding und Raum: Vorlesungen 1907. Ed. by U. Claesges (=Husserliana
16). Den Haag: Nijhoff.
Kolnai, Aurel (1977). Ethics, Value and Reality, Selected Papers (1957–1972). Worcester, MA, London:
Trinity Press.
——— (1998). The Standard Modes of Aversion: Fear, Disgust and Hatred. Mind 107(427), 581–595.
——— (2004). On Disgust. Ed. by B. Smith and C. Korsmeyer. Chicago: Open Court.
Reinach, Adolf (1989). Sämtliche Werke. Textkritische Ausgabe in 2 Bänden. Ed. by K. Schuhmann and
B. Smith. München: Philosophia.
Reiner, Hans (1932). Der Grund der sittlichen Bindung und das sittliche Gute. Halle: Niemeyer.
Scheler, Max (1954[1913]). The Nature of Sympathy. Transl. by P. Heath. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.

2. Further contemporary debates

Bagnoli, Carla (Ed.) (2011). Morality and the Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
D’Arms, Justin, and Jacobson, Daniel (2000). The Moralistic Fallacy: On the “Appropriateness” of
Emotions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51(1), 65–90.
Goldie, Peter (2004). On Personality. London, New York: Routledge.
Johnston, Mark (2001). The Authority of Affect. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63(1), 181–214.

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Mulligan, Kevin (2010). Emotions and Values. In: P. Goldie (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the Philoso-
phy of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 475–500.
Roberts, Robert (2003). Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Tappolet, Christine (2011). Values and Emotions: Neo-Sentimentalist’s Prospect. In: C. Bagnoli (Ed.).
Moral Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 117–134.

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 25
MORALITY AND THE
EMOTIONS
John J. Drummond and Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl

The relation between the emotions and morality is complex and varied, and phenomenolog-
ical reflection thereupon—we shall call it “moral phenomenology”1—is equally complex and
varied. Moral phenomenology seeks to clarify the intentional structures at work in (1) our
experiences of valuing, choosing, planning, and acting in ways that have moral significance;
(2) our experiences of persons, actions, situations, and events as good or bad, right or wrong,
and obligatory, permissible, or impermissible; and (3) our experiences of institutions and
social structures as beneficial or harmful or as liberating or imprisoning. This chapter will
discuss (i) the emotions in the disclosure of moral value, (ii) the emotions and moral obliga-
tion, and (iii) a well-ordered and -balanced emotional life as a constituent of a flourishing
life (see, e.g., Drummond 2010a; Ozar 2010; Hermberg and Gyllenhammer 2013; Steinbock
2014, 2016; Drummond and Rinofner-Kreidl 2017).

1. Emotions and the disclosure of value

Moral phenomenology, as we understand it, is situated within the axiological discussions
prevalent among the early phenomenologists—those working (roughly) in the first third of
the 20th century, such as Edmund Husserl (1988, 2004), Adolf Reinach (1989), Edith Stein
(1989, 2007), Max Scheler (1973), Nicolai Hartmann (1963), and Dietrich von Hildebrand
(1916, 1922, 1953). These phenomenologists agree (1) that the disclosure of values depends
on subjects capable of feelings and emotions, (2) that a thing being valuable is not reducible
to it being felt valuable, (3) that the emotions have moral relevance,2 and (4) that our choices
are rooted in the emotions’ disclosure of the value of both the ends at which the agent aims
and the actions conducive to those ends. Though (1) through (4) attribute crucial importance
to emotions as basic human experiences, phenomenologists reject attempts to naturalize
the emotions and morality when those attempts extend beyond understanding emotions
and morality as proper to human nature and as anchored in natural properties of things
(cf. Rinofner-Kreidl 2011, 2015). In particular, the above theses deny the alleged opposition
between the emotions and rational thinking, that has been used to advance a debunking
argument from the irrationality of moral emotions (Campbell 2015, §4.3).
Notwithstanding their shared commitment to (1) through (4), there is disagreement
among phenomenologists about the nature of value, a disagreement best exemplified in the

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difference between Husserl and Scheler. Husserl characterizes the experience of value as a
type of perceiving; he uses the term wertnehmen (1989a, 12; 2004, 120, 283, 292)—a modi-
fication of wahrnehmen, to perceive or take as true—to denote the taking of “objects, things,
qualities, and states of affairs that stand there in the valuing as valuable (im Werten als werte)”
(Husserl 2014a, 190). For Husserl, to experience a value is to have an intentional feeling or
emotion grasp its object as valued. The value of the object is grounded in the object’s non-
axiological properties that, relative to the physiological constitution, experiential history,
interests, concerns, and commitments of the subject, make the object valuable. The value
attribute is understood as a dyadic attribute dependent both upon features of the object and
upon subjective structures at work in the subject’s evaluatively intending the object. In the
moral sphere, examples of such Wertnehmungen include seeing a student gratuitously punch
a classmate as morally wrong or hearing someone making a rude remark to a colleague as
morally wrong (see also Audi 2013). Value-perceptions underlie both value-judgments and
the identification of the a priori (universal) “values as objects themselves” (Wertgegenstände or
Wertobjektitäten) (Husserl 2014a, 190–191). Disclosure of the latter, however, requires reflect-
ing upon the intentional contents of the underlying value-perceptions and abstracting the
value-content of similarly valued objects. Husserl’s axiological theory has, therefore, been
characterized as a two-tiered theory of the constitution of value (Rinofner-Kreidl 2016c).
Scheler (1973), by contrast, claims that an intentional feeling directly and originally ap-
prehends an a priori value. The experience of value in an intentional feeling is epistemolog-
ically (although not temporally) prior to the experience of an entity as bearing that value.
The value-perception, in other words, apprehends the instantiated value as the good-making
characteristic of the object valued as good, but, contra Husserl, the a priori value itself does
not depend on any non-axiological properties of the bearer or any psychological features of
the subject experiencing it, although experiencing an entity with particular non-axiological
properties is an occasion for the subject’s feeling the value and attributing it to the bearer. For
Scheler, valued objects (goods) are empirical, variable, and subjective objects of desire, but
the values themselves are a priori, immutable, and objective ideals that are ontologically prior
to goods. Whereas, for Husserl, values are a priori in the sense of being necessary and uni-
versal features of objects possessing that value but are not epistemologically prior to goods,
they are, for Scheler, both ontologically and epistemologically prior to goods. And whereas
for Husserl value attributes are dyadic, value-objects are for Scheler monadic.
Scheler further believes that there is an a priori hierarchy of values. In ascending order,
they are (1) the values of the pleasant and unpleasant; (2) vital values, such as the fine and
the vulgar; (3) spiritual values, such as the beautiful and the ugly, correctness and incorrect-
ness; and (4) the values of the holy and unholy. Although the list does not include any moral
values, the hierarchy has moral significance. Scheler distinguishes the purely ideal ought-
to-be (the value) from the moral ought-to-do (Scheler 1973, 203ff.) and claims that insight
into the ideal ought-to-be grounds the willing and realizing the moral ought-to-do. Moral
value, then, is found in the actions realizing the values in the hierarchy. There is, however,
no clear account in Scheler of the transition from the insight into ideal value-possibilities
to the experience of moral imperatives. What is clear is that in the order of experience, the
movement is from the lower to higher values and that the higher a value, the more difficult
it is for a subject to realize it.
Husserl’s early ethics is a form of ideal consequentialism, and he argues that the laws gov-
erning our axiological and practical reasoning are a priori laws. Husserl’s consequentialism,
however, explicitly recognizes that the reasoned determination of the highest good must
take account of what is attainable in the circumstances in which the particular agent acts.

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The practical domain, in other words, is circumscribed in reference to both the agent’s ca-
pabilities and the agent’s circumstances. Husserl later modified his view, bringing to the fore
this idea of the particularity of the agent and her practical domain. Central to the later view
is the recognition that the same objective value can become an “individual, subjective value
of love,” that is, that “the same value can be infinitely more ‘significant’ for one person than
another” (Husserl 2012, 146). Hence, Husserl came to favor the view that “absolute loves”
(commitments) generate “absolute oughts” (Husserl 2012, 146; 2014b, 391–392). The idea
is that a subject with certain loves or commitments unconditionally values those things to
which the love or commitment binds the subject (Husserl 2014b, 391–392). Such absolute
loves motivate an agent to adopt an ethical life-project and to undertake those actions nec-
essary to realize that project, a project that is “the deepest ground of [her] personal iden-
tity and individuality” (Melle 1991, 131; see also 2002, 243–244). The dyadic character of
Husserl’s notion of value comes to the fore even more clearly in these later views. This does
not, however, mean that values for Husserl are subjective or viciously relativistic. Values are
more significant for different persons having different experiential histories, different cultural
traditions, and different commitments, but they are no less objective (cf. Drummond 2010b;
Rinofner-Kreidl 2016b).
Nicolai Hartmann, like Scheler, maintains that feelings and emotions access a priori val-
ues. On Hartmann’s view, ideal values are experienced as universal demands, but they can
conflict with personal values in ways that can never be fully resolved. To do what everyone
should do in the same circumstances is, in effect, to say that an agent is replaceable by anyone,
and, for Hartman, this is to deny the agent’s individuality as a person (Hartmann 1963, 357).
Moreover, appeals to universal values and principles depend upon a similarity among the
situations in which we act, but any action is necessarily tied to both a particular situation and
a particular agent in that situation. Hence, the universality of a principle undercuts its own
applicability to particular situations that, owing to the uniqueness of persons, their interests,
and commitments, is itself unique (Hartmann 1963, 358–360). For Hartmann, universal val-
ues and principles—just insofar as they fail to heed the individual personalities of agents—in
a paradoxical way do not, and cannot, offer moral guidance.
Systematically viewed, any phenomenological critique of a strong commitment to the
universality of values will acknowledge the more or less extensive context-dependence of
morally relevant emotions. Context-dependence refers to the specific ways in which or the
specific aspects according to which different emotions function as reason-responsive, and it
is relevant to assessing their moral significance and moral impact. It is impossible to deter-
mine the latter once and for all by considering only abstract types of emotional experiences.
For example, it is not universally true that showing gratitude is the morally correct response
to every situation in which one receives a gift as when a gift is intended to humiliate a less
fortunate person. The moral significance of gratitude cannot be stated in advance, once and
for all. It displays considerable variation according to the different circumstances in which
it is realized and the different kinds of behavior and social interaction involved. Given that
it is nonetheless feasible to determine non-arbitrary and invariant relations holding between
specific types of emotion, types (or patterns) of behavior or interaction, and types of situa-
tion, we need not overinterpret examples of historical and cultural variation. The latter do
not without further ado warrant a strong moral relativism.
We may characterize the relevant differences in how various emotions are reason-
responsive in terms of varying requirements and demands of appropriateness. For some
emotions, responding appropriately to an object lies exclusively or predominantly in accu-
rately grasping its nature. This is true, for example, with regard to the (unarmed) hiker’s

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fear in the face of a horde of howling wolves. For other emotions, appropriate responses
depend more extensively and more determinatively on the motives underlying a person’s
intentions and modes of behavior or expressions. Humility, hate, and indignation pro-
vide suitable examples. In yet other cases, judging whether an emotion is an appropriate
response requires accounting for the manner in which the person addresses an object or
another person. Generosity and gratitude are instructive examples of an emotional engage-
ment whose moral character and moral achievement are complex in terms of combining
the elements listed above: picking out of suitable objects, entertaining proper motives, and
referring not only to suitable objects but also doing so in a suitable manner. Determin-
ing how precisely these combined requirements play out in different emotions is part of
the micro-ethical descriptive-analytic work done by a moral phenomenology (see, e.g.,
Chapter 43 in this volume).
The above considerations support the view that for phenomenologists, it is far more
important to delve into the moral phenomenology of particular emotions than to begin
by distinguishing moral emotions from non-moral ones. To give priority to fine-grained
bottom-up descriptions of particular emotions may result in blurring apparently clear-cut
distinctions, but it could turn out to be both more sensible and more faithful to the phe-
nomena to consider varying degrees or different spheres of moral significance as well as the
different evaluative power particular emotions might manifest in typical situations.

2. Emotions and moral obligation

Values are often experienced as confronting us, as prescriptions, norms, imperatives, obli-
gations, demands, and so forth. The problem of making the transition from the experience
of value to the experience of obligation provides the context for understanding those phe-
nomenologists who emphasize the deontological aspect of morality. Emmanuel Levinas, for
example, claims that the experience of obligation is prior to all acts of evaluation, all choices,
all projects, and all dictates of reason. Obligation arises for Levinas, as it does for Kant, from
beyond all “inclinations.” Unlike Kant, however, Levinas turns his attention to a primordial
sociality to find the ground of obligation. Ethics begins when another addresses me, sum-
mons me, and commands me, and this awakens in me a sense of responsibility (Levinas 1969,
43, 50–51; cf. Darwall 2006). Only insofar as I acknowledge this command do I live in a
world with the other and become a person myself. The experience of the other is from the
start an experience of obligation.
The question raised by this account concerns the motivation of moral action. I can
encounter moral obligation as my obligation only insofar as what I encounter is referred back
to my moral concerns. As Hartmann recognizes, obedience to the moral imperative apart
from any reference to inclinations or desires depersonalizes the action insofar as the action is
divorced even from the agent’s will to flourish as a human agent. More recently, although on
entirely different theoretical grounds, Mackie (1977, chap. 1) has argued that invoking uni-
versal principles and abstract value-entities renders moral motivation mysterious. In either
case, we are led back to the sphere of social interaction in which all moral action occurs. If
it is correct (1) that emotions are indispensable for each and every instance of Wertnehmung
and (2) that in undergoing emotional experiences, human beings find themselves entan-
gled in particular social relations and situations, these relations and situation are the natural
starting-points for a phenomenological investigation of moral motivation. Within this do-
main, moral motivation presents itself as an ongoing attempt to establish a proper balance
between self-interest and other-directedness.

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The moral significance for the agent of various emotions and the moral obligations en-
tailed in undergoing and expressing emotions depend on how these emotional experiences
establish a balance between self-interest and other-directedness. It is often the case that this
balance is not only subtle but also involves both the extended experience of undergoing an
emotional process (rather than a fleeting state) and a far-reaching social dynamic (rather
than an inner mental “reality”). This is obvious, for instance, with regard to feelings of grief
(cf. Rinofner-Kreidl 2016a, 2017). Generally, a specific emotion’s balancing achievement
can unfold only if the emotion is realized in a concrete situation. Nor can we become aware
of this achievement or assess it from various points of view (e.g., moral, social, or psycho-
logical) unless we are acquainted with the peculiar circumstances in which the emotion
becomes manifest.
Let us assume that I receive a gift I dislike. Yet, I know that the benefactor has made a
great effort to obtain it and expected it to make me happy. If, on these conditions, I failed to
show any gratitude or, even worse, declared how ugly and disgusting the gift was, this cer-
tainly would be insensitive and unfair. Such behavior could hardly count as a morally decent
response. Yet, failing to show gratitude in the face of a “generous” gift from someone who
deliberately hands it over with a disrespectful and humiliating gesture that makes me feel
ashamed is entirely justified. In this case, failing to be grateful is a morally suitable response
(cf. Chapter 43 in this volume). Analogous considerations and cases can be found for anger,
guilt, forgiveness, and other emotions.
Everyday motivations are typically mixed and involve elements of self-concern and
other-directedness. This kind of motivation reflects a moral agent’s communality whose self-
understanding is replete with references to social relations and experiences. It is, however,
necessary to note that dwelling on moral motivation according to the above lines of reason-
ing is not meant to be a phenomenological inquiry into the ultimate sources of normativity.
Talk of (mixed) moral motivation in the above sense presupposes the social constitution of
the moral self (or agent). By contrast, inquiring into the ultimate sources of normativity en-
tails an account of the social constitution of the self (cf. Crowell 2013; Zahavi 2014). If this is
done on phenomenological grounds, that is, in a descriptive-analytic manner, it is crucial to
give due attention to and to accurately expose the radical otherness of the other.
One of us has suggested that an axiological approach can ground obligation by appealing
to the phenomenological notion of empathy (Drummond 2006). Empathy is the experience
in which one experiences a “subject-object,” an embodied, experiential agent who shares
a world with me (Husserl 1973, 427). To this extent, the other is, like me, a subject in the
world who is aware of the world and, unlike me, a subject who radically transcends me
and my perceptual capacities. I can never directly experience the other’s experiences, and
this paradox of sameness and radical difference in the experience of the other is a univer-
sal and mutual feature of our encounter of other persons. Both respect and sympathy for
other persons are rooted in empathy. Respect is rooted in the radical otherness of the other,
while sympathy for other persons is rooted in the sameness and communalization of persons
(Drummond 2006, 2017b). A subject moves beyond mere empathy in the encounter with
the other when she encounters a being who is not merely a conscious agent but one who is
capable of (i) articulating the goods they pursue and the choices she makes; (ii) reflecting
on her ends and choices; and (iii) expressing her moral judgments and reasoning in words
as well as actions. When we encounter another in whose actions we can note a firm and
habitual commitment to overarching goals that give meaning to and order that person’s life,
our affective response is appraisal respect.3 When we recognize that the ground of appraisal
respect lies in the rational capacities necessary for and presupposed by an agent’s acting in

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ways that elicit appraisal respect, we recognize that the possession of these rational capacities
constitutes the dignity of rational agents. Recognition respect, which is phenomenologically
posterior but morally prior to appraisal respect, grasps any being possessing these capacities,
whether or not they are well exercised, as having the dignity proper to a free, rational agent
(see also Chapter 43 in this volume).
The mutuality in empathy introduces a communalization that is essential to objective
knowledge (Mertens 2000, 10–14), including moral knowledge. Respect and sympathy are
two affective responses to the empathically perceived other that complement our under-
standing of the other by introducing value and motivations into our shared experience. I
experience—or should experience—the other both as having dignity and as a person with
whose well-being and flourishing I am—or should be—concerned. I recognize—or should
recognize—that, like all understanding, my understanding of emotion, value, and moral
concepts is an intersubjectively achieved understanding that responds both to the way things
are and to the histories, concerns, and commitments of both individuals and communities.
In brief, in recognition respecting another, I am focused on the other precisely and ex-
clusively as an alternate center of rational, conscious agency, as a person having dignity. The
particular characteristics of that person’s experiences are irrelevant to the nature of recognition
respect. However, the person I experience has particular experiences that I empathically rec-
ognize. In encountering the other as both like me and irreducibly different, it is necessarily
the case that, along with respect, what Nancy Sherman (1997, 175–181; 1998, 134–139) calls
“attractive” responses also occur. Chief among these is sympathy, which includes a care for the
other (cf. Scheler 1954, 8; Darwall 1998, 261; Husserl 2004, 194; Zahavi 2008, 516) and mo-
tivates us to help them realize their chosen goods. We should not collapse sympathy into pity
or commiseration (see also Chapter 37 in this volume). In empathically perceiving another’s
joy, for example, I can sympathetically savor, relish, or rejoice in her joy (Scheler 1954, 42). A
cultivated sympathy inclines us toward caring for and aiding the other person that recognition
respect discloses as a moral agent worthy of and demanding our own moral attention.
Just as we need sympathy in relation to recognition respect, we need recognition respect
in relation to sympathy. The irreducible difference between self and other cannot be lost
from view. The other is always irreducibly other, and recognition respect of the irreducibil-
ity of the other—a conscious, free being in her own right—creates the moral space in which
sympathy can work. Sympathy, conversely, fills the moral space bounded by respect. Respect
and properly cultivated sympathy jointly preserve the “sameness and communalization in
irreducible difference” characteristic of the empathy grounding them.

3. Emotions and human flourishing

The respect-sympathy structure at the basis of morality has further implications for ethics.
First and foremost, the recognition of the communalizing nature of empathically grounded
respect and sympathy has further implications for thinking about the flourishing of free,
rational beings. Husserl understands that telos in terms of the achievement of evidenced truth
in all the spheres of reason (Husserl 1989a, 33), in terms, that is, of “deciding” for oneself
what to avow as true (Husserl 1989b, 281–282; see also Drummond 2010a). Granted that
an agent’s understanding of emotion-, value-, and moral concepts is an intersubjectively
achieved understanding, that agent depends upon other subjects in her striving for the te-
los for rational agents. To achieve it, an individual agent must (i) grasp truthfully the way
things are, (ii) have appropriate affective responses and evaluations of things, and (iii) act
rightly in the light of these evaluations. In deciding for herself what to avow, she executes

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her reflected upon and evidenced intersubjective understanding, and yet she must remain
capable of taking a critical distance from it.
In encountering other persons and challenging my own view with theirs, I recognize an-
other subject who is irreducibly different from me. She is the subject of her own cognitions,
emotions, and actions. In this recognition, I experience an obligation out of respect for the
other not to interfere with her pursuit of the goods of agency, that is, an obligation not to
interfere with her autonomous cognitive, emotional, and volitional responses to things and
persons in the world. Moreover, in acknowledging that my flourishing depends as well on
the other’s flourishing, I adopt a sympathetic care for the other; I experience the desire to
do what I can to promote the other’s realizing the goods of agency for herself as conducing
to human flourishing for both of us. This encourages the development of virtues such as
humility, charity, generosity, a balance between open-mindedness and firm-mindedness.
Phenomenological approaches to ethics are not of mere historical interest. There has recently
been an explosion of interdisciplinary research into the emotions, including by phenomenol-
ogists. For example, Íngrid Vendrell Ferran has explored the work on the emotions by early,
realist phenomenologists (2008), and she has explored the implications of their work for con-
temporary metaethics and theory of value (2013) and for the analysis of individual moral emo-
tions (see, e.g., 2017). Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, developing ideas found in Husserl and Scheler,
has explored the ethical significance of a number of emotions (2014a, 2014b, 2016a, 2017).
Sophie Loidolt (2010, 2011, 2018) has developed ethical ideas from both Husserl and Arendt.
Sara Heinämaa (2014, 2017), Anne Ozar (2009, 2010, 2017), and Michael Kelly (2016a, 2016b,
2016c) have analyzed morally relevant emotions, and Paul Gyllenhammer (2010, 2017) has tied
his analyses of emotions to the virtues (see also Reynolds 2013). John Drummond (2006, 2010a,
2010b, 2013, 2015, 2017a) has modified Husserl’s account of the emotions within a eudaimonis-
tic context. Janet Donohoe (2004) and James Hart (1992, 1997) have explored Husserl’s later
ethical thought, and Anthony Steinbock (e.g., 2014, 2016) has developed a view of moral emo-
tions grounded in Scheler’s views. William Smith (2012), Irene McMullin (2019), and Steven
Crowell (2007a, 2007b, 2013, 2015) have addressed the question of moral normativity—and
the place of the emotions therein—from a Heideggerian perspective.
The rise of logical positivism and scientific naturalism pushed aside the study of emotions as
supposedly irrational and of ethics as outside the scope of a positivistic philosophy. Since the pub-
lication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1961, however, the study of ethics has returned to a
central position in philosophy. Moreover, important publications by Elizabeth Anscombe (1958),
Peter Geach (1977), Philippa Foot (1978), and Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) have re-energized the
Aristotelian tradition in ethics with its emphasis on the role of the emotions in morality. These
events have served to re-ignite the phenomenological tradition’s investigation of these questions,
as evidenced by the just mentioned researchers. The debates have, in a sense, begun anew. There
can be no doubt that these studies will continue to enrich our understanding of the emotions and
our sense of the varied role they play in morality and in flourishing human lives.

Notes

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Further reading
Ahmed, Sara (2015). The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd ed.). London, New York: Routledge.
Greenspan, Patricia S. (1988). Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification. London,
New York: Routledge.
Nussbaum, Martha C. (2013). Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
——— (2016). Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oakley, Justin (1992). Morality and the Emotions. London, New York: Routledge.
Roberts, Robert C. (2003). Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
——— (2013). Emotions in the Moral Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roeser, Sabine, and Todd, Cain (Eds.) (2014). Emotion and Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Solomon, Robert C. (2003). Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— (2007). True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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 26
SITUATED AFFECTIVITY
Achim Stephan and Sven Walter

“You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can’t do much thinking with
your bare brain.” Dennett’s (2000, 17) insightful adage reminds us that just as we do well to
use a hammer, a saw and clamps when building a log cabin, we are well advised not to bank
on our internal neuronal machinery when dealing with the obstacles we encounter day after
day. Rather, we ought to exploit ‘tools for thinking’ whenever possible. The philosophi-
cal literature on the so-called ‘situated’ (e.g., Walter 2014) or ‘4E’ approaches to cognition
(e.g., Newen et al. 2018) that has proliferated over the past decade or two has detailed many
ways in which the integration of neuronal resources with extracranial ‘tools’—including the
morphological and physiological characteristics of our body as well as our embodied inter-
action with our appropriately structured natural, technological or social environment—can
simplify our cognitive life. Recently, the ensuing debate has spilled over into the affective sci-
ences and the philosophy of emotions, with some daring pioneers arguing that the same holds
for our affective life. As they see it, ‘tools for feeling’ are just as characteristic of the human
condition as tools for carpentry or thinking (Griffiths and Scarantino 2009; Colombetti 2014;
Krueger 2014; Slaby 2014; Stephan et al. 2014; Colombetti and Krueger 2015; Colombetti
and Roberts 2015; Wilutzky 2015; Carter et al. 2016; Krueger and Szanto 2016).
On the surface, the claim that human affectivity is not ‘brainbound,’ but a matter of our
specific bodily constitution and environment, ties in nicely not only with the mundane fact
that affective episodes typically occur in social contexts and are mostly reactions to, ex-
pressed towards and regulated by our relations with others; it is equally supported by recent
work in psychology that deals with the function of individual affective comportments with
respect to social practices, group processes or culture at large (e.g., Parkinson et al. 2005;
Fischer and Manstead 2008). It also reflects the dominant consensus in most of philosophy,
ranging all the way from Aristotle’s remark that anger is as much a matter of the boiling of
the blood around the heart as it is a matter of the striving for revenge (De Anima 403a/b),
over William James’ famous quip that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonen-
tity” (1890, II, 452), to Heidegger’s view that moods and emotions are core structures of our
being-in-the-world (see Chapter 7 in this volume), Sartre’s contention that emotions are not
simply passive reactions to but an active “transformation of the world” (1994[1938], 58; see
Chapter 13 in this volume) and Merleau-Ponty’s argument in “The Child’s Relations with
Others” (1968[1951]) that certain early experiences are jointly owned by both infant and

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caregiver or his claim that we “perceive the grief or anger of the other in his conduct, in
his face or his hands (…) because grief and anger are variations of belonging to the world”
(1962[1945], 318–319; see Chapter 17 in this volume).
One need not dig far below the surface, though, to be struck by the fact that the recent
debate about situated affectivity seems somewhat odd in that it either appears to reinvent
the wheel or else indulge in metaphysical intricacies that will hardly resonate with those
familiar with the topic, in particular from a more phenomenological point of view. Putting
these seemingly odd excesses into perspective is the goal of Sections 1 and 2. In Section 1,
we briefly show why it seemed promising to carry over some of the key terms from the
philosophy of cognitive science to the affective domain. In Section 2, we sketch the roots of
these terms in their original context and argue that taking them either not seriously enough or
too seriously blocks the view for what is really at issue. Having cleared up some of the mess we
ourselves have contributed to causing in the first place (Stephan et al. 2014), we then discuss
some intriguing situated aspects of human affectivity in Sections 3 and 4.

1. From situated cognition to situated affectivity

The idea of situated affectivity took root in the philosophy of emotions because of the concern
that both the philosophical discussion and the empirical investigation of affective phenomena
were too strongly biased toward cognitivist and individualist accounts. In their legitimate pursuit
of an alternative to pure feeling theories à la James (1884), which conceived of emotions as
feelings of bodily changes, cognitivists had come to regard them as fleshless cognitive states
or processes. They thereby veered too far in the other direction. The reduction of our fear
of a spider to our belief that the spider is dangerous together with our desire that it go away
(e.g., Marks 1982), or the reduction of our anger to our judgment that we have been wronged
(e.g., Solomon 1976; Nussbaum 2001), downright ignored the essential role of the body in
emotional experience. At the same time, efforts to operationalize affective phenomena and
investigate them under lab conditions had led to an almost exclusive focus on emotions that
could be analyzed as inner snapshot responses to external triggers, such as fear- or disgust-
reactions. This ignored that affective phenomena also include dynamic engagements with the
world and dynamically unfolding interactions between two or more social agents and thus the
essential role that the interaction with the environment plays in emotional experience.
Dissatisfied by this denigration of body and environment, early advocates of the idea of
situated affectivity saw a striking parallel to recent developments in cognitive science. Up
until the end of the 20th century, cognitive scientists had conceived of cognition as an abstract
process of computation consisting in the syntactically driven manipulation of internal repre-
sentations in a central processing unit like the brain. As such, cognition was regarded as an
entirely intracranial affair. This changed with the advent of situated approaches to cognition,
according to which cognition is essentially also a matter of the agent’s body and her embodied
interaction with her environment. By providing indispensable ‘tools for thinking,’ body and
environment function as important cognitive resources. It is thus little wonder that those who
were concerned that philosophical and empirical emotion research had come to focus too nar-
rowly on cognitivist and individualist aspects of affective phenomena and deemed it important
to (re-)honor the essential role of the body and the interaction with the environment sought
support in situated approaches to cognition. This was a laudable endeavor. Alas, in retrospect,
one has to admit that it backfired. For along with some helpful, innovative and fertile ideas, it
also brought in conceptual confusion, ontological promiscuity and a penchant for metaphysi-
cal aberrations that have blocked the view for what really matters.

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In Section 2, we explain our rather pessimistically sounding assessment before we turn to

the decidedly more positive side of the story in Sections 3 and 4.

2. Situated affectivity: trials and tribulations

When cognition is said to be situated, this is a placeholder for a family of approaches accord-
ing to which cognitive processes are (potentially) Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and
Enacted. Each of these ‘4Es’ is supposed to highlight a different—and allegedly unique—way
in which cognition is a matter of the specific morphological and physiological characteristics
of the agent’s body and her embodied interaction with her appropriately structured natural,
technological or social environment. This is not the place to go into the details of all the
ideas discussed under this conceptual behemoth (see Walter 2014; Newen et al. 2018). Here
are some pithy clarifications, just enough to later illustrate some pitfalls these notions harbor.
According to embodied approaches, cognitive processing exploits our specific bodily
make-up, in particular the fact that we have the kind of body that functions in our envi-
ronment as it does. On one popular—although quite weak—reading, this means that cog-
nitive processes are not just a matter of abstract (potentially symbolic) processes, but reuse
action-specific bodily format representations. For instance, there is no abstract ‘meaning
center’ in the brain. Rather, words retain their sensorimotor origins: Semantic processing
of action verbs ‘lick,’ ‘pick’ and ‘kick’ activates areas that are also activated by actual move-
ments of the tongue, fingers, or feet (Pulvermüller 2005). According to a stronger—and
significantly more interesting—reading, cognitive processes are in part constituted by the
extracranial body in the sense that they make use not (only) of bodily format representations in
the brain but of certain features of the agent’s (extracranial) body in such a way that the overall
computational load is reduced. For instance, the density and placement of the facets in the
compound eye of the housefly structure visual information in such a way that motion iden-
tification becomes less computationally demanding (e.g., Pfeifer and Bongard 2007).
According to embedded approaches, human and non-human animals sometimes use an
appropriately structured environment as an external ‘scaffold’ that makes neuronal repre-
sentations (be they modality-specific or not) dispensable because it replaces or augments the
intracranial transformation of passively received representations by the active manipulation
of the corresponding external structures. To take the standard example: Expert bar tenders
associate drinks with different glassware and decorations and memorize long lists of orders
by arranging the corresponding items on the counter rather than literally remembering the
orders in their head.
According to extended approaches, interactions with the environment sometimes become
so intricate that it no longer seems appropriate to distinguish an organism-bound cognitive
system—the agent—on the one hand and the external ‘tool’ on the other. Rather, a hybrid
‘extended’ system spanning brain, body and environment seems to emerge, with cognitive
processing constantly ‘looping out’ into the world. In the standard example of Otto, who
suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and relies on a notebook to record information he thinks he
will later need to remember (Clark and Chalmers 1998), the notebook entries are supposed
to literally be an extended constituent of Otto’s memories.
According to enacted approaches to cognition, cognition is an active, essentially rela-
tional and temporally extended process of ‘sense-making’ through which autonomous and
adaptive cognitive systems bring about (‘enact’) a meaningful environment (e.g., Thompson
2007). The continuous struggle for self-preservation in the face of decay under precarious
circumstances defines a norm of survival for the system. Thereby, things in its surroundings

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acquire a meaning as something which is good or bad for it. This sort of meaning generation
is the primordial progenitor of the kind of cognition found in complex systems such as hu-
man beings. Human beings also enact cognition as the relational result of a sense-making
process in which they come to view the world as having a value with regard to their basic
goal of self-preservation inherent in them qua living organisms. Importantly, this renders it
senseless to ask whether cognition is confined to the brain or loops out into the body, the
environment or any combination thereof; cognition is an essentially relational phenomenon
that is brought about by the agents having a concerned perspective on the world and as such
simply has no location.
As indicated in Section 1, early proponents of a situated approach to affectivity turned to
these notions in reaction to a cognitivist and individualist climate. They wanted to reiterate
what once would have been little more than a truism, viz., that many interesting affec-
tive phenomena do not lend themselves to overly simplistic analyses as fleshless, one-shot
sense-appraise-act cycles by individual emoters. Judging by the renewed (and seemingly
still increasing) interest in the idea of emotions beyond the brain, both from a philosophical
(e.g., Colombetti 2017; León et al. 2019; Slaby et al. 2019; Varga 2019) and an empirical (e.g.,
Carr et al. 2018) perspective, they achieved their goal. But they paid a heavy price for it. For
while the ‘4E’-terminology is by now well entrenched, its sloppy and sometimes outright
inconsistent use and the metaphysical aberrations that have followed suit have often led to
less, not more, clarity, opening up irrelevant secondary battlefields and obscuring the view
for what really matters. Let us highlight three examples of what we have in mind.
Embodied emotions? When advocates of an embodied approach first suggested that cog-
nition is essentially a matter of the agent’s particular bodily features, this was truly revo-
lutionary. The computational approaches prevailing at the time worked with a rather bold
functionalist conception of the mind according to which mental processes are a matter of
their functional role, not their material implementation. What they overlooked, and what
advocates of an embodied approach pointed out, is that functional roles are causal roles and
that not just anything can implement any causal role, and in particular not equally efficiently.
In contrast, if it had not been for the short period of radical cognitivism, it would not have
been necessary (let alone revolutionary) to point out that affectivity is essentially a matter
of the agent’s bodily features. Affective phenomena have always been regarded as hybrid
phenomena including the body—from Aristotle to recent psychological theories of emotions
such as Scherer’s (2005) component process model in which three of the five components are
essentially bodily. Given that the whole idea of disembodied emotions is pretty much a red
herring in the first place, it is hardly surprising that much research on embodied emotions
is actually not concerned with the question whether emotions are embodied. Most take this
for granted and then argue that embodied emotional processes strongly (though not indis-
pensably) influence various cognitive and motivational tasks (Wilutzky et al. 2011, 287–298;
Stephan 2018, 609–610). The result is a pompous, but annoying, change of topic.
Some studies regularly associated with embodied emotions are concerned with the way in
which the cognitive processing of affective stimuli is facilitated or impeded by either using
or not using parts of one’s (extracranial) body. For instance, using one’s own facial muscles
facilitates both the recognition of emotions and the linguistic understanding of affective content
(e.g., Effron et al. 2006; Niedenthal et al. 2009). The key idea is something like ‘affective
mimicry,’ i.e., affective stimuli are more easily recognized, categorized, comprehended, etc.,
by using the extracranial morphological and physiological structures involved in the corre-
sponding affective phenomena themselves. This is undeniably interesting. But it has little
to do with the embodiment of emotions. What such studies investigate is not the way in which

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affectivity is grounded in our bodily nature, but the way in which the latter affects the
cognitive processing of affective stimuli.
Other studies regularly associated with embodied emotions are concerned with the way
in which cognitively processing affective stimuli activates sensorimotor representations. For
instance, anger is frequently conceptualized in heat-related terms (e.g., hot-headed) because
the representation of anger is systematically related to sensorimotor representations of heat,
so that perceptions of heat facilitate the use of anger-related conceptual knowledge and
a priming with anger-related thoughts leads participants to judge the room temperature
as hotter than it actually is (Wilkowski et al. 2009). Again, this is undeniably interesting.
But again, it has little to do with the embodiment of emotions. What such studies investigate
is not the way in which affectivity is grounded in our bodily nature, but the way in which
cognitively processing affective stimuli relies on something like an ‘affective mirror neuron
system,’ i.e., activates sensorimotor brain regions also involved in actually experiencing the
corresponding affective phenomenon. Such studies not only work with too weak a notion
of embodiment as is particularly apparent in the case of emotions: When James (1884) took
the body to be a ‘resonance body,’ a most sensitive ‘sounding board,’ he did not have in mind
bodily format representations in the brain, but the extracranial body—the sweaty hands in
which our fear resonates, the deep-red face in which our shame resonates, etc. They also
investigate the (embodied) mechanisms of the cognitive processing of affective stimuli only,
not the embodiment of emotions.
Much recent empirical research regularly associated with embodied emotions is thus ei-
ther not about the body or not about emotions (or, in the worst case, not about either).
Importantly, this is not just a terminological quarrel. The point is not that these studies work
with a different conception of embodiment than the one established in the debate about em-
bodied cognition. The point is that they are either not about emotions or not about the body
and thus a fortiori not about embodied emotions in any intelligible sense.
Those are cases in which our view for what matters is obscured by paying not enough alle-
giance to the conceptual roots of one of the famous ‘4Es.’ Research on embodied emotions
ought to investigate whether and in what way the body, and in particular the extracranial
body, is constitutive of our affective states or processes. For instance, affective processes are
associated with characteristic bodily changes, such as when depressed or sad individuals walk
slower, show less movements of their arms, adopt a less erect posture, etc., and some take this
to provide “strong support for the notion that sadness and depression are embodied in the way
people walk” (Michalak et al. 2009, 586). The problem with such studies is to substantiate
the claim that movement patterns and body posture are indeed constitutive of and not merely
causal consequences of sadness or depression. This problem of distinguishing between causation
and constitution is at the heart of our second exemplary worry to which we turn next. But aside
from that, it is studies like this one that investigate the embodiment of emotions and the embod-
iment of emotions. Recent studies claim that some extracranial parts of the body, namely the
gastrointestinal tract and gut microbiota together with the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal
(HPA) axis modulate various brain processes, with which they are reciprocally connected;
and jointly play a role in depression, anxiety and the susceptibility to stressors (Dinan and
Cryan 2013; Foster et al. 2017). If correct, these studies show that the brain alone neither
realizes nor is the single control unit of an important subset of affective processes.
Embedded or extended emotions? The distinction between causation and constitution just
mentioned is at the heart of the distinction between embedded and extended approaches to cog-
nition or affectivity. Conceptually, this distinction is easy to draw. Causation is a diachronic
relation between two ontologically unrelated entities, whereas constitution is a synchronic

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relation between two entities standing to each other in the part–whole relationship. With
regard to concrete examples, however, it is hard, if not outright impossible, to make a prin-
cipled case for, say, the extendedness thesis over the embeddedness thesis. In particular, as the
debate about the so-called ‘coupling-constitution fallacy’ has made amply clear (e.g., Adams
and Aizawa 2008), the mere fact that an environmental structure or process causally contrib-
utes to a cognitive process, no matter how critically, does not render it constitutive of it. The
mere fact that, say, we could not see without light should not render the light rays radiating
from the sun constitutive of our visual perception, at least not if one does not want to water
down the notion of a constituent beyond recognition. As a result, there have been seemingly
endless—and equally fruitless—metaphysical skirmishes between those who believe that
cognition is extended and those who insist that it is merely embedded. By picking up on
the 4E-terminology, the debate about situated affectivity has inherited that futile metaphys-
ical dispute and along with it all the unwary ontological promiscuity it invites. Slaby, for
instance, takes the fact that in some cases, “a part of the world is what sets up, drives, and en-
ergizes our emotional experience” (2014, 35) to show that the environment provides “‘tools
for feeling’ (…) in something like the way there are ‘tools for thinking’ in EM [extended
mind] theorizing” (ibid., 36). This is an instance of Adams and Aizawa’s (2008) coupling-
constitution fallacy. The mere fact that a part of the world sets up, drives, and energizes our
affective life neither entails nor justifies the claim that that part of the world is constitutive
of our affective life. The same holds for other alleged cases of extended emotions that have
come to be championed by advocates of the idea of emotions beyond the brain: A diary, say,
in which a person notes things her parents do that make her angry, which is supposed to be
an extended constituent of her resentment toward her parents (Colombetti and Roberts 2015,
1253), or a wedding ring which is supposed to be a proper part of the vehicles that instan-
tiate one’s love towards one’s deceased spouse (ibid., 1254). Taking such ideas seriously leads
to what one could call affective inflation, viz., to seeing (the partial constituents of ) affective
episodes virtually everywhere. As we see it, this is a case in which what matters is obscured
by paying too much allegiance to the conceptual roots of one of the ‘4Es.’ Again, this is not
just terminological nitpicking. If the claim is supposed to be that emotions are extended sensu
stricto, then one would like to hear a justification for such a prima facie surprising ontological
promiscuity: What exactly is gained by conceiving of affectivity along such lines that could
not equally well be gained by an ontologically much more conservative causation-claim?
If, however, the causation-constitution distinction is supposed to be secondary, so that the
claim that emotions are extended is to be read without any real metaphysical punch, then
calling them such is at best hardly helpful and at worst misleading. Talk about extended
emotions in the absence of any sound argument for the ontological promiscuity this entails is
particularly onerous in the light of two facts. First, we will never be able to decide on empir-
ical grounds whether a process is embedded or extended because there is no way to generate
unequivocal experimental evidence for constitution, given that constitution-claims are in-
herently underdetermined by evidence (Baumgartner and Casini 2017). Instead, we should
follow Baumgartner and Wilutzky (2017) and admit that the “inference to the extension of
cognition [i.e., constitution; A. S. and S. W.] is of inherently pragmatic nature” (ibid., 1122).
Second, this admission is innocuous, given that as far as any practical issues are concerned,
it does not matter whether affective processes are extended or just embedded—as (we hope)
will become clearer in light of the affective phenomena discussed in Sections 3 and 4.
Extended or enacted emotions? Lastly, let us briefly turn to the idea of enacted emotions.
Harking back to the notion of enactivism, Colombetti (2014, 2018) has recently emphasized the
inherently affective character of the mind. Claiming that a mind deprived of affectivity would

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not be a mind at all, she argues that we should give up on the distinction between cognition
and affectivity. While enactivism is usually confined to the claim that cognitive processes are acts
of sense-making, Colombetti takes enactivism to be inherently committed to a primordial
form of affectivity as well (2014, 2). Accordingly, sense-making is always both a cognitive and
an affective phenomenon. Even human cognition thus remains an essentially affective affair,
being a matter of our human capacity to ‘give a damn.’ We happily concur. As one of us has
argued, a system with original intentionality must care, i.e., give a damn, about getting things
right, and this is a sui generis kind of affective intentionality that is irreducible to other ways of
relating to the world (Slaby and Stephan 2008). But we find it unfortunate that the waters are
muddied— superfluously—by combining this enactive approach to affectivity with the claim
that the process of sense-making is extended. For one of the key claims of enactivism has always
been that cognition—and thus, if Colombetti is right, affectivity—is a relational phenomenon and
as such no more and no less in the brain than in the body, in the environment or somewhere else.
It might, of course, be that what Colombetti has in mind with extended sense-making is signifi-
cantly weaker than what, say, Clark and Chalmers (1998) had in mind. But then, again, it is at
best hardly helpful and at worst misleading to call it such. It fosters confusion and opens up ir-
relevant secondary battlefields regarding the very issue it was supposed to illuminate and clarify.
Now that we have a sense for what quagmire we have gotten into and what has gotten us
into it, let’s try to see how to get out of it.

3. Environmentally scaffolded emotions 1:

user–resource interactions
Let us leave the coupling-constitution debate with its futile metaphysical quarrels behind.
Let us also take it for granted that affectivity is (in ways yet to be detailed) embodied. Let us
instead take a fresh look at the varieties of human affectivity beyond brain and body. We will
elaborate on two different, albeit interconnected, ways in which our affective life is essen-
tially a matter of more or less intimate dependencies and interdependencies between us and
our natural, technological, and social environment. In this section, we focus on interactions
which originate with the individual and from there stretch out into the environment through
a (mostly intentional) process of resource usage. In the next section, we focus on influences
which (mostly) originate with structures in the environment and from there reach inward into
the individual through a process of intentional or unintentional mind invasion.
Sterelny (2010) rightly observed that what early proponents of the extended mind thesis
targeted was, in fact, just a special case of what should be characterized quite generally as
niche construction by the use of environmental scaffolds. The extended mind thesis, he claimed,
is true at best of “highly trusted, individualized and entrenched, single-user resources”
(Sterelny 2010, 480; see also 476) which occupy just “one corner in a 3D space of environ-
mental scaffolds” (ibid.). Most environmental resources, in contrast, do not fall under this
category, as they fail to be entrenched or individualized, for example when we jointly work
with others on complex tasks, or when babies interact with their caregivers. To capture such
phenomena that are overlooked if one focuses too narrowly on the extended mind thesis
proper, Sterelny suggested to take the hypothesis of a scaffolded mind, in its more comprehen-
sive form, to simply be the thesis “that human cognitive capacities both depend on and have
been transformed by environmental resources” (ibid., 472). Let us thus have a look at various
ways in which human affectivity can be transformed by user–resource interactions.
Unidirectional material tools for emoting. A mundane and ubiquitous kind of user–resource
interaction is familiar from situations in which we exploit environmental resources in order

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to regulate our affective life. For instance, we (a) visit places that promise to steer our moods
and emotions into an intended direction (e.g., scenic places for easing our mood, a silent old
roman chapel for calming down, etc.), (b) listen to music that supports certain moods, or
(c) furnish our apartment in a way to feel at home, or remove everything that reminds us of
our ex-partner to avoid feelings of loneliness, loss and jealousy. In the (a)- and (b)-cases, we
regulate our moods and emotions by interacting with already existing natural resources or
artifacts. In contrast, in the (c)-case, we actively and deliberately structure or restructure our
environment in order to regulate our moods and emotions by the preemptive selection of
appropriate experiential frames. In all three cases, however, we initiate and establish more or
less intentionally a predominantly unidirectional influence of the world onto us, specifically
tailored to concrete emotional needs. Barring any good philosophical account of what ex-
actly is gained from a pragmatic point of view (see Section 2) by taking human affectivity to
literally extend into natural beauties, the way we furnish our rooms or to the music we listen
to, such cases are arguably best regarded as instances of what using the traditional terminol-
ogy one would have called ‘embedded’ affectivity—pace recent attempts to argue that even
listening to music can be seen as an instance of a dynamical coupling with a “functionally
integrated, gainful system” (Krueger and Szanto 2016, 867).
Strongly coupled and integrated material tools for emoting. Stronger types of user–resource inter-
actions have been discussed by Colombetti and Roberts (2015). In particular, they consider
cases in which a coupled system, consisting of an emoter and an environmental item, enacts
some kind of self-stimulating activity, which has been set in place and maintained over time
in order to move into a certain emotional process, resulting in the formation of a new whole
which allows novel forms of steering and expressing affectivity inaccessible to the uncoupled
individual. A repeatedly mentioned example for an occurrent affective process of that type is
(d) a deeply mourning jazz musician whose

playing sets up a mutually constraining cycle of affective responding and expression:

the qualities of the music performed, and of the actions and gestures initiated, feed back
into the character of the musician’s emotional experience, which in turn governs what
he plays next.
(ibid., 2015, 1258; see also Colombetti 2018, 583–584)

Another case in point might be (e) an agent who (in explicit analogy to the extended mind
veteran Otto) uses a diary as a tool for constantly and reliably refueling the (dispositional)
feelings of resentment toward her parents (Colombetti and Roberts 2015, 1253).
Transiently coupled social tools for emoting. It took a while until it was acknowledged how
strongly we also connect to other people as ‘tools for emoting.’ Think (f ) of someone who seeks
to act out his bursting aggression and, therefore, goes out to find others to couple to ‘in the
right way’—elbows out, just waiting for someone to bump into him and drag the other into
an argument which can develop into a fight. In such cases, the aggressor treats the other as a
tool for acting out aggression. But compared to the deep and integrated coupling a musician
can develop with her instrument, the coupling between the aggressor and the victim seems
to be rather transient. Yet, the aggressor obviously involves and manipulates the victim with
the deliberate goal of emotion regulation. Similar cases include going to (g) techno parties
in order to ‘dance out’ one’s emotions, or (h) confession in order to relieve one’s pain about
one’s failures. In both cases, the individual—again intentionally—uses resources which are
already out there. As in case (f ), however, the causal path is multi- or bi-directional. In case
(g), the individual herself contributes in one way or another to the atmosphere of the party

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through the way she interacts with others. Case (h) is also a mutual affair between priest and
confessor. Furthermore, the confessor must already be familiar with the catholic practice of
penance, that is, she must understand and believe in the ritual a confession offers—a point to
which we will return in Section 4 in connection with mind invasions.
Affectivity instantiated by strongly coupled social systems. There are cases in which the coupling
between two or more individuals is much stronger, though. Old couples sometimes have de-
veloped (i) rituals regarding how to interact and enact certain types of emotional dynamics
over and over again. These can be cycles of mutual soothing and loving, but also cycles of
one partner sulking and refusing to speak, while the other tries to put things right. In other
couples, the affective cycles can involve one partner responding to seemingly flirting affairs
of the other with mistrust and jealousy in such a way that they mutually goad each other. In
these (i)-cases, it is the existence and the particular nature of a long developed, strong cou-
pling that allows the individuals involved to enact some sort of affectivity in the first place.
Compared to the transient social tools for emotions in cases (g) and (h), though, the ‘other’ in
such couplings can hardly be thought of as a ‘tool’ for sulking or putting things right, since
these processes are arguably not consciously intended or endorsed.
Coupled social tools for changing the emotional mind-set. There are, however, also cases where
( j) someone is indeed intentionally looking for another person as a ‘tool’ for modifying her
life and mood, and not just with regard to concrete emotional needs, but in order to trans-
form her affective response repertoire in general. Consider, for instance, someone who seeks
a psychotherapist to work with. Depending on the professional orientation of the psycho-
therapist, her work can comprise the re-enactment of painful re-occurring interactions with
others while transforming the capacities of the client to act and emote differently in similar
encounters in the future.
Both seeking a psychotherapist and the confession in case (h) go beyond mere user–
resource interactions, albeit in different ways. They both involve some sort of mind invasion
whereby structures in the environment reach inward into the individual (deliberately or not),
rather than stretching out from the individual into the environment. But while the client
explicitly intends that his mind set-up will be transformed by working with the psychother-
apist, the confessor has (typically) been enculturated in the catholic tradition without having
explicitly asked for it. Such cases of world-to-mind extension that are typically ignored in the
literature on allegedly ‘extended’ emotions are the topic of Section 4.

4. Environmentally scaffolded emotions 2: mind-invasions

Slaby (2016) coined the term ‘mind invasion’ to refer to cases in which what is at issue is
exactly not our “individual decision to employ a mind tool in the pursuit of (…) self-avowed
goals, but rather forms of pervasive framing and molding effected by aspects of technical
infrastructure and institutional realities” (ibid., 6). We will use this notion more broadly to
cover in toto transformational processes of the mind in enculturation—starting from early
childhood to all later stages in life. Human beings have the unique privilege—and sometimes
burden—that the structures offered during ontogenesis by other members of the society—be
it family, peers, schools, companies, organizations, parties, and social media—can function
as emotional scaffolds. Sometimes, for instance in the ( j)-case of someone seeking a psycho-
therapist, a scaffold for mind invasion is deliberately chosen. But as we will see below, often
it is not and instead imposed on us, without us being consciously aware of it. On the side of
those who provide the scaffolds, some act unintentionally, while others intentionally prepare
a certain scaffold for a particular audience. In this case, the external world uses a ‘tool,’ so to

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speak, to manipulate and transform the mind-set of the individual, regardless of whether the
individual wants to be affected or not.
Affective enculturation through strongly coupled social systems. In their attempts to find convinc-
ing examples of extended affectivity, Krueger (2014) and Varga (2016) have addressed (k)
developmental aspects in early dyadic relationships. Krueger takes infant–caregiver interac-
tions that establish shared emotions and provide mutual affect regulation to be exemplars of
collectively extended emotions (2014, 545–548). Likewise, Varga emphasizes the essential
role of successful synchronic interactions between infant and caregiver for both the regu-
lation of the infant’s current emotions and the maturation of her emotional self-regulatory
abilities in an evolving diachronic process (2016, 2475–2476). In her comprehensive study of
the affective and cognitive development in early childhood, Greenwood examines both syn-
chronic and diachronic scaffolds provided by caregivers in specific sociocultural settings and
explores in depth the synchronous interactions of infant and caregiver that diachronically
shape and enhance the infant’s behavioral repertoire by transforming the neural structure of
the child’s brain (2015, 8–9, chaps. 4–6).
If we put the phase of early childhood aside and consider that (l) all human beings get en-
culturated in particular family styles, group norms and emotion regimes, we must appreciate
that during these processes, we learn to participate in life forms with a specific repertoire
of ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild 1983) which find bodily sediments in what we may call our
‘affective biographies’ (von Maur 2017, chap. 4). Becoming familiar with, for instance, the
rituals of the catholic church is but one small aspect of a larger set of diachronic enculturation
processes that allow the synchronic tool use of confession in a particular situation. Special
cases of (l) are particular adaptations to specific institutions and organizations that Slaby
discusses under the heading of ‘mind invasion’ or ‘life hack’: the working atmosphere in
a company, or the atmosphere in a study program (Haken (1996) treated such working
atmospheres as order parameters that ‘enslave’ new members of the corresponding group;
see Stephan 1998, 650–652). For the most part, (l)-cases are not explicitly intended, neither
by caretakers, working groups, companies, etc. nor by the greater society. They are not for
a special purpose, although we know of mobbing or exclusion if someone does not obey,
for example, the emotion regimes established within a group, but also of various corporate
manipulations of emotion regulation and ‘emotional management’ (cf. Hochschild 1983).
Affective transformation through social media. A different set of structures that strongly con-
tribute to the transformation of our (affective) mind-set are provided by (m) social media.
Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram have a strong influence on the affective life of
digital natives and non-natives. On the one hand, they allow one to participate in and share
precious moments with others, even over long distances. On the other hand, they create a
feeling of permanent availability and the need to communicate; they contribute to an in-
crease of feelings of exclusion, and an increase in anonymously spread hate speech with all
its consequences. In most cases though, the affective significance in such cases is merely an
unintended and unsought side-effect of social media.
Mind invasion as a tool for manipulating emoters. In contrast, other scaffolds are (n) deliberately
launched as tools for mind invasion in order to diachronically modify the attitudes and the
emotional set up of a target group. We see this in advertising, but also in political campaigns
and in the recruitment policies of radical groups. The German Af D, for example, was eager
to create an emotional bond with Russian-Germans by translating the party program into
Russian and being present on social media platforms (e.g., Odnoklassniki.ru), which Russian-
Germans use to connect (positively) with relatives and friends. Another case in point is the
intense and specialized social media use of extremist groups to recruit and keep followers.

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If nothing else, it is the personal, moral and societal importance of being aware of these
scaffoldings that are set up to modulate our emotional life and to intrude our minds that
reinvigorate our point from Section 2: From a practical point of view, it simply does not matter
whether our affectivity is properly extended or merely embedded, and we run the risk of
losing track of the truly important things in life if we allow ourselves to indulge in too much
quixotic metaphysics.

5. Conclusion
The phenomena we have described—from very mundane and unostentatious user–resource
interactions like listening to music to momentous and vital mind invasions like unwanted
political agitation and other, milder, forms of brainwashing—emphasize, just with less
metaphysical ballast, what advocates of enacted approaches to affectivity have continuously
underlined: Namely, that there is no pre-formed, independently existing individual that
comes into a pre-formed, independently existing world which it has then to make affective
sense of. Rather, it is the environment and the individual which together determine who and
what they are in continuous, reciprocal, dynamical interactions.

Acknowledgments
The research presented in this chapter has been carried out in collaboration with the bi-
local DFG-Research Training Group ‘Situated Cognition,’ GRK-2185/1, hosted by the
Ruhr-University Bochum and Osnabrück University.

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 27
FEMINISM, EMBODIMENT
AND EMOTIONS
Luna Dolezal

1. Introduction
There has been substantial reflection within feminist scholarship on the role that emotion
plays when considering the subordination of women within patriarchal structures and power
relations. In fact, in recent decades, an “affective turn” has taken place in feminist philosophy
(Clough and Halley 2007), where considering how social, political and institutional forces
impact on the affective and emotional lives of embodied subjects has become a central focus
of scholarship (e.g., Ahmed 2004; Brennan 2004; Gorton 2007). In an era where gender
equality is ostensibly guaranteed through legislation along with equality and diversity ini-
tiatives in many liberal democracies, it is argued that certain gendered inequalities persist as
a result of affective, rather than material, conditions.1 Examining how negative and positive
affects are embedded and operationalized within social, political and institutional structures
is a means to demonstrate not only how the personal is political, but also how the political
registers within the personal (Gorton 2007, 336).
Feminist phenomenology has become an important theoretical frame for feminist schol-
arship on emotion (e.g., Bartky 1990; Dolezal 2015; McMahon 2016). Feminist phenom-
enology is an approach that combines insights regarding embodied experience, through
phenomenological investigation, with reflections about the discursive structures which
frame that experience, through feminist theory. As embodied emotional experiences are
always shaped by a broad range of factors, which have political and social significance, such
as age, gender, race, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, among others, feminist phenomenology
attempts to reveal not only the taken for granted structures of lived experience but also
the sedimented or ‘hidden’ assumptions that inform our experience with respect to these
categories (e.g., Fisher and Embree 2000; Landweer and Marcinski 2016). Considering a
feminist phenomenology of emotion is important as it is paramount to investigate how the
structures of one’s emotional experience can affect the expression, attitude and atmosphere
of one’s embodied life along with the textures of one’s experiences of intercorporeality, and
furthermore the repercussions this has in familial, social and political life.
Sandra L. Bartky, writing on the phenomenology of emotion in her influential collection of
essays Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, argues that women
“are situated differently than men within the ensemble of social relations” (Bartky 1990, 83).

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She identifies that certain “patterns of mood or feeling (…) tend to characterize” women’s
experience (Bartky 1990, 84). The differences in women’s social position—as a result of
the material and psychic legacies of patriarchy along with the enduring embodied realities
of pregnancy and motherhood—mean that, in general rather than universal terms, women
find themselves living within social structures in such a way that certain emotional responses
become more predominant, especially when compared to their male counterparts.2 While
there are an array of emotions and experiences that might be identified to be characteristic
of women’s experience, Bartky identifies negative self-conscious emotions as particularly
central (Bartky 1990, 84). More specifically, she argues that shame is the most ubiquitous and
significant emotion to the experience of female subjectivity.
As a result of their subordinated position, she writes, women “more often than men, are
made to feel shame in the major sites of social life” (Bartky 1990, 93). For women, Bartky
argues, shame forms a “pervasive affective attunement to the social environment” (Bartky
1990, 85). In making this claim, Bartky identifies shame not merely as a discrete emotional
event occurring as a result of a breach of social norms (as described, in part, by Chapter 30
in this volume), but rather, she argues that shame, for women, is a chronic and persistent
backdrop colouring all aspects of ordinary day-to-day life: “women’s shame is more than
merely an effect of subordination but, within the larger universe of patriarchal social rela-
tions, a profound mode of disclosure both of self and situation” (Bartky 1990, 85). My aim
in this chapter is to take up Bartky’s claim that shame, particularly in its chronic form, is
characteristic of female embodied experience, or a profound mode of disclosure both of self and
situation, to use her words, and to explore some of the particularities that substantiate this
claim. Through exploring chronic shame in relation to female embodied experience, the
mechanisms through which certain gendered power relations are sustained and reproduced
will be elucidated.3 Furthermore, the challenges inherent in providing a phenomenology of
chronic shame will be considered.

2. Shame, embodiment and female experience

Bartky is, by no means, the only feminist scholar to identify shame, particularly in its
chronic form, as a characteristic of female experience and social oppression (e.g., Bouson
2009; Johnson and Moran 2013). There exists a long association historically, theologically,
sociologically and philosophically between women, shame and the body. As the psychol-
ogist Paul Gilbert notes: “Control of female sexuality (and the female body) has been
institutionalized in social and religious forms for hundreds of years and more (…) often in-
volving the shaming/stigmatizing of female sexuality and appearance” (Gilbert 2002, 35).
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, drawing on insights from biology, social and eco-
nomic history and sociology, gives a philosophical account of the process of becoming a
woman, essentially characterizing this process as “an extended lesson in shame” (Guenther
2011, 11). Beauvoir discusses how many ordinary female anatomical differences, such as the
onset of menstruation, sexual maturation and breast development, have long been occasions
for shame, especially recurring shame about embodiment, for young girls (Beauvoir 2010,
336–341). These bodily changes, deviating from an imagined norm of male bodily stasis,
are seen as shameful and of needing concealment, and this has a long history in many cul-
tures and traditions. As Beauvoir writes, “[The young girl’s] metamorphosis into a woman
takes place not only in shame but in remorse for suffering that shame” (Beauvoir 2010, 347).
The experience of becoming and being a woman, as Beauvoir and other feminist thinkers

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argue (e.g., Manion 2003; Locke 2007; Fischer 2018), historically involves a process of
learning to interpret the body as a site of shame (on Beauvoir, see also Chapter 16 in this
volume).
The strong relation and association, historically and culturally, between women’s bodies,
women’s sexuality and shame, both personally and politically, is far from trivial. The male body
has set the standard for the ‘normal’ or ‘neutral’ body in philosophical accounts of experience
and subjectivity—and there is a long tradition of feminist writing critiquing phenomenologists
such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre for this implicit bias in their work (e.g., Young 1980;
Murphy 1999; Fisher and Embree 2000; Olkowski and Weiss 2006). As a result, women’s bodies
and female experience are positioned as essentially deviant from this (male) norm or, in some
cases, even pathological. Inevitable events in female embodiment such as pregnancy, childbirth,
menstruation and menopause are positioned as anomalies of ‘normal’ experience, which are not
only stigmatized, but also pathologized, requiring professional medical attention.
Furthermore, a significant site for shame for women is in the realm of the seemingly
‘trivial’ concerns of appearance and physical attractiveness. The control of women’s bodies
through oppressive beauty norms has been an explicit focus of the feminist critique of the
patriarchal framework of consumer capitalism and neoliberalism for several decades. It is
widely acknowledged by feminist thinkers that appearances cannot be considered a trivial
concern for women and that body dissatisfaction is part of a systematic (and oppressive) social
phenomenon. Appearances are intimately linked to how one values and sees oneself, and,
furthermore, to one’s social worth and position within a social group. Increasingly, beauty
ideals have become ethical ideals (Widdows 2018, 30). Failing to achieve certain standards of
attractiveness through the physical body has repercussions for one’s sense of self. One is not
just failing to achieve a discrete social norm, but instead this embodied failure is viewed as
global, and, as a result, it is an occasion for shame (Widdows 2018, 31–35). This is especially
the case for women, as how they look and present themselves affects how they are treated and
their chances for success in various aspects of their lives.
That which is considered a ‘normal’ and allegedly attainable standard of attractiveness
is, in fact, an ever-shifting and unattainable body ideal. As a result, women, as Susan Bordo
notes, are often “obsessed” with their bodies and are “hardly accepting of them” (Bordo
1993, 14–15). The continuous comparisons a woman may make between her actual body
and versions of the socially constructed ‘ideal’ body represented in media images are a
potent source of shame. Women’s bodies, already shame-prone as a result of their cul-
tural inheritance, are continuously positioned as inadequate or inferior when compared
to these elusive body ideals; shame, and body shame in particular, becomes a permanent
possibility. Jane Northrop notes that the “potential for women to feel shame is ubiquitous
and potentially overwhelming” (Northrop 2012, 179). In short, ubiquitous and oppressive
social structures position the appearance of women’s bodies as a constant opportunity for
the experience of shame. As physical and personal ‘inadequacies’ are recurrent, difficult to
alleviate and ever-shifting, shame can become permanently anticipated, part of a ‘normal’
landscape of experience, or an “affective attunement” to use Bartky’s formulation (Bartky
1990, 85).

3. Understanding shame
Shame is commonly understood to be an emotion that arises when we are concerned
about how we are seen and judged by others. It is what is called a self-conscious emotion,
in that the object of shame is oneself and, furthermore, it involves an awareness of how

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other people view the self.4 As such, shame is an emotion that involves both self-awareness
and social interaction (even if this interaction is just anticipated or imagined). We feel
ashamed when we are seen by others (whether they are present, imagined or internal-
ized) to be flawed in some crucial way, or when some part of our core self is perceived to
be inadequate, inappropriate, or immoral. Distinguished from guilt, where we feel bad
about an action or something that we have done, shame is about the person that one is. In
a moment of shame, we feel deeply and often irreparably flawed, or that we are unworthy
and unlovable.
Shame has both acute and chronic forms. When struck by a moment of acute shame,
we can understand shame to be a discrete experience that arises, has a certain duration,
and then passes away. During the moments of the shame experience, it is characteristic
that one is overwhelmed physically, and common physical responses to shame include a
sense of intense physical exposure, coupled with a sense of wanting to hide or withdraw.
In moments of shame, the body folds in on itself. Often, our posture is stooped, the gaze
is downward, and the head is bowed; we want to shrink or get smaller, or to just disap-
pear. There are many other physical signs of shame, such as blushing, stuttering, sweating,
blanching, hesitating, cowering, covering the face, and a sinking feeling. Accompanying
these physical and physiological responses is an intense feeling of emotional anguish or
pain. There is a sinking feeling of dread, coupled with an acute anxiety. An acute episode
of shame is experienced as an overwhelming feeling of self-consciousness that is focused
on some negative evaluation of the self and a concern with how the self is or will be per-
ceived by others.
The extreme negative self-consciousness that comes with shame, coupled with its intense
physical response, gives shame its most recognizable feature: the feeling that one is com-
pletely, and uncontrollably, exposed. This exposure leads to a physic, along with a sense of
physical, paralysis or, what Kaufman terms “binding.” Kaufman writes: “Exposure can in-
terrupt movement, bind speech and make eye contact intolerable. Shame paralyzes the self ”
(Kaufman 1993, 5, 18). One feels isolated, singled out and intensely conspicuous, as though
paralysed in a spotlight. There is a strong feeling of vulnerability that comes with this sense
of exposure. It feels as though everyone can see your flaws or misdeeds and that they may
scorn, judge and then ultimately reject you. As a result, acute shame is alienating, isolating
and deeply disturbing. It can provoke powerful feelings of despair, inferiority, powerlessness,
defectiveness and self-contempt, to name a few.
As a result of acute shame’s deeply painful and disturbing nature, it is widely acknowl-
edged that we go to great lengths to avoid and circumvent shame experiences. In fact,
anticipated shame is a powerful force within in social interaction, where individuals in so-
cial situations make continuous efforts to avoid shame, embarrassment and other negative
self-conscious experiences that might arise because of social transgressions. We unremit-
tingly design and adjust our behaviour and appearance to avoid shame in order to avoid the
pain of social rejection and the threat of severing our social bonds. In this way, anticipated
shame acts as an invisible and often unacknowledged boundary in social interaction, de-
lineating the contours of what is permissible or acceptable, and the standards for ‘normal’
behaviour, appearance, speech and so on.
Anticipating acute shame experiences, and making efforts to avoid them, is an ordinary
part of social interaction and human lived experience. However, when the anticipation of
shame becomes overwhelming and a constant feature of every interaction and experience,
then we can start to see how shame can become chronic in nature, or form an “affective
attunement,” as Bartky postulates (Bartky 1990, 85).

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4. A phenomenology of chronic shame?

Living with chronic shame, one might experience a pervasive and enduring sense of shame
that colours many aspects of life and social interaction. Shame, instead of being an acute and
fleeting episode, becomes global and diffuse, causing a continuous sense of social anxiety,
personal inadequacy and relational disconnection. Chronic shame can be linked to an en-
during feature of the self, for instance, one’s appearance, weight, skin colour or social status.
However, research suggests that susceptibility to chronic shame in adult experience can be
caused by a variety of factors, including childhood abuse or highly dysfunctional shame-
based family dynamics, as well as being a feature of certain psychopathologies such as PTSD
or social anxiety disorder (Dolezal and Lyons 2017, 3). As the theologian and philosopher
Stephen Pattison, who has theorized extensively about shame, writes:

There is an enormous difference between acute, reactive shame and the chronic shame
that shapes a whole personality and may last a lifetime. When individuals appear to
experience the whole of life as actually or potentially shame-productive and manifest
such symptoms as withdrawal, self-contempt, inferiority and gaze aversion as a matter
of course throughout their everyday lives, shame has become pathological and chronic.
(Pattison 2000, 83)

Chronic shame, in contrast to experiences of acute shame, has a very different phenomenology.
While chronic shame would share many of the painful features of acute shame, such as emo-
tional pain, self-consciousness and a heightened sense of visibility, chronic shame is not ex-
perienced as an acute incident of emotional torment and hyper-self-consciousness, but rather
as a background of pain and self-consciousness, perhaps becoming more acute in moments
of exposure or self-awareness.
In fact, it is widely acknowledged that chronic shame is less about discrete shame experi-
ences, but instead is an affective atmosphere—or attunement—that colours many, if not all,
aspects of one’s life. Living with chronic shame may not mean that shame is continuously ex-
perienced, but instead that the threat of shame is more predominant and persistent. Chronic
shame, hence, is not a state of perpetually feeling ashamed, but rather, a state of persistent
“shame anxiety,” where there is an “anticipatory anxiety about the imminent threat of being
exposed, humiliated, belittled or rejected” (Pattison 2000, 85). Anticipated shame comes to
be an enduring part of experience.
What is most challenging when attempting to articulate a phenomenology of chronic
shame is that it is frequently silent, repressed or unavailable to reflective consciousness.
Shame is an experience that is so painful and intolerable that it is often forced outside the
realm of conscious lived experience: It is forced “underground” (Scheff 2004, 231), and as a
result, chronic shame often “disappears” or is “bypassed” (DeYoung 2015, 24). Rather than
the searingly painful self-consciousness that accompanies episodes of acute shame, chronic
shame can be invisible, both to the self, who is experiencing it, and to others around them.
As a result, there are challenges to identifying, diagnosing and describing the experience of
chronic shame, and, concomitantly, attempting to describe its phenomenology.
In her recent book Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame, the relational psychotherapist
Patricia DeYoung discusses how many of her clients who suffer from chronic shame do not
even know that they are experiencing shame (and related strategies to circumvent the threat
of shame) with debilitating frequency. DeYoung writes: “Clients come for help with trou-
bled emotions and difficult relationships. They say they have problems with stress, anxiety,

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depression, or self-esteem. But they don’t name shame as a problem” (DeYoung 2015, 3). She
describes chronic shame as “silent,” shadowing her clients’ experiences in the world:

Clients who struggle with the disintegrating power of chronic shame may not daily or
consciously expect to be annihilated by shame. However, the threat is always around
somewhere, just out of awareness, kept at bay. What they live with daily is what it costs
them to keep from falling into shame.
(DeYoung 2015, 19)

Stephen Pattison echoes these insights: “few people may describe themselves as chron-
ically shamed, many exhibit behaviour and attitudes such as consistently blaming others,
being passive, deprecating themselves and their achievements, or ridiculing self and others”
(Pattison 2000, 120).
As a result, what seems to characterize the experience of chronic shame is not enduring or
repetitive experiences of shame but rather an atmosphere of anticipated shame that leads to com-
pensatory behaviours or experiences. Instead of shame, what often enters reflective consciousness
and the landscapes of lived experience are powerful “defensive scripts,” or rules and habits of in-
teraction, which make it possible for an individual to avoid the constant pain of shame (Kaufman
1993, 113). Shame anxiety activates a variety of “reactive scripts and actions,” Pattison writes,
drawing on the work of the shame theorists Donald Nathanson and Gershan Kaufman (Pattison
2000, 120). “These scripts are ‘performed’ or activated when shame threatens” (Pattison 2000,
111). While some of these scripts allow the shame experience to manifest, others use denial or
bypassing as coping mechanisms. Nathanson describes four basic shame scripts: shameful with-
drawal, masochistic submission, narcissistic avoidance of shame and the rage of wounded pride
(Nathanson 1992). Through this schema of reaction patterns, a wide range of behavioural forms
emerge that help one cope with the perceived threats to one’s social bonds and one’s identity that
shame experiences provoke, no matter how mild or intense. Defensive scripts commonly lead to a
wide range of experiences or states of being such as narcissism, depression, perfectionism, aggres-
sion, violence, anxiety, addiction and social withdrawal, among others (Pattison 2000, 110–130).
In other words, chronic shame is frequently cloaked by other experiences, and as a result, its
presence and impact on lived experience are often underestimated or remain unacknowledged in
phenomenological accounts of affect and embodiment.

5. Living with shame as an ‘affective attunement’

When considering the experience of living with chronic shame, and how this may take on
a decidedly gendered nature, it is important to keep in mind that shame is not experienced
in the same manner by all subjects. In fact, the propensity to shame, and its consequences, is
very much dependent on one’s position within a social group. Shame, as Northrop remarks,
is “most often experienced by those who occupy positions lacking social authority, those
who find themselves in social situations where the parameters of shame are determined, not
by themselves, but by a more powerful other” (Northrop 2012, 128). Shame experienced
by members of subordinated groups is, in fact, different in nature from, and, in addition,
more pernicious than, the shame experienced by socially privileged or dominant individu-
als. Those wielding higher levels of social power are not only less likely to be susceptible to
shame, both acute and chronic, but are in a better position to inflict it on others. Cheshire
Calhoun notes, “the power to shame is likely to be concentrated in the hands of those whose
interpretations are socially authoritative” (Calhoun 2004, 143).

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Those with social power, who constitute and ratify the normative values which carve out
the parameters for shame within a social group, are certainly not immune to shame; however,
they are more likely to experience shame as an minor, and fleeting, disturbance. For these
socially powerful individuals, shame is more often acute, rather than chronic. Shame is a
“blip across the face of an otherwise undisturbed consciousness,” to use Bartky’s formulation
(Bartky 1990, 97). Ullaliina Lehtinen, commenting on Bartky’s account, calls this shame
of the “aristocrat’s kind”; she writes, “white European or North American, middle-class,
academically trained men. The only shame they themselves knew, had experienced, was (…)
a painful episode, a sudden unexpected change in the state of things, an occasion for moral
reaffirmation” (Lehtinen 1998, 63). Acute shame of this sort has didactic potential: One is
able to learn from one’s transgression and then adjust or regulate their behaviour accordingly.
As Bartky comments, the “experience of shame can be salutary for such a person because he is
not systematically impoverished by the moral economy he is compelled to inhabit” (Bartky
1990, 97). A typically socially privileged subject (usually characterized as white, Western,
educated, male in feminist accounts) does not experience the same affective landscape from
which hierarchies of race, class, sexuality and gender, for example, arise and are sustained.
The continuous recurrence of shame for women (along with other subordinated or margin-
alized groups) arises because of, but also perpetuates, their subordination.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential reflections on the role of emotions can be helpful here.
Sartre reflects on how emotions are not merely cognitive events, but instead are embodied
experiences that create a context or situation in which meaning, sense and one’s lived ex-
perience are shaped (see also Chapter 13 in this volume). As such, an emotion is an active
and embodied response to a situation and discloses not only the self, but, in addition, the
quality of one’s life-world. An emotion, such as anger, guilt, jealousy or shame, can evoke, as
Sartre argues, a “total alteration of the world” (Sartre 2002, 47). Consider, for example, the
jealousy experienced by the voyeur kneeling at the keyhole spying on his lover, in Sartre’s
well-known vignette from Being and Nothingness. Jealousy organizes his world, shaping his
actions, responses and experience within a particular situation. When the voyeur hears foot-
steps in the hallway behind him, he is overcome with shame, as he feels he has been caught
transgressing a social norm—that it is wrong to spy on strangers.
While this vignette is illustrative of an episode of acute shame, it also reveals the world-
organizing nature of emotion or affect. Jealousy, in this example, is not merely a cognitive
event that can be contemplated; instead, Sartre writes, “I am this jealousy; I do not know
it” (Sartre 2003, 283). The world constituted by jealousy is one of suspicion and anger. The
door and the keyhole that the voyeur encounters are not merely objective objects in a neutral
space, but a landscape of betrayal, obstacle and embittered curiosity. Jealousy not only colours
his intentional relation to the physical realm, but also shrinks his world and its concerns. The
voyeur’s preoccupations, attentions and desires spiral in a tight circle around his jealousy.
Sartre’s insights on the world-organizing nature of emotions provide a useful framework
through which we can articulate the affects and consequences of chronic shame, especially
when considering chronic shame’s link to social and political subordination, as Bartky pos-
tulates in the case of women’s experience. Shame becomes a “form of cultural politics”
that is “world making,” to quote Sara Ahmed (Ahmed 2004, 9, 12). Instead of a discrete
disturbance of an otherwise untroubled consciousness, living with chronic shame has pro-
found and on-going consequences for one’s subjectivity, both personally and politically. In
addition to shaping the contours of one’s world, shame becomes characteristic of one’s way
of being in the world. As the shame theorist and counsellor John Bradshaw writes, “When
internalized an emotion stops functioning in the manner of an emotion and becomes a

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characterological style … The person doesn’t have anger or melancholy, she is anger and
melancholy” (Bradshaw 1988, 10–11). Living with chronic shame means that shame comes
to colour most, if not all, situations, interactions and actions.
In these cases, even when shame is not felt directly, it is permanently anticipated as one’s
identity is spoiled in the first instance. Individuals who experience chronic shame are de-
scribed as “shame-bound,” “shame-prone” (Pattison 2000, 83), a “shame subjectivity”
(Berlant et al. 2008), and often experience “shame as a state of being” (Bradshaw 1988, vii).
Crucially, this frequently occurs as a result of a set of structural social relations that create
hierarchies of social worth, such as the gender inequalities that persist within traditionally
patriarchal societies.
Living with chronic shame can mean that one’s experience is characterized by “experi-
ences that induce a sense of persistent inferiority, worthlessness, (…) stigmatisation, unlove-
ablility and social exclusion” (Pattison 2000, 108). In short, the consequences of living with
chronic shame are far from trivial. As Lehtinen points out, the experiences arising from the
chronic shame of a socially subordinated individual “often breed a stagnant self-obsession,
they are unconstructive and self-destructive; and they function as confirmations of what the
agent knew all along—that he or she was a person of lesser worth” (Lehtinen 1998, 62).
Chronic shame can be profoundly disempowering and damaging affecting one’s global sense
of self and, as a result, the expression of one’s intentionality and agency in the world and
with others.
Living as a shame, subjectivity does not entail merely having internalized ideas about
one’s inferior social status. Instead, this inferiority is literally embodied. The hesitation and
withdrawal that characterize acute shame experiences become an enduring feature of one’s
body schema and this may result in a “(psychophysical) inferiority complex” (Weiss 1999,
27–28).5 One’s posture may become stooped, one’s motor actions subdued, one’s gestures
hesitant or faltering. Perpetually feeling oneself to be a person of lesser worth has concrete
consequences in terms of how one comports oneself and this, of course, has consequences
for one’s life chances. In general, the effect of chronic shame is negative, and sometimes
even “toxic” (Bradshaw 1988, 10–11). As a result, chronic shame is closely correlated with
depression, low self-esteem, suicide, anxiety, poor health, sexual assault, violence, bullying,
addiction and eating disorders. Furthermore, it has been posited that chronic shame has been
linked to a variety of mood disorders and pathologies such as alcoholism, anti-social person-
ality disorder, borderline personality, pathological narcissism, psychoanalytic neuroses and
social anxiety disorder (Bradshaw 1988).
Even if chronic shame doesn’t result in pathological states as serious as mood disorders
or in behaviours as damaging as addiction, in its on-going landscape of self-reference and
self-consciousness, chronic shame can lead to a psychic ‘binding’ which is not only emo-
tional but cognitive as well, and this is profoundly disempowering. Empirical research has
demonstrated that performance in cognitive tasks, such as mathematics, diminishes when
one is made to feel self-conscious or ashamed, especially when these experiences are centred
on the body and attention is directed to appearance management and fear of social judge-
ment (Fredrickson et al. 1998).
Beyond its significance for individual health and well-being, chronic shame has signifi-
cant social and political consequences. In fact, the sort of subjectivity that is constituted in
light of the experience of chronic shame is one that is politically and socially compromised,
leading to a state of profound disempowerment. It does not lead to the sort of “lucid” agent
of moral philosophy, who can supposedly clearly discern between right and wrong, and
exert agency in ethical and political contexts (Woodward 2000, 225). There is an extensive

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literature which links the systematic shaming of certain individuals to political strategies
of exclusion and marginalization, arguing that chronic forms of shame, which are induced
by certain societal power relations, play a key role in the establishment and sustaining of
social inequalities.6 Thus, also when considered as an aspect of social and political relations,
chronic shame can have serious consequences. The continuous binding effects of chronic
shame hinder empathy, responsibility and active political engagement, while encouraging
a toxic self-centredness and self-interest (cf. Locke 2016; Probyn 2005). As Pattison and his
colleagues write:

Shame (…) is a curiously premoral or amoral state in which the self is inwardly engaged
and preoccupied, paralysed either temporarily or permanently, and unable to engage
in taking responsibility and judgement for its own actions; a failed, defiled, unwanted
self cannot act as a responsive and responsible agent. Perhaps it is not surprising that a
shamed person often feels speechless—they fall out of the community of human dis-
course and responsibility.
(Sanders et al. 2011, 85)

In short, chronic has a largely negative and destructive potential, personally, socially and po-
litically. Chronic shame seems to lack the positive potential for moral edification and social
development that it is often discussed with relation to acute shame.

6. Conclusion
The attunement to body shame that women experience is so pervasive and indeterminate
that it is often beyond the reach of reflective consciousness. Women may not even realize that
they are experiencing shame, or the threat of shame, and that they are exerting inordinate
efforts to avoid shameful exposure. Instead, they become preoccupied with cultivating pride
which hinges on the other side of the emotional dialectic which accompanies the narcissistic
concern of the body as spectacle (Bartky 1990, 84). Or, if shame does, in fact, enter conscious
awareness, it is seen as a result of one’s own inadequacies and, in particular, as one’s own
fault. Personal efforts must be made in order to eliminate it. For women, chronic shame,
particularly shame that is centred on embodiment, can shrink one’s world, disrupting on-
going activities and life projects as the self turns attention inward on itself. This may resu lt in
compromising one’s confidence and ability to fully engage with others and with projects in
the world. Or perhaps it evokes an inhibited style of bodily movement, rendering one fragile,
insecure, timid and emotionally vulnerable. Or it may inhibit empathy or ethical concern for
others, as Pattison and his colleagues suggest.
However, as shame is such an integrated part of female identity and preying on this shame
such a central part of our cultural discourse and the machinations of neoliberal consumerism
(e.g., Jansen and Wehrle 2018), it is easily overlooked or ignored. There is an abiding cultural
reluctance to confront the pernicious and ubiquitous shame that infects women’s day-to-
day lived experience. It has become so thoroughly integrated into our social, cultural and
political landscape as to be rendered invisible. It is precisely for this reason that any account
of women’s shame must look not only at its phenomenology, or how it is experienced by the
subject, but also at the structures of shame that result in the fact it is often not experienced.
In its chronic form, shame is frequently anticipated but often not realized. In other words, a
subjectivity can be structured by shame, and the ongoing strategies to avoid shame, without
shame necessarily entering into conscious awareness or being an explicit part of the way

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one self-identifies one’s experience. When considering women and their embodiment, it is
evident that shame has the power to subtend all one’s experience and to form one’s world and
the consequences of this can be far-reaching.

Notes

References
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Bartky, Sandra Lee (1990). Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression.
London: Routledge.
Beauvoir, Simone de (2010). The Second Sex. London: Vintage.
Berlant, Lauren, Najafi, Sina, and Serlin, David (2008). The Broken Circuit: An Interview with
Lauren Berlant. Cabinet Magazine (Fall 2008).
Bordo, Susan (1993). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Bouson, J. Brooks (2009). Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writing.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Bradshaw, John (1988). Healing the Shame that Binds You. Deerfield Beach: Health Communications.
Brennan, Teresa (2004). The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
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Clough, Patricia T., and Halley, Jean (Eds.) (2007). The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham:
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Deyoung, Patricia A. (2015). Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Ap-
proach. London, New York: Routledge.
Dolezal, Luna (2015). The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body.
Lanham: Lexington.
Dolezal, Luna, and Lyons, Barry (2017). Health-Related Shame: An Affective Determinant of Health?
Medical Humanities 43(4), 257–263.
Fischer, Clara (2018). Gender and the Politics of Shame: A Twenty-First-Century Feminist Shame
Theory. Hypatia 33, 371–383.
Fisher, Linda, and Embree, Lester (2000). Feminist Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
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Gilbert, Paul (2002). Body Shame: A Biopsychological Conceptualisation and Overview, with
Treatment Implications. In: P. Gilbert, and J. Miles (Eds.). Body Shame: Conceptualisation, Research
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Gorton, Kristyn (2007). Theorizing Emotion and Affect: Feminist Engagements. Feminist Theory 8(3),
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Guenther, Lisa (2011). Shame and the Temporality of Social Life. Continental Philosophy Review 44,
23–39.
Harris-Perry, Melissa V. (2011). Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America.
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Hatzenbuehler, Mark L., and Pachankis, John E. (2016). Stigma and Minority Stress as Social
Determinants of Health Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth. Pediatric Clinics of
North America 63, 985–997.
Jansen, Julia, and Wehrle, Maren (2018). The Normal Body: Female Bodies in Changing Contexts of
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Embodiment. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 37–55.
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London, New York: Routledge.
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Lehtinen, Ullaliina (1998). How Does One Know What Shame Is? Epistemology, Emotions and
Forms of Life in Juxtaposition. Hypatia 13, 56–77.
Locke, Jill (2007). Shame and the Future of Feminism. Hypatia 22, 146–162.
——— (2016). Democracy and the Death of Shame: Political Equality and Social Disturbance. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Manion, Jennifer C. (2003). Girls Blush, Sometimes: Gender, Moral Agency and the Problem of
Shame. Hypatia 18, 21–41.
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ity and the Emotional Phenomenology of Gender. philoSOPHIA 6(2), 215–240.
Murphy, Julien (Ed.) (1999). Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre. University Park: The Pennsylvania
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Nathanson, Donald L. 1992. Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex and the Birth of the Self. New York: Norton.
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New York: Routledge.
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University Park: They Pennsylvania State University Press.
Pattison, Stephen (2000). Shame: Theory, Therapy, Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Probyn, Elspeth (2005). Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sanders, Karen, Pattison, Stephen, and Hurwitz, Brian (2011). Tracking Shame and Humiliation in
Accident and Emergency. Nursing Philosophy 12, 83–93.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (2002). Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. London: Routledge.
——— (2003). Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Routledge.
Scheff, Thomas J. (2004). Elias, Freud and Goffman: Shame as the Master Emotion. In: S. Loyal and S.
Quilley (Eds.). The Sociology of Norbert Elias. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weiss, Gail (1999). Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York, London: Routledge.
Widdows, Heather (2018). Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Woodward, Kathleen (2000). Traumatic Shame: Toni Morrison, Televisual Culture, and the Cultural
Politics of Emotions. Cultural Critique 46, 210–240.
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ment, Motility and Spatiality. Human Studies 3(2), 137–156.

Further reading
Heinämaa, Sara (2012). Sex, Gender and Embodiment. In: D. Zahavi (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook in
Contemporary Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 216–242.

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 28
EMBODIED INTERAFFECTIVITY
AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
Thomas Fuchs

1. Introduction
The question of how interpersonal empathy and mutual understanding may be achieved
on a preverbal level has dominated the debates in social cognition, social neuroscience and
social philosophy for over two decades. The prevailing view still rests on the assumption that
other minds are, in principle, hidden to us; hence, possible routes towards understanding can
only take the detour of relying on internal cognitive mechanisms such as a ‘theory of mind’,
‘mentalizing’ or ‘mindreading’, which allow to infer others’ states of mind. Regardless of
whether these mechanisms are described as akin to a scientific ‘theory’ or rather as a mental
‘simulation’ routine (Stich and Nichols 1992; Baron-Cohen 1995; Carruthers and Smith
1996), the general framework has mostly remained true to its origins in classical cognitivism
and representationalism. Empathy is considered either as mind-reading or as simulating oth-
ers’ mental states inside oneself. This paradigm is typically applied to emotions in general:
They are not regarded as embodied responses to meaningful situations, thus being perceiv-
able in the bodily expression and conduct of another person, but rather as internal cognitive
appraisals of environmental stimuli.
The phenomenological critique of the cognitivist position has rejected the internalist idea
that our emotional and intentional states are hidden to others, and that empathy or sympathy
may be conceived in analogy to a theory (Gallagher 2008; Zahavi 2008). Two alternative
concepts of social understanding have been put forward, the one on a phenomenological, the
other on an enactivist basis:

a According to the concept of direct perception, we are well able to immediately perceive
others’ intentions and emotions to a certain extent, on the one hand in their expressive
behaviour, and on the other hand in their visible intentions-in-action as being related to
a meaningful context (Gallagher 2008; Krueger 2018). Seeing another person cry, one
sees part of her sadness; seeing her running after a train, one sees her intention to reach
it, without a need for inference.
b According to interaction theory, social cognition is mainly based on social interactions
which induce, on a prereflective and preverbal level, a mutual bodily resonance and cor-
responding modification of emotional states. These felt changes brought about by the

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mutual engagement should enable a primary form of empathy without requiring any
representations (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007; Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009).

Accordingly, phenomenological and enactive approaches to sociality do not start from iso-
lated individuals and their respective inner states, but from the overarching phenomena of
intercorporeality and interaffectivity (Gallagher 2001; Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009; Froese and
Fuchs 2012; De Jaegher 2015). In particular, the concept of inter-bodily resonance implies the
idea that the emergent dynamics of interaction creates a shared affective experience rather
than transmitting internal states between individuals. On the other hand, such concepts raise
the difficult question of how it is possible to experience the shared feeling or atmosphere
arising from the interaction, while at the same time empathically perceiving the other’s
specific emotional state. In other words, emphasizing the interaffective component of social
encounters may risk losing the difference between empathic understanding and emotional
contagion or even fusion. To avoid this risk, I propose that bodily and affective resonance
should be conceived as a polarity of consonance and dissonance, which despite affective attune-
ment maintains the otherness of the other.
To elaborate the concept of embodied interaffectivity, in the following, I will introduce
(1) a general concept of embodied affectivity: It conceives emotions not as inner mental states,
but as encompassing spatial phenomena that connect the embodied subject and the situation
with its affective affordances in a dynamic interaction. (2) This leads to a concept of embodied
interaffectivity: In every face-to-face encounter, the partners’ lived bodies are intertwined in
a process of inter-bodily resonance which provides the basis for a primary, intuitive em-
pathic understanding. According to this concept, emotions in social encounters may not be
localized within the individual (let alone his or her brain), but should rather be conceived as
phenomena of a shared intercorporeal space in which the interaction partners are involved.
(3) The proposed concept will then be illustrated and deepened by an analysis of disturbances
of social resonance and empathy in psychopathology.

2. Embodied affectivity
The concept of embodied affectivity rejects the idea that emotions are only mental phenom-
ena, and that the world is bare of affective qualities. In fact, we do not live in a merely phys-
ical world; the experienced space is always charged with affective and expressive qualities.
We feel, for example, the hilarity of a party, the sadness of a funeral march, the icy climate
of a meeting or the uncanniness of a sombre wood at night. Emotions also emerge from
situations, persons and objects with their expressive, attractive or repulsive qualities. The
peculiar intentionality of emotions relates to what is particularly valuable and relevant for the
subject (see Solomon 1976; Frijda 1994; Scarantino and De Sousa 2018). In a sense, emotions
are ways of perceiving, namely attending to salient features of a situation, lending them a
significance and weight they would not have without the emotion. Referring to Gibson’s
(1979) concept of affordance, we may also speak of affective affordances: Objects or situations
appear to us as ‘important’, ‘worthwhile’, ‘attractive’, ‘unpleasant’, ‘disgusting’ and so on.
The way emotions disclose the affective qualities or affordances of a given situation is by
bodily resonance. This includes, on the one hand, all kinds of bodily sensations: feelings of
warmth or coldness, tickling or shivering, pain, tension or relaxation, constriction or expan-
sion, sinking, tumbling or lifting, etc. On the other hand, emotions involve bodily action
tendencies which are felt kinaesthetically, such as bowing, rising, receding, advancing, etc.
There is no emotion without at least slightest bodily sensations and movement tendencies.

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Being afraid, for instance, is not possible without feeling a bodily tension or trembling, a
beating of the heart or a shortness of breath, and a tendency to withdraw.1 It is through these
sensations that one is anxiously directed towards a frightening situation. Therefore, bodily
feelings and action tendencies should not be conceived as a mere by-product or add-on to the
emotion, but as the very medium of affective intentionality. As William James already pointed
out, the body is a “resonance body”, in which every emotion reverberates ( James 1884).2
This leads to an embodied and extended conception of emotions (see also Fuchs 2013a and
Chapter 26 in this volume): Emotions emerge as specific forms of a subject’s bodily directed-
ness towards the values and affective affordances of a given situation. They encompass subject
and situation and may not be localized in the interior of persons (be it their psyche or their
brain). Rather, the affected subject is engaged with an environment that has itself affective
qualities. For example, in shame, an embarrassing situation and the dismissive gazes of others
are experienced as a painful bodily affection, which is the way the subject feels the sudden
devaluation in others’ eyes. The emotion of shame is thus extended over the feeling person
and his body as well as the situation as a whole.
Emotions further imply two components of bodily resonance: (1) a centripetal or affective
component, i.e. being affected, ‘moved’ or ‘touched’ by an event through various forms of
bodily sensations (e.g., the blushing and burning of shame); and (2) a centrifugal or ‘emotive’
component, implying specific movement tendencies (e.g., hiding, avoiding the other’s gaze,
‘sinking into the floor’ from shame). Other tendencies are approach (desire, anger), avoid-
ance (fear), being-with (enjoyment, confidence), rejection (disgust), dominance (pride) or
submission (humility, resignation) (cf. Frijda 1986). In emotions, “we are moved to move
toward or against or away” (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 267).
Taken together, emotions may be regarded as circular interactions or feedback cycles between
the embodied subject and the current situation (cf. Figure 28.1): Being affected by the emo-
tional affordances or qualities of the situation (affection, impression) triggers a specific bodily
resonance which, in turn, influences the emotional perception of the situation and implies
a corresponding action readiness (e-motion, expression). Embodied affectivity consists in the
whole interactive cycle, which is crucially mediated by the resonance of the feeling body.
Bodily resonance thus acts as the medium of our affective engagement in a given situ-
ation. It imbues, taints and permeates the perception of this situation without necessarily

Figure 28.1 Embodied affectivity (adapted from Fuchs 2013a, 623)

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 Thomas Fuchs

stepping into the foreground. In Polanyi’s terms, bodily resonance is the proximal, and the
perceived situation is the distal component of affective intentionality, with the proximal or
tacit component usually receding from awareness in favour of the distal (Polanyi 1967). The
bodily resonance of the emotion becomes conscious only at a certain level of intensity.

3. Embodied interaffectivity
If we now turn to the social sphere, in particular to face-to-face encounters, then the cycle
of affection and emotion, or impression and expression, involves another person as a specific
affective affordance. Emotions thus become interactive phenomena which are not only felt from
the inside, but also displayed and visible in expression and behaviour, often as bodily tokens
or rudiments of action (Darwin 1872). The facial, gestural, vocal and postural expression of
an emotion is part of the bodily resonance that feeds back into the emotion itself, but also
induces processes of interaffectivity: One’s body is affected by the other’s expression, and one
experiences the kinetics and intensity of his emotions through one’s own bodily kinaesthesia
and sensation. Both partners’ body schemas and bodily feelings expand and incorporate the
other’s body. This creates a dynamic interplay which forms the basis of social understanding
and empathy, and which may also be described as “mutual incorporation” (Schmitz 1989;
Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009). Here, two cycles of embodied affectivity become intertwined,
thus continuously modifying each partner’s affective affordances and bodily resonance, as
illustrated in Figure 28.2.
Let us assume that A is a person whose emotion, e.g., anger, manifests itself in typical
bodily (facial, gestural, interoceptive, adrenergic, circulatory, etc.) changes. His body thus
functions as a felt ‘resonance board’ for his emotion: A feels the anger as the tension in his
face, as the sharpness of his voice, the arousal in his body, etc. These proprio- and intero-
ceptive feelings may be termed intra-bodily resonance. This resonance is an expression of the
emotion at the same time; that means, the anger becomes visible and is perceived as such by
A’s partner B. Moreover, the expression will also produce an impression, namely by triggering
corresponding or complementary bodily feelings in B. A’s sinister gaze, the sharpness of his
voice or expansive bodily movements might induce in B an unpleasant tension or even a jerk,
a tendency to withdraw, etc. Thus, B not only sees the anger immediately in A’s face and
gesture, but also senses it through his own intra-bodily resonance.
However, it does not stop here, for the impression and bodily reaction caused in B, in
turn, becomes an expression for A; it will immediately affect his bodily reaction, change
his expression, however slightly, and so forth. This creates a circular interplay of expres-
sions, impressions and reactions running in split seconds and constantly modifying each
partner’s bodily state, in a process that becomes highly autonomous and is not controlled by

Figure 28.2 Inter-bodily resonance (Froese and Fuchs 2012)

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 Embodied interaffectivity and psychopathology

the partners. They have become parts of a dynamic sensorimotor and interaffective system
that connects both bodies by reciprocal movements and reactions, that means, in inter-bodily
resonance. Of course, the signals and reactions involved proceed far too quickly to stand out
discretely and become conscious. Instead, both partners will experience a specific feeling of
being bodily connected with the other: Based on its sensorimotor body schema, each lived
body reaches out, as it were, to be extended by the other in a mutual incorporation. This is
accompanied by a specific impression of the interaction partner and, at the same time, by a
holistic feeling for the encompassing atmosphere of the shared situation.3
Importantly, as the example shows, this inter-bodily resonance and the resulting atmo-
sphere are, by no means, restricted to ‘harmonious’ social situations—interpersonal conflicts
may create most intense forms of mutual resonance and atmospheric tensions. In other words,
resonance takes place on a range between consonance and dissonance. The resulting interper-
sonal atmosphere (e.g., ‘pleasant’ versus ‘tense’) mirrors the different interaction dynam-
ics. This leads to a further clarification: The neurobiological support of simulation theory
through the discovery of the mirror neuron system (Gallese and Goldman 1998; Gallese
2005) has often led to the assumption that empathic understanding is only based on mimetic
bodily tendencies, such as subliminally imitating another’s smile or his painfully distorted
facial expression. However, in order to recognize and feel the anger in another’s face, we
certainly do not have to experience or simulate anger ourselves. Our primary reaction would
be rather oppositional than concordant; that means, we would feel tense, frightened and tend
to withdraw. Hence, inter-bodily resonance may include both mimetic and complementary
or antagonistic dynamics. This offers a serious objection to concepts of embodied simulation
(Gallese 2005; Gallese and Sinigaglia 2011).
Moreover, even in consonant or harmonious interactions, there is never a complete at-
tunement or in-phase mutual behaviour. Apart from situations of emotional fusion (as in
joint mass emotions such as panic or enthusiasm), the other’s body always offers at least
some resistance to perfect attunement, usually resulting in sequences of ‘matching’ and
‘mismatching’ episodes. This has also been shown by infant research: Even in harmonious
playing interactions, infants and mothers match their affects only 30% of the time; the typical
micro-interaction patterns consist in repeated sequences of matches, mismatches and ‘repairs’
(Tronick and Cohn 1989; Beebe et al. 1992). Similarly, in adult interactions, the observable
coordination of movements and reactions never reaches a state of perfect synchronization
(Tschacher et al. 2014). Even in a well-trained dancing couple, the other’s body offers a min-
ute resistance and unpredictability, which ensures that the dance still remains an interaction.
This lack of complete congruence in interaffectivity is crucial for the distinction of self and
other, which is maintained despite mutual incorporation. Out-of-phase movements, slight
misunderstandings and irritations are necessary as the dialectical counterparts of mutual em-
pathy, should it not turn into a fusion where the other is no longer perceived as other. Thus,
the behaviours and experiences of two interactants, by no means, always resemble or match
each other completely. Nevertheless, their resonant dynamics is jointly created and cannot
be broken down to individual behaviour. Each of them behaves and experiences differently
from how they would do outside of the process, which thus gains an emergent autonomy (De
Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007; Mühlhoff 2015).
No mental representation of other minds is necessary for this process. There is no dualistic
separation between the inner and the outer at all, as if a hidden mental state in A produced
certain external signs, which B would have to decipher. A’s anger may not be separated from
its bodily resonance and expression; conversely, B does not perceive A as a mere object but
as a living and expressive body that he is in contact with. Instead of a hidden inside, there

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is an ongoing mutual transition between expression and impression, or between centrifugal

emotion and centripetal affection. The other shows himself to me through his bodily ap-
pearance and conduct. This expressivity is concentrated in the gaze: The other is for me not
somewhere ‘behind’ his gaze, but he is visible in it. What is more, I experience his gaze as
being seen by him, or in other words, I see him seeing me (as seeing him). There is a circularity or
reflexivity involved which does not allow to clearly separate inside and outside; the gaze itself
is perceived as intentional or ‘minded’.
Nor is an inner or bodily simulation required for the process of mutual empathic
understanding—all the more since it often happens, as we have seen, without mimetic reso-
nance at all. Bodily sensations, tensions and movement tendencies, which arise in the inter-
action, do not serve as a separate simulation of the other person, but are fed into the holistic
perception of the other. Using Polanyi’s terms once more, one’s own bodily resonance may
be regarded as the proximal component of empathic perception, which recedes from aware-
ness in favour of the distal, namely the other’s perceived body. Bodily resonance does not
simulate, but mediate the perception of the other. Hence, direct perception in interpersonal
encounters is a “mediated immediacy” (to use Hegel’s term), based on the lived body.
A frequent objection to such an embodied account refers to the fact that humans are able
to control their emotional expressions, that means, to withhold, suppress or feign emotions
to a certain extent (for example, when lying, cheating, playacting, in poker games, etc.).
This seems to show that the expression of an emotion is different from the emotion itself.
However, while the phenomena themselves are undeniable, the conclusion that emotions are
actually inner, disembodied states is not justified, for at least two reasons:
First, the control of one’s emotional bodily resonance is restricted to the movement of
the voluntary muscles, whereas the reaction of the autonomous nervous system and the
kinaesthetic tendencies of the body remain largely outside of control. This may be demon-
strated by measuring heart rate, skin conductance (as with a lie detector), muscle tonus, etc.,
during concealed emotional states. Moreover, the suppression of an emerging emotion is
enabled through increased muscle tension (hardening one’s face, jaw clenching, stiff posture,
etc.), which demonstrates that the emotion in question already leads to kinaesthetic tenden-
cies that are suppressed. Hence, emotions are always embodied states, even though we can
restrict their expression to a certain extent.
Secondly, even artificial or pretended emotional expressions have a tendency to evoke the
corresponding emotion in the individual, as embodiment research has repeatedly demon-
strated (Niedenthal et al. 2005; Niedenthal 2007). Moreover, the effect of playacting on the
audience depends precisely on primary interaffectivity: If we would not normally perceive
others’ expressions as their emotional states, we couldn’t be easily deceived either. Hence,
even though we cannot be sure that a perceived emotion is actually what the other person
feels, spontaneous bodily resonance remains the default mode of non-verbal understanding.
Our analysis thus confirms Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a primary intercorporeality: “It is
through my body that I understand other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive
‘things’” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 216).

4. Psychopathology of interaffectivity
The concept of embodied interaffectivity may be usefully applied to several psychopathologi-
cal phenomena, where the described structure of intercorporeality and empathy is disturbed.
This refers mainly to a lack or loss of bodily resonance and emotional perception, as it is
found, for instance, in depression, autism, schizophrenia or certain neurological disorders.

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4.1 Neurological disorders

Individuals whose facial expression is disturbed, whether congenital as in Möbius Syndrome,
by an acquired facial paralysis or by Parkinson’s disease, often report diminished emotional
experience (Krueger and Michael 2012). They may complain, for example, about an im-
paired sense of joy or humour, since their smiling is inhibited, and about an embarrassing
lack of emotional communication with others. This points to the crucial importance of fa-
cial sensorimotor feedback for the full experience of an emotion as well as for interaffective
resonance: If the external expressive profile of emotions is missing, this frequently leads to
experiences of social rejection or exclusion (Bogart 2015).

4.2 Depression
A more encompassing loss of bodily resonance is characteristic for severe depression. Here,
the lived body loses the lightness, fluidity and mobility of a medium and turns into a heavy,
solid body, which puts up resistance to all intentions and impulses directed towards the world
(Fuchs 2013b). This may also be characterized by a general constriction and rigidity of the body,
leading not only to felt oppression and anxiety but, more subtly, to a loss of the inter-bodily
resonance in social encounters. The depressive body lacks expression and offers only min-
imal clues for the other’s empathic perception. The continuous synchronization of bodily
gestures and gazes which normally accompany interaction (Tschacher et al. 2014) breaks
down. Moreover, the patients’ own mimetic perception and resonance with the other’s body
is lacking (Persad and Polivy 1993; Csukly et al. 2009; Bourke et al. 2010). Thus, they feel
unable to emotionally communicate their experience and try in vain to compensate for the
loss of resonance by stereotyped repetition of their complaints.
The deeper the depression, the more the affective qualities and atmospheres of the en-
vironment fade. The patients are no longer capable of being moved and affected by things,
situations or other persons. They complain of a painful apathy, a ‘feeling of not feeling’ and of
not being able to sympathize with their relatives any more. In his autobiographical account,
Solomon describes his depression as “a loss of feeling, a numbness, [which] had infected all
my human relations. I didn’t care about love; about my work; about family; about friends”
(Solomon 2001, 45). This emotional numbing may finally lead to affective depersonalization:
The patients feel disconnected from the world; they lose their participation in the interaf-
fective space that we normally share with others (Fuchs 2005; 2013b, Ratcliffe 2014, 218ff.).

4.3 Autism
Until recently, social difficulties in autism or autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) were mainly
thought to arise from a dysfunctional theory of mind, rendering the individual unable to attri-
bute mental states to others in order to interpret their behaviour (Frith 1989; Baron-Cohen
1995). However, this cognitivist approach is increasingly questioned. In contrast, phenom-
enological accounts locate the main problem in a fundamental disturbance of embodied
interaffectivity, namely in a lack of perceiving others’ expressions, gestures and voicings in
terms of affective affordances (De Jaegher 2013; Fuchs 2015). From early childhood onwards,
affected individuals fail to spontaneously perceive a smile as a smile, an angry expression
as anger, or a sad face as showing sadness. They are blind or non-sensitive to what infant re-
searcher Daniel Stern (1985) has termed “vitality affects”, i.e., the intermodal qualities and
dynamics of facial, gestural and vocal expressions, which their caregivers exhibit, and which

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for neurotypical children convey a sense of the other’s emotion. This account is supported by
the fact that many autistic symptoms such as lack of emotional contact, anxiety or agitation
are already present in the first years of life, i.e. long before the supposed age of 4–5 years to
acquire a theory of mind.
Furthermore, while imitation and co-movement serve as a major instrument for early
affect attunement and primary empathy, several studies have found that children with ASD
do not readily imitate the actions of others (Smith and Bryson 1994; Hobson and Lee 1999).
As a result, there is a lack of the kinaesthetic empathy that normally mediates the affective
perception of the other. The feedback cycles of mutual incorporation are not achieved;
instead, for children with autism, the others remain rather mysterious, detached objects
whose behaviour is troublesome to predict. They prefer to attend to inanimate objects over
other humans, tend to avoid direct gaze and withdraw from emotionally overburdening
contacts (Klin et al. 2003; Jones et al. 2008). Correspondingly, eye tracking studies have
shown that children with autism focus on inanimate and irrelevant details of interactive
situations while missing the relevant social cues, e.g., neglecting the eyes and mouths of
protagonists (Klin et al. 2002). In other words, the salience of social stimuli is reduced,
because these are particularly bound to the resonant perception of expressive gestures which
is lacking in autism.
It is the disturbance of primary empathy which also compromises the later development
of higher-order capacities such as perspective-taking and language acquisition. For these are
based on a primary sense of ‘being-like-others’ that is subsequently extended by relating to a
shared context, such as in social referencing or joint attention, and finally, by understanding
others as mental agents like oneself. However, if the ‘like-me’ experience is already missing
in primary bodily encounters, the development of more abstract mentalizing capacities will
be seriously retarded or even remain impossible. Hence, what these children primarily lack
is not a theoretical concept of other minds, but the direct perception enabled by bodily res-
onance (Klin et al. 2003; Gallagher 2004; De Jaegher 2013).
Strategies of explicit mentalizing and inferring from social cues are rather employed by
high-functioning autistic individuals as a compensation for the lacking capacities of primary
intersubjectivity. Thus, Temple Grandin, a woman with ASD, described her problems with
interpersonal relations to Oliver Sacks as follows:

It has to do, she has inferred, with an implicit knowledge of social conventions and
codes, of cultural presuppositions of every sort. This implicit knowledge, which every
normal person accumulates and generates throughout life on the basis of experience and
encounters with others, Temple seems to be largely devoid of. Lacking it, she has instead
to “compute” others’ intentions and states of mind, to try to make algorithmic, explicit,
what for the rest of us is second nature.
(Sacks 1995, 270)

These compensatory strategies enable functional interactions with others to a certain degree,
but fail to establish the primary sense of being-with-others which is normally provided im-
plicitly by intercorporeality, as a kind of “magical communication”:

She is now aware of the existence of these social signals. She can infer them, she says,
but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication
directly, or conceive the many-levelled kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it. Knowing
this intellectually, she does her best to compensate, bringing immense intellectual effort

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and computational power to bear on matters that others understand with unthinking
ease. This is why she often feels excluded, an alien.
(ibid., 272)

As we can see from Grandin’s report, a lacking social sense as normally conveyed by bodily
resonance cannot be substituted by explicit inference or rule-based knowledge about others’
behaviour.

4.4 Schizophrenia
A severe disturbance of interaffectivity is also found in schizophrenia spectrum disorders,
which, from a phenomenological point of view, may be regarded as fundamental distur-
bances of the embodied self, or as a disembodiment. This includes a weakening of the basic
sense of self, a disruption of implicit bodily functioning, and a disconnection from the in-
tercorporeality with others (Parnas 2003; Sass and Parnas 2003; Fuchs 2005; Fuchs and
Röhricht 2017). If the embodied engagement in the world is disturbed, it will result in a
fundamental alienation of intersubjectivity: The basic sense of being-with-others is replaced
by a sense of detachment.
Hence, schizophrenic patients have been found to lack primary or bodily empathy: They
have problems with understanding facial and gestural expressions of others (Kington et al.
2000; Edwards et al. 2002; Amminger et al. 2012). Like individuals with ASD, they tend to
experience other’s bodies as less animated and rather like objects. Moreover, patients often
show a lack of implicit understanding of social situations, manifesting itself in a subtle “loss
of natural self-evidence”, as Blankenburg (1971) has described it; they are unable to grasp the
natural, everyday meanings of the shared life world. This alienation may sometimes even
date back to the patient’s childhood:

When a child, I used to watch my little cousin in order to understand when it was the
right moment to laugh or how they managed to act without thinking of it before (…) It
is since I was a child that I try to understand how the others function, and I am therefore
forced to play the little anthropologist.
(Stanghellini 2004, 115)
I don’t really grasp what others are up to (…) I constantly observe myself while I am
together with people, trying to find out what I should say or do. It’s easier when I am
alone or watching TV.
(Quote from one of my own patients)

Thus, the behaviour of others comes to be observed from a distant or third-person point of
view, instead of entering second-person embodied interactions. Interpersonal relationships
have then to be managed by deliberate efforts, leading to constant stress in complex social
situations and finally to autistic withdrawal.
This alienation can also be felt when interacting with the patient, leading to what has
been termed praecox feeling by the Dutch psychiatrist Rümke (1941) (derived from the former
term dementia praecox for schizophrenia). It means an interpersonal atmosphere of unnatural-
ness, characterized by a lack of mutuality, responsivity, or attunement:

Often the praecox feeling is felt even before one has spoken to the patient; the con-
dition is recognized by mere observation of body-posture, facial expression, motor

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behaviour—the whole of the patient’s expressivity. It is intuitively felt that all these
are disturbed, i.e., changed with respect to the norm. Motor behaviour is stiff, bizarre,
ceremonious; there are tic-like movements and the queerness of the smile is beyond
description—the famous empty smile.
(Rümke 1941, 337)

In the encounter, the patient’s bodily movements and expressions seem stiff, often bizarre
or ceremonious; they are not integrated to form a harmonious whole. Moreover, the emo-
tional expressions and verbal utterances do not seem to correspond to each other or to the
context—a feature termed parathymia. When Rümke speaks of the “queerness” of the smile,
he means not only unusual kinematic features such as stiffness and rigidity, but also a lack of
appropriateness to the social context. The patients’ psychomotor movements are not

geared towards the establishment of human contact; we miss the contact-directed ex-
pressions found in normal people, and, at the same time, we are struck by the desperate
attempts undertaken by the schizophrenic to re-establish contact.
(ibid., 338)

Rümke’s description has been confirmed in recent studies on the diagnostic significance
and reliability of the praecox feeling (Grube 2006; Pallagrosi and Fonzi 2018). It may be
regarded as a further illustration of the concept of embodied interaffectivity: The psychia-
trist’s impression corresponds not only to the patient’s expression, but also to the experiential
disembodiment of persons with schizophrenia.

5. Conclusion
I have outlined a concept of primary intersubjectivity that is based on embodied affectivity
and interaffectivity. It conceives emotions not as inner mental states, which have to be deci-
phered or inferred from external cues, but as expressive, dynamic forces, which affect indi-
viduals through bodily resonance and connect them with each other in circular interactions.
In face-to-face encounters, each partner’s lived body reaches towards the other to form an
overarching system of inter-bodily resonance and mutual incorporation. According to this
concept, social understanding is primarily based on intercorporeality; it emerges from the
interactive practice and coordination of embodied agents. We do not need to form internal
models or representations of others in order to understand and communicate with them; as
bodily subjects, we are always already involved in a shared affective and expressive space.
Psychopathological conditions in which bodily resonance is disturbed in various ways can
illustrate ex negativo the intercorporeal basis of normal encounters.
To be sure, this embodied and enactive concept does not exhaust the possibilities of
empathic understanding. On the basis of primary bodily empathy, we are also able to ex-
plicitly represent or to imagine the other’s situation. This happens in particular when their
behaviour seems ambiguous or when an irritation or misunderstanding occurs. Through
additional information and inference, we can then try to enhance our understanding, infer
possible hidden intentions and in this way often deepen our empathy (Fuchs 2017). A further
possibility is to transpose oneself into the other’s situation, take his perspective and imagine
how one would feel or react in his place.
Such higher-level capacities of understanding others complement the spontaneous in-
teraffectivity of bodily resonance and direct perception. Though they correspond to the

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notions of ‘theory of mind’ or ‘mind-reading’ to a certain extent, these terms presuppose an

inferential approach to others’ supposedly hidden minds as the standard mode of intersubjec-
tivity. Yet, the need for such an approach arises mainly in situations in which intercorporeal
communication becomes ambiguous or restricted, such as in poker games, or when it is miss-
ing completely, as in written exchange. In most cases, sophisticated or even detective-like
cognitive capacities are neither necessary nor sufficient to enable empathic intersubjective
relations. Despite those options for extended understanding, our everyday social encounters
remain based on embodied intersubjectivity.

Notes

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 29
ART AND EMOTION
Noël Carroll

The arts have been associated with the emotions for millennia. In the 5th century BCE,
the Greek philosopher Plato linked poetry to the arousal of emotion, while in the Hindu
tradition, Bharata in his Natya Shastra (Bharata 1987) made comparable claims for theater
between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE. Nor is the association only an ancient
one. In the 18th century, the philosopher Jean-Baptiste Dubos argued that the function of art
was to elicit the emotions as a means of warding boredom (Dubos 1748).
Although the relation of art to the emotions is often discussed in terms of the arousal of
the emotions in audiences, the relation of emotion to the artist is also a subject of philosophi-
cal attention, often in terms of the notion of expression. Thus, in this essay, we will examine
the relation of art to the emotions first in terms of the arousal of the emotions and then in
terms of the expression of emotion. We will further subdivide the section on the arousal of
emotion into two parts: the arousal of the everyday or common or “garden variety” emo-
tions, like anger and sadness, and the arousal of art-specific emotions. Likewise, the topic
of the expression of the emotions will be divided into two parts: the expression of emotion
proper and the projection of expressive or emotively charged properties.

1. The arousal of common emotions

Artworks engender a wide variety of emotions that are also common in everyday life. We
are angered by the injustice suffered by fictional characters in stories as we are by the tribu-
lations of actual oppressed peoples. We feel joy viewing pictures of people triumphing over
the odds just as we do when witnessing it in the flesh. One of the earliest, if not the earliest,
philosophical discussion of this phenomena in the Western tradition can be found in Books
2 and 3 of Plato’s Republic (Plato 1961).
At that point in his discussion of the ideal state, Plato is concerned with the education of
the future rulers of that state whom he called Guardians. Plato was especially concerned with
the way in which literature, like the poetry of Homer, would influence the emotions of these
impressionable youths. To this end, Plato developed the first theory of the impact of the arts
on the emotions. It was a theory, based on the idea of emotional identification, that continues
to live on today in views about the relation of art, especially popular art, to the emotions.

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 Noël Carroll

Greek students learned to read by reading aloud from classic texts such as those of Homer,
who was called “the educator of the Greeks.” In reading his epics aloud, they would recite
the dialogue spoken by the characters in the stories. This is what Plato meant by mimesis.
Plato disapproved of mimesis because he feared that in voicing the feelings of Homer’s char-
acters, the prospective Guardians would become infected by various undesirable emotions.
For example, in the Iliad, Achilles laments to Odysseus that he is dead and doomed for
eternity to dwell in Hades. Plato does not want the Guardians to speak Achilles’ self-pitying
lines. For among their future roles, Plato’s Guardians are to be warriors. Consequently, Plato
does not want them to become accustomed to self-pitying declarations especially with re-
spect to death for that, Plato worries, would undermine their martial ardor. Plato fears that
in reciting speeches that express the fear of death, the Guardians will think that the fear of
death is an appropriate emotion and that this will compromise their commitment to dying
for their country.
Likewise, Plato did not want the Guardians to recite speeches in which the gods express
their envy for each other and engage in angry disputes because Plato thought that this would
abet in internecine conflict, rivalry, and civil war among the Guardians when they matured
and took on their civic responsibilities. Plato feared that if his students spoke the lies of the
gods and heroes, like wily Odysseus, they would become liars themselves to the detriment of
the commonwealth. In short, Plato felt that the Guardians would identify with the unsavory
emotions they encountered in their readers and for that reason he maintained that the poets
should be censored.
Undoubtedly, Plato’s sentiments continue to influence contemporary thinking about the
arts in the form of demands for the regulation and even censorship of violent media. Ironi-
cally, however, where contemporary censors worry that the media will encourage aggressive
tendencies, Plato feared that certain literature would inhibit the warlike temperament of his
Guardians.
Nevertheless, despite their different aims, Plato and present-day censors presuppose that
the same mechanism is in operation in the process of molding the dispositions of audiences.
That mechanism is identification, understood as the taking on by audiences of the self-same
emotions as the characters in the stories that they read, hear, or watch because that is what
the characters feel. Achilles feels anger toward Agamemnon; we too feel anger. The lovers
feel joy when they are reunited in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and we feel joy because they
feel joy. For Plato, identification took place as a result of reading certain emotively charged
lines aloud; however, the notion of audience identification still holds sway in the era of silent
reading. Indeed, identification is probably the most popular view of our emotional engage-
ment with art today, held by experts and lay folk alike.
But, despite its popularity, there are a number of empirical problems with the notion of
identification as a general account of our emotional engagement with art and there are also
certain logical or conceptual problems with its putative intelligibility.
The first empirical problem can be called the emotional asymmetry problem. Quite frequently,
our emotions are not the same as those of the characters with whom we are allegedly iden-
tifying. As calamity befalls Oedipus in the play of the same name, we feel pity toward him,
but he is feeling remorse for killing his father and guilt for having slept with his mother.
Similarly, the character in a thriller movie may be heedlessly on her way home, while we
are gripped by suspense because we know that kidnappers are lying in wait there to ambush
her. So, often our response to the characters in stories diverges from their emotional states
because we know more than they do. However, it can also be the case that we know less than

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they do and that this too results in our suffering asymmetric emotions. Sherlock Holmes,
knowing more than we do, is calm, while we excitedly wonder who has done it.
In any event, it should be clear that very often the audience’s emotional state does not
match the emotional states of the characters in the stories we consume. Therefore, identifi-
cation cannot offer a general account of our emotional engagement with narratives or even
of pictures of events and states of affairs.
Of course, sometimes the character and the audience may be in roughly the same emo-
tional state. As the giant shark crashes into the hero’s boat, the hero is terrified and so am I.
Nevertheless, I submit that this is not best explained by means of identification because my
state of terror is not the result of my identifying with the emotional state of the hero, but,
instead, of my being moved coincidentally by attending to the same frightening stimulus
to which the hero is attending. The hero is staring into the shark’s maw and is scared; I too
attend to the rows of razor sharp teeth and recoil. But I am not frightened because the hero
is frightened. I am frightened because of my own apprehension of the danger in the fic-
tional situation as I consider it imaginatively. There is no need, so to speak, to route my fear
through the mental state of the hero. I am frightened as a result of my own attention to the
fictional situation. Consequently, even in cases where the character and the audience appear
to be in the same emotional state, identification may not be the right explanation. Indeed, it
may add an extra step to the process. Thus, once again we see that identification is not a gen-
eral account of our emotional engagement with art. Call this the problem of coincident emotions.
Added to these empirical problems with the notion of identification, there are also con-
ceptual problems. Very often—if not most often—the objects of the emotional states of
the characters in fictions are different from the objects of the emotional states of the audi-
ence. Emotions have intentionality; they are directed at particular objects, such as fictional
characters.
We feel pity for Anna Karenina because her husband has forbidden her to visit her son.
The object of Anna’s sadness is her separation from her son. Her sadness is directed at her
son. But our pity is not directed toward either her son or our own sons. It is directed toward
Anna, a woman who has been exiled from her child. The object of the audience’s emotion
and the object of the character’s emotional state differ ontologically and, since they are not
identical, what is going on in this case cannot be described as identification, even though
cases like this are often proposed as evidence of identification. Of course, our pity for Anna’s
plight and her sadness have, in a manner of speaking, a similar affective tone. They are both
dysphoric emotional states. But they are different dysphoric emotional states.
The notion of identification also involves logical problems insofar as it can lead to anom-
alies. For instance, characters in fictions are often in love. Romeo loves Juliet. If we are
identifying with Romeo, then, I suppose, we should also love Juliet. But if that were so,
wouldn’t we be jealous of Romeo since Juliet loves him and not me? Yet, does this ever
occur and, if it did, wouldn’t we regard any audience member who was jealous of Romeo to
be deranged? Surely, what we feel toward Romeo is a species of affectively charged alliance,
a pro-attitude which disposes us to desire that Romeo’s desire be fulfilled. When they are
not, we feel distress on Romeo’s behalf. But distress is not love, which is what the theory of
identification should predict.
One last problem with identification is perhaps the most obvious. Identification cannot
provide us with a comprehensive account of our emotional involvement with art because
a great deal of our emotional involvement with art is aroused by factors that have nothing
to do with characters. We are aroused in response to art by such things as depictions of the

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landscape, the atmosphere, the climate, the architecture, the clothing, the flora and fauna of
the environment, including the soundscape, and, needless to say, by the artist’s style whether
it be her vocabulary and prosody with respect to literature or her orchestration with respect
to music.
Given the various problems that challenge the theory of identification, an alternative
account of the arousal of audience emotion in response to art needs to be explored. The
most developed alternative in this regard can be called “the theory of criterial prefocusing”
(Carroll 2001).
The theory of criterial prefocusing presupposes that the emotions are processes that in-
volve mental states that cause internal bodily states of the sorts that typically predispose
certain behavioral inclinations to act. In particular, the emotions comprise evaluative mental
states that appraise our circumstances in light of whether those circumstances are likely to
advance or imperil our vital interests. Fear assesses a present situation as dangerous, that alerts
us in a bodily fashion by quickening our pulse physiologically and/or sending a chill down
our spine phenomenologically. And once this bodily alarm is sounded, we ready ourselves to
flee, freeze, or fight. The emotions are psychophysical mechanisms that we use to assimilate
our environment. They are fast mechanisms for sizing up the situation—fast, that is, in com-
parison with deliberation and reasoning.
In the current psychological and philosophical literatures, there is some debate about
whether our emotive appraisals are cognitive (Lyons 1980) versus thoroughly affective
(Robinson 2005). This is sometimes framed as a matter of whether the emotions can be
initiated in the frontal cortex or whether they are primarily an affair of the amygdala.
I believe that the emotions can be caused cognitively even if usually they are more often
than not more perception-like, immediate non-cognitive reactions. With regard to the arts,
some emotional responses are more cognitively laden as in the case of literature, which
must not only be read, but which must be processed imaginatively and understood. On the
other hand, being comically amused by a grotesque caricature may involve a much more
perception-like, immediate response.
However, with respect to the theory of criterial prefocusing, the debate over whether
emotive appraisals are primarily cognitive or affective is less important than the fact that
they are appraisals—appraisals of the environment in light of our vital interests. An offer
of food when we are hungry is appraised as a contribution to our well-being and is greeted
with a feeling of gratitude. The approach of an angry, large dog is assessed as dangerous and
engenders fear.
The emotions are selective—they organize the environment in light of what will help
or hinder us. They appraise our surroundings or elements thereof either positively or nega-
tively. Moreover, insofar as they are evaluative, they are governed by criteria. They size up
situations against certain standards of evaluation. Anger appraises circumstances as unjust;
fear assesses situations as dangerous. In other words, the emotions have criteria of appropri-
ateness (see also Chapter 24 in this volume). To be the particular object of an emotional state,
the object must meet the criterion of that state. To be the object of my envy, for example,
another person must be perceived to possess something that I lack—for example, a bigger
bank account.
In everyday life, the emotions function like searchlights, scanning the surround in order
to select features of the situation that will advance or setback our interests and when the
emotions appraise items one way or the other, they rivet our attention on the relevant fea-
tures of our circumstances. The emotions focus our attention, directing us to what we are
to attend to in our environment and to how we are to evaluate it. And once the emotions

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fix our attention on the particular object that has excited our affective state, the presiding
emotion surveys the scene for other elements that may be pertinent to that state. Awakened
by a loud noise downstairs, our fear encourages us to search for further possible signs of the
presence of intruders.
However, our emotions are engaged very differently when it comes to the arts. With
respect to the arts, the artwork itself has already been structured in such a way that pertinent
emotional features in the scene have already been foregrounded or made salient. For ex-
ample, in a novel, certain emotional themes—such as danger or injustice—have been made
to stand out. Or, in a painting, the poverty of its subjects is emphasized in order to elicit
sympathy.
With representational artworks, the artist literally controls our attention insofar as we can
only attend to what she chooses to describe, or depict, or imply, and furthermore, we can
only attend to that in light of how she has described or depicted them. So, whereas in our
everyday experiences, our emotions filter situations for us, in art, scenes and sequences have
been pre-digested or pre-filtered for us by the work of the artist. The artist structures the art-
work in such a way that it guides our attention almost irresistibly to the elements of the scene
that call for the emotional response that the artist has already cued by selecting and making
prominent an object appropriate to the emotional response the artist intends to elicit.
Imagine that you are making a horror film about rampaging zombies. You will design
the zombies’ make-up with an eye toward provoking certain preordained affective responses
by bringing to the viewer’s attention features of the relevant characters that are criterially
appropriate to the desired emotional state. Where the characters are zombies, you will depict
their suppurating bodies in terms of decay and incompleteness in order to arouse disgust in
the viewers by focusing their attention unavoidably upon these features, thereby securing a
central component of the emotion of horror, namely disgust.
The process just outlined is criterial prefocusing. It is a process of prefocusing, since the
relevant characters have been artfully articulated by prominently emphasizing certain as-
pects of the characters that are pertinent to the emotion the moviemaker intends to arouse.
This prefocusing, in turn, is criterial because the objects, events, and characters and their
properties that have been selected and made salient for attention are those that are appropri-
ate to the intended emotion. That is, the features foregrounded satisfy the criteria of appraisal
appropriate to that emotion-type.
In our example of the zombie movie, the themes of impurity and incompleteness meet
the criteria for assessing a human body as disgusting. Thus, in order to arouse the feeling of
disgust in the viewer, the film director will depict the sequences of relentlessly encroaching
zombie bodies as impure and incomplete in a way that viewers cannot avoid seeing save by
closing their eyes or leaving the theater.
Likewise, suspense is an emotion that involves presenting a situation in which an un-
wanted outcome seems likely to obtain—for example, that a progressively lowering, ax-
pendulum seems destined slice its bound victim below in half. In order to arouse suspense,
an author must criterially prefocus the helplessness of the victim and the implacability of the
descending mechanism.
With respect to painting, if the artist wishes to arouse the feeling of sublimity in the spec-
tator, she should criterially prefocus aspects of immense scale and limitlessness in the pic-
torial array. Much music is accompanied by songs where the lyrics criterially prefocus the
elements pertinent to the presiding emotion.
Absolute or pure music—pure orchestral music—raises some theoretical problems for
theories of the arousal of the common emotions in the arts since music without words or a

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program does not appear to refer to the kinds of persons, events, states of affairs, and places
that arouse to the common emotions. This is an issue to which we will return in the last
section of this article on the projection of expressive properties. Nevertheless, with the ex-
ception of the controversial case of music without words or program, the theory of criterial
prefocusing provides a serviceable general theory for the discussion of the arousal of the
common, everyday, or “garden variety” emotions in (most) of the arts.

2. The arousal of art-specific emotions

So far, we have been discussing the arousal of common emotions—such as sorrow, pity, fear,
joy, etc.—by artworks. However, some philosophers of art have denied the relevance of such
emotions to the proper appreciation of art and have instead maintained that there is a specific
emotion, an aesthetic emotion, that all authentic art aims to arouse. Perhaps the most influ-
ential proponent of this view was Clive Bell in his book Art (1914).
In Art, Bell explicitly associates the arousal of the aesthetic emotion with the essence
of art, properly so called. Bell’s avowed purpose in Art is to define art. He identifies the
defining characteristic of art as a significant form. Here, it is important to emphasize that
Bell is talking specifically about fine art—pictorial and sculptural art. With respect to the
visual arts, he characterizes significant form as an arrangement of lines, colors, spaces, and
vectors. Of course, these seem to be features of visual form simpliciter. The question is: What
makes these formal properties “significant?” For, without that, any visual array, including a
monkey’s finger painting, would count as art, properly so called.
This is where Bell’s notion of the aesthetic emotion enters the discussion. Significant
form, he contends, is precisely that which arouses the aesthetic emotion in everyone who
knows about art, that is, in suitably prepared and informed subjects. What exactly does this
putative emotion involve? Aesthetic exaltation. It is an experience of being transported from
the world of practical activity and human concerns where the expectations and worries of
our mundane existence are suspended and we transcend the stream of everyday life. We are,
so to speak, lifted above it.
Thus, aesthetic emotion is, by definition, distinct from the common emotions since the
common emotions are those that shape everyday life, the very thing from which aesthetic
emotion is said to afford escape. Moreover, for the same reason, aesthetic emotion can dis-
tinguish the artwork from mere ordinary objects since mere ordinary objects are intended to
serve the purposes of everyday life. So, form is significant if it arouses aesthetic emotion and,
therefore, aesthetic emotion singles out art, properly so called.
Of course, Bell is aware that much art, in virtue of being representational, has been
known to arouse the common emotions. Pietas arouse feelings of sorrow among the faithful
as they gaze upon their dying savior in the lap of his loving mother. However, Bell argues
that it is not the right sort of response that the suitably prepared spectator should mobilize.
Why not? A representational artwork involves form and content. A painting of a crucifixion,
for example, may portray the execution of Christ on the cross with various onlookers assem-
bled around it. The content of the painting is the dying Jesus and his family and followers,
gathered at the foot of the cross. The visual form of the painting, in contrast, comprises a
vertical division running down the center of the painting with shapes of contrasting masses
of color balanced to either side of the cross. The cast of the painting refers to something
outside the painting itself—to Jesus, his family, his friends, and followers on the promontory
Golgotha. These are things in the world—or, at least, the historical world. They are not in-
side the painting. Shapes, colors, masses, lines, and so on are what is literally in the painting.

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Emotions, as we’ve seen, are directed. When we feel sad standing before the picture of the
crucifixion, our emotional response is directed to something outside the painting—to the
historical event of the death of Jesus. Bell regards all of the common emotions aroused by
the representational content of the painting as directed to events and states of affairs outside
the painting to be merely suggested emotions. Moreover, to indulge in the emotions sug-
gested by the painting is to direct your attention inappropriately.
Why? Isn’t it obvious that to appreciate the painting, our attention should be directed at
the painting itself—at what is inside it and not at something outside it, like events repre-
sented by the picture? But what is inside it? Lines, colors, spaces, spaces, masses, perceptual
vectors, and so forth. How will you know if those forms are significant forms? If they arouse
the aesthetic emotion—if they lift you out of the flow of life which is dominated by the
common (also known as suggested) emotions.
To appreciate a painting as a painting—as a work of art—you should attend to the paint-
ing, not to the events and states of affairs outside the painting that the painting represents.
Attend to the painting itself, which is literally an affair of visual forms. If those forms are
arranged significantly, they will arouse the aesthetic emotion where the appropriate object
of the aesthetic emotion is the form of the painting.
Given his emphasis on form, it should come as no surprise that Bell’s view is called “for-
malism.” Although he committed himself to this view with emphasis on the visual arts, it has
been extended to other arts in directions sometimes suggested by Bell himself.
In many ways, Bell’s approach seems very empirical. If you want to discover whether
or not a particular painting is a work of art, properly so called, see if it possesses significant
form. And if you want to see if it possesses significant form, expose suitably informed and
prepared spectators to it. If they suffer aesthetic emotion, the painting is a work of art; if they
do not, it is not an artwork. Not all paintings are works of art. Presumably, Hitler’s weren’t.
Bell can explain to us why they are not for what appear to be empirical reasons.
There are many problems with Bell’s theory of art. One especially glaring is that it
makes no provision for bad art insofar everything that is art, by definition, possesses some
measure of significant form, which is, one assumes a good-bestowing property. Therefore,
every work of art, properly so called, possesses some good. This, of course, is stupendously
improbable, since we have all experienced bad art—indeed, lots of it. Another problem with
Bell’s account concerns his supposed method. It appears very scientific. He gives the impres-
sion that he is doing something like discovering what causes sweetness.
With sweetness, we start with certain responses in subjects—that such and such tastes
sweet—and then we go on to isolate the molecular structure common to all the things that
arouse the sensations of sweetness in our subjects. Putatively, we do the same thing with re-
gard to art. We expose suitably informed and prepared subjects to an array of visual designs
and discover which ones cause the aesthetic emotion. Then, we investigate those, searching
for what feature or features they all share. And voilà—significant form.
But is this analogy convincing? We can characterize the molecular structure of sweetness
independently of referring to the sensation of sweetness. And we can use that way of iden-
tifying the pertinent molecular structure to test our hypothesis about that which gives rise
to the sensation of sweetness by exposing people to that very molecular structure and seeing
whether our subjects say that it’s sweet.
But you can’t do the same thing with significant form. Why not? Because significant form,
unlike the molecular structure that gives rise to sweetness, is not independently specifiable
apart from the so-called aesthetic emotion. About all we know of significant form is that it
arouses the aesthetic emotion, or, correlatively, that it is the object of the aesthetic emotion.

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Thus, we have no way of running a test to determine whether significant form systemically
arouses the aesthetic emotion, since we have no way of independently identifying significant
form apart from the provocation of the aesthetic emotion. Put technically, we have no inde-
pendent variable to manipulate.
Likewise, we confront a comparable problem with the aesthetic emotion. We have no
way to identify the aesthetic emotion except to say that it is aroused by significant form. But
this is tantamount to saying that the aesthetic emotion is caused by the aesthetic emotion,
which is both uninformative and circular. Bell might object that he has told us something
about the nature of the aesthetic emotion, viz., that it is a form of exaltation or ecstasy. But
this is not sufficient to differentiate aesthetic emotions from other forms of exaltation and
ecstasy. There are also religious forms of exaltation and ecstasy, which are also said to release
us from everyday earthly concerns. Suppose I am standing before a painting of the Madonna
and Child and I feel ecstasy, a sensation of freedom from the quotidian and an intimation of
the transcendental. How will Bell discriminate that experience of deeply reverential emo-
tion from an experience of the aesthetic emotion? Undoubtedly, he will say that it is not
directed at significant form. But that puts it back on the circle again.
Moreover, Bell’s argument presupposes that what is “inside” an artwork is just its formal
elements. He never argues for this claim, but simply presumes it. Surely, the image of the
Madonna is in the painting and, furthermore, it would appear to be an appropriate prompt
for the emotion of reverence. Can Bell show this is an inadmissible way of speaking without
begging the question again?
Bell’s is probably the most influential defense of the idea that there is an art-specific
emotion—a distinctive emotion that art and only art proper arouses. However, the problems
with this view are pressing enough that the more frequent position—that art arouses a mul-
titude of common emotions—seems much more attractive.

3. Art as the expression of the emotions

So far, we have been discussing the arousal of emotion by works of art which has led us to fo-
cus on the effect of artworks upon their audiences. But what of the relation of the emotional
states of the artists to the artworks that they create? Here, the relevant idea is not arousal but
expression. That is, the artist is said to express her feelings, emotions, moods, and other affec-
tive states by means of her artwork. For some philosophers of art, like R. G. Collingwood
(1938), expression is the essential defining characteristic of art. Indeed, for Collingwood, the
arousal of emotion in an audience is the mark of craft, not art.
Collingwood maintains that insofar as emotions can be aroused by means of certain
techniques, as we have seen in terms of criterial prefocusing (a notion Collingwood does not
use), it is more like pharmacology than art. It is a matter of finding the most efficient means
to the designated end (such as arousing pity and fear). Expression, on the other hand, is not
aimed at securing a preordained emotional end by means of tried-and-true techniques. It is
involved with the artist’s exploration of her feelings for the purpose of clarifying them.
Typically, an artist begins a work—a poem, a song, or a painting—with an insistent, but
nevertheless vague feeling. She tries to bring this feeling into sharp relief. She works on it,
bringing it into sharper focus. Partly, she does this by eternalizing it—by experimenting with
different ways of expressing it. A dancer will combine several steps and phrases; a painter by
trying several brushstrokes, erasing some, expanding upon others; a composer by playing
with alternative notes and chords. At various points, the artist stands back from her work
and surveys it, inquiring whether her choices are “right”—where “right” means “do they

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feel right?” or “do they get the emotion right?” This process clarifies the emotion for the
artist at the same time that the initially vague feeling inspires and informs the artist’s choices.
The artist does not start out with an agenda—to arouse fear. The artist aspires to discover
precisely what she is feeling in the process of producing her artwork. She does not know
what she feels until she is satisfied that she has captured it. And the feeling she articulates may
not be one that we antecedently have a name for. In this way, artworks can give us a handle
on heretofore unrecognized feelings as the label “Kaf kaesque” gives a symbol or marker
with which to recognize many of our affective experiences when dealing with modern
bureaucracies.
In making an artwork, the artist is working through an emotion by striving to articulate
it in her medium. The artist is doing what we all do when we ask ourselves what we really
feel about something. The first few sentences that we utter may be vague and fragmentary.
But we keep revising them, striving to be more accurate and exact. Similarly, a painter is
working through the same process, only she is using lines, shapes, colors, and images rather
than words. What color is my emotion? Is it jagged or smooth? She tries one line and then
shortens it. The painting is under the controlled guidance of the emotion, but as the picture
acquires more detail and definition, so does the emotion. The painting as a process of succes-
sive choices is a way of clarifying the emotion—a way of clarifying what the artist is feeling.
Undoubtedly, Collingwood’s account of expression accurately describes the process of
many artists. But it is overly ambitious in several respects. It does not characterize all art since
some art is not devoted to expression but may be predominantly cognitive, plumbing the
very nature of art itself, while other acknowledged artistic masterpieces, such as the Greek
tragedies, may be dedicated to the arousal of emotions, and yet other artworks may not traffic
in expression, truth, or the arousal of emotion, but in formal invention.
Furthermore, Collingwood’s conception of expression presupposes that the artist must
actually be undergoing some affective state, whereas it seems eminently possible that a com-
poser may write a requiem expressive of sadness without being sad herself. That is, she may
be projecting the expressive property of sadness without being in that state, the sadness in-
stead being a property of the music.

4. The projection of expressive properties

Artworks have expressive properties. That is, they may have various affective, anthropo-
morphic properties attributed to them. But these attributions need not presuppose that the
creator was in the affective state signaled by the property in question. For example, one can
imagine a thoroughgoing atheist composer being commissioned to write a religious hymn
that is highly reverential in tone without the composer feeling reverential. Rather, she may
know how to combine musical structures in a way that projects reverence. Similarly, a mo-
tion picture cinematographer knows how to light a scene so that it appears menacing, with-
out having to feel menaced herself.
In other words, we often discern properties in artworks where we are not tempted to con-
nect them to an underlying psychological state attributable to either the artist or to the work
itself. Yet, this should not seem strange. After all, we do it with objects in nature frequently.
Certain willow trees are said to weep, but we do not believe that the willow trees are sad.
Instead, we call the willow trees sad because in virtue of its configuration, it reminds us of
the prototypical aspects of sad people who in their misery are bent over, and their shoulders
hunched. Likewise, the tumultuous background of an expressionist painting may suggest
to us configurationally the unsettled thought and chaotic movement of an anxious person.

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How artists’ configurations manage to project expressive properties not necessarily con-
nected to the psychological states of their creators is an important question to which various
answers have been offered. Nelson Goodman (1968) proposes that it is accomplished by means
of complex systems of analogy and homology resulting in metaphorical exemplification;
Peter Kivy thinks that it is a matter the imitation of (human) behavioral configurations (sad
music is slow because sad people typically move slowly); others cite cultural and linguistic
associations and conventions; and some say: all of the above (Carroll 1999).
Although the projection of expressive properties occurs across the arts, it provides an es-
pecially useful clue for solving the problem of the relation of the emotions to pure orchestral
music. That is, since pure orchestral music lacks reference to characters, actions, and events,
it would appear incapable of arousing common emotions like anger and grief. Nevertheless,
pure orchestral music clearly seems to have a relation to such emotions. What could it be?
Perhaps that is projects’ expressive properties (Kivy 1984).
Of course, the projection of expressive properties figures in all of the arts. The enveloping
columns fronting St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome are inviting; the towers of Gothic churches are
aspiring; the French horns in Handel’s Water Music are jaunty; the plot structures of many
comedies are antic; and so on.
Through the projection of expressive qualities, artworks of all sorts are suffused with
emotion.

References
Bell, Clive (1958[1914]). Art. New York: Capricorn Books.
Bharata (1987). The Natya Shastra of Bharata Muni. Delhi: Sri Satguru.
Carroll, Noël (1999). Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction. London, New York: Routledge.
——— (2001). Art, Narrative and Emotion. In: N. Carroll: Beyond Aesthetics. Philosophical Essays.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Collingwood, R. G. (1938). Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dubos, Jean-Baptiste (1748). Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music. Transl. by T. Nugent. 3
vols. London: John Nourse.
Goodman, Nelson (1968). Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: The
Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Kivy, Peter (1984). Sound Sentiment. An Essay on the Musical Emotions. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Lyons, William (1980). Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plato (1961). The Collected Works of Plato. Ed. by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Robinson, Jenefer (2005). Deeper than Reason. Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

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 PART 3

Self-directed and individual emotions

. ( Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
 30
SHAME
Dan Zahavi

It is not by chance that shame has received quite some attention from phenomenological
philosophers over the years. As an analysis of the emotion reveals, shame involves and affects
several dimensions of enduring interest to phenomenologists, including embodiment, tem-
porality, sociality, and self-consciousness.
Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant from 1943 contains the most well-known phenomenological
treatment of shame, but other important analyses can be found in a long essay by Scheler
entitled Über Scham und Schamgefühl from 1913, in a short but suggestive text by Straus from
1933 entitled “Die Scham als historiologisches Problem”, and in several texts by Levinas
including De L’Évasion from 1935 and Totalité et Infini from 1961. In the following, I will not
discuss the contribution of each of these authors one by one, but rather reference them in the
course of a more systematically oriented discussion.1

1. Shame and related emotions

What is shame? One initial challenge is to clarify how shame differs from other related
emotions. As Miller rightly points out, it would be a mistake to approach shame as if it is a
clearly demarcated and well-bounded type of experience. The distinction between shame
and embarrassment is not as neat as the difference between a lamp and a table (Miller 1985,
28). Shame belongs to a family of interrelated emotion, and it is not difficult to come up
with scenarios where the demarcations get fuzzy, and where different individuals might react
differently. Consider, however, the following four cases:

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 Shame

The moment the humiliated person will start to blame himself for his humiliation, shame
will follow.
To sum up, shame is a distressing emotion, where we feel faulty and unworthy, defective,
exposed, and vulnerable. Whereas we in guilt are concerned with our actions or omissions,
with having breached a norm or inflicted harm upon another, the focus of shame is on our
very being, on who we are. Although one can be ashamed of moral infractions, one can
certainly also be ashamed of things that have nothing to do with the moral domain. Indeed,
shame does not have to be brought about by something one wilfully does. One can feel
ashamed of a physical disability, of one’s parentage, or of skin colour, etc.
To be sure, my interpretation of these cases is open to dispute. Some might claim that the
scene with the bullies is more likely to result in shame, or that the scene with the friend will
only give rise to embarrassment. I think this is quite correct. Different people can indeed react
to the same event with humiliation, shame, or embarrassment. To that extent, there is no clear
correlation between specific scenarios or events and the occurrence of specific emotions, and
one cannot define the latter in terms of the former. However, the purpose of the four examples
was simply to single out some distinctive features of shame, features that makes it different
from embarrassment, humiliation, and guilt. Let me in the following explore these features
further, and examine how a variety of experiential dimensions is affected in shame.

2. Shame and self-consciousness

As we have seen, shame is generally considered a self-involving and self-directed emotion. I am
ashamed of who and what I am. Obviously, the trigger might be a specific property or trait
of mine, I might feel ashamed because of my weight, my speech defect, my lack of courage,
my salary level, my dishonesty, etc., but importantly when feeling ashamed, I am never simply
ashamed of that specific property. Rather, the property in question is taken to reveal something
more fundamental about who I am, is taken to disclose a central flaw in my very being.
The experience of shame is consequently an experience of self. It is somewhat more con-
troversial what kind of self-experience shame is. Is it a reflective form of self-consciousness?
Is shame primarily a question of reflectively sitting in judgment on oneself, is it a critical
self-evaluation? For Sartre, shame is not primarily and originally a phenomenon of reflec-
tion. I can reflect upon my failings and feel shame as a result, just as I might reflect upon my
feeling of shame, but I can also feel shame prior to engaging in any kind of reflection. Shame
is initially, as he puts it, “an immediate shudder which runs through me from head to foot
without any discursive preparation” (Sartre 1943, 246). Shame is not something we control,
but something that overwhelms us. As Sartre is quick to point out, however, there is some-
thing special about shame. It does not simply amount to an ordinary form of pre-reflective
self-consciousness. Rather, in addition to reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, we
ought to recognize the existence of a third type of self-consciousness that is intersubjectively
mediated, i.e., one that has the other as its condition of possibility. Sartre consequently ar-
gues that shame in its primary form is a feeling that I cannot elicit on my own, but that shame
is shame of oneself before the other:

[A]lthough certain complex forms derived from shame can appear on the reflective
plane, shame is not originally a phenomenon of reflection. In fact no matter what results
one can obtain in solitude by the religious practice of shame, it is in its primary structure
shame before somebody.
(Sartre 1943, 245)

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Thus, although shame exemplifies a self-relation, we are on Sartre’s account dealing with
an essentially mediated form of self-relation, one where the other is the mediator between
me and myself. Shame presupposes the intervention of the other, and not simply because
the other is the one before whom I feel ashamed, but also and more significantly because
that of which I am ashamed is only constituted in and through my encounter with the
other (Sartre 1943, 246). To put it differently, rather than primarily being a self-reflective
emotion involving negative self-evaluation, shame is for Sartre an emotion that reveals our
being-for-others. Shame is relational. It reveals to me that I am (partially) constituted by
others, that I depend upon others, and that I have my foundation outside myself. For Sartre,
shame is consequently both a self-conscious emotion and a social emotion. To use a term
coined by Reddy, one might talk of shame as a self-other-conscious emotion, since it makes
us aware of our relational being, it concerns the self-in-relation-to-the-other (Reddy 2008).
This is one of the areas where Sartre’s and Scheler’s analyses diverge. Scheler accepts the
idea that shame is an emotion that essentially involves the self, but he explicitly rejects the
claim that shame is essentially a social emotion, one that by necessity involves others. For
Scheler, there are self-directed forms of shame that are just as fundamental as the shame one
can feel in the presence of others, and, more generally speaking, Scheler argues that shame
is an emotional response to the uncovering and display of our weaknesses, defects, and im-
perfections. In its core, shame concerns the tension between our aspirations and ideals on
the one hand and our awareness of our finitude, vulnerability, and bodily needs on the other
(Scheler 1913, 5, 15). This is also why Scheler claims that shame is a distinctly human emo-
tion, one that neither God nor animals could have (Scheler 1913, 3, 28).

3. Shame and the body

The behavioural manifestations of shame typically include averted gaze, slumped posture,
and downward head movement. The fact that shame is also characterized by a heightened
feeling of exposure and vulnerability, by a wish to hide, to become invisible, and to sink into
the ground, should alert us to the fact that the body plays a significant role in the emotion.
This is highlighted in Sartre’s analysis, since he speaks of how shame reveals to me that I
am visible to others. Rather than simply existing bodily, rather than simply being absorbed
in various projects, rather than simply interacting confidently with the environment, shame
makes me painfully aware of my bodily facticity and exposure, and effects something akin to
a bodily paralysis. Sartre speaks of the existential alienation occasioned by my encounter with
the gaze of the other. To apprehend myself from the perspective of the other is to apprehend
myself as seen in the midst of the world, as a thing among things with properties and de-
terminations that I am without having chosen them. The gaze of the other confers a truth
upon me that I do not master, and over which I am—in that moment—powerless (Sartre
1943, 260). For Sartre, the body symbolizes our defenceless state as objects and he claims
that the fear of being surprised in a state of nakedness is a symbolic manifestation of original
shame. To put on clothes is to attempt to hide one’s object-state; it is to claim the right of
seeing without being seen; that is, to be a pure subject (Sartre 1943, 312).
Scheler, as well, comments on the fact that nakedness has traditionally been associated
with shame. For him, however, the reason why we seek to cover our body is precisely
because it reminds us of our animality, mortality, and neediness (Scheler 1913, 11). Consider
how the loss of control over one’s bodily functions, as in sickness or old age, might be felt
as shameful, just as it might be shame-inducing to realize that one is being observed while
vomiting or defecating.

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4. Shame and time

We have seen that guilt is typically accompanied by a wish to repent, to repair the harm,
and to make it up to the other. In all these cases, there is a future-directed dimension to
guilt. In the case of humiliation, as well, the desire for revenge will make the emotion
future-oriented. What about shame? Some further distinctions are in order. Sometimes
people distinguish what is called prospective shame from retrospective shame. As an instance of
the former, consider the case of a teenager who spends hours on end trying out different
clothes in preparation for the school party. The one thing he desires is the approval of others,
the one thing he fears is their ridicule. Prospective shame is clearly forward-looking, but
rather than being a case of shame proper, it might be better characterized as a fear of shame-
ful situations. Prospective shame can consequently function as significant restrictive force.
If I do not do anything—if I stay away from the party—I do not risk potential shameful
exposure. Retrospective shame, by contrast, can either take the form of a repeated return
to and rumination over a past shame or as the subsequent realization that a past situation
or action was indeed shameful. In either case, the retrospective shame is past-oriented and
might well be accompanied by a feeling of remorse. In both cases, however, and more so in
the former than in the latter, one will have the benefit of a temporal distance to the actual
event; a temporal distance that everything else being equal will lessen the force of the emo-
tion. Prospective and retrospective shame must consequently be distinguished from the acute
shame best characterized in terms of what Karlsson and Sjöberg have called a “frozen now”
(2009, 353). When caught in the spotlight of the other’s unsparing glance, it is not only as if
the moment seems to drag on and on, but that experience of shame also disrupts the normal
temporal flow. As Sartre writes, in shame I experience myself as trapped in facticity, as being
irremediably what I am (rather than as someone with future possibilities, as someone who
can become otherwise) (Sartre 1943, 286, 312). The shamed subject is fixed in the present
to such an extent that an open future is lost. When shame overwhelms you, you are reduced
to your flaw and there is no room for the exploration of future possibilities of redemption.

5. Shame and others

What is the role of others? Despite their differences, both Sartre and Scheler agree that
one can feel ashamed when one is de facto alone. However, they interpret this possibility
differently. For Sartre, this fact, in and of itself, does not prove that the relation to others is
inessential for shame, and that one can simply ignore the social dimension when analysing
the emotion. The evaluating perspective of others might play a role in the structure of the
emotion even when they are not factually present. On his account, there are certain pre-
conditions that must be met if reflective shame is to be possible. It is a latecomer, and a more
paradigmatic and more fundamental form of shame is the one we feel when confronted with
the objectifying gaze of others. It is only because of a subsequent internalization of the oth-
er’s perspective that the kind of critical self-evaluation that we find in intrapersonal reflective
shame becomes possible. And the latter will never have the same force as the former.
In his analysis, Sartre highlights the impact of the gaze. However, the nature of the look
can vary enormously. As Straus observes, the look of the voyeur is as different from the looks
exchanged by lovers as the medical palpation is from the gentle caress (Straus 1966, 219).
More importantly, however, shame can be triggered not only by the look of others but also
by their wilful overlooking. The fact that we can feel ashamed because we are overlooked
and ignored by others is revealing. In psychoanalytic theorizing, it has been proposed that

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shame is an emotional reaction to the absence of approval (Ikonen and Rechardt 1993, 100).
If this were correct, it would situate shame right at the core of our interpersonal life. In its
most fundamental form, it would not be connected to a breach of specific cultural norms or
standards, but rather concern our fundamental need for recognition. When the latter is being
withheld, we might feel shame. If so, this would also suggest a possible remedy for more
enduring forms of shame, namely love.2
But why is the contempt of the other, her disrespect, met with shame? If one found the
assessment of the other completely unwarranted, it would not result in shame, but more
likely in indignation or indifference. To react with shame when confronted with the other’s
evaluation is consequently, as Sartre points out, to accept that evaluation (Sartre 1943, 246,
287, 290). That which is revealed in shame, although highly undesirable, is precisely experi-
enced as disclosing the truth about oneself (Karlsson and Sjöberg 2009, 350).
Perhaps more distinctions are in order, however. Does the identity of the other not make
a difference? Aristotle once observed that the people we feel shame before are those whose
opinion of us matters to us (Aristotle 1984, 1384a25). To have one’s frailties exposed to one’s
beloved is quite different from having them exposed to people in whose presence one does not
feel secure or loved. Not only might it make a difference whether the witness is a close family
member, somebody who is part of your social network, or a total stranger (especially if the per-
son in question does not know who you are either), but hierarchy and social status can also play
a role (Landweer 1999). A sub-par performance in public will be experienced as more shameful
if noticed by somebody with more rather than less status and authority than you. Compare,
for instance, the situation where a flutist makes mistakes when practicing a piece alone, with
the situation where she makes mistakes at a public recital with the composer in attendance. An
account of shame should be able to explain why mistakes that are tolerated in privacy as minor
shortcomings might be felt as shameful the moment they are publicly exposed.
The case of vicarious shame provides further reason to question the proposal that others are
accidental to shame, and play no significant role in its structure. It is no coincidence that the
Oxford English Dictionary in its definition of shame includes a reference to situations, where
shame arises from the consciousness of something dishonouring, ridiculous, or indecorous
in the conduct of those whose honour or disgrace one regards as one’s own. Consider the
two following examples:

In both cases, you are unlikely to remain emotionally unaffected. Again, people might react
differently, but in some cases, I would venture, shame would occur.3 The interesting question,
though, is why? If shame is a self-conscious emotion, if shame concerns your own identity,

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why then feel ashamed in situations like these. The key, I believe, lies in the relationship
between yourself and the one who is behaving indecorous or who is subjected to a denigrat-
ing criticism. Had the latter been a stranger, it is unlikely that you would have felt ashamed.
For us to react with shame in the two situations described above presupposes that processes
of group-identification are in place, and that we consider, say, our relationship to our parents
(partially) constitutive of our own identity, constitutive of who we are (see Salice and Montes
Sánchez 2016; see also Chapter 39 in this volume). Obviously, such identifications are not
restricted to family members alone, which is also why, when travelling abroad, some might
feel ashamed when witnessing the misbehaviour of compatriots. We are not only individuals,
possessors of singular identities, but also group members, shareholders in collective identities.

6. The moral value of shame

How should one assess the role of shame? Is it, as Tangney and Dearing have argued “an
extremely painful and ugly feeling that has a negative impact on interpersonal behaviour”
(2002, 3)? Is it a destructive and repressive emotion, one we should aim to remove from our
lives? One line of thinking taken to support such a view is the following. When you feel
guilty, you wish to undo the deed and you seek to redress the harm. You seek the forgiveness
of the other and attempt to repair and re-establish the social bond. To that extent, the feeling
of guilt serves a pro-social purpose. Shame by contrast is isolating. You withdraw from oth-
ers and are consumed by a self-loathing with no obvious social benefits that can ultimately
lead to suicide (see Lester 1997). One indication that this depiction is highly incomplete,
however, can be found if we for a moment return to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
Among the various meanings of the term, the OED distinguishes the painful emotion aris-
ing from the consciousness of something dishonouring or disgraceful in one’s own conduct
from the sense of shame, i.e., the perception of what is improper or disgraceful. Why should
the latter be something we would want to eliminate? Indeed, as the notion of shamelessness
suggests, it is not the presence, but the absence of shame that is shameful. The incapacity to
be ashamed of anything is not a moral virtue, but a moral flaw, a sign of degradation.
Similar considerations can be found in the writings of the phenomenologists. Scheler
explicitly considers a capacity for shame ethically valuable and links it to the emergence of
conscience—it is, as he points out, no coincidence that Genesis explicitly relates shame to
knowledge of good and evil (Scheler 1913, 79). Scheler also emphasizes the extent to which
our feeling of shame, even if it involves a decrease of self-esteem, testifies to the continuing
presence of a certain amount of self-respect; it is only because one expects oneself to have
worth that this expectation can be disappointed and give rise to shame (Scheler 1913, 79).
Indeed, as Scheler points out, the shame reaction must be seen in the light of a persisting
normative commitment (Scheler 1913, 37). The feeling of shame occurs precisely because of
a discrepancy between values one continues to endorse and the actual situation. Some have
also claimed that shame, rather than being inherently debilitating, might play a constructive
role in moral development. In Totalité et infini Levinas argues that shame is a response to the
ethical encounter with the other who interrupts and disrupts my tranquillity by putting
me and my unjustified and arbitrary freedom into question (1979, 83–84). More generally
speaking, the experience of shame might function as a wake-up call. It can disrupt my
self-complacency, modify my self-understanding, and in the end, motivate me to reorient
my way of living (Steinbock 2014). For a concrete example, consider a case reported by
Hutchinson. It concerns Léopard, who committed atrocities during the Rwanda genocide.
Several years later, Léopard is interviewed while in prison, and he recounts how he has

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subsequently come to feel deep shame and how this has resulted in him being ostracized by
his former comrades (Hutchinson 2008, 141–143).
It is, however, again important not to overlook differences. There is more than one type
of shame. In his work, Straus discusses a kind of protective shame, which involves sensitivity
to and respect for boundaries of intimacy (Straus 1966, 220), and which manifests our need
to protect the most private and intimate aspects of our existence from public exposure and
scrutiny. Likewise, in the literature, one can find distinctions between disgrace-shame and
discretion-shame, natural shame and moral shame, and bodily shame and spiritual shame,
to mention just a few of the available candidates (Ausubel 1955, 382; Smith et al. 2002, 157;
Gilbert 2003, 1215; Bollnow 2009, 55–57). Even if there is something valuable in the type of
shame discussed by Straus, it is hard to see anything positive in the so-called chronic and toxic
shame felt by some sexually abused children (Zupancic and Kreidler 1999; see also Chapter 27
in this volume).

7. Conclusion
As I have suggested above, shame testifies to our exposure, vulnerability, and visibility and
is importantly linked to such issues as concealment and disclosure, sociality and alienation,
and difference and connectedness. Shame is a self-involving emotion, one that points to the
embodied and normatively embedded nature of the self. Shame is a more complex emotion
than say anger, fear, or joy, and there are limits to how far a purely philosophical analysis can
progress. A more comprehensive understanding of shame would also require extensive anal-
yses of, for instance, its developmental trajectory (how early does it emerge, how much does
infantile shame—if it exists—resemble adult shame, what role does it play in adolescence,
and so on), and cultural specificity (to what extent do the shame-inducing situations, the
very experience of shame and the available coping strategies vary from culture to culture)
(see Cole et al. 2006).
Shame can be a very painful experience, but it is by no means obvious that we should
regret being able to feel it and strive to remove it from our lives. As Scheler wrote, shame
is a fundamental human emotion, one characterizing conditio humana (Scheler 1913, 3, 28).4

Notes

References
Aristotle (1984[c.340 BCE]). Rhetoric. In: The Complete Works of Aristotle II. Ed. by J. Barnes. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Ausubel, David P. (1955). Relationships between Shame and Guilt in the Socializing Process.
Psychological Review 62(5), 378–390.

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Bollnow, Otto F. (2009[1947]). Die Ehrfurcht: Wesen und Wandel der Tugenden. Würzburg: Königshausen
und Neumann.
Cole, Pamela M., Tamang, Babu L., and Shrestha, Srijana. (2006). Cultural Variations in the Socializa-
tion of Young Children’s Anger and Shame. Child Development 77(5), 1237–1251.
Darwall, Stephen L. (1977). Two Kinds of Respect. Ethics 88(1), 36–49.
Gilbert, Paul (2003). Evolution, Social Roles, and the Differences in Shame and Guilt. Social Research
70(4), 1205–1230.
Honneth, Axel (1995). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Transl. by J.
Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hutchinson, Phil (2008). Shame and Philosophy: An Investigation in the Philosophy of Emotions and Ethics.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ikonen, Pentti, and Rechardt, Eero. (1993). The Origin of Shame and its Vicissitudes. Scandinavian
Psychoanalytic Review 16(2), 100–124.
Karlsson, Gunnar, and Sjöberg, Lennart G. (2009). The Experiences of Guilt and Shame: A
Phenomenological–Psychological Study. Human Studies 32(3), 335–355.
Landweer, Hilge (1999). Scham und Macht: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Sozialität eines Gefühls.
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Lester, David (1997). The Role of Shame in Suicide. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 27(4), 352–361.
Levinas, Emmanuel (2003[1935]). On Escape. Transl. by B. Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
——— (1979[1961]). Totality and Infinity. Transl. by A. Lingis. The Hague: Nijhoff.
Miller, Susan (1985). The Shame Experience. London: Analytic Press.
Reddy, Vasudevi (2008). How Infants Know Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Salice, Alessandro, and Montes Sánchez, Alba (2016). Pride, Shame, and Group Identification. Frontiers
in Psychology 7(557), 1–13.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (2003[1943]). Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, Transl. by
H. E. Barnes. London, New York: Routledge.
Scheler, Max (1987[1913]). Shame and Feelings of Modesty. In: Max Scheler: Person and Self-Value:
Three Essays. Dordrecht: Springer.
Smith, Richard H., Webster, Matthew J., Parrott, Gerrod W., and Eyre, Heidi L. (2002). The Role of
Public Exposure in Moral and Nonmoral Shame and Guilt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
83(1), 138–159.
Steinbock, Anthony J. (2014). Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart. Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press.
Straus, Erwin W. (1966[1933]). Shame as a Historiological Problem. In: Erwin W. Straus: Phenomeno-
logical Psychology: Selected Papers. New York: Basic Books.
Tangney, June P., and Dearing, Ronda L. (2002). Shame and Guilt. New York: Guilford Press.
Zahavi, Dan (2014). Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Zupancic, Melissa K., and Kreidler, Maryhelen C. (1999). Shame and the Fear of Feeling. Perspectives
in Psychiatric Care 35(2), 29–34.

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 31
SELF-ESTEEM, PRIDE,
EMBARRASSMENT AND
SHYNESS
Anna Bortolan

1. Introduction
Extensively investigated across disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, education, and
social policy, self-esteem has been comparatively under-researched in philosophy.1 However,
a number of theories and notions relevant to the understanding of self-esteem and related
experiences have been put forward in both classical and contemporary phenomenology of
emotion. Drawing upon this body of research, in this chapter, I will present a phenomeno-
logical account of self-esteem. First, I will suggest that this is best understood as a particu-
lar kind of background affective orientation, and, more specifically, as a narratively shaped
“existential feeling”. I will then move to explore the relevance of such an account for the
philosophical understanding of pride, embarrassment, and shyness, thus providing an exam-
ple of the influence exerted by self-esteem on other self-related affects and traits.

2. Self-esteem

2.1 A background affective orientation

In the psychological literature, self-esteem is generally characterised as a positive, evalua-
tive attitude towards the self (Baumeister et al. 1989). Self-esteem, it is claimed, consists in
conceiving of oneself as valuable because of the possession of certain features and particular
achievements. For example, the APA Dictionary of Psychology defines self-esteem as follows:

[T]he degree to which the qualities and characteristics contained in one’s self-concept
are perceived to be positive. It reflects a person’s physical self-image, view of his or her
accomplishments and capabilities, and values and perceived success in living up to them, as
well as the ways in which others view and respond to that person. The more positive the
cumulative perception of these qualities and characteristics, the higher one’s self-esteem.
(VandenBos 2015, 955)

The idea that positive self-evaluation is at the core of self-esteem emerges also from phil-
osophical accounts. Gabriele Taylor (1985), for instance, claims that “[t]he person who has

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self-esteem takes a favourable view of himself, while he who lacks it, will think of himself in
unfavourable terms: he is not worth much” (1985, 77–78).
In both philosophy and psychology, self-esteem is thus often associated with a concep-
tion of the self as worthy, and cognition is attributed a central role in such self-evaluation.
Self-esteem is indeed seen as an evaluative response to the conception one has of oneself,
thus requiring both reflective awareness and a degree of self-knowledge. In this context, it
is recognised that feelings and self-assessment are related (e.g., Campbell and Lavalle 1993),
but the self-attitude with which self-esteem is identified is not generally attributed a distinct
phenomenal character or a primarily affective nature.
A connection is also often established between self-esteem and various dimensions of
our mental and practical life. It is acknowledged that self-esteem has a strong motivational
character (Dillon 2013), inclining us to think and act in certain ways. However, despite the
recognition of these dynamics, self-esteem itself has been seen as an “intrapsychic attitude”
(Baumeister et al. 1989), a discrete mental state—or set of mental states—which are structur-
ally distinct from one’s bodily experience of self, others, and the world.
The idea that self-esteem is first and foremost a matter of cognitive self-evaluation, po-
tentially accompanied by a set of self-focused feelings, and that it is just one possible manner
of relating to oneself, can be challenged by providing a more fine-grained account of the
ways in which it influences our experience. This account will show that a particular form
of affectivity is cardinal to the structure of self-esteem, and that this is not a circumscribed
self-attitude, but rather an experiential orientation that radically shapes our emotions, ac-
tions, and cognition itself.
In order to bring the phenomenological features of self-esteem to the fore, it will be help-
ful to start by examining an example of how one’s experience may be impacted by fluctua-
tions of self-esteem. Consider, for instance, the case of someone who has been in a precarious
employment situation for a while and, despite strenuous attempts to secure a more stable
position, still has to move from one temporary job to another in the uttermost uncertainty
regarding their future. While people may react in very different ways to such circumstances,
some may experience a weakening of self-esteem when faced with this kind of adversity.
Due to the repeated failed attempts to reach the professional position that she is seeking,
the person may lose confidence in her abilities and start to conceive of herself as not good
enough to reach the goals that she is striving towards. This loss, however, will not amount
to an isolated change which will leave unaltered the other dimensions of her experience. On
the contrary, the weakening of self-esteem will be marked by a series of modifications in
various aspects of the individual’s personal and interpersonal life.
For example, upon hearing about new job opportunities she may no longer react with
excitement and hope, taking this as a possibility to finally reach her goals and a professional
position in alignment with her competences and capacities. Rather, hearing about job open-
ings may trigger feelings of hopelessness, as the person predicts that this will be yet another
situation in which she will fail to achieve what she wants. Rather than being enlivening,
getting to know about these opportunities will be disheartening, as she has lost confidence in
her ability to change her position. The fluctuation of self-esteem thus goes hand in hand with
a modification of one’s attitude towards the future, as this comes to be seen as something
that one does not have the power to control or influence. The loss of confidence in one’s
ability to improve one’s standing, may also lead to the feeling of being “stuck” or “trapped”
in the present. What before appeared to be annoying and painful, but bearable because of its
temporary nature, now may become intolerable due to its seemingly unavoidable character.
The dissatisfaction, despondency, and profound irritability that may ensue will unlikely be

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confined to the professional domain, but will rather tend to spread to other dimensions of the
person’s life. In particular, feelings of low self-worth may have a strong impact on the way
in which she relates to others, both at work and in the interaction with family and friends.
Judging herself as unable to reach her goals and fulfil her ambitions may trigger feelings of
shame, and the willingness to withdraw from social interaction, so as to avoid her alleged
failures being exposed to and potentially further criticised by others. This may be the case
also when others have a non-judgemental attitude and offer support and encouragement,
as the person who is experiencing low self-esteem may struggle to believe other people when
they praise her and when they show optimism towards the future, and can rather come to
think that they are doing so just to make her feel better. She may also doubt that colleagues,
friends, and significant others who act in this way fully appreciate the seriousness of her sit-
uation, and this could lead to feelings of resentment or loss of trust.
Self-esteem thus appears to have a distinct phenomenal character: it is something that we
feel, and that significantly impacts upon how we perceive both our position in the world, and
others more broadly. As I argued elsewhere (Bortolan 2018), however, it is difficult to provide
an account of self-esteem through the framework of existing affective taxonomies, as neither
the concept of “emotion” nor that of “disposition”, which are central to these classifications
can do justice to the features of self-esteem. Rather, I claimed that in order to account for
the structure of this experience we need to refer to a different form of affect, suggesting that
the phenomenological notion of “mood” (Heidegger 1927) or “existential feeling” (Ratcliffe
2005, 2008; see also Chapter 22 in this volume) is the most relevant in this context.
In phenomenology of emotion attention has often been drawn to the fact that every in-
tentional state—be it cognitive, affective, or volitional—is grounded in particular forms of
affective experience, which enable us to encounter the world and objects in it as meaningful
in certain ways. These affects are not themselves intentional, but are considered to be the
ground from which mental states directed at particular things, people, or states of affairs
stem. Heidegger refers to experiences of this kind through the concept of “moods” which—
contrary to the characterisation often provided in the psychological literature—he conceives
of not as inner mental states, but rather as ways of being in the world, which make it possible
for things to matter to us in particular manners (Elpidorou and Freeman 2015; Ratcliffe
2013) (see also Chapter 7 in this volume). This idea has been further developed by Ratcliffe
who conceives of “existential feelings” as sets of bodily feelings, which are fundamental in
shaping our “sense of possibility” (Ratcliffe 2012, 2015). According to him, these feelings
have a “pre-intentional” character, that is not only they do not have specific intentional ob-
jects but rather determine “what kinds of intentional state it is possible to have” (2010, 604).
Self-esteem appears to share its fundamental features with the background affects dis-
cussed by Heidegger and Ratcliffe. As shown above, it is an occurrent, felt state, but one
that is not directed to particular objects as emotions, for example, are. Self-esteem cannot
be “about something”: it may be nurtured by the positive assessment of particular traits and
features, but in itself, it is a global form of self-experience, which is devoid of such direction-
ality (cf. Bortolan 2018). However, self-esteem is not merely non-intentional either, a feeling
which only occasionally comes to colour our experiential field. Degrees of self-esteem can
fluctuate, and so can the degree of reflective awareness that we have of these dynamics, but a
sense of one’s own worth is always present: it is an ineliminable feature of our self-awareness,
which, as highlighted previously, modulates other dimensions of experience too. Our level
of self-esteem determines the possible ways in which we can think and feel about ourselves,
and the range of possibilities of action and interaction that the world appears to harbour. As
such, self-esteem too can be considered to be “pre-intentional”.

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The idea that self-esteem can be accounted for in these terms is consonant with various
insights into the connection between existential feelings and self-experience put forward by
Ratcliffe and other contemporary phenomenologists. For instance, the suggestion that affects
closely related to self-esteem may be integral to the “background orientations” (Ratcliffe
2008), which structure our experience seems to emerge from Ratcliffe’s account of trust
(Ratcliffe et al. 2014; Ratcliffe 2015). Through the examination of the multiple manners
in which one’s way of being in the world may be altered after having undergone traumatic
events, Ratcliffe identifies interpersonal trust as one of the experiential structures upon
which our perception of the world and everyday interactions with others fundamentally
impinge. Trust, and the loss of it which may be triggered as a response to trauma, in other
terms, are background orientations, which modulate our sense of possibility, and are ex-
plicitly described by Ratcliffe as being “integral to existential feeling” (2015, 123). While
focused predominantly on the trust we experience towards other people, this account, how-
ever, also draws attention to the existence of a close connection between interpersonal trust
and self-trust. As Ratcliffe and colleagues (2014) suggest, disruptions of interpersonal trust
have an impact upon the attitudes we hold towards ourselves too. Moreover, they highlight
that one of the ways in which the trust that underlies our ordinary dealings with the world
can be disrupted involves the loss of confidence in oneself (2014, 5). It is thus suggested that
self-trust not only can be influenced by alterations of interpersonal trust, but also that it is
one of the experiential structures that modulate the way in which we find ourselves in the
world.
A view that is deeply consonant with Ratcliffe’s position and the insights presented in
this chapter is developed by Slaby in his account of affective self-consciousness and the sense
of ability (2012; Slaby and Wüschner 2014), a form of experience which he explicitly con-
nects to self-esteem (2012, 153). According to Slaby, affective states have a “self-disclosive”
character, they enable us to experience not only certain aspects of the world but also various
features of the self. More specifically, Slaby suggests that intrinsic to any affective experience
is a particular “affective self-construal”, a feeling of oneself as possessing certain abilities and
agentive capacities in the context in which one finds oneself. This form of self-feeling is con-
sidered to be essentially connected to a sense of one’s bodily potentialities, and it is indeed
defined by Slaby as an “embodied sense of capability” (2012, 152), which deeply shapes one’s
self- and world-experience. Because of its pervasiveness and the role it plays in structuring
our personal and interpersonal experience, the sense of ability is considered by Slaby to be
akin to the notion of “existential feeling” (2012, 153).2
What emerges from Slaby’s and Ratcliffe’s accounts is thus the idea that a particular sense
of oneself as more of less able to deal with and act in the particular circumstances that have
to be faced is integral to any form of experience and structures the way in which we find
ourselves in the world.

2.2 Ability, achievement, and narrative structure

Phenomenological accounts of affectivity thus point towards the possibility of conceiving of
trust and confidence in oneself—or what in the psychological literature has been described
through the notion of “self-efficacy” (e.g., Branden 1994; Bandura 1997), namely a sense of
being able to cope with the demands and challenges of one’s life—as a background affective
orientation akin to “moods” or “existential feelings”. This is highly relevant to the attempt
to provide an account of self-esteem, because the experiences described through the notions
of self-trust, sense of ability, or self-efficacy appear to be a core aspect of its phenomenology.

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Confidence in one’s capacities and potentialities—a felt sense of one’s cognitive, affec-
tive, and practical possibilities—seems to be key to experiencing self-esteem. However, as
remarked in the definition given by the American Psychological Association, self-esteem
does not have to do only with abilities and potential; rather, it is also dependent on how we
use those capabilities, and what we manage to realise through their exercise. In other terms,
self-esteem is both a matter of possibility and reality, and it is anchored to both our perceived
ability and our actual “accomplishments”.
The positive self-evaluation with which self-esteem is identified concerns both one’s
capacity to achieve and the successes that one has already achieved, an idea that the psy-
chologist Nathaniel Branden has defended by claiming that not only self-efficacy, but also
“self-respect” is to be considered a key component of self-esteem (1994). In the philosophical
literature, the notion of “self-respect” has received multiple characterisations (Cf. Dillon
1995), and engaging in a comparison and critical assessment of these views would exceed the
scope of this study. For the purpose of my analysis, and in line with Branden’s characterisa-
tion, I will be using “self-respect” to refer to the positive form of self-evaluation, which has
one’s achievements, rather than one’s ability, as its focus.
Experiences of self-efficacy and self-respect are both causally and phenomenologically en-
tangled. A good level of confidence in one’s own abilities can have a positive effect on one’s
performance, facilitating the achievement of one’s goals and success in a variety of domains.
On the other hand, trust in one’s capacities is nurtured by the awareness of one’s previous
accomplishments. As far as the phenomenology of these experiences is concerned, while it
is possible to distinguish between feelings of ability and possibility on the one hand, and a
felt sense of achievement on the other, what we usually experience is rather a broader sense
of ourselves as being more or less worthy, a global feeling of our value in which assessments
concerning capability and actual success are inextricable. Self-esteem is to be identified with
this general experience of the self as valuable to various degrees, and although there are dif-
ferent constitutive elements to it, this is still a unitary phenomenon.3
Can a phenomenological account of self-esteem do justice to the complex nature of the
self-evaluations involved in the experience of self-esteem? And, more specifically, is the
account of self-esteem as an existential feeling compatible with the acknowledgement that
there are various aspects or components to the experience of self-esteem? I believe that both
questions can be given a positive answer, and, in the following, I will argue that the various
features of self-esteem discussed so far can be coherently accounted for through the notion of
“narrative structure” as developed by Peter Goldie in his account of emotions.
Goldie’s account moves from the acknowledgement that the theories that conceive of
emotions as single mental states or events do not do justice to some fundamental intuitions
we have about the nature of affective experience (Goldie 2011). By identifying emotions
with individual affective, cognitive, or volitional states, these theories would provide a static
characterisation of emotions, which ignores their intrinsically “dynamic” and “complex”
nature (Goldie 2000, 12). An example that Goldie uses to clarify his view is the emotion of
grief (2011). He observes that while grieving certainly involves a specific feeling, this is not
all there is to this experience. Grief, he suggests, involves a plurality of other elements un-
folding over time and thus should be seen as a complex and temporally extended experience.
According to Goldie, emotions involve the recognition of something as possessing a par-
ticular evaluative property, and a number of responses including characteristic expressions,
bodily changes, motivational elements, and actions (2000). For instance, the fear experienced
when facing a ferocious animal would be characterised by the acknowledgement of the animal

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as dangerous and by a number of reactions to that danger, such as the feeling of fear, a specific
profile of bodily activation, and action tendencies such as the impulse to run away.
Goldie claims that the various components of the emotion are meaningfully connected,
as they are various aspects of the process through which we recognise and respond to some-
thing as valuable in a certain respect—what he calls the “recognition-response tie” (2000,
28–37). The fact that the emotion has different constituents which are so connected is in his
view what makes it possible to attribute to it a “narrative structure”.
The notion of narrative structure appears to be useful to account for the complex na-
ture of self-esteem. As previously observed, this predicament is indeed best understood as a
background feeling of the self as worthy, an experience to which both a sense of ability and
a sense of actual achievement are integral. Self-esteem is, from a phenomenological point
of view, a unitary experience, but, as it is the case for the emotions discussed by Goldie, its
structure comprises different components, namely, as discussed above, self-efficacy (or sense
of ability or self-trust) and self-respect.
Conceiving of self-esteem as a narratively structured existential feeling also makes it pos-
sible to account for the fact that the role played by the different components of self-esteem in
its constitution and phenomenology can be different at different points in time. For example,
there may be situations in which the felt sense of achievement at the core of self-respect is
diminished, but our sense of ability and possibility remains intact, allowing for self-esteem to
be preserved. In other circumstances the situation may be reversed, and a diminished sense
of ability may co-exist with a positive level of self-respect, to which our sense of self-worth
remains anchored.
Therefore, the weakening of one of the components of self-esteem does not always bring
about a diminishment of self-esteem, and this is the case because other components in the
narrative structure of this affect may remain unaffected, making it possible to maintain one’s
positive self-evaluation. However, if an alteration of self-efficacy or self-respect persists over
time, also one’s general level of self-esteem may be affected. As it is the case with the emo-
tions discussed by Goldie (2000, 37), occasional failures to experience one of the constituents
of the narrative structure of self-esteem will not change the self-evaluation with which it is
identified. Nevertheless, persisting modifications of one’s sense of ability or achievement will
result in a different narrative structure and level of self-esteem.4

3. Pride, embarrassment, and shyness

So far I have defended the idea that self-esteem is best understood as a complex background
affective orientation. I have argued that this is a specific way of experiencing oneself, which
deeply modulates the range of cognitive, affective, and volitional states that we can enter-
tain. As such, self-esteem plays a fundamental role in our mental and practical life. In the
following, I will investigate this further by examining the connection between self-esteem
and other self-focused affects, namely pride, embarrassment, and shyness.

3.1 Pride
In the philosophical and psychological literature, pride is often characterised as a “self-
conscious emotion” (Tracy and Robins 2004), namely as an emotion that is essentially
connected to the way in which we conceive of ourselves.5 To be more specific, pride is fre-
quently identified with a self-evaluation, and, in particular, with an evaluation of the self as

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praiseworthy (Solomon 2007, 99). We are proud of ourselves in virtue of being connected
to something that we deem positive (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 491), and philosophers have advanced
various proposals as how this relationship should be characterised. Gabriele Taylor (1985),
for example, claims that there needs to be a relationship of “belonging” between what we
are proud of and ourselves, where “belonging” may involve “ownership”, but can just be
a shared condition (e.g., belonging to the same family etc.) (30–32). Pride is often related
to the possession of certain features—for example certain physical or psychological traits—
particular achievements, relationships, or the ownership of particular goods. When we feel
pride, we experience ourselves as deserving praise in virtue of having certain properties or
being closely associated with something or someone that does have these properties.
Pride is thus closely connected to one’s self-conception, and it is to be expected that expe-
riences of pride will influence and be influenced by feelings and judgements regarding one’s
worth. This has been noted by Taylor (1985), who claims that our level of self-confidence
and the related expectations we have with regard to what is possible for us to achieve deter-
mine the frequency with which we are likely to experience pride. In particular, she suggests
that a low degree of self-confidence will lead to not expect much of oneself, and that this in
turn will provide us with more opportunities to experience pride. As she explains:

Where expectations are pitched low the occasions for thinking of oneself as having
achieved something are particularly numerous. If I think of myself as the sort of person
who cannot make machines work for them or whose flowers die on them, then any
successful operation of the machine and any flourishing of my plants will be seen as an
achievement and so as something to be proud of.
(1985, 39–40)

This view, however, does not consider that such an evaluation can only take place if one’s
general experience of oneself and the world allows for a positive form of self-assessment.
I can only be proud of a particular achievement if, to start with, I experience myself as
someone for whom achieving something of value is a possibility. Taylor recognises that the
experience of pride is dependent on one’s self-conception and the expectations which are
rooted in it, but she does not consider the impact that extremely low levels of self-esteem
can have on the capability to recognise one’s achievements as such, and thus to feel pride. If,
due to little trust in my abilities, I do not expect much of myself—that is, I do not expect
myself to be capable of doing anything of particular value—it is likely that, when I manage
to do something good, I will struggle to see it as such. As my successes will not appear to be
coherent with the negative view of myself, I may rather be inclined to belittle them, or to
deny that they are successes at all, for example by downplaying the efforts or skills necessary
to their obtainment, or by refusing to take credit for them.6 Therefore, contrary to what is
suggested by Taylor’s account, the person who has a low consideration of herself will have
fewer opportunities to experience pride than the one who has a positive self-conception.
This dynamic provides an illustration of the way in which self-esteem can restrict (or extend)
the range of affective and other mental states we are capable of experiencing. The background
sense of one’s ability and achievements with which this affect has been identified disposes us to
feel emotions and entertain thoughts, which are congruent with it, and these in turn can re-
enforce the negative (or positive) evaluations at the core of self-esteem. On this basis, it is also pos-
sible to conceive of pride—and arguably other self-conscious emotions like guilt and shame—as
an integral part of the narrative structure of self-esteem, as they can be characterised as some of
the responses through which the evaluation of one’s worthiness is realised over time.7
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3.2 Embarrassment
Embarrassment is a social emotion, which we experience when we find ourselves in a par-
ticular relationship to other people. While it is generally agreed that embarrassment is expe-
rienced in interpersonal contexts (Taylor 1985; Ben-Ze’ev 2000; Purshouse 2001), different
accounts have been given of the dynamics in which it originates. For example, Purshouse
has argued that embarrassment stems from an unwanted experience of “exposure” to which
either the self or someone she is interacting with are subjected. The nature of what can be
so exposed and thus generate embarrassment is diverse: according to Purshouse, this can be
one’s “physical body, mental states, dispositions of character, and actions”, where also cases
in which someone acquires knowledge about someone else can count as “exposure” (2001,
530–531). A compatible, but more restrictive account of the conditions that must be in place
in order for embarrassment to occur is put forward by Taylor (1985). In her view, embar-
rassment stems from a particular demand posed directly or indirectly by others to which the
individual is unable to respond appropriately. Not knowing what to do when a pipe bursts,
she observes, may lead to feelings of embarrassment if I am in the presence of someone who
can efficiently deal with this type of situation (69–70). In this case, the emotion would be
triggered by perceiving the need to respond to the situation while not having the possibility
or the knowledge necessary to do so.
As it is the case with pride, embarrassment is thus a self-conscious emotion, and one
that may entail a negative self-evaluation.8 When feeling embarrassed, we see ourselves as
being in a situation in which we deem inappropriate to be, or as failing to behave in a way
adequate to the circumstances. These shortcomings are relative to specific contexts (Taylor
1985, 75; Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 503) and may not concern domains which are central to one’s
self-conception, but they still show the self as falling short in a certain way.
Whether embarrassment is conceived simply as a form of unwanted or unforeseen expo-
sure, or whether a more demanding account of the type of dynamic in which it is rooted is
embraced, it is important to acknowledge that, in virtue of its structure as a background feel-
ing of one’s worth, self-esteem can be closely connected to the experience of this emotion
too. For example, the range of situations that we conceive as involving “unwanted exposure”
will at least in part depend on how confident and good we feel about ourselves. Low self-
esteem may indeed be associated with the tendency to withdraw or refrain from social inter-
actions, as the person who keeps herself in low regard will expect others to share her negative
views of herself. In addition, lack of self-trust and/or self-respect may make us feel “on the
spot”, making us more inclined to think that we are responsible for solving the socially
problematic situations we are facing. This may be the case because, due to low self-esteem,
the person may be more prone to consider herself as the cause of negative events—although
in many circumstances, such a causal attribution would likely give rise to shame rather than
embarrassment (see also Chapter 30 in this volume). Alternatively, her feelings of inadequacy
may make her feel as if she always owed something to others, so that any demand for action
which arises in a social context may be taken as having to be fulfilled by her.
This does not mean that embarrassment is only experienced when self-esteem is low,
but rather that the evaluation of oneself as failing to adequately deal with the demands
of a particular situation may be fostered by prior feelings of worthlessness. Unlike pride,
which is connected to one’s achievements and thus to the evaluation of one’s worthiness,
embarrassment—even when it involves a negative self-assessment—does not appear to im-
mediately reflect on our value as persons. However, it is arguable that repeated, intense ex-
periences of embarrassment may weaken one’s confidence, generate shame (Taylor 1985, 76),
and ultimately pose a danger to the integrity of one’s self-esteem.
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3.3 Shyness
Shyness can be conceived of as a character or personality trait (Ben-Ze’ev 2000)—i.e., being
a shy person. However, as it is the case with pride, shyness can also refer to an episodic af-
fective state—i.e., feeling shy in a particular situation. Here, I will predominantly consider
shyness in its occurrent, emotional form, but my observations will also be relevant to our
understanding of dispositional shyness, as arguably the shy person is inclined, among other
things, to experience feelings of shyness when certain circumstances occur.
Like embarrassment, shyness requires the presence of a real or imagined audience and is
thus to be considered a social emotion. We feel shy when we are in front of other people or
directly interacting with them, but we can also experience shyness when foreseeing or imag-
ining a possible interaction, so the physical presence of an interlocutor is not a necessary con-
dition. Shyness is defined by the reluctance to be seen, heard, or to interact with others. We
typically feel shy in situations in which we may be at the centre of attention—for example
when asking a question at an academic event, or when someone wants to take a picture of
us—and at the core of the experience is a felt hesitance to be the object of such attention. In-
trinsic to shyness is a disinclination to engage in particular forms of interpersonal exchange,
but this does not necessarily entail a firm resolution to avoid the relevant situation. At least
in some cases, it seems that uncertainty, rather than the resolve to avoid interaction, is what
the shy person is experiencing.
In an analogous way to pride and embarrassment, due to its focus on the self, shyness is also
likely to be modulated by self-esteem. As previously discussed, the way in which we feel about
ourselves shapes our expectations and perceptions regarding the encounter with others, so
that different levels of self-esteem may be associated with different patterns of social emotions
and behaviours in interpersonal contexts. For example, as remarked above, the feelings of
unworthiness that mark low self-esteem may affect the decisiveness with which we approach
social interactions, as we may expect others to share the negative view we have of ourselves,
potentially exacerbating our painful feelings of inadequacy. On the other hand, high self-
esteem may dispose us towards a more optimistic attitude with regard to social encounters, as
confidence in our value inclines us to expect that others may find enjoyable interacting with
us, thus providing opportunities to confirm or enhance our sense of self-worth. Both dynam-
ics can therefore also have a self-perpetuating effect, as others may respond with diffidence or
disappointment to the hesitation of the person who is being shy, while resonating more easily
with the openness of those who are forthcoming in social interactions.

4. Conclusions
In this chapter, I have outlined a phenomenological exploration of self-esteem, and of some
of the experiences to which this is closely related. I claimed that self-esteem is to be un-
derstood as a particular form of “existential feeling”, an affective, background experience
of one’s worth, which deeply modulates our way of being in the world. In so doing, I have
also shown that intrinsic to the structure of self-esteem is a sense of both one’s abilities and
achievements, and—drawing on Goldie’s account of the narrative structure of emotions—I
suggested that these are intertwined components of a unitary phenomenological experience.
I then moved to show how self-esteem can impact on the experience of pride, embarrass-
ment, and shyness. In particular, I suggested that the ability to experience pride, the frequency
with which we feel embarrassed, and the tendency to be more or less shy, are all shaped by the
implicit sense we have of our own value. More broadly, due to its structure as a background

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affective orientation, it is to be expected that different degrees of self-esteem will be associated

with distinct patterns of self-focused emotions and attitudes, influencing whether and how we
can experience feelings such as guilt, shame, self-compassion, and self-love.

Acknowledgments
This chapter was developed during my appointment at University College Dublin as a
Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow (project “The Phenomenology of Self-Esteem” –
GOIPD/2016/555) and I thank the Irish Research Council for their support.

Notes

References
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Dillon, Robin (2013). Self-Respect and Self-Esteem. In: H. LaFollette (Ed.). The International Encyclo-
pedia of Ethics. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 4772–4782.
Dillon, Robin (Ed.) (1995). Dignity, Character, and Self-Respect. New York, London: Routledge.
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Being and Time. Philosophy Compass 10(10), 661-671.
Goldie, Peter (2000). The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
——— (2011). Grief: A Narrative Account. Ratio 24(2), 119–137.
Govier, Trudy (1993). Self-Trust, Autonomy, and Self-Esteem. Hypatia 8(1), 99–120.
——— (1998). Dilemmas of Trust. Montreal, Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1962[1927]]). Being and Time. Transl. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Helm, Bennett W. (2009). Love, Identification, and the Emotions. American Philosophical Quarterly
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68(3), 518–530.
Purshouse, Luke (2001). Embarrassment: A Philosophical Analysis. Philosophy 76(4), 515–540.
Ratcliffe, Matthew (2005). The Feeling of Being. Journal of Consciousness Studies 12(8-10), 43-60.
——— (2008). Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality. Oxford: Oxford
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Further reading
Baumeister, Roy F., (Ed.) (1993). Self-Esteem: The Puzzle of Low Self-Regard. New York: Plenum Press.
Brennan, Geoffrey, and Pettit, Philip. (2004). The Economy of Esteem. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lehrer, Keith. (1997). Self-Trust. A Study of Reason, Knowledge and Autonomy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tangney, June P., and Fischer, Kurt W. (1995). Self-Conscious Emotions. The Psychology of Shame, Guilt,
Embarrassment, and Pride. New York: The Guildford Press.
Tracy, Jessica L., Robins, Richard W., and Tangney, June P. (Eds.) (2007). The Self-Conscious Emotions.
Theory and Research. New York: The Guildford Press.

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 32
HUMILITY, HUMILIATION
AND AFFLICTION
Anthony J. Steinbock

Loving and humility are intimately related, and I understand their difference in terms of
experiential emphases. I take loving as an immediate and direct opening to another as bearer
of value—any other—in the integrity of what it is and toward the fullest realization of what
it is with respect to its own sphere. Here the focus is on the other, and is characterized as
a movement originating from the beloved as invitational (in one respect), and toward the
other as an initiatory movement of the lover (in another). Humility is this openness and dy-
namic movement, but where the experiential resonance is on how I spontaneously receive
myself as what I call “Myself,” that is, as who I am from another and as not self-grounding. Both
loving and humility are equally radical, but humility is a spontaneous actualization where
the experience is lived in its emphasis on the reception of “Myself,” most fundamentally as
beloved (Steinbock 2014).1
I treat humility as a moral emotion because of the way in which it is inherently con-
nected to loving, namely, as the way I receive myself in loving. Although humility is how I
receive Myself, humility is a moral emotion of otherness, and describing its structure helps
to elucidate the meaning of person. In this chapter, I address the question of self-givenness in
humility especially in relation to pride. This is followed by a differentiation between being
humbled, humbling myself, and modesty. I then distinguish between humiliation, affliction,
and humility.

1. The question of self-givenness in humility

If we examine emotions of self-givenness such as pride, shame, and guilt, we can find an
unequivocal self-givenness (which some investigators take as forms of self-assessment or
self-judgment) in the experiences of them. These emotions of self-givenness are conducive
to a phenomenological analysis, not only because “I” am given to myself in these very ex-
periences as first-person experiences but also because I can reflect on this self-givenness and
describe it as it is taking place. Here, I become an explicit theme of the experience, even if—
as in the case of pride—such an experience amounts to a self-dissimulation (Steinbock 2014,
31–66). Humility is usually treated alongside pride, shame, and guilt because it is seen either
as marking a point of contrast with pride or as residing on a continuum with shame and
guilt (Taylor 1985; Tangney and Fischer 1995). How are we to understand the experience of

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self-givenness in relation to humility? In this section, I examine the sense in which humility
clearly is not a self-givenness like we find in the cases of pride, shame, and guilt. But I also
describe the distinctive way humility is a unique kind of self-givenness. Thus, humility
occupies a peculiar place in relation to the individual person (self-givenness) and otherness.
Let’s begin with an example. If I were to present a group design project as my own work,
it could make sense to reflect on it and think, “Wow, I am really being prideful right now”
(and disdain it or embrace it). If I look at the way that the other team members and the
judges look at me for grandstanding, it might make sense to feel shame and to describe it
as such in that very experience. Further, if I take all the credit and the prize money for the
winning design, I could experience guilt and describe this experience as it is taking place.
But when for example describing the communal effort that went into the design, where the
focus is on the design and the cooperation—and not myself as ego—it does not seem possible
at that very moment, reflectively, to describe myself as experiencing humility. “I” in some
sense disappear as a focal point in the very experience of humility, which is one reason why
humility evades the same kind of first-person-present description that we find in the other
emotions of self-givenness, e.g., pride, shame, and guilt. Nevertheless, the difficulty of de-
scribing humility as I experience it in a first-person-present experience is also a clue to the
very experience of humility. It is a clue insofar as this difficulty corresponds to what can be
loosely described as a “loss” or “forgetfulness” of self.
Because humility is given as I am disposed toward an “other” (i.e., loving) I do not find
myself as humble in the first-person experience, now. Yet, as in the case of shamelessness, hu-
mility can be given from a first-person plural perspective, a “we,” or from an I–you perspec-
tive (e.g., perceiving humility in someone) (Steinbock 2014, 67–99). In this way, another can
become exemplary of humility for me. Or humility can be given in a memorial experience
with regard to myself as the person of my own past, whereby I am able to identify some act
or attitude as humble.
Let me now examine the way in which humility is a kind of self-givenness. Phenome-
nologically speaking, what is known as the phenomenological “reduction” is not method of
finding a remainder, something left over after putting my prejudices out of play, but a process
of disposing oneself to what something is in the manner that it gives itself. It thus liberates the
phenomena, as it were. The style of “liberation” of the reduction is operative in the epis-
temic as well as in the moral sphere, though in different ways. In the “moral reduction” of
humility, I am “reduced”—to Myself. That is, I am reduced to the core of who “I” am—not
as independent, fully self-originating, or self-grounding, but as essentially relational and not
self-grounding, ultimately, interpersonal from the very start. Humility is a being revealed to
myself as Myself: as related to another, as accepting from another, as accepting the givenness
from another and contributions from others—precisely the opposite of pride. Accordingly,
the eclipse of self-givenness where I am an explicit theme (like we find in pride, shame, and
guilt) does not mean that there is no self-givenness in humility. It is possible, for instance, to
receive myself as a recovery of Myself as relational, since humility is the way I am self-given
in the process of accepting or receiving without merit or “just deserts.”
I understand by pride an interpersonal movement that presupposes an implicit movement
toward others, one that includes others only by resisting their contributions to who I am and
the meaning of the world through them in the constitution of who I am through the vaulting
self-valuation. Thus, pride is a twofold movement. It is both (1) a subjective self-movement,
as (2) a resistance to others. This is why pride is actually a self-dissimulation; it dissimulates
the self as interpersonal, as receiving myself/Myself. Pride belongs to a moral dimension of
experience, because it is a resistance to others and to their contributions to shared meaning

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in and through asserting myself as the only or the highest source of meaning. I am given to
myself in pride as self-grounding.
In distinction to pride, humility is a recovery and realization of myself, precisely as Myself
in the dynamic sense described above. But as foundational for pride, humility does not
reach its deepest sense first as a “recovery” of the interpersonal from pride. I mean by this
that humility does not presuppose pride; it is just the reverse in terms of its very structure.
As foundation, “I” can in principle experience of Myself as interpersonal without having to
have been a recovery of a sovereign self in pride. Rather, humility is a reception of myself in
the presence of things, a reception of myself as Myself—outside of my expectation or what
I would anticipate as a return. As humble, I receive Myself, accepting in openness Myself as
self-given ( Jankélévitch 1986, 363).
Not only am I not the “object” of the experience, I am not the motivation of the
movement—even though it is none other than “I” who am humble. I am not the object
of the experience of humility in the sense that I am not the thematic terminus a quo and
terminus ad quem. And I am not the motivation of the movement of humility in the sense
that this movement is initiated from the outside, from the other, and not from myself. For
example, I am drawn toward this profession; I devote myself to understanding this text; I am
engaged in pursuing that idea which “I” am trying to realize; I am caught up in a conver-
sation with this student. Because humility is the way in which I am “self-given,” e.g., in
loving, the humble person is completely absorbed in the attentiveness to others, to the tea, to
the process, the music, etc. In this respect, the non-reflection on myself in the experience is
a by-product of humility, but not the goal.
This is also why I cannot try to be humble and achieve humility; the very “attempt” as
the exercise of my focus on myself would eclipse the very process. It is not that the case that
the humble person is pathetic or feeble. Quite the contrary; there is an integrity, “force,” and
strength in humility; but the point of the integrity, force, and strength arises through the
spontaneous acceptance of Myself in its movement toward and reception from others. Humil-
ity should not be confused with abasement. I do not focus on myself in order to be humble. It
is quite the opposite. I am too engaged in the reception of what is given to be concerned with
myself. It is a question of overabundance in an affirming or accepting, not negating.
In comparison to pride, therefore, the humble person accepts the contribution of others
to the meaning constitution of the world, and to Myself. We see this spontaneous accep-
tance in humility that qualifies the person as humble. Certainly, given the whole person,
we live through manifold layers and dimensions of temporality. But by honing in on the
experience of temporality in humility, there are unique modes of temporal givenness.
They include a presence-at, which is the temporal “how” of openness and acceptance,
as a being thankful for, an ante-memorial reception, or how I receive myself as given to
Myself, as not self-grounding, and accepting-ahead and as accepting-ahead, reflected in
devotion toward—all of which may go on at the same time as a presentation, retention,
and protention—or with the temporal modes of other emotional experiences—but are
essentially distinct from them.
To sum up, then, I have characterized humility as a mode of self-givenness as who I am
in loving or being oriented toward another. As a way of clarifying this, I have examined
the limits of this self-givenness in humility. Unlike pride, humility is the experience of the
non-self-grounding character of who I am. Further, unlike other emotions of self-givenness,
namely, pride, shame, and guilt, however, I am not self-given in a thematic way in hu-
mility. And unlike shame and guilt, I am not given to myself in a diremptive experience.
Nevertheless, I am given as having received Myself.

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However, because humility—viewed from the perspective of pride—calls pride into

question, humility can be understood as a recovery of Myself as not-self-grounding, as in-
terrelated, and as interpersonal, and only thereby a forgetfulness of the self in which “I” am
not an issue in humility. From this viewpoint, it is possible to distinguish humility from ex-
periences that seem to be similar to humility, but that are essentially distinct, precisely where
“I” am an issue. To this end, I describe below the experiences of being humbled, humbling
myself, and modesty, all of which are distinct from humility. This set of issues relates to the
problem of self-givenness because in these cases it is precisely an issue of how I am given in
them.

2. Being humbled, humbling myself, and modesty

In order to discern stricter contours of humility, and to avoid common ambiguities associ-
ated with this emotion, I describe the experience of being humbled, of humbling myself, and
of modesty. In each of these cases, “I” come into a certain prominence in the experience,
something that is not the case in humility.
Being Humbled: The experience of being humbled presupposes the constitution of some-
thing like an “emotional level,” akin to what Merleau-Ponty (1945) has called the consti-
tution of a “spatial level.” That is, being humbled presupposes something in relationship to
which I now experience myself as lowered. For example, I may think of myself as an accom-
plished rock climber, but when I climb with others, and I see how good they are, I could feel
humbled. This need not take place before a personal other. For instance, I could try to climb
an apparently easy path up a rock face, but struggle making the climb; I may even give up. In
this case, I could realize that my efforts to overpower the rock face did not work, that I do
not know how to read the rock cliff, or that I am no match for the rock face (as if I were in
a competition with it). In these ways, I might experience myself as humbled by the rock face
without having to impute any intention to it or of it wanting to humble me.
In all instances of being humbled, the experience is accompanied by a negative valence.
Certainly, this is not the strong negative valence that is encountered in shame, but it is neg-
ative nonetheless because the discrepancy from one emotional level to the next is an abasing
one. Even if we might feel positive about being humbled, this is not an original positive
valence unique to the experience, but a positivity as a reaction to the negative valence.
For example, I may take pleasure in being humbled by the rock face (it may disclose my
place in the universe), or in being humbled by another person for some reason, but then we
are witnessing two levels peculiar to the experience. First, there is a spontaneity in this being
humbled (which is given with a negative valence), and then there is a positivity associated
with the negativity such that I may even delight in being humbled. This is why being hum-
bled cannot be equated with masochism. Masochism wants to will being lowered, and in this
sense, it insidiously wills to be or to remain in control in the submission. Being humbled,
experienced originally, is something by which I am caught off-guard and is not willed; I ex-
perience myself immediately as not in control or as having to release my control or mastery.
Certainly, being humbled may lead to new insights that I have gained into myself; however,
it could just as well motivate other responses; for example, it could just make me angry,
prideful, or reactionary.
Humbling Myself: Humbling myself relates to my egoic activity, and as such it is expressive
of my will. In humbling myself, I freely submit myself to another in a relation to whom I
am given to myself. Humbling myself is something distinctive from humility in and through
which I serve another, because in humbling myself, I posit myself as in relation to another,

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in and through the process of serving another. This can be seen in the case of perceiving
someone as superior to me and perhaps more poignantly, with respect to someone perceived
as “inferior” to me in some regard.
For example, as a car mechanic, I can devote myself to the repair of cars, or I can aid
the head mechanic in her task. This could be simply a matter of service—independently of
whether or not I am getting paid for this service. Further, no matter how I may have consid-
ered myself in relation to others or to this task, I undertake it, say, without complaint, though
I may have had my own ideas of how to do things; or I could undertake my duties without
any consideration of the merits of the head mechanic, but do this only with the awareness
that she is in charge. In this spirit, I carry out my task as servicing cars. Such an example
can be seen as humbling myself in relation to the “master” because the very positions of the
relation demand “lowering” myself in relation to her. It is also possible that I humble myself
in relation to another because I perceive that she is in a position of power; from here I can
recognize myself as inferior in relation to someone who is superior, and I could do it out of
self-preservation (I want to keep my job).
We might consider other examples in which the relation of “humbling myself ” is in-
tensified, for instance, when as a car mechanic I still serve the head mechanic in the same
spirit, but I think my ideas, methods, or techniques are superior to hers. This is likewise
the case when I, as the head mechanic, inversely work for the new hire—in the spirit of
serving—e.g., by assisting the new mechanic in her own way.
If I do humble myself in these ways, however, I do not do so in a condescending or pa-
tronizing manner. I may do this as a courtesy, in an effort to encourage dialogue rather than
shut it down, or in order to make another feel comfortable. In terms of bodily comportment,
humbling myself can be expressed as bowing down lower than another; or by letting another
go first, as when entering a building. If it is a matter of humbling myself, then it is more
than merely following custom, manners, or mores. I mean by this that humbling myself is
irreducible to following rules of behavior or codes of conduct, because whereas the latter
might be compulsory, here I am “freely” engaged in the process of humbling myself before
another—even if objectively humbling myself and just doing things by social rote might
look the same.
I cite these examples of being humbled and humbling myself because they are essen-
tially distinct from humility; and though they may seem to be quite similar, they show by
contrast how distinctive the movement of humility is from them. In humility, the humble
person does not compare his position with another; the humble person does not position
herself in relation to another. She thinks neither highly nor lowly of herself, because I am
not the issue.2
Likewise, when one receives in humility, what is received is not taken as one’s “just des-
erts,” but rather as gift; only post facto is it “humbling”; only after the fact do I feel myself as
“undeserving”—which for humility, would find no end. In fact, humility admits of no in-
tention, no fulfillment, no disappointment. Accordingly, Scheler writes that in humility one
accepts all things with thanks, from the most subtle pleasure to the grandest bliss; we do this
without ever imagining that we deserve even the smallest part (Scheler 1955, 17–26). The
humble person does not give thought to the proper order of things, but accepts what comes
with gratitude and without the thought of merit. Accordingly, Jankélévitch writes that the
humble person does not have rights, but only duties ( Jankélévitch 1986, 398).
I find it telling that the process of humbling myself is susceptible to a patronizing attitude,
whereas humility is not. There is a danger where humbling myself is concerned insofar as
this process of humbling myself could slip into being manipulative (for example, I lower

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myself in order to gain control). Moreover, because it is possible to sense my superiority in

humbling myself (and therefore put myself above another by placing myself below another—
and also having a positive valence accompany this experience), humbling myself reveals the
possibility of superiority in relation to which the earlier being humbled had a negative va-
lence. Thus, being humbled and humbling myself are distinctive experiences from humility.
Let me now compare these two experiences (which in their own ways bring the self into
relief at least in terms of a comparative relation) with modesty, which also bears on me in a
peculiar way.
Modesty. In distinction to being humbled or humbling myself, modesty requires neither
lowering nor raising myself. It is also a style of comportment that operates or attempts to
operate without pretension, illusion, or self-deception. Not only does modesty presuppose
an exposure of myself, but it is simultaneously a refraining from the exposure of myself, a
process of not being “showy,” where precisely a refraining from myself is brought into relief.
In this regard, modesty is more aligned with pride than with shame, since the self-salience in
a positive respect emerges and is covered up. Unlike humility, in modesty, I am still an issue
because I am oriented toward the non-salience of the self (Dōgen 2007, 961).3 Thus, modesty
emerges in the context of exposing myself or being exposed in a brazen way and resisting this
kind of exposure; modesty holds back from asserting myself in this way.
Further, modesty is impersonal in the sense that it is not oriented toward anyone in par-
ticular or toward the personal core of the individual. The reserved character of modesty as
a holding myself back makes a gesture both toward a hiding or veiling of insufficiencies,
or delicately showing talents, and in this way gestures toward anonymity. Its movement is
more a self-retraction than putting myself in my rightful place. But if the latter were the
case, then it would always be subordinated to the movement of non-prominence, and hence
the former gesture. Even though there is this gesture toward impersonality and anonymity,
there is nonetheless a givenness of myself. In modesty, writes Jankélévitch, it is not a matter
of the others; or as I would say in this context, it is not a question of a comparison in being
humbled or humbling myself before another. It is “only me,” but it is still (a matter of ) me
( Jankélévitch, 1986, 333). The individual is not a big deal, but what he is, is something, how-
ever minimally.
Moderation or the appearance of equilibrium might be a consequence of modesty, but
if moderation or equilibrium were the intended outcome, we would only be describing
something like propriety. This is because modesty is still a practice related to myself, as a
recognition and a suppression of the self-salience.

3. Humiliation and affliction

Because humiliation is often treated alongside the experience of humility (perhaps because
of an etymological relatedness), often—misleadingly I think—in terms of a genetic relation
of humiliation to humility, I treat the experience of humiliation in the context of humility.
I also treat the phenomenon of affliction here. I do this because from the outside, affliction
and humiliation appear to be the same; experientially, however, they are quite distinct. Fur-
thermore, it is affliction, not humiliation that can lead to humility. Further, the discussion of
humiliation belongs in the context of shame and debilitating shame.
In a different work (Steinbock 2014), I have shown how shame is lived in a distinctive
manner as a diremptive experience, and how shame as self-revelation (which can provoke a
positive self-critique), can also issue in (but is irreducible to) a debilitating shame. In fact, the
former presupposes the latter such that this kind of self-revelation and self-critique become

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distorted precisely through a disordered heart, and such that I am given to myself through
distortions of value, either on the part of others or myself. We see this in the cases of emo-
tional or physical abuse and cultural forms of domination (like racism) that support and
elicit deformative and alienating economic, political, corporeal value ideals such as we get in
advertising and in certain forms of commoditization.4 These result from a disordered heart
(Scheler 1957).
Humiliation and Debilitating Shame: By humiliation, I understand a destructive force that
is abusive, such as being exposed to mockery, being subject to ridicule, or being reduced to
powerlessness before the power of another. It includes being stripped down before others,
physically and emotionally—before others who remain in power, where this power is a
power over the humiliated one. It targets the basic sense and integrity of the person for all
to see. This gives us a clue to the interpersonal status of humiliation. Humiliation is at heart
interpersonal; it cannot occur within a solus ipse, but it is not expressive of positive interper-
sonal relations.
The interpersonal nexus that we would find in experiences like love or trust are disori-
ented. If I am humiliated, I am humiliated by another and before another; I am both presup-
posed as person, yet actively de-personified. This is what makes the process so powerful. I
can only be subject to humiliation because there is (at least) an implicit sense of my personal
integrity to be humiliated. It is a de-personalization on the basis of an interpersonal nexus.
In this regard, humiliation can also be understood as a diremptive experience, namely, I
am given to myself in a way that is in tension with a more basic orientation, or in this case,
personal self-presence. There is a diremption in humiliation because I am being reduced to
this object, which I as person am not, though I am made to appear (=violence) in this light.
Humiliation sustains this active tension. I cannot humiliate a person who does not have a
sense of him or herself as a person. However, as opposed to embarrassment or shame, there
is nothing “corrective” that can come out of humiliation. Shame, for example, keeps the
personal sense of the individual intact—I am thrown back on myself as being revealed to
myself as who I “am” in the dynamic sense of becoming. Humiliation, on the other hand,
targets me as destroying the personal integrity in question; it is not open to positive critique
or to a re-orientation of who I am, but only holds me as dis-oriented from who I am before
others and as subject to others. Whereas it is courage that might be evoked as a resistance to
humiliation, it is rather arrogance that might arise as a resistance to shame (provided, again,
that it is not debilitating shame—i.e., akin to humiliation).
We can see the difference between shame and humiliation in the following example. I can
scold a child in public, saying: “you should be ashamed of yourself ” from the perspective of
our shared homeworld. But this is much different from humiliating a child—opening him
or her to the derision of others and in a manner that does not allow the child to recover from
it. This could include bringing out the child’s faults in front of friends or strangers, with no
other purpose than bringing attention to the faults and so ridicule the child; for example, it
could entail drawing attention to someone who stammers simply to draw attention to it such
that the other person just goes deeper and deeper into stammering. When I am humiliated,
I am made to feel less than who I am, and only that.
Whereas invoking shameful behavior in a scold could still take place in a loving attitude
that wants to draw the child back to his or her “true” self, humiliation only wants to dis-
parage, ridicule, and to reduce the other person to an object in order to exert control, but
hold the experience at the disorientation, as it were, without futural recovery. Its internal
sense is interpersonal since it is realized as violence directed toward a person. But it is not
a positive return to my “true” self—which could in a different context lead to repentance

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(Steinbock 2014, 137–159). Its internal sense is not humility, as the recovery or reception
of myself as Myself. Rather, the sense of humiliation is for this other person to become that
de-personified object that I or others could master (e.g., out of anger or hate), where the
humiliated person remains a witness to this de-personalization. In this respect, its meaning is
not the positive interpersonal relation.
Thus, shame, guilt, embarrassment, and humiliation are all diremptive experiences. But
whereas shame can point toward the future in the sense of a recovery or a return to Myself, hu-
miliation sustains the point of “disorientation” or “diremption” and holds it there, withholding
the dimension of recovery or return to the presence of personhood. The devastating quality of
humiliation is due in part to closing down the future, holding the individual in the obstinate
and abstract “now,” making it all the more difficult to recover. Further, while I can be embar-
rassed before others because of something I do, in humiliation, it is others (real or imagined)
who make me appear in this way before others. Finally, humiliation is distinct from insult in
the way that embarrassment is distinguished from shame. Insult is an incidental rupture against
a basic self or personal experience. Humiliation bears on the core of the personal orientation.
Let’s compare this characterization of humiliation with debilitating shame (MacKendrick
2008, 145–163). Debilitating shame appropriates a “false” self-image such that the individ-
ual internalizes it, producing or appropriating the same dis-ordered heart. Unlike shame,
which is rooted in a genuine self-love, debilitating shame works from self-love that is trans-
formed into self-hate. Humiliation is an active operation toward another who is acted upon
as an object—but where the individual has not yet internalized what I would want to call
this disordered sense of self. Hence, we can say that debilitating shame can result from an
internalized humiliation (though this is not the only source), and why the experience of
humiliation belongs properly alongside the thematic of debilitating shame, and not humility.
Paradoxically, in order to humiliate another, in order to execute or sustain a de-
personification of him, I have to posit him as “person.” And in order for humiliation to
work, I have to keep it in process or in an active tension. I have to recognize his personhood
in order to destroy it before his eyes, which is to say, before others’ eyes—without completely
reducing him to the status of an object while attempting to reduce him to the status of an
object—so that he can actively witness his own de-personalization against the background
of a perceived personhood. Similarly, as the one humiliated, I have to maintain my own per-
sonal sense or dignity, while I am being made to appear differently, and I must remain held
there at this disequilibrium without the futural movement of return.
However, for humiliation to arise, while I may presuppose the other’s personhood, it is
also essential that the personhood of the other not be acknowledged explicitly or be made the
theme of the actions. If so, this process might instead result in torture without humiliation,
for example, physical or psychological abuse (e.g., only to get information, or to do to an-
other what she did to me, etc.) without the diremptive experience of a denigrated integrity
before others, thwarting a futural recovery. Thus, there has to be a co-givenness of person-
hood, but a personhood that is both being denied by the one humiliating and experienced
as such by the one humiliated. For example, if someone tries to humiliate me by shaving my
head and exposing me to public ridicule, this will only work if I, too, see a positivity in a full
head of hair and a simultaneous denigration in a shaved head.5 But if it is only a matter of the
shaved head, and if in fact, a shaved head is actually part of my usual self-comportment, say,
as a monk, I will not be humiliated by this singular activity.
Thus, the sense of integrity (the person—person relation) on both sides of humiliating and
humiliated must be presupposed in order for humiliation to arise, but it must remain in the
background of and resist an active de-personalization. There is thus a double gesture of both

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ascribing and denying the dignity of the other in humiliation where a diremption is posited,
but held there without the possibility of the individual’s return to his or her personal integrity.
Humiliation and Affliction: Let me draw a further distinction between humiliation and
affliction. Affliction is not only lived as beyond my own power, or as beyond any “worldly”
measures to initiate it or alleviate it, but ultimately because affliction is a religious relation
and for those who undergo it, has a redemptive quality. The fact that there is no “worldly”
cause to affliction is an initial clue that affliction has a “religious” sense. Hence, Simone Weil
will distinguish between the “I” that is “destroyed” in a mundane manner, which is what I
have called humiliation, and the “I” that is “destroyed” from within an interpersonal rela-
tion (a relation with God), which only within this very movement is viewed as redemptive
(Weil 1988, 35, 2002, 26).6
Affliction is experienced in terms of a presence that should be there, but is not. It is there-
fore important to note that we cannot simultaneously experience affliction and experience
affliction as the process of redemption. It is only after the fact, that is, from the perspective
of redemption, and for whom on the other side of the experience, that it may constitute the
removal of obstacles, like the attachment to myself in pride, etc.
These experiences have a different tenor depending upon how they are lived and are not
differentiated by virtue of their objective circumstances. For example, it is not the event itself
that qualifies it for me as suffering, humiliation, or affliction. Social degradation, poverty,
separation from a loved one, torture, could be lived as either suffering, humiliation, and/or
affliction. But in affliction, writes Weil, God is made to appear absent for a time, more absent
than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. “A kind of horror
submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love” (Weil 1963, 84,
2001, 70). This suggests an essential difference between humiliation and affliction, namely,
“I” can try to resist humiliation, but there is no point to trying to resist affliction in the same
way. For example, I can assert in humiliation (at least to myself ) that “I have my pride, you
know.” But “I” am powerless to resist affliction.
From the outside, of course, extreme suffering, humiliation, and affliction can appear
indistinguishable. They all essentially occur against my will. Is it others with a political
agenda who make me a pariah; is it economic conditions that make me a social outcast; is it
God who makes me stand alone or removes my dignity? Within a merely secular experience,
humiliation would be limited to something like exerting power over another, on the one
hand, and experiencing abuse and destruction of integrity, on the other.
Affliction is ultimately a religious experience. Only to the extent that there is an experi-
ence of some other as a center of loving, could there be an experience of affliction. This is to
say two things. First, the context in which affliction arises cannot be “secular” because the
otherwise secular would have a religious meaning, even if we did not actively impute to it
a religious significance. Second, affliction tears down the attitude that gives absolute weight
to some relative good, on infinite weight to some finite value. This goes even to the finite
absoluteness of myself in pride. Thus affliction, properly speaking, belongs to the religious
sphere of experiencing. Accordingly, it is affliction, which is ultimately rooted in loving, and
not at all humiliation, that has a genetic connection to humility.

4. Conclusion
Allow me to conclude these reflections on humility by providing a brief summary. To de-
scribe humility, I related it to the experience of loving as movement toward another as bearer
in the fullness of its becoming-being. Humility is who I “am” as how I am given to myself

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in as Myself. It is a unique kind of self-givenness that is unlike the self-givenness of pride,

shame, or guilt. Further, humility is distinctive from my being humbled, from humbling
myself insofar as I am not placed or do not place myself in comparison with another; unlike
modesty, there is no attempt in humility to suppress myself. Despite the fact that humiliation
seems to be tied to humility, humiliation really belongs to the problematic of shame, and in
particular, to the dynamic of debilitating shame. Distinguishing between humiliation and
affliction, it is possible to assert that the latter appears within a religious or interpersonal
context, and that it is this experience, namely, affliction, and not humiliation that can have
a genetic relation to humility.

Notes

References
Dōgen (2007). Sh ōb ōgenzō: The Treasure House of the Eye of the True Teaching (A Trainee’s Translation of
Great Master Dōgen’s Spiritual Masterpiece). Transl. by Rev. Hubert Nearman, O. B. C. Mount
Shasta: Shasta Abbey Press.
Hagerty, Barbara Bradley (October 14, 2003). Papers Show Mother Teresa Felt Abandoned. National
Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1464889.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir (1986). Les vertus et l’amour. Ed. by Françoise Schwab. Paris: Flammarion.
MacKendrick, Karmen (2008). Humiliated Subjects. In: L. Armand, J. Lewty, and A. Mitchell (Eds.).
Pornotopia: Image, Apocalypse, Desire. Prague: Univerzita Karlova v Praze, 145–163.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. [Engl. Transl.:
Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. by D. Landes. London, New York: Routledge 2014.]
Scheler, Max (1955). Die Demut. In: Maria Scheler (Ed.). Vom Umsturz der Werte. Gesammelte Werke,
Vol. 3. Bern: Francke, 17–26.
––––– (1957). Ordo Amoris [=Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, Vol 1./ Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 10.]. Ed. by M.
Scheler. Bern: Francke, 345–376.

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Steinbock, Anthony J. (2014). Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Tangney, June Price, and Fischer, Kurt W. (Eds.) (1995). Self-Conscious Emotions: The Psychology of
Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, and Pride. New York: Guilford Press.
Taylor, Gabriele (1985). Pride, Shame and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Theresa, Mother (1995). A Simple Path. Ed. by Lucinda Vardey. New York: Ballantine Books.
Weil, Simone (1963). Attente de Dieu. Paris: La Colombe. [Engl. Transl.: Waiting for God. Transl. by
E. Craufurd. New York: Perennial Classics 2001.]
––––– (1988). Le pesanteur et la grâce. Paris: Librairie Plon. [Engl. Transl.: Gravity and Grace. Transl. by
E. Crawford, and M. von der Ruhr. New York, London: Routledge 2002.]

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 33
DISGUST
Sara Heinämaa

1. Introduction
Disgust is usually characterized as a strong negative emotion, more concretely as an aver-
sion accompanied by intense, even violent, bodily reactions. The bodily aspects of disgust
are taken to include nose wrinkling, retraction of the upper lip, gaping, convulsions, gag-
ging and nausea. Many theorists contend that such bodily tendencies are universally shared
by all humans (or primates more generally) (cf. Demmerling and Landweer 2007, 93–95).
The putative fact is explained ontogenetically by early child-development and phylogenet-
ically by the mechanisms of species evolution (e.g., Darwin 1872; Rozin and Fallon 1987;
Rozin et al. 1993, 757). This does not entail that all human beings in all cultures and at
all times would reject the same objects as disgusting, but merely that when humans reject
something as disgusting, they do so by the same or very similar facial gestures and bodily
movements.1
The intentional content of disgust involves a disturbing or threatening focal object given
either perceptually or imaginatively to the experiencing subject. The experienced threat
is specific in depending on the vivid presence of the object (cf. Kolnai 1929, 40ff., 78–80;
Demmerling and Landweer 2007, 95). When we hear that a callous criminal has broken loose
from the city prison, we tend to be alarmed and feel fear even when we have no visual or
auditory evidence of the vicinity of the person. In contrast, slimy substances and obsequious
behaviors elicit disgust only when actually detected, directly perceived or vividly imagined.
Disregarding such a difference, disgust resembles fear in that its focal object menaces the
subject in a thorough and comprehensive way, bodily and mentally. Moreover, both emo-
tions easily transfer from one object to another. Having been attacked by a bull, a person may
dread all cattle; and a person disgusted by spiders may also be alarmed by other arthropods.
The center of attention of the two emotions differs, however: whereas the frightened is con-
cerned about the very being of the object (actual or possible, present or future), the disgusted
is more troubled by the object’s manner of being. Moreover, the experiencing subject is given
in different ways in fear and disgust: fear brings the subject, her well-being and survival into
focus, but disgust is fixed on an external object and involves only a marginal awareness of
the subject (cf. Korsmeyer and Smith 2004, 8–9; Korsmeyer 2008). These differences in the
intentional content of the two emotions manifest in characteristic behaviors: a person struck

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by fear tends to look for escape routes or hiding places, or, when petrified by the emotion,
tends to cower; the revolted, in contrast, cannot but stare at the disturbing thing.
Disgust differs from other negative emotions also in having a great variety of intentional
objects. On the one hand, human beings tend to be disgusted by many different sorts of
material substances and things. This category involves various objects characterized by brute
materiality: feces, waste, sewage, corpses, carrions, wounds and bodily fluids (pus, clot,
snot, spittle, urine, vomit). Also many sorts of animals belong in this category: rats, snakes,
maggots, spiders and a mixed group of insects, including cockroaches and grasshoppers. On
the other hand, disgust may also be inflicted by human behaviors and actions. The objects
of this category involve both manners of behavior and types of agency: compromise, treach-
ery and betrayal; laziness, idleness and obsessions of different kinds; weaklings, traitors and
devious criminals.
This duality of disgust elicitors is often conceptualized by the distinction between ‘physical
disgust’ directed at natural substances, matters, things and processes, and ‘moral disgust’
directed at human behaviors and actions. However, the terms ‘physical’ (or ‘visceral’) and
‘moral’ are also used to distinguish between forms of aversion accompanied by strong bodily
reactions and merely verbal reproach without visceral convulsions.2
Several contemporary philosophers discuss the role of disgust in racism, sexism and ho-
mophobia and other forms of social and political discrimination.3 Martha Nussbaum argues
in Hiding from Humanity (2006) that disgust is a dehumanizing emotion that tends to strip its
human targets from their capacities and aspirations and from their individuality and reduces
them to lower forms of life. Nussbaum criticizes disgust-ridden behavior by arguing that
disgust depends on projective psychological mechanisms that prompt us to attribute to others
those aspects of our own existence that we experience as most disturbing: dependency on
others, vulnerability and mortality. Furthering this line of thought, Nussbaum argues that
disgust is a seriously detrimental emotion since its projective mechanisms allow us to disre-
gard or belittle our factual condition and reject it as a weakness in others, but also, and more
viciously, since its mechanisms serve attacks against marginalized and powerless groups of
individuals (e.g., Nussbaum 2006, 14–16, 89, 114, cf. Nussbaum 2010, 2013).
Many theorists agree with Nussbaum in criticizing disgust as a profoundly harmful emo-
tion. Whereas shame and guilt are taken to have potentially constructive social implications,
disgust is seen as an essentially destructive feeling. The analytical concepts and the critical
methods used in putting forward such arguments, however, greatly vary.
In her Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Sara Ahmed argues that human bodies and
human behaviors become disgust elicitors on the basis of the social-historical processes of
stigma-creation that operate by circulation, repetition and accumulation of affective signs.
In The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996), Elisabeth Young-Bruehl resorts to the Freudian theory
of libidinal economies and distinguishes between different personality types disposed to dif-
ferent forms of emotive bigotry and fanaticism. More recent studies have drawn attention to
the fact that disgust is not just operative in the segregation, marginalization and exclusion of
groups but that it also has an intensifying or amplifying role in collective acts of persecution,
mass perpetration and genocide (e.g., Munch-Jurisic 2015, 2018; cf. Cavarero 2018).
However, some theorists have argued that disgust has a constructive role of in the evalua-
tion and ranking of socially or morally offensive or unacceptable forms of behavior and types
of action (e.g., Kahan 1998; Miller 1998). Nussbaum rejects these proposals by arguing that
the strong tendency of disgust to transfer from harmful things and actions to persons and
groups of persons is more detrimental than any minor advantage that the emotion may have
in intensifying proper moral sentiments, such as indignation or anger (e.g., Nussbaum 2006).

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2. Theorizing disgust
The main difficulty in providing a philosophical account of disgust lies in the fact that the
emotion is highly various and ambiguous, both in its motivations and functions and in its
intentional content.
One general strategy in the theorization of disgust has been to identify a set of core
objects—substances, elements, materials, things or processes—that paradigmatically in-
flict disgust, and then argue that other disgust elicitors are extensions of this class of “core
elicitors.” Theorists have introduced various psychological, social-cultural, historical and
symbolic processes and mechanisms to explain how such extensions become possible and
are motivated and realized. These processes include association, analogy, condensation,
displacement, symbolization and projection.4
One dominant strategy is to argue that all disgust experiences originate, in one way or another,
from rejection of spoiled food and/or viral substances (e.g., Rozin and Fallon 1987; Rozin et al.
1993; cf. Oaten et al. 2009; Curtis et al. 2011). The other explanatory strategy is to contend that
disgust originally guards our bodily boundaries and is thus paradigmatically focused on bodily
orifices and their secretions and excrements (e.g., Freud 1910–1905; Jones 1912; Angyal 1941;
Kristeva 1980). Third, it has been suggested that disgust is paradigmatically elicited by animals
that spread diseases or threaten the cultivation of crops, such as rats, pigeons, cockroaches and
grasshoppers. In this account, the core elicitors of disgust would be pests and parasites.
The cognitive psychologist Paul Rozin has developed a highly influential explanatory
paradigm centering on the concepts of contamination and magical thinking (cf. Rozin and
Fallon 1987; Rozin et al. 1993, 757). Rozin and his colleagues argue that disgust has a
species-specific core form in the rejection of potentially contaminating nourishment but, in
addition to this, also culture-specific variants in which specific foods and other substances,
but also human behaviors, are rejected as potentially contaminating. Rozin’s account is cog-
nitivist in suggesting that disgust essentially involves a magical belief in the viral powers of
its object. Several theorists and critics of disgust build on this contamination-theoretical
corner-stone (cf. Nussbaum 2006, 2010, 2013; Kelly 2011).
The problem with such explanatory accounts and hypotheses is that they tend to be ex-
perientially selective. Whereas some cases of felt disgust are handled in detailed analyses and
cogent explanations, other cases are omitted as insignificant, and without proper arguments.
Rozin, for example, dismisses a prominent class of disgust elicitors consisting of spiders and
harmless insects and characterizes them as “anomalous animals” (Rozin et al. 1993, 760).
Such approaches can be said to be experientially inadequate in so far as they sacrifice phe-
nomena for the unity of explanation (cf. McGinn 2015).
Phenomenological accounts of disgust differ from explanatory approaches—both causal
and functional—in aiming primarily at a comprehensive description that covers all promi-
nent experiences of the emotion as well as their various intentional objects. Such accounts
look for common structural features shared by all cases of disgust, both at their subjective
(noetic) and objective (noematic) sides. Rather than offering an account in terms of common
origins or root forms, phenomenologists put forward claims about the common structures
and modes of organization of experiences, that is, isomorphisms.
Another characteristic factor of phenomenological approaches is that many of them
entail the idea that disgust is directly founded on perception and does not entail acts of be-
lieving or judging. If this holds, then disgust would not involve any beliefs about its object,
its viral powers or role as a contaminant. On the basis of such analyses, phenomenologists
tend to question both contamination theories of disgust and cognitivist approaches to
emotions.
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3. Kristeva’s concept of abject and Sartre’s

discourse on the slimy
Many contemporary discussions of disgust build on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection as
developed in Powers of Horror (1980) and related works. The emotional reactions and attitudes
that Kristeva describes by her concept of abjection are not distinguished by their strength or
intensity. What defines this category of the affective and emotive responses is their inten-
tional structure and experiential genesis, not their force.
Kristeva argues that abjection and emotional reactions to abject things and processes are
experientially not motivated by prospects of infection, sickness or death. What is at issue is
not death and mortality as such but the unstable borderline between life and lifeless mat-
ter and our task of maintaining this border, necessary for our existence as bodily subjects
(1980, 3; cf. Demmerling and Landweer 2007, 95–96; Cavarero 2018, 131–133).
In phenomenological terms, we can say that in instances of abjection something in the
world—a thing, a process, a behavior—is presented in a way that undermines or endangers
the division between life and the non-living. This can happen when something traverses
between these two experiential fields, when something undergoes a transformation from
one mode of being to another, or when something combines features from both realms in an
unexpected way. Thus, the category of the abject is broad and includes many different kinds
of material entities and processes, from bodily fluids and waste products to parasites and
vermin. Moreover, we may also reject in abjection human behaviors and modes of agency
that are socially or morally questionable. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva summarizes: “The in-
between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good con-
science, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior” (Kristeva 1980, 4, cf. 69).
On psychoanalytical and semiotic grounds, Kristeva argues that abjection is always am-
bivalent, including opposite values or valences. The main experiential component is a clear
rejection or refusal of the abject thing or process, but this is always accompanied by a peculiar
fascination which is foreign to other negative emotions, for example, anxiety, fear and an-
ger. We turn away from and take distance from the abject, but at the same time it draws and
attracts us; we rebuff it, but we also feel an alluring force that resides in it. Thus, we do not
distance ourselves from the abject in order to simply leave it behind, but in order to establish
a proper boundary between ourselves and it.
In Kristeva’s account, this ambivalence bears traces of our pre-verbal struggle for identity
and differentiation, more concretely, for separation from our bodily contact with our care-
takers, paradigmatically from the maternal body. Kristeva argues that human infants must
make considerable efforts to break the vital strings and contours that sustain their early exis-
tence, already long before any verbal tools are available to them, and already before entering
any social roles or positions. Thus understood, abjection involves a non-conceptual bodily
“memory” or “trace” of the primary struggle for separation and identity (Kristeva 1980, 13).
One of Kristeva philosophical sources in the theorization and explanation of the a mbivalent
character of abject phenomena is Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943). Kristeva does not draw
directly from Sartre’s account, but she inherits Sartrean insights through one of her central
sources. This is Mary Douglas’ anthropological classic, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the
Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), that deals with the cultural boundaries between pu-
rity and impurity, from the dirty and polluted to the defiled, the mixed and the tabooed.
In Chapter 2, titled “Secular defilement,” Douglas resorts to Sartre’s analysis of the slimy
(viscous) when theorizing the ambivalent character of tabooed phenomena: “The viscous is a
state half-way between solid and liquid. It is like a cross-section in a process of change. There
is no gliding on its surface. Its stickiness is a trap, it clings like a leech” (Douglas 1966, 39).
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Douglas’ reference here is to the very last sections of Being and Nothingness, in which
Sartre outlines a new philosophical approach that he calls “psychoanalysis of things” (psy-
chanalyse des choses). Sartre is not concerned with psychological images, memories or
phantasies of individual persons nor with social-cultural distinctions but aims at captur-
ing modes of being that belong to things themselves as they are given in experience.5 His
analysis is existential-phenomenological and concerns the givenness of things (Sartre 1943,
645–647/764–766; cf. Dalí 1932).6
To concretize his new type of philosophical-experiential inquiry, Sartre develops an ex-
emplary inquiry into the quality of the slimy. The inquiry confronts us with a type of
repulsion directed at various objects, including concrete items and abstract entities, mate-
rial things and mental states and attitudes. Sartre’s examples accentuate the variety of the
phenomenon: pitch, tar, honey, syrup, melted sugar, oysters, raw eggs, snails, leaches, fungi,
mollusks, bogholes, quick sand, liars, weaklings and deceivers (Sartre 1943, 650–652/770–
773; cf. Kolnai 1929, 48, 55).
As conceptualized by Sartre, slime is “a substance between two states,” an intermediate
mode of being between solidity and fluidity (Sartre 1943, 654/774; cf. Kolnai 1929, 49–51).
Thus characterized, slime is exemplified by the movements of coagulating liquids that have
started to solidify, have lost their quickness and freely flowing character, but have not yet
reached the firmness and rigidity of solid objects. As such, slime is a thickening, dense and
viscous fluid, yielding but deceptive.
Sartre, like Kristeva, stresses that the aversion elicited by abject slime must not be assim-
ilated with the fear of death or with the anguish inflicted by our own mortality. Rather,
what is at issue for Sartre is the horror (horreur) of the possibility that consciousness (being-
for-itself ) could be arrested by materiality (being-in-itself ) and could lose the projective
openness of its temporality. Thus, whereas Kristeva’s analysis suggests that the emotion of
disgust is evoked by any kind of transgression of the cultural and symbolic border between
the living and the dead, inside and outside, Sartre argues that all slimy phenomena involve
the specific mode of being that looms between self-governed free activity and inert matter
(cf. Demmerling and Landweer 2007, 97).
Sartre’s discussion of slime is influenced by the French literary tradition, but it is also
significantly indebted to earlier phenomenological inquiries. The most important source
here is Aurel Kolnai’s treatise On Disgust (Der Ekel) from 1929.7 Sartre did not study Kolnai
directly, but he was exposed to Kolnaiean themes and conceptualizations through the works
of Salvador Dalí, Louis Buñuel and Georges Bataille, who all were readers of Kolnai and ap-
plied his descriptive and analytical results in their own essayistic and artistic projects (Margat
2000; Radford 2004; Menninghaus 2012, 363; cf. Dalí 1930, 1932; Buñuel 1982).
My aim here is not to focus on the historical connections of influence between these think-
ers. Rather, I want to argue that with the help of Kolnai’s analyses we can further illuminate
the intentionality of disgust and sharpen the phenomenological description of the emotion.

4. Kolnai’s phenomenological analysis of disgust

The main analytical outcome of Kolnai’s essay concerns the peculiar intertwining of life and
death that characterizes experiences of disgust. What disgusts us ultimately, Kolnai argues,
is the disintegration of purposeful life into extravagant proliferation or excessive growth.
The intentional object of the experience is “surplus of life (...) [not] structured by purpose”
(Kolnai 1929, 72, cf. 57–62). The phenomenon has two faces, so to say: on the one hand,

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boundless regeneration and, on the other hand, the inner tendency of life to collapse in su-
perfluity (Kolnai 1929, 53–65; cf. Kosmeyer and Smith 2004; Knapp 2007; Korsmeyer 2008;
Šinkūnas 2017a, 2017b).
The paradigm here is the rotting, putrefying corpse, but Kolnai’s account emphasizes that
the focus of disgust experiences is not on the dead body as such but on the extravagant life
that feeds on the body and multiplies without boundaries or directions. Pullulating maggots
and swarming flies are thus central to the imagery of disgust. They signal superfluous fertil-
ity, excessive vitality and unbounded energy (Kolnai 1929, 50–56, 62–63, 72–74).
The core structure here is not just the interconnection of two dynamic processes—
directionless life feeding on death and death endlessly lurking in life—but rather the flip
from one process to the other, the verge or the peak past which one course turns into
another (Šinkūnas 2017a, 238ff., 2017b, 10). Thus conceived, disgust is a dynamic double
phenomenon that in a disturbing way combines two modalities of living and a transfor-
mation from one to the other: on the one hand, purposeful human existence organized
by goals and means, and on the other hand, extravagantly flourishing life that mushrooms
without boundaries (cf. McGinn 2011). Separately, neither of these two phenomena is able
to elicit feelings of disgust, but when juxtaposed and connected in a particular manner they
are bound to evoke the type of repulsion-attraction characteristic of disgusted aversion.
Thus, rapidly dividing and replicating mitotic cells observed through a microscope or viral
growth simulated on a computer screen are not experienced as disgusting, since they lack
this dual structure.
In contrast, a cadaver coated by pullulating maggots, a corner of a room infested by
harvestmen and even an isolated light source surrounded by swarming moths would all be
disgust elicitors in Kolnai’s analysis since they display the dual pattern of purposefulness, on
the one hand, and directionless energy of life, on the other. Moreover, what is equally cru-
cial to disgust as this juxtaposition is the dynamic temporal structure of the phenomenon.
In the paradigmatic case, extravagant growth first spurts and with such vigor that it seems
to be prolonged endlessly; but then suddenly, as fast as it first appeared, the growing mass
disintegrates and vanishes, displaying an emptiness.
This Kolnaiean analysis of the intentionality of disgust further illuminates the crucial fac-
tor that both Kristeva and Sartre stress: disgust is not about fear of death or about abhorrence
of corpses; nor should it be assimilated with anxiety about human mortality or vulnerability.
It is a more complex aversion that concerns disproportional intertwinements of life and death
(Kolnai 1929, 53ff., 1998, 102; cf. Cavarero 2018, 132–133). But even more specifically, and
in contrast to Kristeva and Sartre, Kolnai’s analysis demonstrates that disgust is not just about
any kind of imbalance but about a specific type of disproportion: extravagant, profligate or
wasteful expenditure of life forces, behaviors in which the goals and the means, the what and
the how, get out of proportion.
Kolnai’s essay also clarifies the complexity of the subjective side of disgust. We have seen
that on the objective side of the experienced phenomenon, life and death penetrate one an-
other in disturbing proportions. On the subjective side, the experience is correspondingly
characterized by an ambivalence: disgust alternates between repulsion and attraction and
is able to combine instantaneous, even violent rejection with persisting fascination. Kolnai
calls “macabre allure” the force by which disgusting things and processes draw us while at
the same time provoking our revulsion. On the one hand, disgust-elicitors command us to
eject, expel and distance, but concurrently they captivate our interest and order us fix our
gaze upon them. We are drawn to inspect their details and scrutinize their sensible qualities

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(Kolnai 1929, 39–43; cf. Knapp 2007, 524). As such, the disgust experience resembles de-
sire or, better, it betrays “a shadow of desire for intimacy,” as Kolnai himself formulates
(1929, 46). Alluringly, the object suggests that the subject could “lay hold of [it] whether by
touching, consuming or embracing” (Kolnai 1929, 43).

5. From “anomalous animals” to shameless criminals

In this last section of this chapter, I will develop Kolnai’s analysis of disgust by adding two
new insights with the aim of finding deeper unity in the experimental field of disgust elici-
tors. The first insight comes from my own work in phenomenology of embodiment. It con-
cerns the group of disgust elicitors which Rozin calls “anomalous” on the basis that they do
not fit neatly in any explanatory paradigm. My argument is that in order to find a unity in
the phenomenal field of disgust elicitors we need to pay attention not merely to the entities
at issue or their powers but more importantly to their manners of movement and behavior. I
will suggest that the intentional content of disgust has a dynamic perceptual gestalt.
On the basis of this insight, I want to argue that moral disgust is an emotive reaction di-
rected at manners of behaving and acting rather than action types or motivations of actions.
Thus, I will ultimately argue that moral disgust is an adverbial emotion, and structurally
similar to physical disgust since both concern manners and modes of discernible behaviors
or activities.
Let us start with the case of the “anomalous animals,” that is, with the mixed group of
spiders, harvestmen and insects, that do not seem to fit in any explanatory and theoretical
paradigm of contemporary disgust studies. It seems to me that if we are able to spell out how
the givenness of these beings resembles those of slimy substances and decomposing bodies,
then we get a new grip on the intentional content of the emotion of disgust. I will build on
Kolnai’s idea of disproportional and extravagant life but will add insights from my earlier
work in phenomenology of embodiment that clarify the role of movement in the constitu-
tion of the sense of alien life (Heinämaa 2014, 2018).
I will argue that what is crucial to disgust is the manner of the movement or behavior wit-
nessed (cf. Kolnai 1998, 102). In other words, disgust is not focused on what the animal does
or what results from its behavior but on how it behaves and moves. Accordingly, the object
of disgust is not grasped in cognition or belief, and it is not rejected on the basis of everyday
or magical reasoning about causes and effects. Rather, the object is immediately grasped in
perception (or imagination), as it appears in the proximate perceived environment. This does
not imply that the object of disgust would be simple. Rather, it has an intricate and dynamic
gestalt structure, a characteristic organization with a focal center and non-thematic margins,
as well as internal and external horizons, and it is associated with other percepts by isomor-
phism (cf. Kolnai 1929, 29–30, 47, 80).8
On this account, the trouble with insects and spiders is not, as the contamination-theorists
and many cognitivists suggest, that they would be considered polluting or contaminating or
associated with such processes. In Kolnai’s analysis, repulsion characteristic of disgust is fun-
damentally not triggered by any beliefs or cognitions about the harmfulness of these entities
or about their causal role in the spreading of diseases and death—real or imagined, verifiable
or magical (Kolnai 1929, 31, 39–40, 48–49, 1998, 100–101; Johnston 2001, 84ff.; Charles
2004). In order to be repulsed or disgusted by swarming flies, by pullulating maggots or by
wobbly masses of spiders one does not have to have any biological, physiological or medical
beliefs about these invertebrates or their powers. Disgust may immediately be inflicted by the

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movements of the creatures, given to us in straightforward perception (or imagination), free

from magical notions about influence at a distance and everyday beliefs about viral powers.
The notion that disgust is directly founded on perception and not on any type of judg-
ment, cognition or belief, is one of the main results of Kolnai’s analysis. I agree with Kolnai
on this basic point but wish to develop it further by adding two arguments: first, that
disgust-eliciting percepts have a dynamic gestalt form, and second, that the focus of percep-
tion in disgust is not on any particular behavior or type of behavior but on the manner of
behaving or being (So-being, Sosein) (Kolnai 1929, 34, 44–47, 74–77, 1998, 99–100).
So, what in the movements of invertebrates is disturbing in the particular manner that
involves attraction? Ordinary language offers clues that help us focus on experientially cru-
cial aspects. We have already used some verbs to characterize these beings, pointing out that
they “swarm” and “pullulate.” When we add more terms—such as “wriggling,” “buzzing,”
“quivering,” “scrambling,” “fluttering,” “throbbing” and “pulsating”—we can detect a per-
ceptual pattern.
Two aspects stand out. First, when we observe insects, for example bees or ants in their
‘daily business’—collecting honey, dragging food crumbles, cutting leaves or carrying their
larvae from one place to another—we are usually able to detect aims and goals in their move-
ments. But when we see the same creatures gathering in great quantities or swarming around
a covered thing, their movements do not present any evident goals or purposes (cf. Kolnai
1929, 56–58). Such a structureless aggregate is at the nucleus of the ant scene of Dalí and
Buñuel’s The Andalusian Dog, but the same emotive content also informs the very last clip
of Hitchcock’s Birds (1963) in which the main characters cautiously get in a car at dawn and
slowly drive away, crossing a bird-infested landscape.
The gestalt is specific in having a center around which the energetic animal movement
revolves and cruises in unexpected ways and from which it seems to spread. Moreover, the
moving mass of animal bodies covers this center or source and hides it from sight. Finally,
when the mass dissolves, an emptiness is disclosed. Thus, the gestalt is spatial but also dy-
namic, with progress and duration.
Second, when we study such living creatures collectively as a mass, their combined move-
ments resemble those of glutinous liquids. The animal mass spreads slowly, like spilled gore
or syrup, but it may also vanish unexpectedly in the ground and reappear without warning.
It is plastic like resin and sticky like glue. Being able to split and divide, it can invade solids;
it is capable of percolating through porous surfaces, membranes and pellicles, and entering
insides protected by integumentary systems. Most critically, such movements threaten the
orifices and openings of the human body (cf. Kolnai 1998, 101–102).
On this Kolnai-inspired analysis, the connection between masses of insects (and masses of
animals in general) and viscous liquids, crucial to the understanding of the feeling of disgust,
is in their ways of moving and in the disturbing potencies that their movements indicate, and
so in the dynamism of their movements. The relevant movement gives itself as purposeless
or as merely aiming at (self-)proliferation, but at the same time also as exceptionally vigor-
ous, cohesive and unexpectedly morphing. Such movements are displayed by rotting bodies,
bodily fluids, saprophytes, colonies of insects and loathed forms of obsessed and addictive
behaviors (cf. Kolnai 1929, 52–58). What is emotionally disturbing is unrestricted autotelic
growth and extravagant behavior that uses life force for no other end than that of maintain-
ing itself.
I want to conclude by specifying the category of moral disgust on the basis of this prepa-
ratory analysis of physical disgust. For this end, I resort to a crucial distinction that Robert

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Audi makes in his analysis of moral action. In his Means, Ends, and Persons: The Mean-
ing and Psychological Dimensions of Kant’s Humanity Formula from 2016, Audi argues that for
moral-theoretical and ethical purposes it is crucial to distinguish between three aspects of
human conduct: (i) the action type, (ii) the motivations of the action, and (iii) the manner
of performing the action (Audi 2004, 391–398, 2016, 55–56, 64, 151–152). Audi argues that
all these aspects can be morally assessed or evaluated, and independently of one another. My
hypothesis here is that moral disgust concerns not action types nor motivations of actions,
but the manners in which actions are performed (cf. Kolnai 1929, 82–83).
In order to clarify this idea, I want to return to Sartre’s and Kristeva’s formulations. We
saw above that, in Sartre’s account, both innocent actions or types of actions and moral
offences can be rejected as slimy: a handshake, a smile, a deception and a lie. Kristeva’s for-
mulations concretize the idea further by specifying the kinds of actions and agents at issue:
“The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who
claims he is a savior” (Kristeva 1980, 4; italics added).
Both Sartre and Kristeva argue that disgust has social or socio-moral functions that are
not all negative or destructive, as many contemporary authors argue. Moreover, Kristeva’s
formulations give us an analytical clue by specifying the types of offences and offenders that
typically inflict disgust. It is not just any criminals or wrongdoers who are rejected as abject
but the ones who “act in good conscience,” the ones who proceed shamelessly and the ones
who portray themselves as saviors. The attributive adjectives and adverbs are crucial here:
Moral disgust is not focused on episodic actions, action types or agents. Rather, disgust is
directed at actions that are performed in specific ways and agents who operate in particular
manners.
This highlights the fact that moral disgust is an adverbial emotion, and not a material one,
being focused on the manner in which an action is performed rather than on the intentions,
goals or motivations of the action (cf. Audi 2004, 292, 2016, 64).9 To give a concrete ex-
ample: all lies are reprehended; ‘white lies’ may be tolerated with sympathy or with mixed
feelings; ‘black lies’ are rejected in anger; it is only heartless lies that elicit disgust, such as
the lies of Tom Ripley.10
Correspondingly, what is disgustingly disturbing in Hannibal Lecter’s case is not merely
the amount of his victims or his ritualistic repetition of the crime, but Lecter’s culinary,
elegant and artistic attitudes toward his targets. Similarly, what is disgusting in Charles
Manson’s destructive actions and chaos-oriented projects is not the goals of destruction and
chaos as such. Such goals may elicit horror or fear and many other negative emotions, but not
disgust. What elicits disgust is the quasi-political and quasi-religious tone that Manson gives
to his projects and actions. The crucial aspect is not quantitative but qualitative, or adverbial
in Audi’s terms.
My point here is not to belittle the quantitative dimensions of mass murders or genocides,
but to draw attention to the fact that human sentiments as well as the concepts describing
them are specific in their functions: whereas some distinguish between types of actions and
others between motivations of actions, still others focus on the manners in which actions
are performed.
More precisely, moral disgust is directed at the manner of behaving or way of acting, and
can thus be characterized as an emotive response to the adverbial aspects of human behavior
and action. As such, disgust would be a response to the experiential fact that the manner of
behavior or action is not appropriate, but disproportional in respect to the action or action
type at issue.11

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Notes

References
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Dalí, Salvador (1932). The Object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiments. This Quarter VIII(1), 197–207.
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Darwin, Charles (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: Murray.
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Kim, David Haekwon (2001). Mortal Feelings: A Theory of Revulsion and the Intimacy of Agency. Doctoral
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Knapp, Christopher (2007). Aurel Kolnai: On Disgust. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74(2),
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Korsmeyer, Carolyn, and Smith, Barry (2004). Visceral Values: Aurel Kolnai on Disgust. In: Aurel
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Kristeva, Julia (1982[1980]). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Transl. by L. S. Roudiez. New York:
Columbia University Press. [Orig.: Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Seuil].
Margat, Claire (2000). Bataille et Sartre face au dégôt. Linges 1(1), 197–205.
McGinn, Colin (2011). The Meaning of Disgust. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— (2015). Disgust and Disease. Emotion Review 7(4), 381–382.
Menninghaus, Winfried (1999[2012]). Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Emotion. Transl. by
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Mizrahi, Vivian (2018). Stench and Olfactory Disgust. In: C. Tappolet, F. Teroni, and A. Konzelmann
(Eds.). Shadows of the Soul: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Emotions. London, New York:
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Munch-Jurisic, Ditte Marie (2015). Perpetrator Disgust: An Inquiry into the Relationship between Body,
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——— (2018). Perpetrator Disgust: A Morally Destructive Emotion. In: T. Brudholm and J. Lang
(Eds.). Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explanations. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 142–161.
Nussbaum, Martha (2006). Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton: Princeton
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——— (2010). From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law. Oxford: Oxford
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——— (2013). Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Oaten, Megan, Stevenson, Richard J., and Case, Trevor I. (2009). Disgust as a Disease-Avoidance
Mechanism. Psychological Bulletin 135(2), 303–321.
Prinz, Jesse J. (2010): The Moral Emotions. In: P. Goldie (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of
Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 519–538.
Radford, Robert (2004). Aurel Kolnai’s “Disgust”: A Source in the Art and Writing of Salvador Dalí.
In: Z. Balázs, and F. Dunlop (Eds.). Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in and about the
Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai. Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 327–333.
Rozin, Paul, and Fallon, April E. (1987). A Perspective on Disgust. Psychological Review 94(1), 23–41.
Rozin, Paul, Haidt, Jonathan, and McCauley, Clark R. (1993[2008]): Disgust. In: M. Lewis and
J. Haviland (Eds.). Handbook of Emotions. New York: Guilford, 757–776.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1956[1943]). Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Transl.
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New York: Schocken Books. [Orig.: Réflexions sur la question juive. Paris: Paul Morihien].
Šink ū nas, Tomas (2017a). Hidden Foundations of Disgust: Reevaluating the Existential Nature of
Disgust. Horizon 6(2), 226–249.
——— (2017b). Making Sense of the Confused Defence Mechanism of Disgust: Reinterpreting Aurel
Kolnai’s Essay Disgust (1929). Unpublished research manuscript, KU Leuven.
Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid (2008). Die Emotionen: Gefühle in der realistischen Phänomenologie. Stuttgart:
Akademie Verlag.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth (1996). The Anatomy of Prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Further reading
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1964[1938]). Nausea. Transl. by L. Alexander. New York: New Directions. [Orig.:
La nausée. Paris: Gallimard].
Tedeschini, Marco (2018) Disgust. In: International Lexicon of Aesthetics. Spring 2018 Edition, URL=
https://lexicon.mimesisjournals.com/archive/2018/spring/Disgust.pdf, doi:10.7413/18258630010.

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FEAR, ANXIETY AND BOREDOM
Lauren Freeman and Andreas Elpidorou

Phenomenology’s central insight is that affectivity is not an inconsequential or contingent

characteristic of human existence. Emotions, moods, sentiments, and feelings are not ac-
cidents of human existence. They do not happen to us. Rather, we exist the way we do
because of and through our affective experiences. Phenomenology thus acknowledges the
centrality and ubiquity of affectivity by noting the multitude of ways in which our existence
is permeated by our various affective experiences. Yet, it also insists that such experiences
are both revealing and constitutive of human nature. It is precisely this last point that marks
an important distinction between a phenomenological study of affectivity and perhaps all
others. For phenomenology, one cannot understand the nature of human existence without
coming to terms with the character of affectivity, and at the same time, one cannot come to
terms with the character of affectivity without understanding the nature of human existence.
Practical and social engagements, scientific endeavors, familial and political interactions are
all predicted on the fact that we are beings who are capable of being affectively attuned to
ourselves, to the world, and to others.
In this entry, we discuss Martin Heidegger’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s respective accounts of
affectivity. In the first section, we present Heidegger’s understanding of affective existence.
In this context, we discuss the significance of moods and offer an analysis of the affective
phenomena of fear, anxiety, and boredom. In the second section, we present an overview of
Sartre’s account of emotions and advance a Sartrean interpretation of fear and boredom. We
conclude by raising some brief concerns with both accounts.

1. Heidegger and affectivity

Heidegger’s phenomenological account of affect is both novel and important.1 Moreover,
it can be instructive both within the phenomenological tradition and also more generally
within the context of conceptual and empirically informed studies of emotion (see, e.g.,
Ratcliffe 2008; Elpidorou 2013; Freeman 2014; see also Chapter 7 in this volume). This is
because for Heidegger, affective experiences are far more robust than we typically think;
contrary to many folk psychological conceptions of emotion, they are not just discrete states
that we happen to occupy that are caused by our surrounding environment; rather, they are
basic to and constitutive of human existence. According to Heidegger, what makes us human

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(or, Dasein) is not just that we are rational, social, or practical beings. In addition to being
these things, we are also affective, specifically, ‘mooded’ beings. Moods shape the fabric
of our being insofar as they are the condition for the possibility of experiencing a world of
values and concerns (Elpidorou and Freeman 2015). Additionally, affective experiences are
disclosive. On account of their disclosive nature, they make accessible to us the valence of
situations thereby highlighting what is important for us. For Heidegger, it is through moods
that the world is disclosed to us and that we find ourselves amidst worldly projects and social
situations that matter to and that affect us emotionally.
In what follows, we first situate Heidegger’s account of mood within the context of
his project of fundamental ontology in Being and Time (BT).2 In order to do so, we briefly
outline the role of Befindlichkeit (“attunement” or “disposition”) and Stimmung (“mood”) in
Heidegger’s general account of human existence, discuss the relationship between the two,
and consider how the former discloses the world. We then focus on the fundamental moods
(Grundstimmungen) of anxiety and profound boredom; discuss why, for Heidegger, they are
important; and try to make sense of the relationship between anxiety and fear, two “kindred
phenomena” (BT 230/185).3

1.1. Befindlichkeit and Stimmung

Heidegger’s account of mood unfolds systematically within the context of his project of
fundamental ontology in BT, the aim of which is to ask the question of the meaning of
Being. Heidegger answers this question with an analysis of the only kind of being for whom
such a question arises, namely, human beings, or Dasein. Dasein is a unique kind of being
insofar as its Being is disclosed (erschlossen) to it in various ways. Much of BT is an existential-
ontological analysis of how Dasein exists in the world, how its existence in the world is
disclosed to it, and how it makes sense of the meaning of this disclosedness.
Ontologically, Dasein is constituted by four basic structures of existence, or existentials—
Befindlichkeit,4 understanding (Verstehen), fallenness (Verfallensein), and talk (Rede).5 These ex-
istentials are equiprimordially united in Dasein’s ontological structure, care (Sorge), which
unifies and discloses Dasein’s being-in-the-world as temporal (BT 375/327, 293/249,
277/234). Each ontological structure manifests ontically through the ways in which Dasein
finds itself (sich befinden) in the world. Dasein’s ontic and ontological dimensions are two dif-
ferent, yet related ways of understanding and articulating its existence: whereas the former
refers to the necessary structures of its existence, the latter refers to the concrete aspects of its
comportment to the world and to others.
Befindlichkeit is a basic ontological structure of human existence that makes it possible for
human beings to find themselves in the world in a way that holds meaning for and thus mat-
ters to them. It is one of the ways in which Dasein’s existence in the world is disclosed to it.
Heidegger uses the term “Befindlichkeit” to denote the ontological character of a phenom-
enon, mood (Stimmung), that is ontically (i.e., in an ordinary manner) most familiar to us
(BT 172/134). Thus, the terms “Befindlichkeit” and “Stimmung” name the same phenomenon,
understood from different perspectives: the former, an ontological structure of Dasein’s exis-
tence, refers to a basic mode of existence in, and openness to, the world; the latter, the ontic
manifestation of Befindlichkeit, refers to the various and specific ways in which Dasein can relate
to and disclose the world. For Heidegger, Befindlichkeit is always manifested through mood
and Dasein is always in some mood. As modes of a fundamental ontological structure, moods
are both constitutive and disclosive of the way one exists or finds oneself (sich befinden) attuned
to the world and of how one is faring in the world with others. Moods have an important,

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underlying revelatory dimension in that they affect and to an extent, even determine, how
things appear to us. Moods disclose three key features of Dasein’s existence to it: (a) its thrown-
ness (Geworfenheit), (b) being-in-the-world as a whole, and (c) what matters to it.6

1.2 Fear, anxiety, and boredom

For Heidegger, not all affective states are metaphysically on par; some have more primary
disclosive powers than others. Those that do are called “fundamental moods” (Grundstim-
mungen) or “fundamental attunements” (Grundbefindlichkeiten) and constitute the most far-
reaching and primordial possibilities of disclosure in which Dasein is revealed to itself in
some exceptional way (BT 226/182). Heidegger’s point in outlining such fundamental modes
of existence is that they bring us closer to an understanding of both the meaning of Being
as such and also of Dasein’s existence. In what follows, we begin by briefly discussing fear,
an important, yet for Heidegger, ultimately inauthentic mood or affective state.7 We then
focus on what Heidegger takes to be two fundamental affective experiences: anxiety (Angst),
fear’s authentic relative, and profound boredom (tiefe Langeweile).8 We highlight some of the
similarities between them and discuss how they both enable Dasein’s authentic existence.
For Heidegger, fear (Furcht) is an affective experience that arises when one encounters
something in the world that is fearsome or threatening: something that has as its kind of
being either readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenes), presence-at-hand (Vorhandenes), or Dasein-with
(Mitdasein). According to Heidegger, fear compels Dasein to turn away from itself, thereby
preventing Dasein from being able to face its own existence (BT 229–230/184–185). Thus,
in fear, Dasein fails to notice its thrownness and insofar as this is the case, it cannot take
over its ground (in other words, it cannot authentically take over its possibilities as its own).
Thrownness is a central feature of Dasein’s existence and as long as Dasein exists, it is always
thrown (BT 223/179, 321/276, 344/297)—that is, it finds itself always in a specific material,
embodied, social, political, historical, and ancestral situation that it did not choose, that is
beyond its control, and that both grounds and delimits Dasein’s actions and possibilities.
Dasein’s thrownness is revealed to it through moods, but in a peculiar way: moods disclose
Dasein’s thrownness “in the manner of an evasive turning-away” (BT 175/136; cf. 230/185).
That is, moods do not reveal our thrownness as a fact that can be apprehended or perceived.
Instead, through moods, our thrownness is disclosed in our very tendency to turn away
from it. In fear, this turning away is understood by Heidegger as both a fleeing and a falling
(BT 230/185): we flee from our thrownness by evading our true self (who we were, are,
and can be) and by falling into the “world” of concern we can, temporarily at least, ignore
the weight of our existence (BT 233–234/189). Fear precludes one from becoming one’s
authentic self (BT 373–374/325–326) and precisely because it does so, it is considered to be
an inauthentic affective experience.
In contrast to fear, anxiety carries for Heidegger greater existential and ontological signif-
icance and consequently, plays a much more important role in Dasein’s existential-analytic.
A key difference between fear and anxiety is this: whereas that in the face of which Da sein
fears is a determinate entity within-the-world (BT 230/185), that in the face of which
Dasein has anxiety is not. What is threatening in anxiety does not have the character of a
“definite detrimentality” (BT 231/186)—anxiety neither has a specific intentional object
nor a determine cause. Moreover, it comes unannounced. That in the face of which one is
anxious is “completely indefinite” (ibid.). In anxiety, the world of our everyday concern loses
all significance, but not in the sense that it falls away from us as an absence (ibid.); rather, in
anxiety significance is lost insofar as familiar entities appear foreign, disconnected from their

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ordinary uses and meanings (BT 393/343). As a result, one ceases to feel at home, one is un-
able to understand oneself, and one is thrown into a profound and uncanny crisis of meaning.
From the fact that anxiety renders everything insignificant, one ought not to conclude
that anxiety itself is a passive state of meaninglessness or insignificance: quite the opposite.
The profound crisis of meaning that Dasein experiences in anxiety is not the end; rather,
it initiates a transformation in Dasein’s existence. Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that
which it is anxious about, namely, its own authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world
(BT 232/187). More specifically, in anxiety, Dasein is brought to see itself for who it really
is (BT 235/190–191): a thrown, fallen, finite being who is ever projecting its future pos-
sibilities and whose existence is oriented toward and also individuated by, its own death.
Unlike fear, during anxiety, one does not flee from one’s thrownness. Even though anxiety,
like fear, involves a turning-away, in anxiety one turns away from everydayness and turns
toward one’s existence. In doing so, one finds oneself face-to-face with one’s “ownmost
potentiality-for-Being” (BT 321/276). Heidegger writes:

Anxiety makes manifest Dasein in its being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being,
namely, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself. Anxiety
brings Dasein face to face with its Being-free for the authenticity of its Being and for this
authenticity as a possibility which it always is.
(BT 232/188; see also BT 321/276)

Moreover, and crucially, anxiety individualizes Dasein for its ownmost being-in-the-world,
which projects itself authentically upon its possibilities.

This individualization brings Dasein back from its falling, and makes manifest to it that
authenticity and inauthenticity are possibilities of its Being. These basic possibilities of
Dasein (…) show themselves in anxiety as they are in themselves—undisguised by enti-
ties in the world, to which, proximally and for the most part, Dasein clings.
(BT 235/191)

Though unannounced and unanticipated, Dasein’s authenticity is disclosed in this primordial

sense in anxiety (BT 190/234–235). The capricious features of anxiety render it profound
and ominous, particularly since it is unpredictable and inescapable.
In the first half of his 1929–1930 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics:
World, Finitude, Solitude (FCM), Heidegger discusses profound boredom (in addition to two
other forms of boredom), thereby broadening his account of Grundstimmungen in his oeuvre.
Up until that point, Grundstimmungen had only been discussed in terms of anxiety, which
played a key role in both BT and also in his lecture, “What is Metaphysics?” (1929). One
of Heidegger’s aims in FCM is to delineate his conception of philosophy and metaphysics,
already departing from the one presented in BT. Another aim is to develop his account of
the fundamental mood (Grundstimmung) of boredom in terms of grasping the fundamental
meaning of our being.
Heidegger delineates three forms of boredom in this lecture. The first is becoming bored by
something (Gelangweiltwerden von etwas), for example, an object, person, or state of affairs (FCM
§§19–23); the second is being bored with something (Sichlangweilen bei etwas), where it is not im-
mediately clear to Dasein precisely what is boring, but only that one is bored (FCM §§24–28).
In what follows, we limit our discussion to the third type of boredom (FCM §§29–41), pro-
found boredom (tiefe Langeweile), since it is both the most fundamental kind and also the one

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that is central to Heidegger’s aim in the course. Unlike the first two forms of boredom, in
profound boredom, nothing in particular is boring, nor is there any determinate cause of
boredom or reason for being bored.9 And yet, everything bores us, even ourselves. The very
construction that Heidegger uses to describe profound boredom—the impersonal, “it is bor-
ing for one,” where “it” (es) is the same subject found in expressions such as “it is snowing” or
“it is cold”—expresses the depersonalized omnipresence of profound boredom (see, e.g., FCM
§30). Neither I nor you experience this form of boredom; rather, in it, Dasein becomes an
“undifferentiated no one” (FCM 135/203). Not only does Dasein lose all concerns and inter-
ests, but all identifying characteristics, histories, and projects fall away. Like anxiety, profound
boredom is unbidden, overpowering, and all-encompassing. Moreover, in profound bore-
dom, the passing of time is absent in that all three temporal dimensions (past, present, future)
merge into a unified temporality. The experience of profound boredom reflects that of anxi-
ety. During profound boredom, one experiences the complete withdrawal of beings. This loss
of significance is ontologically important insofar as everything around and alongside us loses
meaning, nothing carries any future prospects, and nothing relates to or gives meaning to our
past (having-been). Thus, in profound boredom, Dasein becomes indifferent to who and what
one was, is, and to who and what one will be. And yet, as with anxiety, what might appear
to be a nadir of Dasein’s existence by leading to complete meaninglessness, is anything but.
Profound boredom leaves Dasein empty and holds it in limbo, yet it also brings the po-
tential for “an exceptional understanding” of the kind of being that Dasein is (FCM 136/205).
This is because entrancement—the loss of all meaning and significance—results not only
in the withdrawal of significance but also in the revealing of possibilities proper to Dasein.
What is revealed to Dasein in this peculiar refusal is its freedom, and this revealing acts as
a call for action (FCM 148–152/222–228). That is, in profound boredom, Dasein is called
to resolutely disclose and appropriate itself, namely, to take action in the moment of vision
(Augenblick), to choose what is properly its own, and to become the author of its own exis-
tential meaning (FCM 149/224) (for more detailed discussions of Heidegger and boredom,
see De Beistegui 2003; Slaby 2014; Elpidorou and Freeman 2019).
We can see then that there are important similarities between the Grundstimmungen of
anxiety and profound boredom: first, both have distinctive revelatory functions, and second,
both compel Dasein to face its own existence and to become authentic.

2. Sartre and affectivity

Sartre addresses the topic of affectivity explicitly and in most detail in his Sketch for a Theory of
Emotions. The Sketch might be the locus classicus of Sartre’s treatment of affectivity, yet it is not
the only place in his work in which affectivity is discussed. In addition to a presentation of
the notions of unreflective consciousness and pre-reflective self-awareness—both of which
are necessary for understanding Sartre’s position on the emotions—The Transcendence of the
Ego includes brief discussions of the nature of states (e.g., hate) and dispositions. The Imag-
inary enriches and extends Sartre’s account of the Sketch. It contains, among other things,
a careful analysis of feelings and an exploration into the relationship between emotions
and imagination. Being and Nothingness adds layers to Sartre’s earlier account of emotions
by painting a vivid picture of human existence in its various concrete and interpersonal
manifestations. Saint Genet, Critique of Dialectical Reason, and The Family Idiot provide indis-
pensable insights into Sartre’s more mature views about the power of circumstances to shape
human existence. And Sartre’s literary writings supply texture, specificity, and urgency to
his philosophical approach to affectivity.

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It is not possible to offer a comprehensive account of Sartre’s views on affectivity in this

entry (for a more detailed account, see Chapter 13 in this volume). Our aim is not complete-
ness but rather accessibility and clarity. By focusing primarily on the Sketch, we explicate the
most central themes of Sartre’s view on emotions and put them to use by offering a Sartrean
interpretation of the negative emotions of fear and boredom.

2.1 Emotions as lived transformations

For Sartre, emotions are embodied, enactive ways in which we exist in the world and en-
gage with worldly objects, situations, others, and with ourselves. While experiencing an
emotional episode, we could react to it by making the emotion the focal point of our con-
sciousness or by becoming aware of ourselves as emoting subjects (STE 34).10 We could do
that, and sometimes we do just that. Yet, for Sartre, emotions are not primarily nor most fun-
damentally reflective experiences. During emotional experiences, it is the world that is our
primary concern, not our consciousness of it. And although we continue to be conscious of
ourselves during emotional experiences, the form of awareness that characterizes emotions
is pre-reflective (STE 35–37, 52, 61).
Emotions are thus, first and foremost, ways of relating to and experiencing the world—
“[e]motion is a specific manner of apprehending the world” (STE 35). But by apprehending
the world emotionally, the world is transformed: “The onset of emotion is a complete modi-
fication of the ‘being-in-the-world’” (STE 63; cf. STE 54).11 Emotions thus mark an existen-
tial transition: through them our engagement with the world is modified. Before the onset
of an emotion, our experience of the world is characterized by means-ends relationships. In
this mode of existence, the “world around us […] appears to be all furrowed with straight
and narrow paths leading to such and such determinate ends” (STE 39). Entities within it are
perceived as calls for action. We find ourselves within a nexus of concerns, obligations, and
possibilities. Such a world is both instrumental and deterministic. It is instrumental because,
to attain the ends that one desires, one must first procure the means that lead to those ends.
It is deterministic because there is a presumed order in the world; there are rules—physical,
social, or otherwise—that one must obey. Due to its instrumental and deterministic charac-
ter, our everyday concernful world can be inflexible. There will be occasions during which
we will be unable to achieve the necessary means and consequently, our desired ends will
remain out of reach. It is precisely when we find ourselves in such unyielding situations—
situations in which our desires remain frustrated and our practical actions cannot resolve the
difficulties that we face—that emotions arise. And they arise as a way of mitigating or even
resolving the experienced difficulties (STE 39–40).
Emotions are capable of offering a solution to the difficulties that we face only because
the world that they usher in is unlike the one encountered in our concernful existence.
During our emotional experiences, we “live it [the world] as though the relations between
things and their potentialities were not governed by deterministic processes but by magic”
(STE 40). Emotions modify our world, and do so profoundly. They confer onto situations
and encountered entities new qualities. Importantly, they also alter the way in which the
world itself is experienced—the world is no longer governed by instrumental rules and
means-ends relationships. Precisely because emotions do not reveal a world that is deter-
ministic and governed by instrumental rules, they are capable (at least, most of the time) of
providing escapes from the difficulties that gave rise to them. A fit of anger is an escape from
an argument not because it deals with the issue at hand but because one no longer needs
to offer a response to the argument. One can yell and silence one’s interlocutor, or one can

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just walk away. Anger magically absolves one of the responsibility of dealing with a difficult
situation. Crying during sadness does something similar. It can offer us a respite from a diffi-
cult situation. It affords us a break and thus an escape because, at least temporally, it suspends
the need to deal with the world. But the world of emotions is magical not only because emo-
tions change the way in which we experience and relate to the world; it is also magical be-
cause of the peculiar manner in which they do so. The change that emotional consciousness
brings about is not material: emotional conduct “is not effectual” (STE 41). Emotions change
the world magically insofar as they change our consciousness of the world.12

2.2 Fear and boredom

Emotions are embodied, enactive, and unreflective attempts to resolve insurmountable diffi-
culties by changing the ways in which we relate to the world. By offering us a world in which
deterministic means no longer hold, they strive to make the difficulties that we previously
encountered disappear. A Sartrean characterization of any type of emotion requires the
explication of at least two features of emotions: (i) the difficulty that gives rise to the type
of emotion, and (ii) the manner in which the onset of the emotion attempts to resolve the
difficulty.
Consider fear. Sartre discusses fear in the Sketch (STE 42–43) and distinguishes between
passive and active fear, both of which arise on account of the experience of a threat. Thus,
what gives rise to the emotion of fear is the perception of a situation that is threatening to
one’s well-being. Passive and active fear are both fear not only because they arise due to the
perception of a threat, but also because they share a common aim: they both attempt to take
care of the perceived threat when deterministic means fail us. If fear arises on account of the
perception of a threat and if its aim is to negate that threat, then how does it attempt to fulfill
its aim? In other words, what exactly is the magical transformation brought about by the
onset of fear that carries the potential to resolve the experienced difficulty? Here is where the
distinction between passive and active fear becomes pertinent. The two subtypes of fear are
differentiated in terms of the manner in which they offer an escape from the perceived threat.
In the case of passive fear, we cannot outrun the threat, nor can we escape it using ordi-
nary means. So, we use the only means available to us: we negate it by negating our con-
sciousness of it. We faint, thereby we make the threat disappear.

I see a ferocious beast coming towards me: my legs give way under me, my heart beats
more feebly, I turn pale, full down and faint away. No conduct could seem worse adapted
to the danger than this, which leaves me defenseless. And nevertheless it is a behaviour
of escape; the fainting away is a refuge.
(STE 42)

The transformation that passive fear brings about is the same as that which all emotions bring
out: it is, according to Sartre, magical. Consequently, its power is limited. We negate the
threat without materially changing the world. And that means that we do not really make
the beast disappear. The beast is there; we simply do not perceive it.
Whereas in the case of passive fear, we negate our consciousness in order to negate the
threat; in active fear, we flee. Yet, in essence, the two are different manifestations of the same
phenomenon. “Flight is fainting away in play,” Sartre writes (STE 43). And he adds that “it is
magical behaviour which negates the dangerous object with one’s whole body, by reversing
the vectorial structure of the space we live in and suddenly creating a potential direction on

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the other side” (ibid.). While fleeing, we have magically transformed our world so that it does
not contain the threat. But of course, the threat still exists. By running away, we have at least
temporarily forgotten about it. Out of sight, out of mind. It is tempting to think of fleeing as
some kind of prudential or calculative action. We flee in order to escape. But as Sartre warns
us, this would be a misunderstanding of the character of emotional consciousness. Fear is
unreflective behavior. It is not a tool that we calculatedly employ; rather, we live the world
through it. As a type of emotional consciousness, fear “is primarily consciousness of the
world” (STE 34).13
Though boredom is not discussed in the Sketch, Sartre’s account could indeed be applied
to it—in fact, given that Sartre’s account is a general account of affect, it ought to apply to
boredom. A Sartrean explication of boredom would need to specify the difficulty that gives
rise to boredom and the solution that boredom attempts to offer. The problem that gives
rise to boredom is not difficult to discern. Boredom arises on account of the perception of a
situation that is not meaningful, interesting, or captivating to us. The problem of boredom
is, in other words, a perceived meaninglessness, lack of interest, or challenge. We wish to do
something other than what is available to us. And when we find ourselves in such a difficult
situation, we experience boredom.
Being stuck in a meaningless or unengaging situation is the problem that gives rise to
boredom, but what solution does it offers? Boredom is characterized by a feeling of dissatis-
faction and involves a strong desire to engage in something else. During boredom, we cannot
maintain our attention to the situation at hand; we mind-wander and alternative goals and
situations, which we could pursue become salient to us. Time appears to be moving slowly
and we undergo various physiological changes (see, e.g., Eastwood et al. 2013; Elpidorou
2018a). Ultimately, and because of the manner in which boredom is experienced, boredom
modifies our situation: our situation loses its grip on us and is no longer meaningful or worth
pursing. But unlike apathy, boredom is not a state in which we merely remain unengaged
with our situation; instead, it repels us from our meaningless or unengaging situation. In
sum, boredom transforms our world magically (Elpidorou 2015). It creates zones of interests
and dullness. It delineates the meaningful and the fulfilling from that which is not. And it
sets us in motion by pushing us out of our unsatisfactory situation.
A Sartrean take on boredom safeguards one from assuming an overly negative take on
boredom. Although boredom is potentially problematic and can be associated with a number
of harms, it is not necessarily negative. Depending on the context and the manner in which
one responds to it, boredom could serve as the means out of a difficult situation and into a
better (i.e., more fulfilling) life (Elpidorou 2018b). By transforming our bodies and our con-
sciousness of the world, the onset of boredom motivates the pursuit of an alternative situation
when our current situation ceases to be meaningful, engaging, fulfilling to us. Sartre’s view
on boredom, however, comes with a price: it appears to turn boredom into something more
radical than what it is. Often, when we experience boredom, we are aware of it. We know
that we are bored and we even think of ways to alleviate it. It is on account of our realization
that we are bored that we fight off boredom. We go for walks, check our phone, and turn
on (or off ) the television, all of which are means of making it disappear. If boredom involves
a magical transformation, it is not one that strips our world of its means-ends relationships.
The worry generalizes. It would appear that Sartre’s account of the emotions renders
them disruptive: they do not permit us to relate to the world in instrumental ways. But is it
always the case that we “lose our heads” in the midst of our emotions? For instance, couldn’t
we be afraid and still act calculatedly? One might worry that Sartre’s account of emotions is
too inflexible (we either exist in our concernful world or in the magical world of emotions)

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or too radical (there are no “weak” emotions). It is often objected that the main weakness of
Sartre’s account is that it does not apply to positive emotions—such emotions, critics point
out, do not seem to be solutions to experienced difficulties (see, e.g., Fell 1965; Weberman
1996). But given our foregoing discussion, it appears that his views on negative emotions
are also susceptible to criticism, for not all instances of negative emotions need to mark an
existential transition. Perhaps Sartre’s account could be amended in a way that avoids these
and other difficulties. Whether such a restorative project can ultimately succeed remains to
be seen.

3. Conclusion
Though Heidegger and Sartre adopt importantly different perspectives on affectivity, they
both insist that it is a constitutive part of human existence. Furthermore, through their
respective accounts, they highlight phenomenology’s ability to bring into clear view the sig-
nificance of our affective experiences. But can the two accounts be rendered consistent with
each other? Are Sartrean emotions compatible with Heidegger’s ontological claims? And
do Heideggerian moods have a place in Sartre’s system? Although we cannot take up these
issues in great detail here, we wish to conclude by raising a conciliatory suggestion: Sartre’s
account appears to already utilize many of the philosophical resources that Heidegger derives
from Befindlichkeit (and Stimmungen). The grounds of our emotions, according to Sartre, are
experienced difficulties that we cannot overcome with pragmatic means. Such experiences
are difficult precisely because they arise in situations that matter to us. Thus, emotions al-
ready presuppose that the world is meaningful to us; they are predicated on the fact that our
existence matters to us. Seen in this light, Sartrean emotions appear to require something
like Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit.
The two philosophers are similar, however, in another, more problematic, respect: their
accounts portray human existence as overly and almost exclusively negative. If, as Sartre
maintains, all emotions (both negative and positive) are solutions to experienced difficulties,
then emotions arise only when things go wrong for us. And if we accept Heidegger’s account
of anxiety and profound boredom, then affectivity can lead to authentic existence primarily
by bringing about a profound crisis of meaning, but cannot do so in extreme instances of
joy, love, awe, hope, etc. Both philosophers, it seems, have neglected to investigate into the
distinctive nature of positive affective experiences and to explore the transformative power
and character of the various subtle shades of affectivity that define our existence. Even if
neither one has taken up those important tasks in any detail, we can. In the case of affectivity,
the phenomenological project must carry on.

Notes

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anxiety, or profound boredom without understanding how each is related to Dasein’s temporality.
For our expanded discussion of the temporality of fundamental affective states, see Freeman and
Elpidorou (2015).
4 We leave Befindlichkeit un translated because no English term fully and adequately captures its
meaning. For a lengthy discussion of this issue, see Elpidorou and Freeman (2015), note 4; see also
Thonhauser’s discussion in his Chapter 7 on Heidegger in this volume.
5 In several instances in BT, Heidegger excludes talk from the list of existentials (BT 235ff./191ff.,
263ff./221ff., 401/350); in others, he replaces fallenness with talk (BT 172/133, 203/161, 342/296).
In BT 384/335, however, he mentions all four.
6 For an extended discussion of each of these three features, see Elpidorou and Freeman (2015).
7 Though in BT §30, Heidegger claims that fear is a mood (Stimmung), we hesitate in following
his lead. This is because a close reading of this section yields the conclusion that, despite what
Heidegger writes, fear more closely resembles what we would consider to be an emotion (an oc-
current, intentional state experienced by an agent). Heidegger himself even confirms that fear is
more emotion-like than mood-like (BT 230/185). For a more complete argument, see Freeman
(2014, 250–252).
8 It ought to be underscored that Heidegger is not consistent with the use of his own terminology.
He refers to anxiety as both “Grundstimmung” (BT 358/310; see also “What is Metaphysics?” in
GA 9) and as “Grundbefindlichkeit” (for example, see BT 179/140, 227/182, 228/184, 233–235/
188–190, 321/276, 393/342). Taking some interpretive liberty in the name of clarity and con-
sistency, we will refer to anxiety as “Grundstimmung.” This is because the way that Heidegger
describes it—namely, as a profound experience that brings us closer to authentic existence—it
only makes sense for it to be a Stimmung (or experience of mood) and not a Befindlichkeit (structure of
existence). This is because we cannot directly experience structures of existence. Moreover, there
are a number of parallels between anxiety and profound boredom and the latter, according to
Heidegger, is also a Grundstimmung and not a Grundbefindlichkeit.
9 For a more robust consideration of profound boredom, in addition to the other two forms of bore-
dom, see Elpidorou and Freeman (2019).
10 All references to Sartre’s Esquisse d’une théorie des emotions will be indicated by STE followed by the
pagination of the English translation.
11 Sartre draws a distinction between two types of emotions on the basis of whether the transfor-
mation happens on account of our own doing or not (STE 57). The issue is discussed in detail in
Elpidorou (2016).
12 A more detailed presentation of Sartre’s account of emotions can be found in Elpidorou (2017).
13 Sartre considers only one possible expression of passive fear (i.e., fainting), thereby neglecting to
consider other expressions of this emotion. In fact, the most prominent expression of passive fear
is freezing. To use Sartre’s own example, upon encountering the predator or ferocious beast, one
would very likely and at least initially freeze: one would remain motionless and orient oneself with
respect to the threat. Although it is easy to see how fainting could solve the difficulty that gives
rise to fear—indeed, fainting appears to be a solution to every conceivable difficulty that one may
experience—it is not obvious how freezing could offer us a solution. What exactly is the magical
transformation that such behavior brings about? And how does it negate the perceived threat?
Given that Sartre does not discuss this issue, the onus of explication falls on commentators (see
Elpidorou 2016).

References
De Beistegui, Miguel (2003). Thinking with Heidegger: Displacements. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Eastwood, John D., Frischen, Alexandra, Fenske, Mark J., and Smilek, Daniel (2012). The Unengaged
Mind: Defining Boredom in Terms of Attention. Perspectives on Psychological Science 7(5), 482–495.
Elpidorou, Andreas (2013). Moods and Appraisals: How the Phenomenology and Science of Emotions
Can Come Together. Human Studies 36(4), 565–591.
——— (2015). The Significance of Boredom: A Sartrean Reading. In: D. Dahlstrom, A. Elpidorou,
and W. Hopp (Eds.). Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches.
London, New York: Routledge, 268–283.

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——— (2016). Horror, Fear, and the Sartrean Account of Emotions. The Southern Journal of Philosophy
54(2), 209–225.
——— (2017). Emotions in Early Sartre. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41(1), 241–259.
——— (2018a). The Bored Mind Is a Guiding Mind: Toward a Regulatory Theory of Boredom.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17(3), 455–484.
——— (2018b). The Good of Boredom. Philosophical Psychology 31(3), 323–351.
Elpidorou, Andreas, and Freeman, Lauren (2015). Affectivity in Heidegger I: Moods and Emotions in
Being and Time. Philosophy Compass 10(10), 661–671.
——— (2019). Is Fundamental Boredom Boredom? In: C. Hadjioannou (Ed.). Heidegger on Affect.
New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 177–203.
Fell, Joseph P. (1965). Emotion in the Thought of Sartre. New York: Columbia University Press.
Freeman, Lauren (2014). Toward a Phenomenology of Mood. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 52(4),
445–476.
Freeman, Lauren, and Elpidorou, Andreas (2015). Affectivity in Heidegger II: Temporality, Boredom,
and Beyond. Philosophy Compass 10(10), 672–684.
Heidegger, Martin (1927). [=GA 2]. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer [Engl. Transl.: Being and
Time. Transl. by Macquarrie and Robinson. New York: Harper & Row 1962.]
——— (1983). [=GA 29/30]. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit. Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. [Engl. Transl.: Basic Concepts of Metaphysics: World—Finitude—
Solitude. Transl. by W. McNeill and N. Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1995.]
——— (1997). [=GA 9]. Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. [Engl. Transl.: Path-
marks. Ed. by William McNeill, multiple translators. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1998.]
Ratcliffe, Matthew (2008). Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1939). Esquisse d’une théorie des emotions. Paris: Hermann. [Engl. Transl.: Sketch for a
Theory of the Emotions. Transl. by P. Mairet. London, New York: Routledge 2004.]
Slaby, Jan (2014). The Other Side of Existence: Heidegger on Boredom. In: S. Flach and J. Söffner
(Eds.). Habitus in Habitat II: Other Sides of Cognition. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Weberman, David (1996) Sartre, Emotions, and Wallowing. American Philosophical Quarterly 33(4),
393–407.

Further reading
Neuber, Simone (2017). Latent Moods in Heidegger and Sartre: From Being Assailed by Moods to Not
Conceding to (Some) Moods that Assail Us. Philosophia 45(4), 1563–1574.

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 35
GRIEF
Line Ryberg Ingerslev

What has taken refuge

Your future in me
becomes my
purity through life, which I shall not touch –
(Mallarmé, A Tomb for Anatole)

1. Introduction
In many accounts of grief, the struggle to handle reality after losing a loved one is to be
reconciled in a form of internalization of the deceased. As a way in which we attempt to
keep our lost ones, we carry them with us in our narratives, in our vivid memories, in our
rituals, and in our attempts to make sense beyond the lack of sense that is exposed to us by
death. In his “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud (1917) describes how we enter a twilight
zone of reality-testing when we mourn the loss of a loved one. No longer finding our lost
other, our whole conception of reality is distorted and disrupted. Reality testing is a process
of coming to term with no longer finding the other, and consists of what Freud called
Trauerarbeit, grief work. Thus, Freud and with him many others describe mourning and
the result of a process of mourning as an internalization of the relation with the deceased:
“Mourning is one way we recreate our past by making it present—sometimes as memory,
sometimes as psychic structure” (Lear 2017, 196). In the psychoanalytic tradition, Lear here
quotes Loewald, internalization refers to “processes of transformation by which relationships
and interactions between the individual psychic apparatus and its environment are changed
into inner relationships and interaction within the psychic apparatus” (ibid.).
The idea of internalizing the deceased other as part of the self-transformation taking
place in grief can be found in reports on how continuing bonds are kept with the deceased
(Silvermann and Klass 1996; Higgins 2008; Attig 2011; Fuchs 2018) as well as in autobi-
ographical reports (Lewis 1961; Didion 2005; Barthes 2009; Riley 2012). What we often
find here are descriptions of how we hold on to our deceased loved one by integrating and
incorporating them in our routines; we turn to them as guardians of a moral code we try to
live by; we keep them in our narratives and remain in inner dialogue with them; we keep

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saluting their existence by ways of honoring them in our doings (Nussbaum 2001; Solomon
2004; Kierkegaard 2009a; de Warren 2017; Ruin 2018).
What does it mean philosophically to keep a bond with one’s ancestors and to incorporate
a relation with a deceased? In order to reflect on these question, we must look at what kind
of memory is at stake in grief and at what kind of psychic structure we experience, as we
experience the death of the other. Do we in fact get to keep our dead ones in this way, that
is, by incorporating them and by preserving an inner relation with them? One such account
is offered by Thomas Fuchs (2018). Fuchs argues that incorporation and identification are
ways in which we respond to grief; and at the same time, these are ways that allow us to
lead an afterlife with the deceased other. This view provides an occasion for asking a more
general question that is at the root of any grief: in responding to grief, how do we preserve
the otherness of the other? That is, in keeping a bond with our deceased how do we avoid
reducing them to fiction of our own imagination? What does a phenomenology of grief tell
about relating to the dead?

2. Incorporation in the case of grief

In his grief diary, C.S. Lewis (1961) writes that in his insistence on remembering exactly how
his late wife was, he tends to forget her the most. He describes how already a month after her
death, he has turned her into an imaginary woman, a phantom. Only when he tries not to
mourn her, does he see her most vividly: “And suddenly, at the very moment when, so far, I
mourned H. the least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than
memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression” (1961, 39). Although this problem is
not restricted to deceased persons, it allows us to ask how we are to remember the dead.
Fuchs describes the structure of grief as an experience of a “partial loss of oneself ” (see also
Murray Parkes 2009; Ratcliffe 2017, 2019), since in grief I can no longer share the habituated
and embodied world with the deceased other. The bench we used to sit on, the stories we
used to laugh at can no longer be shared. The person who has lost a loved one is expressive
of an embodied form of ‘being-with’ the other that results from the work of shared habits
and life forms: despite the loss of the other and the loss of the meaning of our shared world, I
keep expressing what can no longer be shared: our world. In this way, grief “like hardly any
other psychic phenomenon” reveals how we are “fundamentally related to, and in need of,
other” (Fuchs 2018, 48). According to Fuchs, the being-with that we experience differently
when the other dies is constituted by two interdependent moments, namely self-expansion
and identification. Self-expansion is defined by the way in which the other enables aspects
of my self-realization, which I would not have had without her. Identification is defined as
a way in which I adapt to the other by taking on his or her feelings such that they affect me
as well as him (2018, 48–49). This model of an interfused self-other organism, described by
Fuchs, leads us to the following question: if interdependent, what happens when a part of the
intrapsychic organism dies? As Fuchs puts it:

The question is “who am I now that my loved one is gone?” (…) Grief offers the chance
to ultimately gain a new relation to the deceased and to resolve the ambiguity [of search-
ing and not finding the other] in two complementary ways: the one means taking the
lost person inward, namely through incorporation and identification, the other proceeds
by way of representation, be it by recollection or by symbolization.
(Fuchs 2018, 57)

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Grief offers the survivor the “chance to ultimately gain a new relation to the deceased”.
The new relationship consists in a twofold process: on the one hand, the survivor incorpo-
rates and identifies with the deceased; on the one hand, she represents the deceased other
differently. The idea of gaining a new relation to the deceased is common place as part of
the self-transformation that takes place in grief, as argued for instance by Freud, but also re-
cently by Attig (2011), as a way in which we come to “relearn” our world. But Fuchs argues
for something stronger. Taking the lost person inward, what would that mean? Apart from
being a metaphor, the movement inwards is described as follows: When I identify with the
deceased “the loved one is gradually incorporated, as it were, instead of being searched in
vain outside” (Fuchs 2018, 57). The deceased becomes incorporated due to mimic appro-
priation and is granted an inner presence in me. It might be in my laughter, my gait or my
daily routines that I mimic my lost friend or partner. As Fuchs describes it, the purpose of
internalization is to stop the searching behavior that conflicts with reality; the other cannot
be found in the outside world, but if we internalize the deceased within as an “inner com-
forting presence”, there will be no conflict any more:

In the later stages of grief, the mimetic incorporation proceeds more subtly. One can
frequently observe the appearance of traits of the deceased in the behavior of the be-
reaved. They may be observed or find themselves gesturing or walking in the same
manner, or they may take over the loved one’s former habits, interests and activities by
an often unconscious identification. (…) However, instead of the detachment or cutting
the bonds of which Freud considered the purpose of grief work, it may rather lead to a
new inner presence of the deceased which does not get in conflict with external reality
any longer. The loved one is now “in me”, within my own field of emotional experi-
ence; still present, but as an inner, comforting presence, without having to be searched
for or “found outside”.
(Fuchs 2018, 57–58)

The loved one is ‘in me’, the conflict is resolved, and my habits have enabled the transition;
by identifying, taking over, repeating, and mimicking patterns, I have come to incorporate
my deceased other.
As for the second moment, that of representation and recollection, Fuchs holds that we
can think of it as a way recollecting the past as past and no longer as an ambiguous presence
of the other. Once representation is possible, say in the form of clear memories, rather than
felt ambiguous presence, as might be the case very close to the actual death of the other, “the
past may retain a consolatory indelibility: what we have shared and experienced together
remains and cannot be extinguished” (2018, 58). In symbolic recollection, representation
provides the deceased a place, be it in memorial space, in rituals, or in combination of these
like in narratives about the deceased.
The central forces at stake in this process are habit and memory. Through identification,
we transform uncertainty into patterns of meaning where the deceased other can be kept
as a form of inner presence. Meanwhile, memory allows us to narratively hold on to our
deceased, while externalizing what is irreducibly something we have shared. In this way, it
seems, we do keep our dead ‘alive’. With the death of a loved one, a joint sense-making has
been disrupted; however, by practice of internalization, the joint aspect is artificially kept
alive. But what is meant by the process of internalization, and how do habit and memory in
narratives and repeated rituals allow us to capture and eventually control what we have lost.

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In what follows, I will focus on two sets of problems. First, the term internalization has
a psychoanalytic heritage, that Fuchs translates as incorporation and intersubjective bodily
resonance (2018; see also Fuchs 2012, 2017). This translation, however, does away with the
terminological ambiguity related to the technical term. I suggest to question the term on its
own grounds in order to better understand how ‘incorporation’ is to be imagined. Second,
the idea of representation in narratives, habits, and rituals seem to somehow affect the mem-
ory of the dead, namely turning it into an unchanging memory, into an invariable, timeless
picture and thereby into sort of icon. While an icon is one way to preserve value, the prob-
lem consists in turning the icon into a ghost; the holiness of the picture ignores the horror of
facing and accepting the death of the other. As a result, we might be stuck in obsessive rituals
that allow the dead to ‘haunt’ us. As Lewis describes:

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs
over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances,
all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is in her foursquare and independent reality.
And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.
(Lewis 1961, 56)

Can we keep the otherness of the other without turning her into an icon or a ghost, but
rather into an ancestor, that is, a source of sense?

3. Abraham and Torok on incorporation

A first set of problems announces itself simply by the term incorporation. As Abraham
and Torok explain, the psychoanalytic term is ambiguous and referred to in different ways
(1994, 110–116). As the authors describe it, incorporation has the following meaning in
psychoanalysis:

Introducing all or a part of a love object or a thing into one’s own body, possessing,
expelling or alternately acquiring, keeping, losing it—here are varieties of fantasy indi-
cating, in the typical forms of possession or feigned dispossession, a basic intrapsychic
situation: the situation created by the reality of a loss sustained by the psyche. If accepted
and worked through, the loss would require major readjustment. But the fantasy of in-
corporation merely simulates profound psychic transformation through magic; it does
so by implementing literally something that has only figurative meaning. So in order to
“swallow” a loss, we fantasize swallowing (or having swallowed) that which has been
lost, as if it were some kind of thing.
(Abraham and Torok 1994, 126)

As a consequence of de-metaphorization, that is, of taking the figurative term literally, and
of objectifying the loved object, “the magical cure by way of incorporation exempts the sub-
ject from the painful process of recognizing the loss” (Abraham and Torok 1994, 126–127).
According to Abraham and Torok “[w]hen, in the form of imaginary or real nourishment,
we ingest the love-object we miss, this means that we refuse to mourn and that we shun the
consequences of mourning even though our psyche is fully bereaved” (1994, 127). What is
important here is the idea that part of the incorporation consists in refusing to mourn. Identify-
ing and incorporating the other can prevent us from realizing the loss we are suffering (1994,
130). That is, taking the deceased loved one inwards, be it by carrying on an inner dialogue,

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be it in habitual patterns, invented rituals, or be it as a moral code to be consulted; some

aspects of incorporation can prevent us from realizing the loss, and it can eventually cancel
out the death of the other, as it were.
What I will suggest is that we think of two possible ways of coming to terms with the
absence that grief leaves us to face and with the idea of preserving a relationship with the
deceased. As Fuchs suggests, internalization can be understood as an embodied practice of
keeping the dead by affectively identifying with her, reproducing the habitual patterns that
constituted our shared world, as we saw above. Here, the other is swallowed in the sense that
he or she is made into a comforting presence, a being-with the other that cancels out the ac-
tual painful absence; we keep the other by repeating his or her gestures, expressions, stories,
and values. By contrast, internalization could be understood in terms of being responsible
for the other by way of surviving his or her absence. In this case, survival is something only I
do; I remain alone, and surviving means carrying back into the world something that has no
place in the world any more. In what follows, I will try to spell out how we can understand
survival as a form of responsibility for carrying on the world (see also Derrida 2004, 8), not
by taking the other inwards as a comforting presence, but by carrying outwards the mean-
inglessness that we experience in grief and thus by recommitting to the world.

4. Levinas and the pure question mark

What is, for us, the mode of being of the dead other? How do we preserve the alterity of the
other after her death? Put differently, how does absence actively modify our relation to the
dead other. And what is the object of modification in the first place? As C.S. Lewis describes,
he fears that his memories will inevitably change his picture of his beloved wife; due to the
modification made by our way of recollecting, he fears that “the real shape will be quite hid-
den in the end” (Lewis 1961, 18). Our relation to the other is modified, not simply because
the other is dead but also because memory keeps changing it:

Ten minutes—ten seconds—of the real H. would correct all of this. And yet, even if
those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall
again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.
(Ibid.)

The experience of absence questions our mode of survival and at the same time something
or someone survives the absence. Survival calls us into question, and the modified relation
is articulated as an experience of concern that has no place. The experience of the death of
the other is tied to a disruption of responsiveness that leaves us only with the experience of
a pure question mark, that is, with us having to relate to what Levinas calls “the unknown”
(Levinas 2000, 18). Something is modified and modifies us; and the concern we are left with
is articulated as a pure question mark. Let me unfold this idea.
For Levinas, the other is “someone who expresses himself in his nudity—the face—is
one to the point of appealing to me, of placing himself under my responsibility: Henceforth,
I have to respond for him” (Levinas 2000, 12). First of all, this means that all the gestures
of the other, conceived of in this way, are signs addressed to me. Address comes with being
entrusted. I am never free of an infinite debt that comes with being entrusted in this way
(ibid.). Being addressed by the other in his gestures is a way in which we exist responsively
for-each-other. Before I directly perceive expressive gestures as meaningful, I am already
addressed by the other. Being addressed is not a contingent happening; it is the structure

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of my subjectivity. This can be understood as follows: The appeal, within the expressive
gestures of the other, affects and calls me before they are perceived as meaningful in this or
that way. My experience of your expressions is not first and foremost a matter of how you
appear in my experience, structured in its for-me-ness, intentionality, and mineness; it is not
a matter of which opportune self-realization you might enable; rather, the expressive body
of the other interrupts a joint sense-making in addressing me first and foremost as a subject.
Therefore, in the experience of bodily expressions, I do not identify with you, nor do we
overlap in undifferentiated, bodily resonating interaffectivity (cf. Chapter 28 in this volume).
Rather, as responsive subjects we exist as exposed and on the outside of ourselves, sensing our-
selves by being sensed and subjected by others.
To put it differently, we can say with Nancy that

the body is the unity of a being outside itself. The unity of the coming to self as a
“self-sensing” a “self-touching” that necessarily passes through the outside—which is
why I can’t sense myself without sensing otherness and without being sensed by the
other. It involves thinking the unity (…) as form, which is inevitably an articulation.
(Nancy 2008, 133)

What Nancy describes here is an articulation that goes through the other, and by being
separate from the other, it constitutes the responsive unity of my subjectivity. It is only by
being in-touch with others that I sense myself. The important point is that my articulation
is experienced and mediated by the other. I will return to the role of articulation later. For
now, consider that it is through the other that I come to conceive of sense, namely as the
sense that has been articulated through outsidedness and exposure to the other.
Now, if as responsive subjects we articulate sense, then this kind of sense is disrupted with
the death of the other. “Death is an immobilization of the mobility of the face that denies
death in advance; it is a struggle between discourse and its negation” (Levinas 2000, 14).
We must ask how this struggle is experienced, the struggle between the wanting-to-be-
responded-to and the denial of being-called-again. How is wanting-be-responded-to related
to the impossible continuation of discourse with a deceased?
The experience, according to Levinas, is that of a pure question mark which is pure in
the following sense:

Instead of letting itself be described in its own event, death concerns us by its nonsense.
The point that death seems to mark in our time (i.e., our relation to the infinite) is a
pure question mark: the opening onto that which provides no possibility of a response.
(2000, 21)

For Levinas, the pure question mark is a point of concern that is experienced as responsibil-
ity. Let’s hold on to the idea that surviving the absence of the other is tied to an experience
of responsibility and that the concern at the root of this experience is still tied to having
no place and to the experience of no-response. Levinas expands on how this concern is
experienced:

The other concerns me as a neighbor. In every death is shown the nearness of the
neighbor, and the responsibility of the survivor, in the form of a responsibility that the
approach of proximity moves or agitates. A disquietude that is not thematization, not in-
tentionality (…) This is a disquietude that therefore resists all appearing, all phenomenal

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aspects, as though emotions passed by way of the question, without encountering the
slightest quiddity, toward that acuity of death, and instituted an unknown that is not
purely negative but rather in nearness without knowledge.
(Levinas 2000, 18)

For present purposes, let me focus on the idea that survival is tied to a concern that is insti-
tuted by a relation to the unknown. The unknown that Levinas describes and that is initiated
by disquietude is not the unknown that is tied to answers we will never get, the purely nega-
tive; rather, it consists in a nearness without knowledge and it is experienced as responsibility
for the other. When Levinas emphasizes the purity of the question mark as beyond thema-
tization and intentionality it means that our attempts to represent the other will all fail. The
otherness of the other is beyond intentionality in the sense that we cannot come to grasp it;
rather, we come to experience it as concern and responsibility. Thus, the mode of survival
does not allow for an experience of undifferentiated affective sameness. Rather, it keeps us
suspended in relation to the unknown, that is, to what cannot be an object of consciousness,
namely the absent other. While doing so, the experience of surviving establishes an opening
towards what doesn’t provide a response, and yet keeps addressing us in terms of disquietude,
searching and desiring a response from the deceased other (2000, 107).
The idea of the pure question mark that keeps addressing us as responsible for the dead
in the unknown, a pure question mark that resists thematization and all appearing, seems
to resist any form of internalization or incorporation along the lines that Fuchs describes it.
According to Levinas, there can be no reduction of dead other to the realm of sameness, of
understanding-as, or of appearing-as. I do not keep the dead reduced to a form of comfort-
ing sameness within. The experience of the death of the other leaves us with a no-response.
I myself am no longer responded to by you, and this experience is one of disquietude. I am
eager to respond to the plaguing questions your absence leave me with; at the same time, I
cannot reduce your absence to my lack of getting any answers. Rather, I experience your
absence as a nearness without knowledge and a kind of responsibility for the other in the
unknown. The structure I am interested in is how preservation of the otherness of the other
is possible without reducing her to my own narrative, my own memory, my own set of com-
memorative rituals, that is, how is preservation possible without internalization? How can
we preserve the dead other without reducing him to imaginary sameness, that is, to a fiction
of our own imagination?

5. The taboo of wanting to be responded to

Let me illustrate the anticipated grief by way of an example that illustrates the struggle
between wanting-to-be-responded-to and the inescapable silence of the (soon to be) de-
ceased other. The example also provides grounds for a discussion of incorporation as a form
of reconciliation. Simone de Beauvoir describes a scene with her dying mother in her book
A Very Easy Death (1965):

The physiotherapist came to Maman’s bed, turned down the sheet and took hold of her
leg: Maman had an open hospital nightdress on and she did not mind that her wrinkled
belly, criss-crossed with tiny lines, and her bald pubis showed. “I no longer have any sort
of shame”, she observed in a surprised voice. “You are perfectly right not to have any”,
I said. But I turned away and gazed fixedly into the garden. The sight of my mother’s
nakedness had jarred me. No body existed less for me: none existed more. As a child I

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had loved it dearly; as an adolescent it had filled me with an uneasy repulsion: all this
was perfectly in the ordinary course of things and it seemed reasonable to me that her
body should retain its dual nature, that it should be both repugnant and holy—a taboo.
(Beauvoir 1965, 19–20)

In witnessing her mother’s insensitivity to shame, Beauvoir herself feels ashamed, while
granting that there is nothing to be ashamed of. This moment reveals how the responsive
dynamic tied to exposure is disrupted in grief. It is not because we can see the mother now
naked and dying that we feel ashamed on her behalf, and it is not because she no longer
makes herself shown or presents herself that we feel ashamed on her behalf. Rather, it is because
her body now lacks an address that an essential for-you-ness is already dying. Death makes
itself appear as a lack of address, a no-longer-responding, thereby turning the body into a
being-for-no-one; the moment of no-shame reveals a sliding into non-responsive anonym-
ity. This process reveals itself in the mother’s witnessing of her own letting go. “Death is
the disappearance in beings of those expressive movements that made them appear as living,
those movements that are always responses. Death will touch above all, that autonomy or
that expressiveness of movement (…) Death is the no-response” (Levinas 2000, 9).
The experience of shame in front of her dying mother can be understood as what A nthony
Steinbock calls a diremptive experience (Steinbock 2014, 72–37, 98): two modes of orienta-
tion that are otherwise unified come apart and the one experiencing the diremption is itself
called into question. Beauvoir’s experience of shame can be understood as a call for orienta-
tion, being lost as she is in front of her mother, wanting her response, and realizing she shall
not receive it any longer. The conflict experienced as two different modes of orientation fall-
ing apart is articulated in the feeling of a taboo tied to desiring a response from a body that,
in turning into a corpse, can no longer express itself in proximity, can no longer address or
respond anymore. To witness this silencing of the body, as it appears as a saying-for-the-other,
fills Beauvoir with shame. Not only because her mother’s body is now naked, aging and dying,
but because the body now appears for-no-one. Shame in Beauvoir’s case is a response to being
left alone with seeking, demanding, and desiring responses from the flesh that cannot and will
not respond. Beauvoir’s sense of herself is interrupted, distorted by the fact that the mother will
no longer respond. The shame does not concern the nakedness of the mother’s body, but the
inappropriateness of her own (Simone’s) embodied wanting-to-be-responded-to. We can say
that the mother is letting go of hosting the other’s desire, letting go of

inviting to the fine risk of approach qua approach, to the exposure of one to the other,
to the exposure of this exposedness, the expression of exposure, saying. In the approach
of a face the flesh becomes word, the caress a saying.
(Levinas 1998, 94)

What Beauvoir’s story reveals is the structural responsiveness tied to the body: Constitu-
tively, I am not at one with myself, but I am exposed to otherness and alterity, coming to
myself from the outside (Nancy 2008, 33). My sense of myself, we might say, is a form of
anticipated wholeness that is bound to fall apart, since we can capture neither the recognition
nor the response from the other. We might say that my sense of myself consists in an expecta-
tion of sense that structurally depends on otherness:

Rather (…) I promise, I anticipate a sense that is not yet there and will, in fact never be
there as something completed and presentable, a sense that is always in and according to

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the other, making sense only by being exposed to the other, to the risk of not m aking
sense, to the always certain risk of changing the sense of the other and so of always
being other, always being altered, always being outside, being by itself, as sense, a
being-infinitely-for-the-other.
(Nancy 2003, 295)

Being situated next to her dying mother, we can say that Beauvoir’s self-conception is dis-
rupted since she can no longer call or demand anything from the (m)other, and thus, her
self-image cannot continue to be imagined—it becomes unimaginable. The exposure and
suffering tied to being-for-the-other is articulated in my self-image shaped as a being-for-
you. Exposure to silence in this case breaks the anticipated wholeness and reveals that my
sense of myself was always deferred, incapable of receiving the response that shaped it as a
saying:

The disclosing of a face is nudity, non-form, abandon of self, ageing, dying more naked
than nudity. It is poverty, skin with wrinkles, which are a trace of itself [sic!]. My reac-
tion misses a present which is already the past of itself. This past is not in the present, but
is as a phase retained, the past of this present, a lapse already lost which marks ageing,
escaping all retention, altering my contemporaneousness with the other. It reclaimed me
before I came. The delay is irrecuperable. (…) The common hour marked by the clock
is the hour in which the neighbor reveals himself and delivers himself in his image, but
it is precisely in his image that he is no longer near.
(Levinas 2000, 88–89)

Confronted with her nakedness as the incarnation of a non-responsive body, Beauvoir is

overwhelmed of the motherly body as she has loved and hated it, as it represents what is at
one and the same time holy and repugnant: a taboo. What is sacred and forbidden in relation
to the body is not merely its nakedness or sexuality, but its falling out of time, its timeless-
ness. The enigma of time captured in the body is exposed in the face of death: “No body ex-
isted less for me: none existed more”. Irreducible to identification in Fuchs’ sense, the taboo
that confronts Beauvoir tells of her desire to be responded to what death confronts her with.
In this sense, we might say that my own self-understanding reflects a displacement in time; I
am constitutively delayed, and in the face of death, the responsive moments come apart; I can
no longer make claims on you; it becomes clear that your response was always unimaginable
and as such part of my deferred sense of myself. Importantly, the diachronicity that Levinas
describes in terms of responsibility cannot be reduced to my way of incorporating the image
of the other and fixating him or her in time, in an image, in a narrative or a ritual or a new set
of animated habits. The deferral that articulates the sense for which I am responsible consists
in the irreducibility of the other to becoming that image.

6. Survival as responsibility for sense

This example provides us with an important antidote to the idea of a possible reconciliation
with the dead through our memory and our continuation or re-enactment of shared habits.
Fuchs suggested that we can incorporate the other and gain a new relationship with her in the
form of an inner comforting presence. Beauvoir’s story however could be understood as testi-
fying to the impossibility of keeping the dead exactly because we ourselves embody the insa-
tiable desire to be responded to that cannot be fulfilled. Therefore, any form of internalization

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and identification would only attest to wishful thinking or indeed self- deception. For, as we
would ourselves fill in that lacking response by way of restoring an imaginary sameness,
namely the sameness of tying together two incommensurable orders, the order of death and
the order of our own survival, we would in that self-fabricated response come to answer to
our own desires by way of our powerful monitoring of our fantasies.
Now, as Kierkegaard (2009b) writes, the dead man is a silent man. By placing himself,
imaginatively, at a graveside, looking into the grave, speaking at the grave, Kierkegaard
insists that there is a struggle to be recognized at the graveside, namely the struggle of what
is known and certain (that we will survive some of our loved ones, we might say) and what is un-
known and uncertain (that we don’t know what survival means, that survival is unimaginable, we
might say). We must experience this struggle practically, in order to fully grasp it, despite the
knowledge we already have of it. What presents itself differently when death cuts into our
lives with certainty is the future. While this factually happens after the death of the other,
the struggle between certainty and uncertainty serves as an existential fundament for being
placed and for us taking place in the world. Survival is at stake at every moment as praxis of
sense, whereas death factually reveals the fundamental dynamic of survival in time.
The earnestful praxis described by Kierkegaard consists in a form of re-engagement, as
it were. In grief and at the graveside, I have to re-settle the struggle between the known
(that you have died) and the unknown (that I survived but I don’t know what that means
without you to give sense to our world) by way of re-committing myself to the world. As
Kelly suggests,

we can capture grief by accounting for its temporal meaning or significance on analogy
with a thrown projection. As throwness denotes a full awareness of those uncontrollable
and limiting conditions into which we have been born, we might consider grief a second
thrownness in which we once again enter the world anew—and wailing.
(Kelly 2017, 176–177)

The important point here is that we have to recommit to the world in which we already are;
we have to relearn the world (Attig 2011) and we do so in the form of recommitting to sense
in the face of no-response and the non-sense of death, almost as an ethical practice of hope
(Mattingly 2010). The promise of sense is made not to the absent other, but consist in the
praxis of articulating that absence back into the world over and over again, as a reengaging
movement in time that constitutes the world. Absence and separation are what enable an
articulation of the world, and this articulation is carried out as responsibility for sense. Grief
reveals this struggling articulation as a mode in which we survive absence.
What Kelly describes as thrownness, a second birth, brings us back to the difference
emphasized by Abraham and Torok, namely between incorporation and Sándor Ferenczi’s
original term “introjection” (Ferenczi 1912, 316–317). According to the authors, incorpo-
ration denotes a fantasy, a psychic structure, whereas introjection should be understood as
a process; a process by which experiences of the dead is indeed projected inwards, but at the
same time these experiences involve an opening to the external world. Therefore, the notion
of introjection, offered by Abraham and Torok, might be helpful to correct some of the
tendencies in approaches that speak of taking the deceased inwards in order to keep her as a
kind of comforting presence by proxy.
The originary experience of absence, viewed psychoanalytically, is tied to the absence
or separation from the care-taking other (see also Winnicot 1958, 2005), which gives rise
to articulation. The infant learns separation as articulation out of absence of the caregiving

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(m)other/milk; the empty mouth is the experience of and articulation of absence, and in the
transformation of articulating absence a world is gained:

The absence of objects and the empty mouth are transformed into words. So the wants
of the original oral vacancy are remedied by being turned into verbal relationships with
the speaking community at large. Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation means chan-
neling them through language into a communion of empty mouths… Since language
acts and makes up for absence by representing, by giving figurative shape to presence, it
can only be comprehended or shared in a ‘community of empty mouths’.
(Abraham and Torok 1994, 128)

Importantly, absence here is something we learn to experience, and this absence is tied to
an experience of sense as world-building. Relating to the other through identification or
affective overlapping, as described by Fuchs, does to some extent prevent an open world-
directedness. By contrast, it is through the experienced separation from—and absence of—
the other that we gain access to a shared world, a world for which we are at the same time
responsible. It is the lived articulation of the experience of absence that commits us to the
world. The contrast between introjection and incorporation is respectively tied to the ar-
ticulation of a wanting-to-mourn or to refusing-to-mourn by taking the other inward. We
might say that survival in the case of incorporation turns the survivor into a cemetery guard,
whereas survival in the case of introjection is tied to a constant confrontation with being
committed, worldly, at the graveside, thrown a second time and ongoingly into giving sense
otherwise (see also Ingerslev 2018).
We might think of refusing to mourn in collective terms as well. In Jonathan Lear’s in-
terpretation (2017) of Coetze’s Waiting for the Barbarians, he describes how melancholia can
become a life form; waiting is what we do, melancholically, when we hold on to a certain life
form, a certain set of norms, a certain way of seeing each other. Collectively, we can wait for
the climate to get worse, we can wait for justice, we can accept injustice, but with mourning
comes a creative recommitment to sense.

Melancholia is the condition of being stuck in repetition. For the melancholic, everything
is always already the same again—stretching back into the past, and on into the future.
Mourning, by contrast, is imaginative recreation. That is, it is the occasion for taking up
the past way and using it as an occasion to break out of repetition and create a new fu-
ture. Though it is often painful process, it is also fertile. In mourning, the past nourishes
the present and future; and the mourner ultimately says yes to life by saying no to the
depressing confines of “same again forever”.
(Lear 2017, 98)

Lear describes the shift from melancholic waiting to a creative commitment to sense un-
derstood as mourning as a shift that grants ghosts the status of being ancestors. We are no
longer just haunted, we commit to non-sense being part of us as a way in which we respond
responsibly to existence. It is not the world that is new in the experience of grief, we remain
embedded in cultural structures of sense, but the sense we re-commit to is a kind of sense
that creatively and re-creatively commit us to the world. Our deceased keep haunting us as
a demand for meaning, as a pure question mark, and we keep hearing this demand, we keep
sending our ghosts away as we turn them into ancestors (see also Butler 2006), into sources
of sense for how we responsibly carry on surviving.

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7. Concluding remarks
In asking how we preserve the alterity of the other who is dead, we looked at two ways of
memorizing the dead other; either as an attempt of carrying the other inwards while creating
a comforting presence, or as a world-directed practice of sense that I keep being concerned
by. These two modes of internalization entail either a form of incorporation of the other
or a way of keeping a promise of sense. Importantly, the promise of sense is not a promise
to the dead; rather, it is a way of re-engaging in time and over time with the memories of
the deceased, by continuously turning him into an ancestor. On this latter model, what we
might get to keep is a relation of sense carried back into the world. Preserving otherness is
thus a way of practicing memory. In Kierkegaard’s terms, the praxis of remembering one’s
dead is a work of love (2009a, 317–329). Our grief work should in fact be understood as a
work of love. We are relearning the world by practicing memory as a work of love over and
over again, each time differently, each time anew; by recommitting to the world, by turning
our ghosts into ancestors, by keeping a promise of sense yet to come. This kind of memory
cannot be purified, kept untouched by time or sterilized into fixed meaning; rather, is a
practice that we rehearse world-building, over and over again.

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Fuchs, Thomas (2012). The Phenomenology of Body Memory. In: S. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa,
and C. Müller (Eds.). Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 9–22.
——— (2017). Collective Body Memory. In: C. Durt, T. Fuchs, and C. Tewes (Eds.). Embodiment,
Enaction and Culture. Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
333–352.
——— (2018). Presence in Absence. The Ambiguous Phenomenology of Grief. Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences 17(1), 43–64.
Higgins, Kathleen (2008). Love and Death. In: J. Deigh (Ed.). On Emotions. Philosophical Essays.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 159–178.
Ingerslev, Line Ryberg (2018). Ongoing: On Grief ’s Open-ended Rehearsal. Continental Philosophy
Review 51(3), 343–360.
Kelly, Michael R. (2017). Grief: Putting the Past before Us. Quaestiones Disputatae 7(1), 156–177.
Kierkegaard, Søren (2009a). At a Graveside. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Transl. by H. and
E. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
——— (2009b). Works of Love. Transl. by H. and E. Hong. New York: Harper-Collins.
Lear, Jonathan (2017). Wisdom Won from Illness. Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1998). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Transl. by A. Lingis. Pittsburg:
Duquesne University Press.
——— (2000). God, Death, and Time. Transl. by B. Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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——— (2006). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Transl. by A. Lingis. Pittsburg: Duquesne
University Press.
Lewis, Clive Staples (1961). A Grief Observed. London: Faber and Faber.
Mattingly, Cheryl (2010). The Paradox of Hope. Journeys through a Clinical Borderland. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press.
Murray Parkes, Colin (2009). Love and Loss. The Roots of Grief and Its Complications. London, New York:
Routledge.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (2003). Responding to Existence. A Finite Thinking. Transl. by S. Guyer. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
——— (2008). Corpus. Transl. by R. A. Rand. New York: Fordham University Press.
Nussbaum, Martha (2001). Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ratcliffe, Matthew (2017). Real Hallucinations. Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality and the Interpersonal World.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
——— (2019). Grief and Phantom Limbs: A Phenomenological Comparison. The New Yearbook for
Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 17, 75–96.
Riley, Denise (2012). Time Lived, Without Its Flow. London: Capsule.
Ruin, Hans (2018). Being with the Dead. Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Silverman, Phyllis R., and Klass, Dennis. (1996). Introduction: What’s the Problem. In: D. Klass,
P. R. Silverman, and S. Nickman (Eds.). Continuing Bonds. New Understandings of Grief. London,
New York: Routledge.
Solomon, Robert (2004). In Defense of Sentimentality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steinbock, Anthony (2014). Moral Emotions. Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart. Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press.
Warren, Nicolas de (2017). The Souls of the Departed. Towards a Phenomenology of the After-Life.
Metodo 5(1), 205–237.
Winnicott, Donald (1958). The Capacity to Be Alone. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 39,
416–420.
——— (2005). Playing and Reality. London, New York: Routledge.

Further reading
Goldie, Peter (2012). The Mess Inside. Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Ratcliffe, Matthew (2016). Relating to the Dead: Social Cognition and the Phenomenology of
Grief. In: T. Szanto and D. Moran (Eds.). Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’. London,
New York: Routledge, 202–215.
——— (2017). The Phenomenological Clarification of Grief and Its Relevance for Psychiatry. In:
G. Stanghellini et al. (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803157.013.58.
Rinofner-Kreidl, Sonja (2018). Grief: Loss and Self-Loss. In: J. J. Drummond, and S. Rinofner-Kreidl
(Eds.). Emotional Experiences: Ethical and Social Significance. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 91–120.
Varga, Somogy, and Gallagher, Shaun (2020). Anticipatory-Vicarious Grief: The Anatomy of a Moral
Emotion. The Monist 103(2), 176–189.

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 36
JOY AND HAPPINESS
Michela Summa

Within the constellation of the positive emotional responses related to the sense of
accomplishment and/or fulfillment—a constellation that also includes feelings like pleasure
and enjoyment as well as positive emotions like gladness, cheerfulness, hilariousness, seren-
ity, etc.—joy and happiness stand out as two related, and yet different, experiences.
Considering recent work, the discrepancy between the large amount of research on hap-
piness and the comparatively little one on joy is remarkable (cf. Demmerling and Landweer
2007, 111–125; Potkay 2007, 1–29). Interdisciplinary research on happiness have flourished
in the last decades, and research fields called “happiness studies” or “the science of happiness”
have developed (Ahmed 2010, 2–20; Haybron 2011). Several attempts have been made to
establish more or less standardized criteria for the evaluation of individual and social happi-
ness. This interest for happiness and happiness standards not only concerns scientific research
but also social discourses: we read articles about the happiest country in Europe, about how
to keep a happy relationship, about being happy with what you are, etc. There seems to be
nothing similar concerning joy.
The reason for this discrepancy is at least partly bound to the cultural tradition in Western
civilization and to the history of concepts. First, the concepts of joy and happiness are often
used interchangeably, so that discourses about happiness should sometimes be better under-
stood as discourses about joy and vice versa. Moreover, both concepts, ‘joy’ and ‘happiness’,
harbor some ambiguities. On the one hand, experiencing joy may be either understood as
‘enjoying something’ or as ‘rejoicing about something’ and the two have rather different
characteristics. On the other hand, ‘happiness’ is alternatively used to designate an emotional
state—feeling happy about something essentially means feeling satisfied—or a judgmental
stance we take about our life, or a period thereof—we are or were happy with what we are,
with what we have reached, which means that a happy life is a life that “goes well for the
person leading it” (Haybron 2011). I will assume that the former sense of ‘happiness’ comes
rather close to joy, whereas the latter is a distinctive experience. ‘Happiness’ in this narrower
sense has historically gained stronger ethical/moral connotations (cf. Annas 1993), which
are not associated with our current understanding of ‘joy’ (Potkay 2007, 1–28). This is par-
ticularly remarkable if one considers how important figures in the philosophical, literary,
and religious tradition have emphasized the social, ethical and even political impact of joy
(cf. Potkay 2007). Finally, and relatedly, our understanding of happiness has requirements

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that do not seem to applicable in the same sense to joy. According to a tradition that has
its roots in Aristotle’s account of eudaimonia, for rational beings, happiness is and should be
the ultimate aim. In this sense, we are somehow accountable and responsible for the way in
which we realize our happiness (Ahmed 2010).
In what follows, I will tackle these issues from a phenomenological perspective. I will em-
phasize what is distinctive for joy and happiness, particularly in relation to temporality and to
processes of self-realization. Section 1 expands on the ambiguity in the use of and on some
relevant distinctions between the concepts of joy and happiness; Section 2 focuses on joy, and
in particular on what I will call ‘deep joy’; Section 3 addresses the specificity of happiness as
based on an evaluative/judgmental stance on one’s own life as a good life.

1. Joy and happiness: some preliminary distinctions

That expressions of joy and happiness are often used interchangeably has notably been ob-
served, in two different argumentative contexts, by Nozick and Foot. Focusing on what we
mean by saying that we are happy to x or that we are happy that x is the case, Nozick (2006,
108 f.) distinguishes: (i) being happy that something or other is the case, (ii) feeling that one’s
own life is good as it is right now, and (iii) being satisfied with one’s own life as a whole.
Discussing these three meanings, he observes that the former two describe joy rather than
happiness: they respectively refer (i) to the ordinary experience of rejoicing about something
and (ii) to the experience of deep joy. Happiness in the strict sense is what is meant in case
(iii), which differs from both previous ones because, on the one hand, it does not refer to one
specific episode and, on the other hand, it entails a judgmental stance that the two others do
not have. Foot’s (2010, 81f.) remarks converge with these in emphasizing how, besides being
used in order to characterize dispositions or moods, expressions of happiness often refer to
two rather different phenomena: rejoicing and being happy about one’s own life as a good
life. Whereas the former designates an episodic state of mind, the latter implies a judgmental
stance on the goodness of one’s life, thus coming close to the understanding of eudaimonia in
Aristotle and the ethical tradition that followed.
Nozick and Foot thus agree on the two following claims: first, joy has an episodic char-
acter, whereas happiness refers to larger segments of one’s own life or even to one’s life as
a whole; second, different from joy, which is an immediate response, happiness entails an
evaluative and judgmental stance.
Yet, a further aspect, which is more explicitly thematized by Strasser in the phenomeno-
logical tradition, is implicit in both Nozick’s and Foot’s observations. Considering both joy
and happiness as experiences of accomplishment, Strasser (1956, 238f.) emphasizes that joy is
felt while we experience the accomplishment of a process, whereas happiness, as an emotional
experience based on evaluation, only comes at the end of a process.
Accordingly, joy should be considered as the feeling of “affirmation” in “taking possess”,
which occurs after previous uncertainty (ibid., 233f.) and accompanies processes of accom-
plishment through and through (ibid., 239). A similar view can be found in some of Husserl’s
manuscripts collected as Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (Husserl forthcoming). Here,
Husserl often associates joy with the fulfilment of the intentional tendency, with the satisfac-
tion of instincts and drives—whereby joy arises in the process of satisfaction and culminates at
its end—and with the dynamics of accomplishment of activities that are considered to be aims
in themselves, like playful activities (cf. Bernet 2006, 2013, 223–332, Summa 2014, 224f.).
Conversely, Strasser (1956, 238f., 244f.) observes that happiness only occurs at the end
of processes of accomplishment, or at the moment of achievement: we are not happy at the

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beginning of a process, nor during its unfolding, but rather only at its successful conclusion,1
as we reflectively turn to the process and its ending.
These remarks indicate that joy and happiness have a different temporal structure and are
differently related to experiences of accomplishment, realization, and self-realization. In the
following two sections, I will explore these aspects more closely.

2. Joy and deep joy

Let us begin with some semantic and grammatical distinctions in the expressions of joy. In
English, the two main verbs that have ‘joy’ as their root are ‘enjoying’2 and ‘rejoicing’. The
distinction between these two verbs at least partially coincides with the distinction between
Freude an etwas and Freude über etwas in German. In his work on aesthetic enjoyment, Geiger
devotes much effort to this distinction, contending that only in the latter case—i.e., only
in rejoicing about something (Freude über)—can we properly speak about joy. Despite the
etymological connection in English and the use of the same word with a different preposi-
tion in German, the experience of enjoyment (Freude an, Genuss) is, in other words, to be
distinguished from joy as rejoicing (Freude über). We should particularly retain three aspects
of Geiger’s phenomenological analysis.
First, Geiger (1913, 587f.) observes that while joy is motivated by inner experiences,
enjoyment can be said to be grounded, but not properly motivated. Motivational relations
concern the reasons why the given state of affairs is something I rejoice about: we cannot
universalize any claim concerning the content of joy, but we can (formally) claim that some-
thing can be the source of joy for someone only if it is meaningful for him/her. Enjoyment,
and aesthetic enjoyment in particular, does not have the same motivational structure. We
can typically mention the aspects that make something enjoyable, and thus also raise general
and quasi-normative claims concerning aesthetic enjoyment, but we are not always able to
say why something is enjoyable for us.
Second, Geiger (1913, 616–617, 587 f.) emphasizes that joy is always an act in the strict
sense. Joy describes a centrifugal movement. We are certainly first of all affected by what
we rejoice about, but the proper experience of joy expresses an active movement toward the
object, and the affirmation of the experience. Enjoyment is instead centripetal, since what
its central feature is the passivity of the affection (ibid., 616–617). Although he does not ex-
plicitly refer to Geiger’s work, this view on the primacy of affection—and of hetero-affection
in particular—in enjoyment is something we also find in Levinas’ (1979, 109f.) discussion
of enjoyment ( jouissance). Although Levinas understands enjoyment as a much more encom-
passing and multifaceted phenomenon, the reference to the primacy of affection may also be
taken to justify his understanding of enjoyment as an experience of separation—an interpre-
tation that is not appropriate to the traditional understanding of joy, which rather emphasizes
unification, and joining (cf. Potkay 2007).
Third, whereas enjoyment can occur only on the basis of the mere presentation of its ob-
ject, or on the basis of imagistic representations, joy requires the position of existence, or of
the actual occurrence of that about which we rejoice (Geiger 1913, 598). Joy, in other words,
presupposes a twofold affirmation: of the intentional correlate and of its existence.3 In his at-
tempt to trace all complex emotions back to joy, sadness, and conatus and their composition,
Spinoza already hints at this. Complex affects like hope and fear are inconstant, since they
respectively entail joy and sadness related to the content (or the idea) of something uncertain
(Spinoza 1985, III, P. 18, schol. 2). Yet, these affects are complementary—there is no hope
without fear and no fear without hope. Thus, the uncertainty concerning the outcome—the

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future effective existence—implies sadness even when the content or the idea is the source
of joy (in hope), and joy even when the content is the source of sadness (in fear) (ibid., III,
def. XII–XIII, exp.). Similarly, longing is for Spinoza sadness concerning the absence of
something we love (ibid., III, P. 36, schol.), i.e., concerning the cause of our joy (ibid., III,
P. 13, schol.).
Given these distinctions, what interests us here is rejoicing, which, following Foot’s and
Nozick’s remarks, should be specified either as ordinary joy or as deep joy. An ordinary expe-
rience of joy is something like a positive emotional response to an event or state of affairs—a
response which, however, remains confined to the present and does not impinge on how
we relate to ourselves and the world we experience in a more encompassing way. Precisely
this bigger impact in terms of meaningfulness of the event or state of affairs about which
we rejoice is characteristic of the experience of deep joy, on which I will concentrate in the
following.
Admittedly, the metaphorical reference to depth may sound somehow vague and is cer-
tainly difficult to define (Foot 2010, 86f.). Such a difficulty can be interpreted as mysteri-
ousness: the depth of an emotional experience, and particularly the depth of rejoicing, is
something we would not be able to grasp in rational terms. In the history of the concept of
joy, such a view on the ineffability of the depth of joy is widely spread, particularly in reli-
gious discourses, and can similarly be found in literary and poetic traditions (Potkay 2007,
esp. 17f., 30f.). Yet, the remark on the metaphorical character of the concept of deep joy, as
well as the reference to the tradition that emphasizes the ineffability of deep joy (or the inca-
pacity to capture and render the experience by means of rational inquiry), should not prevent
us from trying to shed some light on what is characteristic of this phenomenon. The touch of
mysteriousness, in other words, might certainly point to the limits of strictly philosophical
and rationalizing inquiries; but it should not be taken as a mystification of the experience
itself. In order to address some of the aspects that characterize deep joy, let us consider one
passage from Nozick’s discussion at length:

Recall those particular moments when you thought and felt, blissfully, that there was
nothing else you wanted, your life was good then. Perhaps this occurred while walking
alone in nature, or being with someone you loved. What marks these times is their
completeness. There is something you have that you want, and no other wants come
crowding in; there is nothing else that you think of wanting right then. I do not mean
that if someone came up to you right then with a magic lamp, you would be at a loss
to come up with a wish. But in the moments I am describing, these other desires—for
more money or another job or another chocolate bar—simply are not operating. They
are not felt, they are not lurking at the margins to enter. There is no additional thing
you want right then, nothing feels lacking, your satisfaction is complete. The feeling
that accompanies this is intense joy. These moments are wonderful, and they are rare.
(Nozick 2006, 108–109)

There are two aspects in this description that allow us to better characterize the experience
of deep joy. First, the difference between ordinary cases of rejoicing and deep joy does not
rely merely on the intensity of the feeling.4 Second, deep joy is not related to some specific
content, to something we already know to be valuable, or to something we assume to be
equally valuable for everyone. We can thus say that joy is not based on a previous and de-
tached evaluation of the object, but rather that the evaluation of the object depends on the
fact that it generates a response of deep joy for us in the present situation. Watching a sunrise,

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for instance, may produce for someone an experience of deep joy because it yields a sense
of completeness and participation in what this particular person is doing or experiencing. Yet,
deep joy is not simply independent from the qualities of the object, nor shall it be understood
internalistically. Instead, depth relies on some kind of attunement between oneself and what
one experiences. As Pugmire (2005, 30f.) observes, emotional depth in general depends on
both content and personal susceptibility, and it essentially reflects the embeddedness of the
emotion in one’s own larger concerns, or in what matters for a person’s life. These rather
general remarks should now be further explicated in relation to the temporality of deep joy
and its impact on how we experience ourselves in the situation.
With respect to temporality, we can observe that deep joy is characterized by both a
sense of the uniqueness of the episode and by a sense of abidingness, which somehow lets
the feeling irradiate into the past and the future.5 Deep joy is related to moments of fullness
and expresses a feeling of self-sufficient unity with what one is experiencing.6 The feeling
of completeness, of unification with what one experiences, and of integration of the present
moment within one’s own life are certainly among the most characterizing aspects of joy.
As Nozick’s emphasizes, they seem to blend all further desires and expectations, and they
entail some sort of appeasement and tranquility, so that we can somehow experience that
present moment as eternal. Although one might interpret this in terms of a liberation from
the passions—something that we can find in different terms in the understanding of both
joy and happiness in the Stoic and the Epicurean tradition (McMahon 2006, 50f.)—what
Nozick emphasizes is rather that there is some inevitable contingency in these moments,
which is also part of their inner value. Also, these moments are not only contingent, they
are also extremely rare, fragile, and transient: they leave in their wake the nostalgic wish to
re-live them.
Such fugacity of joyful experiences is probably what justifies the traditional conception of
an eschatology of eternal joy. As Potkay shows, eschatological descriptions about the joyful
sense of unity and about the empowerment that results from this sense of unity can be found
in religious and literary texts (Potkay 2007, 31f., 50f.). They refer to an eternal and fully
lived-through presence as something we long for, and as operating in terms of a salvation to
be reached in another world, also thanks to the mediation of worldly joy. Yet, the experience
of joy one longs for is that of an anticipated deep joy, mostly coinciding with the moment in
which the oneness with God and the universe or with the beloved one is reached. Joy is still
considered to be fully realized only in the moment of full presence and realization; yet, the
perspective from which such joy is experienced always implies some divergence, or perhaps
even the hope for an enduring oneness that is always there to come. And this, paraphrasing
Spinoza, would actually be a complex affect in which moments of joy also contain moments
of sadness.
The previous remarks also impinge on the relation between joy and self-realization. The
self-realization that occurs in joy is related to a sense of achievement, which also entails a
sense of unity and sharing. Joy is something that accompanies the process of achievement
through and through. Authors like Spinoza (1985), Bergson (1929), Nietzsche (1987, 1974),
and Deleuze (1988) strongly emphasize this aspect of joy as an affect that is intrinsically
connected with the expression and the increasing of our power to act, as well as with cre-
ativity. Self-realization, in this sense, occurs in the expression of the activity itself. Joy ful-
fills us by expressing who we are, and this also has social and even political reverberations.
Commenting on Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze brings this to the fore by contrasting the
increment of the power to act (puissance d’agir), which is something that unites and promotes
self-realization, to power (pouvoir), which is instead based on separation and on maintaining

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those upon whom power is exercised in the state of ignorance, thus promoting sadness in-
stead of joy through the inhibition of expressiveness (Deleuze 1988, 17f.).7
These remarks should clarify what I previously called the centripetal character of joy as an
act. Rejoicing means affirming and such affirmation is not only relevant for the evaluation of
specific contents (which actually have their value precisely because they are the source of joy
for someone), but also because it says something about who we are, and in this sense, it can be
characterized as a form of self-realization. This kind of self-realization differs from what we
consider to be the self-realization occurring in happiness. Particularly, the self-realization in
moments of joy does not seem to have the same implications in terms of responsibility and ac-
countability or the same claim to truthfulness as the self-realization occurring in a happy life.

3. Happiness and the good life

The main differences between joy and happiness, both considered as emotional responses
to processes of accomplishment, can be reassessed on the basis of the following two factors.
First, joy accompanies the process through and through, whereas happiness seems to be more
strictly tied to the moment of achievement of the process. Second, joy is not only a direct
emotional response to an event that is embedded in our life-concerns but is also tightly
bound to the present moment, whereas happiness presupposes an evaluative stance con-
cerning one period of one’s life or one’s own life as a whole.8 This is also what underlies the
traditionally stronger relation between happiness and ethics/morality (Annas 1993)—mostly
based on the relation between happiness and the good life.9 Different from deep joy, happi-
ness is not an experience of completeness and lack of further desires; it rather derives from a
balanced evaluation of what one has or has achieved.
In his later ethics, and notably in his later manuscripts collected as Grenzprobleme der
Phänomenologie (cf. Husserl 2014, 297f., 379f., 502f.), Husserl also commits to this view
(cf. Drummond 2010; Peucker 2008, 2010).10 He understands happiness as closely related to
virtue ethics, in which self-satisfaction is combined with virtue and corresponds to the best
possible accomplishment of one’s life, as an ideal state of happiness. In his later approach to
ethics, Husserl contends that goodness in general, and the goodness of ethical principles in
particular, do not only refer to singular acts of will, but rather to the significance of these acts
for one’s own personal life, which is always embedded in the life of a community. Further-
more, he argues that happiness arises from a retrospective overview (Überschau) that should
in principle embrace one’s own life as a whole (e.g., Husserl 2014, 502f.). Accordingly, happi-
ness is an emotion that derives from an evaluative, judgmental, and reflective stance taken on
one’s own life as a whole. The ethical value of a happy life, as well as its reflective character,
become evident if one considers how Husserl ‘tests’ happiness in relation to regret (Reue): a
happy life is a life I can appraise and affirm without regret. What Husserl has in mind here
is a “radical and universal regret” (Husserl 2014, 492) concerning the whole of one’s life, or
those important choices and volitions that impinge on one’s life as a whole.
This has implications concerning the temporality of happiness. On the one hand, as we
have seen, happiness arises at the end of a process, and therefore, it seems to rule out the
moments of uncertainty that accompany an unfolding activity. On the other hand, happiness
implies a certain tension between the three temporal dimensions of experience. Although
not episodically tied to the present moment, happiness is nonetheless a present experience.
Yet, this is the presence of an instant (Augenblick), which has its meaningfulness only in re-
lation to the openness toward the past and the future (cf. Bollnow 2009, 123 f.). Moreover,
while the fullness and completeness of joyful experiences is strictly tied to a present moment

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that we may somehow wish to be eternal just as it is, the experience of happiness has some
overarching temporal implications.
Yet, as Nozick (2006, 99f.) observes, it would be wrong to consider happiness as exclu-
sively bound to the temporality of the present. This has to do with his critique to a merely
quantitative understanding of a happy life: intuitively, we would not wish ourselves or some-
one we care about to experience a short period of happiness to be followed by misery and
unhappiness. Assuming that happiness can be experienced without hope for future happiness
seems to entail something like an experienced contradiction.11 This also shows that happiness
does not have the same (aspiration at) fullness as joy: in the experience of deep and fully ac-
tualized joy there is—or there would/will be, if we follow the eschatological tradition—no
space for hope and further desires.
Thus, there is an interplay between different temporal dimensions in happiness. The pres-
ence of a happy moment is the presence of a balanced reflection about what one has and what
one can still wish. It entails a self-evaluative reference to the past and the still open future
possibilities. Moreover, it is the presence of a reflection on how what one has or has done is
related to what is good and valuable, whereby both are not related to the experience of com-
pleteness, but rather to the feeling that one has made the right choices, even if this implies
that one had to give up others, including moments of deep joy. Also, the openness to the
future implied in happiness is not intended in eschatological terms as a salvific unification,
but rather as something we are and can be (ethically) responsible of.
This latter remark brings us to the relation between happiness and self-realization, which
differs from self-realization occurring in joy. Regarding this, Foot (2010, 81f.) emphasizes
that happiness even more than joy presupposes the concept of goodness, so that one cannot
be authentically happy and desire or choose the evil, and this already indicates that there
is some form of responsibility for one’s own happiness, which extends beyond one’s own
individual experience.
The idea that happiness is connected to the assumption of responsibility for one’s own
present and future within social experience can also be interpreted in performative and
social terms of a reciprocal promise between individuals and the society in which they are
embedded. With respect to this, the implications of happiness in terms of commitment and
responsibility even more explicitly come to the fore. Ahmed (2010) develops a reading of
happiness in terms of promise, the uptake of which seems to imply a double-bind situation.
On the one hand, we find ourselves in a social and cultural environment that promises us
happiness, in terms of ethical self-realization, i.e., in terms of an appropriation of one’s own
life as a good life. On the other hand, however, this very promise implicitly made to the
modern individual implies not only the conformity to what one believes to be good, but
more importantly to what is ethically, socially, intersubjectively recognized as good. And
this eventually implies that one is also called to take responsibility for one’s own happiness,
and for what makes him/her happy. For Ahmed, the fact that criteria for happiness are often
criteria of social acceptability and recognition results in the risk of some explicitly or implic-
itly imposed assimilation to models or discursive practices. These often require individuals
to be happy, and to be happy in a certain way, i.e., precisely according to those standards of
acceptability that are often confused with social and ethical goodness.
From this social embedment of the evaluation of one’s life as a happy life, two other aspects
follow, which I wish to mention in conclusion. First, being strictly bound to the responsi-
bility of self-realization as self-conscious determination, happiness makes an even stronger
claim concerning the reality of its object than joy. As we have seen above, different from
aesthetic enjoyment, joy also entails the position of real existence of its object. We would not

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properly rejoice about a merely imagined experience of unification, if our actual experience
is in fact that of a deep separation or inner laceration. Yet, this does not exclude that we can
experience genuine joy only about what we believe to be the case, and that we might not be
interested in checking whether such an experience of joyful unification is real or deceptive
(or that we may even more or less consciously avoid to check whether our joy was fully justi-
fied in terms of a reality-check or not). In other words, precisely because joy is not based on
a detached self-evaluative stance, there seem to be no reasons to question the authenticity or
genuineness of joy. This does not hold for happiness, as Nozick (2006, 110f.) aptly illustrates
with his imaginary example of a happiness machine. In such a machine, we would live an
entire happy life, without, however, ever being able to check whether our happiness passes
the test of Nozick’s own reformulation of the “reality principle”, i.e., without being able to
say whether our happiness is actually “fitting”.
Second, an etymological characteristic of the concept of happiness, which should not be
overlooked if one believes that the history of concepts is also revelatory for their meaning,
is often underestimated, if not explicitly bracketed, in current understandings of happiness
emphasizing the moment of responsibility. This etymological characteristic, which can be
found in several languages, binds happiness to contingency and the arbitrariness of luck. For
instance, in English, this is expressed by the root ‘hap’ in happiness, which signifies ‘luck’,
‘fortune’, ‘chance’. In ancient Greek, ‘eudaimonia’ signifies ‘good-spiritedness’ and, while
certainly remaining secondary if confronted with what is attributed to rational deliberation
and evaluation in the achievement of happiness, the reference to the contingent aspects that
may facilitate or obstacle such achievement is present in Aristotle’s philosophy of happiness.12
In German, the relation is even more salient since ‘Glück’ ordinarily means both ‘happiness’
and ‘fortune’ or ‘luck’ (McMahon 2006, 10f.). Authors believing that ethical responsibility
and commitment to make of one’s own life happy should ideally rule out the contingency or
outer conditions, or that one should focus on the ideality of what is good—isolating it from
contingency—either tend to overlook or to explicitly neglect the ‘hap’ of happiness, even
claiming that “one of the basic tasks of the phenomenology of happiness is to take as much
of the hap out of happiness as possible” (Heffernan 2014, 251). Authors who are keen not to
oppose contingency in phenomenological descriptions, instead, would precisely make the
‘hap’ of happiness stronger, and rather insist on the need to appropriate this ‘hap’, to make
it a virtue, rather than a hindrance, to the understanding of happiness. Ahmed’s (2010) dis-
cussion of cases of resistance to the mere acceptance of established and socially normalized
models of happiness precisely goes in this direction.

4. Concluding remarks
Despite the overlapping in the ordinary and, occasionally, also in the philosophical use of the
concepts of joy and happiness, in this chapter, I have shown that they not only have assumed
a different meaning throughout the (Western) history of ideas, but also that there are various
reasons for this distinction that can be phenomenologically investigated.
The differences between joy and happiness are, in particular, tied to their respective tem-
porality, to their relation to different forms of self-realization and accomplishment, and to
a different ethical and social relevance. A task still to be accomplished is to clarify whether
there are, besides the distinctions, also some necessary relations between the two. What we
can certainly say on the basis of our discussion, is that happiness is neither reducible nor ex-
clusively dependent on the joyful experiences one has had throughout one’s life. Even a life
that has been confronted with several sad episodes and obstacles, to which one has however

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responded in a way that corresponds to what one takes to be a valuable accomplishment or

self-realization, could possibly be experienced as ‘happy’ in self-evaluation. Yet, it seems
plausible that at least in the moment when one realizes that one’s life was a happy life, even
if only under a certain description, one should also experience deep joy, as a sense of unifi-
cation with what one is and as expression of a power to act.

Notes

References
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Annas, Julia (1993). The Morality of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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64(19), 607–614.
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Bernet, Rudolf (2006). Zur Phänomenologie von Trieb und Lust bei Husserl. In: D. Lohmar and
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——— (2013). Force—Pulsion—Désir. Une autre philosophie de la psychanalyse. Paris: Vrin.
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Stuttgart: Metzler.
Drummond, John J. (2010). Self-Responsibility and Eudaimonia. In: C. Ierna, H. Jacobs, and
F. Mattens (Eds.). Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl.
Dordrecht: Springer, 411–430.
Foot, Philippa (2010). Natural Goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geiger, Moritz (1913). Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses. Jahrbuch für Philosophie
und phänomenologische Forschung 1(2), 567–684.
Haybron, Dan (2011). Happiness. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/
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Heffernan, George (2014). The Phenomenon Happiness: Prolegomena to a Phenomenological De-
scription. The Humanistic Psychologist 42(3), 249–267.
Husserl, Edmund (2014). Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte,
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——— (forthcoming). Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Ed. by Ullrich Melle and Thomas Vongehr.
Dordrecht. Springer.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1979). Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Transl. by A. Lingis. Den Haag:
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McMahon, Darrin M. (2006). Happiness. A History. New York: Grove Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974). The Gay Science. Transl. by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.
——— (1987). The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Transl. by W. Kaufmann. New York:
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Nozick, Robert (2006). The Examined Life. Philosophical Meditations. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Peucker, Henning (2008). From Logic to the Person: An Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Ethics.
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——— (2010). Aristotelische Elemente in der Ethik von Edmund Husserl. Philosophisches Jahrbuch 117,
54–68.
Potkay, Adam (2007). The Story of Joy. From the Bible to Late Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Pugmire, David (2005). Sound Sentiments. Integrity in the Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spinoza, Baruch (1985). Ethics. Ed. and transl. by E. Curley. The Collected Works of Spinoza Vol. I.
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Strasser, Stephan (1956). Das Gemüt. Grundgedanken zu einer phänomenologischen Philosophie und Theorie
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http://taylorandfrancis.com
 PART 4

Other-directed and
collective emotions
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Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
 37
EMPATHY, SYMPATHY AND
COMPASSION
Thiemo Breyer

Introduction
In everyday language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “people often
confuse the words empathy and sympathy.” As is clarified promptly, “empathy means ‘the abil-
ity to understand and share the feelings of another’ (as in both authors have the skill to make
you feel empathy with their heroines), whereas sympathy means ‘feelings of pity and sorrow for
someone else’s misfortune’ (as in they had great sympathy for the flood victims).” In the case of
“compassion,” the usage is presented as rather straightforward. Compassion is understood as
“sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others: the victims should
be treated with compassion.” The formulation “should be treated” already implies an other-
directed awareness that is aimed at a helping behaviour—even if no action proper is taken,
compassion demands one to adopt a certain respectful attitude towards the suffering person.
These definitions demonstrate that the three terms pick out different aspects of intersub-
jective experience. Whereas empathy and sympathy seem to refer mainly to the experience
of the empathiser, compassion seems to be more geared towards the target. Having empathy,
according to the linguistic approach, means being able to cognitively make sense of another
subject’s psychological life, or to share an affective state with them. However, these seem
like entirely different capacities with different degrees of interpersonal involvement. Having
sympathy, on the other hand, moves the focus of attention towards the target, for whom we
feel pity, i.e., it is not so much a matter of what we understand or what we feel; rather, it is
more about being concerned for the other. Having compassion goes even further in the di-
rection of the other, since we not only witness somebody’s suffering and feel concerned but
also wish to do something about it.
Interestingly, to conclude this introductory glimpse at the OED, unlike “empathy” and
“compassion,” which are approximated swiftly with singular definitions, the lexeme “sym-
pathy” displays many facets. Its meanings range from having sympathies as an “agreement with
or approval of an opinion or aim,” to one’s sympathies as a “formal expression of pity or sorrow
for someone else’s misfortune,” to common feeling as a special kind of “understanding between
people,” and to being in sympathy as “relating harmoniously to something else.” The latter
two connotations are especially revealing because they point to the deep semantic and phil-
osophical history of the concept, namely to the anthropologically founded fellow-feeling,

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postulated by thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith in the 18th century, and further
to the notion of a cosmological harmony in ancient natural philosophy. In the following, I
will briefly sketch the historical roots of each key concept and then describe how they have
been elaborated in the phenomenological tradition.

Empathy
Empathy is clearly the youngest of our three concepts (for a philosophical history, cf. Pinotti
2011). Even though the word, “empathy,” is rooted in ancient Greek, was not really used
as term in philosophy at that time. Composed of the prefix em- (which can have the spatial
meaning “(with)in,” the temporal meaning “during,” and the figurative meaning “(together)
with” and the root path- (as in the noun pathos, meaning “suffering” or “passion”), empathy
denotes a pathos that is experienced with another. (Side note: in modern Greek, empatheia
has curiously taken a very different meaning, namely spite.)
To better understand what such an intersubjective pathos might mean, it is helpful to
elucidate the different meanings of “pathos” in Greek. As Bernhard Waldenfels (2006, 3)
explains, pathos means first of all an experience (in the sense of the German Widerfahrnis),
something that happens to us—not without our doing, but going beyond it. Second, pathos
means something adversarial, which is connected with suffering or enduring, but which also
allows for a certain kind of learning through it (pathei mathos). Third, pathos is a passion that
pulls us out of the ordinary and makes us transcend what we are commonly immersed in.
These semantic dimensions are interpreted by Waldenfels in such a way that they bring out
the aspect of being challenged by experience and afforded certain options to react that is key
to his responsive phenomenology (cf., e.g., Waldenfels 1994). Pathos, in this sense, is something
that always precedes my subjective intentions and that calls for my response. Empathy would
then be something that I experience as a response to another, whose appearance, expressions,
and actions catch my attention or impose themselves upon me. It is something that has a
unique intersubjective quality insofar as the other is the source and reference point of my
experience, but also in a second sense that it can be a shared suffering the other and I endure
together, and in a third sense, that the other provokes a passionate reaction in me.
After this short interpretation of the important element of pathos, which is of course also
relevant for the second key concept, “sympathy,” let us return to the history of the notion
of “empathy.” As mentioned before, it is of recent origin: for academic purposes, it was in-
troduced as a technical term only at the beginning of the 20th century. Edward Titchener
(1909) used it as a translation of the German Einfühlung (literally meaning “feeling into”),
which had been common in aesthetics (Vischer 1872) and hermeneutics (Dilthey 1910). In
this tradition, empathy was not conceived as an intersubjective process unfolding in the
concrete interaction between persons, but as a mode of relating to artefacts or expressive
displays—for example inspecting a work of art or interpreting a historical source in order to
grasp their meaning. In psychology, especially in the work of Theodor Lipps (1907), empathy
was determined as the primary source of understanding other minds, which functions on
the basis of motorically co-performing a movement of expression observed in another. This
simultaneous imitation leads to a recollection of one’s own prior emotions that are associated
with the perceived expression. The emotion thus experienced is then attributed projectively
to the other as their supposed internal state. This mechanism is, however, not restricted to
the observation of other people, but extends to objects, for example, geometrical figures
with anthropomorphic qualities.

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In early phenomenology, contemporary theories of empathy were much discussed and crit-
icised. Being generally interested in the “experience of the minded life of others” (Zahavi and
Overgaard 2011, 5)—the most general definition of empathy as intersubjective awareness—
phenomenologists tried to work out the fundamental structures of empathy and to differentiate
various forms of alterity. As the mind expresses itself in many ways, the experience of empathy
also takes many forms—from the bodily, to the affective-emotional, to the cognitive dimen-
sion. In the following, I briefly sketch some ideas by classic thinkers in the phenomenological
tradition (for an overview, cf. also Jardine and Szanto 2017), to then point to some ongoing de-
bates about social cognition and the interventions made by current phenomenological authors.
Edmund Husserl (1990) and his pupil Edith Stein (1989) agree with Lipps’s account by
emphasizing that empathy is an experience sui generis, which allows direct access to another
person’s subjectivity. However, they disagree that this access is accomplished by perceptive,
mnemonic, and projective sub-processes taken together. They rather believe that empathy is a
sui generis mode of intentional directedness. Given as the noematic correlate of the empathic
noesis, the other appears as a minded being with all kinds of expressive qualities. As an experi-
ence and understanding of the other mind (Fremderfahrung, Fremdverstehen), empathy consists in
expression-perception (Ausdruckswahrnehmung). When seeing another person’s bodily display
of anger or sadness, for instance, one does not need to first remember how one has experi-
enced those emotions, but grasps their meaning in the expression itself. The phenomenological
criticism rests on the observation that one’s own feeling in the face of another’s expression
is not usually the same feeling the other has. For example, one perceives the other as angry,
but this does not in itself make one angry, since that would amount to emotional contagion,
which is not considered by Husserl and Stein as a form of empathy. Furthermore, one needs
to understand the other’s emotion at least in type before one can recall from memory how it
felt like for oneself to have such an emotion. This goes against Lipps’s claim that the recourse
to one’s own previous emotional experiences allows the access to the other’s emotions in the
first place. What is generally opposed by phenomenologists at this point is the dualism of mind
and body, which underlies not only much of traditional Western ontology and epistemology,
but also Lipps’s psychological approach. According to Max Scheler (1923), as will be discussed
below under the rubric of sympathy, bodily expressions are the locus where understanding of
other minds in the form of direct social perception finds its anchor. Expressions are neutral to
the differentiation between physical outer appearance and psychological inner experience. In
them, the emotions find their proper articulation and display.
Not only in the perception of expressions does the body play a central role for a phenom-
enological understanding of empathy but also in interbodily encounter. According to the ap-
proach taken by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, empathy is possible on the basis of a transcendental
structure of embodied subjectivity, namely the double-aspectivity of body-as-subject (Leib, to
use the original German term) and body-as-object (Körper). This ambivalence that is inherent
in bodily self-experience also allows for an immediate grasp of another’s body, which operates
“neither [by] comparison, nor analogy, nor projection or ‘introjection’” (Merleau-Ponty 1964,
168). Rather, the structure of “compresence” of both aspects within oneself and of the other
and the self in intersubjective space grants an understanding of the other as co-constituting
what empathy can then refer to in various ways. As Merleau-Ponty explains: “The reason why
I have evidence of the other man’s being-there when I shake his hand is that his hand is substi-
tuted for my left hand, and my body annexes the body of another person in that ‘sort of reflec-
tion’ it is paradoxically the seat of. My two hands ‘coexist’ or are ‘compresent’ because they are
one single body’s hands. The other person appears through an extension of that compresence;
he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality” (ibid.).

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In contemporary phenomenology, the concept of empathy is also widely discussed and used
in the context of embodied (Gallagher 2005) and social cognition research (Zahavi 2014),
psychopathology (Henriksen 2018), social ontology and collective intentionality (Salice and
Taipale 2015; Szanto 2015; Szanto and Moran 2015; Szanto and Krueger 2019), virtuality
(Fuchs 2014), and aesthetics (Hagener and Vendrell Ferran 2017), as well as in interdisciplin-
ary cooperation with psychology and anthropology (Breyer 2015).
Concerning a broader theory of intersubjective experience, phenomenological approaches
intervene in mainstream definitions of empathy in elucidating ways as can be exemplified
by the confrontation with theory theory and simulation theory approaches to social cognition.
Theory theory claims that our understanding of other minds is based on knowledge that
has the form of a theory and on computational mechanisms that run as algorithms. Nativistic
varieties postulate evolutionarily developed modules in the brain, which are selected for
processing socially relevant information (Baron-Cohen 1995; Carruthers 1996). Acquisitive
theories, on the other hand, propose that the theory of mind according to which individuals
make sense of other’s actions and psychological states results from continuous learning and
experimentation (Gopnik 1993; Wellman et al. 2001). Understanding the other empathi-
cally, then, means that either neural algorithms run subconsciously and produce an attribut-
able result, or that folk psychological knowledge and general intuitive rules are consciously
applied to a situation. Simulation theory, on the other hand, takes empathy to be a simulation
process that happens in one’s mind when observing another person. Neuroscientific approaches
commonly refer to the activity of mirror neurons, which are supposed to enable empathy.
Research has revealed that similar activity patterns in this part of the brain occur when a sub-
ject performs a specific movement and when it observes another subject do the same (Gallese
and Goldman 1998; Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008). This subpersonal mimetic mechanism
is believed to be the root of empathy. Other accounts understand simulation as the conscious
mental activity of imaginative perspective-taking. Empathy, according to this view, is the
process by which somebody tries to put herself in the position of somebody else to figure out
what they are experiencing (Goldman 2006; Heal 1998).
Phenomenological accounts criticise these approaches for taking the dualism of self and
other for granted and for viewing empathy as a process that goes on in the detached ob-
server’s mind alone, thereby radicalising the third-person perspective. Contrary to this,
they insist on the interactional negotiation (Gallagher 2001) of the contents of the em-
pathic relation and the “participatory sense-making” (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007) in
an empathiser-target-situation, as well as the intertwinement of self and other in embodied
intersubjectivity. The constitutive role of the body for empathy can be emphasised in two
ways (see above). First, the body is regarded as the primary medium of our contact with the
world and with others; therefore, empathy is taken to unfold as an interactive process in the
sphere of intercorporeality (Fuchs 2013; Tanaka 2015). Second, the body also displays all kinds
of expressions (mimic and gestural), which provide information about the experience of the
expressing subject. Empathic understanding, then, consists primarily in the perceptual grasp
of another’s bodily expression (Gallagher 2008), an idea taken from early phenomenology
and developed further under the rubric of “direct social perception” (Zahavi 2011).

Sympathy
Sympathy (from Greek sym-, meaning “(together) with,” and again path-) can literally mean
the same as empathy, namely experiencing a pathos with another (for philosophical differenti-
ations cf. Chismar 1988 and Darwall 1998). If there is a semantic difference, it is perhaps that

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the prefix sym- accentuates the togetherness even stronger than the prefix em-. The concept
of sympathy has been widely used in the philosophical tradition since antiquity in various
domains, from natural philosophy and cosmology to moral philosophy and ethics. In ancient
philosophy, sympathy served as an explanatory concept for the most diverse phenomena,
which are based on the observation that the same thing happens to two entities in an overar-
ching whole without any visible direct influence. What this connection in each case is based
on was interpreted differently, for example physically by Aristotle, atomistic by Epicurus,
cosmologically by the Stoics or by a world-soul as by the Neoplatonists.
In Plato and Aristotle, sympathy is construed as a physiological process, exemplified by
the bodily resonance that is experienced when yawning because somebody else is yawning
(Plato, Critias (1989)) or shuddering when hearing an unpleasant sound (Aristotle, Problems
(2011)). Sympathy in this understanding always has an involuntary or compulsive element.
There is a transfer of energy that is physically mediated and that contagiously overwhelms
one. The Stoics understood sympathy as a principle that permeated and regulated the entire
universe. It was not primarily a process of interpersonal encounter and communication, but
a characteristic of the world. Nevertheless, there were also reflections that led from cosmic
sympathy to interpersonal sympathy as a sense of community, not unlike how the concept is
used in modern times. In particular, the postulate of a feeling of community through ratio-
nality stands out. When their anthropologically founded rationality is perfected to a certain
degree, a person will experience their belonging to a humanity of likewise rational beings,
and this is called sympathy.
Though the word, sympathy, is not originally used for interpersonal affection but primar-
ily describes the “coaffectibility” (Schliesser 2015, 9) of different entities—physical, biologi-
cal, or psychological—it is increasingly applied to social, moral, and socio-political relations
from the 16th century onwards. It then denotes the attraction between people or the corre-
spondence of their feelings. In the 18th century, the term sympathy, and especially the adjec-
tive sympathetic, was progressively used in literature in which it meant having a direct affinity
for something or an affection for someone, i.e., a resonance that could stand for friendship
and human love. In philosophy, this meaning then became relevant in moral sense philos-
ophy in England, which is based on the assumption that morality is rooted in natural hu-
man tendencies, for example, virtues stemming from an inherent altruism (e.g., Shaftesbury,
Characteristics (2001); Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (2006)). Two prominent posi-
tions developing these ideas shall be briefly mentioned since they elaborate important motifs
that inform the later debates on sympathy and empathy up to the present: David Hume and
Adam Smith.
For Hume, in his Treatise on Human Nature (2007), sympathy means the social practice
of exchanging feelings and opinions on the basis of a universal principle of human nature.
The mechanism behind it is based on the similarity and contiguity between self and other.
When one sees the expressions of another, one tries to infer their causes and realises a certain
affection or passion. This will then activate an idea of that passion in one’s own mind. Ev-
erybody has a vivid impression of their own feelings and other psychological states. Through
sympathy, the idea of another person’s affections is associated with the impressions of one’s
own affections, so that one can eventually experience the same passion as the other.
For Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (2002), the basic process by which sympathy
works is not inference and association, but imaginatively putting oneself into the other’s
position to figure out what it would be like for oneself to be in that situation. This can result
in the matching of one’s own psychological state with that of the other, but there are also
limitations. For instance, it is difficult to imagine what it is like to experience something the

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other is going through if one has never made an experience of the same kind. Today, this
would usually be called perspective-taking or simulation (see above).
What Hume and Smith in their different approaches have in mind when they speak of
sympathy, namely sharing or understanding what another experiences and feels, is usually
called empathy today. In phenomenology, it is Max Scheler—in his groundbreaking work
Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (“Nature and Forms of Sympathy”) from 1923—who elab-
orates the various forms of intersubjective affectivity most extensively under the label of
sympathy (see also Chapter 4 and Chapter 49 in this volume). Also for his approach, it is
true that most people today would subsume some of the phenomena he discusses in terms
of sympathy under the concept of empathy. It should be noted, however, that Scheler uses
the term feeling-after (Nachfühlen) instead of empathy (Einfühlung), because he opposes ba-
sic assumptions of the theories of Einfühlung of his time. The most fundamental critique
concerns the idea that to share emotions and understand other minds, one has to “feel
oneself into” the other. This would imply that what is to be grasped empathically (the psy-
chological experiences of the other) is not directly accessible and that the attempt to access
it amounts to an active conscious procedure. For Scheler, this is a misconception. He em-
phasises that feelings are directly perceivable and understandable in the embodied expres-
sions of a subject. Moreover, what the other is experiencing is often co-experienced by us
involuntarily, as a passive co-affection, not as an imaginative or otherwise cognitive effort to
understand the other. Among the many ways intersubjective affectivity manifests itself in ex-
perience, the following basic types of sympathy should be distinguished: (1) feeling-together
(Mit-einander-fühlen), (2) feeling-after (Nachfühlen), (3) feeling-with (Mitgefühl), emotional
contagion (Gefühlsansteckung), and (5) feeling-one or emotional unification (Einsfühlung).
(1) The first form consists in feeling the same feeling as another subject by way of par-
ticipating in it. The famous case Scheler evokes is that of two parents mourning over their
deceased child. Each of them has their individual feelings of pain and sadness, but when
standing next to the dead body of the child, they experience the suffering together as one
and the same feeling. In this case, the sadness of the mother is not objectified in the con-
sciousness of the father and vice versa. Rather, they co-subjectively experience the same.
(2) Feeling-after is a mode of intentional relatedness to the other by which an understanding
of their feelings emerges that does not involve sharing the same feeling. One retains a cer-
tain emotional distance and grasps what the other is experiencing without having analogous
affective qualities in one’s own experience to the same extent as in feeling-together. Scheler
nonetheless points out that the understanding of the other through feeling-after is not purely
cognitive and affectively neutral. It is best understood as an understanding-by-feeling, in
which we realise the type of the other’s feeling without it being transferred and made into
a concrete vivid feeling of our own. It is this form of sympathy that today would regularly
be conceptualised as empathy. (3) In feeling-with, on the other hand, one develops the same
feeling in oneself on the basis of a previous feeling-after. One can share in the other’s joy
in co-joy (Mitfreude) or in their suffering in co-suffering (Mitleid) with the corresponding
affective characteristics. Hereby, one not only understands what the other is going through
but also feels with them and potentially for them (as in the case of compassion or pity dis-
cussed below). (4) Emotional contagion is different from feeling-with because one is not
intentionally directed towards the other but rather overtakes an emotion passively and in-
voluntarily from them up to the point where one seems to loose oneself in the emotion of
the other. Essentially, through contagion one is compelled to perform the same expressive
movement as the other. It can happen in a dyadic form, as for instance when one feels the
urge to giggle standing next to somebody who is giggling, but also in more collective forms,

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as when entering a party and catching the joyful atmosphere in the room (for a contemporary
social-psychological account, see Hatfield et al. 1993). (5) Feeling-one can be conceived as
a limit case of contagion because here the ego perspective gets lost, and the subject merges
with the other. For this mode of sympathy, Scheler gives a number of examples: the iden-
tification of a child with a toy or figure; the identification of spiritual practitioners with a
totem animal in certain cultures, or with gods in ancient mystical traditions; the adoption
of the will and contents of consciousness of the hypnotist when undergoing hypnosis; the
reciprocal merging of partners during sexual intercourse; the mass-dynamic phenomenon of
identification with a charismatic leader and with the other members of the collective; or the
love of a mother for her child, where the impulses and drives of the child are experienced by
the mother as if they were her own.

Compassion
Compassion (from Latin compassio) is a literal translation of Greek sympatheia, which makes
it difficult on a linguistic level to differentiate between compassion and sympathy; thus, we
have to look for the historical developments of their respective usages as well as the phil-
osophical meanings that have been bestowed upon them. Throughout history, there have
been diverging opinions not so much on the basic psychological process of compassion, but
concerning the ethical and moral value of compassion as an instinct, drive, motivation, feel-
ing, or attitude. Plato and the Stoics commonly regarded compassion as a human tendency
working against the application of rational principles, hindering appropriate moral evalua-
tions and the capacity to adequately help the other.
In the Christian tradition, compassion is then considered as a positive virtue. Apart from
the term compassio, there are also the terms misericordia and commiseratio, expressing aspects
of sympathy with varying connotations (Fischl 2017). It is impossible to trace the semantic
history of these concepts here, yet it suffices to allude to a general tendency towards altru-
istic action in the context of theology. Here, misericordia was used as a translation of eleos,
which in Greek means compassion in the sense of pity, as famously defined by Aristotle:
“a feeling of pain that arises on the occasion of any evil, or suffering, manifest, evident
(apparent, to the eye or ear), deadly or (…) painful, when unmerited; and also of such a
kind as we may expect to happen either to ourselves or to those near and dear to us, and
that when it seems to be near at hand” (Aristotle 2009, 2.8.2). Misericordia is then spelled
out in different ways, but an important articulation is given by Augustine, who defines it
as “a kind of compassion in our hearts for the misery of others which compels us to help
them if we can” (Augustine 2018, 9.5). The shift from Aristotle’s conception consists in the
idea that the emotional process of misericordia as a kind of compassion goes beyond eleos
and is not so much about relating the perceived suffering to oneself, but about feeling the
urge to help the other and eventually doing it. This of course is at the heart of the Christian
virtue of charity.
The positive value of compassion is also later embraced by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and moral sense philosophers. For Rousseau, it is not practical reason but com-
passion as a natural feeling before any reflection that is considered to be a moral principle.
Compassion is the revulsion to see one’s kind suffer, which allows one to identify with
a suffering person and thereby grasp the fundamental connectedness of humankind, in-
cluding the anthropologically founded pains and sorrows of life. For Hume and Smith,
compassion is a universal feeling that is explained by sympathy (see above). According to
Smith, it is “the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it,

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or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner,” a “fellow-feeling with the sorrow of
others” (Smith 2002, 4ff.).
Among the more critical voices concerning the ethical impact of compassion is Immanuel
Kant, who characterises it as a weak and blind affect. Therefore, “it must never rule, but must
be subordinated to the capacity and reasonable desire to do good” (Kant 2011, 103). However,
Kant also acknowledges that compassion can have a subsidiary motivating force precisely to
do what is good. Taking this into account, he demands that it be an “indirect duty to culti-
vate the compassionate natural (…) feelings in us” (Kant 1991, 251) because they help realise
the moral principles that reason alone perhaps could not apply. Schopenhauer in his ethics
of compassion then famously radicalised the idea of an anthropological foundation of a feel-
ing of humanity by claiming that compassion alone is the only true source of moral action,
which again provoked efficacious criticism by thinkers such as Nietzsche (1986). Similarly,
Arendt (1963) voiced staunched criticism of compassion’s role for genuine political action
(see Chapter 15 in this volume). But here is not the place to review the ramified history of
moral philosophy; let us thus turn to phenomenology.
In phenomenology, the interest is first and foremost not in evaluating the moral signifi-
cance of compassion, but in descriptively capturing it and comparing it with other types of
affective states and emotional acts. In his lectures on ethics, Husserl briefly treats compassion
when discussing Hume’s moral philosophy. Compassion, for Husserl, “does not mean suf-
fering from the same pain as another, but to feel sorry for him, pitying him, suffering from
the fact that he is suffering and because he is suffering” (Husserl 2012, 194, own translation).
Concerning the affective quality, such suffering on the part of the compassionate subject is
“genuine suffering,” as Husserl (1973b, 188) emphasises. Concerning the intentional object
of an act of compassion, Husserl makes clear that one is only directed to the cause of the
other’s suffering in a mediate way. The primary object of compassion is the other and the fact
that they are suffering. In other places, Husserl identifies compassion as a genuinely intersub-
jective act, in that we regard the other as an ego, and acknowledge their subjectivity, their
embodied being with all respective sensations and their having a world (the same world) as
oneself (Husserl 1973a, 92).
For Scheler, as we have seen, compassion as co-suffering (Mitleid) is a subtype of
feeling-with (Mitgefühl). Compassion in this sense is a suffering on the basis of the other’s
suffering, while it is clear to the compassionate subject that the original suffering is on the
side of the other, i.e., the feeling of co-suffering has its origin there, not in one’s own sub-
jectivity. In compassion, one experiences the other “as the other” (Scheler 1923, 40). The
other’s alterity is thematic in consciousness, which excludes any form of identification or
contagion. The intentional reference point of compassion is the other as a personal subject
with their unique individual pain and sorrow. In emphasising the heteropathic element of
compassion, Scheler criticises the theories of French Enlightenment thinkers who would
attest an egoistic tendency to compassion, as they would suppose that it operates as a mode of
self-protection on the basis of an analogical comparison of the sufferer with oneself, aiming
at identifying and avoiding potential harm. In contrast, authentic compassion, according to
Scheler, acknowledges the other’s suffering as their suffering. In the context of the question
regarding the egoistic and altruistic tendencies of intersubjective emotions, Scheler also dis-
cusses the possibility of “inauthentic compassion” (Scheler 1923, 45), which arises when one
feels distressed by witnessing the suffering of another and as a consequence helps them in
order to alleviate one’s own discomfort. This feeling is affected by the feeling of the other
but is ultimately self-directed and egoistic.

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 Empathy, sympathy and compassion

In Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological approach to an asymmetrical ethics, which is

based on the idea of the primacy of the other who appears as a vulnerable being, suffering is
conceived as irreducible. Thus, a responsibility for the other arises from the impossibility of
looking away or attending to their suffering. This responsibility is manifest first and foremost
in compassion, i.e., the compassionate co-suffering in which one also experiences oneself as
an essentially vulnerable and exposed being and which constitutes the “nexus of human sub-
jectivity” and as such a “supreme ethical principle” (Levinas 1998, 94). For Levinas, suffering
is in principle endured as pure passivity. It is meaningless because it cannot be embedded in
a rational whole, and therefore it is essentially evil. As such, it can also never be justified—be
it as a mild form of suffering for a greater good or on the basis of utilitarian principles, or
universal ethical principles à la Kant. One recognises the ethical command coming from the
face of the other in suffering calls for a compassionate response in which the most funda-
mental responsibility for the other is rendered visible. Furthermore, according to Levinas, it
is only via suffering that one can build up a relationship with the other (Levinas 1987, 92).
In suffering as a limit case of consciousness, one experiences radical alterity—one is over-
whelmed by the merciless world and by violent others. Precisely because of this heterono-
mous experience one can attain access to the other’s subjectivity through witnessing their
suffering. Conversely, Levinas sees the justification of the suffering of others or its neglect as
the source of all cruelty and immorality (Edelglass 2006, 45). Compassion is the remedy in
that it not only acknowledges the other as being exposed to suffering, but also renders oneself
exposed and vulnerable to the other. In being a “suffering for the suffering (…) of someone
else” (Levinas 1998, 94), compassion is a genuinely ethical response, a mode of being-for-
the-other that goes beyond—or lies ontologically before—any understanding of compassion
as a psychological process or feeling.
Working in the French tradition of combining phenomenological and theological
thought (with key figures such as Paul Ricœur or Jean-Luc Nancy), Emmanuel Housset, in
his book L’intelligence de la pitié (2003) (“The Intelligence of Pity”), has recently developed a
wide-ranging account of compassion. In this investigation, he proposes that compassion is
the only place from which the other can be attended to, recognised as a moral person, and
understood in an ethically relevant sense. The author opposes views suspecting compassion
to be an irrational drive leading to blurred moral judgments and requiring the correction
through universal rational principles. In favouring compassion as a fundamental or existential
dimension of the human being, Housset emphasises the quality of a responsive opening-up
to the other, while letting them be, as well as the possibility of developing an intelligence for
love, which also comprises a duty to realise justice made possible by compassion.

Conclusion
As this chapter has shown, the terms “empathy,” “sympathy,” and “compassion” each have
their remarkable semantic and philosophical history—sometimes reaching far into the past
and into domains like theology and literature, sometimes signalling a specific discursive
constellation where philosophy and the sciences construe new guiding concepts. In the con-
text of a handbook on emotions, we should finally ask: Are all three concepts referring to
emotions proper? As there is great variability in definitions, one will easily find theories that
would clearly answer the question affirmatively. However, especially when it comes to em-
pathy, it is not so clear whether it is a purely emotional capacity, or even whether the main
component of the empathic process is emotional in nature. Phenomenologists have devoted

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a lot of descriptive work to capturing the essential structures of empathy. Being conceived
as a perception-like process of understanding the expressions of others, empathy does not
in and of itself imply a necessary emotional component. Also, the basic embodied kind of
empathy that ranges from intercorporeality to synchronisations and bodily resonances does
not yield specific emotional qualities, but rather precedes and enables them. Furthermore,
the imaginative engagement with the other in terms of putting oneself in their position and
approximating their experience need not occur while feeling in a similar way as the other.
In the case of sympathy, Scheler developed the most thorough account, wherein he subsumes
various forms of affective forms of intersubjective engagement under the label. However,
what Scheler refers to as “sympathy” would today frequently be construed as “empathy,”
namely as affective or emotional empathy, which itself would be regarded as one among
several forms of empathy (including bodily and cognitive empathy). Depending on the the-
oretical approach, emotional sharing is taken to be or not to be an integral part of empathy.
In the first case, empathy would amount to what Scheler calls Mitfühlen, in the second case, it
would come close to Nachfühlen. Compassion is quite unanimously regarded as an emotional
matter, combined with a motivational and volitional component that drives us to help the
other who is suffering and thereby causes our co-suffering. However, we should be aware
that there are also other conceptions of compassion that regard the emotional dimension of
the complex process leading from passive affection to active helping as morally problematic
and would rather cut it out altogether. Such proponents of a “rational compassion” (from the
Stoics to contemporary psychologists, cf. Bloom 2017) would reserve the term, compassion,
for a purely cognitive procedure of figuring out the best ways to support the ones in need
without any emotional involvement.
To conclude, one should note that in phenomenology, but also in philosophy in general,
in psychology, anthropology, and neighbouring disciplines, empathy has become the most
widely used term. It has become an umbrella term for phenomena that have tradition-
ally been designated with “sympathy” or “compassion.” These concepts are in themselves
complex and cover many different aspects of our conscious experience (cf. also Michael
2014). Therefore, when using the broader term, “empathy,” one needs to be particularly
clear about which aspect of intersubjectivity one is referring to. I have suggested elsewhere
(Breyer 2015) that a multidimensional theory of empathy—covering processes on the level
of embodiment, affectivity, perception, and cognition—can help locate the various inter-
subjective phenomena in a conceptual matrix and prevent hasty reductions of the term,
“empathy,” to narrow definitions, which isolate phenomena that are best understood in
their interconnectedness.

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 38
AGGRESSIVE EMOTIONS
From irritation to hatred, contempt
and indignation

Hilge Landweer

What do emotions like irritation, rage, envy, hatred and indignation have in common and
how do they differ? Are there connections between them? There seem to be some typical
overlaps, such as between hatred and contempt. How can these emotions be transformed into
one another, and what role does embodiment play in this? These are the questions that I will
address in the present chapter.1
At first glance, all of these emotions seem to be triggered by something that is rejected by
the subject of the emotions; from her point of view, it would have been better if the occasion
for the emotion had not existed in the first place. These emotions are often accompanied
by the desire, which is not necessarily realizable, that the circumstance that occasioned it
should disappear or even be destroyed. Thus, all these emotions have an aversive character:
when they are directed against things, then it is with an urge to destroy them; when they are
directed against persons, they can generally be characterized by the desire to see the other
person suffer harm, or they even involve the impulse to harm them. Therefore, I want to de-
scribe them as “emotions of aggression” or “aggressive emotions,” where “aggression” should
not be understood in the psychoanalytical sense of the theory of drives. What is “aggressive”
about these emotions is their bodily orientation: they are all directed “outwards” against
other persons or things on which they impinge like aggressive vectors.
I will argue that these aversive strivings often prevail despite social condemnation.
Typically, they do so by virtue of the fact that emotions like hatred are reinterpreted by their
subjects into seemingly more harmless emotions like contempt.

1. Basic concepts of my phenomenological analysis

In what follows, I make use of Hermann Schmitz’ phenomenological vocabulary (Schmitz
2019; Chapter 19 in this volume), which is only gradually gaining recognition in the debate
on emotions. A more common approach is to differentiate Husserl’s concept of the inten-
tional object in terms of more recent concepts in the theory of emotions such as target, focus
and formal object (Helm 2001). Schmitz’s phenomenological apparatus has the advantage of
offering a more precise analysis of the reinterpretations in the spectrum of the emotions of
aggression based on their bodily-felt aspects and spatiality.

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 Hilge Landweer

I describe as “corporeal,” “bodily-felt” or “relating to the felt body” (leiblich)—what can

be felt on or in the body from the first-person perspective (whether interoceptively or not)
without relying on exteroceptive senses such as sight or touch. The “body” (Körper), on the
other hand, is objectified and perceived from the third-person perspective, even when it is
viewed by the person herself.
“Contraction” and “expansion” are two fundamental categories for describing bodily-felt
sensation. To illustrate: When I am afraid, I experience a certain bodily-felt contraction,
as when someone says “I am choking with fear”; when I am happy, I may feel buoyant and
elated (think of the expression “walking on air”) or feel a sense of expansion, as when we say
“my heart is bursting with joy.”
The structure of contraction and expansion is not specific to emotions, but is a fundamental
feature of our bodily-felt experience. Our entire bodily-felt condition continually oscillates
between tendencies toward contraction and toward expansion. One could say that it exhibits
a dialogical structure: contraction “responds” to expansion and vice versa, whereby contrac-
tion and expansion remain closely interrelated (Schmitz 2019, 61–72).2 When inhaling, for
example, you first feel an expansion until a contraction begins that is released by exhaling; this
second expansion in turn reaches a limit, as it were, and thus contracts, thereby forcing you to
reverse direction in renewed expansion by inhaling. This is a spatial experience.
Emotions grip us at the bodily-felt (leiblich) level, that is, they intrude in the dynamics of
our felt bodies and change them. This is what I call “affectedness” (Betroffenheit), the con-
dition of being affected by an emotion, or “affective involvement.” Affectedness refers to
having an emotion. There are good reasons to distinguish between an emotion and being
affected by it, that is, between an emotion and actually experiencing it. Thus, we are quite
capable of perceiving an emotion merely in a distanced way without at the same time being
affected by it—for example, when we register the emotions of other people who are not
close to us without feeling with them. The same applies to observing the emotions of film
characters (see Chapter 29 in this volume) or noticing the atmospheres of landscapes, which
we can also perceive without necessarily being gripped by them at a corporeal-affective level
(see Chapter 23 in this volume).
That emotions can be perceived from a distance without one being gripped by them
indicates they possess a relative ontological independence. Like bodily-felt sensations, they
are situated phenomenologically in experiential space, which is different from the familiar
geometric space. In the space of emotions (Gefühlsraum), we can perceive directions such as
the downward pressure exerted by the weight of grief; these directions cannot be measured,
however, and their at times voluminous weight cannot be divided into dimensions. Thus,
emotions are not primarily states of consciousness, but spatial phenomena that are appropri-
ated in bodily-affective affectedness (see Landweer 2019).
Since emotions are spatial, they can be described more precisely in terms of the dis-
tinction between their “anchoring point” (Verankerungspunkt) and their “condensation area”
(Verdichtungsbereich). This only appears to correspond to the more standard distinction in
theories of emotions between “focus” (anchoring point) and “target” (condensation area).
The anchoring point can be understood as the location that triggers the emotion, while the
condensation area refers to those aspects of the situation in which the emotion manifests itself
vividly (Schmitz 1990, 301). This distinction enables a better understanding of the transi-
tions and overlaps between supposedly distinct emotions in space; in all factual emotions,
mixtures of different emotional states are the norm rather than the exception. How, then,
can the individual emotions be delimited from each other?

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We can offer at least a rough sketch of the specific embodiment of the particular emotions.
Our vocabulary for describing bodily-felt experience is limited and is probably insufficient
to demarcate the different emotions clearly from each other through bodily-felt sensation
alone. However, this becomes possible through a more precise description of the respective
anchoring points and condensation areas of the emotions, or their absence, as spatial deter-
minations. These determinations provide us with orientation, given that the vast majority
of languages have a plethora of expressions for emotions of aggression, whereby not every
expression refers to a distinct phenomenon and not every distinct emotion has a name in
every language.
Characteristic of all emotions of aggression is that they are almost universally normatively
regulated, and indeed sanctioned. Consequently, there is a strong impulse on the part of
their subjects to reinterpret them in terms of socially more accepted emotions, often against
the background of ideological narratives. The theoretical framework of the spatiality of
emotions, with anchoring point and condensation area, and their embodiment renders these
reinterpretation processes more transparent (see Section 6).

2. Irritation and rage

Irritation as an emotion refers to a more or less slight irritability that arises when the person
concerned is disturbed in the pursuit of their intentions or in their actions (anchoring point).
The condensation area of irritation is unspecific: one can become irritated about something
or about someone that one blames for the disturbance. But the emotion can also become
consolidated in the circumstance that was hindered or constrained, or in the hindrance itself,
that is, in the state of affairs that thwarts one’s intentions. In the form of an irritated mood,
irritation can dispense with an anchoring point altogether; often the individual who has
the emotion is unaware of a cause of their emotional state. Irritation is characterized at the
corporeal level by a tension, a disquieting restlessness and impatience that finds expression in
clenched teeth, but also in one’s tone of voice, irritated utterances and little attacks against
others, which the subject of the emotion herself hardly notices. The aggressive bodily-felt
orientation of irritation may manifest itself in treating things roughly. Instead of “breaking
out,” irritation simmers. The actions to which it can lead usually provide no relief—unlike
angry and indignant actions—and they are not necessarily directed against the (actual or
supposed) source of the disturbance. Rather, they are generally directed more or less aim-
lessly against the entire social environment, on which the subject takes out her irritation.
Typically, the anchoring point and the condensation area can shift from one object or state
of affairs to another over the course of a period of irritation. For example, initially the fact
that the carpenter failed to appear at the appointed time and you waited in vain can be the
anchoring point, eventually that the bus came too late, and finally that you forgot important
documents. As a result, someone who is not involved often becomes the “victim” of the irri-
tated mood. Here the condensation area would first be the carpenter or carpenters in general,
then the appointment you have missed because of the bus delay, and finally everyone you
meet, all of whom are now perceived as an annoying disturbance. This description shows
that irritation often fluctuates between an emotion with a clearly recognizable anchoring
point and an objectless mood.
The characteristic corporeal manifestation of the emotions of aggression as a whole is
one of breaking out of bodily-felt confinement. This is least pronounced in the case of irri-
tation, but appears clearly in the case of rage, hatred, anger and indignation (contempt is an

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interesting exception that I will address below). “Rage” generally designates an emotion that
reacts to more serious disturbances than anger—moreover, in an explosive way. Here, too,
the trigger is something external that thwarts one’s intentions, but which—more so than in
the case of irritation—often arises suddenly and unexpectedly (anchoring point). As with
irritation, the condensation area of rage can be a person or a state of affairs, but also in a very
diffuse way the situation as a whole and even something against which one is in a rage; in
“blind” rage, the condensation area is lacking entirely (see Schmitz 1973, 33f.). Corporeally
speaking, rage can be described in terms of centrifugal impulses that break out of the con-
finement of the felt body into expansiveness with directions but without an aim. The ex-
pression a “fit of rage” expresses the involuntary, violent and sudden character of rage. In its
condensation area, this emotion is not as unwavering and unerring as, for example, anger
over an injustice that has been committed, which can only refer to persons, specifically those
who are held responsible for the injustice by the subject of the emotion (see below). Rage, on
the other hand, is vented on someone or something who or which is not necessarily related
to its anchoring point; rage often seeks out substitutes.3

3. Envy, jealousy, Ressentiment

Envy and jealousy, emotions whose anchoring points and condensation areas are more
sharply circumscribed than those of irritation and rage, undoubtedly belong to the emotions
of aggression. The anchoring point of envy is a quality or the possessions of another person,
which the subject of the emotion would like to possess herself. Corporeally speaking, envy
is a contracting or confining, unrelenting emotion; thus, we sometimes speak of “gnawing”
envy. Envy involves a certain fixation on the thing envied and also on the person who is
envied; the episodic emotion of envy has a more pronounced tendency than other emotions
to develop into an attitude or disposition, in the sense of an increased probability of being
overcome by acute envy. The condensation area of this emotion is always clearly circum-
scribed, but it can either be the person envied—in which case it typically has the connotation
that one begrudges the person the things for which one envies them—or more strongly the
coveted quality or thing itself. In the latter case, envy can develop into competition or even
into a certain admiration, and largely lose its aversive quality. Often this “productive” envy
is subsequently used to make an effort to acquire the envied thing oneself, an attitude and
emotional modification typical of neoliberal societies. In all cases, however, envy presup-
poses comparability and hence, in certain respects, also equality between the envier and the
envied.4 But one can certainly also envy people with whom one is not personally acquainted,
as long as one sees one’s own situation as being comparable to theirs; one can even be envi-
ous of social groups with whom one merely shares membership in a society (see Salice and
Montes Sánchez 2019).
Jealousy, on the other hand, seems to be an emotion that is reserved for close relation-
ships, i.e., above all family and intimate relationships and friendships. It can be regarded as
a special case and a further differentiation of envy, since it is related to persons not only in
its condensation area but, like envy, also in its anchoring point. The jealous person A envies
another person B for the relationship she has with someone C and sees it as a threat to her
own relationship with C (anchoring point). In its condensation area can be situated either the
person “of whom” one is jealous (B), less often the person for whose sake one is jealous (C),
but above all also obsessive fantasies about the nature of the relationship between B and C.
Thus, jealousy has an extremely complex structure bound up with a strong fixation on its
condensation area: the jealous person cannot let go of the “object” of her emotion. In many

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cases, the feeling of jealousy is virtually immune to correction through confrontation with
reality, i.e., with the question of how “justified” it is; the jealous person often seems to be
almost inextricably fettered to the condensation area of her emotion.
The complexity and fixedness of jealousy have to do with the fact that it is closely bound
up with other emotions: most importantly, jealousy can easily turn into resentment, Ressen-
timent or hatred of one—generally B; C is usually “spared”—or both parties involved. The
violent corporeal reactions associated with jealousy, ranging from palpitations, shortness of
breath and other sudden feelings of contraction (in the sense outlined in Section 1) to violent
attacks, are well documented.5
A phenomenon widely studied in philosophy and closely related to envy is Ressenti-
ment, a mixture of emotions that originates in feelings of inferiority and envy, and of-
ten also shame.6 Ressentiment is founded on prejudices, presumed negative attributes of
persons, which constitute its anchoring point. It is marked by a strong emotional aversion
mostly against certain social groups, less often against individuals, as its condensation area. In
French, “ressentiment” means something like “secret rancor.” The genesis of Ressentiment
is rooted in an enduring feeling of powerlessness: those affected feel disadvantaged by com-
parison with those who are situated in the condensation area of this emotion, or feel that they
have been outdone or outsmarted by them and correspondingly are inferior to them. At the
same time, Ressentiment is often associated with a compensatory ideology of one’s own su-
periority, although this is not felt at the moment of affective involvement—in fact, the person
who is developing an attitude of Ressentiment tends to feel inferior. This ambivalence can
easily develop into a general attitude that one has got a raw deal. This rancor is “secret”—as
suggested by the French term—insofar as the resentful person does not admit this to herself,
but also because she keeps it in check, generally for reasons of conforming to social norms.
The concept of Ressentiment represents a challenge for the theory of emotions because
the vast majority of those affected by this emotion would not describe their own state of
mind in this way; sometimes Ressentiment is deemed to be “unconscious” from an outside
perspective. It then seems questionable whether Ressentiment is a distinct episodic emotion
at all, or whether it is not rather a consolidated conglomerate of emotions, or even a dis-
position or an affective attitude toward certain others (Szanto unpubl. manus.). Even if the
latter conception may capture how the word is commonly used, an attitude that is so strongly
associated with aversive emotions will undoubtedly manifest itself at least occasionally in
episodic emotions. In the case of Ressentiment, it is the aversion to certain others, which can
assume an acute form and at any rate in most cases is likely to be noticed by those affected
themselves. The term “Ressentiment” would then designate a special disposition to aversion
and even hatred among the emotions of aggression.

4. Hatred and contempt

This brings me to the most clearly aversive emotion in the spectrum of emotions of aggres-
sion, which is almost always associated with an impulse to violence—which, of course, does
not have to be acted out—namely, hatred. A certain group or the hated person is situated in
its condensation area—that is, as in the case of envy and jealousy, it can only be a personal
object.7 Like jealousy, hatred is also marked by a contracting fixation on the condensation
area, from which the subject can free herself only with difficulty. In the case of hatred, how-
ever, this fixation on a particular group or person is even more powerful. The occasions for
hatred in individual relationships, its anchoring points, may be injuries suffered or humilia-
tions; in the case of hatred of groups (but also of individuals), the occasions are generally real

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or imagined restrictions of one’s own possibilities by the reactively hated persons. Typical of
hatred, however, is that the original anchoring point fades and mutates into other reasons
that become the pretext for the persistence of this emotion, which is supposedly “justified”
by the new state of affairs. A characteristic feature of hatred is therefore that the anchoring
point often shifts, so that ultimately it is arbitrary. Although someone appears to be hateful
because they have done something, such as harming the hater, or supposedly have certain
odious qualities, it is ultimately almost impossible from an external perspective to distin-
guish whether there are in fact reasons for the hatred or the hater is just looking for pretexts
for their emotions (see Szanto forthcoming). So is hatred, like love, an emotion without an
anchoring point? Do people hate “for no reason,” as they love “for no reason”? That would
be an overhasty inference.
The question of the reason for hatred or its groundlessness does not arise in a neutral
space, but is always shaped by normative ideas (see Chapter 48 in this volume). If one un-
derstands hatred as an emotion that has to be proscribed and prevented on account of its
destructiveness, then one may be more inclined to describe hate as fundamentally irrational,
as an emotion without any reason or “focus” (in the terminology of Helm 2001; see also
Chapter 20 in this volume) or any anchoring point, as if what is “hateful” cannot be con-
cretized in principle.8 On the other hand, one could also argue that hatred lacks an anchor-
ing point in principle on the grounds that those who hate tend to offer pretexts for hatred
precisely because they know that their hatred is not tolerated: in order to lend their emotions
the appearance of being justified in their own eyes and those of others, they cite reasons that
do not really apply to them or are even entirely arbitrary. From this perspective, one could
go so far as to assert that the normative proscription of hatred leads to its being presented as
a different emotion, such as indignation, for which there is a clear reason, but that “genuine”
hatred does not have any qualifiable anchoring point (see Section 6).
Even though this may actually occur, I don’t think that it is justified to infer that hatred
has no anchoring point at all. The phenomenological description of hatred should not treat
as paradigmatic the cases in which hatred seems especially incongruous or arbitrary; rather,
as with other emotions, the analysis of hatred should be based on situations in which hatred
is comprehensible, albeit not acceptable. At any rate, the normative attitude to this emotion
should be methodologically separated as far as possible from its description. Let us consider
the extreme case of hatred of a rapist or a torturer in a legal system that does not allow such
perpetrators to be prosecuted. Here hatred seems to have a clear anchoring point. In this
case, hatred even has a certain proximity to emotions of injustice such as feeling humili-
ated or indignation (Landweer 2016, see Section 5). In such a case, for example, the story
may begin with indignation at the behavior of the person who is eventually hated; but the
indignation does not find any legally or socially recognized form and remains ineffectual,
because—for whatever reason—it cannot pursue its retributive impulse. As a result, the
person concerned often cannot express or act out their emotions, and instead becomes
completely fixated on the person who was previously situated in the condensation area of
anger or indignation and is now hated. This fixation on the condensation area is typical of
fully developed hatred.
In some cases, then, hatred has a clear anchoring point, but in others the anchoring point
seems arbitrary or is entirely absent. In all cases of hatred, however—and in contrast to
anger, indignation, rage and even irritation—the anchoring point loses its salience by com-
parison with its condensation area: the more intense the hatred, the more its object becomes
the hated person in their entirety; and this means that, regardless of what they do or fail to
do, the less important their actual and past behavior, the stronger the concentration on the

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hated person becomes. To a certain extent, the hater is hardly able to detach herself from her
fixation on the object of her hatred when she has surrendered herself to her hatred.
Corporeally speaking, the hater is directed in her acute emotion directly at the hated
person with aggressive vectors: if there were no inhibiting factors, her preference would be
to attack the hated person head-on. The expression “If looks could kill…” expresses this
aggressive concentration on the hated person. More than any other emotion, hatred is asso-
ciated with an impulse to act to destroy one’s counterpart. The object of hatred is someone
whose presence is unbearable to the hater; everything the hated person does seems equally
repugnant; from the hater’s perspective, it would be better if they did not exist. This impulse
is what constitutes the high propensity to violence of hatred.
In contrast to emotions such as irritation, rage and anger, hatred very rarely occurs just
once and in an exclusively acute form and then disappears again. Instead, it typically devel-
ops into a disposition of hatred toward a specific person or a group and can then become an
attitude that determines long phases or even the whole life of the person affected.9 This is
linked to the fact that hatred, unlike rage or anger, cannot be acted out corporeally through
acute outbursts. Hatred is typically limitless; the pattern in which this emotion unfolds does
not allow its fixation on its condensation area to be loosened and in many cases not even the
death of the hated person puts an end to the emotion of the hater.
Of course, as with all emotions, the personal attitude toward this emotion contributes
to the intensity and concision or vagueness in which hatred is expressed; this attitude is
always shaped by culture. Thus, everyone develops an attitude toward how they deal with
corporeal-affective affectedness, for example, whether they cultivate it, endure it or deny it.
In Western Europe, individual hatred is generally morally denounced and in certain frame-
works also legally proscribed (think of hate speech or hate crime legislations); thus, those
subject to it usually deny it, but hatred of certain social groups is at least tolerated in some mi-
lieus, and is even sometimes cultivated. Legitimizing narratives about the hated group, such
as misogyny, racism and anti-Semitism, serve as indicators and justifications of hatred, espe-
cially hatred of collectives (Demmerling and Landweer 2007; Szanto forthcoming). These
ideologies, stories and anecdotes contain allusions to ambivalent emotions such as feelings of
superiority and inferiority, and it becomes clear that hate narratives always address a mixture
comprising a variety of aggressive emotions: envy, resentment, anger and indignation, but
also contempt, combine with hatred to form a toxic mixture.
Here the coexistence of hatred and contempt is in need of explanation, since, aside from
some commonalities, the two emotions exhibit virtually opposed strivings. At first glance,
contempt seems to be an anomaly among the group of aggressive emotions, because it leads
those who feel it to avoid the objects of their contempt; unlike hatred or anger, it is spe-
cifically not corporeally directed against its object. In its clear and unadulterated forms, in
particular in the case of moral contempt,10 it is rarely associated with a physical impulse to
annihilate its object. Nevertheless, it has a high potential for aggression, not only because
social exclusion on account of ignorance can have equally destructive effects to violence, but
also because the despised person is regarded and treated as someone who should not be there
and is worthless. Characteristic of contempt is a corporeal impulse to shun, which is con-
nected with a tendency to adopt an upright posture, comparable to the bodily-felt directions
in pride, but also arrogance (see Kolnai 1935), and is generally associated with a feeling of
superiority. This actual or merely imagined superiority can refer to supposed moral qualities,
but also to any other qualities regarded as somehow “good.”
The feeling of superiority corresponding to the upward bodily-felt tendency is associated
with the fact that contempt tends to be felt from a socially superior position or one endowed

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with a greater potential for power (Kolnai 1935). Hatred, on the other hand, is more an emo-
tion of the socially inferior,11 which is directed against those who—from the point of view
of those who feel hatred—are responsible for their problematic situation. Thus, in historical
and in individual or political constellations, it can often be traced back to the experience
of inferiority. This connection is founded on the fact that hatred mobilizes forces for over-
coming the situation that is experienced as unbearable; in hatred, the powerless experience
themselves as capable of action. This is why it is those who feel powerless and helpless who
are more likely to hate. Someone in a socially superior position, on the other hand, can feel
confidently detached or sovereign, and hence will more likely feel contempt.
Unlike hatred’s impulse to annihilate, contempt involves an impulse to social ostracism
and exclusion; it aims at the “social death” of its object as opposed to their physical death,
which is the ultimate goal of hatred. This does not mean that contempt is incompatible with
physical violence, only that its starting point is a different one. Because the despised person
is regarded as in some way inferior, inferiority can become the reason for treating those who
are despised in extreme cases as things and thus dehumanize them; any kind of treatment,
including brutal violence, then seems justified. The connection between hatred and violence
only seems to be closer than that between contempt and violence because, in hatred, the
powerless person is bent on violence to resolve the situation, whereas the socially superior
person stands in a different relation to the situation, and therefore has no need to hate, and
certainly does not need to become violent—they have other practical options.
In any case, one or more persons are situated in the condensation area of contempt, while
the anchoring point is their supposed inferiority in moral, social or some other respects. In
all forms of contempt, the despisers elevate themselves above the despised; contempt stages
its own superiority. Hatred, on the other hand, involves concentrated attention to the other;
it binds (see also Kolnai 1935; Ahmed 2014; Szanto forthcoming). Contempt, by contrast,
is expressed in the withdrawal of recognition of the other person as an equal; those who are
despised are disregarded and ignored.
Here, I have offered ideal-typical descriptions of the two emotions in order to differenti-
ate the phenomena. However, since hatred and contempt are often intermingled, can mutate
into each other, but can also alternate, the above attribution to power constellations will
have to be differentiated further in Section 6.

5. Anger and indignation

Anger and indignation are moral emotions or emotions grounded in the sense of justice.
They arise when someone has committed an injustice against you or against someone else.
Here, it should be noted that “anger” is used in everyday language in a wider sense and often
coincides with what has been described here as “rage.” Moral emotions or justice-related
emotions are not exclusively individual but are shared in a legal culture—notwithstanding
differences in detail (Landweer 2016). A legal culture is mainly held together by a range of
shared legal and moral emotions, even if one may feel or express, with regard to particu-
lar legal issues, very different emotions; accordingly, in this sense, different, more or less
individual emotional orientations may be at play in some cases while the most important
legal norms are shared. A norm applies to someone if she recognizes it in the sense that she
feels bound by it. Without such (emotional) self-commitment, no norm can be valid for the
respective person in the sense that she is really oriented toward it and its observance can be
ensured, at best, through external coercion. Norms thus would not even be valid for us if
we did not register and sanction violations of them emotionally, which means: if we did

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not become indignant when others violate norms and if we did not feel ashamed when we
violate norms ourselves.12 The violation of binding norms—regardless of whether oneself
or someone else has transgressed the norm—disturbs what can be called “legal peace” in a
certain social context, namely that balance in which there is no reason for anger, indignation
and shame.
The emotions of indignation and shame demand that the legal peace disturbed by the
violation of the norm be restored: shame by signaling that the person who is ashamed recog-
nizes the norm in question in principle, even though they have just transgressed it; anger and
indignation by indicating that someone else has transgressed a norm that applies to the angry
person and by urging that action be taken against them. Anger and indignation involve an
impulse to exact retribution that can assume various forms. The endeavor to restore the legal
peace disturbed by an injustice is a characteristic feature of the emotions of justice, which
traditionally include at least shame, guilt, anger and indignation.
Anger and indignation are difficult to distinguish. Indignation has the same cause, but it
can also refer to injustice that either cannot be attributed to specific persons or is based on
abstract circumstances. The phrase “to be angry with someone (for something)” suggests
that anger has one or more persons as a condensation area. Accordingly, if it is unclear who
is responsible for the injustice, we speak instead of “indignation”; it is significant that, in the
expression “to be indignant over something,” there is no personal object.13 Anger seems to
require a counterpart, whereas this is not necessarily the case with indignation. As regards
corporeality, however, there is no difference, and even the everyday understanding seems to
regard both emotion terms as synonymous.
The corporeal side of anger and indignation and its anchoring point and condensation
area can be explained by contrasting it with shame, which is not, of course, counted among
the emotions of aggression, but is rather opposed to them. Anger and indignation, like rage,
are projected in all directions. Thus, corporeally speaking, they are directed centrifugally
into expansiveness, in stark contrast to the contracting centripetal directions of shame: some-
one who is ashamed feels penetrated by the glances of others as if by aggressive vectors, and
lowers her gaze. Typical of shame is the metaphor of wanting to sink into the ground, and
in shame one does indeed feel an absolute contraction. Anger and rage, on the other hand,
are often described in German using the image “aus der Haut fahren” (“to jump out of one’s
skin”—i.e., “to fly off the handle”). This touches on to the centrifugal and thus expansive
corporeal directions of the emotion and an eruptive element. As with shame, the anchoring
point of anger is also that a norm was transgressed that holds for the subject of the emotion.
However, anger and indignation refer to the transgressions of others, whereas shame (and
also guilt) refers to one’s own violations; the condensation area of anger is one or more
other persons, that of shame is oneself, one’s own unworthiness (but on shame on behalf of
someone else, or Fremdscham, see Chapter 40 in this volume; see also Landweer 1999). Apart
from persons, institutions such as “the government” or abstractions such as “capitalism” can
also be located in the condensation area of indignation, provided that they are determined
by human action.
But how do emotions like anger indict right or wrong? Hermann Schmitz argues that
anger takes the measure of the prior disruption of the sphere of justice and that it can adapt
its intensity to the violation suffered. Of course, anger can also be mistaken and be too
violent. The fact that we make corresponding evaluations, however, points indirectly to a
margin of variation that is normally sounded out in the emotion itself. To corroborate this,
Schmitz refers, among others, to the despair of the irascible when they suddenly realize that
their anger has gone far beyond the appropriate retribution.14 It is not that the angry person

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measures the talion precisely, according to Schmitz; the measuring is normally performed by
the emotion itself. In support of Schmitz, one could also cite talk of the “appropriateness”
of anger and indignation, which not only refers to whether an injustice has occurred at all,
but can also mean the intensity of the emotion and the measure of the action motivated by
it, that is, the retribution. The expression “holy anger” also refers indirectly to a measuring
internal to the emotion itself. This expression implies a certain admiration for the extent of
the anger thus described, which refers to especially egregious injustice: “holy anger” is gen-
erally judged to be vehement, but morally appropriate, because it corresponds as a sanction
to the scale of the injustice.

6. Transformations and reinterpretations

of emotions of aggression
At the outset, I raised the question of the similarities between the emotions of aggression and
of typical mixtures and transformations. In this section, I would like to draw together the
results and, on this basis, outline some theses on the normatively embedded character of the
transformations and the corresponding reinterpretations.
All aggressive emotions (with the exception of some forms of irritation and rage) share
the more or less sharply circumscribed personal object in their condensation area, and they
are corporeally directed against this object in irritated, explosive or fixating ways. This com-
monality facilitates transformations from one aggressive emotion to another, transformations
that should be understood in spatial terms. If the anchoring point and condensation area
are conceived as part of the experienced space of the emotion, then all that is required for a
transformation into a different aggressive emotion is a slight shift of the anchoring point in
directional space while the condensation area remains constant. For example, I can initially
envy a colleague for the honorable post to which he has been appointed. But if I learn that
he probably only got the position because he is best friends with the person who wielded
the most influence in the decision-making process, then the anchoring point, the coveted
post, can shift, namely to the fact that my colleague was appointed to this post unjustly—on
the basis of a biased judgment. The condensation area of envy in which the colleague with
the honorable post was situated does not need to be changed, but only needs to be ex-
panded to include his friend: now my indignation is clearly consolidated in both persons as
jointly illegitimate actors. What is important here is that the space involved is not geometric
three-dimensional space, but experienced directional space: with the new anchoring point,
the emotion intrudes from an only slightly altered direction in the dynamics of the felt body.
The fact that such transitions are facilitated by the spatial structure of anchoring point and
condensation area makes it easier to understand the typical mixtures in the domain of emotions
of aggression mentioned in the foregoing sections: Ressentiment as involving the overlapping
of envy, feelings of inferiority, aversion and rancor, the frequent mixture of hatred and con-
tempt, but also the combination of jealousy and hatred. If the aforementioned transformations
of emotions were merely phenomena of consciousness, the transitions within the “focuses” and
“targets” would be less obvious and more difficult to explain than if the transmissions are un-
derstood as spatial processes involving shifts in the anchoring point and the condensation area.
However, the transformations supported by the spatial structure of the emotions also
provide occasions for misinterpretations and reinterpretations, which always occur within a
normative framework. The norms in terms of which the aggressive emotions are judged go
beyond the notions of appropriateness that also apply to all other emotions (see Chapters 24
and 41 in this volume). Since emotions such as hatred, envy and resentment can motivate

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aggressive, and even violent, actions, not only are these actions themselves generally so-
cially sanctioned, but so too are the emotions by which they are motivated and prompted.
To what extent and on which occasions the various emotions of aggression are tabooed,
sanctioned or accepted depends, of course, on the cultural context in which they arise. The
spectrum of possible normative attitudes extends from an absolute taboo, which for the most
part applies to hatred, especially in virtue of its high potential for violence, to disapproval
of uncontrolled outbursts of rage and approval of some forms of envy that are regarded as
productive and simultaneous condemnation of other variants such as malevolence. However,
these normative attitudes also include the acceptance of certain forms of jealousy, which,
despite a high proclivity to violence in certain contexts, are still regarded as understandable,
and sometimes even as proof of love or as being required by honor. While contempt is more
or less ignored in public and private discourses, the retributive emotions of justice, anger and
indignation, garner special recognition.15
What accounts for their special status? In the spectrum of the emotions of aggression
discussed here, anger is certainly not only the emotion which—in appropriate expressions—
enjoys the highest social esteem. It also stands in contrast to the other aggressive emotions
in virtue of its particularly concise structure. Its anchoring point and condensation area
are clearly circumscribed and, in addition, are connected in an unambiguous way: one is
angered by a violation of a binding norm, namely by someone who has committed this
violation. It is only in virtue of this interlocking but unambiguous structure that anger can
function as a feeling of justice. Only envy and its special form, jealousy, have a similarly clear
and at the same time complex structure. But these emotions have a close connection to the
subject of the emotion herself: here it is a matter of the thing, quality or relationship that she
claims for herself. Anger, on the other hand, is aimed at an injustice that need not necessarily
have been suffered by the angry person herself. Any notion of “injustice,” and hence of “jus-
tice,” relativizes the limited perspective on one’s own immediate well-being and includes
the views of others. What is aggressive about anger seems justified because (and when) it is
not merely a matter of selfish interests, as in the case of envy and jealousy, but, moreover, the
retribution to which the emotion motivates must be commensurate with the seriousness of
the violation of the norm.
Since anger and indignation are the only socially accepted emotions of aggression, it
makes sense to reinterpret other aggressive emotions as instances of anger and indignation in
order to increase their acceptance. Thus, it may happen that someone envies somebody else’s
possessions, but does not accept her own envious feelings. Instead, she may deem the other’s
possessions to be “unjust” and describe her emotions accordingly as “indignation” over the
unequal distribution of goods. Such reinterpretations will rarely be instances of intentional
deception, but more often of self-misunderstanding or self-deception. In such cases, one
is not mistaken about the fact that one is affected in a corporeal-affective way, but instead
about the emotion by which one is affected: one thinks that one is angry about an injustice,
but “in reality” is envious. The motive for this self-misunderstanding is the normative pre-
cept that envy is not a socially acceptable emotion, while anger or indignation is. But the
fact that envy is often reinterpreted as indignation also means that indignation can easily be
misunderstood by others as envy or is deliberately reinterpreted as envy in order to discredit
the concerns expressed in indignation. This is how the concept of “social envy” became
established and used as a polarizing label.
The close connection between envy and indignation can also be observed in the case
of Ressentiment, which Nietzsche describes as self-poisoning through inhibited revenge.16
Here the transformation in the genesis of Ressentiment assumes a different form. Envy,

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shame and feelings of inferiority are the initial emotions that are suppressed, denied and
then transformed into irritation, aversion and hatred. But these emotions are also inhibited
in their expression. Here, it is above all the shares of envy in Ressentiment that are not
acknowledged in the relation to self, because they are not approved, but also one’s own social
inferiority, which as a result has to be reinterpreted.
As with Ressentiment in its typical mixture, the dynamics of superiority and inferiority
also play an important role in many particular emotions of aggression. This applies espe-
cially to the above-mentioned oscillation between hatred and contempt. Whereas contempt
has a clear anchoring point in the supposed inferiority of those who are despised, this is, as
outlined above, much less clear in the case of hatred, while the same group of persons or an
individual can be located in the condensation area of both emotions.17 Even if hatred may
arise out of a situation of real or supposed inferiority, how the relationship of power to those
who are hated is viewed may undergo a shift, for example as a result of ideologies about their
inferiority, such as misogyny. Moreover, subjectively speaking, contempt is certainly the
more pleasant emotion, since it dispenses with the fixation of hatred on its condensation area
and in addition involves the feeling of superiority. That is why talk about the inferiority of
those who are despised is so cheap. Fantasies and projections have massive effects; even the
suggestion of supposed superiority improves one’s own power position. But contempt—and
here this is the most important motive for the reinterpretations of hatred into contempt—is
also the more socially recognized emotion: unlike hatred, it hardly seems to lead to physical
violence, since its motivating impulse is to avoid contact with the despised person.
But, as we have seen in Section 4, this is to underestimate the aggressive potential of
contempt, which, in virtue of its anchoring point in supposed inferiority, can lead to the
presumption of superiority, and at worst to social exclusion and dehumanization. This is
why the tendency to trivialize contempt18 seems highly problematic, especially since it is
combined with a cultural tendency in neoliberal social media to cultivate feelings of one’s
own moral or other superiority, contempt and gloating. Malicious glee at the dismantling
of public personalities and of private persons through bullying has become a depressingly
frequent occurrence (see also Chapter 27 in this volume). In this way, hatred and arrogance
appear disguised as contempt.
The transformations that the emotions of aggression undergo show that the aversive striv-
ings also try to circumvent normative proscriptions. While the reinterpretations of envy into
anger or indignation are comparatively harmless, because references to justice always have to
be justified in a public discourse, the misrecognition of hatred and of the destructive effects
of contempt are much more serious. The foregoing analysis points to the conclusion that it
makes more sense to recognize emotions of aggression in all their diversity than to suppress
them. Only then it is possible to control their aggressive tendencies effectively. But this pre-
supposes that we understand their aggressive impact. Thus, we are in urgent need of a public
discourse on the corrosive role of contempt in neoliberal cultures.

Notes

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 Aggressive emotions

References
Aeschbach, Sebastian (2017). Ressentiment: An Anatomy. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Geneva. https://
www.academia.edu/35721906/Ressentiment_--_An_Anatomy.
Ahmed, Sara (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Aristotle (2007). On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Transl. and ed. by George A. Kennedy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bell, Macalester (2013). Hard Feelings. The Moral Psychology of Contempt. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Bollnow, Otto Friedrich (1968). Einfache Sittlichkeit (4th ed.). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.
Demmerling, Christoph, and Landweer, Hilge (2007). Philosophie der Gefühle. Von Achtung bis Zorn.
Stuttgart: Metzler.
Fuchs, Thomas, and De Jaegher, Hanne (2009). Enactive Intersubjectivity: Participatory Sense-
Making and Mutual Incorporation. Phenomenology and Cognitive Science 8(4), 465–486.
Helm, Bennet W. (2001). Emotional Reason: Deliberation, Motivation, and the Nature of Value. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

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 Hilge Landweer

Kolnai, Aurel (2004[1935]). On Disgust. Transl. by E. Kolnai et al. Peru: Open Court.
Landweer, Hilge (1999). Scham und Macht. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Sozialität eines Gefühls.
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
——— (2016). Ist Sich-gedemütigt-Fühlen ein Rechtsgefühl? In: H. Landweer, and D. Koppelberg
(Eds.). Recht und Emotion I. Verkannte Zusammenhänge, Freiburg: Alber, 103–135.
——— (2019). The Spatial Character of Atmospheres: Being affected and Corporeal Interaction in
the Context of Collective Feeling, Studi di estetica, XLVII, IV serie, 2/2019 Sensibilia, 153–168.
Mason, Michelle (2003). Contempt as a Moral Attitude. Ethics 113, 234–272.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1996[1878]). Human, All Too Human. Transl. by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge:
Cambridge University.
——— (2007[1887]). On the Genealogy of Morals. Transl. by C. Diethe, and ed. by K. Ansell-Pearson.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rinofner-Kreidl, Sonja (2014). Neid und Ressentiment: Zur Phänomenologie negativer sozialer
Gefühle. In: J. Müller, and K. Mertens (Eds.). Die Dimension des Sozialen: Neue philosophische
Zugänge zu Fühlen, Wollen und Handeln. Berlin: De Gruyter, 103–126.
Salice, Alessandro, and Montes Sánchez, Alba (2019). Envy and Us. European Journal of Philosophy 27(1),
227–242.
Scheler, Max (1994[1915]). Ressentiment. Transl. by L. B. Coser. Milwaukee: Marquette University
Press.
Schmitz, Hermann (1982[1965]). Der Leib [= System der Philosophie Vol. II, 1]: Bonn: Bouvier.
——— (1983[1973]). Der Rechtsraum. Praktische Philosophie [= System der Philosophie, Vol. III, 3]. Bonn:
Bouvier.
——— (1990). Der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand. Bonn: Bouvier.
——— (2011a). Der Leib. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
——— (2011b). Emotions Outside the Box—The New Phenomenology of Feeling and Corporeality.
Transl. by R. O. Müllan, and J. Slaby. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10(2), 241–259.
——— (2019). New Phenomenology. A Brief Introduction. With an introd. by T. Griffero. Transl. by
R. O. Müllan with support from M. Bastert. Milan: Mimesis International.
Solomon, Robert (1978). Emotions and Anthropology: The Logic of Emotional World Views. Inquiry
21, 181–199.
Szanto, Thomas (forthcoming). In Hate We Trust: The Collectivization and Habitualization of
Hatred. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. doi:10.1007/s11097-018-9604-9.
——— (unpubl. ms.). The Politics of Ressentiment: From Value-Illusion to False Solidarity. Presentation at
ZiF, University of Bielefeld, 2019.
Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid (2017). Contempt: The Experience and Intersubjective Dynamics of a Nasty
Emotion. In: J. Drummond, and S. Rinofner-Kreidl (Eds.). Emotional Experiences. Ethical and Social
Significance. London, New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
——— (2018). Phenomenological Approaches to Hatred: Scheler, Pfänder, and Kolnai. The New Year-
book for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 16, 158–179.
Wüschner, Philipp (2017). Scham—Schuld—Strafe. Zur Frage nach der Legitimität von Schamstrafen.
In: H. Landweer and F. Bernhardt (Eds.). Recht und Emotion II. Sphären der Verletzlichkeit. Freiburg,
München: Alber.

Further reading
Brudholm, Thomas (2010). Hatred as an Attitude. Philosophical Papers 39(3), 289–313.
Brudholm, Thomas, and Johansen Schepelern, Brigitte (2018). Pondering Hatred. In: T. Brudholm,
and J. Lang (Eds.). Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explorations. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 81–103.
Caze, Marguerite L. (2001). Envy and Resentment. Philosophical Explorations 4(1), 31–45.
Goldie, Peter (2000). The Emotions. A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meyer-Drawe, Käte (2007). Ablehnung des Leibes. Ekel und Haß. In: R. Konersmann (Ed.). Das
Leben denken—die Kultur denken. Freiburg: Alber, 110–127.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1976[1944]). Anti-Semite and Jew. An Exploration of the Etiology of Hatred. Transl. by
G. J. Becker. New York: Schocken.

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 39
HETERO-INDUCED SHAME
AND SURVIVOR SHAME
Alba Montes Sánchez

Most authors writing on shame nowadays agree in characterizing it as an emotion of self-

assessment, an emotion that intentionally targets and evaluates the one who feels it (see
Chapter 30 in this volume; cf. also Chapter 27 in this volume). Now, if this is true, some
instances of shame seem puzzling, because the circumstances in which they typically arise
don’t appear to offer the right kind of basis for a self-evaluation: hetero-induced shame1
(or shame felt about somebody else’s actions or features) and survivor shame (or shame felt
about having been the victim of an abuse). Here are some examples. Consider, first, hetero-
induced shame: You take a friend to a classical music concert where your son, a professional
piano-player, is the main soloist. When he comes on stage, he is visibly drunk and offers a
disgraceful performance. You feel ashamed.
As for survivor shame, consider the testimony of two genocide survivors. This is Primo
Levi on the Nazi genocide: “That many (including me) experienced ‘shame’, that is, a feeling
of guilt during the imprisonment and afterward, is an ascertained fact confirmed by numer-
ous testimonies. It may seem absurd, but it is a fact” (Levi 1989, 60). And this is Francine
Niyitegeka, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide:

I do not think this will ever be over for me, to be so despised for having Tutsi blood. (…)
I feel a sort of shame to have to spend a lifetime feeling hunted, simply for being
what I am. The very moment my eyelids close shut on all of this, I weep inside, out of
grief and humiliation.
(Hatzfeld 2008, 28)

These phenomena are different in most respects, but they share one common feature: the
ashamed individual hasn’t done anything to bring about a state of degradation onto them-
selves or others. Therefore, the self-evaluation might seem inappropriate. In the first case, it
seems inappropriate to self-evaluate on the basis of someone else’s degradation. In the second
case, it seems inappropriate to do so when one is not responsible at all, but just a victim, of
the situation.
In an influential paper, D’Arms and Jacobson (2000) distinguished between the moral
appropriateness of an emotion, i.e., whether it is morally good to feel it, and its fittingness,
whether it correctly represents and evaluates its intentional object. For example, my envy

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may be fitting, in that it correctly represent my colleague as having gained the promo-
tion I coveted and didn’t get, while still deserving moral condemnation. Hetero-induced
shame and survivor shame raise different worries concerning appropriateness. In the case of
hetero-induced shame, the suspicion is that, according to the standard view, it may never be
fitting. As such, it seems either to be irrational, or to put pressure on the received view on
shame. In the case of survivor shame, the puzzle primarily concerns moral appropriateness,
and it puts pressure on the relatively widely held view of shame as a positive force in our
moral lives, an emotion that motivates us to learn from previous inappropriate behavior
and change for the better (e.g., Williams 2008; Deonna et al. 2011; Aristotle 2014). In what
follows, I provide analyses of both phenomena that dispel such worries.

1. Hetero-induced shame2
If we assume that the intentional object of shame is the one feeling it, how can we explain
those instances where we feel ashamed of someone else? Few philosophers have addressed
this question, with Scheler among the notable exceptions. But before I tackle it, let me make
it explicit that I seek to investigate an emotional experience, not to clarify language use. I
do not seek an account of what competent English speakers mean when they say they are
ashamed of someone else, or when speakers of other languages use expressions that refer to
similar phenomena, such as Fremdscham in German or vergüenza ajena in Spanish (in fact,
these expressions are used in quite different ways). What I am after is a phenomenological
description: i.e., investigating the structure of an experience of “being ashamed of someone
else”. It is therefore important to bear in mind that language use and phenomenological
structure can and do come apart.
Indeed, when German speakers say they feel Fremdscham, and when English speakers
say “I am ashamed of you/him”, often they are not reporting actual experiences of shame.
Instead, these expressions might be reports of indignation at shamelessness that seek to reaf-
firm relevant communal norms. They mean something along the lines of: “this behavior is
shameless, you/he should be ashamed of your/himself, and I am shocked that you aren’t/he
isn’t”. For example, imagine you are returning home from a conference abroad, and in the
airport you bump into a colleague from a different country. While waiting to go through
security, you witness a scene where some fellow nationals of yours try to jump the line and
behave rudely to everyone. You comment to your colleague that this is terrible and you are
ashamed of them. On one interpretation of this example, it is easy to see your comment not
as reporting your actual feeling of shame, but simply as reporting disapproval and trying to
reassure your colleague that you are not like those shameless fellows.
There might be a different explanation: you might be feeling something similar to, but
different from, shame, namely embarrassment. Both emotions are closely related, but they
differ in important ways that in principle may make it easier to feel embarrassment when one
is only a witness of a ridiculous or inappropriate situation. Embarrassment is always about
public appearances, about looking foolish in front of others, while shame is characterized
by a deeper feeling of degradation or inferiority. Embarrassment is shallower and much
more fleeting, it disappears as soon as you remove yourself from the situation, and it always
requires an audience. It typically arises when one makes a social faux-pas, for example, mis-
remembering yet again the name of your next-door neighbor (for a full characterization,
see Nussbaum 2006; Zahavi 2014; Chapter 31 this volume). But situations and our position
in them are not exclusively the product of our own actions. Others can easily cause social
awkwardness, in ways that leave you feeling ridiculous, out of place, or thrown into an

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uncomfortable witness position. The above example of the airport could be one of them. So
often when we feel “ashamed of others” what we actually are is embarrassed.
This is a possibility, but not all cases of feeling ashamed of others can be explained away
in this manner. I believe that my initial example of you feeling ashamed of your son cannot.
Moreover, embarrassment and shame are so closely related that they can easily transform
into each other, depending on how the subject experiences the situation. In any case, the
crucial point is not whether from a third-person perspective the situation is better described
as one of social awkwardness or as one of degradation. Rather, the crucial point is whether
the subject undergoing the emotion frames the situation as one or the other. Issues of public
presentation can have deeper implications, they can sometimes be experienced as degrading,
and so transform into shame. You might experience that your tendency to forget your neigh-
bor’s name is a sign of you being selfish, and this might cause you shame. Similarly, someone
may come to feel shame in my airport example above (more on this below).
Finally, someone might argue that, when I feel ashamed of someone else, what I do is
putting myself in their shoes and coming to feel the emotions that are appropriate to their
situation, like we do when we read an engaging novel.3 Once again, this is a possibility, but
it cannot account for most cases of hetero-induced shame. Take the example of you feeling
ashamed of your son at the concert. Are you feeling ashamed of him because you put yourself
in his shoes and imagine the situation from his perspective? Do you feel as if you were the
pianist? This doesn’t seem very plausible. As the parent, you are more likely to be keeping
a clear awareness of your own position as an observer, of the strong bond that links you
to the shameful subject, and of the presence of your friend looking at you both. There are
clear differences between the intentionality of hetero-induced shame and that of imaginative
perspective taking.
These considerations show that, even if expressions such as Fremdscham or “I am ashamed
of you” are sometimes employed to refer to something other than an experience of shame,
there are genuine cases of shame where the characteristic evaluation of degradedness seems
better ascribed to someone other than the emoter. In previous work with Alessandro Salice,
we have labeled such cases ‘hetero-induced shame’ (Salice and Montes Sánchez 2016; Montes
Sánchez and Salice 2017). But if these cases are genuine and relatively frequent, the question
is whether the standard account of shame is adequate. Perhaps we should abandon the claim
that shame intentionally targets the one that feels it. Indeed, a minority of authors thinks
it doesn’t necessarily. Scheler is perhaps the most prominent example (Scheler 1987). More
recently, Helm (2010, chap. 5, 2017, chap. 7) has offered a more detailed version of a similar
idea. Let me briefly discuss their views in turn.
For Scheler, shame is an emotion that protects our humanity and individuality, our higher
spiritual values, from threats of degradation and contamination. He writes: “shame is a
protective feeling of the individual and his or her value against the whole sphere of what is
public and general” (Scheler 1987, 17). But in his view, since the sphere of human spiritual
values and individuality is not exclusive to myself, it can be put at risk in myself or in another.
This is what, in Scheler’s view, explains why he feels ashamed when another man makes an
indecent comment in front of a lady. Scheler is quick to rule out emotional contagion: he
feels ashamed even though nobody else present, neither the other man nor the lady, feels
ashamed. His shame can therefore not be the product of his having been “infected” by some-
one else’s emotions, as when we join a merry party and become merry ourselves. Scheler’s
example has complications I cannot address here, but the crucial point is that, in his view, it
shows that the intentional object of shame is “the individual self as such (das individuelle Selbst
überhaupt)” (Scheler 1987, 18, transl. modified, for the original, see 1957, 81). Anybody can

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be in a position where their higher spiritual values are threatened with contamination, and
anyone who witnesses this can respond with shame, with this protective reaction.
Unfortunately, Scheler never completed his essay on shame. But as things stand, an obvi-
ous problem with his account is that most of us do not routinely feel ashamed whenever we
see others in shameful situations: often we are amused or outraged instead. So the idea that
shame is “about the individual self as such” seems much too wide to specify the characteristic
intentional object of shame. What distinguishes those others whose behavior or features can
make me feel shame from those who cannot? Some have gestured at an answer by saying this
happens because one associates or identifies with others, or loves them, without explicating
how such connections work to produce shame (Walsh 1970; Cavell 1995, 286; a more de-
tailed account can be devised on the basis of Hume (1978, 277–391, 310–311); see Salice and
Montes Sánchez 2016, 3–4). Helm, however, does offer a detailed account of how one can
come to feel ashamed of others.
Helm distinguishes between two types of shame: personal shame, which is a “person-
focused emotion” (Helm 2010, chaps. 4 and 5, 2017, 49–51), and social shame, which is a
“character-oriented reactive attitude” (Helm 2017, chap. 7). The difference between them
is based on his distinction between ‘target’ and ‘focus’ of an emotion (Helm 2010, 58). The
target of the emotion is its thematic object: if you are angry at your son for playing carelessly
with a ball next to your porcelain vase, then your son is the target of your anger. The focus
of the emotion is a background object that you care about, which is related to the target in
such a way as to make intelligible your emotional evaluation of the target: in this example,
the precious vase you treasure. Your anger at your son is intelligible because you care about
the vase, which is threatened by his behavior. Applying this distinction, Helm proposes that
two types of shame can be distinguished in virtue of their foci. Personal shame is focused
on a person, on her identity and the kind of life she finds worth her living. Social shame is
focused on a specific community that the subject belongs to, and on its norms of character,
on the kind of life the community finds worthy of their members.
For Helm, person-focused shame can target someone other than the emoting subject:
a loved one. Paradigmatic cases of shame about oneself are focused on oneself as a person,
they are made intelligible, in Helm’s view, by one’s own self-love. To love oneself is “to have
a concern for oneself as this particular person with a sense of the kind of life worth one’s
living” (Helm 2010, chap. 4, 2017, 49). This is the background concern that enables us to
understand why I evaluate myself as degraded (why I feel ashamed) when I betray the values
that make up the life worth my living. That would be the case was I the pianist that gets
drunk in an attempt to fight stage fright and ends up giving a horrible performance. This is
what Helm (2010, 153) calls “directly reflexive” shame.4
Personal shame can also be “indirectly reflexive”, when we feel ashamed of something
that we take to be representative of qualities we value (e.g., if I take my battered old apartment
to represent my low social status and I am therefore ashamed of it). Being ashamed of other
people would be a subclass of indirectly reflexive shame, for example, if you were ashamed
of your national soccer team’s poor performance in the World Cup. In Helm’s view, in such
cases you see others as representing something else you value as a part of your identity (i.e.,
here, national citizenship), such that their performance reflects on who you are (Helm 2010,
153–154). However, seeing someone as representative of something you value cannot always
ground shame. The shameful others have to be associated with you in a meaningful way:
they have to represent a group the membership in which you value (Helm 2010, 154). I think
this is a crucial point, but here Helm doesn’t develop it further. As I argue below, a link is
still missing: the question is not whether the other does actually represent my values or is a

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member of my group, but whether, in the relevant situation, I frame her as a group member
with a capacity to impact my identity.
Now, Helm further argues for a third class of person-focused shame—“loving” shame—
that is not reflexive, because it is focused on the beloved, not on oneself (Helm 2010, 154).
In his view, loving someone implies an “intimate identification” with them, where I care
about them as persons, I care about the life they find worth living, and about their projects
for their sake. This concern makes it intelligible for me to feel a range of person-focused
emotions with a focus on my beloved, including shame. So in my example of the pianist, his
parents can intelligibly feel ashamed of him because they love him, they intimately identify
with him, they care about him as this particular person and about his projects for his sake.
Part of Helm’s motivation to defend this view is to resist the union account of love, accord-
ing to which lovers form a unity, a “we” that blurs the boundaries between self and other.
While I partially agree with him in resisting this blurring, there are ways of conceiving of
a “we” that don’t erase the boundary, but rather presuppose it (see, e.g., Zahavi 2015). The
above taxonomy, however, seems to suggest that fusion is the only option: either the other
is taken as a representative of my personal values, and therefore an extension of myself, in
indirectly reflexive shame, or the other is fully recognized as an independent person whose
identity doesn’t affect mine, in loving shame. I find this dichotomy, especially the lack of
inter mediate cases or gradual variations, unsatisfactory.
Collective intentionality is obviously more complex than this and Helm has since de-
voted an entire book to it (Helm 2017, see also his contribution to this volume). Here Helm
introduces a second type of shame, social shame. But his analysis of it doesn’t seem to allow
for being socially ashamed of others in the sense of hetero-induced shame. Social shame,
for him, is shame one feels as a member of a particular community of respect before one’s
fellow members, when one betrays norms of character that prescribe the kinds of life worth
living for community members. The foci of social shame are the community and its norms
of character. These foci don’t seem to allow for one to feel socially ashamed of someone else:
our common concern for the community means that if I do something shameful before our
eyes, you as a fellow member should be contemptuous (not ashamed) of me (2017, 197–198,
see also 201–202, 210).
If I read Helm correctly, we are left with the following picture: we have a commu-
nal identity that is not susceptible to hetero-induced shame, a personal identity that is
susceptible to it through group representatives, and a kind of shame (loving shame) that
leaves the emoter’s identity untouched. I am not sure to what extent personal and group
identities can be disentangled in particular cases, but I will leave this point aside. What
I want to take issue with is the idea that shame might be non-reflexive. I am skeptical of
this proposal, since I agree with Sartre (2003), according to whom shame is the experience
that I am Being-for-Others, that I am an object of the other’s perception, that I have an
outside that others can observe and that escapes my control, even though it is a part of me
(see Chapter 30 in this volume for details). This phenomenological structure of felt ex-
posure is preserved in cases of feeling ashamed of others. Take my example of the pianist.
You are much less likely to feel ashamed of your son if you hear his drunken playing in
his rehearsal studio with no other witnesses present: you might rather feel disappointed
or angry. You are more likely to feel ashamed in public, i.e., in a situation where your
identity and his are associated and degraded together, where his performance might put
you both on the spot.
Therefore, in my view, the best way of accounting for episodes of “being ashamed of
others” (both loving and indirectly reflexive in Helm’s terminology) is to retain the idea that

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they are about oneself, but they are special cases. They do not target oneself as an individ-
ual, but oneself as a member of a group to which the shameful other also belongs, they are
instances, so to speak, of being exposed by proxy, of having one’s own identity “tainted” by
association (see Salice and Montes Sánchez 2016; Montes Sánchez and Salice 2017). The cru-
cial aspect is indeed identification, but not in Helm’s sense of love, of caring about the other’s
projects for their sake, nor of mere representativeness of personal values, but in the sense of
social or group identification, such that some aspects of my own identity are (or can become)
entangled with others, in a way that I can become exposed through them.
As hyper-social creatures, many aspects of our identities are tied to our belonging to
certain groups: families, friends, religious groups, professions and so on. This is what social
psychologists call our social identities (e.g., Brewer 1991)—although they shouldn’t be re-
garded as clearly distinct from personal identity. Nevertheless, merely acknowledging that
I belong to a category, say, that I have a certain nationality, does not necessarily have an
impact on my social identity. For this to happen, I have to group-identify, which means
living the group “from within”, experiencing myself as part of a “we”, such that my behav-
ior and emotions are significantly impacted (Turner 1987, 50). When group identification
is in place, I can easily feel ashamed of myself because of the actions or features of another
member of my group, since they impact my social identity. Family members can thus feel
ashamed of each other because they group-identify as members of the same family; sport
fans can feel ashamed of the team’s performance because they identify as members of the
same group, and so on.
Social psychologists call this group-based shame (Lickel et al. 2011). Salice and I call this
hetero-induced shame because we don’t think robust group membership is either strictly
necessary or actually sufficient for so-called group-based shame. Again, one can formally
and robustly be a member of some group without identifying with it in some situations—or
ever. Perhaps, I regard my nationality as irrelevant to my identity, and thus I’m not disposed
to group identifying with my fellow nationals, so in a case like the airport example above, I
might feel annoyed by the noise or disapprove of the rowdy travelers’ behavior, but remain
unashamed. On the other hand, perhaps I typically don’t care about nationality as a part of
my identity, but the presence of my colleague (who might associate me with the trouble-
makers in virtue of it) assigns salience to this feature of myself and prompts me to (atypically
for me) group-identify with the other travelers and feel ashamed in this occasion. Moreover,
in certain situations, one can group-identify with people who are not co-members of a
robust group, on the basis of very superficial features, as shown by in “minimal group” par-
adigm experiments (Tajfel 1970; Tajfel et al. 1971). Situational factors are crucial, they can
confer salience to certain properties one shares with others, and prompt group identification
even where one would not expect it.
Where does this leave us on the matter of appropriateness I mentioned at the start? If one
agrees that personal identity constructions are not an entirely private matter, that they have
social aspects and others can impact them and constantly contribute to shape them, I can see
no principled reason why it may always necessarily be unfitting to feel “exposed by proxy”.
Sometimes it will be fitting, and some other times it won’t. As for moral appropriateness, the
issue will partially depend on how one understands collective responsibility. These questions
remain largely unexplored (but see Salmela and Sullivan 2016), and they require a careful
consideration of particular examples that I cannot engage in here. However, having clarified
the general mechanism underlying hetero-induced shame allows us to see that it is not nec-
essarily inappropriate. In this sense, it does not differ from standard shame, and so the initial
puzzlement is dissolved.

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2. Survivor shame5
Survivor shame, as claimed above, is the shame that survivors of atrocities and abuse often
feel about what happened to them. It is so frequent among trauma victims that it is in-
cluded in psychiatry manuals as a diagnostic criterion for post-traumatic stress disorder (see
American Psychiatric Association 2013). The puzzle with this type of shame precisely con-
cerns its moral appropriateness and significance. The question here is why a victim should
feel ashamed about what happened to her. It seems that, if the perpetrator is the one at fault,
it is the perpetrator who should feel ashamed—and often they don’t. What we find in these
cases looks like a paradox: the victims feel deeply ashamed; the perpetrators are shameless
(Shapiro 2003).
Explanations of this paradox often take an evolutionary route (see Budden 2009; for a
philosopher who adopts this strategy, see Maibom 2010). According to Fessler (2007), there
are two kinds of shame—subordinance shame and social acceptability shame. The latter is
characteristically human, and it focuses on one’s peers’ good opinions, on keeping a good
reputation and having smooth social relations within a group of equals. This kind of shame
can be linked to moral norms. But the former, subordinance shame, is simpler, evolutionarily
more primary, it can be found in non-human animals, and it is about strict hierarchies of
dominance and subordination. Subordinance shame is a mechanism to prevent aggression
from a hierarchical superior through a display of inferiority. Survivor shame looks paradox-
ical from the point of view of social acceptability shame, but it is perfectly intelligible from
the point of view of subordinance shame. Indeed, if you are being attacked and subjugated
by someone with power over you, according to this description, it is to be expected that you
display subordinance shame (and incidentally, it would be nonsensical for the powerful one
to feel it).
This approach is helpful in dissolving the paradox and making shame intelligible in such
cases, as well as in emphasizing how some aspects of our identities (and their degradation) can
indeed be outside of our control. The problem is that survivor shame, as its name indicates, is
a survivor phenomenon, i.e., an emotion that is felt by someone who has been, but is no longer
being, attacked and subjugated. While the abuse is taking place, an appeasement response
seems appropriate, but afterwards it seems pointless. And thus survivor shame seems to be a
clearly pathological and irrational phenomenon. Furthermore, since it is disconnected from
social acceptability shame, it seems to have no moral significance.
This, however, doesn’t neatly match the complex descriptions of the phenomenon that
one finds in survivors’ testimonies. Most survivors do feel that their shame is paradoxical and
irrational, but they often also attribute it some moral significance (Levi 1989, 1996). Indeed,
the first term that psychiatrist chose to refer to this phenomenon was survivor guilt. This was
in part due to psychoanalytic influences, but it also reflects the fact that survivors often give
some moral significance to these feelings (Leys 2009, chap. 2). The standard way of defin-
ing guilt, in counter-distinction to shame, is that, while in guilt I feel bad about an action
or omission (and so guilt always entails responsibility and a moral evaluation), in shame I
feel bad about my identity, about the kind of person I am (see Tangney and Dearing, 2004;
Williams, 2008). Given this account, as Corbí (2012) argues, interpreting survivor shame as
exclusively pathological and irrational amounts to dismissing the survivors’ experiences and
their moral meaning as irrelevant, which inadvertently serves the purposes of the perpetrator
by ignoring the victims’ experiences and silencing their voices.
Another problem with an account of survivor shame exclusively in terms of subor-
dinance shame is that it flattens the complexity of the phenomenon and collapses its

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diachronic extendedness. Such an account approaches survivor shame as if it was, on the one
hand, equivalent to the shame that a victim might feel while being humiliated,6 and on the
other, as if it was an isolated and uniform emotional episode, a more or less short-lived men-
tal state, like being afraid of a snake when I see one. Paradoxically, when Agamben (1999)
attempted to do justice to the moral meaning of survivor shame, he ran into these problems
too (see Welz 2011; Guenther 2012).
Agamben (1999) builds his account of survivor shame drawing on the early Levinas, and
focusing mainly on a passage where Antelme (1992, 231) describes the blush of a prisoner be-
ing singled out for execution. In On Escape, an essay originally published in French in 1935,
Levinas (2003, 63–64) argued that shame is not about the exposure of a particular flaw one
could fix, but about discovering that insufficiency and vulnerability are constitutive of our
very being. Drawing on Levinas, Agamben described shame, as exemplified by the blush of
the prisoner being singled out for execution, as a simultaneous movement of subjectification
and desubjectification, as a moment when the subject bears witness to her own desubjecti-
fication. Shame would thus reveal the resistance of humanity in the face of dehumanizing
attacks, and that would constitute its ethical significance (Agamben 1999, 104, 128). This
account is not only problematic, as I already suggested, because it collapses the temporality
of survivor shame and victim humiliation, but also because it is solipsistic and ignores the re-
lational element of shame. After surviving the Holocaust himself, Levinas (1969) developed
a new account of ethical shame that is not about me discovering my own vulnerability, but
about being called into question by another, about having to respond to the call implied in
the suffering of others (see Morgan 2008; Guenther 2011, 28–33). As Guenther (2012, 64)
puts it,

the importance of shame in this context is its emphasis on relations rather than acts: I
feel shame not because of what I have done, but rather because others matter to me, and
because I care what they think of me. The capacity for shame attests to a remnant, how-
ever small, of interhuman relationality—an interest, however diminished or degraded,
in others.

To appreciate more clearly the force of these objections, consider Levi’s testimony. In the
last volume of his Auschwitz trilogy, he lists some typical sources of survivor shame and
guilt (he does not clearly distinguish between them and often refers to both synonymously):
(i) the state of real degradation in which the prisoners were forced to live; (ii) their passivity
in the face of their oppressors, i.e., the prisoner’s failure to fight or rebel; (iii) their failures
of solidarity to other prisoners; (iv) the suspicion that they might have survived in the place
of another, a better or worthier person; and (v) what he calls “the shame of the world”: the
shame of knowing that humanity is capable of horrors such as the Holocaust (Levi 1989,
75–85). A mere glance at Levi’s list allows us to see that, except for (i), all sources of shame
imply an explicit reference to a relation to others. Furthermore, he is referring to a host of
related, but different, phenomena, most prominently: memories of past shame, humiliation
(i) and guilt (iii), as well as present-day shame and guilt when looking back (ii, iii, iv, v).7
Note also that this list includes emotional episodes, but also judgments, and emotions that
seem to require a degree of analysis of the past events (iv, v). This is one of the reasons why
in previous work, Zahavi and I (Montes Sánchez and Zahavi 2018) have suggested that we
should understand survivor shame as a process, rather than a state, in line with Goldie’s nar-
rative model of emotion.

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Goldie (2012, 56) argues that an emotion is

a kind of process; more specifically, it is a complex pattern of activity and passivity, inner
and outer, that unfolds over time, and the unfolding pattern over time is explanatorily
prior to what is the case at any particular time.

This pattern is composed of many different elements, including judgments, dispositions,

emotional episodes, expressive actions, habitual actions, etc., which take a characteristic
shape that distinguishes them from other emotions (2012, 62). Understanding survivor
shame as an emotional process structured in this way can help us do justice to the complexity
of this phenomenon. The main idea is that survivor shame is not a unified experience, a sin-
gle mental state, it involves emotional episodes of, at least, shame of both kinds discussed by
Fessler, humiliation and guilt. It contains irrational and rational elements, some unjustified
and some justified. This variety of elements means that questions of fittingness and moral
appropriateness cannot be settled in general terms. Furthermore, from second- and third-
person perspectives, survivor shame calls for compassion rather than contempt, and it can be
so destructive (Baumeister, 1990; Budden, 2009) that considerations of prudential appropri-
ateness (whether the emotion is practically advisable in a given situation) may often overrule
all others. The puzzle of survivor shame is thus related to its multivalent complexity, but
once this is recognized, it doesn’t invalidate the picture of shame as a potentially positive
force in our moral lives.

3. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have addressed two varieties of shame that seem puzzling: hetero-induced
shame and survivor shame. Far from undermining the claim that shame involves a self-
evaluation, both disclose ways in which our personal identities are social: they can become
entangled with the identities of others via group identification, or they can be impacted, for
better or worse, by what others do to us. Both conclusions ultimately underscore the idea
that shame discloses our essential human relationality.

Notes

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 Alba Montes Sánchez

6 This is not to deny that trauma victims typically experience flashbacks, where the traumatic
experience is given not as a memory, but as if it was happening in the present. Survivor shame,
however, is not typically described as a flashback experience.
7 For more on the differences among these emotions, see Chapters 30 and 32, respectively, in this
volume; on embodiment and shame, and in particular chronic shame, see Chapter 27 in this
volume.

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 40
JOINT FEELING
Héctor Andrés Sánchez Guerrero

1. Introduction
There are different senses in which people might be said to share an emotion. In certain
cases, talk of participation in a joint feeling may appear warranted. The minimal phenomeno-
logical condition satisfied in these cases might be articulated as follows: If I am to regard my-
self as someone who is sharing in a joint feeling I have to be able to experience the emotion
I am feeling as a constituent of our emotional response. That we can have this sort of affective
experiences seems uncontroversial. In which cases exactly they may be said to have a foun-
dation in a state of affairs that deserves to be called a collective emotional response, however, is a
matter of debate. Moreover, one could take the very idea of a response that is at the same time
affective and collective to involve a metaphysical absurdity. For one thing, properly affective
states centrally involve feelings, and there is widespread agreement that groups are not the
kind of entities that can experience feelings. This contribution offers a phenomenological
account of the core features of those emotional feelings that allow a number of individuals
to respond to some event in a manner experienced by them as authentically affective and
genuinely collective. In so doing, it shows that a phenomenological characterization of the
relevant affective experiences delivers that which skeptics about the possibility of properly
collective emotions miss: a description of the ontological requirements of a genuinely joint
feeling.

2. Episodes of joint feeling

We often speak and write in ways that suggest that humans can participate in what we
may call episodes of joint feeling. After a crucial game, a football player may exclaim: “We
feel enormously happy about the undefeated season”. A family member might assert: “This
family has treated you very badly. We feel terribly guilty” (Gilbert 2002, 118). Konzelmann
Ziv asks us to consider the following statement made by a journalist reporting on the funeral
of Winston Churchill: “Not since the war has there been such a shared emotion” (2009, 85).
When we hear someone making a statement along these lines, we normally do not feel
urged to interrupt her in order to ask what she means. We seem to pre-theoretically un-
derstand what is meant by such an assertion. But, although we have an intuitive grasp of

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the meaning of these sorts of statements, there is ample room for dispute concerning what
exactly it is that we have thus understood.
Here are two options. Statements that refer to episodes of joint feeling may be taken to
describe the “affective atmosphere” that reigns at a given moment—something that, so to
say, is in the air and may be perceived by the individuals involved in the situation. Alterna-
tively, it may be argued that such statements should be understood as economical ways of
saying that most of the implicated individuals have responded in a similar emotional way to
the event at issue.
The problem with these two interpretations is that they do not entail the crucial idea that
the participants are jointly responding to something. But if the similarity of the individuals’
responses is not sufficient, adding some component of mutual awareness concerning this
match could complete the picture, one may think.
To explore this intuition, imagine a number of passengers who have coincidentally taken
the same train. Given that the train has left the last station with a delay of about 20 minutes,
each of them has come to feel worried about the possibility of not getting her or his train
connection. Assume that they become aware of this similarity and feel, for this reason, in
some way closer to one another. Would this suffice?
The sense in which we could in this case assert that the involved individuals are sharing
an emotion is definitively not weak. But it is uncontroversial that these individuals are not
sharing in a joint feeling in the same sense in which the members of a football team who
exclaim to feel blissful about their undefeated season may be claimed to be doing so. The
point is that there are situations—and the other three sorts of cases examined so far do not
exemplify them—in which the affective responses of the participants are such that we could
assert that they are feeling together, and not merely alongside each other—in a merely parallel
way. These are situations in which our inclination to speak of a joint feeling may correspond
to some state of affairs that deserves to be called a collective emotional response. To come
closer to a characterization of such states of affairs, let us continue to specify what is special
about the way in which we experience these situations.
At the beginning of his book The Nature of Sympathy, the German phenomenologist
Max Scheler, as it has been repeatedly pointed out in recent contributions to the debate
on collective emotions (cf. Konzelmann Ziv 2009; Schmid 2009; Salmela 2012), offers a
taxonomy of what we may call varieties of shared affectivity. In this context, Scheler argues
that there are cases in which we could talk of a type of immediate feeling-together (unmittelbares
Miteinanderfühlen). He distils this phenomenon by discussing a dramatic situation:

Two parents stand beside the dead body of a beloved child. They feel in common the
‘same’ sorrow, the ‘same’ anguish. It is not that A feels this sorrow and B feels it also,
and moreover that they both know they are feeling it. No, it is a feeling-in-common. A’s
sorrow is in no way an ‘external’ matter for B here, as it is, e.g. for their friend C, who
joins them, and commiserates ‘with them’ or ‘upon their sorrow’. On the contrary, they
feel it together, in the sense that they feel and experience in common, not only the self-
same value-situation, but also the same keenness of emotion in regard to it. The sorrow,
as value-content, and the grief, as characterizing the functional relation thereto, are here
one and identical.
(1913, 12–13)

In the described situation, the participants are not simply responding in a similar way to one
and the same occurrence. Furthermore, they are doing this in such a way so as to understand

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their feelings as feelings that constitute a joint experiential act. This feeling-together, Scheler
argues, is not a matter of the involved individuals’ capacity to become aware, in a second move,
that they have an experience of the same sort—like in the case of the train passengers who
worry in a parallel way. Nor is it a matter of their capacity to have affective experiences
whose intentional object is the emotion of another individual, such as in the case of someone
who merely sympathetically feels the sorrow of another person. Rather, it is in virtue of their
being intentionally directed toward a given event in a very particular mode that the involved
individuals come to participate in a joint affective experience. This is why Scheler talks of
an immediate feeling-together.
Against this background, we could formulate a first characterization of the phenomenon
at issue. An episode of joint feeling is a situation in which two or more individuals are emo-
tionally responding to an event in such a way as to non-mistakenly understand their feelings
as affective experiences that immediately bring them to take part in some unified emotional
response.
Taking this possibility for granted, some philosophers have tried to elucidate what it
means to non-mistakenly understand one’s feelings as experiences that bring one to partic-
ipate in a genuinely collective emotional response. In the next section, I shall reconstruct
an attempt to do so that originates in primarily ontological concerns. On this basis, I shall
propose requirements that any adequate phenomenological account of properly joint feeling
must accommodate.

3. Feeling together that our action is morally blameworthy

In the context of the current debate on collective intentionality, Margaret Gilbert (2002) has
offered the most influential account of a collective affective intentional attitude. Her leading
intuition could be stated as follows: if we are to make sense of the idea of a genuinely col-
lective affective intentional attitude, we have to show that there are situations in which we
could speak of an emotion had by the group itself.
Gilbert sets out to show that such a view is defensible by developing an account of what
she calls collective guilt feelings. Extending her previous accounts of collective action and
collective belief, Gilbert proposes that a collective guilt feeling could be understood in terms
of a joint commitment on which the involved individuals have, at least tacitly, agreed. She
writes: “For us collectively to feel guilt over our action A is for us to be jointly committed to feel-
ing guilt as a body over our action A” (2002, 139).
Gilbert provides the following answer to the question as to what exactly the parties
involved in such a joint commitment are committed to: “They are to act as would be ap-
propriate were they to constitute a single subject of guilt feelings” (ibid.). Being aware that
most philosophers do not understand social groups as entities capable of experience, Gilbert
argues for the idea that such a collective response amounts to a collective emotional response
and claims that there is no particular feeling that necessarily accompanies a response of guilt.
She generalizes the claim by asserting that “[p]articular emotions may not require a specific phe-
nomenology” (ibid., 119). Although certain “feeling-sensations”, Gilbert contends, could be
argued to typically accompany our experiences of guilt, all that is needed for us to feel guilt
is a judgment concerning the morally blameworthy character of the acts we feel guilty about
(cf. ibid., 120). Her point is, of course, that this holds true for what she calls a collective guilt
feeling. How compelling is such an account?
Gilbert’s view has been criticized for different reasons. The most common objection
leveled against Gilbert’s position concerns the inadequacy of this proposal as an account of a

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collective affective intentional state (cf. Wilkins 2002; Konzelmann Ziv 2007; Schmid 2009;
Salmela 2012; Sánchez Guerrero 2016). The problem is that it is hard to see to which extent
the invoked joint commitment to “feel guilt as a body” is not merely a joint commitment to
judge a certain action to be morally wrong. And the issue is that such a joint commitment
does not necessarily give rise to a genuinely affective experience.
But there is a second—and more fundamental—problem. It concerns Gilbert’s assump-
tion that the “specific phenomenology” of an emotion is best characterized in terms of the
bodily sensations that contingently, as she correctly points out, accompany this response.
One of the thoughts that have revolutionized the contemporary debate on emotions turns
on the issue that although feelings are at the heart of genuinely emotional responses, to feel
an emotion is not identical to feeling certain bodily sensations. To feel fear, for instance, is
not necessarily to feel the hairs on the back of one’s neck going up and one’s heart beating
faster. Rather, to feel fear means to feel a particular situation to be dangerous (cf. Sartre 1939;
Ricœur 1950; Goldie 2000; Helm 2001; see also Chapter 20 in this volume). The point is
that the intentional character of our emotional experiences may be said to be a matter of
certain feelings that are not sheer sensations, since they are object directed or world construing.
Peter Goldie (2000) calls them feelings towards.
So, even if we granted that there are no feeling-sensations specific to particular kinds of
emotions, we should be careful not to overlook a fundamental issue: being able to respond in
a properly emotional way presupposes being able to feelingly understand the relevant situation
as meriting a particular sort of response.
By the same token, feeling guilt in a joint manner is not a matter of being jointly com-
mitted to deeming some acts of our group to be morally blameworthy and, on this basis,
experiencing some bodily sensations. Rather, it is a matter of feeling together that something
we did deserves some sort of repentance expressing act. If in our attempt to provide an ac-
count of collective emotions we are to take seriously this idea that object-directed feelings
are central to our emotional relation to the world we have to construe the phenomenon at
issue in terms of individuals feeling towards something together.
In the next section, I shall formulate a phenomenologically rooted proposal concerning
what it means to feel toward in a properly joint manner. Before I do so, however, I would like
to stress a distinctive feature that the account reconstructed in this section captures, which is
in a way not paralleled by accounts originating from the phenomenological tradition. What
I am referring to is the normative dimension essential to every genuinely collective inten-
tional act. This is a dimension that Gilbert, extending her original conception of collective
actions and beliefs to the realm of the affective, captures in terms of a joint commitment.
To avoid losing sight of this aspect, while trying to offer a phenomenological account
of joint feeling, we could formulate at this point a condition of adequacy against which to
weigh, then, the resulting view. On the basis of a crucial insight articulated by Bennett
Helm (2001, 2017), we could require from every account of joint feeling that it should
manage to extend to the collective level the following idea: given what we know about the
things that really matter to the subject of emotion, in the relevant situation certain (and
only certain) emotional responses may be taken to be warranted. My extreme anger at a
car driver who ignored the zebra crossing while my daughter wanted to cross the street
may appear warranted, given the extent to which my daughter’s wellbeing matters to me.
But if what in this situation warrants my anger is the import my daughter’s wellbeing has
to me, some contextual explanation would be required, were I, for instance, to react with
disappointment to a letter that confirms that she has been accepted to the school she most
wanted to attend.

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I believe that the latter thought may be accommodated in a way that respects the intu-
ition that object-directed feelings are at the heart of collective emotional responses, too. As
argued in detail elsewhere (Sánchez Guerrero 2016), this could be achieved by construing
a collective emotion in terms of a joint act of felt understanding. According to this view, what
this joint act of feeling discloses is the import something has to the participants as members
of a certain group. And it is this idea that the participants’ emotional feelings disclose the
import the relevant situation has to them (as a group) that makes their responses intelligible as
constituting a properly collective and authentically emotional response.

4. Jointly feeling that it matters to us

Hans Bernhard Schmid has suggested an account that allows us to begin spelling out what
it is to jointly actualize our capacity to feel toward. What brings two or more individuals to
feel that they are participating in a feeling-in-common, Schmid proposes, is the fact that at
the relevant moment, they have come to emotionally express a shared concern (cf. Schmid
2009, 68). This idea could be worked out by appealing again to Helm’s (2001) insight that our
emotions disclose and co-constitute what we care about by disclosing and co- constituting a
unified (and for the most part coherent) personal evaluative perspective (see also Chapter 20
in this volume). In a paper more straightforwardly related to our discussion, Helm (2008)
extends this view by arguing that some of the responses exhibited by certain collectives—he
talks of plural robust agents—may also be taken to disclose a unified (and for the most part
coherent) evaluative perspective; an evaluative perspective the participants share.
The latter proposal allows us to provide a first answer to the question concerning what it
means to jointly actualize our capacity to feel toward: it means to emotionally respond to a
certain event in such a way as to disclose that we (the participants) share an evaluative view
of some aspect of this occurrence.
This, however, can only be a provisional answer. For, not only the sense in which we can
share an emotion, but also the sense in which we can share an evaluative view of the world
or a concern, can be more or less demanding (cf. Salmela 2012). Responding emotionally in
a genuinely joint manner is, hence, not simply a matter of responding in a way that makes
evident that we (the participants) share a concern. Furthermore, it is a matter of being able
to express in an authentically emotional way our capacity to care with one another about
something. Participating in an episode of joint feeling is, hence, a matter of expressing in an
emotional way that we care about something in a particular mode—a mode for which I have
elsewhere used the label caring-with (cf. Sánchez Guerrero 2016).
The question that arises here is, of course, what it means to care with one another about
something, as opposed to merely caring about something alongside each other. Appealing to a
technical notion employed by Martin Heidegger in his analysis of fear (1927, §30), I would
suggest that to care about something in a genuinely joint manner means for two or more
individuals to care about this thing in such a way as to understand a particular group they
take themselves to constitute as the for-the-sake-of-which (das Worum) of their concern, i.e., as
that to which the experiential state refers back as the relevant—in this case plural—subject
of care.1
In order to spell out this idea of caring about something in such a way as to understand
some concrete ‘We’ as the for-the-sake-of-which of our concern-based responses, we could
appeal to Heidegger’s explication of what it is to exist as a human being, i.e., in a care- defined
way. Heidegger seems to suggest that this means to exist in terms of certain possibilities that
one takes oneself to be able to actualize (cf. Blattner 1999). Being a Dasein is thus a matter of

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existing in such a way that in doing what one is doing, one is always already “pressing ahead
into” the actualization of certain possibilities (in Möglichkeiten dringen), thereby leaving other
possibilities unactualized (cf. Heidegger 1927, 184ff.). In this sense, to exist as a human means
to be those concrete possibilities toward whose actualization one is pressing ahead in the
different situations that constitute one’s existence.
On this basis, we could conceive of those situations in which a number of individuals
are actualizing their capacity to care with one another—and these are the sorts of situation
in which individuals can come to participate in an episode of joint feeling—as situations in
which the participants are jointly pressing ahead into the actualization of some concrete pos-
sibilities they together have as a group: possibilities they jointly are. This is the fundamental
sense in which feeling together may be said to be a matter of jointly feeling that something
matters to us, as a group.

5. Feeling in concert and affective synchrony

Let us contrast this proposal with an alternative view of collective emotions that might seem
to resonate with the phenomenological approach to emotions. Its core idea could be captured
as follows: if affective intentionality is a matter of object-directed feelings, genuinely collective
affective intentionality could be said to be a result of highly synchronized object-directed feel-
ings. Recent philosophical work inspired by empirical observations may be taken to suggest
that this idea of affective synchrony is the key to a proper understanding of collective emotions.
Drawing on Randall Collins’ (2004) analysis of the emergence of collective emotions in
interaction rituals, Mikko Salmela offers an account of shared emotions that, among other
things, aims at accommodating the crucial requirements of joint feeling discussed above.
Salmela observes: “[M]ere contingent similarity among people’s emotional responses does
not amount to the collectivity of those responses, let alone to a phenomenological fusion
of individual feelings. The individual responses must be synchronized in order to produce a
shared affective experience” (Salmela 2012, 41).
Here, Salmela is distinguishing between feeling in a merely parallel way and participating
in a collective emotional response. His claim seems to be that the relevant difference could,
at least in part, be captured in terms of the interindividual synchrony of different components
of the participants’ responses. He writes: “I believe that a convergence and synchronization
of both cognitive and non-cognitive elements of emotion is required for such non-reflexive
absorption in shared affect that sometimes takes the form of a phenomenological fusion of
feelings” (2012, 42).2
In the context of an informative classification of degrees of collectivity exhibited by dif-
ferent forms of shared emotions, Salmela construes the experience of affective sharedness in
terms of the result of the mentioned synchronization processes. In particular, he maintains
that different forms of shared emotional experience emerge when, among other things,

the mechanisms of attentional deployment, emotional contagion, facial mimicry, and

behavioral entrainment synchronize the group members’ emotional responses producing
a (…) shared affective experience, either phenomenologically fused or aggregative, with
mutual awareness that the other group members are feeling the same.
(Ibid., 43; my emphasis)

Based on interviews with the members of the Danish String Quartet, Salice et al. (forthcoming)
discuss affective states that can arise in the course of joint musical performances. The authors

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challenge Schmid’s (2014) claim that a pre-reflective form of plural self-awareness is at the
heart of properly collective actions. They do so by showing that musical interaction can also
unfold without a sense of we-agency. In a vein similar to Salmela’s proposal, the authors con-
strue the sense of we-agency that, as they contend, develops only in certain moments of joint
musical performance as a result mainly of synchronization processes. They put a stronger
emphasis than Salmela on the synchronization—or what they call entrainment—of corporeal
aspects that, as they argue, lead to a sense of “intercorporeity”. To this effect, they appeal to
Elizabeth Behnke’s (2008) notion of interkinesthetic affectivity and briefly discuss in this con-
text the importance that shared emotions have for the emergence of the sense of we-agency.
The authors maintain that

interkinesthetic affectivity is unique in generating a feeling of we-agency, a ‘hive-mind’

in which one’s own perception–action loops are coupled to other bodies (in an intercor-
poreity that is also describable in terms of (…) joint body schemas or the experience of
extended peripersonal space), and thus loop intersubjectively.
(Salice et al. 2019, 206)

They suggest that the possibility that a number of individuals, who are making music to-
gether, develop a sense of we-agency and that this depends on the sum of “ingredients like
trust, the intensity of the collective emotion, etc. [which] come in degree[s]” (ibid.). Their
claim, then, is that, the sense of we-agency, understood as something that can come in
degrees, “peaks when interkinesthesia is at the forefront of the [participant’s] experience.
Once [interkinesthetic affectivity] is in place, the sense of individual agency is transformed—
one feels totally absorbed by the group’s activity” (ibid.). Here, too, the crucial point seems
to be the achievement of high degrees of synchrony.
Also alluding to emotions that emerge in the context of musical experiences, Joel Krueger
argues that in certain situations—cases of collective emotion, as he calls them—“a numer-
ically single emotion can be given to more than one subject” (2016, 263). In his discussion,
Krueger also makes use of the term “entrainment” which he, referring to Will and Turrow
(2011), defines as follows: “‘Entrainment’ refers to instances where two or more independent
processes become synchronized with each other, gradually adjusting toward, and eventually
locking into, a common phase and/or periodicity” (Krueger 2016, 267).
Krueger argues that individuals interacting under certain conditions engage in mutual
processes of emotion regulation (“emotional off-loading”). His point is that this gives rise to
affective experiences that could not be had outside such a group context.
Seeking to deliver a picture of the “mechanisms” by means of which a collective accom-
plishes these regulative functions, Krueger discusses the capacity of music to modulate our
affective experiences: “by manipulating our behavioral responses via entrainment, music ma-
nipulates our emotions by taking over what are normally subject-centered, endogenous pro-
cesses of self-regulation” (ibid., 268). Here, too, the capacity of a piece of music or a collective
to modulate the emotions of individuals is understood in terms of certain forms of synchrony.
One virtue of these types of accounts is that they also accommodate the phenomenolog-
ically crucial idea that feelings play a key role in collective emotions. Furthermore, these
arguments may be taken to articulate more straightforwardly the above-formulated thought
that feeling together is a matter of jointly feeling that a particular situation deserves a certain
sort of response. For, the reconstructed proposals conceive of certain feelings that emerge
in the context of interpersonal interactions as affective states able to give rise to a sense of
experiential proximity apt to motivate collective acts.

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Note, however, that in these accounts the experienced fusion of feelings is construed as
something that results from the synchronization of affective states that are, at least initially,
experienced by each participant as her or his affective state. Indeed, a shared emotion is con-
strued here as a state of affairs based on a web of interlocked and highly coordinated formally
individual feelings: feelings whose intentional structure does not refer back to a group as the
subject of the relevant act.3
According to these authors, the key to an account of properly collective emotion lies
in the idea that there are some sorts of affective states that can exclusively be instantiated in
certain pluripersonal contexts apt to induce high degrees of synchrony. But the problem is
that this could hold true for certain merely parallel affective experiences. As far as the partic-
ipants’ experience is concerned, the appeal to high degrees of synchrony cannot (on its own)
explain the crucial difference between feelings the participants experience alongside each
other and feelings they experience together.
This is not a minor point. Indeed, this ostensible shortcoming of the examined proposals
allows us to better understand what is at stake here. The claim that the intentional feelings
by means of which a number of individuals participate in an episode of joint feeling have a
plural for-the-sake-of-which is not an empirical claim concerning merely the probable exis-
tence of some feelings with a peculiar structure. Rather, it is a transcendental philosophical
claim concerning the necessity of such a structure. The point is that we simply cannot make
sense of the idea of a genuinely collective emotional response, as opposed to the idea a highly
coordinated web of individual emotions, without presupposing this structure that certain
affective experiences exhibit.
One could allege that by alluding to a sort of second-order feeling (the emergent “hive-
mind” or the “phenomenological fusion of individual feelings”), the scrutinized proposals
can accommodate the idea of a participation in one and the same joint feeling. But this
move could do its job only if the invoked second-order feelings were to have the structural
property that I have discussed above in terms of a ‘plural for-the-sake-of-which’. In fact, one
could argue that the possibility of the invoked synchronization to induce, in certain cases, a
sense of togetherness is grounded in the following fact: in these cases, the participants always
already understand themselves as confronted with an event that has import to them qua mem-
bers of one and the same group.
To probe the latter intuition, imagine that the train passengers of our example above are
mutually aware not merely of the coincidence between their worries of possibly not reaching
their train connection but also of the perfect synchrony of their respective (formally indi-
vidual) emotions. The individuals would not be able to understand the highly synchronized
emotional expressions as responses that bring them to participate in one and the same joint
experiential act were the feelings that are at the heart of their emotional responses not to be
(tacitly) understood by them as experiences that express the import something has to them (as
a group they have come to constitute, at the latest, as it were, in this situation).
Moreover, it would be a mistake to think that the appeal to some observationally based
cognitive processes that (in a second step) register the perfect synchrony of certain emotions
could offer the basis for a justification of the participants’ belief to the effect that they are
feeling in a joint manner. If, being challenged by a skeptic, they had to explain why they
are convinced that they are feeling in concert (and not merely alongside each other), the
participants could surely appeal to reliable cognitive processes at the core of their mutual
awareness of the perfect synchrony at issue. But this reference would manage to convince
the skeptical observer just in case she shared with the challenged participants the assumption
that this synchrony transforms their emotional experiences in a particular way. And the required

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phenomenal transformation must, at the minimum, transform the object-directed feelings of

the participants into intentional acts with a convergent plural for-the-sake-of-which.
To illustrate the issue, imagine four gifted musicians who are in the last stages of their
preparation for an important audition that is going to decide which of them is going to be
hired by a renowned orchestra. There is only one vacant position. These four musicians
can, for this reason, not be said to constitute a social group. On the contrary, they are com-
petitors. Imagine that the conditions of preparation at this stage of the contest are extreme:
they have to simultaneously and in the same room complete the preparation for their last
(individual) performances. Being aware that they are going to perform the same piece of mu-
sic, they begin to synchronize their individual acts just to avoid, as far as possible, disturbing
each other. Assume that, being gifted musicians, they immediately achieve an extremely
high degree of musical synchrony of which they become aware. Feeling proud of what she
or he is able to musically achieve even under extreme conditions, each of the four musicians
experiences a particular kind of joy that can certainly be said to have some foundation in
this pluripersonal musical act. Being guided by the music, their emotional expressions in this
peculiar situation also rapidly achieve a point of perfect synchrony of which they (in a series
of further cognitive steps) also become mutually aware.
Note that just the way the appeal to the mutual awareness of musical synchrony would
doubtfully convince our skeptical observer—who knows the conditions under which this
‘perfect’ pluripersonal resonant structure emerged—that the participants are performing to-
gether a piece of music, and not merely alongside each other, the appeal to a mutual aware-
ness of the perfect synchrony of their affective states would hardly convince her that they
are feeling together. The problem is that the appeal to the synchrony of affective expressions
offers primarily what we may call a mechanical account. But such an account would be
phenomenologically relevant just in case it could explain in phenomenological terms the
relevant experiential transformation: the transformation that brings the participants to un-
derstand their feelings as part of their joint feeling.
To be sure, neither Salmela nor Krueger seems to take a primarily mechanical account
to be apt to explain the emergence of an experience of affective sharedness. Salmela, for
instance, writes:

Even if it is widely agreed that the causal processes that contribute to the synchroniza-
tion of emotional responses in groups are non-conscious and automatic, recent evidence
suggests that these processes are nevertheless sensitive to social context. Thus, Bourgois
and Hess (2008) found [that] anger and sadness were mimicked only between ingroup
members. Other emotions that may be synchronized only within an ingroup might
include pride, shame, and guilt.
(Salmela 2012, 43)

In an account of the situation described by Scheler, Krueger (2016), on the other hand,
introduces an additional dimension, which he calls “diachronic narrative intimacy”. He
refers in this context to Konzelmann Ziv who in her analysis of Scheler’s example points to
“pre-existing relations of marital love and marital life between the sharers of the feeling, as
well as the relations of biological maternity, of care giving and of parental love to the object
of the shared feeling” (2009, 102).
Observe that both the sensitiveness to an ingroup-status and the requirement of a dia-
chronic narrative intimacy may be accommodated by the idea that two or more individuals
can come to experience their feelings as constituents of a joint feeling just in case they, at the

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relevant moment, always already take themselves to constitute together the group at issue.
This is completely independent of—and cannot be explained by—the level of affective or
behavioral synchrony achieved.
There is, furthermore, an important aspect that the simple image of affective synchrony
is not able to accommodate, namely the normative aspect. On the contrary, the experience
of an emotion self-referentially structured by a plural for-the-sake-of-which may be taken
to entail the experience of a commitment to a series of intentional acts, namely those that
are warranted, given the import something has to us. Imagine a football player who shares
with one of his teammates the position as leading scorer of the tournament. Were the im-
port his team has to him to be of a greater degree than the value he sees in the award as
leading scorer, he ought to feel an impulse to join the rest of the team in a joyful celebration,
would the mentioned teammate in the last minute score a goal that at the same time leads
the team to become champion of the tournament and keeps him from becoming personally
awarded. Were he to exclusively celebrate the goals he himself scores, his teammates could
have reasons to think that in the cases in which he does celebrate his joy merely coincides
with the joy of the other individuals involved in the situation. What is more, were this player
to register in a delayed manner that his teammate has scored, thereby failing to celebrate in
a synchronous way with the other players, his retarded celebration could still be felt by him
and understood by others as a participation in their collective joy.
Failing to adequately synchronize our emotions with the relevant other’s ones we
could still participate (together with them) in an episode of joint feeling and feel com-
pelled to respond in certain ways. One of the virtues of the recommended view is that
it elucidates what it is that enables us to do so. Coming back to the above-formulated
condition of adequacy, the ground for this possibility may be finally articulated here as
follows: joint feeling is feeling that in virtue of an experienced normative pressure to
act in conformity to the import certain things have to us discloses our joint commitment
concerning a certain collective-pressing-ahead-toward—i.e., discloses our capacity to be
this group.4

6. Closing remark
The main reason why the view suggested in this contribution may be seen as a phenomeno-
logically satisfactory account of collective emotion is because it explains the key conception
captured by Scheler’s example: the conception of a participation in a unified feeling. As I
have tried to show, competing views of collective emotion, for different reasons, ultimately
fail to account for this crucial idea. I have argued that the capacity we have to affectively
respond to certain events in such a way as to be able to understand our feelings as feelings
that constitute a joint experiential act is grounded in our capacity to care with one another
about something. I have proposed that we can conceive of those situations in which we are
actualizing our capacity to care with one another as situations in which we (the participants)
non-mistakenly experience ourselves as jointly pressing ahead into the actualization of some
possibilities of a group that we together are. Importantly, the phenomenological characteri-
zation of the conditions met by those experiences that are at the heart of an episode of joint
feeling leads to a description of a state of affairs in which talk of participation in an episode
of joint feeling is warranted. To the extent to which this description captures conditions that
are necessary and jointly sufficient to justify talk of participation in a joint feeling, it may be
understood as a characterization of the ontological conditions of cases of genuinely collective
emotions.

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 Héctor Andrés Sánchez Guerrero

Notes

References
Behnke, Elisabeth (2008). Interkinaesthetic Affectivity: A Phenomenological Approach. Continental
Philosophy Review 41(2), 143–161.
Blattner, William (1999). Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourgois, Patrick, and Hess, Ursula (2008). The Impact of Social Context on Mimicry. Biological
Psychology 77(3), 343–352.
Collins, Randall. (2004). Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gilbert, Margaret (2002). Collective Guilt and Collective Guilt Feelings. The Journal of Ethics 6(2),
115–143.
Goldie, Peter (2000). The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1962[1927]). Being and Time. Transl. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York:
Harper and Row.
Helm, Bennett (2001). Emotional Reason. Deliberation, Motivation, and the Nature of Value. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
——— (2008). Plural Agents. Noûs 42, 17–49.
——— (2017). Communities of Respect. Grounding, Responsibility, Authority, and Dignity. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Konzelmann Ziv, A. (2007). Collective Guilt Feeling Revisited. Dialectica 61, 467–493.
——— (2009). The Semantics of Shared Emotion. Universitas Philosophica 52, 81–106.
Krueger, Joel (2016). The Affective ‘We’: Self-regulation and Shared Emotions. In: T. Szanto and D.
Moran (Eds.). The Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’. London, New York: Routledge,
263–280.
Ricœur, Paul (2009[1950]). Philosophie de la Volonté I: Le Volontaire et l’Involontaire. Paris: Édition Points.
Salice, Alessandro, Høffding, Simon, and Gallagher, Shaun (2019). Putting Plural Self-awareness into
Practice: The Phenomenology of Expert Musicianship. Topoi 38(1), 197–209.
Salmela, Mikko (2012). Shared Emotions. Philosophical Explorations 15(1), 33–46.
Salmela, Mikko, and Nagatsu, Michiru (2016). Collective Emotions and Joint Action. Journal of Social
Ontology 2(1), 33–57.
Sánchez Guerrero, Héctor A. (2016). Feeling Together and Caring with One Another: A Contribution to the
Debate on Collective Affective Intentionality. Cham: Springer.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1939). Esquisse d’une Théorie des Emotions. Paris: Hermann.
Scheler, Max (2008[1913]). The Nature of Sympathy. Transl. by P. Heath. New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers.
Schmid, Hans Bernhard (2003). Can Brains in Vats Think as a Team? Philosophical Explorations 6(3),
201–218.
——— (2009). Plural Action: Essays in Philosophy and Social Science. Dordrecht: Springer.
——— (2014). Plural Self-Awareness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13(1), 7–24.

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Stein, Edith (1922). Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissen-
schaften. Zweite Abhandlung: Individuum und Gemeinschaft. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänom-
enologische Forschung, Vol. V. Halle: Niemeyer, 116–283. [Engl. Transl.: Philosophy of Psychology and
the Humanities. Transl. by M. C. Baseheart, and M. Sawicki. Washington D.C.: ICS Publications
2000.]
Szanto, Thomas (2015). Collective Emotions, Normativity, and Empathy: A Steinian Account. Human
Studies 38(4), 503–527.
——— (2017). Review of Feelings of Being Together and Caring with One Another: A Contribution to the
Debate on Collective Affective Intentionality. Journal of Social Ontology 3(2), 267–273.
Wilkins, Burleigh (2002). Joint Commitments. The Journal of Ethics 6(2)3, 145–155.
Will, Udo, and Turrow, Gabe (2011). Introduction to Entrainment and Cognitive Ethnomusicology.
In: J. Berger, and G. Turrow (Eds.). Music, Science, and the Rhythmic Brain: Cultural and Clinical Im-
plications. London, New York: Routledge, 3–30.
Zahavi, Dan (2018). Collective Intentionality and Plural Pre-Reflective Self-Awareness. Journal of
Social Philosophy 49(1), 61–75.

Further Reading
Osler, Lucy (forthcoming). Feeling Togetherness Online: A Phenomenological Sketch of Online
Communal Experiences. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. doi:10.1007/s11097-019-09627-4.
Thonhauser, Gerhard (2018). Shared Emotions: A Steinian Proposal. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences 17(5), 997–1015.

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 41
Political emotions
Thomas Szanto and Jan Slaby

1. Introduction
Philosophers, cultural, social and political scientists are increasingly recognizing affectiv-
ity as an essential dimension of the political. Affectively charged political rhetoric, polit-
ical strategies, and the global rise of populist and nationalist movements have contributed
to this resurging interest in political affectivity (cf. Cossarini and Vallespín 2019). Yet,
when one recent political economy bestseller’s title reads Nervous States: How Feeling Took
Over the World (Davies 2018), anybody who is at all familiar with the history of political
philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Montesquieu
and, indeed, Kant, to contemporary postfoundational political theorists is likely to meet
such a title with a raised eyebrow. Arguably, it is not news that the political is deeply
stirred by affect and emotions. But affectivity is not just some by-product of a properly
“emotion-proof ” ( Demertzis 2013) political domain based on rational judgment, delib-
eration and (self-)interest, as some traditional liberal political theorists have suggested
(Hirschman 1977; Holmes 1995).1 Rather, the political—the realm in which we negotiate
our plurality and differences with a view to freedom, power, individual autonomy, collec-
tive recognition or our forms of living- together—is essentially affective. In this respect,
‘the political’ must be distinguished from policy-making or ‘real politics’, where affec-
tivity and emotions are typically also involved, but often just contingently so (cf. Slaby
and Bens 2019). The political is affective because it fundamentally deals with what matters
to us, what we value, fear or desire, or what concerns us—us as a polity. Conversely, the
affective is always political, since emotions are not just subjective affairs but are governed
by “feeling rules” (Hochschild 1983) and are modulated by shared or conflicting values.
Hence, emotions always involve the negotiation of what, how, and with (or against)
whom we ought to feel.
In the wake of the ‘affective turn’, political affect and emotions have been widely inves-
tigated in various research fields. Within cultural studies, there has been a special emphasis
on gender, the ‘politics of affect,’ and power (Ahmed 2004; Thrift 2008; Butler 2009;
Bargetz 2015, 2020). Political theorists have focused on the ambivalent role of emotions
in liberal democracies, and on ‘hostile’ emotions and sentiments such as disgust, resent-
ment, or hatred in the context of political tensions, nationalism, genocide, or transitional

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and post- conflict retributive justice processes (Brudholm and Lang 2018; Hutchinson
and Bleiker 2008; Crociani-Windland and Hoggett 2012; Hoggett and Thompson 2012;
Demertzis 2013; Mihai 2016). Political psychologists have targeted, for instance, the role
of affects in voters’ behaviour, political judgment, campaigning, or in the context of
(post-)war conflicts (Marcus 2002; Redlawsk 2006; Neuman et al. 2007; Åhäll and Gregory
2015). Sociologists addressed political emotions in activism and social and protest move-
ments (Goodwin et al. 2001; Flam and King 2005; Van Stekelenburg and Klandermans
2013; Jasper 2018), and social psychologists have investigated different affective and politi-
cal reactions to in-group and out-group members based on emotional group-identification
(Clarke et al. 2006; Halperin 2016).
In philosophy, some have drawn on the work of the French philosopher Deleuze and on
historical resources in Spinoza and Bergson for analyzing the “socio-somatic” (Protevi 2009),
dynamic and relational nature of political affect (Protevi 2014; Massumi 2015; Lordon 2016;
Slaby 2017). Others have reassessed ancient Greek and further historical sources (Sokolon
2003; Hall 2005; Kingston and Ferry 2008; Koziak 2010) or aimed at bridging political
philosophy or psychology with contemporary philosophy of emotions (Solomon 1995; James
2003; Nussbaum 2013; Mohrmann 2015; Romano 2018).
This wide-ranging discussion can be broadly sorted into approaches that focus on emo-
tions, and those that focus on affect. While emotions are usually construed as mental states
with specific intentional contents or directed at specific affectively significant targets—for
example fear, anger, shame, hatred, envy or indignation—affect is an ontologically broader
and less specific category. This is especially so in the Spinoza- and Deleuze-inspired per-
spective prevalent in recent cultural studies and parts of continental philosophy. Within this
context, affect is seen as a dynamic relationality between organic and non-organic bodies,
comprising an ontological layer of reality prior to and formative of intentionally directed
emotions (see Slaby and Mühlhoff 2019). Not surprisingly, these two approaches have rather
little in common. In order to prevent confusion, and not least because there is a significant la-
cuna of philosophical discussions about the political nature of emotions, in the present chap-
ter, we focus on the political character of just these, leaving considerations about affect aside.2
With regard to political emotions, there are several important issues that remain contro-
versial and little understood: In what sense exactly is the political essentially tied to emo-
tions? And what makes emotions political? Is it their public expression and recognition? Is
it their reference to a political community and the sharedness of the concerns? How and
by whom are political emotions felt? What is their normative function, and can they be
appropriate or inappropriate? Are forms of antagonisms—along with their orientation to
commonality—built into the very heart of political emotions qua political, as anti-liberal
political theorists in the tradition of Carl Schmitt (1932) or post-foundational democracy
theorists (Mouffe 2013; cf. Mihai 2014) claim?
To address these issues, we elaborate the conceptual preconditions that must be fulfilled
such that the qualifier ‘political’ can be applied to emotions in the first place (Section 2). We
then sketch a multi-dimensional approach to political emotions3 and employ the concept of
‘collective affective intentionality’ as an explicative framework. We argue that political emo-
tions in the robust sense constitute a subclass of collective emotions—collective emotions
that disclose a shared concern of political import, claim public recognition and affectively
and normatively modulate the emotional life of the members of a polity (Section 3). Finally,
we demonstrate how political emotions essentially contain an orientation towards—often
contested or ‘agonistic’—forms of communalization (Section 4).

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2. Emotions and the political: preliminaries

In this section, we provide a provisionary sketch of the relationship between emotions and
the political. In order to approach political emotions, we start out from a construal of emo-
tions as repeatable sequences of embodied relations—relations both among actors and be-
tween actors and environment. Most generally, what qualifies social relations as emotional
is their systematic relatedness to what matters—to individuals as well as to collectives. As en-
gagements with matters of concern emotional comportments inevitably raise questions with
regard to what has—or should have—significance and what might or should be done about
it. This lends emotions a complex normative dimension (see Section 3.2).
Against this background, it is relatively easy to see that the political is non-contingently
interlinked with emotions. No matter whether the political is understood in terms of for-
mative power relations (Saar 2013), in terms of the formation of collectives (see Section 3),
in terms of human freedom (Arendt 1961) and contingency (Marchart 2007), or as antag-
onistic relations between collectives or social formations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Mouffe
2013)—emotions loom large in its affairs. Think of the aversive sentiments in an open polit-
ical conflict, or of the enthusiasm accompanying political sea changes, or the fear, envy and
resentment directed at powerful or wealthy factions in divided societies, hatred in intergroup
and ethnic conflicts or feelings of solidarity within social movements. Likewise, consider the
public outrage in response to manifest social injustice, or the “collective joy” (Ehrenreich
2007) that energizes grass-root political initiatives, or the tricks and techniques of emotional
modulation employed strategically by expert politicians. But pointing to such cases is cer-
tainly not enough to see how ‘the political’ is essentially affective or how emotions can be
counted as political emotions properly speaking.
We cannot revisit the debate about the nature of ‘the political’ in contra-distinction to in-
stitutionalized ‘real politics’, as it has been conducted especially in French Theory informed
political philosophy in recent decades (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997; Marchart 2007).
Instead, we circle in on an interrelated cluster of issues that we deem central for determining
the affective nature of the political and the political nature of political emotions (regardless
of whether these issues might also be manifest in concrete political practices and institutions).
For a start, consider Hannah Arendt’s dictum that “freedom is the raison d’être of politics”
(Arendt 1961, 146)4: Only beings who are not confined to natural necessity and thus capable
of self-determination, however limited, have both the capacity and the need for politics. Ac-
cordingly, the political, for Arendt, is the dimension pertaining to the active determination
of that which is not already determined for human collectives. The political is a collective
engagement with contingence—a matter of shaping the world in certain ways.
The partial freedom from necessity that Arendt highlights implies a further key dimen-
sion of the political: the possibility, but also the need, to form alliances—to act in concert,
as Arendt (1958) puts it—and also the all-too acute possibility of conflict and antagonism
resulting from free beings encountering one another. Another crucial aspect is implied by
Arendt’s general characterization: political concerns are only those that make some (implicit
or explicit) claim to public recognition, where these claims are typically, but pace Arendt
(1958) not necessarily, explicitly raised in a public sphere. Freedom, contingency, collectiv-
ity, antagonism and publicity—these are five different yet constitutively interlinked ‘names’
of the political.
Unsurprisingly, there are many rivalling accounts of the nature of the political. But the
most foundational quarrel is the one between Arendt’s associative paradigm, where the polit-
ical is at base a matter of commonality, collectivity or collective action, and the dissociative

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paradigm forcefully articulated by Carl Schmitt (1932; cf. Marchart 2007). For Schmitt, the
essence of the political lies in the possibility to draw and enact the distinction between friend
and enemy—i.e., association by dissociation. Accordingly, Schmitt defines the political in
terms of the instituting power of the ever-lurking possibility of, and indeed the preparedness
and ability to, engage in conflict or war.
Regardless of which side one takes in the debate between Arendtians and Schmittians,
what matters presently is just the broad contours of an understanding of the political shared
by both camps. On the level of analysis needed for studying the general structure of politi-
cal emotions, alliance, antagonism, contingency and (bounded) freedom operate together as
a tension-riddled constellation that is characteristic of the political, whatever its particular
manifestations.

3. Political emotions: collectivity and normativity

Consider the following examples for political emotions: anger of state-employees in the
face of cutting paid lunch-breaks, leading to nation-wide strikes; indignation of an affluent
downtown apartment owner on behalf of precarious creative industry workers and low-
income families in the neighbourhood, who are forced to move due to steeply rising rents;
resentment and feelings of powerlessness or hatred on the part of minorities over failed
retributive justice in the wake of ethnic cleansing they have suffered; or a still simmering
but growing hope for a future when humanity would come to terms with its failings and
reverse climate change. What, if anything, do these emotions and sentiments, with such
saliently different affective and political impact, power-relations and political stakes, have in
common? And what makes them political in the first place?
In this section, we propose to answer these questions by first considering the intentional
structure of political emotions, i.e., what philosophers of emotion call affective intentional-
ity (Slaby 2008). Next, we will zero in on the distinctive and complex normative structure
of political emotions.

3.1 The collective affective intentionality

account of political emotions
Affective intentionality refers to the evaluative world-orientation of emotions, their capacity
to disclose the world in light of specific concerns. The key point of the concept is that the
intentional evaluation of objects, persons and events is intrinsically linked to their affective
import for the subjects of those evaluations. Intentional evaluation and affective import are
not two separate components of emotions. Rather, emotions are “feelings-towards” (Goldie
2000), or “felt evaluations” (Helm 2001). Moreover, the concerns, in the light of which felt
evaluations gain their affective weight so as to matter, holistically hang together. They form
more or less coherent patterns that constitute the overall emotional orientations of the sub-
jects (cf. Chapter 20 in this volume).
Particularly relevant for our purpose is that some recent phenomenologically inspired
work applies the concept of affective intentionality to collectives, and suggests a collective af-
fective intentionality (CAI) account (Schmid 2009; Guerrero Sánchez 2016; Thonhauser 2018;
see Chapter 40 in this volume). Now, we suggest applying the CAI account to political
emotions. Applying CAI to political emotions means taking their affective phenomenology
seriously: political emotions are not mere cognitive appraisals or evaluations of import in

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the service of political judgment. Rather, they have an experiential dimension and are felt
in certain ways.
CAI is the disposition of a group to jointly disclose situations or events in light of more
or less unified patterns of shared concerns. Notice that this disposition is not actualized by
groups as such, but by individual members’ “feeling-towards together” (Guerrero Sánchez
2016). Hence, CAI requires no emergent or supra-individual subject as the bearer of col-
lective emotions. On the other hand, collective emotions are not reducible to some loose
affective interaction between members either. Specifically, collective emotions are neither
reducible to what psychologists call ‘social appraisal’, nor to communicative sharing of emo-
tional information (Michael 2011). Similarly, collective emotions cannot be construed in
terms of the “synchronous convergence” of individuals’ emotions towards the same target
(von Scheve and Ismer 2013), a mere affective resonance between individuals or so-called
emotional contagion (Hatfield et al. 2014).
In applying the CAI account to political emotions, we argue that robustly political emo-
tions too must be jointly felt. That is to say, they are not merely based on affective interac-
tions between citizens either, but on affectively shared evaluations that disclose concerns of
political import. According to our proposal, there are three necessary and in conjunction
sufficient requirements for members of a community to affectively share political concerns
in this robust sense5:

1 The members’ emotions have a double affective-intentional focus: (a) a focus on the same
matter of political import and (b) a background focus on the political community itself.
2 Members implicitly or explicitly claim public recognition of the emotions and their import
for the polity.
3 There are certain reciprocal relations between the community’s emotional outlook and
that of the members: The very shared nature of political emotions must feed into the
individuals’ felt experience, or their affective concern for the polity, and it must have
normative impact on their emotion regulation, their political motivation and comportment and
on the appropriateness of their emotions. Thus, there will be an affective and normative
integration of the members’ emotions.

The initial consideration underlying (1) is that emotions cannot be properly shared unless the
respective members acknowledge their sharedness. Note that this acknowledgment need not
occur via any direct, let alone mutual, awareness of each other’s emotions. Members of a po-
litical community often lack direct bodily or communicative interaction, and typically, the
acknowledgement involves symbolic, ritualistic or discursive forms of mediation. Moreover,
the subjects of such shared political emotions must not only acknowledge the sharedness of
their concerns, but also the import of those concerns for the community. The ‘double aspect’
of the affective intentionality of political emotions in sketched in (1) is meant to capture
this.6 As part of their affective focus, political emotions thus involve the concern for a group
and its felt evaluative outlook. The key idea, then, is that in political emotions, individuals
overtly or tacitly pay “reverence” (Helm 2017) to the emotional outlook of their (actual or
projected) political community. Thus, members not only reinforce this outlook but also
co-constitute it as theirs—as their jointly felt evaluation.
Concerning (2), we argue that it is this very sharedness that makes political emotions
publicly recognizable in a way that non-political emotions are not.7 To be sure, a fan crowd at
a football match vociferously cheering for their team is also readily recognizable publicly.
However, there is a significant difference between a sports fan crowd and a political protest

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group: As shared concerns of import for the political community, political emotions must
also always involve a claim to public recognition. In addition to recognizing their manifest
concerns, this is also a claim for others to recognize these concerns as being of import for the
community at stake. We take this to be an ontologically foundational claim: One need not
publicly express or enact this claim for recognition to transpire.
As we have just seen, the community whose political concerns are at stake must figure
among the emotion-constitutive concerns. Now, the community ‘at stake’ may already be
constituted and united by some shared political concerns, or it may be a community ‘in the
making’. In the latter case, the community’s evaluative outlook is not yet settled even if
engaged individuals might emphatically endorse it. To be sure, emotions not only facilitate
a sense of belonging to a putative or given community but also a community’s constitution
as a community of a concern. Furthermore, political emotions shape individuals’ socio-
affective relations to certain political communities, and may eventually modulate their polit-
ical and social identity, even if they are not actual members of those communities. Consider a
white-collar employee who, in feelings of solidarity, comes to share the concerns of working
class citizens and engages in related activism. She may thus incorporate those working class
concerns into her social identity without ever belonging to the working class.
Now, before outlining the various affective and normative relations of reciprocity (3)
in the next two subsections, we need to further specify the affective-intentional structure
of political emotions. Following affective-intentional accounts of emotions, we must first
distinguish the target of an emotion from its focus. The target of an emotion is the object
eliciting the emotional reaction; its focus is the object of import, or the background feature
of the object that makes the emotion’s evaluation of the target intelligible (Helm 2001, 2017;
Slaby 2008). Say, the target of my anger is the finance minister’s decision to lower corporate
taxes, while its focus is the state of the tax-dependent medical care system. The target of
political emotions may involve quite different kinds of objects: political events or policies,
politicians, discursive elites, majority or minority groups, individual proxies or representa-
tives of groups, etc. Often, in certain antagonistic political emotions, the target is a diffuse or
overgeneralized object: think of Ressentiment directed at ‘the establishment’, distrust borne
towards ‘the media’, or hatred in the face of ‘hordes of refugees’. In such cases, the negatively
evaluated properties (e.g., greed, exploitation) are transposed from individuals to groups
or to some unspecified ‘Other’, or individuals are treated as stereotypical proxies of groups
(cf. Szanto forthcoming).
The target on its own, however, will not suffice to render an emotion political, even if
it qualifies as a political object in some relevant sense.8 Our point is not only that, for in-
stance, my repulsion of the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro as a despicable human being
is insufficient to render my repulsion political. Moreover, even my repulsion of him as a
homophobe will not suffice for it to count as a political emotion properly speaking, as long
as homophobia is only of my individual concern. Instead, we suggest that for the emotion
to have political import, it must also have a background focus, namely a concern for the actual,
putative or imaginary political community. But above and beyond their general background
focus, political emotions always have specific concerns as their focus as well.
It is worth noting that target and focus do not always overlap. Political discourse often
aims precisely at driving them apart. Consider the hatred of refugees. Typically, that hatred
is not focused on individual refugees, but nor is its focus on heterogeneous refugee-groups.
Rather, the focus tends to be on the putatively endangered ethnic or cultural homogeneity
of the host country, some readily invoked ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition, or an allegedly un-
ambiguous Western liberal Enlightenment heritage (cf. Mishra 2017). Thus, in some cases,

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such as intergroup hatred, the focus of political emotions is “blurred” and the intentional
object of the emotions is “overgeneralized” (Szanto forthcoming). As Scheler’s classic-
phenomenological study (1912/1919) demonstrates, this feature of an indeterminate focus
is also distinctive of Ressentiment. According to Scheler, Ressentiment is characterized by
an unfocused intentionality “radiating” in all directions (Scheler 1912/1919, 60). Instead of
making the concerns of the emoter salient, the affective focus of Ressentiment is uninforma-
tive of what really matters to the emoters.9
In other cases, though, political emotions will have a clear focus. In such cases, they will
also have clear epistemic functions and contribute to so-called ‘political sophistication’, or the
capacity and attempts to integrate complex and often diffuse political information (Schreiber
2007; Miller 2011). Paradigmatic examples here are emotions that drive political movements,
such as anger, moral outrage or indignation (e.g., the Spanish and Greek Indignants). Such
emotions will alert or capture the attention of oneself, one’s peers, or third parties to the
underlying political concerns at stake, and facilitate critical reappraisal of the information
upon which the evaluation is based (Romano 2018; cf. Brady 2013).

3.2 Towards a multi-dimensional taxonomy

We have seen that, for an emotion to count as political in the robust sense of a CAI-type polit-
ical emotion, it is not enough that individuals have certain affective reactions towards political
issues. Nor is it sufficient that they simply interact or group-identify with other political subjects
and actors who have the same or similar emotional reactions. Rather, we have argued that what
renders emotions political in the robust sense is a jointly felt evaluative outlook that involves a
number of requirements: an acknowledgment of the sharedness of concern and import for the
political community, a concern for the community itself, a claim for the public recognition of
the former, and a reciprocal modulation and integration of individuals’ emotional experiences.
To be sure, this is a demanding model. However, notice our emphasis on ‘robustness’
here. To accommodate emotions that are not shared in the robust sense of the CAI model,
but which do still have a political focus, we propose a multi-dimensional account. Consider,
for example, an individual’s fear of social déclassement due to certain socio-economic and
political developments; that fear may modulate one’s voting behaviour without, however,
resulting in any robustly shared sense of belonging to a class or political group. Contrast
this to emotions jointly expressed in a political movement or with the motivational power
for even existentially dangerous political action that feelings of solidarity in certain protest
movements might generate. Accounting for such differences also helps clarify the flexibility
of behaviour among voters who are not politically organized or who do not group-identify
with any political organization or class—a phenomenon evidenced by the current erosion of
established parties across Western democracies.
Accordingly, we need to differentiate not just between individual and shared political
emotions but also among different levels of emotional sharing and their distinct socio-
psychological mechanisms (see Salmela 2014; Salmela and Nagatsu 2016; cf. Barsade and
Knight 2015). At the minimum, we can distinguish the following levels:
(a) Weakly shared political emotions; at this level, sharedness is based on social appraisal or
on the socio-communicative sharing of information. An individual’s emotional appraisal of a
political fact or event is influenced and modulated by relevant others’ appraisals (Rimé 2007;
cf. Michael 2011), as for example when individuals’ xenophobic fears are reinforced by po-
larized peer-discussions. Incidentally, these mechanisms are partly responsible for so-called
‘emotional enclaves’ (see Section 3.3), especially if they are amplified by social or mass media.

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(b) Group-based political emotions; here, political emotions are based on individuals’
self-categorization as members of a political community and their concomitant group-
identification (cf. Smith et al. 2007). In addition to their appraisal of certain political facts
or events, such emotions also re-evaluate one’s relation to the (putative) group, and typically
serve as “amplifier” of the emotion (Halperin 2016). Think of feeling guilt, shame, or indig-
nation ‘in the name of ’ one’s group.
(c) Finally, we have more or less diachronically robust, public, and properly speaking col-
lective political emotions. These are precisely based on a shared and jointly felt evaluation of the
target in light of the community’s concerns.
Let us emphasize that only (c) requires the existence of an actual community and an actual
interaction between members. Such interaction can take place either in physical co-presence
or, more typically, in variously mediated (e.g., by social media), in shared public spaces, or in
the so-called ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor 2004). But emotions still qualify as political as long as
the individuals’ affective focus involves reference to a public space of shared concerns—even
if those individuals ultimately turn out to be political Robinson Crusoes and the allegedly
social imaginary nothing but an imaginary space.
In contrast, we can dub emotions that only have a politically relevant focus but are other-
wise in no relevant sense of (a) to (c) related to a political community as such, politically focused
emotions. According to our account, however, these are not ‘political emotions’ properly
speaking. Consider somebody who is angry in the face of a policy reform of employment
laws that affect her working-hours, but who doesn’t have any solidary with similarly affected
employees.
Coming back to the reciprocity requirement above (3), notice that differences in the
robustness of sharing correspond not just to the mentioned behavioural or motivational
differences (voting, joining social movements, etc.) but also to certain phenomenological and
normative differences in the participants’ affective and political life. Consider, for example,
how the fact that I share my indignation about a political event with others modulates the
very felt quality of my emotion. This different phenomenology has much to do with ac-
companying feelings of solidarity (cf. Chapter 45 in this volume). Such feelings of solidarity
will, in turn, have certain motivational and normative functions. Most obviously, they will
reinforce political identification and might motivate members to join a political movement.
Mere individual group-identification will not have the same effects.
Collective political emotions often also express, or indeed co-constitute, a sense of the
breaching of shared values. And, as moral address, such emotions do more than simply tar-
get the disruptors of the normative order. They are also directed at one’s own community
or at third parties, whom they may address as witnesses of the violation and as implicit
benefactors or potential agents of restorative justice (cf. Brudholm 2008; MacLachlan
2010; Mihai 2016; Salmela and von Scheve 2018). Consider, for example, indigenous
Canadians’ resentment towards the forefathers of non-indigenous citizens regarding a
forced schooling policy (see MacLachlan 2010; Stockdale 2013): the resentment is not pri-
marily directed at the forefathers themselves but at their contemporary successors or cur-
rent quasi-colonial conditions, while also focusing fellow indigenous citizens’ collective
memory or shared vulnerability. Thereby, these emotions (re-)establish or (re-)enforce
sympathy or solidarity with, and among, say, the oppressed. But often the inverse will also
happen, as when groups refuse to recognize grounds for such collective or proxy resent-
ment and instead bear resentment towards the ‘resenters.’ Think, for instance, of overtly
or covertly misogynistic anti-‘MeToo’ repercussions, or of anti-Semitic refusals of the
‘remembrance culture’.

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3.3 The normativity of political emotions

Phenomenological differences between the above-sketched types of political emotions are
intimately tied to differences regarding their normative dimensions. In particular, different
types of political emotions correlate to differences in normative power and to the pressure
they place upon individuals regarding what and how they ought to feel (together), and how
they ought to express, voice and enact certain emotions.
Concerning their normative power, collective indignation or resentment, for example, are
surely more powerful emotions for restorative claims of justice than interpersonal emotions
or the ‘private’ resentment of individuals towards certain groups. Concerning their different
normative pressures, consider the difference between personal and collective commitment
to feel something. For instance, if I sincerely share my anger with my ‘fellow-travellers’,
and am thus committed to the emotion’s shared focus, it will not be quite appropriate to
only half-heartedly join demonstrations, and even less appropriate to ridicule in private my
fellow-travellers for their naïve behaviour. On pain of feeling excluded or being in fact ex-
cluded from the community, I will rather have to regulate, monitor, express and enact my
emotions accordingly.
In more general terms, there are three interrelated but distinct normative issues regarding
political emotions:
(i) The first has to do with their normative capacity and function vis-à-vis political con-
cerns. Emotions clearly have not just an epistemic but also a normative function. For exam-
ple, they voice or testify to moral breaches or reclaim moral or social norms. The paradigm
emotions usually invoked here belong to the class of moral emotions that Strawson (1962)
famously labelled ‘reactive attitudes’, and in particular, resentment, contempt, indignation,
moral outrage or anger (e.g., Rawls 1971; Nussbaum 2016), and shame (Tarnopolsky 2010;
Locke 2016). Moreover, many have argued that emotions help establish and maintain attach-
ments to otherwise abstract liberal or democratic political values, such as equality, fairness
or justice (Walzer 2004; Hall 2005; Kingston 2011; Nussbaum 2013). Others have claimed
that they constitute a sense of justice and contribute to its cultivation (Solomon 1995). Ever
since ancient Greek discussions of political emotions, and in particular Aristotle’s Rhetoric,
whenever philosophers or political theorists discuss the normative dimension of political
emotions, it is usually only these normative functions they have in view. However, there are
two equally important normative dimensions, albeit normative in a different sense.
(ii) As we have seen, collective affective intentionality puts certain normative pressures on
individuals’ emotional regulation and expression, and indeed on the very way they (ought
to) feel. These norms are particularly powerful in political contexts. But they do not exert
their normative powers so much by individuals’ “joint commitment to feel” “as one body”.
According to such a joint commitment account of collective emotions, suggested by Gilbert
(2002, 2014), members retain the right to “rebuke” each other for unilateral affective devi-
ance. But the norms at issue work more subtly and indeed more effectively: namely by means
of internalized “feeling rules” (Hochschild 1983) or what Hochschild (2016) calls “deep
stories”, viz. narratives that we are told and re-tell ourselves about how, given our political
identifications and allegiances, we ought to feel about certain socio-cultural or political is-
sues. And when such norms and internalized narratives sediment themselves abidingly, they
constitute what has recently been described as “emotional habitus” or “emotional culture”
(Illouz 2007; Barsade and Knight 2015).
Habitualized emotion norms guide and police appropriateness of emotions with regard
to the display, suppression, or duration, of the emotion. They also apply to the perceived

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appropriateness of specific types of emotions vis-à-vis specific emotional targets, which is coded
within particular political communities (‘We are not complainers like those welfare-benefit
recipients’; ‘War-refugees don’t deserve compassion, they are traitors and should rather fight
for their freedom, as we have’; ‘These are liberal sympathies, not ours’; cf. Hochschild 2016).
As Hochschild arrestingly puts it, what often happens here is that “people are segregating
themselves into different emotionally toned enclaves—anger here, hopefulness and trust
there” (2016, 6). In more positive terms, such norms affectively integrate individuals’ affec-
tive concerns into the broader network of the political community’s concerns, and thus they
(re-)align individuals around a shared emotional perspective.
(iii) Finally, there is another central, but so far largely ignored,10 dimension to the nor-
mative appropriateness of political emotions. This dimension is best conceived of in terms
of emotions’ so-called “fittingness”. As a number of analytic philosophers of emotions have
convincingly argued, fittingness is orthogonal to the moral appropriateness of emotions, but
also to any instrumental or prudential consideration (de Sousa 1987; Helm 2001; D’Arms and
Jacobson 2010; Salmela 2014). Fittingness is not a question of which emotions are, as it were,
good, or when it is right to feel or express them. Nor is the issue which emotions are condu-
cive to certain political goals. Rather, what is at stake is whether an emotion is fitting in the
sense that its intentional object actually has the evaluative features that the respective emo-
tion discloses to the emoter. Fittingness thus does not appeal to objective evaluative prop-
erties, and it is neutral to value-realism.11 As such, the concept allows us to ask whether an
emotion’s focus picks out those evaluative properties that really matter to the emoters themselves.
To illustrate, consider again Ressentiment, a sentiment that has been repeatedly identi-
fied as a driving emotional mechanisms of right-wing populism (in contrast to resentment
as a form of shared moral anger fuelling left-wing populism; cf. Salmela and von Scheve
2018). Ressentiment is precisely an emotional mechanism that renders certain emotions—
primarily envy and shame—unfitting in the above sense. Imagine somebody who has fully
internalized the values of a success-oriented individualistic society, and envies the success of
others. He feels powerless, fears that he cannot keep pace, and is ashamed in the face of these
insufficiencies. Facilitated by the repression mechanism characteristic of Ressentiment, he
eventually comes to conceive of the desired values (success, wealth, etc.) in a self- deceptive
fashion as something undesirable (‘success only corrupts’) or as based on reprehensible values
(e.g., greediness). Thus, in a process of “transvaluations of values” (Nietzsche 1887), desirable
values that one finds oneself powerless to attain are reassessed as non-desirable or repre-
hensible. This is a clear case of an inappropriate relation between an emotion and its focus,
since the sentiment discloses subjectively ‘false’ values to the emoter. Accordingly, Scheler
(1912/1919) views Ressentiment as an “illusion of evaluative feeling”.12 As we shall see in the
next section, such subjectively unfitting or self-deceptive affective mechanisms will only be
reinforced on the collective level, leading to ever-fortified emotional enclaves.

4. Collectivity, the political and the “agonistic” dialectic

Our provisional result is that robustly political emotions affectively and normatively align
individuals around a shared emotional perspective and, at the same time, exclude, vitiate or
even aim to eliminate those not endorsing that perspective. Moreover, we have argued that
the distinctive feature of political emotions is a concern for the (real or imagined) polity.
This polity is part of the manifest content of the overall emotional outlook, and variously
modulates individuals’ emotional experience and behaviour. Viewed thus, a certain striving
for communalization as such forms a fundamental concern of political emotions.

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However, this needs to be immediately qualified: surely, not all types of communities are
grounded in a political concern. As we have seen, concerns are only political if they recog-
nize the possibility, as well as the need, to form alliances in the face of finite and contested
resources; ultimately, they thus have individual and collective freedom in view. Moreover,
recall that concerns only qualify as political in the proper sense if they make some claim for
public recognition. Accordingly, a family or a circle of friends or a team at one’s workplace
will not, under normal circumstances, qualify to ground an allegiance or antagonism (or
both) that carries political weight.
In this section, we aim to show how in the striving for communalization, there is always
an element of both allegiance and antagonism involved, no matter whether communalization
assumes directly associative or dissociative forms. We suggest that political emotions essen-
tially involve a certain “agonistic” dialectic of allegiance and antagonism (Mouffe 2013).
Simply put, our suggestion is that both sharedness and antagonism are built into the very
heart of political emotions. Shared emotional outlooks will always involve some who do
not share them: those who do not wish to partake, those who are excluded from partaking,
or those who are negatively evaluated by it. But there are different aspects of this still very
general claim. To determine which form of ‘agonism’ applies, one must look case by case
at concrete instantiations of political emotions. We cannot provide any such contextual
analysis here; instead, in accordance with our multi-dimensional model, we shall sketch a
rough-and-ready taxonomy of possible manifestations of agonistic communalization, which
in actual scenarios typically intermesh:
(i) There are manifestations of directly associative communalization. These may come in
the form of group-identification, the aspiration for group inclusion, or alliance-formation,
in the sense of the CAI account. This will vary according to the level and type of affective
sharing outlined above. Finally, directly associative communalization may also involve uto-
pian hope, revolutionary ‘enthusiasm’ (Mohrmann 2015), or the anticipation of imagined
political communities to come (Nancy 1991; Agamben 1993).
(ii) On the other hand, the political arena is also characterized by outright affective an-
tagonism in the form of hostile emotions, such as hatred, distrust, resentment, indignation,
moral outrage or disgust, or more subtle ‘anti-pathetic’ emotions, such as envy, lack of sym-
pathy, refusal of compassion (see Chapter 38 in this volume). Direct manifestations of such
dissociative communalization will involve some element of outgroup demarcation, which may
or may not eventually lead to intergroup conflict or violence (e.g., derogative or ridiculing
discourse targeting minorities or power groups).
What we wish to stress is that an essential characteristic of the political emerges not only
in such direct forms of inclusive alliances (i) or exclusive antagonism (ii) but also in indi-
rect forms of ‘agonism’: alliances for self-empowerment and what might be called ‘negative
solidarity’ (cf. Arendt 1951, 315). This brings us to two further manifestations of contested
political community.
(iii) Consider instrumental, agonistic alliances of self-empowerment. Political alliances
are often not so much formed on the basis of affects, emotions or values in concordance, but
precisely when there is no such accord, or even in instances of outright evaluative conflict.
Here, one affectively allies oneself with those one considers as fundamentally Others—i.e.,
those whose overall evaluative outlook is different from one’s own—if such an alliance serves
or facilitates one’s own thriving or power-status. Indeed, the distinctive force of political af-
fectivity often manifests itself precisely where it cuts across more or less superficial alliances,
bridging conflicting values or interests. By doing so, political affectivity not only reinforces the
respective parties’ room for manoeuvre and control over the other group or third parties but,

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more importantly, what might be called their ‘affective power’. A curious example here is the
alliance between environmentalist and staunchly anti-environmentalist fractions within the
Tea Party movement. These two fractions do not share concrete core political interests. Yet,
they do share a whole range of affectively binding and mutually empowering background
sentiments, such as a deep distrust towards the government, religious devotion, or Ressenti-
ment in the face of affirmative action (see Hochschild 2016).
(iv) Finally, consider hostile emotions that manifest agonistic forms of communalization
or involve a certain ‘negative dialectic’ leading to forms of ‘false solidarity’. For example,
a number of phenomenologists have pointed out that racial or religious hatred not only
creates outgroup demarcation but, ironically, facilitates feelings of solidarity, which indeed
co-constitutes allegiance to one’s ingroup (Kolnai 1935, 1998; Sartre 1944; Ahmed 2004;
Szanto forthcoming; cf. also Chapter 38 in this volume). There are two dialectically opposed
affective orientations here. The first is a ‘positive’ affective binding that attaches individuals
to their ingroup (the ‘community of haters’), or an “alignment” between the I and the We
(Ahmed 2014, 51). Just as importantly, the second orientation entails an antagonistic affective
attachment to the target: here the haters (We) negatively “attach” themselves to the hated
ones (Them). In that sense, one can say that haters ‘need’ a stereotypically created Other for
their very self-constitution as a community of haters (cf. above, and Sartre 1944). A some-
what similar mechanism can be seen in collective forms of Ressentiment. In order to facili-
tate repression of negative self-focused or social emotions (shame, feelings of powerlessness),
individuals align themselves with their initially powerless ingroup and collectively transform
negative emotions into ones that are ‘positive’ (e.g., national pride) or into purportedly moral
or power-conducive antagonistic ones (e.g., Ressentiment, feelings of superiority, hatred).
The solidarity here is ‘false’ since the concern for one’s own community is solely based on
a devaluation of others (as in hatred), and more importantly, because of its (self-)deceptively
invoked—and hence ‘false’—values (as in Ressentiment). This self-deceptive affective mech-
anism is often reinforced at the collective level, leading to a sort of “spiralling” (Szanto 2017)
that eventually strengthens the formation of isolated affective enclaves. To be sure, the col-
laborative transformation of negatively valenced self-regarding emotions into positive ones
is not restricted to cases of false solidarity, as for instance the Gay Pride movements show.
To avoid any misunderstanding, none of the above agonistic orientations are meant to
establish any necessary connection between ingroup solidarity and outgroup hostility (con-
sider, for instance, differences between patriotic and nationalistic forms of allegiances; cf. Li
and Brewer 2004). Rather, what this taxonomy aims to show is that different forms of ago-
nism are generally at work on the ontologically foundational baseline of political emotions.

5. Conclusion
At all its levels, the political intersects with power. We have suggested that the affective drive
behind the political, however, is not so much concrete political power-dynamics themselves
as contested commonality. Such contested commonality entails dialectics of antagonism,
allegiance and relations of power, long before they manifest themselves in concrete
institutional power-struggles. This perspective should also allow for a theory of political
emotions that cuts across the reductive dichotomy between the Arendtian associative and the
Schmittian dissociative traditions of conceptualizing the political.
As an alternative, we have argued that what makes emotions political is their shared
or jointly felt evaluative outlook. This involves an acknowledgment of the import of the
focus of the emotions for the political community and claims to their public recognition.

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Moreover, this shared evaluative outlook variously modulates individuals’ emotional experi-
ences. Ultimately, emotions partly constitute that politics matters, disclose what matters—and
that it matters to ‘me’, to ‘us’, and to ‘them’ often differently and conflictingly. In this sense,
then, political affectivity, in general, and antagonistic political emotions in particular, go
directly to the onto-political heart of ‘real politics’.

Acknowledgments
Thomas Szanto’s work on this paper was supported by the Academy of Finland research
project MEPA: “Marginalization and Experience: Phenomenological Analyses of Normality
and Abnormality” (PI: Sara Heinämaa), as well as Szanto’s research project “Antagonistic
Political Emotions” (P 32392-G), from The Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Jan Slaby’s con-
tribution was conducted within the subproject B05 of the Collaborative Research Center
“Affective Societies”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We are very
grateful for Tamar Blickstein’s, Lucy Osler’s, Gerhard Thonhauser’s and Ruth Rebecca
Tietjen’s insightful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes
1 See critically of this tradition Okin (1989), Walzer (2004), Hall (2005); Kingston (2011), and most
recently Ginsberg and Labate (2019).
2 For an analysis of ‘political affect’ in a perspective indebted to Spinoza, Deleuze and Foucault,
see Slaby and Bens (2019), which is effectively a sister article to the present one. Another recent
alternative that is in many respects congenial to our account is Bens et al. (2019).
3 Emotions in the sense employed here encompass both episodic (e.g., occurrent fear) and disposi-
tional affective states, and in particular sentiments (e.g., hatred). We refrain here from discussions
of the political moods, emotional climates or atmospheres; but as should become clear, they too
can be integrated into our framework.
4 On Arendt’s otherwise critical and indeed deflationary account of the role of emotions for the
political, esp. in Arendt (1961), see Chapter 15 in this volume.
5 For similar requirements for collective emotions, see Szanto (2015, 201) and León et al. (2019).
Notice that in Section 3.2, we sketch an account that can accommodate politically focused emo-
tions that need not fulfill all these robust—and arguably demanding—requirements.
6 This double-aspect intentionality account for shared emotions was first suggested by phenomenol-
ogists such as Scheler (1912) and Stein (1922); cf. Szanto (2018).
7 Closest to the mark is the conceptualization of “public passions” by Kingston. Kingston convinc-
ingly argues that what makes an emotion public and hence distinguishes it as a political emotion,
are three features: “its quality as shared, its focus or object of concern acknowledged as something
that has impact on the life of everyone in the political community, and the importance attached
to that concern” (Kingston 2011, 46). She markedly distinguishes this account from construals of
political emotions, according to which “emotions relevant to polities are a collection of essentially
idiosyncratic responses to matters of public importance and may vary considerably within a given
population” (ibid.) (a view she attributes to Hall (2005), Koziak (2010) and Sokolon (2003)). Cf.
also Berezin’s (2002) notion of political “communities of feeling”, that she borrows from Scheler
(1913/1926), which, however, is actually a much looser notion than Scheler’s (and also than Kings-
ton’s “public passions”).
8 In this respect we disagree with Protevi, who “define[s] collective political emotion as collective
emotion within a political context such that a political event of issue is the target, but not neces-
sarily the focus, of the emotion. (…) Thus, a group of people could be angry about the inflation
they expect to come from a particular government policy, but the focus of those fears might be
individual retirement plans of the angry people” (Protevi 2014, 327).
9 Note that Ressentiment in Scheler’s (and Nietzsche’s) technical sense is altogether different from
resentment; see more on both below. See also the respective sections on Ressentiment in Chapters
4, 6 and 38 in this volume.

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Borderline cases of emotions

. ( Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
 42
FORGIVENESS AND REVENGE
Fabian Bernhardt

1. Introduction: the place of forgiveness and revenge

in everyday life and in philosophy
Human agency goes hand in hand with fallibility. The capability to act inevitably involves
the capability for wrongdoing. People hurt each other—sometimes intentionally, often
without bad faith—and treat each other in unjust ways. The intersection between agency
and vulnerability—the point where one subject gets negatively affected by the unjust action
of another subject—thus can be conceived of as the existential and affective ground from
which both the desire for revenge and the longing for forgiveness emerge. “Who among us”,
Charles Griswold asks, “has not longed to be forgiven? Nearly everyone has suffered the bit-
ter injustice of wrongdoing. Who has not struggled to forgive? Revenge impulsively surges
in response to wrong and becomes perversely delicious to those possessed by it” (2007, XIII).
Forgiveness and revenge are both responses to the experience of getting wronged. As such,
they play a vital role in the lives of individuals and of communities.
In everyday language, we use and understand the terms forgiveness and revenge without
problems. In the context of a phenomenology of emotions, it might be noteworthy that the
very words revenge and forgiveness already bear an affective quality. When we hear them,
we tend to think of certain episodes and instances of our lives which go along with moral
sentiments like anger, indignation, resentment and grief. That forgiveness and revenge are
somehow connected to affective phenomena seems obvious. However, the question which
particular emotions are involved in them and how these emotions relate to each other is sub-
ject of ongoing philosophical debates (for an overview, cf. Hughes and Warmke 2017). As
soon as one starts to examine revenge and forgiveness philosophically, both notions turn out
to be astonishingly complex and difficult to understand.
The specific reasons for this difficulty in both cases are quite different though. The diffi-
culty in understanding forgiveness has to do with the fact that in the last decades the notion
of forgiveness has disseminated into many different spheres—international politics, penal
law, even economy—such that it has become increasingly difficult to identify its semantic
core and conceptual limits. “In all the scenes of repentance, confession, forgiveness or apol-
ogy which have multiplied on the geopolitical scene since the last war, and in an accelerated
fashion within in the last few years”, Jacques Derrida stated already in 1997, “one sees not

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only individuals, but also entire communities, professional corporations, the representatives
of ecclesiastical hierarchies, sovereigns, and heads of state ask for ‘forgiveness’” (2001, 28).
In public discourse, the language of forgiveness has become ubiquitous. It has not only en-
tered the political and legal sphere but has also been assimilated into the therapeutic domain,
where forgiveness, or self-forgiveness, is broadly construed as a technique of individually
healing oneself from the burdens of a painful past. This development—which can be char-
acterized as a gesture of politicalizing forgiveness on the one hand and of psychologizing it on
the other hand—tends to blur the lines between forgiveness and cognate concepts such as
apology, regret, excuse, pardon, reconciliation, closing and healing (cf. Derrida 1997, 27–32;
Griswold 2007, XVII–XX; Bandes 2009; Hughes and Warmke 2017). Yet, even when being
differentiated from these cognate phenomena, conceptualizing forgiveness remains a chal-
lenging philosophical task.
The difficulty in understanding revenge is quite different in nature. Contrarily to for-
giveness, the problem is not that the conceptual limits of revenge have become too broad
and blurry, but rather too narrow. The modern standard view of revenge can be described
as follows: “Vengeance is thought to be especially dangerous and socially disruptive, typi-
cally violent, utterly unreasonable, and by its very nature opposed to law and its constraints”
(Solomon 1999, 129). This prevalent understanding is also shared by many philosophers.
However, it is normatively distorted and flawed by a number of Eurocentric misconceptions
(cf. Bernhardt 2017, 1–34). It is true that revenge can occur in the form as described—violent,
unreasonable and socially disruptive—but it is wrong to believe that it necessarily does so. In
fact, revenge occurs in many different forms. In modern everyday life, for example, there are
numerous instances where people get even in ways which are not violent at all (for example,
if person X intentionally refuses to invite person Y to a party because some time ago Y has
not invited her). According to Robert Solomon—one of the few philosophers who aim to
develop a more differentiated approach to revenge—we are all “living in a tit-for-tat-world.
We are all moral accountants, even if the bookkeeping varies considerably” (1999, 126).
Another problem with the modern standard view of revenge is that it does not consider ap-
propriately that the functioning and conceptualization of revenge differs drastically between
different cultures and societies. The place and functioning of revenge in societies without a
central political power (which are usually referred to as “segmentary” or “acephalous” so-
cieties in social and cultural anthropology; cf. Amborn 2016) can hardly be compared to its
place in societies with a central political power (like modern states or ancient Greek poleis)
(cf. Verdier 1980–1984; Hénaff 2002, 202–241; Paul 2005; Schlee and Turner 2008a, 2008b).
Most philosophical approaches tend to ignore this fact (cf., e.g., Govier 2002). Instead, the
one-sided notion of revenge as “typically violent, utterly unreasonable, and by its very na-
ture opposed to law” is taken to be universally valid and projected onto those societies which,
from the viewpoint of Western imagination, figure as cultural counterpart and epitomized
“other” to modern civilization. In order to develop a more appropriate (and less Eurocentric)
understanding of revenge, philosophers are therefore better off when applying an interdisci-
plinary framework that takes into account the findings of cultural and social anthropologists,
historians and other researchers who are concerned with so-called “traditional” societies
(cf. Hénaff 2002; Bernhardt 2017).
In the following, I will discuss the issues that seem, against the just-sketched background,
particularly pertinent when it comes to theorizing forgiveness and revenge. I will start with
forgiveness (Section 2) and then focus on revenge (Section 3); in the last section, I will out-
line in which sense forgiveness and revenge can be considered as borderline cases of emotion
(Section 4).

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2. Theorizing forgiveness
What is it that we call forgiveness? To start with, it seems a lot easier to say what forgiveness
is not than to determine what it is. As already mentioned, forgiveness is part of a whole cluster
of concepts including pardon, excuse, mercy, apology and reconciliation. In some respects,
the meaning of forgiveness and these other concepts overlap, in other respects, there are sig-
nificant differences. However, among most researchers there is general agreement

that forgiveness should be differentiated from ‘pardoning’ (which is a legal term), ‘con-
doning’ (which implies a justification of the offense), ‘excusing’ (which implies that the
offender had a good reason for committing the offense), ‘forgetting’ (which implies that
the memory of the offense has simply decayed or slipped out of conscious awareness),
and ‘denying’ (which implies simply an unwillingness to perceive the harmful injuries
that one has incurred). Most also seem to agree that forgiveness is distinct form ‘recon-
ciliation’ (which implies the restoration of a relationship).
(McCullough 2001, 8)

Charles Griswold also cautions not to confound forgiveness with the notion of simply “find-
ing a therapeutic way to ‘deal with’ injury, pain, or anger”; if it were nothing more than that,
Griswold argues, “then hypnosis or amnesia or taking a pill might [also] count as forgiveness”
(2007, XIV).
What can be positively said about forgiveness is that it requires fault; one can only forgive
where there has been an infraction of shared moral norms (cf. Ricœur 2000, 459). This basic
presupposition entails another: There must be an agent who can be held accountable for the
infraction that occurred. Paul Ricœur has highlighted that fault is necessarily based on im-
putability. He explains this relation as follows:

There can (…) be forgiveness only where we can accuse someone of something, presume
him to be or declare him guilty. And one can indict only those acts that are imputable to
an agent who holds himself to be their genuine author. In other words, imputability is
that capacity, that aptitude, by virtue of which actions can be held to someone’s account.
(Ricœur 2000, 460)

In its most basic sense, the term forgiveness thus refers to a relationship between two subjects,
one of whom has wronged the other. Most philosophers take this interpersonal situation
as a paradigm scenario (cf. Arendt 1958, 241; Derrida 1997, 42; Griswold 2007, 47) from
which all other possible uses of the term forgiveness—for example political forgiveness—are
derived of.
Even if pinned down to this basic meaning, the notion of forgiveness still raises a number
of puzzling questions since it seems to contest our established notions of responsibility and
fault, the nature of human agency and the irreversibility of time (cf. Crépon and Rauen
2012). Within the last few decades, there has been a significant rise of philosophical inter-
est in the questions surrounding the notion of forgiveness, especially in the United States.1
Accordingly, philosophical attempts to theorize forgiveness by now form a manifold and
diverse landscape. By and large, the different theories of forgiveness can be separated into
two groups, each of them starting from different premises and focusing on different ques-
tions. I will refer to them as (I.) the conditional approach and (II.) the unconditional approach to
forgiveness.

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(I.) The conditional approach is based on the premise that forgiveness is in principle a human
capability (as we shall see, this claim is not as self-evident as it might initially seem). There is
nothing enigmatic or metaphysical about forgiveness; the power to forgive lies fully within
the sphere of human agency. Forgiveness is here conceived of as a form of action which, as
such, is governed by certain norms. Accordingly, theorists of this group focus on the ques-
tion which conditions must be met by the wrongdoer and by the wronged person in order
for the act of forgiveness to be morally praiseworthy.
One of the most elaborated versions of the conditional approach has been developed by
Charles Griswold (2007). Like Hannah Arendt, Griswold asserts that the proper target of
forgiveness is the person, not the deed (cf. Arendt 1958, 241–243; Griswold 2007, 47–48).
As a starting point, Griswold also takes the paradigm scenario laid out above—forgiveness
as an interpersonal relation—but he adds an important detail: The two individuals must be
“capable of communicating with each other” (2007, XVI). In his view, forgiveness should be
seen not so much as a unilateral act (relying solely on the good will of the wronged person)
but, rather, as a dyadic process in which the steps both individuals take reciprocally depend on
each other. From this it follows that “each party holds the other in its power (…): the offender
depends on the victim in order to be forgiven, and the victim depends on the offender in
order to forgive” (Griswold 2007, 49). This interdependence is not just logical but practical:
There are certain conditions both individuals must meet, certain things they must do and
feel, in order to assure that the act of forgiveness does not collapse into mere condonation,
forgetting, excusing or some sort of rationalization. What precisely are these conditions?
Let’s begin with the conditions that must be met by the wrongdoer. Griswold identifies
six of them (cf. 2007, 49–53). (1) The offender must take over accountability and thus ac-
knowledge that she indeed was the author of the deeds in question. (2) The wrongdoer must
credibly repudiate these deeds and disavow that she would do this kind of wrong again.
(3) The wrongdoer must feel regret about the specific injury that she has caused and she must
communicate this feeling to the particular person she injured. (4) Furthermore, she must
credibly commit to changing her ways and to becoming a person who does not inflict injury to
others. (5) This commitment would be incomplete without a true understanding of the suffer-
ing that was caused by the deeds in question. According to Griswold, the “offender is thus
required to exercise ‘sympathy’ in the sense of putting herself in the position of the person
she injured, and understanding what being in that situation meant for the injured person”
(2007, 51). (6) The last condition is a kind of synthesis of the precedent. Griswold asserts
that the offender is required to “offer some sort of narrative accounting for how she came to
do wrong, how that wrongdoing does not express the totality of her person, and how she is
becoming worthy of approbation” (2007, 51).
Corresponding to the required transformation of the wrongdoer, there are also certain
conditions the wronged person must meet if forgiveness is to take place. Again, Griswold lists
six of them (2007, 53–59). In accordance with the Butlerian framework of his approach
(cf. Butler 1896), Griswold asserts that forgiveness (1) necessarily requires the wronged per-
son to forswear revenge.2 This entails (2) a moderation of resentment—which Griswold under-
stands as a “reactive as well as retributive passion that instinctively seeks to exact a due
measure of punishment” (2007, 26)—and (3) the commitment to let resentment go altogether.
Whereas the first three conditions are situated on the affective level, the fourth condition is
merely cognitive. (4) It involves a process of reframing through which the victim comes to
see the offender in a new light—a light, which enables the wronged individual in particular to
recognise that the wrongdoer as a whole person cannot be reduced to the self she was when
committing the wrong (cf. also Ricœur who identifies the core of forgiveness in the formula

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“you are better than your actions” (2000, 493)). The reframing entails that (5) the victim
comes to see herself in a new light as well. This change of perspective involves “dropping
any presumption of decisive moral superiority, and recognizing instead the shared humanity
of both parties” (Griswold 2007, 58) (6). The last condition is that there must be an explicit
statement of forgiveness that is directly addressed to the wrongdoer. If the wrongdoer explicitly
asked for forgiveness, Griswold argues, then the positive response should be explicit, too. In
other words, the act of forgiving should take the form of a “communicative act that is and is
taken to be an expression of forgiveness” (2007, 58).
It is important to note that this set of conditions does not only involve certain steps on
the level of action, but also, and even more importantly, on the level of emotions (the plea
for forgiveness, for example, would become worthless if it was not supported and motivated
by a true change of heart, the feeling of regret and so on). Both the offender and the victim
are required to change the way they feel. This, however, gives rise to a basic problem. We
cannot look inside another person’s heart. Therefore, we can never know for sure—with
absolute certainty—if the two individuals have really undergone the required affective trans-
formation. How, for example, do we verify if the wrongdoer actually feels regret or if she
just pretends to do so in order to appear in a more favourable light? Due to this epistemic
problem, the conditional approach to forgiveness is inevitably prone to the dangers of un-
trustworthiness and instrumentalisation. And, in fact, when watching the news today, one
easily gets the impression that many of those scenes of self-accusation, repentance and asking
for forgiveness—publicly performed by accused war criminals, politicians, managers, the
representatives of churches and so on—resemble the staging of a hollow ritual, being enacted
in the service of particular interests.
(II.) In a way, the unconditional approach to forgiveness can be understood as a response
to this basic problem. The most radical and uncompromising version of the unconditional
approach was developed by Jacques Derrida (1997). Derrida directly contests the idea that
forgiveness should come with certain conditions attached. According to Derrida, this idea
is based on what he calls a “logic of the exchange” (1997, 34). If forgiveness was only granted
on the condition that the wrongdoer asked for it, “in the course of a scene of repentance at-
testing at once to the consciousness of the fault, the transformation of the guilty, and the (…)
obligation to do everything to avoid the return of evil”, then it would sink down to a kind
of “economic transaction” (ibid.). Instead, Derrida argues for what he calls “pure” forgiveness,
a forgiveness which is unconditional, and, moreover, devoid of any purpose. “I shall risk this
proposition”, he states,

that each time forgiveness is at the service of a finality, be it noble and spiritual (atone-
ment or redemption, reconciliation, salvation), each time that it aims to re-establish a
normality (social, national, political, psychological) by a work of mourning, by some
therapy or ecology of memory, then the ‘forgiveness’ is not pure—nor is its concept.
Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalising. It should remain
exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the or-
dinary course of historical temporality.
(Derrida 1997, 31–32)

What are Derrida’s arguments to support this extreme claim? With his notion of pure for-
giveness, Derrida explicitly calls two assumptions into question: The first is that forgiveness
is in principle a “human possibility” and, thus, a human capacity; the second assumption
is that the capacity to forgive is the “correlate to the possibility of punishment” (1997, 37).

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Both assumptions figure prominently in Arendt’s theory of forgiveness. In The Human

Condition, Arendt states:

The alternative to forgiveness (…) is punishment (…). It is (…) a structural element in

the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and
that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable. This is the true
hallmark of those offenses which, since Kant, we call ‘radical evil’ (…).
(Arendt 1958, 241)

According to Arendt (and many others), the unforgivable is beyond forgiveness. If a crime
is so enormous that it transcends the possibility of due punishment, then it also exceeds the
power to forgive. In the face of the unforgivable, there is no place for forgiveness. Derrida
does not only refuse this view, he turns it completely upside-down. According to him, the
unforgivable is not where forgiveness ends, but the very source where the idea of forgiveness
emerges from. “Is the unforgivable”, he asks,

not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? If one
is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable, (…) then the very idea of forgiveness
would disappear. If there is something to forgive, it would be what in religious language
is called mortal sin, the worst, the unforgivable crime or harm. From which comes the
aporia (…): forgiveness only forgives the unforgivable. (…) That is to say that forgiveness
must announce itself as impossibility itself. It can only be possible in doing the impossible.
(Derrida 1997, 32–33)

In Derrida’s view, only the hyperbolic notion of “pure” forgiveness is able to ascend to the
unforgivable (cf. 1997, 39). However, he makes no secret of the fact that his demand of purity
makes it virtually impossible for forgiveness to actually take place in real life; it remains “a
madness of the impossible” (ibid.). So, what’s the use of setting the bar so high and articulat-
ing an ideal which is impossible to meet?
It is important to note that the idea of unconditional forgiveness is not an invention of
Derrida, but something he derives from the “Abrahamitic” tradition (a label Derrida uses in
order to refer to Judaism, Christianity and Islam altogether). However, at the heart of this
religious heir, we find not only the idea of unconditional forgiveness but also its opposite.
Thus, already in the historical backdrop, there is a characteristic tension between two poles:
On the one side, there is the gracious idea of unconditional pure forgiveness—“granted to the
guilty as guilty (…) even to those who do not repent”—and, on the other side, there is the idea
of a conditional forgiveness which is “proportionate to the recognition of the fault, to re-
pentance, to the transformation of the sinner who then explicitly asks forgiveness” (Derrida
1997, 34–35). One would misunderstand Derrida’s position, if one took it only as a radical
plea for the first pole. Derrida’s intention is not to dismiss the notion of conditional forgive-
ness altogether; his claim is, rather, that whenever forgiveness is made a subject of discussion,
whenever the question of forgiveness is at stake, either in a practical context or theoretically,
one should always remain the reference to the pole, which binds forgiveness to the idea of un-
conditional purity. Without the reference to this pole, the whole idea of forgiveness would
become meaningless. Although the two poles are completely heterogeneous, they cannot be
separated from each other. Derrida explains this as follows:

Sometimes, forgiveness (…) must be a gracious gift, without exchange and with-
out condition; sometimes it requires, as its minimal condition, the repentance and
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transformation of the sinner. (…) These two poles, the unconditional and the conditional,
are absolutely heterogeneous, and must remain irreducible to one another. They are
nonetheless indissociable: if one wants (…) forgiveness to become effective, concrete,
historic; if one wants it to arrive, to happen by changing things, it is necessary that this
purity engage [sic] itself in a series of conditions of all kinds (…). It is between these two
poles, irreconcilable but indissociable, that decisions and responsibilities are to be taken.
(Derrida 1997, 44–45)

This claim also holds true for the different philosophical attempts to theorize forgiveness.
Concerning their premises and basic assumptions, the conditional approach and the uncon-
ditional approach are extremely different and in some respects even irreconcilable. However,
when it comes to capturing the idea of forgiveness in its full extent, in all its depth and prac-
tical implications, the two approaches must complement each other.

3. Theorizing revenge
In modern societies, revenge has a bad image. Understood as an outburst of uncontrolled
individual passions, blind, dysfunctional and excessively violent, revenge seems to contradict
everything modernity stands for—particularly its establishment of legal procedures based
on the ideas of impartiality and dispassionate reason (cf. Maroney 2011). Philosophy played
a great part in shaping this image (cf. Bernhardt 2017, 11–22). In their endeavour to pro-
vide the normative ground for the rule of state and its monopoly on the use of retributive
violence, legal and political philosophers from the 18th and 19th century drew a sharp line
between (private) revenge and (public) punishment (cf. Foucault 1975; Lehmann 2012). This
operation was essentially driven by normative interests. The genuine motivation of these
thinkers was primarily not to better understand revenge but to provide reasons for its con-
demnation. The legitimization of the state and the delegitimization of revenge were part of
the same philosophical project (cf. Menke 2012; Bernhardt 2017). In older traditions (for
example the biblical and the ancient Greek), revenge and justice were not conceived of as
being necessarily opposed to one another (cf. Gehrke 1987; Burkert 1998; Beinhauer-Köhler
et al. 2004). However, in modern legal and political philosophy, it is taken for granted that
they are mutually exclusive: “Justice is a legitimate concept in the modern code of civilized
behavior. Vengeance is not ( Jacoby 1983, 1).
Only recently did philosophers begin to call this prevalent view into question, claiming
that “vengeance and its satisfaction will remain durable components of any realistic theory
of human nature” (Solomon 1999, 124). Despite the extensive endeavor to exclude revenge
from the realm of modern existence, the emotions and affects underlying the desire for re-
venge have not vanished—although they often remain on the level of private imagination
and are not publicly shared (cf. Frijda 1994, 264; Bernhardt 2017, 274–282). Philosophy is
therefore well advised to acknowledge that revenge inevitably remains “an integral aspect of
our recognition and reaction to wrong and being wronged” (Solomon 1999, 126). Instead of
regarding our legal system as being directly opposed to revenge, both should be conceived
of as interdependent (cf. Jacoby 1983; Frijda 1994; Solomon 1994 and 1999). As Jacoby
puts it: “Laws are designed not to weed out the impulse towards revenge but to contain it
in a manner consistent with the maintenance of an orderly and humane society” (1983, 5)
Solomon goes even further when he claims that “the often despised and dismissed emotion
of vengeance (…) may, in fact, be (both historically and psychologically) the seed from which
the entire plant of justice has grown” (1994, 304).
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Based on this view, it becomes possible to analyze revenge in a less unbiased way.
The impulse toward revenge emerges from the experience of being wronged: we feel a
desire to injure those who have injured us. The offended person becomes the offender,
and vice versa. Again, we find the intersection between agency and vulnerability here,
and again, there are the basic presuppositions of fault and accountability. Accordingly, the
paradigm scenario of revenge seems to be the same as in the case of forgiveness: There are
two individuals, one of whom has wronged the other. However, this paradigm scenario
cannot be taken for universal. In societies without a central political authority, revenge
is not a relation between two individuals, but between two groups. It is collective, not in-
dividual (cf. Hénaff 2002, 216; Paul 2005, 245). Social and cultural anthropologists have
clearly shown that in these societies revenge is neither uncontrolled nor excessively violent:

This may be the case within political societies where vengeance is no longer coded (since
it is considered illegitimate in principle). (…) But the case is entirely different in societies
without a central state, in which vengeance contrarily constitutes an extremely elaborate
and controlled form of the regulation of violence. This is the important point: in traditional
societies, far from being an outburst of pure violence, ceremonial vengeance is a way to rigorously
restrict violence. It is indeed a sophisticated exercise of justice.
(Hénaff 2002, 215; emphasis mine)

In these societies, the ceremonial revenge—or “vindicatory system”, as Hénaff also calls
it—follows the same rules and norms as the ceremonial gift-exchange. Both are governed
by a rationale of reciprocity (cf. Hénaff 2002, 215; Paul 2005, 255; Schlee and Turner
2008a, 7–9): “In the same way as a countergift must reply to a gift, a counteroffense must
reply to an offense” (Hénaff 2002, 218). The system of vindicatory justice does not aim
at perpetuating the violence, but at putting an end to the conflict. There are complex
procedures of compensation, which allow to make up for an incurred harm without using
violence. Instead, the party of the wrongdoer makes amends by offering some form of sym-
bolic compensation. All of this is subject of negotiations. The ceremonial revenge remains
within the sphere of reciprocity, which, at the same time, is the sphere of partners in alli-
ance and horizontal gift-exchange (cf. Hénaff 2002, 218). The popular belief according to
which revenge in premodern societies is necessarily violent and socially dysfunctional—a
belief both shared by common sense and a great part of modern philosophy—thus turns out
to be errant and empirically inaccurate. The revenge of the alleged “savages” is everything
but savage. In fact, revenge only takes this form under the condition of the establishment
of a central political authority. In other words, uncontrolled revenge is not what modernity
has left behind, but something it gave birth to by replacing the vindicatory system through
a new model, a system administered by a central power that solely is bestowed with the
right to judge and punish:

It is this replacement of ceremonial vengeance by arbitrational justice that opens the

possibility of private revenge. But then vengeance is no longer the application of justice.
It becomes the pursuit of personal compensation. It no longer constitutes a complete and
instituted procedure. It releases individual violence instead of expressing the action of
the group vis-à-vis another group.
(Hénaff 2002, 221)

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4. Forgiveness and revenge as borderline cases of emotion

In fact, forgiveness and revenge can both be regarded as genuine borderline cases of emotion.
Both phenomena are intricately entwined with emotions and other affective states, but nei-
ther revenge nor forgiveness are names for a particular or discrete emotion. There is not the
one emotion of forgiveness (cf. Rinofner-Kreidl 2013, 216). The same holds true for revenge.
In the history of philosophy, the desire for revenge has been frequently linked to (venge-
ful) anger and resentment, but we have to take into account here that the meanings of these
terms—like of all emotion terms—are not stable. Language is historical. And emotions are
historical, too. The way we feel is shaped by various conditions which change throughout
time, depending on the cultural, social and political contexts. This particularly holds true
when it comes to our emotional responses to the experience of being wronged. They are
shaped and channelled differently in different societies. Closely connected to the historicity
of emotions is the problem of how to translate emotion terms from one language to another.
Aristotle’s orge, Homer’s menis, and Seneca’s ira—all notions used in the context of revenge
(cf. Homer 1961; Aristotle 1991; Seneca 2013)—can be equally translated with ‘anger’, but
it would be short-sighted to believe that their respective meaning therefore is synonymous.
Anger is polymorphous; it involves different forms and shades. And it is by no means the
only emotion that can give rise to revenge. Most languages provide not a single term, but a
whole cluster of expressions to refer to the affective side of revenge. Besides anger, in English
there is also “wrath, indignation, fury, ill temper, ill humour, bitterness, irritation, irascibil-
ity, resentment, exasperation, pouting, annoyance, and, of course, vengefulness” (Griswold
2013, 81–82). Solomon refers to vengeance as an emotion, but he frankly admits that he just
does so in order to avoid “the intolerable awkwardness of always referring to ‘the complex of
various emotions that gives shape to and motivates the desire for revenge and the demand for
its satisfaction’” (1999, 124) In short: “The set of emotions that victims might possess in re-
sponse to being wronged by another agent (…) form a large and diverse landscape” (Hughes
and Warmke 2017).
Now, what about the affective side of forgiveness? Interestingly, in continental philos-
ophy, emotions hardly play a role when it comes to theorizing forgiveness. Arendt and
Ricœur remind us of the relationship that the Christian tradition has established between
forgiveness and love (agape) (cf. Arendt 1958, 242–243; Ricœur 2000, 467–468), but the re-
spective notion of love is very different from our modern understanding and seems to refer
rather to a general trait of character than to an actual emotion. In analytic philosophy, or
the Anglophone tradition, the picture is quite different; the emotional make-up of forgive-
ness is frequently discussed here. This might be due to the fact that continental and analytic
thinkers of forgiveness tend to start from quite different theoretical (and also historical) back-
grounds. The accounts of Arendt (1958), Derrida (1997), Jankélévitch (1967, 1996), Levinas
(1961) and Ricœur (2000), either directly or implicitly, all refer to the crimes that have
been committed throughout the first half of the 20th century, namely the Holocaust. This
is probably why the notion of the unforgivable figures more prominently in their accounts
than in their US-counterparts. For most Anglophone philosophers, the seminal work of
Joseph Butler (1896) serves as the philosophical point of departure. (Curiously, his theory of
forgiveness is not mentioned at all by Arendt, Derrida and other philosophers from the con-
tinental tradition.) For Butler, forgiveness and resentment are intimately tied to one another.
This is why questions concerning the emotional nature of forgiveness are routinely discussed
in the Anglophone tradition. According to Butler, to forgive means essentially to overcome

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resentment and the desire for revenge. Accordingly, the affective make-up of forgiveness can
best be described in negative terms. It comes along with the forswearing and vanishing of
retributive emotions like anger, resentment and hatred. Here, then, forgiveness is less about
what one feels and does than about what one ceases to feel and strive for. Drawing on the
etymological relationship between the German words Verzeihen (forgiveness) and Verzicht
(waiver, renunciation), Thomas Macho has highlighted that forgiveness is more passive than
active. According to Macho, “each act of forgiveness (Verzeihen) is originally an act of waiver
(Verzicht): an omission of retribution and the form of compensation that vengefulness strives
for. Forgiveness is the name of the action which abstains from acting” (Macho 1988, 139;
own transl.). In this peculiar embrace of activity and inactivity, the act of forgiveness in-
volves the acknowledgement that there are deeds and sufferings that cannot be undone. The
fault is irreversible. However, forgiveness is irreversible, too. To say “I forgive you” means
to do what one says. If one utters these words and comes to revoke them later, then one can
be sure that the phrase has been out of place (cf. Bernhardt 2014, 116). If forgiveness takes
place, it remains once and for all—thereby opening up the possibility of a new beginning.

Notes
1 The rise of philosophical interest not only in forgiveness but also in revenge broadly converges
with the general renaissance of the philosophy of emotion, and, in particular, the establishment of
the research field “Law and Emotion”. The authors in this field share the assumption that the strict
distinction in legal theory between reason and emotion—and the dismissal of the latter—is not
only empirically wrong, but also the source of much mischief. Accordingly, their common aim is
“to inject emotion back into discussions of justice” (Solomon 1994, 292).
2 In this respect, Griswold’s interpretation of Butler differs from the standard reading, accord-
ing to which the core of Butler’s account is not to forswear revenge, but to forswear resentment
(cf. Griswold 2007, 20).

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Schlee, Günther, and Turner, Bertram (2008a). Einleitung: Wirkungskontexte des Vergeltungsprinzips
in der Konfliktregulierung. In: G. Schlee and B. Turner (Eds.). Vergeltung. Eine interdisziplinäre
Betrachtung der Rechtfertigung und Regulation von Gewalt. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 7–47.
——— (2008b). Rache, Wiedergutmachung und Strafe: Ein Überblick. In: G. Schlee and B. Turner
(Eds.). Vergeltung. Eine interdisziplinäre Betrachtung der Rechtfertigung und Regulation von Gewalt.
Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 49–67.
Seneca (2013). On Anger. In: Seneca: Moral and Political Essays. Ed. and transl. by J. M. Cooper and
J. F. Procopé. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–116.
Solomon, Robert C. (1994). Sympathy and Vengeance: The Role of the Emotions in Justice. In:
S. v. Goozen, N. v. de Poll, and J. Sergeant (Eds.). Emotions. Essays on Emotion Theory. Hillsdale:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 291–311.
——— (1999). Justice v. Vengeance. On Law and the Satisfaction of Emotion. In: Susan A. Bandes
(Ed.). The Passions of Law. New York: New York University Press, 123–148.
Verdier, Raymond et al. (Eds.) (1980–1984). La vengeance. Études d’ethnologie, d’histoire et de philosophie.
4 vols. Paris: Editions Cujas.

Further reading
Burkert, Walter (1994). ‘Vergeltung’ zwischen Ethologie und Ethik. Reflexe und Reflexionen in Texten und
Mythologien des Altertums. München: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung.
Flaßpöhler, Svenja (2016). Verzeihen. Vom Umgang mit Schuld. München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.
French, Peter (2001). The Virtues of Vengeance. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

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Griswold, Charles L., and Konstan, David (Eds.) (2012). Ancient Forgiveness. Classical, Judaic, and
Christian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Klinger, Elmar (1987). Revenge and Retribution. In: M. Eliade (Ed.). The Encyclopedia of Religion,
vol. 12. New York: Macmillan, 362–368.
Probst, Peter, and Sprenger, Gerhard (1992). Rache. In: J. Ritter and K. Gründer (Ed.). Historisches
Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 8. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1–6.
Sloterdijk, Peter (2006). Zorn und Zeit. Politisch-psychologischer Versuch. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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 43
GRATITUDE
Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl

Gratitude is the return of good for good. Generally, it is a positive emotion someone un-
dergoes in response to another one’s attention, love, fidelity or any other kind of mate-
rial or immaterial good. Either as an independent object of concern or as associated with
other phenomena, gratitude is of interest for normative ethics, moral psychology and po-
litical philosophy. It also has been discussed in non-philosophical contexts, above all by
anthropologists, sociologists, and more recently psychologists, in the wake of so-called pos-
itive psychology. Gratitude is an important part of common morality. It is firmly anchored
in Christianity and other religious traditions like Judaism, Islam or Buddhism. Among
philosophers, it is contested what its precise meaning, range and implications are. The pres-
ent chapter focuses on a phenomenology of gratitude and does so by addressing the following
questions: What is gratitude? What is its object? On what conditions do people feel and show
gratitude? What inhibits gratitude in situations that prima facie seem to warrant it? What is
the good of gratitude? How should we assess its social and moral significance?

1. Historical and cultural relativity: shifting views of gratitude

and associated clusters of emotions
To a considerable extent, the social and moral significance of gratitude depends on the
status and meaning of gift-giving as part of everyday life and common morality. Relating
to this, far-reaching differences between different epochs and societies suggest themselves
(cf. Mauss 1923; Heyd 1982, 38–48; Komter 2004). Among others, these differences concern
the ( lacking) spiritual, religious or metaphysical underpinning of gift-giving or benevolence
towards human and non-human creatures. They are also due to the respective functions of
gratitude in terms of establishing and strengthening intergenerational bonds and collective
or group identities.
Querying the adaptive function of gratitude in postmodern societies should also take
into account those clusters of emotions and attitudes with which gratitude is linked up
(cf. Klein 1957; Emmons and Shelton 2002, 460; Solomon 2004; Algoe and Haidt 2009).
Compassion, contentment, modesty, humility, kindness, forgiveness or love do not seem
to be among the most cherished dispositional emotions or character traits in highly com-
petitive achievement-orientated societies. The same holds for mindfulness, awe, wonder

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and admiration. It also holds for empathy, which is involved in both giving and receiving of
benefits. Therefore, gratitude has been placed in the class of empathic emotions (cf. Lazarus
and Lazarus 1994). Historical and cultural shifts of meaning and moral assessment also come
to bear on those mind-sets and (pathological) character dispositions that render feelings of
gratitude unlikely or effectively prevent their occurrence (e.g., envy, narcissism, egoism,
haughtiness, hate). Relevant emotions come in degrees and have to be caught in their per-
taining dynamic and dialectics in order to see whether they function as reinforcers or disen-
ablers of gratitude. Pride, for example, can very well go along with gratitude, yet tends to
exclude it as soon as it intensifies and enlarges, transforming itself into an excessive proud of
one’s independence (see Selbständigkeitsstolz, Kolnai 2007, 79). “We wish to be self-sustained.
We do not quite forgive a giver” (Emerson 1923, 12). Humility can help to become sensitive
to a plenty of reasons for being grateful (cf. Hildebrandt 1980; Schwarz 1992; Scheler 2005,
24–32; Snow 2005; Wenisch 2010; McAleer 2012; Roberts 2016). If it degenerates into
self-abnegation and obsequiousness, it is, however, incompatible with authentic gratitude.

2. Elements and accounts of gratitude

Typical cases of gratitude are triadic relations: someone is grateful to x for A. Apart from
this basic form of personal (attribution-dependent or targeted) gratitude, which seems to prevail in
everyday life, there is also a dyadic relation of gratitude. The latter is outcome-dependent, but
attribution-independent and can be designated non-personal gratitude: someone is grateful for A,
for instance, for enjoying physical health, the sight of a captivating landscape or the good
luck that happens in one’s life.
In this chapter, I restrict myself to triadic or personal gratitude, which conceives of grat-
itude as an essentially social emotion that goes beyond an attribution-independent feeling of
appreciation (cf. McCullough et al. 2001, 256; Emmons and Shelton 2002, 460f.; Gulliford
et al. 2013, 297–301; Kristjánsson 2015, 500f.). The aim is to carve out the distinctive fea-
tures of gratitude as a positive emotion, which is different from other positive emotions like
joy, hope, relief or admiration (cf. Roberts 2004, 65). More precisely, I focus on the core
experience of personal gratitude. I do not pretend to cover the entire range of its social impli-
cations. The effects of this restriction need to be kept in mind. When specifying inhibiting
conditions of gratitude, for example, I do not mention institutional factors that thwart grat-
itude. Such factors certainly had to be considered if one took a more encompassing perspec-
tive. What might fill the gap between the personal and the institutional aspects of gratitude
is a closer investigation of the various ways in which gratitude and justice are interrelated, on
the one hand (cf. Solomon 1995; Boleyn-Fitzgerald 2005), and the role of gratitude, taken as
a civic virtue, in moral learning and moral education, especially in citizenship education, on
the other hand (cf. Klosko 1989; White 1999; Jonas 2012).
Investigating gratitude in terms of a triadic relation amounts to considering it as part of
benevolence/gratitude interactions. Accordingly, talk about goods for which someone is
grateful refers to goods conveyed in course of such interactions. For the present purpose, I
use “good,” “gift” and “benefit” interchangeably. When designating gratitude as a positive
emotion “positive” has at least one of the following meanings that prevail depending on the
particular context of speech: “appropriate,” “pleasant,” “positively evaluating,” “conducive
to (mental and physical) health” (cf. Kristjánsson 2013, 173f.). Moreover, it is controversial
among philosophers whether the good whose conveyance calls for gratitude should be inter-
preted in a broad (non-standard cases) or narrow sense (standard cases). Narrowly conceived,
gratitude is a response to beneficence. Broadly conceived, one should also include non-standard

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cases of gratitude to the non-maleficent, that is, those who do not harm you although they
could do so and might have good reasons to do so (cf. Smilansky 1997) and even, though
much more controversial, gratitude to the maleficent, that is, to those who pushed you towards
self-improvement by actually harming you (cf. Boleyn-Fitzgerald 2005).
Gratitude can be conceived either as an occurring emotion (episode-gratitude) or as a disposi-
tion (trait-gratitude) as is the case when it is taken as a human strength or moral virtue said
to increase individual well-being and social cohesion. The present chapter is mainly con-
cerned with episode-gratitude. Without first gaining, a clear grasp on the rational structure
of episode-gratitude one could not understand the meaning and working of trait-gratitude.
The rational structure, however, must not be considered in isolation (see Sections 3.1
and 3.2). Any complete understanding and assessment of gratitude has to take into account
the particular circumstances and modes of acting.
Among the philosophical issues that come along with gratitude, especially in deonto-
logical or virtue ethical contexts (cf. Smit and Timmons 2011; Herman 2012), is whether
one should conceive of benevolence and gratitude in terms of obligations, supererogation,
virtues or imperfect duties (cf. Card 1988; Manela 2015; Carr 2015a). It has been argued that
whether or not beneficent acts count as supererogatory depends on whether they surpass
specific demands of justice. This, again, depends on the presupposed notion of justice as has
been shown, among others, relating to the narrow and wider meaning of justice in A ristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics (cf. Heyd 1982, 42–48). The present chapter cannot enter detailed discus-
sion of these and other special issues although they will be touched on occasionally. The fo-
cus lies on a phenomenology of gratitude.

3. A phenomenological framework for studying gratitude

The main thrust of a phenomenology of gratitude does not lie with taxonomies of various
theoretical accounts of gratitude and relating classificatory issues. It rather aims at clarifying
the phenomenal qualities and the intentional structure of gratitude and, within this framework,
giving an account of its social and moral dimension. For phenomenologists, the feeling qual-
ities cannot be considered separately from the intentional structure of an experience (as is
nowadays usually supposed when referring to so-called “qualia”). The former rather are part
and parcel of the latter. According to its focus on human experience, spelled out in terms
of a variety of different forms of intentional structures, the phenomenological analysis sets
in bottom-up, yet without taking an anti-universalist position. Rather, it refers to tokens
of gratitude experiences, delivers intuition-based in-depth descriptions and thereby tries to
unveil an essential structure, which proves valid for every particular instance of the same
type of experience (cf. Rinofner-Kreidl 2018).
If studying emotions proceeds bottom-up in the peculiar manner specified in Edmund
Husserl’s phenomenology, one must be all the more vigilant not to base one’s investigation
on too limited a range of cases (although cases here always function as exemplary cases).
The idea of gratitude we advance, among others, depends on the breadth and variety of
cases we take into account in the first place. For example, there are non-standard cases in
which benefactors severely suffer because they give more than they can do without. Benefi-
ciaries who learn about disproportionate sacrifices for their benefit tend to undergo mostly
negative feelings of gratitude, which are mixed up with feelings of regret, shame or guilt
(cf. Manela 2016).
The intentionalist framework and intuitive-descriptive method distinguishes the
phenomenological approach from empirical (e.g. psychological) investigations dealing with

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statistical or experimental research on gratitude’s intensity, frequency, life-span distribu-

tions or effects on physiological functioning and physical health (cf. Peterson and Seligman
2004, 558–563). Elaborating on the intentional structure of gratitude is meant to demarcate
and define the core experience of gratitude. It does not display the overall role of gratitude
in human flourishing. Neither does it overrule or render unimportant the particular con-
texts and social dynamics gratitude experiences are part of. (For an explanation of how an
intuition-based phenomenological investigation leaves room for considering varying con-
texts and various elements of experiences linked up with a routine practice of shifts of atti-
tudes see Rinofner-Kreidl 2014.) Combining intuitive and attitude-related aspects in one’s
investigation of specific emotions allows for reflectively shaping one’s emotions. Relating
to these general features, a phenomenology of emotion, which follows Husserl’s classical
brand of phenomenology, fits well with those strands of current emotion studies that embark
on moderate cognitivism (see, for instance, the conception of emotions as concern-based
construals, cf. Roberts 2003, 2007, 2013).

3.1 The intentional structure of gratitude

Clarifying the intentional structure of gratitude requires making explicit its cognitive con-
tent. The fact that the beneficiary’s gratitude is a response to another one’s benevolent in-
tention, which is perceived or otherwise immediately grasped, is of crucial importance to
understand what gratitude is and achieves. Gratitude is not merely and not exclusively a
response to the good received. This holds true even on condition that the relevant good
is urgently desired or required, which marks the subject-relative and yet objectively stated
value of the good. (The latter certainly is compatible with stating different degrees of a
particular good’s desirability or requiredness according to persons and circumstances.) The
assumption that gratitude does not only respond to the good received is corroborated if a
benefactor’s serious attempt to convey a good founders. In such cases, it regularly happens
that the beneficiary nonetheless feels and shows gratitude for the benefactor’s willingness
and effort, however futile, to convey the good. This behaviour would be irrational and hard
to understand if the only relevant factor were the value of the good (for her) as well as its
immediate and successful conveyance. Indeed, the benefactor’s kind and friendly intent is
part of the notion of benefit as it reflects common morality. Accordingly, nobody can do a
benefit without knowing that he does. Neither can one do a benefit unwillingly (cf. Seneca
1935, 379–387).
Hence, we may say that the relational (or social) aspect is crucial for gratitude to be
warranted. The benefactor’s intention to convey the good, as noticed by the beneficiary, is a
necessary condition of gratitude to be justified. Gratitude is an appropriate response primar-
ily to another one’s benevolent intention, which is directed to some particular person who
is perceived as needing help or support (cf. Seneca 1935, 401–403). The beneficiary becomes
indebted for a good bestowed on him only on condition that she conceives herself as object
of the benefactor’s goodwill intention. Gratitude therefore is part of a complex intentional
structure that entails recognition of another person, of a specific relation to her and of a
specific good conveyed (cf. Watkins 2014, 42–49). It is not simply a response to a benefit or
good considered as such, that is, in isolation from the mutual intentionality of benevolent/
gratitude interactions. Such an isolating consideration of the good conveyed is tempting only
on condition that the social interaction at issue is reduced to bargaining. Benevolent actions
and grateful responses, however, do not represent exchange relations in terms of commercial
transactions (cf. Simmel 1908). Warding off this misconception amounts to realizing that,

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at this primary level of description, the intended object of gratitude is the good-as-valuable-
for-the beneficiary-according-to-the benefactor’s-intention as the latter is conceived by the ben-
eficiary. Less technically: it is not the good as such (i.e., the good absolutely conceived) but
its meaning here and now for a particular beneficiary that is a relevant factor with regard to the
appropriateness of gratitude. Benefit appraisals therefore vary from individual to individual
(as is the case with benevolence and generosity too). Explaining the respective differences
required going beyond episode-gratitude and investigating trait-gratitude. It also required taking
into account past experiences, current social positions, the dynamics of other-perception and
self-perception, political convictions and other factors in order to fully understand what fuels
or thwarts the respective gratitude dispositions and their connection with episode-gratitude.
Each or all these factors may well undermine the giving and receiving relation. Consider,
for instance, the rule of thumb that the needier a person is the more grateful she will be for
suitable benefits.

The reverse often turns out to be true, however, especially when recipients believe their
needs are unjust or a source of shame. In such a case, the donor may be resented, and the
recipient may feel entitled to what is given.
(Lazarus 1999, 245)

This, again, touches upon the issue of a clustering of emotions, which can turn the positive
value of gratitude into a mixed or ambiguous emotion. It can even engender an altogether
different, mainly negative emotional outlook like resentment, contempt, or hate. There is no
pure and stable intentionality of gratitude responses. They are always entangled in particular
relations and social dynamics, which must be taken seriously in order to understand the eval-
uating character of the many forms of gratitude (cf. Kekes 1981, 299, 302; Blum 2000, 206,
211f., 217). In this vein, a phenomenology of gratitude delivers a thick description. It takes
note of how the various elements of benevolent/gratitude interactions are related to one
another and does not simplify the situation by, first, artificially disentangling and separating
the moments involved and, second, trying to get rid of or objectify circumstantial aspects.
Pondering possible inhibiting conditions of gratitude can pave the way for a more fine-
grained description of gratitude. Given that someone carries out a benevolent action and that
the circumstances do not impair or annul its aim and basic character, what kind of reason
could then block the beneficiary’s impulse to feel and show gratitude? A case in point is that
the beneficiary cannot enjoy the gift or cannot consider it valuable at all. If we exclude the
unlikely case that the benefactor erroneously conceived of the other person as standing in
need of shelter, food, emotional support or whatever, reasons for denying appreciation of
the gift will distribute among the following options. The beneficiary may (a) dislike the
benefactor as a person, independent of her actual gift-giving, due to previous experiences
and interactions. Or she may (b) dislike receiving help from this particular person because,
for example, the benefactor is in love with her but she does not feel the same way. Or the
benefactor who helped her getting out of an embarrassing public scenario turned out to be
a racist or sexist afterwards. Also it might be the case that the beneficiary (c) dislikes the
kind of help or support she is offered because, for instance, she feels forced into an improper
intimate relation with or subservient position to the benefactor. Or the beneficiary (d) be-
lieves that the benefactor would like to be repaid in terms of goods she does not want to give
(e.g., joining the benefactor’s religion). The beneficiary may also be inclined (e) to refute
in general being the addressee of benefaction because she reduces gratitude to and does not
distinguish it from indebtedness, which can be felt as extremely unpleasant and burdening

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(cf. Schwarz 1992, 25; Lazarus and Lazarus 1994, 122; Watkins 2014, 215f.). Nowadays,
the received view is that gratitude cannot be reduced to indebtedness and should be distin-
guished from it, although a feeling of indebtedness regularly is part of gratitude (cf. Watkins
et al. 2006). A strong feeling of indebtedness can inhibit gratitude. It can also inhibit ac-
knowledging gratitude as a virtuous emotion. An overstatement of indebtedness is probably
also what motivates Aristotle to deny acknowledging gratitude as a virtue, since it would
not be decent and indeed demeaning for the great-minded (megalopsychoi) to show gratitude
(cf. Kristjánsson 2015). Finally, and possibly nourished or increased by (some of ) the afore-
mentioned options (a)–(e), the beneficiary may (f ) have doubts concerning the goodwill of
the benefactor.
The goodwill of the benefactor can be impaired or annulled either from reasons in-
ternal to the present (inter)action or from external reasons. In the latter case, the reasons
that diminish or abolish the benefactor’s (alleged) goodwill can, for example, refer to her
character traits and feeling dispositions. A case in point is what Max Scheler discusses under
the heading of a “pharisaic” attitude and motivation to act. Though this may characterize
an agent’s general attitude and behaviour, it has a remarkable impact on particular instances
of benevolence/gratitude interactions by redefining their intentional structure. Acting in a
pharisaic manner means not to do benevolent acts for the sake of alleviating the beneficiary’s
needs or hardship; rather carrying them out in order to publicly show up as a benevolent
person. The agent of course tries to conceal this selfish motivation or downrightly denies
having it (cf. Scheler 1973, 27, 179f., 182f.). It is an effective disqualifier of gratitude if the
beneficiary views the donor as self-serving. Authentic benevolence and authentic gratitude
are devoid of predominating pharisaic motives. It is, however, misconceived to stipulate a
radical antagonism of pure pharisaism and pure altruism (cf. Hampton 1993). Self-concern,
to some degree, is always involved. Real-life benevolence/gratitude interactions allow for
mixed motives on both sides. Mixed motives do not necessarily hamper or annul the benev-
olent act and its generosity. They are compatible with the normative idea of a benevolence/
gratitude interaction as long as the self-related aspects do not take precedence. Acting phari-
saically does not primarily concern the manner in which the benevolent act is carried out. It
rather concerns the posture or mindset of the alleged benefactor. It therefore represents an at
least semi-external inhibiting condition of gratitude. This being the case, one may argue that
pharisaic benevolence hinders the occurrence of gratitude from contingent reason.
The next step is to query whether there are inhibiting conditions of gratitude referring to
intrinsic aspects of the benevolence/gratitude interaction. Scrutinizing possible intrinsic rea-
sons for inhibiting gratitude helps to get a clearer grasp on the social and moral significance
of gratitude. It also helps to understand the specific “sense of justice” involved in everyday
benevolence/gratitude interactions.

3.2 Adverbial duties and the proper reference of “a sense of justice”

Both in philosophical and psychological literature, gratitude is usually understood as a pos-
itive emotion suited to enhance social cohesion and individual well-being. Given this char-
acteristic, it is disturbing to see how insecure and wavering actual assessments of benevolent
actions and relating responses of gratitude are. Although it is generally assumed that grati-
tude is the proper and warranted response to benevolent actions, the reality of gift-giving
shows an entire range of more or less positive or negative assessments referring to gratitude.
On various occasions, it is considered inappropriate to show gratitude because it would be
insincere, humiliating, obsequious or self-demeaning to do so. Whether or not gratitude is

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warranted in particular cases cannot be determined in advance and in a context-independent

manner. Neither can it be determined without judging upon the correlating benevolent act.
This seems clear and uncontroversial given the fact that gratitude occurs as an emotional re-
sponse. The propriety of the response, at least to a large extent, depends on the propriety of
the originary act of benevolence. Moreover, the relational aspect has to be taken in account
too. Among others, it is relevant with regard to assessing the proper intensity (magnitude)
and expression of gratitude. Whether it is suitable to feel gratitude on a given occasion,
however, first and foremost depends on the propriety of the benevolent act. “Propriety” here
does not merely refer to the occurrence or non-occurrence of gift-giving; or, to the issue
whether, from what reasons and to what extent, the benevolent action was called for at all.
The extended meaning of “propriety” in the present context mirrors the idea that the moral
assessment of gratitude depends on the desirability of the benefit from the beneficiary’s point
of view, the goodwill of the benefactor, the effort she undergoes to give the benefit (e.g., by
deviating from her social roles) and how hard it is for her to relinquish the good herself (cf.
Watkins 2014, 41–51). Yet the effective assessment of gratitude—whether it is justified and
decent to feel gratitude in particular instances of benevolence/gratitude interactions—also
and in a weighty sense depends on what has been designated “duties of manner” or “adver-
bial duties” (cf. Audi 2004, 179–182).
Adverbial duties go beyond the demand that some specific (type of ) action has to be
realized in order to meet certain normatively required achievements. They go beyond the
fulfilment of strict or perfect duties. Adverbial duties refer to the manner in which those ac-
tions are carried out whose performance is suited to meet either perfect or imperfect duties.
(The latter distinction goes back to Kant who defines imperfect duties as duties of personal
discretion: it is up to the individual agent when and to what extent they are fulfilled. On the
contrary, there is a moral demand on every agent to completely fulfil strict or perfect duties.
Cf. Kant 1964, 118–124 [§§ 27–33].) Deontologists and virtue ethicists usually agree that
benevolence is an imperfect duty: the benefactor is not strictly speaking obliged to help the
beneficiary. If she does so, the help is offered not on the basis of another one’s right or enti-
tlement (which does not exist) but on the basis of a voluntary decision and within the limits
of individual discretion. What sense could it make to nonetheless talk about adverbial duties
on these conditions? As “duties” falling on the side of the benefactor, they refer to the right
manner of giving benefits. Though the right manner of giving certainly leaves some latitude
it nonetheless is subject to an invariable constraint of rationality. The respective manner of
giving must not undermine or abolish the very nature of benefaction and, consequently,
must not disenable the beneficiary to feel and show gratitude in a proper manner. Among
Seneca’s many subtle descriptions of the dialectics involved in benevolence/gratitude inter-
actions, we find the following:

Often, I say, the benefit endures, and yet imposes no obligation. If the giver repents of
his gift, if he says that he is sorry that he gave it, if he sighs, or makes a wry face when
he gives it, if he thinks that he is, not bestowing, but throwing away, his gift, if he gave
it to please himself, or, at any rate, not to please me, if he persists in being offensive, in
boasting of his gift, in bragging of it everywhere, and in making it painful to me, the
benefit endures, although it imposes no obligation (…).
(Seneca 1935, 373)

How do adverbial duties of gratitude bear on the issue of justice and its specific weaving into
benevolence/gratitude interactions? If interactions are motivated by justice-based rights or

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entitlements, the agents are brought together on symmetrical terms, at least as far as their for-
mal roles as bearers and “executers” of the relevant rights-based claims are concerned. There
is no debt of gratitude involved. One person is entitled to receive something, and another
person is strictly obliged to give it. Both of them act in accordance with a principle of justice
or a particular application thereof (indictment) which they unanimously acknowledge. In
case of clear-cut justice-based interactions there is no absolute need to pay attention to the
peculiar manner of giving and receiving. The object conveyed is a material thing or im-
material good. To be sure, flaws concerning the manner of giving and receiving may cause
annoyance even on condition that we are dealing with justice-based claims. Yet the crucial
point is that these flaws do not undermine or annul the very nature or normative character
of the relevant act or interaction.
Gift-giving is far more susceptible to variations with regard to the manner in which it is
carried out. This goes hand in hand with other relevant differences that come to light when
this kind of interaction is compared with straightforwardly justice-based interactions. First of
all, gift-giving or benefaction is no strict obligation. The benefactor’s help, if she decides to
offer it, is voluntary and flows from her own initiative. The beneficiary’s gratitude depends
on his understanding that the benefactor acted from goodwill, without any strict obligation
and in the absence of any outer influence or force that determined her to do so. (This reflects
the feeling of undeserved benefit often reported.) Taking benevolence/gratitude interactions
at face value, it is obvious that they rest on an asymmetrical relation: the beneficiary stands
in need of some good, which is conveyed voluntarily and intentionally by the benefactor.
The beneficiary depends on the attentiveness and generosity of the benefactor. The latter
enjoys an opportunity to gain self-esteem as well as social appreciation because she is able
to alleviate the other’s plight. While the benefactor is endowed with property, knowledge,
cultural backing, professional networks or whatever appears useful and desirable, the benefi-
ciary is seriously hampered with regard to her freedom of action. She is unable to satisfy an
urgent need without the help of others, and she perceives herself unable to do so right in the
moment when she is succoured.
It is due to this striking asymmetry, which is more or less strongly felt by the parties in-
volved, that benevolence/gratitude interactions gain a considerable complexity with regard
to their intentional content and social as well as moral significance. Owing to this asym-
metry, it is all the more important to carefully pay attention to the manner of giving and
receiving. More precisely, adverbial duties are crucial with regard to benevolence/gratitude
interactions because they reflect a deeper layer of meaning, which is suited to balance the
prima facie asymmetry of giver and receiver by a more fundamental symmetry. How does
this work?
At first sight, benevolence/gratitude interactions revolve around the conveyed good and
its value for both the giver and the receiver. It is therefore plausible to consider the benefit as
the visible or otherwise immediately present object of concern. However, it is by focusing
on the (missing) fulfilment of adverbial duties that we realize the true range of the experi-
ences at issue. What is at stake goes far beyond the giving and receiving of a benefit. What
is at stake can properly be called the “topic” of benevolence/gratitude interactions, which
does not coincide with their intentional object or prima facie agential character. The topic
announces itself and can be seized (at least by those who are sensitive and attentive to these
qualifications) in the manner in which benefits are conveyed and received. The topic is a
mutually granted, that is, symmetrically “distributed” recognition-respect between the par-
ties involved (cf. Darwall 1977, 2006). Acknowledging the other in the light of this respect
is inevitable as soon as the allocation of social roles (powerful/helpless, rich/poor, generous/

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needy) is realized as built on unstable and contingent grounds. By means of empathic un-
derstanding and imagination, it is conceivable that the roles of benefactor and beneficiary
could be performed the other way round. Recognition-respect does not address the agents
as equipped with their actual social roles. It rather takes them as “naked” human beings who
find themselves in very different situations, striving to get along, to improve themselves, to
live an honourable and worthwhile life. Recognition-respect is inevitable on condition that
the donor and the receiver of a benefit both realize (and know about each other’s insight in)
their shared human vulnerability. This seems to be the ultimate ground of the experience of
gratitude: that the other’s existence must not be denied; that it is urged upon us. Seeing the
other and oneself in the light of plain existence and human vulnerability certainly cannot be
expected from young children, even if they are already able to routinely act as gift-receivers
or gift-donors and are trained to say “thank you.” Becoming sensitive to the existential level of
gift-giving has to be learned. Doing so is part of acquiring the virtue of gratitude. As long as
we restrict ourselves to what is obvious, that is, the asymmetrical relation of giving and receiving we
are inclined to merely tackle with the benefit. Yet its conveyance can occasionally be felt as a
callous demonstration of social imbalance. At this level, it is, however, impossible to under-
stand why it often is so difficult to show an authentic and pure gratitude, which evades the
risk of turning into ambiguous or even clearly negative emotions like envy or hate.
Taking the point of view of deep level recognition-respect, we are able to reevaluate the
above-mentioned case that a beneficiary feels and shows gratitude notwithstanding the fact
that the benefactor’s intention to convey a good has failed. In this case, the beneficiary’s grat-
itude depends on her confidence that the benefactor tried to convey the benefit ultimately
because of the recognition-respect directed towards her. The latter remains untouched by his failure
to convey the good. Conversely, it can be unwarranted and unacceptable to show gratitude
even if the benefit is successfully conveyed, yet the benefaction is used as a means to humil-
iate or denigrate, manipulate or compromise the beneficiary (cf. Lazarus and Lazarus 1994,
119). Due to the deprecating manner of conveying the gift, it has ceased to be a benefit: “A
gift is not a benefit if the best part of it is lacking—the fact that it was given as a mark of es-
teem” (Seneca 1935, 49). Morally assessing gift-giving requires assessing possible inhibiting
conditions in the light of the deep level involvement of recognition-respect. The immediate
starting-point for doing so is the very manner of how the giving and receiving is carried out.
The sense of justice relevant here does not refer to entitlements and obligations. It ad-
dresses the right and decent manner to encounter one’s fellow humans as it is reflected in the
very manner of giving and receiving benefits. This particular sense of justice usually remains un-
expressed. It is primarily given in terms of an emotional awareness of the other’s presence
as it is especially realized in her empathic understanding. The sense of justice involved in
benevolence/gratitude interactions does not stand in need of deliberation or theoretical in-
vestigation in order to be grasped. In particular, it must not be reduced to calculations of a
“debt balance” (cf. Komter 2004, 206f.). It rather reflects the deeper existential dimension
of this kind of interaction and the tacitly shared willingness not to let the obvious asym-
metry between giver and receiver determine their other-perception and self-esteem. There
is no right that underlies this mutual willingness. Neither do the agents have any theory of
human dignity in mind. Yet being engaged in gift-giving the agents can clearly feel their
respective vulnerability, at least if they have reached a mature level of moral perception
(cf. Rinofner-Kreidl 2013, 175–181, 186–191). The “object” of gratitude, at this level, is the
experience of sharing their human vulnerability. Correspondingly, deep level ingratitude goes
beyond the ordinary conception of ingratitude, that is, one’s failing to appreciate a “visible”
gift conveyed. It manifests itself as the inability to gain access to the feeling of deep level symmetry

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or existential equality. Let us assume that it is indeed a matter of the agents’ moral matu-
rity whether they become aware of their existential community. We then need to ponder
whether deep level ingratitude (fully) lies within the individual’s responsibility or whether
it is due to unfavourable circumstances of life and bad moral luck. Hence, it is not only the
obvious issue of charity and generosity but also the above-sketched deep level sense of justice
involved in gratitude that leads us back into the more robust political struggles about unequal
distributions of opportunities and favourable circumstances of life. From this point of view,
gratitude ceases to be a mild and calm emotion. It rather presents itself as a burdened virtue
(cf. Tessman 2005), which includes the task to discriminate excessive or misplaced thank-
fulness from virtuous gratitude (cf. Carr 2015a, 2015b). A so-conceived gratitude is bound
within the limits of a precarious life and incessantly on the edge to turn into anger, indigna-
tion, rage or other self-protective emotions and reactive attitudes. Understanding gratitude
in its full complexity also requires seeing it as part of conflicting claims and far-reaching
social dynamics (cf. McConnell 2016; Smilansky 2016).
Let us take stock. In the present section, I submitted that adverbial duties are crucial
because (i) they bring to bear the sense of justice that is involved in benevolence/gratitude
interactions; (ii) if met properly, they can counterbalance the asymmetry between bene-
factor and beneficiary in a way that allows the latter to authentically feel gratitude without
being forced into ambiguous emotions. Adverbial duties are the main reference for defining
enabling and inhibiting conditions of gratitude. (iii) They reflect and render accessible the
deeper meaning layer and overall topic of benevolence/gratitude interactions, that is, mutu-
ally granted recognition-respect.

4. Concluding remarks
Benevolence/gratitude interactions must not be misconceived in terms of merely conven-
tional practices or commercial exchanges. Neither can they be reduced to straightforwardly
justice-based interactions that posit rights or entitlements and corresponding obligations.
Benevolence/gratitude relations hinge upon the benefactor’s voluntariness and genuine and
honest goodwill. They also hinge upon the beneficiary’s capability to ungrudgingly accept
being succoured, to enjoy the good and to freely express her gratitude. All of this can be hard
to realize or can become an inroad for deception and self-deception.
Gratitude does not only strengthen social ties on condition of asymmetrically distrib-
uted social roles, positions and powers. The formative effects of gratitude (cf. Fredrickson
2004) also include the shaping of a virtuous character whose manifestation in an agent’s
emotional responses and actions goes beyond the more superficial aspects of human inter-
action in favour of its existential layers. In giving and receiving gifts in a proper manner the
deep symmetry of mutual recognition-respect “shines through” and thereby counterbal-
ances those destabilizing elements of the social situation that easily bring it about that the
positive feeling of gratitude turns into an ambiguous or thoroughly negative emotion. As
argued above, adverbial duties function as intermediaries between the conspicuously given
benevolence/gratitude interactions and the deeper meaning structure of recognition-respect.
As to the latter, the crucial question is how to treat fellow human beings on conditions of
dependency, which cover both circumstances of life and acquired attachment styles. The
deep level sense of justice involved in everyday benevolence/gratitude interactions therefore
seems to be connected with an inchoate and unarticulated, yet emotionally ingrained sense
of self which amounts to a sense-of-self-as-encountering-the-other or as-bound-up-with-
the-other. The relevant sense of justice is a sense of being human (cf. Roberts 2007, 147).

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The above-sketched phenomenology of gratitude submits a phenomenological explana-

tion of what philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists often have been
stating: that gratitude is a positive emotion, which is apt to strengthen social cohesion and
individual well-being. Yet, it does so in a far more complicated manner than one might have
expected. The accurate meaning, evaluation and effects of gratitude vary according to the
personalities and types of action involved (e.g. being grateful for a good Samaritan’s help;
for having been courageous enough to beat off a rapist’s attack). They also vary according
to the social contexts in which benevolence/gratitude interactions occur. Resulting from its
context-sensitive appearance and against the grain of a commonplace, our emotional prac-
tice does not show gratitude as an overall calm, kind and unequivocally positive emotion.

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 44
TRUST
Nicolas de Warren

Considerations of trust widely recognize trust as indispensable for human concourse,

communication, and commerce. When we commonly speak of trust, we principally have in
mind the trust that is given, received, and honored among individuals. Philosophical elab-
orations of trust likewise focus on, or give special (“paradigmatic”) status to, mutual trust
between individuals. While interpersonal trust undoubtedly represents a central dimension
of trust, a consideration of trust must take into view a more complex landscape to include
self-trust and trust in the world.1 Any account of these dimensions of trust in isolation,
and especially with the prevalent single-minded focus on interpersonal trust commanding
much of the philosophical literature, must be deemed inadequate to the truism that “upon
trust men live in the world.” To thus expand a consideration of trust is to broaden as well as
deepen, but as significantly: to render more complex, our understanding of the varieties of
trust for human life.
A consideration of trust must attend to its three manifest dimensions: trust in Others
(interpersonal trust), self-trust, and trust in the world. This threefold imbrication of trusts
provides the threads from which the life-world is woven and torn. When we enter into
relations of trust, we become not only entrusted to the Other and give the Other our trust,
but to the specific relation of trust to which we have subscribed along with the Other. In
being entrusted by the Other with her trust, or likewise, in entrusting the Other with my
trust, I, or the Other, must trust in oneself to honor this election. Trust is not simply given
and received; it must be honored, and in honoring our trusts, we must continually attest to
ourselves as entrusted as well as to our trusting relationship. In its interpersonal form, trust is
not simply a binding—to be bound to the Other in trust. It is also an accompanying: when
we trust the Other, we are bound to her, much as she is bound (in cases of mutual trust) to
us: in friendship, in love, in collegiality, etc. This bond of trust is an accompanying. I accom-
pany the Other in trust. The Other stands as my witness. I become the Other’s keeper much
as the Other becomes my keeper. We are both keepers of our trust. In this bond of trust
along with the Other (to the Other as well as towards our bond of trust), I am also bound to
myself in the company of the Other’s trust in me. There is no binding to and with the Other
that is also not a binding to and with myself. My trustworthiness on the basis of which the
Other trusts me just as much engages and requires truthfulness towards myself as well as
towards the Other. Self-attestation, and hence self-trust, is inseparable from trust in Others

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(Ricoeur 1992). The dimension of truthfulness is not only Other-regarding but just as, sig-
nificantly, self-regarding. In attesting to myself as being truthful, I stand truthfully towards
the Other. The formation of the self in self-truthfulness and self-attestation, as entrusted to
oneself, is critical for discourse as well as for collaborative action; without this assumption
of truthfulness, discourse would collapse into either blatant hypocrisy or sheer rhetorical
performance. To be truthful to oneself is to be authentic to oneself in cultivating a distance
within oneself that only oneself can and knows, and, in this sense, owns.
Trust in others and self-trust are inseparable from trust in the world. Trust in the world
can—broadly speaking—be distinguished into two basic forms: trust as determined by
modal specification and general trust in the world. In its elemental form, trust is both a bind-
ing and an accompanying: when we trust the Other, we are bound to the Other and she is
bound to us: in friendship, in love, in collegiality, etc. These bindings are edgings, or linings,
of the self in a dual sense: a boundary of inclusion becomes circumscribed around the trust-
ing parties, which at once internally distinguishes a schema of mutual recognition (as those
in whom we trust) as well as externally forming a schema of discrimination, as those outside
the bounds of our trust, towards which we are more readily, if not by default, distrustful.
Bound in trust, we accompany, and, in this sense, participate in the lives of Others, much
as those Others accompany, and, in this sense, participate in our lives. Trust constitutes an
elemental form of participation, or involvement; in trust, we do not simply live with Others,
but we live with Others in us much as we live in Others (de Warren 2017). Individuals in
whom we trust line our own sense of self from within; the inner lining of myself is the Other
in whom I trust. We are involved in their lives in an emotional atmosphere of assuredness
from the inside; from within their own lives in the allowance of their trust. Such intimate
involvement in the lives of Others (in contrast to involvement with the lives of Others) fosters
an assured form of identification and emotional attachment: we identify more assuredly with
those in whom we trust, both cognitively, conatively, and affectively, much as we come to
identify ourselves more assuredly in our entrustments by Others.
Such “trust networks” (family, community, parish, army, nation-state, etc.) reflect the
social structuring and modal specification of trust that configure various institutions of trust
in the life-world (Tilly 2005). Institutions of trust are bound to modal specifications: we trust
a given person in her capacity as a doctor, as a professor, etc. (Misztal 1996, 129ff.; Steinbock
2014, 219ff.). By contrast, we more readily distrust Others, or simply distrust by default,
according modal specifications that define those Others in terms of a distance, or exclusion,
from our own self-invested trust networks. Trust networks are symbolically encoded (we
spontaneously trust the stranger with the Red Sox cap rather than the stranger with the
New York Yankees cap) as well as historically embedded. In terms of social groups, cultural
heritage, and other institutions in the phenomenological sense of Stiftungen, trust networks
are inscribed into symbolic forms, or symbolic systems, that mediate and, in this sense, en-
able the coupling of values, discourse, and action (Hosking 2014).
Trust networks, modal specifications, and symbolic forms compose manifold struc-
tures of the life-world. As Schütz argues, “faith in the Other’s truthfulness” (Glauben an
die Wahrhaftigkeit des Anderen) stands as the conditio sine qua non for intersubjective existence:
the possibility of communication, participation, and experience with others assumes the
truthfulness of Others, and this truthfulness, in turn, must be invested in the truthfulness
of the world (Schütz 1964, 155). This faith or belief in the “truthfulness” or “creditability”
(die Wahrhaftigkeit) of Others, without which we would not entrust Others (either give, re-
ceive, or honor trusts), entails not only a trust that Others speak truthfully and take respon-
sibility for their speaking; we would not be disappointed at the individual who lies to us if

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not for this basic trust that Others should speak truthfully. This assumption of the Other’s
truthfulness bespeaks a general attitude of trustworthiness in Others as such. Simmel argues
that money and, more broadly, economic exchange and value critically depend on such trust.
More pervasively, as Simmel writes:

without the general trust that people have in each other, society itself would disinte-
grate, for very few relationships are based entirely upon what is known with certainty
about another person, and very few relationships would endure if trust were not as
strong, or stronger than, rational proof or personal observation.
(Simmel 1978, 178)

This “general trust”—here understood as a pervasive assumption of the trustworthiness of

Others as such—is both inseparable from yet irreducible to the plurality of trust networks, or
institutions of trust, configuring the life-world.
Is there is pervasive and grounding trustworthiness towards Others, irrespective of any
differentiation between friend and foe, us and them? This general thesis of the natural atti-
tude, not just in terms of an original positing of the world, but as an original positing, that
is: faith, in the trustworthiness of Others should not be understood in the vein of instinc-
tual human sympathy or Christian universal Love of humankind. Such notions assume a
determinate image of human nature and, moreover, a specifiable emotional quality as well
as specifiable object (“who” is humanity as such?). What distinguishes a general thesis of
trustworthiness is precisely that it lacks any specifiable object, in so far as it bespeaks of a
trustworthiness not yet configured according to modal specifications and collective trusts
that bind together in-groups (we trust those whom we recognize as members of our group).
In edging our identity, trust institutes a border of inclusion, edging away the stranger, who
is placed outside the sphere of our trust in an atmosphere of distrust. Trust constitutes bonds
as well as boundaries; the stronger our emotional investment and feelings of mutual trust,
the stronger the inclusionary affective force of trust’s assuredness, and, likewise, the stron-
ger the exclusionary repulsion of distrust’s assurances. Trust’s emotional lining, as bonding
and boundary-marking, is exemplified with nation-states and religious communities. As
Hosking observes, “nations create both strong solidarities and also rigid boundaries. A major
component of national feeling is the sense of the Other, the certainty about who one is not,
whom one tends to distrust, or certainly trusts less readily” (Hosking 2014, 110).
Trust in the world is spun from social, cultural, and institutional trusts (along with their
respective symbolic forms and historical sedimentations) along with the underpinning of such
trust networks in the truthfulness/trustworthiness of Others as such. In its primordial form,
this faith in the Other is an openness towards Others molded on an assuredness that the Other
is first neither my friend nor my enemy, but the Stranger with whom communication, com-
merce, and concourse are possible, but not guaranteed. Openness towards the Other is trust-
ing that there is a possible future of encounter and shared narrative with the Stranger. What
distinguishes this assuredness is, on the one hand, its thinness with regard to the instituted
robustness of modal specification, collective differentiation, and symbolic forms, and, on the
other hand, its steadfastness in the face of innumerable betrayals, deceits, and conflicts within
the specification of instituted trust. If we were deprived of any openness in trust towards
Others, were we to live entirely distrustful of Others, we would become the Misanthrope in
the image of the Man from the Underground, whose pervasive distrust of Others expresses
itself in the heady mixture of aggression towards Others and toxic volatility within his own
pride and shame, self-assuredness (egotism), and self-doubt. We cannot live with a complete

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lack of assuredness with regard to Others; and yet, we cannot live trusting Others equally and
universally, in which case we would become either the Idiot (Prince Myshkin) of Dostoevsky,
who remains socially illiterate to the intrigues and machinations around him, or Voltaire’s
Candide, whose unperturbed faith in humankind remains innocent, yet therefore blank and
untroubled in the stare and stupor of non-comprehension, despite the patent evils of the world.
With Candide, unflagging optimism in humankind is bolstered by an unassailable trust in
the rationality of the world, or trust in the world in the maximized form of rational intelligibil-
ity and necessity. Pangloss’ metaphysical refrain “this is the best of all possible worlds” accompa-
nies Candide’s faith in human beings like a mantra with its constant reassurance that optimism
with regard to Others is not misplaced given this underwritten trust in the world as the best of
all possible worlds. Candide’s narrative wanders across the globe of human folly, ever in search
of returning to the garden from which he was first ejected. The gardens located throughout
Candide’s journey each represents a different image (or mirage) of being at home in the world.
Thrown into his narrative from the garden of paradise (Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh’s keep),
Candide comes across in his worldly wanderings the False Garden of Eldorado, only to end his
travels in a more modest garden with the memorable counsel: il faut cultiver notre jardin. Trust
in the world as structured through social, cultural, and political institutions, as well as the
open-ended assuredness of human truthfulness, rests on an existential sense of being at home
in the world, or trust in the world in this more fundamental sense, one that is not constituted
through trust networks, but disclosed as their very condition. Loss of trust in the world in this
primordial sense—when the gods fall silent—unhinges and uncouples social, cultural, and
discursive symbolic systems of trust, but likewise, the withering away of trust in the world can
be precipitated by the erosion and collapse of those same institutions.
Gaining the Other’s trust and trusting in the Other allows the Other to enter into our
lives as involved and invested participant. The Other accompanies us in our bond of trust.
In granting the Other our trust, we give the Other, as Baier argues, a discretionary power of
judgment over our lives, or something (or someone) we care about, in the hold of assuredness
that we can rest assured in the Other’s beneficence (Baier 1995). The Other becomes our
better angel, thus alleviating the burden of our lives in bolstering our own freedom insofar
as bonds of trust must be freely given and accepted for our own self-realization. The Other
in this manner lines our subjectivity from within; our sense of self becomes edged with the
Other. Allowing the Other to stand as my witness, as critic and confidant (as well as, once
I pass from the scene of the world, in remembrance), the Other is given an edge over my
subjectivity. In moments of personal indecision, ambivalence, or crisis, I look to the Other’s
better judgment and wise counsel. I allow the Other a wider berth within which to con-
front me with myself through the Other with a directness and truthfulness that I would find
either too intrusive (as with my office colleagues) or too obsequious (as with the sycophant)
with Others outside my bond of trust, or too suspicious (as with the Confidence Man).
This edging of the self in the Other can be leveraged against me when the Other abuses or
manipulates my trust to cause my ruin or gain an advantage at my expense. In allowing the
trusted person to participate in our lives and exercise discretionary judgment, we have placed
ourselves in their hands—hands which now move against us.

1. Affective and atmospheric trust

Relations of trust must be nourished and nurtured. Through a mutual edging, or lining,
of one another’s sense of self, a space and time of trust emerges between us, bonding us to
each Other in the allowance of the Other’s accompaniment from within. This span of trust

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is held between two extremes: blind devotion or loyalty in which our autonomy and dis-
cretion becomes entirely dissipated into the Other; paranoid vigilance and corrosive distrust
by which the Other’s discretionary power of judgment and beneficence has been entirely
ejected from having a place in our life. How easily the one we trusted becomes hated when
we feel deeply betrayed; how easily we surrender to the Other’s trust when we feel to have
betrayed our own self-trust. Between these two poles, the nourishment and nurturing of
trust requires, as Baier terms it, the exercise of “functional virtues,” or, in other words,
virtues appropriate for the nourishment and nurturing of trust. We are each entrusted as
the keepers of our trust, and must mutually calibrate and check upon our trust without ob-
trusive and suspicious monitoring. Such measured monitoring of trust involves a degree of
emotional intelligence and cognitive tact. We must feel our way within our trust: adjusting
its contours, shaping its substance, and guiding its future.
Trusting relationships operate within a tensor of different vectors: cognitive, affective,
and conative. Rather than reduce trust to an emotion, a knowing and judging, or an endur-
ing disposition of goodwill, a bond of trust is formed in the tensor of emotions, cognition,
and beneficent desire. As an emotional attachment, trust rests upon cognitive assuredness in
granting discretionary power of judgment to the Other. Assuredness is not merely a felt emo-
tional quality of nearness: the Other as lined within me. It is also an assuredness that allows
for a settled confidence in coupling the Other’s motivations, values, and possible courses of
action. Trusting is not merely based on the cognitive or the affective. Trusting is an assured
capacity of coupling the cognitive, the affective, and the conative and, through this opera-
tion of coupling, apprehending the Other as known to me, as known in me, within the arc of
my own self-knowledge. This operation of coupling is intrinsic to the knowledge I form of
the Other in trusting them. Trust is knowing and being-known.
Trusting relationships operate within a tensor of different vectors: cognitive, affective,
and conative. Rather than reduce trust to an emotion, a knowing and judging, or an endur-
ing disposition of goodwill, a bond of trust is formed in the conglomeration of emotions,
cognition, and benevolent desire within an atmosphere of assuredness. Trust is often de-
scribed as “atmospheric,” and not without reason (Bok 1978; Baier 1986). It is, one the one
hand, descriptively challenging to track the distinctive phenomenological features of trust.
Unlike emotions such as anger and love, or attitudes such as indifference or obsequiousness,
to be trusting or to be entrusted does not manifest itself according to any specific style of
manifestation. This appears to be especially significant for any proposed characterization of
trust as a specific kind of emotion (Hartmann 2011, 151–171). Even love, which is often iden-
tified as the emotional register of trust, proves elusive to specify in this context, other than
through attributes which just as much could be taken as characteristic of an affective attitude
of goodwill towards the Other ( Jones 1996). On the other hand, the emotional registers one
experiences in trusting relationships—intimacy, confidence, peace-of-mind, love, etc.—are
nowhere more clearly manifest as when trust becomes betrayed, disappointed, or failed.
The acute sense of despair, anger, and even hatred felt with the betrayal of trust attest, as
negative images, to the positive emotional registers of trusting relationships. The emotional
presentness of trust is nowhere more manifest as when it becomes lost. This is especially
apparent with the trans-valuation of love into hate: we come to hate the person who betrays
us in an obsessive manner, as the reverse image of our intense attachment to that person in
love. Much as we can speak, as does Stendhal, of the “crystallization” of love, we can speak
of the “crystallization” of hate: the despised Other becomes our entire universe, and even as
we seek to expel the despised Other from our lives, her presence nonetheless remains within

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us to the degree that we remain unable to escape from our own compulsive obsession and
consuming passion for the Other. We are at times never so close to the Other as in hatred.
The characterization of trust as “atmosphere” need not be taken in either a metaphori-
cal or literal sense, but in a genuinely phenomenological sense as truthful to the distinctive of
presentness in trust. Hermann Schmitz argues for “atmospheric emotions” that, by virtue
of their diffuse yet pervading presentness, elude any identification with determinate acts of
consciousness or with a specifiable characteristic of an object (see Chapters 19 and 23 in this
volume). Such atmospheric emotions are “holistic,” embracing and prior to the differentia-
tion between acts of consciousness and objects (intentionality). Rather than consider emo-
tions as either affective states of consciousness or “inner experiences” of a subject, emotions
are understood as embodied moving atmospheres poured out spatially. On this conception,
an emotional atmosphere (for example: grief or joy) “pours” or “spills” out over the sphere
of the present, which, once recognized, affects the body and the person. The person is here
identified neither with “consciousness,” “the soul,” or “the body,” but with the animation,
or life, of what Schmitz calls “the felt body” moving within “felt space” within an original
sense of spatiality (Schmitz 1969, 2014). In a comparable vein, trust manifests itself in its
emotional assuredness and attachment as an atmospheric sphere of presentness much along
the lines of the spatiality of emotions and the affected, moving, that is, acting person who
finds themselves within the hold of trust. We come to feel at home in a strange space within
the atmospheric presence of a trusted person, as with Marcel in the hotel of Balbec (in
Proust’s Recherche), who can only sleep once his grandmother has placed her bed against the
shared bedroom wall from the other side within her own room. We might thus speak of trust
as an emotional sphere of presentness rather than as the form of an object or an act of consciousness
(Sloterdijk 2011). Within such spheres of trust, conglomerations of emotions, cognitions, and
desires crystallize in the hold of trust.
As an emotional attachment, trust rests upon cognitive assuredness in granting discretion-
ary power of judgment to the Other. Assuredness is not merely a felt emotional quality of
nearness: the Other as lined within me. This assuredness within me allows, most critically,
for an affordance of distance from the trusted Other. As argued by Erik Erikson, the forma-
tion of basic trust within the mother-child relationship during infant development hinges
on the capacity of the child to let go of the immediate presence of the mother in the expec-
tation, or trust, that the absent mother will return. Even when the child cannot call upon
the mother directly, trust in the mother’s benevolence for the child and, crucially, eventual
return, allows the child to overcome the anxiety of separation (Erikson 1963). This trust
in the mother’s return, for Erikson, underpins all form of social trust and requires a degree
of self-trust in the child’s capacity to endure, as it were, the absence of the trusted mother.
More generally, the assuredness of trust allows for a settled confidence in coupling the Other’s
motivations, values, and possible courses of action.

2. The coupling of trust

Trusting is an assured capacity of coupling the cognitive, the affective, and the conative
and, through this operation of coupling, apprehending the Other as known to me, as known
in me, within the arc of my own self-knowledge. This operation of coupling is intrinsic to
the knowledge I form of the Other in trusting them. Trust is knowing and being-known.
In trusting the Other, I can more ably and assuredly predict their actions, reactions, and re-
sponses on the basis on more ably and assuredly coupling their possible motivations, reasons,

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and values, so as to plot and understand, approve or disapprove, their chosen course of action,
or lack thereof. The inscrutability of the Other becomes for me leavened with the assuredness
of my coupling together who they might be in any given situation. In trusting the Other, I can
rest assured that the Other shall most likely behave in such and such a manner, be motivated
to do such and such an action, and to act according to such and such a value. In this assured
capacity of coupling together, the Other’s possible courses of action and reasoning, I identify
myself with the kind of individual who, as the Other who is not me, is nonetheless like me. I
trust that the Other would do as I would do in a given situation or trust that the Other will
act in a way with which I could identity and hence endorse. Even when the Other’s actions,
motivations, and values remain opaque, we are more disposed to give the trusted Other the
benefit of our doubt and rule out more incriminating or trust-corrosive motivations, values,
actions. When our trust becomes tested, challenged, or betrayed, the assuredness of our
coupling operation (imagining what the Other would do, knowing that the Other would
not do this and that, etc.) becomes itself tested, challenged, or, in cases of betrayal, broken.
Much as this coupling operation called trusting the Other gives us assurances in granting
discretionary judgment and embedding emotional investment, this knowing of the Other
can be equally used against us, for in trust, I myself become known (and in ways I may not
know of myself ) to the Other. The Confidence Man’s self-assuredness (as in Melville’s novel,
The Confidence Man), charisma, and rhetorical prowess insinuates himself into a member
of my trust-network, or in-group, and through this perspicuous vantage-point over who
I am—what I value, how I would act, etc.—deftly uses the coupling intelligence of trust
against me. Addressing us in ways that speak to what we value, a shared past, and our mem-
bership community, the Confidence Man employs a strategy of mirroring, and in this mirror-
ing, we, the marker, become captivated and captured in seeing an image of ourselves, or an
image of our in-group identity. In this mirror, we see likeness and fellow-feeling without
seeing our own blindness, for it is this very mirroring that makes us blind to the Confidence
Man’s dissimulation and manipulation of our trust. We have been duped in having been
seen through without seeing through our own blindness for having ourselves been rendered
transparent.
The assuredness in trust’s coupling, and hence, coming to know the Other and feeling
attached to the Other, invested in the Other’s life and assured that the Other is invested in
our life, is never static. Our confidence in knowing the trusted Other is always shifting, at
times more or less pronounced. Relationships of trust must be nourished and nurtured so
that the assuredness of coupling becomes related to the self-monitoring of the relationship.
The exercise of functional virtues (those virtues appropriate to the nourishing and nurturing
of trust) as well as the monitoring of trust presupposes that the intrinsic value of trusting is
valued by the mutually entrusted individuals. It is not only that the individuals in trust must
respectively honor their trusts towards each Other. The relationship of trust itself must be
honored by each entrusted member. I am as much your keeper as we are together the keepers
of our bond of trust.
We feel honored in being trusted by the Other. We must honor the trust placed in our
hands by the Other, and this honoring is anchored in a feeling of being recognized and val-
ued, elected. This is an emotion of wanting to be truthful and trustworthy; we do not want
to let the other person down; we want to live up to our trusts and entrustments. To value
myself as entrusted, to value the Other in trust, and to value the value of our relationship of
trust reflects not only that I value both my autonomy as well as the autonomy of the Other. It
also reflects that I value the autonomy of the relationship of trust in which we are bound to each
other in the mutual realization of our respective freedom. We must each serve as the Other’s

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keeper but likewise each serve as the keeper of our trusting relationship. Since it remains
essential for the vitality of trust to remain open towards the future of our respective and re-
ciprocal development in interdependent freedom, relationships of trust can be understood
as an implied dialogue about trust, not merely as a constant dialogue in trust between us (we
confide to each other, judge each other critically, etc.), but where the meaningfulness of our
bond of trust becomes itself a critical element of the dialogue itself. A relationship of trust
unfolds as much as a dialogue in trust as a dialogue about the trust of which it always speaks;
about how we are to trust each other, measure and expand its limits, and make adjustments,
and, when betrayed, its breakages, ruptures, and aftermaths. When conceived in its dialog-
ical form, trust between individuals is not, contra Luhmann (1979), a mechanism for the
reduction of psychological complexity, but, on the contrary, an allowance and affordance for
the exploration and negotiation of complexity within the hold of assurance.
Exploring and determining the possibilities of trust are entrusted to the relationship of
trust itself. Although much of how we trust is prescribed by the modal specification of
our relationship and assessment of the Other’s trustworthiness (we trust the doctor in ways
prescribed by the profession, etc.), there is intrinsically no “concept” or “set of rules” that
prescribes exhaustively the ways in which trust must navigate the course of living with the
Other which trust makes possible. Trust always entails a creative impetus regarding how to
sustain trust and explore, in living, its meaningfulness. Trust must trust in its own capacity to
prescribe for itself how best to nourish and nurture itself, even when trust is (partly) prescribed
by its modal specification, cultural heritage, and symbolic forms. This self-prescribing el-
ement of trust reflects how paradigmatic cases of non-reflective trust are sui generis and es-
sentially without specifiable genealogy or origin. Whereas we are amazed at how suddenly
and knowingly trust becomes broken, the inaugural dawning and accruing of trust is much
less clear and distinct in its origin and progression. Gaining and nurturing trust is akin to
the slow inflation of a balloon. When trust becomes betrayed, it is akin to a violently burst-
ing balloon, all at once. The puncture, however, does not come from the outside, but from
within, given that the Other has lined my subjectivity in trust. The wounding of betrayal
runs deep and catches us from behind, from where we thought our backs were covered.
In trusting each Other, we must trust in the possibilities of trust’s consideration and al-
lowance, which are not clearly and distinctly prescribed or ordained ahead of time. These
possibilities of trust depend on knowing who we are to become together in trust. The pos-
sibilities of trust are entrusted to the relation of trust itself. In this regard, trust functions as
dialogical relationship in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense: a dialogue in which the meaningfulness
of the dialogue becomes itself a critical element in the dialogue itself. The dialogical rela-
tionship of trust contains through three positions: me, the Other, and the self-understanding
of the relationship itself, its meaningfulness for us. As Bakhtin elaborates his conception of
dialogue:

Understanding itself enters as a dialogic element in the dialogic system and somehow
changes its total sense. The person who understands inevitably becomes a third party in
the dialogue (…) but the dialogical position of this third party is a quite special one.
Any utterance always has an addressee (…) whose responsive understanding the author
of the speech work seeks and surpasses. This is the second party (…) But in addition to
this addressee (the second party), the author of the utterance, with a greater or lesser
awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose absolutely just responsive
understanding is presumed, in some metaphysical distance or in distant historic time.
(Bakhtin 1986, 126)

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In the case of trust in its paradigmatic form as mutual trust between individuals, the position
of the third must remain unclaimed and unoccupied by either of the parties in the bond of trust.
This autonomy of the relation of trust does not mean that none of the entrusted parties can
speak for and from the position of the third. We are each keepers of the trust without any one
of us becoming the lord of the trust. As a dialogical relationship, this position of the third is an
“extra-location,” or transcendent opening, that must remain open towards the future and as
the future. This “extra-location” is the “where-in” of the trusting relationship’s meaningful-
ness where we can encounter each other, bound to each other, as entrusted to each other. The
meaningfulness of trust cannot become instrumentalized or manipulated for the gain of one
for the ruin of the Other. When trust becomes the conduit to my ruin, when I am deceived
in trust, this position of the third becomes claimed by the person who deceives me; he plays at
trust all the while understanding what this relation is about, which I do not see, believing that
this place is edged, neither mine nor his, but open. When trust turns against me, the position
of the third has been seized from within, thus producing a split-vision of the relationship of
trust. The Confidence Man runs a certain narrative of our trust while I run a different narra-
tive; both narratives fail to touch each other and communicate. The dialogue has been severed.
When I realize in hindsight that my trust was geared against me, my established perception and
narrative of our trust becomes voided from the inside: I was playing a part in a game that I did
not perceive and understand, and trust both blinded me to and captured me within this game.
The betrayal of trust often provokes pronounced incredulity on the side of the betrayed
individual. That the Other would have betrayed me seems unimaginable and unfathomable.
Something profound in me has been broken: I no longer know who it is in whom I trusted.
I no longer know who I am to have trusted. This existential plunge of betrayal attests to the
existential depth of trust in the formation of self-assuredness. Even when registering and suf-
fering the dissimulation of trust, betrayed individuals can nonetheless cling to their trust in
the Other to the point of over-trust despite revealed untrustworthiness. Compromised trust
has a way of calling the trust of the betrayed person more into question than that of the betrayer,
as if the accusation of unfaithfulness to the bond of trust rebounded back onto the individ-
ual betrayed. Because trust involves the assurance of benefit—achieving a goal, upholding
a value, etc.—we often find ourselves still wanting to believe in the Other by virtue of still
wanting to believe what our relation of trust promised us. Our wanting to believe becomes
all the more intense given the sown seed of doubt which becomes transplanted into our own
self-trust. We become blind to the Other’s failing of our trust and turn to accuse ourselves
instead, thus allowing ourselves, in the most pathological cases, to enter even more into the
spell of the Other’s machinations and duplicity.
Over-trust has a way of inducing a critical blindness often coupled with the leveraging of
fear. Over-trust trumps over its misplaced excess through the incitement of fear of losing what
an empty trust promises but cannot in fact deliver. The fear of losing what trust promises but
cannot deliver inflates trust to over-trust. We desperately want to believe and allow ourselves too
much trust. The mongering of fear covers-over and motivates the misplaced trust of over-trust:
in fearing the disaster said to come, we throw ourselves more willingly (and blindly) to the
promise of a protection in fact never needed, and once we have given ourselves over to over-
trust, we cannot let go for fear of having no where or no one else to trust. Demagogues, like
the trickster, thrive from trust upon which they themselves stand at the expense of all others.

Note
1 I shall omit, not from neglect, but for reasons of prudence and space, trust in God (and deities) as
well as trust in pets and domesticated animals.
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References
Baier, Annette (1986). Trust and Antitrust. Ethics 96(2), 231–260.
——— (1995). Moral Prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Transl. by V. McGee. Austin: University
of Texas Press.
Bok, Sissela (1978). Lying. New York: Vintage.
de Warren, Nicolas (2017). Souls of the Departed: Towards a Phenomenology of the after-Life. Metodo
5(1), 205–237.
Erikson, Erik (1963). Childhood and Society. New York: Norton & Company.
Hartmann, Martin (2011). Die Praxis des Vertrauens. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hosking, Geoffrey (2014). Trust. A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jones, Karen (1996). Trust as Affective Attitude. Ethics 107(1), 4–25.
Luhmann, Niklas (1979). Trust and Power. Transl. by H. Davies. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Misztal, Barbara (1996). Trust in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ricoeur, Paul (1992). Oneself as Other. Transl. by K. Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schmitz, Hermann (2014). Atmosphären. Munich: Alber.
——— (1969). System der Philosophie. Vol. 3/2: Der Gefühlsraum. Bonn: Bouvier.
Schütz, Alfred (1964). Collected Papers. Vol. II. Studies in Social Theory. Den Hague: Nijhof.
Simmel, Georg (1978). The Philosophy of Money. London, New York: Routledge.
Sloterdijk, Peter (2011). Spheres. Transl. by W. Hoban. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e).
Steinbock, Anthony J. (2014). Moral Emotions. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Tilly, Charles (2005). Trust and Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Further reading
Hawley, Katherine (2012). Trust. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McGeer, Victoria (2002). Developing Trust. Philosophical Explorations 5(1), 21–38.
Pettit, Philip (1995). The Cunning of Trust. Philosophy & Public Affairs 24(3), 202–225.
Solomon, Robert C., and Flores, Fernando (2003). Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and
Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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 45
FEELING SOLIDARITY
Jan Müller

Solidarity concerns the social bond, the complex amalgam of emotional relations towards
other persons and groups: sympathy of various forms, but also commitment to a conviction
and to those people and groups (supposedly) sharing this conviction, an emotional invest-
ment in a cause or an idea. “Solidarity” denotes an attitude one holds or a stance one takes,
and so a disposition to act. The attitude of solidarity is realized in solidary action, and ideas
of solidarity are invoked to provide practical reasons: someone may demand assistance from
another who, if this alleged affiliation holds, is obliged by her solidary attitude towards the
claimant (cf. Margalit 2011, 177). These aspects characterize the word’s ordinary uses, where
solidarity sometimes takes on the moral guise of a virtue or an intrinsically valuable idea; at
the same time, references to solidarity are decried as merely “ideological” appeals—for in-
stance when it is dubious whether an affiliation with a group (which might have constituted
reasons for action) actually exists.
In this chapter, I will proceed in three steps. First, I will address the problem that the
various uses of “solidarity” (and their conceptual relatives) always take some cue from the
term’s conceptual history. “Solidarity” essentially functions as a polemical term that inev-
itable raises issues of social membership, and does so against the backdrop of historically
intertwined political and legal discourses. Second, I will argue that the phenomenal content
of the attitude and experiences of solidarity is conceptually linked to concerns of emotional
affiliation and group membership. Moreover, it is a shared emotion that essentially answers
to reasons. Third, I shall conclude that solidarity plays a crucial role in bridging the gap be-
tween the partiality of emotional attachment and the universal claims of (moral) obligations.

1. What’s at stake: solidarity’s promise

The difficulty of an unequivocal account of solidarity stems from both the idea’s and the
phenomenon’s history, tracing back to Roman law and to early modern models of the con-
stitution of society and the social bond, respectively (cf. Bayertz 1999 and esp. Wildt 1999).
In Roman law, a “solidary debt” denotes a special form of loan agreement: Partners in
some joint endeavor enter into a contract with a creditor that renders the partners liable, each
on her own and jointly together, for the whole of their debt (cf. Bayertz 1999, 3). Solidary
debts are thus constitutive of a group: The contractual relation effects that the debtors figure

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as a collective addressee of their creditor, or are “at one in their exposure to the creditor”
only when the debtors cannot fulfil their individual, distributive obligation (Wiggins 2009,
252). The legal institution of solidary debt ensures claims to an equal relationship between
partners in case that their relationship becomes, in fact, unequal, when one of the partners
defaults upon their explicitly pre-arranged obligation and the other steps in. But it also serves
as a paradigm case for modelling obligations between persons by reference to the social and
legal connections between them: To be solidary towards another or a group is to be mo-
tivated to act (and to act accordingly) in support, or for the benefit of others because they
are in peril, and in virtue of one’s particular relation to them. The institution of solidary
serves as a model for the fact that other people’s needs may constitute an obligation; however,
this model relies upon an already existing obligation (namely, to honor one’s agreement). Its
“direction of fit” explains the meaning of solidarity by reference to the contractually con-
stituted obligation between creditors; but the attitude of solidarity and the obligations it
illustrates exist only after the partners have entered into the legal relationship. In contrast,
in modern social and political thought, references to solidarity allude to the idea that a nor-
matively viable social bond is always already in place. According to this model, solidarity
pre-dates and is itself constitutive of normative social relations: Persons are conceived to be
mutually obliged in virtue of their solidarity. It reacts to the demise of traditional theological
and metaphysical justifications of social hierarchies by substituting them with references to
“natural” relations. Pre-given mutual normative relations are no longer attributed to divine
commandments, but to family relations: Members of a social group are conceived to be
connected as if by kinship.1 In the wake of the bourgeois revolutions the idea of solidarity
finally champions even these analogies by substituting “kinship” with the idea of a “human
fraternity” (cf. Brunkhorst 2002, 76).
Ever since, the idea of solidarity purports to answer a dilemma in modern political imag-
ination: When traditional (religious, metaphysic) forms of social cohesion loose authority, it
becomes unclear how the pursuit of individual ends can be reconciled with the interests and
rights of others. On the one hand, models of “natural affiliation” suggest themselves; such
views, however, underrate the pivotal role of individuality (and hence of conflict) in mod-
ern forms of life and thus tend to reproduce bygone social institutions, promoting tribalism
instead of providing adequate means to navigate life in functionally differentiated societies.
Individual interests and pursuits are not only bound to collide; the development of individ-
uality positively requires some relative non-compliance with the similarities in judgement
and conduct that constitute a form of life. Conflict stems not from an accidental malfunction
of the social fabric; it is constitutive of its proper functioning (cf. Hampshire 1991).2 On the
other hand, the fragility of social cohesion cannot be mended by moral reasoning alone.
Social relations are typically thick, embedded in tangible interpersonal conduct and facili-
tated by narratives, and this thickness needs to be accounted for, not merely dismissed as a
relic of traditional ways of life. Moral thought, however, by virtue of its generality strives
for “thin” reasons which touch our thick interpersonal relationships in the wrong way (cf.
Margalit 2001, 139; 2010, 121); they rely on “application of principle” where a “human
gesture” would be needed (Williams 1965, 227). With the concomitant reasons being of the
wrong kind, it seems puzzling how moral reasoning could ever motivate a “human gesture”
towards strangers.
The conceptual history of solidarity carries the promise that these two directions of fit
can be, in practice, reconciled: that even our conflictual modern social relations may exhibit
the “intrinsic value” of “thick” relations like kinship or friendship, which exemplify basic
human relations (cf. Margalit 2011, 177). The task, then, is to spell out the idea of a common

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humanity not merely as an appeal to loyalty (felt on the basis of some ideology or conviction),
nor to typically “thin” universal moral reasoning, but as participation in a jointly pursued
and collectively felt endeavor. Hannah Arendt brings out the problematic tension such a
feeling must mediate: Solidarity establishes, she writes,

a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited (whose) common interest
would (…) be (…) the dignity of man. (…) For solidarity, because it partakes of reason,
and hence of generality, is able to comprehend a multitude conceptually, not only the
multitude of a class or a nation or a people, but eventually all mankind.
(Arendt 1963, 88) 3

Solidarity promises that there is, in fact, a feeling that links one to one’s fellow human be-
ings as fellow human beings. But collective feelings are partial, oriented towards a particular
group; if solidarity were to be true to its promise, then the phenomenon in question would
have to be understood as a collective feeling that not only provides practical reasons, but
is also directed towards “all mankind” in virtue of its receptivity to reasons. Solidarity, so
understood, would be rooted in actual affective relations and figure in moral thought both
as reason-providing and subject to negotiation. Is there such a feeling?

2. What is it to feel solidarity?

Solidarity, observes Avishai Margalit, is connected to “a whole gamut of human emotions”,
ranging from “mild” and “operative sympathy of moral support” up to “total alignment with
a group” (Margalit 2011, 177). Hence, delimitating a distinct “feeling of solidarity” requires
to carefully discern it from its cognates, and in particular from loyalty.
Solidarity is an intentional reactive attitude4: a mode of answering to a situation
emotionally and with an according disposition to act. In solidarity, we perceive a situa-
tion as demanding that we help or benefit those we feel solidarity with (the feeling’s “tar-
get”) in light of the practice(s) we share (the feeling’s “focus”, both of which—technically
speaking—constitute its content) (cf. Schmid 2009, 64). David Heyd accordingly describes
solidarity as a “partial”, “local” and “reflective” reactive emotion. Elaborating these charac-
teristics will bring out the differences between solidarity and its cognates, and explain why
solidarity essentially is a shared emotion.

2.1 A partial and reflective emotion

Solidarity is directed “towards some restricted group of people” (Heyd 2015, 56): One feels
solidarity with someone. The feeling’s content is individuated in virtue of this partiality, which
entails, first, identifying with the person or group one is solidary with, and second, “being
discriminate, leaning to a particular point of view or interest (rather than being impartial)”
(Heyd 2015, 57). The feeling’s partiality stems from the determinacy of its formal object.
It is a reaction to a particular situation: a member of one’s own peer group is (say) in need of
assistance, and one finds oneself disposed to act as befits the circumstances.
Many other reactive attitudes are partial, too: Sympathetic pity, for example, is restricted
to particular addressees, and resolution of their pitiable circumstances typically also brings
one’s feeling-with-them to an end. Affection, to give another example, is qualified by the
particular person one feels affection for, so that one is provided with special practical reasons
through adopting the other’s point of view. Solidarity, however, is partial in a different sense.

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Though it typically occurs in specific situations, its link to these situations is not merely
causal, but also conceptual. Unlike simpler forms of sympathy such as pity, solidarity need
not dissolve with changing circumstances, but may effect a change in the way situations
are perceived and evaluated in the future. The feeling of solidarity with, say, members of
the working class is partial in that it is tethered to its history. But with time, solidarity can
transcend the specific type of situation it originally responded to. Like other more complex
forms of feeling-with such as affection or love, feeling solidarity involves the establishment of
mutual sharedness; and since solidarity issues not merely in feeling but in action, it is not sim-
ply rooted in some (type of ) local situation (though it does by its very form refer back to it),
but in shared practices, which constitute, change and eventually transform the situations one
reacts to. Hence, solidarity can be practiced and trained, and responsiveness to situational
affordances be developed. Feeling affinity with a group constitutes the frame in which situa-
tions reveal their affordances, and this frame is not simply given but emerges from a subject’s
previous engagement, from the history of its thought and conduct (cf. Wollheim 1980, 313).
Thus, solidarity is “typically mediated by thought and belief ” (Heyd 2015, 59). It is reflec-
tive above and beyond the judgment form emotions in general bear.5 Solidarity is positively
defined by its relation to communicative practices of reason which provides the feeling’s
intentional scope, and constitutes the frame in which situations figure in practical reasoning.6
Two aspects here deserve attention.
First, solidarity contains a reflexive attitude towards oneself. Feeling solidary with particu-
lar people presupposes not only having beliefs about them; it implies knowledge of one’s own
attitude towards and relation with them.7 In thoughts accompanying feelings of solidarity, oneself
is represented as belonging to those one reacts solidarily towards.
Second, this dependence on thought implies responsiveness to reason. The framing which
both facilitates and is itself reproduced by feeling solidarity is not impervious to scrutiny;
for precisely because it relies on explicit and articulate beliefs, it is susceptible to doubt and
in perpetual need of rational reassurance in practices of giving and receiving reasons. In
feeling solidarity towards a group, one not only believes the shared project to be worthwhile
but takes these beliefs to be justified. Hence, one cannot rest content with mere “ideological”
convictions to support one’s feeling of solidarity. Solidarity demands justifying reasons for
its partiality; the normative distinction between rational, justified solidarity, and misled or
mistaken solidarity is internal to it. Consider, by contrast, how feeling loyal to one’s sibling,
too, is mediated by beliefs about one’s relation to them. These beliefs, however, figure as rea-
sons regardless of their appropriateness; they are reasons not for the partiality of one’s feeling,
but in virtue of it; the reasons’ scope is restricted to the internal perspective of a presupposed
group.8 Solidarity, on the other hand, relates to the group not merely from within, without
questioning the group’s internal normative fabric, for in a solidary attitude one typically
assumes the intrinsic good and the we-group’s internal normative fabric to also be externally
justifiable. The feeling is subject to an unrestricted claim of reason which may, during the
feeling’s continual development, even devaluate one’s initial emotional response in light
of new reasons.9 In loyalty, the partiality of one’s views aligns with and corresponds to the
feeling’s partial focus; in solidarity, however, the partial focus of one’s feeling may be chal-
lenged by the scope of reasoning, which contributes to its very form and content. Loyalty
is unabashedly partisan; solidarity’s partiality is both a property and a challenge. They differ
in how they relate their subjects to the group: In both feelings, the group is represented as
a we-group united by a shared concern (cf. Tuomela 2013, 27). But relations of loyalty are
typically asymmetric: A loyal person subordinates herself to the we-group’s internal rules
and judgments; she momentarily relinquishes her autonomy by accepting the partial reasons

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her feeling of loyalty provides. Correspondingly, she relates differently to the we-group’s in-
ternal good: loyalty implies that she, if only momentarily and implicitly, simply accepts it as
always already justified. In feeling solidarity, the we-group is represented not as a normative
authority the subject (if only momentarily) merely submits to, but actualizes in mutual and
symmetric relations between the members. Other members are represented in her attitude
not merely as its objects, but as subject-objects who actively contribute to it. They are not
related immediately (as in simpler forms of sympathy), but mediated by thought in a way
that, potentially, demands explicit and articulate justification.

2.2 Sharing solidarity

How, then, is solidarity shared? To share a feeling is neither, to merely imagine another’s
feeling, nor to have a feeling whose content accidentally matches the content of another’s
feeling. If A and B both feel aggrieved over the death of a friend, their parallel feelings are
not shared; if A, in an empathetic imaginative re-enactment, indeed experiences B’s grief,
she still does not share in it, for she lacks the appropriate emotional responses. Shared feel-
ing, by contrast, implies that both A’s and B’s grief is not only directed at the same object,
but also at each other’s grief, and hence non-accidentally aligned (cf. Krebs 2013, 190, 194f.;
2015, chap. II.1.; see also Chapters 40 and 49 in this volume). Both their feelings target the
same intentional object in the same intentional mode—namely, as shared; and this intentional
focus, since it includes reference to the other subject’s feeling, accounts for the nature of
their bond.10 A feels what she herself feels in virtue of B’s feeling (and conversely), so that
both experience a feeling “whose sense is not an aggregate of isolated individual feelings,
but a unity of sense pervading the contributing individual feelings” (Krebs 2013, 185; own
transl.). For all intents and purposes, both experience the same emotional reaction in light of
which they experience themselves as associated members. Such feeling implies consciousness
of sharing; members experience their reactions as defined by both their own and the other’s
contribution. “The relationship of the communal experience to the individual experience”,
writes Edith Stein, “is constitution, not summation” (Stein 2010, 122).11 Experience of such
community ineluctably changes the normative relation between its members: New practical
reasons for mutual engagement emerge from it, however brief the actual communal align-
ment of feelings; for it requires to refer to our conduct “as ours”, to ourselves as parts of a
“we”.12 Our individual behavior is oriented differently now, for it also maintains and devel-
ops “us”, our shared relation. Community neither befalls us, nor is it simply pre-given; being
“parasitic to” and facilitated by shared action (Krebs 2015, 221; own transl.), it is essentially
a project or a task.
Stein’s analysis suggests that this is a general feature of shared feeling. Consider her exam-
ple of a military unit’s members mourning their leader: First, their grief is experienced col-
lectively by being informed by the grief of all the group’s members. An individual member’s
grief may be “quite a private content”, but it claims—by virtue of its sense—“to count for
(…) something subsisting objectively, through which it is rationally substantiated (…) the loss
of the leader”.13 In virtue of this “objective correlate”, the “sense-content” of the individual
feelings is “idealiter the same” in collective feeling, “notwithstanding the private clothing
it bears at any given time” (Stein 2010, 115): It is merely exemplified individually. Second,
the experience of such communal feeling is not “instantaneous. It develops in a continuity
of experiencing”, during which “a whole series of currents of consciousness contributes to
its coalescence” (ibid.). It is as much a process, as it is realized and retained in momentary in-
dividual emotional responses. Third, the individual responses’ interconnectedness not only

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enables that “the sense of the grief ” can be experienced, “in principle, by any member” of
the group; it is positively “required of the unit as such and of everyone that belongs to it”
(ibid.). The feeling’s specific content exerts a normative force, because an individual can
realize the shared collective stance more or less “appropriately”, and even fail; conversely, a
collective feeling’s specific content may be realized even if only one group member reacts
appropriately

‘in the name of the unit’ (…). The experiences of the others aren’t eliminated by this.
They all share in the assembling of the communal experience; but that which was in-
tended in all of them came to fulfillment in the experience of this one alone.
(Ibid.)

This subject’s feeling comes to fruition in her stance and her actions, which are in turn
judged against the collective feeling’s content. Feeling collectively is a practice: Individuals
accomplish their contributions more or less well, with the collective feeling’s content consti-
tuting their internal normative standard. But this implies that shared feeling is mediated not
only by the individuals’ reactive attitudes, but also by their thought and action. For example,
the soldiers’ collective grief presupposes an idea of “fulfillment”, of what it is to feel and
behave appropriately in their loss,14 an idea of which individual reaction towards one’s fellow
grievers and the shared grief is “rationally required” (ibid.). Such an idea makes explicit the
normative fabric of the group, not least by outlining what members can claim from each
other in the process of further developing and perfecting their communal relations.
In solidarity, then, a subject reacts to other’s plight with the disposition to help, or to an-
other’s actions with the desire to join in, where her apperception of other subjects and their
situation is mediated by (a) her thought about a valuable relation that exists between them
in virtue of being group members, (b) about the other subject’s appreciation of this relation,
and (c) her own and the other subject’s feeling as beneficial to their respective happiness and
to the group’s flourishing. These beliefs constitute the idea of what it is to fulfill solidarity’s
intention, its “rational requirement:” What I must demand of myself in order to fulfill my
feeling’s intention, what I may demand from the other members of my solidary group; and
finally, what addressees of our solidarity may rationally expect from us. My solidary attitude
is held and facilitated by the aligned attitudes of others, together aggregating the collec-
tive perspective which, in turn, accounts for its individual constituents’ appropriateness. In
sharing solidarity, we are continually re-evaluating our reactions and actions in light of the
shared feeling’s intention and in light of the relation to our solidary comrades. Again, it is
tempting to confound this with feeling loyalty; but Stein’s model highlights how different
the idea of community appears in each attitude. In loyalty, the we-group is presupposed as
pre-given, independent of its internal normative fabric’s actual justification.15 In solidarity,
however, the we-group is not simply represented as pre-given; community (and the joy of
it) is intended.16 Hence, Stein’s model allows for community to evolve from assumptions of
community that are later unmasked as imaginary, or manifest in only one representative
who, by fulfilling the collective feeling’s intention, nonetheless made it possible for others to
join in. A feeling of community may be rooted in shared feelings, while its evaluation is still
a matter of bitter dispute over who owes whom what kind of assistance, and in light of which
tangible end. The initial nucleus of a collective feeling may even be a mere wish, if that wish
(at first accidentally) aligns with the attitudes of others, in light of which unity an individual
feeling retrospectively appears as already having exemplified the evolving community: “The
wish, and the action that carries it through to fulfillment”, then will have joined

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in the unity of one experiential coherence; and if they owe their origin to different
subjects, then there exists between those subjects an experienced solidarity which (…)
makes it possible for them to [work] together toward one achievement. Thus, motiva-
tions of different kinds can spread from one individual to the other, making it possible
for super-individual experiential unities to arise.
(Stein 2010, 144)

Stein’s use of “solidarity” shows that it is, indeed, fitting to ascribe an aspect of solidarity to
any collective feeling and action,17 for they exhibit solidarity’s mode of reference to oneself
and other as members of a group. However, this mode is fully explicit only when the reactive
attitude is accompanied by the appropriate thoughts.
The promise associated with the notion of solidarity is always already rooted in experi-
ences of community, but it needs explication in terms of a responsiveness to reasons whose
claim is not restricted by a given group’s normative fabric. But then negotiations about how
well an individual contribution fulfills the feeling’s intention, how well individual guises
of solidarity align, is always open to critique and discussion. Put differently: Precisely be-
cause “the solidarity of individuals (…) is formative of community in the highest”—and the
most explicit—“degree”, the subjects’ attitudes towards each other in light of their common
pursuit are fragile, subject to scrutiny, and in need of rational elucidation. “Where the indi-
viduals are ‘open’ to one another, where the attitudes of one (…) penetrate him and deploy
their efficacy”, writes Stein, “there the two are members of one whole” (Stein 2010, 177).
Solidarity proper requires this efficacy to not unfold blindly, as a mere passive experience,
but in a way that enables participants to inquire after its reasonableness (cf. Gaita 1999, 279).
In feeling solidarity, a subject’s reactive attitude is not only factually a judgement about its
addressee in light of their association but is typically accompanied by thoughts fit to justify
her stance.18 One feels and acts solidary from reasons, which claim that this form of com-
radeship is, indeed, intrinsically good (and not merely taken to be so by its loyal participants).

3. Solidarity’s morality
Feeling solidarity seems restricted to tangible, particular others. Hence, reasons from soli-
darity seem to bear only on the “morally significant relation between members of a com-
munity” (Derpmann 2014, 90). Members of a community do not feel solidarity neutrally;
the experiential mode of their relations is—the feeling’s “private clothing” (Stein 2010, 115)
notwithstanding—emotionally charged: I recognize my comrades not “on the basis of cer-
tain common moral characteristics” perceived as if from an impartial neutral standpoint, but
from the participant’s perspective, which draws from a “significance in the commonalities
themselves” (Derpmann 2014, 90), from the experienced history of our relation.
Yet precisely because it entails being emotionally invested, the experience of solidary
sharedness with its internal rational requirement bridges a gap between partial feelings and
the general claims of morality. It contains an always already emotionally charged orientation
towards such claims and duties. Such an understanding of solidarity as a “root of morality”
seems to clash with its intention: Its experience exemplifies ever only partial community.
We may understand how normative convictions can be motivationally effective in light of
the emotional ties between us; but apparently, other people are excluded from the feeling’s
reach and scope. Solidarity is, of course, “an essentially political attitude” (Heyd 2015, 58):
One cannot inquire after the quality of an individual contribution to a joint feeling without
negotiating the group’s identity, its common good, and its terms of membership19; and such

538
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a unifying cause is “always in some competition, or at least contrast, with other causes (…,)
often involving rivalry with or a fight against other groups” (ibid.). Note how the subtle
shift from “partiality” to “competition” (however understandable in light of the fact that,
historically, invocations of solidarity seem indigenous to situations of political strife) results
in a picture of solidarity as essentially confrontational. But there is a difference between con-
ceiving of a joint endeavor so that it may entail actions that clash with opposing endeavors,
and conceiving of the same joint endeavor as defined (primarily) by its aggressive opposition
against an antagonist. In the first case, the respective attitude is directed primarily at my
comrades and our joint well-being; that it may entail resistance against our adversaries is
derivative. The second case emphasizes the conflict; any relation to the other group members
draws from a shared enmity (or opposition, or competition). Solidarity’s partiality would be
irreconcilable with morality if understood only in the second sense; then my felt solidarity
towards my comrades could oblige me to deny our opponents what we morally owe them.
But we should refrain from even calling this a case of (even “misled”)20 solidarity: First, such
joint feeling could not rationally require us to also negotiate the ends of our joint endeavor;
quite contrary, shared enmity is presupposed 21 and, strictly, not up for debate, lest the group’s
existence be jeopardized. Second, such a reactive attitude would surely miss the point of feel-
ing solidarity towards comrades, viz. that we perceive them to be in need of assistance. That
assisting them often entails civilized conflict with and, in extreme cases, resistance against
opposing agents is another matter entirely.22
Thus, solidarity is a partial emotion, but it is exclusive only accidentally, and, in virtue of its
rational requirements, cannot but struggle with these excluding effects. The experience of its
partiality is one of situatedness (cf. Schürmann 2010, 1913b): Feeling solidarity with a group
as particular prompts an understanding that this partiality comes down to mere unavoidable
contingent facts. These facts explain, but cannot justify our feeling’s partiality; they just put a
factual restriction on an intention that rationally ought, but factually cannot reach farther. In
this experience, feelings of solidarity, indeed, are a “root of the ethical”. They show how our
reactive attitude towards others always already exhibit a, however partial, practical recogni-
tion of others as bearing “human form”: for “even if the solidarity of the human may appear
from some angles indiscernible from the kind of fellow feeling that is special to the group,
the thing that it points to is something which has always transcended the group” (Wiggins
2009, 260). This is not to say that we “as humans” (by virtue of, say, our nature) were nec-
essarily disposed to feel solidary towards members of our species.23 It draws merely from
the observation that, as a contingent matter of fact, we do share feelings in solidary groups,
which may well originate, as Stein argued, in accidental alignments of individual intentions
or the spark of an individual wish. But the mere fact that we have experienced sharing, and
in sharing solidarity, have opened our feeling to rational critique, has irreversibly changed
the landscape of our practices (cf. Strawson 1962; Wiggins 2009, 264). It has established a
rational requirement against which feelings of solidarity, their partiality and their urge to-
wards fulfillment in community, are measured. Of course, relations of solidarity, facilitated
by emotional bonds, can never aspire to morality’s universal validity. But they support the
sort of meaningful “thick” relations and practices which only make social realization and
implementation of morality’s claims conceivable. Solidarity, writes David Wiggins, is “not
itself a human pursuit (…), not a way of arriving at something else”, but “a way of being (…).
The role of solidarity is to condition, to civilize and to humanize ordinary human pursuits”
(Wiggins 2009, 265). This role is not presupposed in but achieved through experiences of
shared solidarity. The modern idea of solidarity retrospectively spells out the intention of
such experiences, not by generalizing their partial claim in the abstract (as in naïve appeals to

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“solidarity with all of mankind”), but by translating the idea’s internal tension into an ethical
task. Solidary goodness demands to orient one’s contributions to collectively felt solidarity
towards the maturation of local communities; keeping them as inclusive as humanly possible,
as responsive to reason as practically feasible. Each experience of collective solidarity proper
points, by virtue of this intention, to the conjunction and interconnection of potentially
uncounted partial solidary communities (cf. Scholz 2008, 246; Derpmann 2013, 205). The
idea of a universal principle of human solidarity is unintelligible. But so is the idea that any
human agent be, in principle, excluded from jointly felt solidarity.24

Notes
1 Such models of natural affiliation, however, are limited not only by the fact that they notoriously
fail to value neighbors or strangers just as one’s siblings; moreover, they, too, rely on metaphysical
presuppositions to back up their normative claims; cf. Derrida (1994, Chap. 9).
2 Cf. Durkheim’s corresponding distinction between pre-modern “mechanical” solidarity and “or-
ganic” solidarity under conditions of the modern distribution of labor (Durkheim 1902, 101f.).
3 Arendt takes great care to distinguish solidarity from pity; cf. Chapter 15 in this volume. For the
benefit of this demarcation, Arendt often talks of “solidarity” as a “deliberate” and even “dispas-
sionate” attitude (cf. Arendt 1963, 88). This, however, is just an exaggeration to repel sentimental-
ist interpretations; surely it would run against Arendt’s intention to sever emotion from solidarity
and take the later to be a merely cognitive attitude.
4 Cf. Strawson (1962). Such attitudes are, as all emotions proper, intentional in the sense that they
are directed towards their (logical-grammatical) objects; cf. Goldie (1999, 395).
5 The precise manner in which emotions bear the form of judgements is notoriously contended;
cf. Vendrell Ferran (2015, 495), and the discussion in Schmid (2014, esp. 8f.). Understanding
emotions as instantaneous judging attitudes does not entail ascribing some factual, psychological
act of judging to a subject; however, it is equally misleading to posit some immediate a-rational
“ feeling-sensation” which is only retrospectively fitted with judgmental content. Rather, the feel-
ing sensation irreducibly is the mode in which the judgment’s content is given (its Fregean sense,
if you will; cf. Kenny 1963, 46).
6 This aspect sometimes serves to discredit the whole notion of “solidarity” as a mere ideological
ploy to hijack traditional models of “thick” relationships (cf. Capaldi 1999). Such simple substitu-
tion, however, conflates solidarity with “Kitsch solidarity” (Margalit 2011, 174) or simple loyalty.
7 This distinguishes solidarity among the family of phenomena Richard Wollheim calls “moral emo-
tion”. Moral emotions are “reflexive”: they are an attitude towards oneself as a person ( Wollheim
1999, 149); in solidarity, this attitude towards oneself includes, necessarily, the relation of oneself
and other people.
8 The very fact that the group shares some common good suffices; further inquiry may even be
taken as mistrust in or dissidence from the group.
9 Talk of “false” or “mistaken” loyalty, by contrast, does not concern the reactive attitude itself (or
the loyalty one feels) but the accompanying beliefs and conviction; not one’s loyalty, but one’s
sense of loyalty is mistaken.
10 Hence, Szanto (2015, 507) speaks of “supra-individual” intentions.
11 All citations from Stein’s work are my own translation. Stein’s model in many ways builds upon
Max Scheler’s model of joint feeling; cf. Krebs’s contribution to this volume.
12 Use of the pronoun “we” here cannot be taken to refer to some mysterious “collective conscious-
ness”, or the specter of a “collective subject”. It refers to persons in light of their relations; cf. Krebs
(2011, 196); Schmid (2009, 32); Szanto (2015, 506).
13 Precision is needed here: The feeling is directed towards “the squad leader”, not “my commanding
officer;” to represent her so in thought is already to conceive of her in relation to a group (whereas
“my commanding officer” represented her, primarily, in relation to me).
14 Of course, such an idea in turn presupposes beliefs about military decorum, etc. There is some
discussion whether such presupposition of thought ought to be modeled after explicit, “reflec-
tive” consciousness, or after a more implicit “awareness”. For present purposes, it suffices to
understand that the idea of a collective feeling’s proper fulfillment implies a capacity to articulate

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and judge the goodness of one’s contribution to it—even if a subject’s consciousness of these
presuppositions in phenomenal experience may be gradually obscured by “private clothing”;
cf. Szanto (2015, 507).
15 Consider the zombie obedience which may appear “rationally required” from the internal view-
point of a Mafia family, or the loyalty “rationally required” from within a romantic relation—
independent from the existence (or alarming lack of ) external reasons.
16 Naturally, collective feelings never occur on some fictional “clean slate” but always already par-
take in a communal history. Still, solidarity is essentially directed towards some future end; it is
a project as much as a process. Margalit (2011, 177) helpfully distinguishes solidarity “of fate”,
arising from an accidentally shared history or situation, from a solidarity “of destiny”, directed to-
wards the group’s development or a common endeavor, and shows the necessary interdependence
of both perspectives (lest solidarity wither to reactionary, tribalist or nativist claims).
17 That is to say, it is appropriate to ask of any shared feeling and action “what about it is solidary”,
without ascribing to their subjects an explicit attitude of solidarity. Note how Stein’s model does
not presuppose some pre-given solidarity which, as it were, gave rise to community; rather, soli-
darity and other shared feelings emerge equiprimordially.
18 This rather special phenomenon is probably a paradigm case for Margret Gilbert’s model. Gilbert
highlights the shared commitment implicit in sharing feelings (as well as joint actions) (cf. e.g.,
Gilbert 2002, 125), where “being committed” to do or feel A is “is to have sufficient reason to
A (…). Thus, being committed is a normative rather than a psychological matter” (Gilbert 2014, 24).
19 Solidarity is “political” because it implies reference to the group’s makeup both from within and
from without, and thus situates the group—a limine—within the framework of social relations, or
the body politic. But this is not to say that feelings of solidarity pertain only to the “public sphere”.
There is felt solidarity “in private” as well: with friends, partners and lovers; “political” is not
synonymous with “public”, if the latter is contrasted to “private”.
20 Cf., e.g., Derpmann (2013, 204). “Misled solidarity” is mistaking, e.g., loyalty for solidarity.
That their experiential quality can, at times, be nigh indistinguishable may account for mistaken
self-perception, but does not touch upon their differing claims to reason.
21 It may even require of me to subscribe to the rule that “my enemy’s enemies are my friends”. It
would be quite absurd to hold that solidarity required me to extend the reach of my feeling to-
wards someone simply by virtue of the fact we share an enemy.
22 Consider how jointly pulling a cart from a muddy patch on the road includes “opposing the mud”
and is, in this sense, “directed against the mud” which took hold of our cart. Yet the intention of
our action is indifferent towards the mud as such; it plays no role of its own in it. So it is with class
struggle.
23 Simon Derpmann understands Wiggins’s talk of “human” merely descriptively; hence he believes
that Wiggins’ model of solidarity “cannot accommodate (…) the moral significance of the refer-
ence to the agent and her relations to those others to whom she is morally obliged” (Derpmann
2014, 94). However, “human” is not a merely descriptive, but a normative notion: Negotiation of
what counts as “human” implies reference to the agent and her affiliates; cf. Wiggins (2009, 264).
24 For an elaboration of this thought, cf. Adamczak (2017, 270f ).

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1. Pain and its relation to emotions

We often use the language of pain to point to other forms of suffering than the ones a ssociated
with the body, for example: “Her infidelity caused me significant pain.” To avoid misunder-
standings, I would like to point out that this chapter will not deal with “mental” pains and
suffering but rather focus on the phenomenology of bodily pain.
In standard philosophical classifications of feelings, bodily pain is not considered an emo-
tion, since it does not contain any beliefs or judgments about the world in the way that
emotions do (Goldie 2000). I am mad, sad, afraid, or happy about something (not) being
the case, but when I find myself in pain this intentional structure is not present. Pain is
therefore classified as a pre-intentional feeling, which makes (a part of ) the body appear in
a specific (painful) way, which does not, however, have a proper meaning content. Bodily
sensations can be of the negative sort—pains, itches, feelings of being too hot or cold—or
of the positive sort—tickles, feelings of bodily comfort or orgasms—but they do not carry
any cognitive content beyond this perceived painfulness or pleasantness of the body (parts).
Phenomenology has the potential of improving upon such narrow conceptions of pain by
showing how it is a peculiar and many-faced form of embodied experience. To be in pain is
not only to perceive parts of one’s body in a certain way but also to feel how the perceived
world changes in structure and content. Accordingly, pain can be explored and understood
as an embodied mood; a way of finding oneself in the world that typically leads to certain
emotions of the negative type: frustration, irritation, anger, fear, sadness, self-pity or even
loss of hope and trust in others (Svenaeus 2015, 2017, chap. 2; Kusch and Ratcliffe 2018).
Such emotions, that typically occur if pain is intense and long lasting, display beliefs about
the situation of the pain sufferer that are nurtured by the bodily affliction.
The fact that there exist some rare pathological states that split the hurting feeling from
a person’s caring about the pain, and/or the body part that it concerns, does not change the
fundamentals of this phenomenological analysis. Patients afflicted by pain asymbolia feel pain
without finding it unpleasant, whereas patients suffering from somatoparaphrenia feel the
unpleasantness of pain but experience the part of the body that it concerns as alien—that is,
as not belonging to them (de Vignemont 2015). Even in such extreme cases, not to mention
other rare and fascinating neurological disorders afflicting bodily feelings, the fundamental

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pathology appears to be related to various ways of not being fully present in one’s own body.
The affective space of the lived body—more about this below—is disturbed, and this pre-
vents the patients, not only from experiencing their own embodiment in a full-fledged and
non-ambivalent manner but also from experiencing moods that nurture emotions allowing
the patients to flourish. Bodily pain is not necessarily a bad thing in every type of situation—it
is helpful as an alarm signal that makes us take action to protect ourselves and it can in some
situations even be enjoyed—but pain has a profound tendency to involve suffering when
intense and/or long lasting.
A phenomenological understanding of pain finds support in the official definition elab-
orated by The International Association for the Study of Pain as: “an unpleasant sensory
and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in
terms of such damage” (https://www.iasp-pain.org/Taxonomy). We will return to the med-
ical view on pain and its causes, but already at this point, it should be underlined that most
doctors and other health care professionals treating people with pain acknowledge that pain
has an emotional character and that the phenomenologist is able to explain why this is so.
The feeling of pain has long fascinated philosophers since it appears to present a person
with an experience that it is particularly evident or even incorrigible (it is hard to doubt
that one is in pain when feeling so) and at the same time inevitably private and therefore
unverifiable (how can we know that a person is not faking and lying when he claims to be in
pain?). The phenomenologist would not challenge the evidence of pain but she would point
out that to be in pain is not primarily to hold a belief (that I am in pain) but rather to be pre-
sented with an overwhelming experience. This is also the clue to disentangling claims about
the private character of pain, since human experiences are not only subjective in character,
they also take place in a shared space—the everyday world—in which we express things by
way of our bodies. It is not only possible to see when other persons are in (intense) pain, it is
nearly impossible to doubt that they are so: we feel the pains of other persons (expressing pain)
when encountering them. Such feelings are called empathic when they become emotional in
the sense of containing beliefs about the other person (the belief that she is in pain). We care
not only about our own pains but also about the pains of other persons and such caring may
lead to emotions that express pity or sympathy for them just like one’s own pains may lead to
emotions like self-pity or loss of hope.

2. Pain as inner perception

The first attempts to analyse pain in the phenomenological tradition, made by Carl Stumpf,
Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl around the turn of the last century, are marked by an
ambiguity that still pervades present day theories of pain within the analytical tradition of
philosophy (for references, see: Geniusas 2014). Is pain a pre-intentional feeling, or is it rather
a feeling, which has a content? Another way of phrasing this ambiguity, more amenable to
contemporary philosophy, is to ask whether pain is a type of qualia or rather a form of per-
ception (Aydede 2009). Arguably pain is a form of “inner perception,” but does that mean
that the experience of pain can be understood in analogy with outer perception? Since this
analogy has remained the main line of argument for pain theorists during the 20th century
(see the references found in Aydede 2009), we need to say something about why the percep-
tual account has appeared so tempting, and, also, why it is ultimately doomed to fail from
the phenomenological point of view.
The main reason for considering pain a form of perception is that pain, at least in some
standard situations, appears to have a sort of object, namely the part of my body that hurts.

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In the same way that I see the book lying on the table in front of me I feel the pain in my
left foot. My pain experience—whatever that is exactly—appears to represent the foot in the
same way that the visual experience represents the book. Philosophers of perception have
invested a lot of time and energy in trying to establish how this form of perceptual repre-
sentation comes about (the problems are parallel to the conundrums facing correspondence
theories of truth regarding language). How does my experience—understood in terms of
sense data or brain states—come to mirror a state of the world such that I have an experience
of the book or my foot?
The phenomenological critique of such theories of perception has been stated many times,
but it deserves to be repeated: there is no mirror in my mind or in my brain making me see
or feel the book or foot; the object of perception is not re-presented but presented to me when
I have an experience of it (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, chapter 5). The phenomenological
account of intentionality makes it possible to see why pain and other forms of “inner percep-
tion” are different from perception proper: the hurting foot is presented to me in experience,
just as the book on the table is, but the way it hurts is mine whereas the geometrical form,
colour, beauty or even appealing nature of the book on the table pertains to the book and
not to me. The clue to understanding the feeling of pain therefore lies in spelling out the
meaning of such bodily experienced mineness. We will soon return to this analysis by way
of some key concepts and passages found in the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Jean-Paul Sartre, but first we need to introduce the natural scientific perspective on pain to
understand in what way phenomenology is able to offer a complement to this dominant view
on pain and its causes.

3. Neurophysiological theories of pain and other

bodily feelings
One important reason why philosophers have been keen to understand pain in analogy
with perception is that the rapidly developing knowledge about the physiology of pain has
apparently supported such a model ever since the discovery of nociceptors by Charles Scott
Sherrington in 1907. Just like outer perception, pain (and other forms of sensual) perception
seems to rely on a piece of representational information being formed by sensual receptors
along with the way they innervate the brain. Pain was, accordingly, seen as the result of sig-
nals sent to the brain by way of sensory neurons when certain receptors (nociceptors) found
in the skin and many other organs of the body were damaged by noxious stimuli. The fun-
damentals of the “signal and alarm” theory of pain in medicine still hold, but, importantly,
it has recently been modified by knowledge about how the brain processes pain signals.
Neurophysiological theories about pain—such as the gate control theory and the neuro-
matrix theory—stress that the brain plays a formative part in the pain experience (Moseley
2003). The brain does not only passively register incoming signals and rings the alarm bell,
but it also modulates the nociceptive information by blocking and transforming the signals
travelling through the spinal cord (gate control). The brain may even give rise to pain on
its own without any incoming nociceptive signals, a fact that is especially relevant to some
forms of chronic pain (Thernstrom 2010). The neuromatrix theory of pain developed by
Ronald Melzack states that pain is a multidimensional experience produced by characteristic
patterns of nerve impulses generated by a widely distributed neural network: the “body-self
neuromatrix” in the brain (Melzack 1993). These neurosignature patterns are distributed
over many different regions of the brain including the thalamus, hippocampus, insula, ante-
rior singulate and primary and secondary somatosensory cortices.

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A matrix is arguably a form of image, or, rather, a cast for the moulding of pain feelings.
Pain experiences are assigned with more or less exact bodily location by way of what is
known as the cortical homunculus providing a curious image of the different parts of the
body by way of different zones located on the postcentral gyrus. Located directly in front of
the somatosensory cortex, both extending down from the top of the brain on both sides, the
primary motor cortex provides a homunculus similar to the sensory one responsible for mus-
cle control and movement. These two areas of the brain—sensory and motor cortex—play
important roles in the development and exercise of what is known as the body schema. The
body schema is not an image of the body found in the brain, rather it is the preconscious,
bodily form of all our experiences, depending upon brain functions constantly registering
incoming information about posture and movement of the body and directing our move-
ments by way of output motor programs (Gallagher 2005, 45). The brain-functions support-
ing the body-schema include the coordination of input from the different senses (mainly
vision and touch, but also hearing and perhaps even smell and taste) and what is known as
proprioception—the neural system that allows us to feel the location of our body parts with-
out checking by way of other senses.
The matrix and computer program metaphors are interesting in their own right in ex-
ploring pain physiology (even though they are also potentially misleading if underestimating
the difference between the computer and biological tissue “hardware”), but they do not tell
us very much about the lived experience of pain. It is time to return to the phenomenological
attempts to understand pain as a peculiar feeling of the body.

4. Pain and the lived body

In Phenomenology of Perception, immediately after presenting the famous analysis of “I touch
my right hand with my left hand and vice versa,” Merleau-Ponty makes a detour into the
phenomenology of being in pain (a rather rare subject in his philosophy) (Merleau-Ponty
2012, 96). The point with the touching hands example is that the body can either be lo-
cated on the experiencing-constitutive or on the experienced-constituted side of perception
such that “the two hands can alternate between the functions of ‘touching’ and ‘touched’”
(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 95). The body is first and foremost a personally experienced lived body
by way of which other objects in the world can appear for me. These objects can even include
parts of my own body when I touch it, look upon it, listen to it, or smell it. But how does
this work in the case of pain?

If I say that my foot hurts I do not simply mean that my foot is a cause of the pain in the
same way as the nail piercing it, the only difference being that my foot is closer to me
in the causal chain. Nor do I mean that my foot is the last object of the external world,
after which pain would begin in the intimate sense, namely, a consciousness of pain
by itself and without a location that would only be linked to my foot through a causal
determination and in the system of experience. Rather I mean that the pain indicates its
place, that it is constitutive of a “pain space.”
(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 96)

In his characteristic style, Merleau-Ponty here pits empiricism against idealism to show how
neither can give a complete account of pain and how both are misleading if not supplemented
by a phenomenological analysis. Empiricism (medical pain research) fails because it does not
take into account the subjective aspect of pain. Idealism (dualism) fails because it does not

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take into account the bodily nature of this very subjectivity. The lived body, operated by way
of the body schema functions surveyed above, opens up an affective space—in the case of pain,
a pain space—in which different parts of my body may reveal themselves to me. The hurting
body parts do not show up to me in the manner other things in the experienced world do—
including the self-referring experiences of touching, looking at, listening to and smelling
one’s own body—but the pain is nevertheless experienced as having a more or less distinct
bodily location and volume. As Merleau-Ponty shows by way of the examples of phantom
limb pains (which come in many forms) and prosthetic devices (the feather in a woman’s hat
or a blind man’s cane) lived bodily space is created by way of our inhabiting the world rather
than being a biologically given (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 84, 144). But even if the furthest point
of the blind man’s cane has been “transformed into a sensitive zone” whereby it “increases
the scope and the radius of the act of touching and has become analogous to gaze” he would
probably not experience pain if the stick broke, the way the phantom limb sufferer experi-
ences exactly this. Or would he? To explore the phenomenology of pain experience in tool
use we will now turn to Sartre and Being and Nothingness in which we find a more detailed
continuation of the analysis of pain space:

My eyes are hurting but I should finish reading a philosophical work this evening. I
am reading. The object of my consciousness is the book and across the book the truths
which it points out. The body is in no way apprehended for itself; it is a point of view
and a point of departure. (…) Yet at the very moment that I am reading my eyes hurt.
Let us note first that this pain can itself be indicated by objects of the world; i.e., by
the book which I read. It is with more difficulty that the words are detached from the
undifferentiated ground which they constitute; they may tremble, quiver, their meaning
may be derived only with effort, the sentences which I have just read twice, three times
may be given as “not understood,” as “to be re-read.” But these same indications can be
lacking—for example, in the case when my reading “absorbs me” and when I “forget”
my pain (which does not mean that it has disappeared since if I happen to gain knowl-
edge of it in a later reflective act, it will be given as having always been there).
(Sartre 1956, 436–437)

As Sartre notes, the pain is not only in the eyes (or in the head if we suppose this to be the
case of a headache) but also in the book insofar as my focus when reading is on the words
and their meaning. Perhaps the best phenomenological account of this situation is to say
that the pain is in the activity and process of reading (Svenaeus 2015). As Sartre notes, pain
as lived experience is a bodily influenced mood that is not primarily reflected upon, but
rather lived in and through various projects dealing with things in the world (Sartre 1956,
436–445). In these projects, such as reading a book, the pain mood penetrates the activity
and shows itself in and through the things in the world that occupy my focus—the words
“may tremble and quiver,” as we saw in the quote above. But in doing so the words—or
other things in the world that I am painfully busy with—not only appear as full of pain,
they also “bounce back” in revealing parts of my lived body as painful—the eyes and head
as painful if I am reading, my index finger as painful if it is broken and I use it to turn the
pages (Sartre 1956, 440).
Such situations in which parts of the lived body turn up as painful are similar to the
workshop situations Martin Heidegger describes in Being and Time. He illustrates how the
breakdown of various tools being used in activities reveal the phenomenological structure
of a situation to the person involved (Heidegger 1996, 68–69). When the hammer is no

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longer used for striking nails it becomes obtrusive, obstinate and conspicuous, and as such
it stands out precisely as a tool that is meaningfully linked to other things that are used to
pursue human projects—such as building a house. However, the way the hammer becomes
conspicuous if its handle breaks is different from the way my finger becomes conspicuous if
I accidently hit it when striking nails (Svenaeus 2000, 108–109). Being confronted with a
broken hammer is different from being confronted with a broken finger exactly because the
latter is an experience of pain. If I continue the project of house building, I may be able to
cope with the pain by using other fingers than the broken one (or perhaps even my toes) to
hold the nails, but the pain will tend to infuse and attune the activity and reveal itself when
my broken finger is involuntarily moved.
With the help of tools glued to the lived body in more permanent manners than hammers—
the blind man’s cane referred to by Merleau-Ponty or even a bionic hand containing elec-
trodes, which are connected to nerve endings at the point of amputation—a person may
expand her sensory field and feel the contours of things in the world in a direct manner
(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 144; www.livescience.com/43125-man-gets-first-bionic-hand-that-
feels.html). Yet, even in such cases, the embodied feeling of breaking the cane or a finger of
the bionic hand is not a feeling of pain, but rather a feeling of absence and confusion; perhaps
different than the obtrusion and obstinacy of the broken hammer because of the prosthetic
glue but still not a feeling of pain. This might change in the future if medical researchers are
able to find electronic substitutes for nociceptors or neuron connections that activate centres
of the brain involved in pain processing, but presently prostheses merely expand the affective
space of sensory experience in action, not the experience of pain.

5. Pain and the concept of suffering

The most detailed and compelling phenomenological analyses of pain to date we find in the
works of Drew Leder (1984–85, 1990, chapter 3; 2016, chapter 2), who, in turn, takes his
starting points not only in Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, but also in less known phenomenolo-
gists, such as F. J. J. Buytendijk (1962), Herbert Plügge (1962), and Erwin Straus (1963). Leder
picks up on Merleau-Ponty’s and Sartre’s understanding of pain as an embodied mood and
emphasizes the way the lived body may appear to us in lived experience (Leder 1990, chapter
3). The lived body, as a rule, disappears in perception and through this very withdrawal it cre-
ates a focus in which it becomes possible for things in the world to show up to us in different
meaningful ways (like when I read the book or strike nails with the hammer in the examples
above) (see also Gallagher 2005). Leder adds to this analysis that parallel to the disappearing
tendency the lived body may also resist and hinder our attempts to engage in worldly proj-
ects. In such situations, the body demands our attention through “dys-appearing” and the
main example of such dys-appearance is exactly to be in pain (Leder 1990, chapter 3; 2016,
chapter 2). Our attuned ways of making ourselves at home in the world, constituted in and
through centrifugal movements (we are directed from ourselves towards various things in the
world), are brought to a halt and turned inward in a centripetal fashion:

We no longer see, hear, feel the world through our bodies; instead the body itself becomes
what we feel, the center or axis of thematic attention. As often as we turn outward we
are pulled back by the insistent call of pain, back to the crampy stomach, the headache,
the throbbing foot. Our spatiality constricts, not just to our body, but to a body-part as
small and therefore as trivial as a toe.
(Leder 1984–85, 255)

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Leder goes on to argue that this centripetal force literally shrinks the worldly and tem-
poral horizon of the person in pain. Intense pain confines us to a bodily present that cuts
itself lose from past and future. Nothing matters and nothing can be remembered or
imagined beyond the all-experience-consuming pain. Leder adds that we engage in cen-
trifugal escape behaviours in order to get away from our pains (a hypothesis which is also
explored by Grüni 2004). We scream and moan, twist and turn, try to find distraction by
looking around and enter into absorbing activities such as watching a movie or listening
to music. We may even inflict pain on ourselves to distract from other pains (like when
we pinch ourselves in the arm in the dentist chair to escape the pain in the tooth when
she is drilling).
The example of the dentist makes another important aspect of pain obvious, namely that
it is an experience of passivity, being harmed by the pain in question. When persons attempt
to give descriptions of their pains—a difficult task, especially when the pain is intense and/
or long lasting—they often resort to images of being hurt by something—like the dentist
drill—also in situations when there is no such outer-initiated action going on (Svenaeus
2015). The headache feels like being hit by a sledge hammer, the pain in the toe feels like
someone is squeezing it in a door and the pain in the stomach feels like something is burning
deep inside. Experiences of severe pain bring to mind images of being tortured, also in cases
when no torturer or torture equipment is present (Scarry 1985). The reason why I am pinch-
ing myself in the dentist chair is probably not only to distract from, but also to take control
of the pain by becoming the self-initiator replacing the torturer in inflicting pain.
There are other situations in which pain is willingly inflicted upon oneself despite its ap-
parent unpleasantness. The masochist seemingly enjoys bodily pain and the athlete or ascetic
tolerates (or, perhaps, even enjoys) it for the sake of other goals that demand pain (see also
the examples of pain asymbolia and somatoparaphrenia above). Such examples invite a more
comprehensive picture of pain by addressing the temporal dimension and relating pain to the
concept of suffering. Physician and medical ethicist Eric Cassell defines suffering as follows:

Suffering occurs when an impending destruction of the person is perceived; it continues

until the threat of disintegration has passed or until the integrity of the person can be
restored in some manner. It follows, then, that although it often occurs in the presence
of acute pain, shortness of breath, or other bodily symptoms, suffering extends beyond
the physical. Most generally, suffering can be defined as the state of severe distress asso-
ciated with events that threaten the intactness of the person.
(Cassell 2004, 32)

According to such an understanding, pains that are invested in life goals that do not threaten
the intactness (Cassell also uses the term “integrity”) of the person, but rather form part of
her flourishing, are not examples of suffering. When the masochist asks for and enjoys pain
he does so because he (sexually) enjoys being dominated by the other person. When the
athlete and ascetic welcome pain they do so because they enjoy the experiences of becoming
bodily or spiritually more perfected persons. In most cases, however, bodily pains are not
experienced as part of such personal enjoyment and flourishing projects. The pain is rather
something that alienates the person from her life projects, since it inflicts (or, rather, is identi-
cal with) moods that make it hard to experience and act upon things that were previously of
importance for her (Svenaeus 2017, chap. 2). This is especially so when the pain is intensive
and/or chronic in character (Frank 1995; Carel 2008). Cassell states that the pains that are
hardest to deal with are the ones that are overwhelming and impossible to control as well as

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of unknown cause and non-yielding (Cassell 2004, 35). Such pains give rise to emotions like
frustration, irritation, anger, fear, sadness, self-pity or even loss of hope and trust in others
(Thernstrom 2010; Svenaeus 2015; Leder 2016, chapter 2; Kusch and Ratcliffe 2018).

6. Feeling the pain of others

Pain is a private feeling in so far that no person can feel the pain of another person in the
sense of taking residence in her bodily experienced pain mood. And yet we are affected by
and feel related to the pains of other persons precisely because their lived bodily spaces pro-
ceed beyond the borders of their physical bodies to a world in which we experience things
together. The togetherness of human experiences has two sides. First, we experience things as
belonging to a world shared with others (phenomenologically speaking, there are no private
worlds). We even experience our own physical bodies as things belonging to this shared
world, but, importantly, pain is experienced as a part of my lived bodily space, which cannot
be shared with others because it belongs to the constitutive rather than to the constituted
side of experience. Second, we may share experiences in the sense that we experience things
together with one or more other living (human) being(s) (Szanto and Moran 2016). Such
sharing does not mean that the lived bodily spaces of the persons fully fuse. Even in activities
shared by others in sophisticated and/or deeply felt bodily interaction, such as dancing or
kissing, the affective spaces of the parties are tied together rather than collapsing into one
another (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009).
Human (and other living) bodies express pain through cries, postures, movements, and
facial expressions, which we experience as full of pain without developing any theories about
why these bodies behave as they do. Nor do we need to mirror and then consciously project
the feeling of the other person to see that he is in pain. There is no reflection or simulation
going on when we feel the pain of others, we directly feel that they are so-feeling (Gallagher
and Zahavi 2012, chapter 9; Colombetti 2014, chapter 7). The phenomenologist Edith Stein
analysed the processes and ways of such “sensual empathy” in her doctoral dissertation, pub-
lished in 1917: On the Problem of Empathy (Stein 1989, 58ff.).
Sensual empathy, according to Stein, depends on what she refers to as life-bound feelings
pouring out of bodily expressions to be picked up and followed through by other living
bodies (1989, 49, 98). In sensual empathy, I become aware that a lived body is there in front
of me, and, also, that this creature has a certain type of feeling, like pain. When I see a hand
resting on a table I see immediately that it is part of a lived body that is more or less tense
or relaxed and that presses itself against the table, in contrast to the book that lies beside it
(1989, 58). But not only that, being a lived body myself, I then spontaneously follow the
tenseness and pressing tendency of the foreign hand through with my own hand:

and in this manner of co-comprehension my hand moves itself (not in reality but “as
if ”) into the place of the foreign one, into it, occupying its position and tendencies,
and, now, feels its sensual feelings, not in an original way and not as being its own, but
“with” the foreign hand precisely in the manner of the empathy process that we have
earlier differentiated from our own experiences and every other kind of making present.
(Stein 1989, 58, transl. modified)

When I feel the pain of the other as present in her face, I therefore, according to Stein, not
only feel the pain to be there in a first step but also spontaneously proceed to a second step of
the empathy process in which I follow the other’s pain through in a sort of bodily imagined

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manner. I then return to an experience of the other’s pain, which has been enliven and en-
lightened by the second step of feeling-in-her-footsteps (Stein 1989, 10–11). Empathic feel-
ing alongside the other in empathy step two is not a sharing of the other person’s experience
in the same way as when we do something together with her. The person expressing pain
may be totally unaware of my empathic feelings when I follow her pain through. Rather
than sharing, empathy is a way of spontaneously connecting to the feelings expressed by other
persons, a feeling that can give rise to sympathy (feeling for the other) and attempts to help
her (for a detailed analysis of Stein’s theory of empathy, see Svenaeus 2018).
It is in fact very hard to remain unaffected and pitiless in the face of others when they
express intense pain. The empathic and caring tendencies may become blocked by men-
tal disorders, such as autism or social personality disorder, or by desensitization caused by
repeated confrontations with suffering persons and/or conscious efforts to harden oneself
(Baron-Cohen 2011). Another way of becoming less empathic is to take drugs. Antide-
pressants have long been considered to make people less empathic: when the drugs flatten
the emotional life of the patient they also makes him less receptive to the anxiety and
sadness of others (Kramer 1993). Recently, researchers have found that off prescription
pain killers, like paracetamol, have similar effects on empathy in cases of witnessing or
imagining others in pain (Mischkowski et al. 2016). Such an effect would be well in line
with a phenomenological account of empathy à la Stein, assuming that step two empathy is
necessary to gain a more profound understanding of the pain of others. When “following
through” the pains of others, we thus seem to feel something that, if not being pain, is at
least pain-like, possibly engaging the same neural circuits as when we feel pain. Pain joins
us together just as much as it splits us apart.

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Buytendijk, Frederik J. J. (1962). Pain: Its Modes and Functions. Transl. by E. O’Shiel. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Carel, Havi (2008). Illness: The Cry of the Flesh. London: Acumen Publishing.
Cassell, Eric J. (2004). The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine. (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford
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Colombetti, Giovanna (2014). The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. Cambridge,
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de Vignemont, Frederique (2015). Pain and Bodily Care: Whose Body Matters? Australian Journal of
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Goldie, Peter (2000). The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Heidegger, Martin (1996). Being and Time. Transl. by J. Stambaugh. New York: SUNY.

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Kramer, Peter (1993). Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of
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Stein, Edith (1989). On the Problem of Empathy. Transl. by W. Stein. Washington DC.: ICS Publications.
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——— (2018). Edith Stein’s Phenomenology of Sensual and Emotional Empathy. Phenomenology and
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 47
THE UNCANNY
Dylan Trigg

1. Introduction
“I got so scared,” so Clarice Lispector writes in The Passion According to G.H., “when I realize
I lost my human form for several hours. I don’t know if I’ll have another form to replace
the one I lost” (Lispector 2012, 6). Losing our human form may not be an experience that
many of us have had, but in the course of everyday life, there are moments in which we can
feel ourselves slipping away from a sense of the world as a locus of familiarity. During such
moments, we might feel alienated not only from our surroundings, as though the same sur-
roundings were synthetic, but also from ourselves. For a brief moment, we might catch sight
of ourselves as strangers, as though our identity were a flimsy construct deployed to ward off
unfamiliarity. In such moments, it might be that we have had a feeling of the uncanny.
The concept of the uncanny has a rich history, indebted as much to psychoanalysis as
philosophy. After a lengthy latency period, the concept has flourished in the last 20 years.
This growth of interest in the uncanny is evident in a range of disciplines and thematic ar-
eas, including Heideggerian scholarship (Withy 2015), memory studies (Trigg 2009, 2012),
medical humanities (Zaner 1981; Leder 1990; Svenaeus 2000a, 2000b, 2013), philosophy of
mind (Burwood 2008; Rochat and Zahavi 2011), aesthetics (Trigg 2014), deconstruction-
ism (Derrida 1994), architectural theory (Vidler 1992; Trigg 2006), gothic studies (Spadoni
2007), cultural studies (Collins and Jervis 2008), literature (Danielewski 2000), psychoanal-
ysis (Masschelein 2011), and the humanities more broadly (Royle 2003).
This chapter will trace the conceptual and affective significance of the concept. The plan
of action is as follows. We will begin this chapter by tracing the origins of the uncanny
through a critical—indeed, decisive—essay by Freud. Following this origin, we will see how
phenomenology receives the uncanny, both explicitly in the work of Heidegger, but also in
a more diffused sense in Merleau-Ponty. With this foundation established, we will then plot
some of the “applications” of the uncanny in contemporary phenomenology, especially in the
field of the medical humanities where the concept of the “uncanny body” has proved pivotal.

2. Freud and the uncanny

Although the modern notion of the uncanny formally begins with the work of German
psychiatrist, Ernst Jentsch, the term itself is associated with an essay by Freud, and it is
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Freud who is largely responsible for the genesis of the uncanny in the 20th century (Freud
2003). Prior to Freud, there had been almost no conceptual reflection on the status of the
uncanny, save for Jentsch and also Friedrich Schelling (cf. Masschelein 2011). Freud’s essay
is itself a response to Jentsch’s 1906 paper “Über die Psychologie des Unheimlichen” (“On
the Psychology of the Uncanny”), which Freud deems “rich in content [yet] not exhaustive”
(Freud 2003, 123). In the year of Jentsch’s death in 1919, Freud wrote a paper that would
assume an unexpected significance not only within the corpus of his work but also within
the humanities more broadly. This significance is all the more striking given that Freud
introduces the topic of the uncanny in an off-handed and ironic fashion, claiming that “the
present writer must plead guilty to exceptional obtuseness in [the study of the uncanny],
when great delicacy of feeling would be more appropriate” (ibid., 124). Freud’s dismissal
is, of course, unmerited. Far from inept, his examination of the uncanny is both astute and
incisive. In part, this gift for unmasking the structural and phenomenological aspects of the
uncanny should come as no surprise. After all, the topic of the uncanny dovetails with sev-
eral recurring motifs in Freud’s works, not least anxiety, of which the uncanny is a special
kind of variant. Indeed, the formulation of the uncanny within his essay gravitates around
the idea of something long since repressed coming to the surface in another guise. This was
an idea that Freud had already developed in his 1899 paper on the topic of screen memories,
where screen memories perform the function of substituting one image for another. In “The
Uncanny”, the idea of an image being displaced from one source to an apparently unrelated
other source will itself reappear in a series of different appearances, not least that of the home.
Freud’s definition of the concept remains exemplary: “That species of the frightening that
goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (ibid., 124). Whereas
Jentsch thinks of the uncanny as involving a strong degree of intellectual uncertainty, Freud
introduces a novel reading of the uncanny as entailing an aesthetic dimension, where aesthet-
ics is employed as “relating to the quality of feeling” rather than an evaluative concern with
beauty, tragedy, sublimity, and so forth (ibid., 123). If the uncanny were merely a case of intel-
lectual uncertainty, as Jentsch has it, then the gain of intellectual certainty would domesticate
the feeling, such that “the better oriented [one] was in the world around [one], the less likely
[one] would be to find the objects and occurrences in it uncanny” (ibid., 125). Manifestly this
is not the case; the intellectual procurement of certainty does nothing to assuage the feeling of
uncanniness that is largely resistant to rationality. It is for this reason that Freud frames access
to the uncanny in terms of aesthetic sensibility, the understanding of which depends less on the
presentation of deductive assertions and more on a sensitivity to the phenomena.
Freud comes to this thesis through a lengthy etymological analysis of the term “uncanny”
itself. He begins by noting that “Unheimlich is clearly the opposite of heimlich” insofar as heim-
lich derives from heim, home (ibid., 124–125). There are two problems with this distinction,
however. The first is that the contrast between familiar and the unfamiliar does not capture
the specificity of the uncanny in distinction to, say, horror or fear. This is the limit Freud
thinks Jentsch reached in his analysis, whose accent is largely on unfamiliarity and that alone.
The second problem is that heimlich has multiple meanings. The first sense of heimlich refers
to home in a domestic and familiar sense. But in addition to this usage, the term also refers
to that which is secretive and clandestine, as he writes: “Starting from the homely and the
domestic, there is a further development towards the notion of something removed from
the eyes of strangers, hidden, secret” (ibid., 133). There is, then, an ambiguity between the
heimlich and the unheimlich, or the homely and the unhomely, such that neither can be con-
sidered in isolation from the other; that which is the most familiar—the domesticity of the
everyday—is precisely that which is the most strange.

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At the end of this etymological foray, Freud makes recourse to a formulation of the un-
canny posited by Schelling: “Uncanny is what one calls everything that has meant to remain
secret and hidden and has come into the open” (Schelling 1842, 649). Freud’s endorsement
of Schelling’s formulation is perhaps due in no small part to its alignment with the model of
repression and screen memory Freud had already developed in 1899. What is frightening is
not the object, as such, but instead the fact that the presentation of the uncanny is stipulated
on a return of what has hitherto been repressed. As evidence of this, Freud generates a tax-
onomy of uncanny objects, inspired in part by Jentsch but also through a reading of E.T.A.
Hoffman’s story “The Sand-Man.” For Freud, waxwork figures, dolls, automatons, the evil
eye, dismembered limbs, being buried alive, encountering the same number time and again
in any given day, getting lost in a small Italian town and finding oneself in the red-light
district, and even epileptic fits—all of these inspire a feeling of the uncanny “because they
arouse in the onlooker vague—mechanical—process that may be lie hidden behind the fa-
miliar image of a living person” (Freud 2003, 135).
What is important to Freud’s analysis of such phenomena is that the surface presentation
of a familiar thing—in the case of Hoffmann’s story, the eye—belies another level, in which
a more occult meaning resides. Where “The Sand-Man” is concerned, this hidden level
of meaning derives from a logic of repression whereby one figure—a father, a scientist, a
lover—assumes the place of another, in turn producing a series of doubles. As Freud inter-
prets it, the surface presentation of a given narrative is shrouded in a mist of anxiety-laden
ambivalence, such that the reader herself is never entirely clear where they stand in relation
to the real or fictitious aspects of the narrative. For Freud, it is this ambivalence of meaning
that supersedes and undercuts Jentsch’s appeal to “intellectual uncertainty,” which fails to
capture the irrational—indeed, unconscious—genesis at the heart of the uncanny.
That Freud will end up situating the function of the eye in Hofmann’s story within
the scheme of his psychosexual framework is of less importance than the broader insights
gleamed from the essay. Indeed, the fact that Freud situates the anxiety concerning the loss
of eye in relation to his notion of the castration complex is only a contingent dimension in
the structure of the uncanny. What matters is not the specificity of a given theoretical frame-
work, with its conceptual and cultural inheritance. Rather, what is of critical importance in
the logic of the uncanny is the notion of a thought that ought to be either consigned to the
archive or otherwise domesticated by reason, but which through some elaborate procedure
has managed to outlast these mechanisms.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Freud’s analysis of the doppelgänger, a theme that Freud
inherits from the work of Otto Rank. The figure of the doppelgänger is open to a multiplic-
ity of interpretations, including a symbol of “insurance against the extinction of the self,” a
motif of “boundless self-love,” and a “primordial narcissism that dominates the mental life
of both the child and the primitive man” (ibid., 142). Throughout this genesis of meanings,
themes of uncanniness such as the doppelgänger are not left behind in a primitive phase
of development but are instead reformed in a series of new guises, and it is precisely the
re-encounter of material that ought to remain buried—either to a phylogenetic past or to
infancy—that gives rise to a sense of the uncanny in adult life.
As Freud sees it, the primary affective tonality of the uncanny is one of an anxiety spurred
by ambivalence. But why does such ambivalence lead to anxiety? One possible answer—and
one that has proved influential within a generation of thinkers after Freud—hinges on the
idea that the uncanny introduces us to a dimension of subjectivity that undermines the idea
of the self as rational and sovereign. In and through the experience of the uncanny, some-
thing belonging to a different order of life and thought, hitherto assumed to be relegated to

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the past, comes to the foreground, not as a contingent accident, but as something belonging
to the structure of subjectivity itself. Indeed, the motif of the uncanny within aesthetics tends
to play precisely on how the uncanny, in a Nietzschean sense, renders us strangers to ourselves.
“It appears,” so Freud writes, “that we have all (…) been through a phase corresponding
to the animistic phase in the development of primitive peoples, that this phase did not pass
without leaving behind in us residual traces that can still make themselves felt” (ibid., 147).
Here, we might think of the films of David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and Stanley
Kubrick, the literature of Edgar Allan Poe, W.G. Sebald, and H.P. Lovecraft, the music of
Alfred Schnittke and Valentin Silvestrov, the paintings of Léon Spilliaert, and the installa-
tions of Gregor Schneider. What bridges diverse works of art such as these is the presentation
of an ostensibly familiar everyday world that is offset and undercut by a subtle atmosphere
of disquiet (cf. Trigg 2006, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2019). It is because works of art of this
variation begin from the point of departure of a habitual taken-for-granted world, in which
the self is identifiable with the self, that the anxiety peculiar to the uncanny is rendered
affectively compelling. It is on this point that phenomenology has a special relevance to the
uncanny.

3. Heidegger and the uncanny

Phenomenology’s relation to the uncanny is evident on a number of levels, both themat-
ically but also methodologically. Most obviously, the uncanny has a rich heritage in the
work of Heidegger, especially in his venerated treatment of anxiety in §40 of Being and Time
(Heidegger 2008). Whereas Freud identifies the uncanny with respect to specific discernible
things—an eye, a body part, a place, etc.—one of Heidegger’s main contributions to this
research is to render the unheimlich a generalised and constitutive structure of our being-in-
the-world. To understand this, it is necessary to say a brief word about his account of anxiety
(see also Chapter 34 in this volume).
Alongside Freud and Kierkegaard, Heidegger privileges anxiety as a mood that has the
potential to disrupt our habitual, everyday being-in-the-world. As Heidegger understands
it, anxiety is a privileged mood for at least two reasons. First, anxiety plays a methodological
role in terms of allowing us to gain an understanding of the “totality of the structural whole”
that is Being (Heidegger 2008, 229). How is it, so Heidegger asks, that Being can become an
issue for beings? How, furthermore, can we grasp Being as a whole and not just the being,
which takes up that existence as a series of parts? So long as we are tied up in the world, as
though the world just existed in an unambiguous sense, then such questions are for the most
part lost on us. It is anxiety, Heidegger suggests, that “might (…) perform some such func-
tion” of disclosing Being as a whole (ibid., 230). Anxiety does this through fragmenting the
relational meaning embedded in things, in turn obligating Dasein to call into question the
grounds of being-in-the-world. The implication of this rupture of everyday being-in-the-
world leads to the second reason why anxiety is privileged in Heidegger; namely, it generates
the possibility for a renewed understanding of the everyday. One way it does this is through
the very thematic orientation of anxiety itself, which is that of uncanniness.
Heidegger uses the term unheimlich to describe the state of being uncanny, though he
stresses that uncanniness also means “not-being-at-home” (ibid., 233). Phenomenologically,
our taken-for-granted existence consists of several key dimensions that enable us to proceed
through the world without having to reflect in abstraction on how things work and assume
the meaning they do. Think here of any given moment. For the most part, we are at-home
in the world insofar as the world presents itself to us as a nexus of familiar pathways and

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pregiven meanings. When I move through the world, then I do so with a tacit trust that the
world will unfold to me in a familiar and constant sense. The world as a homeworld is given
to me as a relational whole and is structured at all times in an intersubjective manner. Within
this world, specific things have their place—the table lends itself to be sat at, the mug to be
drunk from, and the body appears for me as a unified set of processes that enable me to get
placed in the first instance. In a word, an atmosphere of familiarity envelops this world, sel-
dom drawing attention to itself except for when it dissents from my expectations. Together,
these structures of familiarity forge the homeliness of everyday existence.
Anxiety, Heidegger suggests, pierces through this veil of familiarity, disrupting our
taken-for-granted attitude and in the process drawing attention to “the world as world”
(ibid., 232). In such moments, no matter how brief, the world no longer performs in the way
we expect it to. “Everyday familiarity,” so Heidegger writes, “collapses” (ibid., 233). What
this means is not that the world suddenly dissolves, as though it were made of slime; but
instead that the roles one assumes and the meaning, action, and purpose one finds in things
appear now as contingent constructs. In the face of this loss of familiarity and intrinsic mean-
ing, we flee back into the state of being “at-home” of established patterns within a public
sphere, such that “complete assurance” can coexist alongside the “threat” of uncanniness that
haunts Dasein from the outset (ibid., 234).
Heidegger’s anxiety, then, is not marked by a paroxysm of panic; he even goes so far
as to dismiss “physiological” anxiety as being the same as the rarer “real” anxiety (ibid.).
Nor is this anxiety an object-directed anxiety about this or that. Rather, anxiety concerns
“Being-in-the-world
­­
itself,” and manifests itself thematically in a mode of being “not-at-
home,” which “pursues Dasein constantly” (ibid., 232–234). “Anxiety,” he goes on to say,
“can arise in the most innocuous Situations. Nor does it have any need for darkness, in which
it is commonly easier for one to feel uncanny” (ibid., 234). The point is that while anxiety
may be an exemplary figuration of the uncanny, the uncanny nonetheless forms a subtle
atmosphere of disquiet in our everyday existence, from time to time flaring up as an ecstatic
realisation that leads to action and at other times paralysing us into inaction.
The vital lesson to be taken from this analysis is the idea that uncanniness is not a sub-
jective state produced by intra-psychic conflict, as we would find in Freud. Such a reading
would render the uncanny a contingent dimension of subjectivity reducible to a predefined
theoretical construct (be it the castration complex, the Oedipus complex, or any other
Freudian conception). Heidegger’s formulation of the uncanny is more pervasive in scope,
forming a primordial and “always latent” undercurrent of everyday existence, which is the
very condition of there being a sense of at-homeness in the first instance (ibid.). Such a
concept is, as we will see, pivotal in terms of providing an account of how being at-home is
subject at all times to disintegration.

***

To what extent is there a relation between Heidegger and Freud on the uncanny? The
question is an area of contested research (cf. Krell 1992, 1997; Withy 2015). David Farrell
Krell maintains that, while it is unlikely that Heidegger would have read Freud, there is
nonetheless a strong connection between the role Freud assigns to the motifs of return and
repression to those of Heidegger’s notions of concealment and unconcealment (Krell 1997).
In this respect, Krell posits that “Heidegger’s thought of self-concealing being as enigma,
mystery, and secret needs the thought of repression” (Krell 1997, 116). Krell’s interpretation is
informed by a specific sort of reading of the relation between Heidegger and Freud, which is

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largely Derridean in spirit. Indeed, Derrida himself, with his influential concept of hauntol-
ogy, insists on a close pairing of Freud and Heidegger, writing that

they do not know each other, but according to me they form a couple, and in fact just
because of that, this singular anachrony. They are bound to each other without reading
each other, and without corresponding (…) two thinkers whose glances never crossed
and who, without ever receiving a word from another, say the same.
(Derrida 1987, 191)

For both Derrida and Krell, it is the unheimlich that draws Freud and Heidegger onto the same
stage, assuming—to use language of emblematic of this sort of reading—a spectral trace that
haunts each figure in turn (cf. Royle 2003).

4. Merleau-Ponty and the uncanny

As we have seen in Heidegger, subjective states such as anxiety render the world uncanny,
transforming everyday experience into a site of estrangement. Viewed in this respect,
Heidegger’s employment of anxiety is methodological in orientation insofar as it seeks to
bring the uncanniness of the world into relief. Yet thematising the uncanniness of the world
is not peculiar to moments of rupture; rather, it is tacit within the phenomenological meth-
odology from the outset. Consider here one of the basic tenets of the phenomenological
approach; namely, the epoché. In whatever variation it assumes, phenomenology proceeds
from the broad point of departure that we put to one side our taken-for-granted presuppo-
sitions concerning our perception of the world. From a phenomenological perspective, the
world is not something I construct in abstraction in order for me to get situated within it;
rather, the world emerges as a unitary field of meaning long before it has become an object
of theoretical reflection. Moreover, the world is given to me in and through a level of affec-
tive intentionality that shapes how I experience and interpret the world in the first instance.
Through habitual experience, a level of familiarity is founded that engenders an implicit
trust in the world. While anxiety and other related affective states can undermine this tacit
trust, thermalising the uncanny structure of being-in-the-world need not be pathological
in orientation. One such non-pathological rupture is the phenomenological method itself,
which involves a gesture of attending to the natural world in an unnatural manner.
Nowhere is this attention to the uncanny singularity of things clearer than in the phe-
nomenology of Merleau-Ponty. From his early essays on Cézanne’s aesthetics to his late work
on the archaeology of the body, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is marked by a commit-
ment to suspending “habits of thought” in order to “reveal the base of inhuman nature upon
which man has installed himself ” (cited in Johnson 1993, 66). It is for this reason, that he
will conduct a phenomenological study of the world, “as if viewed by a creature of another
species” (ibid.). One consequence of this mode of phenomenology is that Merleau-Ponty’s
work is attuned to the ways in which meaning is fundamentally ambiguous, revealing and
concealing itself in a plurality of ways, and always exceeding the horizon of human experi-
ence. Such a task is one that runs the risk of defamiliarising the familiar patterns of thought
and experience that all too often lead to a sedimented perception of the world. Thus, in
Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty will ask that we consider objects in the world
in separation from human perception. Under such conditions, the familiar way in which
we apprehend objects gives way to a “non-human element which lies hidden” in things,
and which is “unaware of us” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 336). Far from affectively neutral, this

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movement of defamiliarising the everyday world carries with it a recognition of how things
are no longer receptive to human habit, but instead “hostile and alien, no longer an interloc-
utor, but a resolutely silent Other” (ibid.). Likewise, in the case of attending to the paintings
of Cézanne, for whom Merleau-Ponty regards as embodying a “feeling of strangeness,”
we are presented with a world that is “unfamiliar [and] in which one is uncomfortable and
which forbids all human effusiveness” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 16). This theme of estrange-
ment from the familiar world is one that runs throughout Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. But it
is especially, as we will see in the following section, in his elaborations on the body that this
theme becomes most expressive, and, moreover, which has proved highly influential within
contemporary research.

5. Uncanny bodies
Whereas Freud gives much attention to how the dead body can produce the sensation of
the uncanny, both he and Heidegger have very little to say on the relation between the
living body and the uncanny. Perhaps the most fertile area of research where this oversight
has been addressed is in applied phenomenology, especially in the area of research covered
under the medical humanities framework (cf. Zaner 1981; Leder 1990; Svenaeus 2000a,
2000b; Burwood 2008; Trigg 2016). Much of the contemporary research on the phenom-
enology of the uncanny body takes its cue from Freud’s account of the relation between
repression and the uncanny, together with Heidegger’s focus on uncanniness as a variant of
anxiety, and, above all, Merleau-Ponty’s rich elaborations of the ambiguity of the body in its
order and disordered state.
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body takes as its point of departure the view that the
body is not one thing among many, but instead a special sort of entity, which is not just an
irreducible site of subjective meaning but also a discernible object in the world. This am-
biguous structure is not exhausted in the distinction between the subjective and objective
dimensions of the body. More than this, Merleau-Ponty will also speak of the body in terms
of a thing that transcends me, and to this extent, remains resistant to any such attempt at
“personalizing” it. His language is telling, speaking of an “impersonal existence [that] ap-
pears around our personal existence” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 86) and likewise noting that
if “I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have to say that one
perceives in me, and not that I perceive” (ibid., 223).
There is much more to say here on how Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the prepersonal or
impersonal body raises questions over to what extent we “own” our bodies and whether this
question of ownership reframes the integrity of identity, but for now let us simply note that
with this anonymous level of bodily existence, we depart from the notion of the body as
strictly “one’s own.” The body that forms a subtheme in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology
is irreducible to one’s own lived experience (“I never have an absolute possession of myself
by myself ” [250]) and also non-identical with myself (“He who sees and touches is not ex-
actly myself ” [224]). While Merleau-Ponty locates with precision the divergent structures
of bodily existence, his philosophy is marked from the outset by an implicit confidence that
these levels converge into a unified arc. The implication of this is that very little attention is
given to our affective relationship to the impersonal dimensions of the body, a blindspot that
I responded to elsewhere (cf. Trigg 2014, 2016).
For the most part, our bodily existence unfolds in the world in a seamless fashion, afford-
ing us a continuity that is both spatial and temporal in structure. The same is also true of our
intersubjective relations. Other people’s bodies are not chunks of matter populating space in

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the way plant pots are; rather, in and through our own bodily existence, we enter into a tacit
pact with other people stipulated on the expressivity of the body. Yet in certain moments, this
pregiven arc of meaning is called into question. In episodes of illness, fatigue, pain, disease,
injury, ageing, anxiety, the body can appear for us as something distant and “thinglike,” be-
traying the identity we have constructed around the idea of the body as being irreducibly mine.
Under such conditions, we can have an experience of the body as separated from our sense
of self. Think here of how illness affords us the sense of a body that is running away from us,
now assuming a course of life that is in some sense opposed to the “I” that is now left to make
sense of a new world. For that matter, think also of heightened forms of anxiety, where the
body generates the impression of acting of its own accord, displaying a series of symptoms that
have no rational place within a given context. Think, finally, of how our relationship with
other people is never neutral, but always laden with an affective structure, such that other
people can render us “at home” with ourselves, or otherwise put us ill-at-ease through being
subject to an objectifying gaze (cf. Trigg 2013). It is for this reason that in such moments we
can speak of the body as an “it,” which has its own nature and rhythms, each of which must
be accommodated in turn. It is visible to others, in such a way that it can be treated as piece of
flesh, animate or otherwise. It lives, and importantly, it does so in spite of me. It is impersonal,
and may at times contest the life I give it through my own history, memories, and experiences.
It is the bearer of a past—whether traumatic or nostalgic in scope—that is not immediately
accessible to me even though that past may play a formative part in my identity. It remains
the same for each of us, a set of discrete organs, which predates personal existence and will
proceed to outlive that existence. Other generations will be born into a body that belongs as
much to a prehistory as it does the contingent circumstances of their personal existence.
To phrase the body as an “it” that is separate from the “I” seems to suggest a form of
dualism that is contrary to the orientation of phenomenology. After all, if the body resists
my possession, declaring its autonomy in moments of vulnerability, then to what extent am
I truly identifiable with my body? Do the experiences described above attest to a form of
substance dualism? The answer is clearly no. What is at stake is not the ontological separation
of body and self, but instead the experience of division, as Merleau-Ponty remarks, “[in] the
cases of disintegration, the soul and the body are apparently distinct; and this is the truth of
dualism” (Merleau-Ponty 1965, 209). Indeed, it is precisely because we begin with the sense
of the body as inextricably mine—ostensibly, the most homely of all things—that its depar-
ture from us leads to a feeling of uncanniness (cf. Burwood 2008; Trigg 2016). In a word, if
we remain strangers to ourselves, then it is only because we are fused with a bodily existence
that is non-possessable while also being the source of self-identification.
In the field of medical humanities, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ambiguity of the
body has been reconfigured under the term “body uncanny” (Zaner 1981; Leder 1990;
Svenaeus 2000b; Burwood 2008). Historically, the notion of the “body uncanny” has its
roots in the work of Richard Zaner. Given the pivotal—and, arguably, overlooked—status
Zaner assumes in this field, it is worth providing a brief overview of his contribution to
current debates in the phenomenology of the body and medical humanities, especially in
his The Context of Self (Zaner 1981). Zaner highlights a series of modalities structuring the
body uncanny. The first dimension is that of the body’s inescapability (Zaner 1981, 50). As
Merleau-Ponty posited, being a subject means being limited and delimited by our bodies.
What does this mean? It means that our existence as subjects is always already given to the
world in a corporeal form. To transcend the body would mean to divest ourselves of what
it is to be human. Being a subject means being bodily, and, more specifically, rendering the
impersonality of the body “one’s own” (ibid., 51).

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This inescapable dimension has an important implication: namely, as much as my sense

of self is tied up with my body, there is a joint sense in which the body “implicates” me,
as Zaner writes, “If there is a sense in which my own-body is ‘intimately mine,’ there is,
furthermore, an equally decisive sense in which I belong to it—in which I am at its disposal
or mercy, if you will” (ibid., 52). This double-sided structure of being inextricably bound
to the body while at the same time being at the mercy of it generates an affective structure,
which Zaner frames as “the chill” (ibid.). By this, Zaner suggests an affective recognition
centred on the dissonance between being unable to escape my body while simultaneously
being implicated by its materiality, Zaner reflects, “Inescapable, my embodiment is as well
dreadfully and chillingly implicative” (ibid., 53).
Zaner’s reflections articulate the tensions within the uncanny. Far from becoming wholly
alien or remote, the body that appears for us in the uncanny is such only insofar as it draws
together a constellation of divergent elements—personal and impersonal, possessable and
non-possessable, contemporary and immemorial—inhabiting a body that is both mine and
not mine concurrently (cf. Trigg 2014, 2016, 2017). In this respect, my affective relation-
ship to the body as uncanny is predicated on an ambiguous interplay, in which the body is
both irreducibly familiar—an expressive centre of personal gestures, memories, habits, skills,
etc.—while simultaneously being that which is the most unfamiliar to me, a nexus of anon-
ymous processes and impersonal structures over which I have no control.
This joint sense of the body as familiar and unfamiliar, homely and unhomely generates
an affective register that reinstates both Heidegger and Freud’s claim that anxiety is central
to the uncanny. But what is at stake in this anxiety? As Freud noted, not every anxiety is
uncanny. What is peculiar to uncanny anxiety—as opposed to, say, generalised anxiety—is
a strange confluence of familiar and unfamiliar attributes converging in the same localised
space; namely, the body. In well-being and health, this disquiet is largely absent. Integrated
and unified, the everyday body not only puts us at-home in the world through allowing
us to get directionally and existentially placed in the world, but also serves as a fulcrum of
familiarity, such that, to paraphrase Bachelard, we carry home with us (Bachelard 2014). In
turn, the fundamental role the body plays in generating a sense of well-being, familiarity,
identity, and, above all, home is also why its dislocations and ruptures can just as easily render
us not-at-home. To think in this respect of the articulations of bodily uncanniness—illness,
anxiety, ageing—is to conceive of a body that returns to us reformed, or rather de-formed,
from how we ostensibly take the body to be. It is for this reason that the affective register of
the uncanny is not horror or panic, but an eerie sense that the integrity of self hood—insofar
as self hood is stipulated on the concept of the body as one’s own—is vulnerable at all times
to disintegration.

6. Conclusion
Contemporary research on the uncanny body has gone in several directions, informed not
only by phenomenology but also by feminist theory (Kokoli 2016), critical theory (Macey
2001), and race theory (Ricatti 2013). While philosophers such as Drew Leder (Leder
1990) have drawn upon Merleau-Ponty and Zaner to develop an enriched understanding
of the body in its plenitude, other thinkers such as Fredrik Svenaeus, also influenced by
Merleau-Ponty and Zaner, have employed the notion of the uncanny to understand specific
modes of bodily existence, not least illness (Svenaeus 2000b) and anorexia (Svenaeus 2013).
For my own part, the concept of the uncanny has been instrumental in developing a richer
account of pathological states such as agoraphobia (Trigg 2016), but also aesthetic experiences

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(Trigg 2014), in addition to more ambiguous states such as nostalgia (Trigg 2012). In each
case, the concept of the uncanny is helpful in delineating the fundamental ways in which our
being-in-the-world is underpinned at all times by a homelessness that, far from contingent,
provides the grounds upon which a sense of being at-home is founded, finding thematic
expression, above all, in the lived and living body.

References
Bachelard, Gaston (2014): The Poetics of Space. Transl. by M. Jolas. London: Penguin.
Burwood, Stephen (2008). The Apparent Truth of Dualism and the Uncanny Body. Phenomenology and
the Cognitive Sciences 7, 263–278.
Collins, Jo, and Jervis, John (2008). Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Basingstoke:
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Danielewski, Mark (2000). House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon.
Derrida, Jacques (1987). The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Transl. by Alan Bass. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
——— (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International.
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Freud, Sigmund (2003). The Uncanny. Transl. by D. McLintock. Harmondsorth: Penguin.
Heidegger, Martin (2008). Being and Time. Transl. by J. Macquarrie, and E. Robinson. New York:
Harper Collins.
Johnson, Galen (1993). The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Evanston:
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Kokoli, Alexandra (2016). The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice. London: Bloomsbury.
Krell, David (1992). “Das Unheimliche”: Architectural Sections of Heidegger and Freud. Research in
Phenomenology 22, 43–61.
——— (1997). Archeticture [sic]: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body. New York: State University
of New York Press.
Leder, Drew (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.
Lispector, Clarice (2012). The Passion According to G.H. New York: New Directions.
Macey, David (2001). Uncanny. Dictionary of Critical Theory. London: Penguin.
Masschelein, Anneleen (2011). The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory.
New York: State University of New York Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964). Cézanne’s Doubt. In: Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Sense and Non-Sense.
Transl. by H. L. Dreyfus, and P. A. Dreyfus. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 9–25.
——— (1965). The Structure of Behaviour. Transl. by A.L. Fischer. London: Methuen.
——— (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. by D. Landes. London, New York: Routledge.
Ricatti, Francesco (2013). The Emotion of Truth and the Racial Uncanny. Cultural Studies Review
19(2), 125–149.
Rochat, Philippe, and Zahavi, Dan (2011). The Uncanny Mirror: A Re-Framing of Mirror Self-
Experience. Consciousness and Cognition 20(2), 204–213.
Royle, Nicholas (2003). The Uncanny: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1842). Philosophie der Mythologie. (Vol. 2). Sämtliche Werke.
Stuttgart: Cotta.
Spadoni, Robert (2007). Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Svenaeus, Fredrik (2000a). Das Unheimliche—Towards a Phenomenology of Illness. Medicine, Health
Care and Philosophy 3, 3–16.
——— (2000b). The Body Uncanny: Further Steps toward a Phenomenology of Illness. Medicine,
Health Care and Philosophy 3, 125–137.
——— (2013). Anorexia Nervosa and the Body Uncanny: A Phenomenological Approach. Philosophy,
Psychiatry, & Psychology 20(1), 81–91.
Trigg, Dylan (2006). The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason. New York:
Peter Lang.
——— (2009). The Place of Trauma: Memory, Hauntings, and the Temporality of Ruins. Memory
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——— (2011). The Return of the New Flesh: Body Memory in David Cronenberg’s the Fly. Film-
Philosophy 15, 82–99.
——— (2012). The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens: Ohio University Press.
——— (2013). The Body of the Other: Intercorporeality and the Phenomenology of Agoraphobia.
Continental Philosophy Review 46(3), 413–429.
——— (2014). The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror. Winchester: Zero Books.
——— (2016). Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety. London: Bloomsbury.
——— (2017). Agoraphobia, Sartre, and the Spatiality of the Other’s Look. In L. Dolezal, and
D. Petherbridge (Eds.). Body/Self/Other: Phenomenology of Social Encounters. New York: SUNY Press.
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Vidler, Anthony (1992). The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA:
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Further reading
Carroll, Noël (2003). The Philosophy of Horror. Or: Paradoxes of the Heart. London, New York: Routledge.

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 48
HATE OF EVIL
Hans Bernhard Schmid

“Hate of evil”, some translations have Aristotle saying in his Virtues and Vices, “belongs
to righteousness” (VV 1250b, 20f.)—an idea that is echoed in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa
Theologiae as “odire malum est laudabile”—“hating evil is praiseworthy” (ST I-II, q. 29,
a. 1, 2). This does not seem to sit particularly well with standard modern moral sensitivi-
ties. Hatred does not strike us as a particularly ethical attitude. Though it seems righteous
and praiseworthy to stand firmly against moral wrongs, “hating evil” takes the idea of
moral sternness over the top. Moral condemnation of wrong is very different from hatred
of evil. Moral condemnation may involve anger and indignation, but this is not hatred.
In anger and indignation, we find ourselves pushed to punish and to compensate, which
is o.k. and perhaps even required if it is done for the right cause and to the right degree.
Hatred, by contrast, is not satisfied with that. It pushes towards annihilation and eradica-
tion. Hatred is absolute enmity—an enmity that does not open up a perspective of living
together with the “evildoers” it targets. It is thus not a way of seeing the wrong we do and
that is done to us “in the right way”. It is not part of the inventory of ethical attitudes. Hate
does not recognize moral wrong as the evil it is. Rather, hatred makes evil. It is prominently
claimed in modern moral theory that the very concept of “evil” and the inimical discourse
thereof is an excrescence of hatred, where pure hatred ideologically distorts our concepts
of true righteousness and justice and poisons our moral outlook with Ressentiment. In the
phenomenological tradition, it is Max Scheler who followed this influential Nietzschean
line most closely (Scheler 1912). Hatred not only tends to single out ever worse features in
its target, but it also contributes to making it worse (Scheler 1913). In this view, hatred is
not seen as the right answer to evil. Rather, it is argued that moral condemnation should
ultimately be guided by love.

1.
It is along these lines that the concept of evil had vanished from mainstream moral philoso-
phy, when the situation changed rather dramatically towards the end of the past century. A
number of authors have come to think that there really is evil after all, and that in modern
times we have come to live in a “denial of evil” (Card 2002). This, it is claimed, has led us
to going too soft on the worst of the moral wrongs. The view seems to be that especially

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after what we have learned about the worst in human nature in the 20th century, we can no
longer remain in denial of evil.
The roots of recent “evil-revivalism” (Russell 2006) go back to Hannah Arendt’s thought
about the Holocaust. “The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war in-
tellectual life in Europe”, Arendt declared in 1945 (Arendt 1994, 134). Somewhat ironically,
it was not the conception of “radical evil” developed in her Elements of Totalitarianism (Arendt
1951), but rather her conception of the “banality of evil” in her reports on the Eichmann
trials in Jerusalem (Arendt 1963) that spurred the new discourse of evil. Unspeakable harm,
the general view among evil-revivalists seems to be, calls for the strongest concepts of con-
demnation, and we cannot deprive our moral vocabulary from its strongest item—“Evil!”—
without turning a blind eye to the darkest realities of social life. “Evil” may be brutishly
harsh, but so are some of the facts. Many philosophers have come to think that there is more
than one occasion in which other discourses of moral disapproval simply will not do, and to
which only a discourse of evil is adequate.
Here are some selected early voices from the rapidly growing chorus of advocates of
a new discourse of evil in moral philosophy. The contributors to María Pía Lara’s 2001
volume engage in the project of Rethinking Evil; as one contributor argues, “modern-
ist common sense” has “not given evil its due”; it has ignored that “evil is a powerful
sui generis social force” that “has been deprived of the intellectual attention it deserves”
(Alexander 2001, 153). Claudia Card, in her admirable Theory of Evil (2002), deplores the
earlier “denial of evil” that makes us, according to her, blind for important moral dif-
ferences in particularly sensitive areas. The denial of evil, Card argues, prevents us from
seeing atrocities for what they really are. John Kekes claims that “evil must be recognized
as a moral phenomenon of primary importance” (1990, 49) because it is “the most serious
obstacle to human well-being”, to which “only the strongest one-word condemnation of
our moral vocabulary” is adequate (Kekes 2009, 139). And Charles T. Mathewes argues
that “the whole intellectual history of modernity can be written as the story of our grow-
ing incomprehension of evil, of our inability adequately to understand both the evils we
mean to oppose, and those in which we find ourselves implicated” (Mathewes 2001, 3).
Mathewes’ aim is to “recover and rehabilitate” evil (2001, 240). In the meantime, it has
become impossible to give even a rough overview over the relevant contributions. Starting
at the fringes of contemporary moral philosophy, the discourse of evil has truly found its
way into mainstream contemporary philosophy.
This is not to say that the reservations against the discourse of evil have been forgotten.
The reaction to the Bush administration’s attempt to introduce “evil” as a core term in
international politics in the aftermath of 9/11 has met with a critical response in the global
intellectual discourse in general, and from the side of moral and political philosophers in
particular. The new discourse of evil in current moral philosophy claims to have learned the
lesson that “evil” easily expresses demonizing bigotry. The current evil-revivalists do not
advocate witch-hunts and torture of “evildoers”. Evil-revivalism aspires to be enlightened
and open-minded, free of the sulfuric fumes and indeed the hatred of the old discourse.
The new discourse of evil is a discourse of moral reprobation to fit the moral sensitivities of
modern times.
This, however, leads to the question: can “evil” be whitewashed without ceasing to be
evil? How many teeth can you pull from “evil” without depriving it of its conceptual bite?
How far can a discourse of evil accommodate the moral sensitivities that motivated the “de-
nial of evil” (Card 2002)—and still be of evil rather than just of any other conception of moral
wrong, such as “bad”, “mean”, or “unfair”?

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Much of the bigotry and demonization of old discourses of evil might easily be avoided,
but any discourse that is truly of evil rather than of some other form of moral condemnation
cannot avoid to be a discourse of hate. A discourse of evil may easily avoid the devil and the
demonic by means of secularization and metaphysical parsimony. The devil may be cut out
of the discourse of evil, but not the idea of a suitable target of hate. No renewal, revision, and
revival of the discourse of evil, insofar as it is really of evil, can ignore one central feature: the
correlation of evil and hate. To call something or somebody “evil” and really mean it is to take
an attitude of hate towards it—hate in terms of an affectively felt commitment to annihila-
tion. Any discourse of evil, old or new, will have to bite the bullet on this: it justifies hate. If
there really is evil, there is something towards which it is righteous and laudable to take the
attitude of hate—because hate is the “fitting attitude” to the kind of disvalue that evil is, it is
the attitude in which evil is seen as the kind of disvalue it really is. Or, to put it in a term that
proved influential in the phenomenology of the emotions: evil is the formal object of hatred.
It is a remarkable observation concerning the recent evil-revivalist literature that the
more loudly the loss of our sensitivity for “real evil” is deplored, the less is said about hate.
Here are just three examples: John Kekes’ book Facing Evil lists in its index such related terms
as “malevolence”, “destructivity”, and “moral monsters”, but it does not even mention the
words “hate” or “hatred”. Charles T. Mathewes’ book-long attempt to “recover and reha-
bilitate” evil (2001, 240) mentions the terms “hate” or “hatred” only three times (twice
in quotes). Something similar is true for Terry Eagleton’s bestselling evil-revivalist books
on Holy Terror (2005) and On Evil (2010). One might ask: how can evil-revivalism aim at
rehabilitate the strongest expression of moral repudiation without thereby calling for the
strongest affective attitude?
Claudia Card—surely one of the philosophically most powerful proponents of evil-
revivalism—proves to be more circumspect in her way of dealing with the question of hate.
She does not ignore Nietzsche’s lesson about the correlation between evil and hate, and she is
well aware that rejecting the Nietzschean social psychological projection theory of evil does
not in itself amount to rejecting any correlation between evil and hate. Yet she avoids taking
a clear position in this regard, and does not oppose the “denial of evil” which she deplores
with a positive account of hate. Rather, she confesses to be “ambivalent” (2002, 49) as to the
question of the place of hate in ethics. She takes the first step towards an endorsement of hate:
“[s]ometimes the danger seems to lie (…) in the inability to hate where hatred is earned”
(Card 2002, 49). However, she takes back with one hand what she has just given with the
other in suggesting that the kind of hate she has in mind is really just something like strong
dislike, disgust, or some other form of repudiation. The conception of hate she seems to
have in mind rids hate from its inherent destructiveness and reduces it to aversion: “Hatred
distances us from what we hate. It asserts a profound rejection. To reject is not to annihilate”
(2002, 49). If Card is rather unique among the recent evil-revivalists in that she preserves a
sense for the correlation of evil and hate, it is a reductionist concept of hate she has in mind:
Something we should better not call hate because it is just a desire for distancing oneself from
the perceived “evil”, and not a commitment to annihilation.
One might object, however, that this blurs important distinctions. Hate is not just any
kind of distancing or rejection. It seems obviously possible to reject or to distance oneself
from, to dislike, or even to be disgusted by a person or some of his or her features for the
danger or harm that lies in them without hating him or her. Even in those frequent cases
where hate arises from other forms of rejection, hate takes a decisive further step—or else it
is, it seems, not proper hate.

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2.
If a discourse of evil makes no sense without a conception of how hatred might be “justi-
fied”, Aristotle and Aquinas might be the right place to look after all. “Hate of evil” translates
Aristotle’s word μισοπονηρία. This terminology features prominently in the Septuaginta that
uses πονηρία (with the adjective πονηρόν) in such famous passages as “knowing good and
evil” (γινώσκοντες καλὸν καὶ πονηρόν; Genesis 3, 5), and rendering πονηρία (or πονηρός)
as “evil” is standard for the translation of the New Testament, such as—most famously—in
the line “deliver us from evil” (ῥύσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ; Matthew 6:13). Yet one might
think that expressions such as “vice”, “badness” or “baseness” might perhaps serve just as
well—at least in Aristotle’s case, where it is clear enough that no such idea as the devil, or
devilish forces are meant. As to the component verb μισεῖν, too, it might seem far from clear
that the attitude Aristotle has in mind here is of the sort of specific radical and affectively felt
enmity that drives at the annihilation of its target. A more generic view of hate seems to be
how Plutarch, in the short treatise On Envy and Hate in his Moralia, echoes Aristotle’s line—
even though Plutarch’s version comes with the problem that he explicitly targets “righteous
hate” at people rather than just their vices. Plutarch, too, says that “hatred of wickedness is
among the things we praise”, but he adds that it is bad people that are “deserving of hate” and
that it is therefore right that we “censure others when they fail to shun such persons and to
feel loathing and disgust for them” (1959, 537 D). Plutarch uses μισεῖν in a general sense, as
an umbrella term for a wide range of aversive or disapproving attitudes, including—besides
the loathing and disgust directed at those who fail to hate evil—fear of and anger at evil
itself.
Plutarch is interested in the specifics of hate only insofar as they concern the relation to
envy (the conclusion of the treatise is that hate aims to injure, whereas envy does not go quite
so far). In the sense of this wider or more generic conception of hate, Plutarch lists as exam-
ples for hate such diverse aversive attitudes as the fear that elephants allegedly have of squeal-
ing pigs and the feeling of having been wronged (which is the classical definition of anger).
Though Plutarch largely draws on Aristotle in his treatise, Aristotle’s own discussion
of hate in the Rhetoric is much more specific about the role of hate among the “inimical”
attitudes than Plutarch’s—and it explicitly involves people as target of hate. Aristotle here
distinguishes hate from both anger and fear—the phenomena that we find lumped together
in Plutarch’s discussion. According to Aristotle, fear is the “troubled feeling” that comes
from the impression of imminent “destruction or pain”, anger is the desire to inflict pain on
those who have committed acts against us, while hate is very simply the desire that the object
of hate “not be” (μὴ εἶναι, sometimes translated as “perish”). If this should be the concept
of hate that Aristotle advertises as “belonging to righteousness” when directed at “evil”, it
seems that it is the specific sort of enmity that the discourse of evil directs at the “evildoers”.
Aristotle’s discussion of hate in the Rhetoric is short but rich. Anger, Aristotle argues, is
“curable by time”, hate is not. Aristotle here suggests that anger and hatred are specific forms
of “enmity”, which is, in turn, the opposite of “friendship” or “friendliness”. In addition to
the temporal structure, further specific differences between anger and hatred include that
the former is compatible with compassion, while the latter is not. The angry person feels
pain and has the intention to take action against the target of anger, and wants to see the
pain he or she inflicts in return on the target; the hateful person does not feel pain (or even
displeasure), and need not care about how it is the desired state comes about (R 1382a).
Aristotle casts hate as an eerily cool, dispassionate and stable attitude here—in the words

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Leo Strauss uses, it is “a settled, quiet determination” (Strauss 1964, transcript p. 184). This
last feature seems to be further fleshed out in a brief passage on the relation between anger
and hate in his Politics, where Aristotle says that hatred is “more calculated” an attitude
than anger, because, as opposed to hate, anger is pain, and pain makes calculation difficult
(P 1312b, 25–34); Aristotle here also makes the surprising claim that anger is a “part” of hate,
which poses difficulties for the understanding of anger and hate as two distinct forms of the
genus “enmity” suggested in the above-mentioned passage in the Rhetoric, as well as in the
Nicomachean Ethics (NE 1105b, 21–23).
Strauss, in his lecture course on the Rhetoric, has difficulty imagining hate to be so utterly
dispassionate, and he suspects that “Aristotle misinterprets hate” (Strauss 1964, transcript
p. 184). One attempt to make sense of the apparently dispassionate and pain-free conception
of hate might be to understand it as an emotional disposition rather than a specific emotion,
in the sense in which many recent authors have conceived of love (cf., e.g., Naar 2013). In
this dispositional view, love is not in itself a type of mental event—it has no phenomenology
and hedonic quality of its own, and, just as Aristotle suggests, it has a different temporal
structure. Rather than being an affective experience itself, it is a feature in virtue of which
a wide array of affective experiences come about and are structured. To love in this dispo-
sitional sense is not to have a specific experience of love; rather, it is a systematic pattern of
very different emotional experiences: it is to experience joy at the loved one’s thriving, to
fear danger, to hope for the loved one’s good, etc. The way in which it is suggestive to read
Aristotle’s “dispassionate” conception of hate along these lines is that in this view, it is not
itself a passion; rather, it constitutes a pattern of passions, spelling out in different emotional
experiences in different circumstances.
A vivid illustration of how this might work in the case of hate is in Rosalind Hursthouse’s
example of “extreme racism”:

Recall, firstly, how extreme racism expresses itself in emotion, the way it generates not
only (…) contempt, but fear, anger, reserve, suspicion, grief that one’s offspring is going
to marry a member of the rejected race, joy when evil befalls them, pity for members
of one’s own race who are bettered by them, pride when one succeeds in doing them
down, amusement at their humiliation, surprise that one of them has shown signs of
advanced humanity, horror or self-contempt at the discovery that one has felt fellow-
feeling for one—it is hard to think of a single emotion that is immune to its corruption.
It can even extend its influence to the appetites, since the rejected race’s food and drink
can be found disgusting, and sexual relations with its members perversely attractive.
(Hursthouse 2000, 88)

It is true that such a dispositional interpretation of hate is difficult to square with many of the
features highlighted by Aristotle. It does not fit to the way he draws a distinction between
hate, anger, and fear, and it does not do much to explain the statement in the Politics that
hate is “more calculated” than anger, to say the least. Even more obviously and importantly,
the example is particularly ill-suited to make any good sense of how hate may “belong to
righteousness”. Indeed, Hursthouse’s example of “extreme racism” certainly does just the
opposite.
Yet there is one reason why the example might nevertheless not be entirely off topic with
regard to a charitable interpretation of Aristotelian hate of evil. The μισοπονηρία Aristotle
commends as belonging to righteousness is of πονηρία, which is a way of acting. Look-
ing at the discussion in his Rhetoric, however, it becomes clear that Plutarch is not entirely

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departing from Aristotle when he claims that hate is not just of “bad behavior”, as it were,
but rather of people for their being bad. In his comparison between anger and hate, Aristotle
says that whereas anger always targets people (for their wrongful, vicious, or base acts, we
might suspect), hate targets individuals and also targets classes, or kinds (this is somewhat ob-
scured in the popular Rackham translation that omits a decisive “and” in the original text,
suggesting that hate is only of classes). This brings us back to Hursthouse’s example—though
obviously, the examples Aristotle gives are not of racist stereotyping, but of other kinds of
affective social classification: “everyone hates a thief or a squealer” (R 1382a). These are not
classifications of agents according to non-agential features, but classifications of agents ac-
cording to forms of acting, and targeting πονηρία in terms of those forms, it might not even
have crossed Aristotle’s mind that classes of people might be hated for non-agential features
of theirs. If it had, one would hope he would have decidedly denounced that attitude as being
quite the opposite of the sort of hate that “belongs to righteousness”—indeed, with some
good will, a passage in the Politics (P 1252a 35ff.) could perhaps be construed as implying that
for Aristotle, misogyny is “the hallmark of barbarism” (Dobbs 1996, 77f.)—which is not to
say, of course, that Aristotle himself was free of that sentiment).
In his Summa Theologiae (ST I-II, q. 29), Aquinas interprets Aristotle’s view of class-
targeting hatred as a transformation of “natural hatred” that “is subsequently shaped by the
functionings of reason in its apprehension of the ‘universal,’ as it grasps abstract properties
that give classes of objects a more or less consistent relationship over time to human desires
and interests” in such a way that “beyond and out of the spontaneous aversive responses of
‘natural hatred’ arise a variety of generalized hatreds” (Green 2007, 410). Keith Green argues
that according to Aquinas this works in love in the same way as it works in hate, and this
is the way how we come to have generalized positive or negative evaluative attitudes—or
proper conceptions of what is good and what it is bad (ibid.). Is this, now, how hate “belongs to
righteousness”? Is, in other words, the problem of Hursthouse’s example just that it invokes
the wrong kind of class? Does hating “thieves”—as a class rather than individually—make any
good and sound ethical sense?
It seems rather doubtful that it does, and it is no coincidence that the concept of hate
of classes comes up in the descriptive venture of the Rhetorics rather than in the normative
context of Virtues and Vices, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics. It does not seem obvious
at all why hate of classes of people would be needed for the right sort of attitude towards types
of actions (such as thievery or treason, to use Aristotle’s examples). The opposite seems to be
true. If it is right to disapprove of actions of certain types, one should not proceed to disap-
proving of classes of people. At the psychological level, it is difficult to imagine that “hate
of classes of people” spells out as anything other than “hate of individuals for the features
in virtue of which they belong to a certain class”. And normatively, it seems obvious that
this is just how the logic of hate works against righteousness; hate construes an anonymous
and threatening entity—“them”, “those people”—and then addresses the individual under
that label. By means of classification, hate thus “produces a differentiation between ‘us’ and
‘them’, whereby ‘they’ are constituted as the cause of ‘our’ feeling of hate” (Ahmed 2014, 48).
This has been studied extensively in psychology (cf., e.g., Gordon W. Allport’s illuminating
analysis of the “Nature of Hatred” in his Nature of Prejudice (1979, 363ff.)) and is the ethical
problem of inimical social stereotyping.
Thus the generalizing move from individuals to kinds, from “natural hatred” to “rational
hatred”, as hinted at in Aristotle’s sparse remarks in the Rhetoric and spelled out in Aquinas’
analysis, does not initially seem to give us an ethically defensible sort of hatred, but rather
leads to an account of one of the most pressing ethical problems in culturally heterogeneous

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societies—if anything, this is gist for the mill of the “evil-deniers”. In the paradigmatic case
of xenophobia, the additional problem is that the base of the generalizing move need not
even be the experience of morally bad acts—it seems that we have the tendency of constru-
ing the unfamiliar and strange as threatening and thus bad. It may be true that the general-
izing construction of the stranger as a “kind” sometimes does not seem to translate directly
as hate of every single individual of that group: “I dislike them, but she is a good person”.
But this is cold comfort, as this may equally be seen as a way in which generalized hatred is
insulated and persists against concrete experiences of friendship.
It is true that the generalizing move of hatred Aristotle and Aquinas have in mind differs
from such cases as xenophobic stereotyping in that the kinds they have in mind are kinds
of “wrongdoers” based on the (presumably) reprehensible acts they do—“the thieves”, “the
squealers”. If it is in virtue of morally reprehensible acts, however, that membership in this class
is construed, it is puzzling how hate of that “kind” should not constitute hate of the member
individuals. Indeed, Aristotle illustrates hate of classes in this way by saying “everybody hates
a thief ”. The only way to make this generalized hate of kinds compatible with the insight that
hate of people is wrong seems to be to separate the agent from the act—hate of “the thieves” is
then something like an affectively felt judgment that acts of thievery should “not be”.

3.
“Hate the sin, not the sinner”, Mahatma Gandhi famously recommends in his Autobiography
(1980), and this reflects a popular idea of how to give hate a morally proper place. Hate,
Gandhi implies, does play a moral role, but, according to him, the room for proper ethical
hate is strictly confined. Hating sins is right and perhaps the only adequate attitude towards
what’s really wrong about us. Hating people, however, is a grave mistake, and indeed one
of the worst of sins. “Man and his deeds are two distinct things”, Gandhi claims, and it is
only when hate is directed at the wrong target that “the poison of hate spreads in the world”
(Gandhi 1980, chap. 87). Here, as in so many other respects, Gandhi’s autobiography echoes
Augustine’s (on which it is modelled). Sin, Augustine claims in the Confessions, should not
be, and this has to be affectively felt: Sin has to be hated. Hating people, however, is wrong.
A non-theological way of making the latter point is to say that as persons, people are targets
of normative attitudes. To understand somebody as a person is to conceive of him or her
as being susceptible to normative reasons—there is a way in which they should be. Hating
people, however, is judging that they should not be. Hatred of people thus fails to conceive
of people as persons. To Augustine, hatred of people is simply a sin. Where it is targeted at
people, it ultimately backfires: instead of being directed at something hateworthy, it is itself
hateworthy. Augustine points this out where he says of the hater of people that

it is as if he should feel that there is an enemy who could be more destructive to himself
than that hatred which excites him against his fellow man; or that he could destroy him
whom he hates more completely than he destroys his own soul by this same hatred.
(Confessions, I, xviii, 29)

Hate of people, in other words, is a projection of enmity; it is itself the evil which it purports
to target. Augustine puts this as clearly and succinctly as any enlightened and liberal critic of
the discourse of evil and hate might wish.
Ethical hate, Gandhi and Augustine argue, cannot be of the agent-targeted sort. We may
be angry at people for what they do because what they do is wrong and should thus not be,

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that is, because what they do is hateworthy, but they themselves are never hateworthy. It can
be granted that such “aversive” attitudes as anger and fear do involve hate. But the hate in-
volved is not of the person, but of his act. Being angry at a person is for his doing, and the
way his doing is judged to be wrong in being angry at the perpetrator involves the affectively
felt commitment to the non-existence of the deed in question: being angry at a person thus
is hate of the act—but it is not hate of the person. The evil that is—to use an Aquinian
conception—the formal object of hate is a property of the act, not of the agent.
Is “hate of sin, not of sinners” thus the answer to the question of ethical hate, and a
perspective for the new discourse of evil? It might seem bold to disagree on a view that
seems to be shared by Augustine and Gandhi, and that seems to receive at least some sup-
port from Aristotle and Aquinas. However, in his important essay on hate, the phenom-
enologist Aurel Kolnai claims that it is quite obvious that there is something fishy about
the easy solution. “The distinction between act and agent”, he argues, “is never perfect”
(Kolnai 1935, 139; cf. 1998 [1969/70]). It is thus not possible, Kolnai claims, to hate actions
without implicating the perpetrators in that hate in some way. Kolnai does not elaborate
on this in further detail, but we can put it bluntly in roughly the following way. Sometimes
people act “out of character”, and the distinction between act and agent is easy in these
cases. More often, however, they do not. What is a person who has a robust disposition to
lying? A liar. A person who is in the habit of stealing is a thief, and a person who murders
is a murderer. There is a sense in which people are what they do. If theft is worthy of hate,
how could the thief not be hated—let alone be loved—without ignoring what he is? The
distinction between act and agent thus leads back to the above issue of hate of evil and hate
of classes addressed by Aristotle in his Rhetoric. Observing how hate works in mind and
society is certainly not the same as recommending that attitude, or identifying conditions
of adequacy. In fact, the way in which Aristotle’s analysis of hate in the Rhetoric is usually
used in the recent literature is in a way that lends itself as a forceful criticism of the “or-
ganization of hate” in society (e.g., Ahmed 2014, 49) rather than a conception of ethical
hate. It might seem that the conception of the perpetrator in the light of the perceived
moral nature of his or her act is simply a mistake—and a fateful one, as it invites the step
from anger at a person for his or her hateworthy act to hating the person. It deserves to be
mentioned (though there is no space to show it here) that Augustine himself, who insists so
vehemently on the person-act-distinction, offers ample evidence for just how slippery the
slope from “hate of sin” down to “hate of sinners” really is (in the Confession, Augustine
hits the bottom at C XII, xiv, 17).
With his claim that the distinction between act and agent is never perfect Kolnai
certainly does not mean to say that it is a common mistake for the two to be conflated.
Rather, he means that there is something about targeting acts in virtue of which to some
degree at least it implicates the agent in a way that is not simply misdirected. This can
be approached by comparing a case of hating an agent for some of his or her bodily fea-
tures or place of birth with a case of hating an agent for some of his or her practices. If it
seems wrong to hate an individual for any reason, it does seem that it is “more wrong”,
as it were, to hate an individual for some feature for which he or she is not responsible
than to hate him or her for what expresses his or her agency. This intuition that hate of
people for anything other than what they do is worse than hating them for what they do
seems to find some corroboration by a comparison between hate crime, on the one hand,
and support of death penalty, on the other. The perpetrators of hate crimes and their
supporters hate their victims for perceived features of theirs which are typically not their
actions, but rather their race, gender, origin, religion, or some such—a sort of hate that

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is universally recognized as despicable—even in places where the cultural politics of hate

crime legislation is portrayed in a rather skeptical light (e.g., Lewis 2014). As to the hate of
people for their acts, a likely place is to look at the discourse on capital punishment. After
all, killing people for what they have done seems as likely a case for hate (in terms of an
affectively felt commitment to the annihilation of the target) as any. There is a strand in
legal theory of capital punishment that is eerily accommodating to agent-directed hatred.
Denunciatory Theories assign punishment the function of “expressing the attitudes (…) that
are felt by law-abiding people toward the criminal misdeed”, and clearly, where killing
the perpetrator is the adequate expression, the attitude in question can only be hate—hate
of the misdeed of course, but also: hate of the perpetrator for his or her act. And though
denunciatory theories are often seen with some suspicion for their relation to hate, it is
not the case that they are universally rejected (e.g., Kramer 2011, chap. 5). The difference
between the discourse on hate crime and on death penalty as a means of denunciation
clearly shows that while hating people for what they are seems out of the question, hat-
ing people for what they do is quite another thing—and is indeed an attitude that under
certain circumstance seems to be met with some degree of understanding, or even ac-
commodation. One way of making sense of this is in terms of what we may call—though
perhaps in a perverted way—agent-respect. People should be seen—and judged as—subjects
rather than objects. Birth, sex, bodily features, race, gender, social class are not up to
an individual agent, and whoever finds him- or herself the victim of discrimination or
aggression because of such features is thereby disrespected as an agent: Respecting an in-
dividual as an agent means judging that individual according to what is up to him or her.
And though we might think, as argued above, that hating an agent is mistaken because
wanting an individual to be killed for the sake of that person’s alleged hateworthiness
seems quite incompatible with conceiving of him or her as a person, there is, it seems,
more agency respect in this attitude, however contradictory it is, than in simply hating
a person under the misconception as an object. It is thus perhaps not altogether surpris-
ing that quite often in the US American debate, death penalty is criticized not because
it expresses agent targeted hatred and is thus a mistake, but because there is “a pattern
of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposing of the
death penalty” (U.S. General Accounting Office 1997, 271).
Our result thus seems to be this: It is far from clear how “hate of evil” could be conceived
in a way that fills the lacuna in current evil-revivalism. Rather than support for the project, it
is critical questions that result from our investigation, especially with regards to the individ-
ual/class-distinction and the act/agent-distinction. Generalized hatred necessarily implicates
individuals, and sometimes implicates them in a particularly problematic, stereotypical way.
And hate of acts tends to implicate agents, and while hate of agents might be problematic
in many ways, this is particularly obvious where the agents in question are persons. Perhaps
there is a point that can be made with regard to some types of deficient group agents—there
seems to be nothing wrong in putting out of existence corporations and institutions that
are systematically geared towards the bad and are organized in a way that makes them un-
suited for reform (Schmid, unpublished). It might be righteous and laudable to hate them—if
the members are not implicated in hate of group agents in the way they are implicated in
Aristotelian “hate of classes”.
But this might seem like a fringe case. The general conclusion remains: The missing
conception of ethical hatred is a reason to be skeptical of evil-revivalism. The critique of
the discourse of evil marks a progress in our moral outlook whose importance is difficult to

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overestimate. The critique of the discourse of evil—polemically labeled the “denial of evil”
by evil-revivalists—firmly opposes the hateful projection of absolute enmity on failing fel-
low human beings, and thus blocks a most destructive feature of the psychological and social
dynamics of hatred.

References
Ahmed, Sara (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Alexander, Jeffrey (2001). Toward a Sociology of Evil—Getting beyond Modernist Common Sense
about the Alternative to “the Good”. In: M. P. Lara (Ed.). Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 153–171.
Allport, Gordon W. (1979). The Nature of Prejudice. New York: Perseus Books.
Aquinas (ST). (2006). Summa Theologiae. Transl. by T. McDermott. New York: McGraw-Hill. [Latin
quote from the Editio Leonina, vols. IV–XII, Rome 1888–1906].
Arendt, Hannah (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
——— (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press.
——— (1994): Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954. Ed. by J. Kohn. New York: Harcourt.
Aristotle (R). (2000[1926]). Art of Rhetoric. With a transl. by J. H. Freese. Loeb Classical Library 193.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
——— (NE). (1994[1926]). Nicomachean Ethics. With a transl. by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library
73. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
——— (P). (2005[1932]). Politics. With a transl. by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 264.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
——— (VV). (2004[1935]). Virtues and Vices. With a transl. by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library
285. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Augustinus, Aurelius (C). (1865). Confessionum Libri Tredecimi. Jacques-Paul Migne (Ed.). Patrologiae
cursus completus, series Latina, vol. 32. Paris.
Card, Claudia (2002). The Atrocity Paradigm. A Theory of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dobbs, Darrell (1996). Family Matters: Aristotle’s Appreciation of Women and the Plural Structure of
Society. The American Political Science Review 90(1), 74–89.
Eagleton, Terry (2005). Holy Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— (2010). On Evil. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1980). An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with Truth.
Bombay: Gandhi Book Centre; Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.
Green, Keith (2007). Aquinas on Attachment, Envy, and Hatred in the Summa Theologica. Journal of
Religious Ethics 35(3), 403–428.
Hursthouse, Rosalind (2000). On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kekes, John (1990). Facing Evil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
——— (2009). The Moral Significance of Evil. In: P. A. Tabensky (Ed.). The Positive Function of Evil.
Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 139–153.
Kolnai, Aurel (1935). Versuch über den Haß. Philosophisches Jahrbuch der Görres-Gesellschaft 48(2/3),
147–187.
——— (1998[1969/70]). The Standard Modes of Aversion: Fear, Disgust and Hatred. Mind 107(427),
581–596.
Kramer, Matthew H. (2011). The Ethics of Capital Punishment. A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and Its
Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, Clara S. (2014). Tough on Hate? The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press.
Mathewes, Charles T. (2001). Evil and the Augustinian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Naar, Hichem (2013). A Dispositional Theory of Love. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94(3), 342–357.
Plutarch (1959). On Envy and Hate. Plutarch’s Moralia in Fifteen Volumes, vol. VII. With a transl. by Ph.
H. de Lacy and B. Einarson. Loeb’s Classical Library vol. 405, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 92–109.
Russell, Luke (2006). Evil-Revivalism vs. Evil-Skepticism. The Journal of Value Inquiry 40, 89–105.

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Scheler, Max (1994[1912]). Ressentiment. Transl. by L. A. Coser. Milwaukee: Marquette University

Press.
——— (1954[1913]). The Nature of Sympathy. Transl. by P. Heath. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Schmid, Hans Bernhard (unpubl. ms.). Evil in Action – The Pear Theft Paradigm: An Essay on Ethics and
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Oxford: Oxford University Press, 168–174.

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 49
LOVE
Angelika Krebs

Romantic lovers share what is important in their lives, or so I will claim. In order to
understand romantic love, we thus need to understand how two people can truly share feel-
ings and actions. Max Scheler and Edith Stein offer us some valuable insights on this issue.1
In the first section, I will introduce three major models of romantic love: the fusion
model, the care model, and the dialogue model. I will argue in support of the third model,
which views romantic love essentially as a form of sharing.
The thoughts of Max Scheler and Edith Stein about sharing are reconstructed in the
second section. I will hold that Edith Stein’s perceptions, which in turn are extensions of
Max Scheler’s work, constitute a convincing account of collective feeling and acting and thus
of what lies at the heart of romantic love.2

1. Three models of romantic love

Whether we turn to the history of ideas or look at the contemporary philosophical field, we
encounter three models of love. The first sees love mainly as fusion, the second mainly as
care, and the third mainly as dialogue.
According to the first, the fusion model, lovers seek to merge into one. A classic version of
this model is found in Plato’s Symposium. Here, Aristophanes recounts the myth of eros, ac-
cording to which all human beings are halves searching for their other missing half in order
to become whole and one again. The American philosopher of emotion, Robert Solomon,
defends a modern version of this model in his book About Love (1988), noting however that
our need to become whole and one again conflicts with our need for autonomy, so that the
romantic urge for fusion can only lead to despair. And this is precisely the problem with the
fusion model: fusion and autonomy don’t sit well together.
The main intuition behind the second—the curative—model is that lovers want to care
for each other’s flourishing. Philia, as Aristotle characterizes it in Books eight and nine of his
Nicomachean Ethics, is a traditional example of this form of love. In philia you care about the
other’s good in life and try to do all you can to make her flourish. The best-known recent
proponent of this model is Harry Frankfurt (see The Reasons of Love 2004). Other propo-
nents are Emmanuel Levinas (1969), David Velleman (1999), and Martha Nussbaum (2001).
However, while parental love might indeed be mainly curative in kind, romantic love seems

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to be more demanding; it aims to achieve a dialogue with the other. Unrequited romantic
love is a disaster!
According to the third model, the dialogical model, lovers wish to share their lives. This
model can be traced back to Aristotle too, if we take into account that his philia, in contrast
to agapé, is decidedly reciprocal and consists mainly in living together and sharing your fa-
vorite pastimes. Another classic proponent of this model is Martin Buber. In I and Thou, he
claims that love is between the partners; it resides in their connection: “Love does not cling
to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its ‘content’, its object; but love is between
I and Thou” (Buber 1958, 14–15). Contemporary versions of this model are to be found in
Roger Scruton (1986), Robert Nozick (1989), Niko Kolodny (2003), Bennett Helm (2010),
and Angelika Krebs (2015).3
The dialogical model incorporates what is most plausible in the other two models: firstly,
that love aims at a kind of union (as the fusion model has it), but one that builds upon and cel-
ebrates the autonomy of the other; secondly and relatedly, that love includes care for the oth-
er’s good life (as the curative model has it), but primarily to safeguard the other’s autonomy
as a prerequisite for sharing. Dialogical love is not only the most fulfilling type of romantic
love; it is also the most demanding. It needs time to develop and mature. This is less the case
for curative love and not at all the case for fusion love, which is usually best when it is fresh.4
Romantic lovers share activities like playing music, hiking, or traveling, and feelings such
as being angry or in flow. They share them not for one hour or two, but for the longer term.
Furthermore, they share them intrinsically; that is to say, for their own sake. This kind of
sharing is essential to human flourishing, as human nature is social and fulfills itself by shar-
ing (among other things). Or, as Aristotle famously puts it in his Politics, man is a political
creature and one whose nature is to live with others. Like all intrinsic activities, sharing for
its own sake usually goes along with pleasure. Thus, there is some truth in the saying that a
shared joy is a double joy (as the pleasure of sharing is added to the original joy) and a shared
sorrow halves a sorrow (as the pleasure of sharing reduces the original sorrow).
To be sure, it is not only lovers who share activities and feelings. Yet in romantic love, the
sharing is of a special kind. It is not only intrinsic (and pleasant, essential, and for the longer
term); it is also comprehensive and personal, directed at the full individuality of the other. In
contrast, think of two strangers who together carry a heavy wardrobe up the stairs; their
sharing is mainly instrumental and without much regard for the particularity of the other.
Sharing is to be contrasted with, first, acting and feeling in parallel; second, mutual
contagion; and third, sympathy with each other. Acting and feeling in parallel is doing or
experiencing the same side by side, in the I-mode. Contagion is being causally infected or
swayed by what the other feels or does. Sympathy differs from contagion in being intentional;
it is directed at the other, but like contagion, it is in the I-mode, even when it is reciprocal.
In sharing, the participants follow practical and affective schemes that are essentially
schemes for two or more people. Think of waltzing, having a philosophical discussion, or
grieving together. In contributing, the participants are directed both to the schemes (of how
to waltz, etc.) and to each other, constantly attuning their respective inputs. Thus, the struc-
ture of sharing is triadic.

waltz

first partner second partner

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 Love

Each participant understands her inputs as contributions to something we do or feel; ac-

cordingly, each feels responsible not only for her own inputs but also for the joint venture.
Sharing is in the We-mode.
Let us turn to the writings of Max Scheler and Edith Stein in order to better understand
how this feeling and acting in the We-mode operates.

2. Max Scheler and Edith Stein on sharing

In Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy, written in 1913, he introduces the idea of emotional
sharing (Miteinanderfühlen) with his now famous example of two parents standing beside the
dead body of their child and experiencing their grief together. Scheler distinguishes this
shared feeling from three other types of sympathy.

2.1 Max Scheler’s four forms of fellow-feeling

The four forms of sympathy or fellow-feeling Scheler distinguishes are as follows:

1 shared feeling (the “dialogical” form, noted above);

2 fellow-feeling with someone (the “caring” form, noted above);
3 emotional infection (“contagion”, from above);
4 emotional identification (the “fusion” form, noted above).

A fifth category that Scheler employs is that of empathy or reproduced feeling; it is not
a form of fellow-feeling itself, but functions in Scheler’s typology as the basis of all true
fellow-feeling. True fellow-feeling includes both shared feeling and also fellow-feeling with
someone; it excludes emotional infection and emotional identification. The chart below
presents, in quotation marks, the definitions of these five phenomena as given in The Nature
of Sympathy as well as the examples Scheler cites for each of them. Most importantly, how-
ever, the chart notes how Scheler analyzes his five categories with the help of three criteria,
namely: first, whether the respective phenomenon is directed at the feeling of the other;
second, whether it recognizes the feeling of the other; and, third, whether it participates in
the feeling of the other.5
Although Scheler initially strictly distinguishes between empathy and the four forms of
fellow-feeling, he does see certain connections between them. Accordingly, in his opinion,
emotional identification both genetically and logically underlies the reproduction of feeling
in empathy, which, in turn, underlies true fellow-feeling in both of its forms. These depen-
dence laws are also recorded in the chart, but space prevents us from exploring them here.
The central passage about shared feeling is only half a page long. It starts with the ex-
ample already mentioned of two parents mourning their dead child and goes on to contrast
their community of feeling with feeling in parallel on the one hand and fellow-feeling with
someone on the other. The assertion (quoted from Scheler 2009, 13 in the chart) that the
parents feel their grief “in common” is specified, first, as the parents’ directedness at the same
value-content, and, second, as the parents’ possession of the same kind of emotional keenness
or functional relation. “Value-content” refers to the painful loss of the child, i.e., not only
the death of the child (as a value-neutral reference) but the death in terms of its meaning for
the parents’ flourishing (in an evaluative sense). “Emotional keenness” refers to the suffering
caused by this loss. Scheler calls this keenness a “function”, because for him mental feel-
ings (or emotions) such as grief are not just states of feeling, which do not refer to anything

577
Scheler’s four Definitions, quoted from
forms of fellow- The Nature of Sympathy (Scheler 2009)
feeling and
reproduced
feeling
Reproduced/ “The reproduction of feeling or experience
vicarious feeling must therefore be sharply distinguished from
(Nachfühlen, fellow-feeling. It is indeed a case of feeling
Einfühlen) the other’s feeling, not just knowing of it, nor
judging that the other has it; but it is not the
same as going through the experience itself. In
reproduced feeling we sense the quality of the
other’s feeling, without it being transmitted to
us, or evoking a similar real emotion in us.” (9)
Community “A’s sorrow is in no way an ‘external’ matter
of feeling/shared for B here, as it is, e.g. for their friend C, who
feeling joins them, and commiserates ‘with them’ or
(Miteinanderfühlen) ‘upon their sorrow’. On the contrary, they
feel it together, in the sense that they feel
and experience in common, not only the
self-same value-situation, but also the same
keenness of emotion in regard to it.” (13)
Fellow-feeling “But here A’s suffering is first presented as
with someone A’s in an act of understanding or ‘vicarious’
(Mitfühlen mit feeling experienced as such, and it is to this
jemandem) material that B’s primary commiseration is
directed. That is, my commiseration and his
suffering are phenomenologically two different
facts, not one fact, as in the first case [the
community of feeling].” (13)
Criteria: Examples
• Directed at the feeling of the other (1)
• Knowledge of the feeling of the other (2)
• Participation in the feeling of the other (3)
1 Intentionally directed at the other’s feeling - What novelists are able
2 Perception of the other’s feeling directly from to do
their expression and not through an inference or - Our capacity to feel
imitation; depends on emotional identification empathy with a dying
and underlies true fellow-feeling (community of bird
feeling and feeling “about something”)
3 No participation in the other’s feeling (only its
quality and not its reality is grasped; does not
preclude indifference, even cruelty)
1 Intentionally directed at the other’s feeling - Shared parental grief:
2 Reproduced feeling (as the grasping of the father and mother
quality of the other’s feeling) and fellow-feeling mourning over the dead
(as the grasping of the reality of the other’s body of their beloved
feeling) are interwoven child
3 Participation in the other’s feeling as one and
the same feeling (as value-content, as functional
quality, but not as function, i.e., consciousness
of the different individual starting points); of
utmost ethical value
1 Intentionally directed at the other’s feeling - Sympathy with grieving
2 Reproduced feeling precedes fellow-feeling as a parents: friend C who
separate act joins the parents and
3 Participation in the other’s feeling as a reaction commiserates with them
to the other’s feeling, therefore involving two in their sorrow
feeling facts (as value-content, functional quality,
and function); in ethical value, inferior to that of
shared feeling
Emotional “Here there is neither a directing of feeling 1 Not intentionally directed at the other’s feeling, - Gaiety at a party
infection towards the other’s joy or suffering, nor but unconsciously and involuntarily (with - Laughter of children
(Gefühlsansteckung) any participation in her experience. On the mechanical causality, but can be put in service of - Lamenting tone of voice
contrary, it is characteristic of emotional conscious will) of old women
infection that it occurs only as a transference 2 Does not presuppose knowledge of the other’s - Cheeriness of a spring
of the state of feeling, and does not presuppose feeling landscape
any sort of knowledge of the joy which others 3 No participation in the other’s feeling, but a flow - Dreariness of rainy
feel.” (15) with its own laws (that sweeps everyone along weather
and makes them do things nobody wants to do - Plaintiveness of a room
or would take the responsibility for); of negative - Wanting to see cheerful
ethical value faces
- Fear infection in an
animal herd
- Folie à deux
- Mass panic
- Revolutionary mass
Emotional “The true sense of emotional unity, the act 1 Not intentionally directed at the other’s feeling, - Primitive thinking
identification of identifying one’s own self with that but unconsciously and involuntarily (however, - Mysteries of antiquity
(Einsfühlen) of another, is only a heightened form, a not with mechanical, but with vital causality); - Hypnosis
limiting case as it were, of infection. It located in the vital I (affects, drives, passions) - Hysteria
represents a limit in that here it is not only between body and person - Child’s play with a doll
the separate process of feeling in another that 2 As instinctive knowledge of others, it underlies - Obsession
is unconsciously taken as one’s own, but his reproduced feeling and through it true - Truly loving sexual
self (in all its basic attitudes), that is identified fellow-feeling intercourse (as gate to
with one’s own self.” (18) 3 No participation in the other’s feeling and the life-stream)
thus not true fellow-feeling, but an I-Thou - Mass (as a bad, dumbing
undifferentiated flow; if not pathological (as in down substitute for it)
hysteria or obsession) or dumbing (as in a mass), - Unity of mother and
of positive ethical value baby
- Targeted wasp sting
for the purpose of
paralyzing the caterpillar
in order to lay eggs in it
 Angelika Krebs

outside of themselves, such as physical pain. Rather, Scheler understands mental feelings as
“intentionally” directed at something in the world; they “mean” something in the world, as
they have a value-content, and are not just caused by something in the world.
According to Scheler, the parents’ suffering is of one and the same functional quality but
not one and the same function; that is, there are two functions with an identical quality.
Thus, we can say that there is a sense in which there are two feelings present, namely as two
functions. In this sense, there is only a type-identity between the parents’ feelings, and not
a token-identity. But Scheler himself emphasizes the other sense, in which there is only one
feeling in shared feeling, as a shared value-content and a shared quality of emotional keen-
ness. He makes this point more explicitly later on in his book. He writes:

Even in the first-mentioned example above [shared feeling], the process of feeling in
the father and the mother is given separately in each case; only what they feel—the one
sorrow—and its value-content, is immediately present to them as identical.
(Scheler 2009, 37)

How can Scheler hold that two people react with an identical—and not only in some respects
the same kind—of emotional keenness toward an identical—and not only in some respects
the same—situation in the world? “Identity” is, after all, sameness in every respect. To clar-
ify this, we need to examine Scheler’s view of personal community, as opposed to the three
other forms of the social unit.

2.2 Scheler’s four forms of the social unit

Three years after The Nature of Sympathy, Scheler published his opus magnum Formalism in
Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Toward the end of this volume, Scheler differentiates
between four forms of the social unit:

1 the mass: constituted in infection and imitation;

2 the life-community (e.g., a family, a local commune or a people): characterized by original
coexperiencing;
3 the society: comparably distanced and existing through promises and contracts;
4 the personal community or collective person (e.g., a culture, a church or a state): consti-
tuted in shared experience of individual people.

In differentiating these four forms, Scheler explicitly builds upon the distinction of the four
forms of fellow-feeling delineated in The Nature of Sympathy, while also revising some aspects
of his arguments in that book (“in conformity with the detailed, but not quite sufficient, pre-
liminary work, Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle, especially its appendix”;
Scheler 1973, 526). It is not easy to compare the two lots of four distinctions with each other,
and Scheler himself is not much help.
Scheler names two principles for differentiating the four forms of the social unit. The
first is the “kinds of being with one another and experiencing one another” (from the Sym-
pathy book) on the one hand, and the second is the “rank of values in whose direction the
member-persons of a social unit see ‘with one another’” (Scheler 1973, 525) on the other
hand. The Formalism book distinguishes the higher ranking personal values (like the being
of the person and virtue values) from the lower ranking thing-values (such as, in ascending
order: the useful, the pleasant, and the noble). Scheler proposes this ranking of values using

580
 Love

criteria such as divisibility, durability, dependence on other values, and the depth of satisfac-
tion (for a more detailed treatment, cf. Scheler 1973, 100–104).
Scheler does not doubt, for example, that the values are higher the less divisible they are.
Sharing material goods (a piece of cloth or a loaf of bread) among several people is only
possible through a division of these goods, for the bodily sensations (warmth or satiation)
that correspond to these are located in the body. In this way, a piece of cloth is worth approx-
imately double than the half of the cloth is. This is entirely different with spiritual values,
e.g., art works. These are intrinsically indivisible; there can be no “partial piece” of an art
work. Art works can be discerned and felt and their value can be enjoyed by any number of
people at the same time. Sensible values “divide” the individuals that feel them, while spiri-
tual values “unite” them (Scheler 1973, 94).
The following chart reproduces as concisely as possible Scheler’s complex system of dis-
tinguishing the four kinds of the social unit. The chart also marks the connections between
the categories, as did its predecessor on the four forms of fellow-feeling. For Scheler, the
life-community genetically and logically underlies society, which in turn both underlie the
personal community.
How do Scheler’s two sets of four distinctions relate to each other? This is relatively
straightforward in the cases of mass and emotional infection. Both of these play practically no
role in the dependence laws. But it makes sense to correlate life-community with emotional
identification, society with reproduced feeling or fellow-feeling with someone, and personal
community with shared feeling. Both dependence chains start with an original unity (the
I-Thou indifferent stream of experience), followed by a distancing process that provides the
precondition for the formation of a higher unity, a unity appropriate to human beings in
terms of their autonomous or personal nature.
A detailed analysis of Scheler’s definition of life-community confirms this reading. What
is decisive here is that in the life-community, the individual I-being of each member, is
not coexperienced as a starting point (cf. the long quotation in the chart from page 526).
But it is precisely this coexperiencing of the individual starting points that is constitutive of
shared feeling. Shared feeling is only possible because it is based upon the distance between
people, which is a given in reproduced feeling. That is why—and as opposed to what is
often claimed in secondary literature (e.g., Frings 1997, 101; Spader 2006, 164; Schloßberger
2016)—life-community cannot contain shared feeling. The “understanding” that Scheler
emphasizes in the life-community is probably a transitional phenomenon ranging some-
where between the instinctive understanding of identification and reproduced feeling.
The personal community can certainly be matched to shared feeling (although feeling is
more passive than free action, which is typical of the personal community). As in his analysis
of shared feeling, in his analysis of the collective person Scheler emphasizes that the com-
munal does not result from an addition of parallel individuals, but that it represents its own
reality:

The collective or group person is not composed of individual persons in the sense that it
derives its existence from such a composition; nor is the collective person a result of the
merely reciprocal agency of individual persons or (subjectively and in cognition) a result
of a synthesis of arbitrary additions. It is an experienced reality.
(Scheler 1973, 522)

The collective person is not a collective soul substance, which Scheler maintains would be
absurd; rather, it is a unity of being of acts of different kind—like an individual person—but

581
Scheler’s four Defi n it ion (quoted) f rom
forms of the Fo r m a l i s m in E t h i c s a n d No n - Fo r m a l E t h i c s
social unit of Value s (Scheler 1973)
Mass “A social unit is constituted (simultaneously) in so-
(Masse) called contagion and involuntary imitation devoid of
understanding. Such a unit of animals is called the
herd, of men, the mass.” (526)
Life- “A social unit is constituted in that kind of
community coexperiencing or reliving (cofeeling, costriving,
(Lebensgemein- cothinking, cojudging, etc.) which reveals
schaft) some ‘understanding’ of the members of this unit
(distinguishing it from the mass). However, this
understanding is not that which would precede
this coexperiencing as a separate act, but that which
occurs in coexperiencing itself. In particular, here
there is no ‘understanding’ in whose acts a member
coexperiences his individual egoness as the starting
point of such acts; still less is the other being objectified
(which distinguishes this unit from society). It is in
this immediate experience and understanding, in
which (as I have shown in the work mentioned) there
is no division of any kind between the experience
of self and that of the other or between bodily
expression and experience in the comprehension of
member A and that of member B, that the basic social
unit which I call the life-community (in the pregnant
sense) is constituted.” (526)
Criteria:
• Kind of being with one another: constitution (1), existence of individual (2),
reality of the unity (3), and solidarity (4)
• Kinds and ranks of values (5)
• Spatial extension (6)
• Temporality (7)
1 Constituted in infection without understanding and involuntary imitation, so it is
mechanical through sense stimulation
2 With the individual not existing as an experience
3 Has its own reality and laws apart from its members
4 No solidarity whatsoever
5 No personal values, only thing-values, therefore of lower rank
6 Without a fixed location
7 Only of short duration
1 Constituted in coexperiencing (with understanding), therefore a mechanical
2 The individual I does not exist primarily as an experienced vantage point, but rather only
secondarily, through an act of singularization; understanding there but without inference
and does not precede coexperiencing; the other’s being is not objectified; identical
content
3 Stream of experience with its own laws and with a unified striving and counter-striving
(however with no real will, no ethos, just conventions and customs)
4 The reality of the community as primary focus of responsibility, with the individuals’
co-responsibility preceding self-responsibility, therefore only representable solidarity
(within a position in the social structure, e.g. social standing)
5 No personal values, only thing-values (welfare and the noble), therefore of lower rank
6 Spatial extension of, e.g., marriage/family (including underage members and pets):
dwelling-place, of the local commune: home, of the people: fatherland, and of humanity:
Earth; overlapping of spatiality possible
7 The temporality of the life-community outlasts that of the life of individual members
Society “The social unit of the society is basically different
(Gesellschaft) from the essential social unit of the life-community.
First, the society, as opposed to the natural unit of the
life-community, is to be defined as an artificial unit
of individuals having no original ‘living-with-one-
another’ in the sense described above. Rather, all
relations among individuals are established by specific
conscious acts that are experienced by each as coming
from his individual ego, which is experientially
given first in this case, as directed to someone else as
‘another’.” (528)
Personal “We must designate as collective persons the various
community/ centers of experiencing [Er-lebens] in this endless totality
collective of living with one another, insofar as these centers
person fully correspond to the definitions of the person
(Personale which we gave earlier.” (520)
Gemeinschaft/
“[T]he unity of independent, spiritual, and individual
Gesamtperson)
single persons ‘in’ an independent, spiritual, and individual
collective person.” (533)
“[T]he idea of a solidary realm of love of individual,
independent spiritual persons in a plurality of
collective persons of the same character (this unity
of collective persons among themselves, as well as
the unity of the individual person and the collective
person, is possible in God alone).” (538)
1 Constituted in conscious acts of the mature and self-conscious individual (e.g. through
promises and contracts)
2 The individual exists, understanding of others is mediated through analogical inferences
(dependent on unmediated understanding of the life-community); common cognition
mediated through criteria and artificial terminologies (dependent on the unmediated
shared natural language of the life-community); common will mediated through
promises and contracts (dependent on the unmediated common striving and solidarity of
the life-community)
3 No independent reality of the unity (only artificial unity); common will only through
fiction and violence (the principle of the majority)
4 Exclusive self-responsibility and no solidarity whatsoever (even baseless distrust)
5 Thing-values (the pleasant, like sociability, and the useful, like civilization)
6 No own space, or rather with the Earth as space of the life-communities, from which the
elements of society come
7 No prolonged duration, only contemporaneity of the living
1 Constituted in shared experience
2 Individuals are experienced, therefore dependent on society
3 The unity has its own reality (↔ sum, synthesis, construction, interaction)
4 Unrepresentable solidarity, single person and collective person, each self-responsible and
co-responsible, no final responsibility to the collective person (like in life-community) or
to the single persons (like in society); co-responsibility of the collective person also to other
collective persons beside and over it (but there is responsibility to a higher instance, e.g., God)
5 Personal values (the holy and the spiritual) and in sovereign rule over life-communities
(as their collective body) and through them indirectly also over society and its thing-
values; collective person as highest form of the social unit; each real existing social unit
is a mixture of all four forms, tendency for historical development from predominant
existence in masses, to predominant existence in life-communities, to predominant
existence in society, to predominant existence in the collective person
6 Spatiality, e.g., of the state (as a mixed spiritual-vital, imperfect collective person; only
perfect in form of nation-state): territory (overlaps not possible), of culture-nation
and cultural group (as purely spiritual, imperfect collective person): culture area as a
playground of influence (overlaps possible) and of church (as purely spiritual, perfect
collective person): supra-spatial and intra-spatial; elevates everything
7 Temporality, e.g., of the state: more durable than the people; of culture (nation and
culture group)
8 More durable than the state; of the church: eternal
 Angelika Krebs

these acts are distributed among various people. Examples of such distributed acts are ques-
tions, love or orders that, in order to be complete, demand counter acts, like answers, that
the love be requited or obedience. Scheler characterizes these social acts in terms of their unity
of sense:

(…) the ideal unity of sense of these acts as acts of the essence of love, esteem, promising,
giving orders, etc., acts that require as ideal correlates responses of love, esteem, accept-
ing, obeying, etc., in order to bring about a fact of uniform sense.
(Scheler 1973, 536) 6

2.3 The unity of feeling in shared feeling

In shared feeling, the participants feel “one and the same” feeling. How should we imag-
ine such unity of feeling in shared feeling, and how does it occur? Three answers in the
Schelerian spirit are possible. The first answer refers to Scheler’s idea of the I-Thou indiffer-
ent stream of experience. The second answer has the supra-individual accessibility of certain
value-contents as its starting point. The third and most promising answer is oriented toward
Scheler’s statements on social acts and transfers these statements out of the context of the
collective person into shared feeling.
According to the first answer, the participants in shared feeling fall back into the I-Thou
indifferent stream of experience. It is the stream that creates the necessary unity (cf. Schmitz
1998; Schmid 2008). Yet, for Scheler, the distance that is achieved in reproduced feeling is
constitutive of shared feeling. His whole Sympathy book is written as a counter to monistic
metaphysical attempts to remove this distance, attempts that he identifies, e.g., in Hegel and
Schopenhauer (cf. Scheler 2009, 64).
As we have seen, for Scheler, reproduced feeling and with it, shared feeling, are in fact
logically and genetically dependent on identification. But what is only a precondition or a
basis for something else cannot at the same time be essential for it. After all, fellow-feeling
with someone and reproduced feeling are also dependent on identification, without being in
themselves identification or shared feeling. Shared feeling is more than reproduced feeling
and is something other than fellow-feeling with someone. What is this more and this some-
thing other? The participants in shared feeling feel one and the same sorrow or joy, but not
because they have forgotten that they are two people.
The second answer to the question regarding the unity in shared feeling retains the sep-
aration of the Is and focuses on the supra-individual accessibility of certain value-contents. In con-
trast to bodily pain, which is only directly accessible to the person who experiences it,
spiritual value-contents, like the death of a person or the sublimity of a piece of music, are
accessible to everyone who is open to the value. The lower bodily values divide us and the
higher spiritual values unite us. Those listening to a piece of music at a concert are united in
this good (cf. Van Hooft 1994; Chapter 40 in this volume).
The problem with this answer is that it also takes something to be essential to shared
feeling that is only its precondition. For feelings to be shared, the value-content at which
they are directed has to be accessible supra-individually. This is why bodily feelings cannot
be shared (cf. Scheler 2009, 13). But the lonely access to something supra-individually ac-
cessible is still not a shared access. The same is true for the parallel and consciously parallel,
and even the enjoyed consciously parallel accesses. If all these forms of access were shared,
it would be hard to feel anything alone, apart from bodily sensations and idiosyncratic

584
 Love

responses. In this second answer, shared feeling does not collapse into identification like in
the first answer, but into parallel feeling. But the participants in shared feeling are not shar-
ing one and the same sorrow or joy just because they are directed at the same value-content.
According to the third answer, shared feeling is a feeling in which the participants intend
their feelings as a contribution to a joint feeling and understand the feelings of the others
in the same way. A shared feeling is the unity of sense of different feeling contributions. It is
not the sum of separately intelligible feelings plus everybody’s knowledge about the feelings
of the others. Shared feeling cannot be achieved in this summative fashion. Shared feeling
is an irreducible category of feeling, like joint action is, e.g., in question and answer or in
order and obedience. The participants in shared feeling feel one and the same sorrow or joy
because their feelings are contributions to a single coherence of sense. This third and most
fruitful way of understanding the unity of shared feelings can be further explicated by refer-
ence to the work of Edith Stein.

2.4 Edith Stein’s development of Scheler’s approach

In the second part of her book Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities entitled Individual
and Community, published in 1922, Edith Stein explores an example that is reminiscent of
Scheler’s case of the grieving parents, namely that of a troop mourning the death of its leader.
Stein distinguishes three phenomena with respect to her example:

1 personal feeling: a member of the troop mourns for the leader as a personal friend;
2 membership feeling: a member of the troop mourns for the leader as the leader of the
troop;
3 community feeling: the troop mourns for its leader.

The third phenomenon is the one that is of interest to us and to Stein. The second phenom-
enon supplies the essential material for it. The first phenomenon does not play any role in
it—Stein introduces it only for the sake of distinction.
Stein begins her analysis with the second phenomenon, membership mourning. Accord-
ing to her, the member’s mourning is directed at the importance for the group of their lead-
er’s death. The member has an intention toward the object, which can more or less do justice
to the object. We know this objective intention from Scheler, who names it as directedness
to a value-object. Yet Stein goes beyond Scheler and claims that, apart from this objec-
tive intention, the mourning member also has “an intention toward the communal experience”
(Stein 2000, 137); his mourning is also aimed at the troop’s mourning as it is constituted by
the individual members’ contributions. This intention, too, can be more or less successful.
The most we find in this regard in Scheler’s exploration of parental mourning is that “All
fellow-feeling involves intentional reference of the feeling of joy or sorrow to the other person’s
experience” (Scheler 2009, 13).
Stein explains, and here she is again in perfect agreement with Scheler, the manner
in which community mourning is constituted by the individual members’ contributions.
She uses biography as an analogy. The biography of an individual is more than the sum
total of all that happened in the individual’s life. It is a coherence of sense in which some
events are more important than others. This is true, too, in community mourning. Some
individuals’ contributions are more important than others’. It is the unity or coherence of

585
 Angelika Krebs

sense that holds the members’ contributions together and makes for the unity of commu-
nity mourning:

The relationship of the communal experience to the individual experience is constitu-

tion, not summation. If you were capable of compiling within yourself all the coalesc-
ing experiences, but you united them as a mere aggregate without inner coherence in
themselves, you wouldn’t be in possession of the full communal experience, any more
than you get the unity of an object by merely stringing together the sensory data.
You don’t have a new whole instead of an aggregate of components until the multiple
contributions, governed by the unity of one sense, have integrated themselves into a
structure of a higher kind.
(Stein 2000, 144)

More explicitly than Scheler, Stein notes two presuppositions for community feeling. The
first is that the members understand each other, that they are able to reproduce the feel-
ings of the others. The second is that the object toward which their feelings are directed is
supra-individually accessible. With regard to the second presupposition, Stein even goes so
far as to call the unity of all who are united in a supra-individually accessible object but do
not interact with each other a weak form of social unit. This weak form of social unit she
names “the unity of structure of experience”. Stein contrasts it with mass, society, and true
community, all of which she understands more or less along Schelerian lines. Stein’s two
presuppositions roughly correspond to the two options of understanding the unity of feel-
ing distinguished in the last section. By making clear that both interpersonal understanding
and supra-individual accessibility are mere presuppositions of shared feeling, Stein rejects
these first two options.

3. Conclusion
With Edith Stein on Max Scheler’s shoulders, we finally get a convincing account of shared
feeling and thus of what love is all about: The participants in shared feeling feel the same
sorrow or joy because they both aim, first, at the same value object and, second, at their
community with each other. That is, they both try to do justice, first, to the importance of
their loss or gain and, second, to their common sorrow or joy, as it is constituted by all of
their contributions.7

Notes
1 Needless to say, other phenomenologists, such as Gerda Walther, Else Voigtländer, Adolf Reinach,
Alfred Schütz, Alexander Pfänder, Ludwig Binswanger, and Otto Friedrich Bollnow, also have
interesting things to say about the nature of sharing. Their work is mentioned here only in passing,
if at all. See more on Walther, Voigtländer, Pfänder and Bollnow in Chapters 3, 6, 7 and 10 (all
in this volume). For the contribution of women phenomenologists to social ontology, cf. Luft and
Hagengruber (2018).
2 For a discussion of Scheler’s metaphysical and anthropological conception of love, see Chapter 4
(in this volume).
3 Some classical articles on love are reprinted in the fourth volume of Ben-Ze’ev and Krebs (2017),
together with articles on love-related emotions, such as jealousy, trust, hope, hatred, regret, and
mourning. For a comprehensive collection on love alone, cf. Solomon and Higgins (1991).

586
 Love

4 Cf. Krebs (2015) for a fuller presentation and critique of the three models. For the role of time in
love, see Ben-Ze’ev and Krebs (2018) as well as Ben-Ze’ev (2019).
5 For a useful survey of Scheler’s distinctions, cf. Goldie (2000, chap. 7), which, however, fails to
fully capture the phenomenon of shared feeling.
6 For an analysis of such social acts, see also Reinach (1913).
7 The account of shared feeling presented here is updated in Krebs (2015) on the basis of contempo-
rary philosophy of emotion (especially Ben-Ze’ev 2000; Goldie 2000; Voss 2004) and the current
debate on collective intentionality (in particular Gilbert 1989; Searle 1990; Baltzer 1999).

References
Baltzer, Ulrich (1999). Gemeinschaftshandeln. Freiburg: Alber.
Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron (2000). The Subtlety of Emotions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
——— (2019). The Arc of Love. How Our Romantic Lives Change with Time. Chicago: Chicago University
Press.
Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron, and Krebs, Angelika (Eds.) (2017). Philosophy of Emotion IV. Specific Emotions. London:
Routledge.
——— (2018). Love and Time. In: C. Grau, and A. Smuts (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love.
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Further reading
Heinämaa, Sara (2018). Love and Admiration (Wonder): Fundaments of the Self-Other Relations. In:
J. J. Drummond and S. Rinofner-Kreidl (Eds.). Emotional Experiences: Ethical and Social Significance.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 155–174.

588
 INDEX
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.
Abraham, Nicolas 169, 406
acquisitive theory 432
action readiness 217, 222, 235
activity and passivity attunement 106, 108
actual impressive situations 264
actual-present experiences 134, 137, 139–141
actual sentiments 65, 67
“add-on” theory 6, 233
Adorno, Theodor W. 17; and Critical Theory 4,
264, 561
adverbial duties 515–516, 518
adverbial emotion 388
aesthetic emotion 342, 343
aesthetic sentiments 68
affectedness (Betroffenheit) 442, 534
affective ankylosis (ankylose affective) 211
affective apperception 58
affective colouration 58
affective experience: emotion- and value-
concepts 244–245; emotions, intentional
structure of 240–244; intentional feeling-
act 240; multi-track dispositions 246;
presentation feeling 240; retention, Husserl’s
notion of 244; sentiments and moods
246–248; single-track dispositions 246
affective illusions 254
affective-intentionalist paradigm 14
affective intentionality 6, 106, 189, 194n8,
232–234, 481; see also collective affective
intentionality
affective motivation theory 88
affective position-takings: moral value of
119–120
affective responses 116, 119
affective self-construal feeling 361
589
affective sensations 54, 58, 59
affective space, pain and 547
affective style 199
affective synchrony 471–475
affective trait 240, 244–245
affective trust 526
affective turn 478
affectivity, complex theory of 215
affects (Affekte) 89
affirmation/denial act 67
affliction 374–377, 543
affordance, concept of 324
Agamben, Giorgio 462
aggressive emotions 441; affectedness 442; anger
448–450; characteristics of 443; contempt
447–448; envy 444; hatred 445–447;
indignation 448–450; irritation 443; jealousy
444–445; norms 448–450; phenomenological
analysis 441–443; rage 444; Ressentiment
445; transformations and reinterpretations
450–452
Ahmed, Sara 318, 381, 569, 571
Allport, Gordon W. 569
altruism, feelings of 175
ambiguity: feeling concept 73; first betrayal of 191;
of freedom 188–189; second betrayal of 191
analysing attention (analysierende Beachtung) 89
analytic-continental divide 2
analytic philosophy, emotions 4–6
anchoring point (Verankerungspunkt) 442–443,
450; anger 449; contempt 448, 452; envy 444;
hatred 446; irritation 443; jealousy 444
anger/angry 448–450, 453n3, 505, 567, 571
angst attunement 109–110
Anscombe, Elizabeth 92, 294
 Index
Antelme, Robert 462
anti-attitudes (anger, fear, and sadness) 45
antidepressants 551
anti-intentionalistic warning 264
anxiety (Angst) 394–396; uncanny 555–557, 561
apprehension (Erfassen) 115, 116
apprehension of value 97
Aquinas, Thomas 5, 11, 21, 23n1, 567, 570;
Summa Theologiae 564, 569
Arendt, Hannah 17, 22, 436, 480, 500, 502, 505,
534, 540n3, 565; antidemocratic idea 179;
compassion, analysis of 181, 183; emotion,
phenomenology of 184, 185; forgiveness
theory 502; French Revolution 177–178;
The Human Condition 185; The Origins of
Totalitarianism 182; politics and emotions
179–185; On Revolution 177; volonté générale,
Rousseauian notion of 179, 180
Aristotle 2, 299, 302, 433, 435, 514, 570;
aesthetic emotions 184; eudaimonia, account
of 417; happiness, philosophy of 423; hate,
conception of 567–570; Nicomachean Ethics
511; Politics 568, 569, 576; Rhetoric 486,
567–569, 571; Virtues and Vices 564
art: art-specific emotions 342–344; common
emotions 337–342; emotions, expression of
344–345; expressive properties 345–346
atmosphere 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 18, 162, 213n3,
215, 222, 259n5, 262–70, 306, 308, 312, 316,
317, 324, 327, 331, 340, 435, 467, 442, 490n3,
523, 526–527, 556, 557
atmospheric feeling 527; anti-projectivist
conception of 264; atmospheric interplay
267–268; classifications of 268–269; definition
of 268; interdisciplinary dissemination 269;
modest atmospherological proposal 265–266;
ontologically heterodox suggestions 266–267
atmospheric trust 526–527
Attig, Thomas 405
attunements 104–106
audiences, emotions in 337
Audi, Robert 388
Augustine: compassion, kind of 435; Confessions
570; hatred of people 570
authentic love 191–193
autism 329–331
autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) 7, 329, 330
aversive emotions 101, 145, 445
Ayer, A.J. 5
background feeling 256
Baier, Annette 525–526
Bakhtin, Mikhail 529
Bartky, Sandra L. 312, 313
Barrett Feldman, Lisa 23n6
basic emotions (Ekman) 23n6
Bataille, Georges 384
590
Baumgartner, Michael 304
de Beauvoir, Simone 13, 17, 18, 41, 313, 409,
410; bodily existence 193; Ethics of Ambiguity
188; freedom, ambiguity of 188–189; in/
authentic love 191–193; love triangle
187–188; The Mandarins 187; Must we burn
Sade 188; Pyrrhus and Cinéas 188; responsive
intersubjectivity 189–191; The Second Sex 188;
She Came to Stay 187; women’s condition,
philosophico-political 187
Befindlichkeit, conception of 104, 105, 107
behaviorism 200
Behnke, Elizabeth 472
being affected 10–11, 14–15, 16, 27n64, 115,
175n3, 281, 325, 442
being-like-others, primary sense of 330
being struck, phenomenon of 283
Bell, Clive 342, 343
Bell, Macalester 453n18
benevolence, feelings of 175
benevolence/gratitude interactions 511, 514–516,
518
Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron 27n72, 586n3
Berezin, Mabel 490n7
Bergson, Henri 420
betrayal: of ambiguity 191, 192; of trust 530
Binswanger, Ludwig 27n75, 586n1
Blankenburg, Wolfgang 331
blind judgments 48, 49
bodily-affective style 203
bodily awareness 155, 156
bodily bound (Leibgebundenheit) 147
bodily existence 193
bodily feelings 6, 10–11, 13–14, 25n33, 26n57;
bodily feelings–feeling-sensations 242
bodily-felt, 441–443, 447; sensation 442; see also:
felt body
bodily incorporation 201
bodily orientation (leibliche Richtung) 11, 215, 219
bodily resonance: components of 325;
encompassing loss of 329; neo-Jamesian
accounts of 215
bodily self-awareness 54
bodily sensations 233
body schema 546
Böhme, Gernot 264, 265
Bollnow, Otto Friedrich 3, 4, 7, 9, 13, 17,
453n3, 586n1; basic attunements 107; Das
Wesen der Stimmungen 107–109, 111
Bordo, Susan 314
boredom 394–396, 398–400
bottom-up approach 276–277
Bradshaw, John 318
Branden, Nathaniel 362
Brentano, Franz 2, 3, 17, 27n75, 240, 282,
544; consciousness theory 44; descriptive
psychology method 42; emotion theory
 Index

41, 45–46; epistemology of value 46–50; community mourning 585–586

evidence, method and source of 44; explicate compassion: Aristotle’s conception 433;
loving and hating 45; genetic psychology definition of 429, 435; ethical impact of 436;
method 42; mental phenomena 42–43; meaning of 429; positive value of 435
phenomenology, senses of 41–42; physical component process model 302
phenomena 42–43; psychology from empirical compromised trust 530
standpoint 42–44, 50n2; sui generis intentional computational processes 198
phenomena 41, 45–46; The True and the condensation area (Verdichtungsbereich) 442–443;
Evident 47 anger 449; contempt 448; envy 444, 450;
Brentano School 2 hatred 445, 446; irritation 443; jealousy
Buber, Martin 576 444–445; rage 444
“Bund,” social modal category 140–142 consciousness theory 44, 98, 160
Buñuel, Louis 384, 387 “Conservative Revolution” 4
Butler, Joseph 505, 506n2 contempt 447–448, 452; “moral” 453n10
Buytendijk, F. J. J. 548 contractualist political theory 5
Corbí, Josep E. 461
Calhoun, Cheshire 317 corporeal 8, 218, 442–443, 445, 447, 449
Card, Claudia 565, 566 corporeal-affective 27n64, 442, 447, 451
care (Sorge) 393 corporeality 442
Cartesian intellectualism 198 correct emotion concept 50
Casini, Lorenzo 304 correct (true) judgment 48
Cassell, Eric 549 correctness and incorrectness possibility 47
center of feeling 67 correspondence theory of truth 47
centrifugal stream of feeling 65–67 cortical homunculus 546
Césaire, Aimé 207 coupling-constitution fallacy 304
Chalmers, David 305 coupling of trust 527–530
chaotic-multiple significance 265 criterial prefocusing theory 340
cheerfulness and sadness 107 critical phenomenology 8
children feel 80 Cronenberg, David 556
Chisholm, Roderick 48 Crowell, Steven 294
Clark, Andy 305 curative model of love 575
cognitive assuredness 526, 527
cognitive model 146, 305 Dalí, Salvador 384
Cohen, Hermann 2, 21 Damasio, Antonio 23n5
collective affective intentionality (CAI) 469, D’Arms, Justin 455
479, 481–484, 486 Darwin, Charles: evolutionary theory 2; species
collective emotional response 466, 468, 471 evolution mechanisms 380
collective emotions theory 133, 482 Dasein 104, 105, 108, 168, 247
collective guilt feelings 468 data of consciousness 42
collective intentionality 459, 468 Daubert, Johannes 101
collective person (Gesamtperson) 583 Davidson, Donald 5
Collingwood, R.G. 344, 345 Dearing, Ronda L. 354
Collins, Randall 471 death penalty 572
Colombetti, Giovanna 155, 156, 202, 216, de Biran, Maine 26n48
304–306 deep joy, concept of 419
colonial duration 209–212, 213n7 deep level ingratitude 517
colonial violence 209 deep stories, Hochschild’s notion of 486
colonization: affective weight of 210–212; Deleuze, Gilles 479
colonization process 208; violence of 210 Deleuzian 23n6; metaphysical affect theory 262
common-sense realism 43 Dennett, Daniel C. 299
communal emotions 133; in broad sense 138; denunciatory theories 572
community feeling 139; general conditions Deonna, Julien 243, 246
135; in narrow sense 137–138; paradigmatic depression 329
example of 140; Walther’s concept of 138; see Derpmann, Simon 541n20, 541n23
also joint feeling, and emotional sharing Derrida, Jacques 497, 505, 558; pure forgiveness
community and society emotions 139–142 501, 502
community feeling 578, 585–586 Descartes, René 42, 184

591
 Index
descriptive psychology method 42
De Sousa, Ronald 5, 12, 27n72
DeYoung, Patricia 316
diachronic narrative intimacy 474
dialogical model of love 576
direct perception concept 323
discouragement 277
disgust: abjection theory 383–384; anomalous
animals 386–388; brute materiality 381;
explanatory strategy 382; Kolnai’s analysis
of 384–386; Kristeva’s concept 383–384;
negative emotion 380, 381; ontogenetic
account of 389n1; phenomenological analysis
of 384–386; philosophical account of 382;
theorization of 382
displeasure emotions 89
disposedness (Befindlichkeit) 246
dissociative communalization 488
Dōgen 374
Donohoe, Janet 294
Doppelgänger, Freud’s analysis of 555
Döring, Sabine 24
Douglas, Mary 383–384
Douglass, Frederick 208
drive-intentionality 7
Drummond, John 294
Dubos, Jean-Baptiste 337
Durkheim, Émile 540n2
Eagleton, Terry 566
ecumenical approach 114
egoism of life 172
Elpidorou, Andreas 166
Elster, Jon 5, 12
embarrassment expression 140, 141, 365, 366,
456, 457
embedded approaches 7, 65, 301, 306
embodied affectivity 324–326
embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted
(4E) approach 6, 18, 275, 299, 302, 303
embodied interaffectivity: autism 329–331;
concept of 324–326; depression 329; inter-
bodily resonance 326–328; neurological
disorders 329; schizophrenia 331–332
embodiment 7, 10, 14, 18, 26n48, 111, 197, 199,
201, 203–204, 208, 275, 302–303, 313, 314,
317, 320–321, 328, 349, 386, 438, 441, 443,
544, 561
emotional asymmetry problem 338
emotional contagion 482; see also emotional
infection
emotional culture 486
emotional depth 147
emotional disposition 568
emotional enclaves 484
emotional feelings (emotionale Gefühle) 89
emotional habitus 486
592
emotional identification (Einsfühlen) 577, 579; see
also emotional unification
emotional infection (Gefühlsansteckung) 577, 579,
581; see also emotional contagion
emotional keenness 577
emotional life stratification 73–75
emotional mind-set 307
emotional sharing (Miteinanderfühlen) 79, 138,
577; see also joint feeling, collective affective
intentionality, and communal emotions
emotional unification 434
emotional unity 78–79
emotion regulation 472
emotions of aggression see aggressive emotions
empathic perception 328
empathy theory 76, 84n5, 510, 577; acquisitive
theory 432; broader theory 432; concept
of 432; contemporary theories of 431;
definition of 429, 431; meaning of 429,
430; neuroscientific approaches 432; pathos,
meanings of 429; sensual 550; simulation
theory 432
entrainment 472
environmental externalism 200, 203
envy 444, 451
episode-gratitude 511, 513
episodic sentiments 68
epistemic contact 282
epistemology of value 46–50
Erikson, Erik 527
eros, phenomenology of 172
erotic love, nature of 102
ethical hate 571
ethical theory 118
evaluative feelings 8, 46
evil: banality of 565; concept of 188; denial of
564–565, 573; discourse of 565–566; hate of
564–573; radical 565; see also hate of evil
evil-revivalism 565, 566
evolutionary theory 2
existential deviation 210
existential feelings 1, 97, 106; affective illusions
254; applications 252–254; classification of
255; concept of 252; of control and safety
254; description of 250–252; interpretations
254–257; outstanding issues 257–259;
psychiatric illness 254
experiential position (Erlebnisstellung) 88, 89
expression concept 56–57, 61n2
externalist approach 197, 201
external perception 44, 99
extracranial body 303
falling (Verfallen) 109
Fanon, Frantz, 13, 17, 18, 389n3; colonization,
affective weight of 210–212; method of touch
209; Peau noire, masques blancs 207, 210, 213n8;
 Index
questions and reconfigures phenomenology
207; racialization, phenomenology of
207–208; touch and affective memory
209–210
far-reaching social dynamic 292
fear (Furcht) 394–396, 398–400, 567
feeling-after (Nachfühlen; Scheler), 434
feeling of being 250, 255
feelings: Ancient Greek concept of 263; breadth
dimension of 283; characteristic of 64, 78;
depth dimension of 283–285; feelings of
reality 82–84; full-fledged phenomenology
of 281; intentional and non-intentional
53–55; logical/intellectual feelings 64; mental
subjects, feelings as 63–64; motivational
components 281–282; normativity,
foundations of 282–283; object-directed
feelings, sentiments as 64–67; Pfänder’s
conception of 63; pleasure feelings 57–61;
of reality 82–84; reality of feelings 82–84;
rhythm of feeling 59; of sympathy (Smith and
Scheler) 72, 433–435; value-reception feeling
57–61
feeling-sensation 540n5
feelings of self-worth, concept 96–100
feeling rules (Hochschild) 478, 486
feeling-together 434, 467–468; see also Scheler,
Max
feeling towards (Goldie) 469; see also affective
intentionality
feeling-with-one-another 79; see also Scheler, Max
fellow-feeling (Mitfühlen mit jemandem) 577–580;
see also Scheler, Max
felt-bodily disposition 267
felt body 3, 8, 10, 14, 25n38, 27n64, 263–266,
442, 444, 450, 527
felt evaluations 8, 227; constituting import 232;
emotional commitment to import 229–232;
pleasure/pain feelings 234
female education 130
female existences 191
female sexuality 313
feminine for emotion 130
feminism: affective attunement 317–320;
characteristic of 313; chronic shame
316–317; feminist theory 312; self-conscious
emotion 314; shame, embodiment 313–314;
understanding shame 314–315
feminist phenomenology 8
feminist theory 312
Ferenczi, Sandor 412
Fernandez, Anthony V. 256
Fessler, Daniel M. T. 461, 463
floating sentiments 68
Foot, Philippa 294, 417, 419, 422
forgiveness 497–498; Arendt’s theory
of 502; as borderline case of emotion
593
505–506; conditional approach 500–501;
interdependence 500; pure 501, 502; and
resentment 505; theorizing 499–503;
unconditional approach 501–503
formal object 220, 228
‘4E’ approach see embodied, embedded,
extended, and enacted (4E) approach
Frankfurt, Harry 575
freedom 190–191
Frege, Gottlob 2
French Revolution 177–178
Freudian theory 381
Freud, Sigmund 20, 24n13, 144, 403, 561; and
uncanny 553–556
friendliness 68
friendly feelings 69
“frozen now” 353
Fuchs, Thomas 404
functional virtues 526, 528
fundamental moods 394
fusion model of love 575
Gandhi, Mahatma 570
“garden variety” emotions 337, 342
gate control theory 545
Geach, Peter 294
Geiger, Moritz 2, 4, 8, 17–18, 82; affective
motivation theory 88; “The Consciousness
of Emotions” 87; “Contributions to the
Phenomenology of Aesthetic Pleasure” 87;
emotions 88–91; ill-motivated emotions
theory 93; intentionality and consciousness
88–91; joy and happiness 418; motives and
emotions theory 91–94; “On the Problem of
Empathy regarding Moods” 87
Gendlin, Eugene T. 256
general feelings (Gemeingefühle), 124; see also
vital/common feelings, and vital feelings
genetic psychology method 42
genuine sentiments 68, 69–70
George, Stefan 140
German Idealism/German Idealists 2, 23n 4
Gestalt Psychology see Leipzig School of
Gibson, James J. 324
Gilbert, Margaret 157, 468, 486, 541n18
Gilbert, Paul 313
Goldie, Peter 3, 6, 9, 12, 14, 24n22, 26n53, 233,
239, 240, 251, 279, 362–363, 462–463, 469
Goodman, Nelson 346
Grandin, Temple 330, 331
gratitude 509; adverbial duties 515–516, 518;
benevolence and 511, 514–516, 518; elements
and accounts of 510–511; episode-gratitude
511, 513; formative effects of 518; gift-giving
516–518; historical and cultural relativity
509–510; indebtedness and 514; intentional
structure of 512–514; non-personal 510;
 Index
personal 510; phenomenological framework
511–518; as positive emotion 510, 514;
recognition-respect 517; sense of justice 517,
518; shifting views of 509–510; trait-gratitude
511, 513
Green, Keith 569
grief: Abraham and Torok explain 406–407;
incorporation in 404–406; Levinas explain
407–409; structure of 404; survival 411–413
Griswold, Charles 497, 499–501, 506n2
grounding-attunement 111
group-based political emotions 485; see also
shame: group based
Guardians 337–338
Guenther, Lisa 462
Guerrero Sánchez, Héctor Andrés 476n4
guilt, collective guilt feelings 468
Gurwitsch, Aron 7, 17–18; bodily and
kinesthetic moments 155; bodily awareness
155, 156; consciousness, view of 154;
criticisms of 157; emotions view 153; passive
impressional states 154; understanding of
emotion 157
Gyllenhammer, Paul 294
Haas, Willy 2, 7, 20, 28n75, 69, 70; authentic/
inauthentic emotion 20, 99; genuine and
non-genuine feelings 69, 70; Über Echtheit und
Unechtheit von Gefühlen 20, 69, 99
habit-incorporation process 201
habitual unification 138
happiness studies 416
Hart, James 294
Hartmann, Martin 166
Hartmann, Nicolai 20–21, 290
Hartman, Saidiya 208
hate of evil 564–573
hateworthy 571
hatred 445–457, 564, 567; natural 569
haughtiness 149
hauntology 558
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 23n4, 169,
237n1
Heidegger, Martin 1, 3, 4, 7–9, 11, 13–14,
17, 21, 41, 159, 470, 547, 561; account of
attunement 106–107; and affectivity 392–393;
angst attunement 109–110; anxiety, notion
of 557; Befindlichkeit, conception of 104,
105, 107, 393; Being and Time 104–107, 556;
Contributions to Philosophy 110–111; depression,
experiences of 256; “everyday familiarity”
557; existential feelings 106; fundamental
attunements 109–111; The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics 110, 395; philosophical
anthropology 109–111; radical anti-mentalism
108; Stimmung 393–394; and uncanny
556–558
594
Heinämaa, Sara 294
Heller, Agnes 20, 22
Helm, Bennett W. 24n25, 457–460,
469, 470, 576
Hénaff, Marcel 504
Henry, Michel 7, 11, 20, 22, 26n48, n51
Hester, Aunt 208
Heyd, David 534
Hildebrand, Dietrich von 8, 15, 17, 21,
146; affective position-takings 116–117,
119–120; apprehension (Erfassen) 115, 116;
cooperative freedom idea 119; Die Idee der
sittlichen Handlung 115; ecumenical approach
114; emotion and position-taking 114–117;
importance, taxonomy of 117–119; notion
of (dis)value 118; Sittlichkeit und ethische
Werterkenntnis 117; theoretical significance
of 118
Hochschild, Arlie R. 22, 486, 487
Hoffman, E.T.A. 555
Holmes, Sherlock 339
Holocaust 462, 565
Homer 337, 338
Hosking, Geoffrey 524
human behaviors 381
human finitude 187
human, ontological structure of 393
Hume, David 3, 5, 430, 433–434
humiliation: and affliction 377;
characterization of 376; and debilitating
shame 375; devastating quality of 376;
discussion of 374; “false” self-image 376;
personal integrity 375; self-revelation and
self-critique 374–375
humility: being humbled 372; humbling myself
372–374; liberation style 370; modesty 374;
“Myself,” reception of 369–370; openness
and dynamic movement 369; self-givenness
369–372; spatial level 372
Hursthouse, Rosalind 69, 568, 569
Husserl, Edmund 1–3, 7–8, 10–11, 13–15, 17,
21–22, 26n52, 41, 114, 116, 159, 209, 431,
436, 441, 544; affective sensations 54;
Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis
211; axiological theory 289, 292; bodily
self-awareness 54; drive-intentionality
7; emotion and value theory 55–57; First
Logical Investigations 53–55, 125, 160; Ideas I
55–57, 160; intentional and non-intentional
feelings 53–55, 189; intentionality theory 3;
natural and personalistic attitudes 240; non-
objectifying awareness 54; notion of feeling
242; phenomenology 511–512; pleasure
feelings 57–61; reactive emotions components
57–61; retention 244; sensation of pleasure
73; unitary impressional episode 59; value-
reception feeling 57–61
 Index
I-center and self 134
identification theory 340, 460
ill-motivated emotions theory 93
Illouz, Eva 22
immediately evident emotions 42
importance (Bedeutsamkeit) 117
inactual experiences 134
inauthentic feelings 98–100
indignation 448–450, 453n13
individual emotions 135–137
infinite responsibility 174
inner concentration (Innenkonzentration) 90
inner perception 44; classification of 46;
judgments of 48; pain form of 544
inner unification/division 67
intellectual position-takings 116
intellectual uncertainty 555
intentional consciousness 169
intentional direction (Gegenstandsrichtung) 90
intentional feeling 53–55, 74, 240, 243, 246, 289
intentionality of emotions 3, 6, 11–12, 14, 16,
21, 27n67, 146, 147, 191
intentionality puzzle 235
intentionality theory 3
interaction theory 323, 326
interaffectivity process 326
inter-bodily resonance 324, 326–328
intercorporeality 324, 328, 330, 332, 472
interkinesthetic affectivity 472
internalization 406
The International Association for the Study of
Pain 544
interpersonal empathy 323
intersubjectivity 72, 74
intrapsychic attitude 359
introspection 91; introspection/inner
observation 44
intuitive act 11
inversion of values (Umkehrung der Werte) 101
involution, movement of 172
irrational inclination 170
irritation 443
Jacobson, Daniel 455
Jacoby, Susan 503
James, William 2, 233, 251, 254, 299, 300, 303,
325
Jankélévitch, Vladimir 373, 505
Jaspers, Karl 160
jealousy 444–445
Jentsch, Ernst 553, 554
Jesus 378n2
joint act of felt understanding 470
joint feeling 466; affective synchrony 471–475;
collective emotional response 466, 468,
471; collective guilt feelings 468; diachronic
narrative intimacy 474; episodes of 466–468;
595
‘feelings towards’ 469; genuinely joint
manner 470; immediate feeling-together
467–468; phenomenological account of 469;
plural for-the-sake-of-which 473; plural
robust agents 470; sense of we-agency 472;
see also collective affective intentionality,
communal emotions, and emotional sharing
Jones, Warren H., 242
joy and happiness 189, 217; concepts of 416,
424n9; differences 421–423; etymological
characteristic of 423; preliminary distinctions
417–418; semantic and grammatical
distinctions 418–421
joy/annoyance (Ärger) 89, 100; see also irritation
judgment: apodictic judgments 48; blind
judgments 48, 49; Brentano’s views 47;
correct (true) judgment 48; correctness and
incorrectness possibility 47; objectual theory
of 45; self-evident judgments 48–50
Kananow, Paul 20
Kant, Immanuel 2, 24n16, 4, 426; compassion,
ethical impact of 436; The Conflict of the
Faculties 186; ethical theory 118; fact of
practical reason 169; nature of feelings 72;
pure practical reason 76; recognition of
autonomy 118
Karenina, Anna 339
Karlsson, Gunnar 353
Kaufman, Gershen 315, 317
keenness, Scheler’s notion of 577
Kekes, John 565, 566
Kelly, Michael R. 294, 412
Kenny, Anthony K. 3, 5
Kierkegaard, Soren 2, 412, 414, 556
Kingston, Rebecca 490n7
Kivy, Peter 346
Klages, Ludwig 96, 263
Kolnai, Aurel 1, 4, 10, 13, 15,17, 21, 24n14,
384–387, 453n7, 571; approach to emotions
144–147; “The Concept of Hierarchy” 147;
“Der Ekel” (On Disgust) 147–149, 384–387;
Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit 144;
“Max Schelers Kritik und Würdigung der
Freudschen Libidolehre” 144; perceptual
model 146; “Über den Hochmut” (On
Haughty Pride) 149–150; value realism 146;
“Versuch über den Hass” (Essay on Hatred)
150–151
Kolodny, Niko 576
Konzelmann Ziv, Anita 466, 474
Krebs, Angelika 576, 586n3, 587n4
Krell, David Farrell 557, 558
Kristeva, Julia 383–384
Krueger, Felix 2
Krueger, Joel 308, 472, 474
Kubrick, Stanley 556
 Index
Lange, Carl Georg 2
Lear, Jonathan 413
Leder, Drew 548, 549, 561
legal peace 449
Lehtinen, Ullaliina 318
Leipzig School of Gestalt psychologists 2
Levinas, Emmanuel 291, 408–409, 462, 505,
575; asymmetrical ethics 437; De L’Évasion
349; emotion, concept of 171; emotions and
affectivity role 168–170; On Escape 462; ethics
of compassion 175n3; infinite responsibility
174; intentional consciousness 169; joy
and happiness 418; self, rise and rupture of
170–175; subjectivity 170, 171; Totality and
Infinity 172, 173, 349, 437
Levi, Primo 462
Lewis, C.S. 404, 406, 407
libidinal economies 381
libido theory 144–145
life-community (Lebensgemeinschaft), Scheler’s
definition of 581, 582
life feelings (Stein), 123–126
Lipps, Theodor 2, 68, 76, 429; aesthetic
sentiments 68; emotions theory 23n7;
empathic understanding 76, 430–431; feeling
of self-worth 96; psychological approach 431;
Selbstgefühl, notion of 94n2; self-conscious
emotions (Selbstgefühle) 89, 94n2, 102n1;
smoke and sadness 125
Lispector, Clarice 553
lived body, pain and 546–548
lived experiences (Erlebnisse) 55, 134, 137
live through (erleben) 88
logical/intellectual feelings 64
Loidolt, Sophie 294
love 66–67, 79–81, 246, 575; authentic love
191–193; curative model 575; dialogical
model 576; fellow-feeling 577–580; fusion
model 575; and hating phenomenology
45, 50; models of 575–577; and sexuality
101–102; sharing 576; and trust 526; unity in
shared feeling 584–585
Lovecraft, H.P. 556
Löwenstein-Freudenberg, Karl Konstantin 20
loyalty 535–537
Luhmann, Niklas 529
Lynch, David 556
Lyons, William 5
McAllister Lopez, Linda 130
McCarthy, Mary 184
McGinn, Colin 389n4
Macho, Thomas 506
MacIntyre, Alasdair 294
Mackie, John L. 291
MacLachlan, Alice 491n12
Malebranche, Nicolas 2
596
McLaughlin, Brian P. 254
McMullin, Irene 294
Margalit, Avishai 534
Marxism 4
masochism 372
Mason, Michelle 453n18
mass: and emotional infection 581; Scheler’s
definition of 582
material tools for emoting 305–306
Mathewes, Charles T. 565, 566
Meinong, Alexius 116
Melzack, Ronald 545
membership feeling 585
mental phenomena 42–43; fundamental classes
of 63; fundamental kinds of 45; inner
perception 44
mental reference 45
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 7, 9–11, 17, 18, 7,
41, 207, 299, 545–548, 560, 561; “body
uncanny” 560; Cartesian intellectualism
198; The Child’s Relations with Others 299;
emotions embodied system 197–200; empathy
431; externalism 197; externalist approach
197; intercorporeality 328; Phenomenology
of Perception 546, 558; scaffolded emotions
200–204; “style” of experience 257; and
uncanny 558–559
Miller, Susan 349
mimesis 338
mind, concept of 144, 308
mind-independent reality 43
Minkowski, Eugene 211
mirroring 528
Möbius Syndrome 7, 329
mode of attunement 108
modes of givenness (Gegebenheitsweise) 134
Montaigne, Michel de 2, 23n1
Montes Sánchez, Alba 71n7
mood: Stein’s account of 124; and sentiments
246–248; see also fundamental moods and
Stimmung
moral condemnation 564
moral emotions 540n7; see also morality and
emotions
moral feelings 168
morality and emotions: and human flourishing
293–294; and moral obligation 291–293;
value, disclosure of 288–291
moral judgment ethics 75–76
moral phenomenology 5, 294n1
moral value 289, 291
Mother Theresa 378n6
motivation theory 58, 91, 127
motive of emotion 92
Mulligan, Kevin 15, 25n35, 70n3, 84n1, 114
multi-dimensional approach 19
multi-layered experiential act 55
 Index
multi-track dispositions 246
Munich Circle of Phenomenology 2
mutual experience 137
mutual incorporation 330
Nancy, Jean-Luc 408, 437
narrative theory/model of emotions 6, 18,
26n53, 462
Nathanson, Donald 317
Natorp, Paul 2, 21
natural affiliation 533, 540n1
natural-cultural segmentation 266
Natya Shastra (Bharata) 337
Nazi Germany 4
negative emotion 380, 381
negative feelings 101
Nemo, Philippe 175
neo-Aristotelian 5
neo-Jamesian accounts, perceptual and
embodied 6; bodily feeling 215
Neo-Kantians/Neo-Kantianism 2, 21, 24n10
Neu, Jerome 5
neural system 546
neurological disorders 329
neuromatrix theory 545–546
neurophysiological theories of pain 545–546
New Phenomenology 3, 8, 13–14, 28n79
Nietzsche, Friedrich 96, 100, 420, 436, 453n6
noematic-noetic analysis 283
noetic description 283–284
non-formal values theory 75
non-genuine feelings (uneigentlich) 99
non-genuine sentiments 68, 69–70
non-intentional behavior 230
non-intentional feelings 53–55
non-judgemental attitude 360
non-objectifying awareness 54
normativity: and political emotions 485–487;
and emotion norms 486; see also feeling rules
norms, aggressive emotions 448–450
Northrop, Jane 314
notion of emotional feelings 89
Nozick, Robert 417, 419–423, 576
neuroscientific approaches 432
Nussbaum, Martha C. 5, 46, 183, 381, 575
object-directed feelings 11, 469, 470
object-incorporation process 202
objective community 136
objectual theory of judgment 45
organism-bound cognitive system 301
Ortega y Gasset, José 20–21
Other’s trust 522, 525
Ought-Implies-Can principle 69
outer concentration (Außenkonzentration) 90
over-trust 530
Ozar, Anne 294
597
pain: affective space 547; bodily 543, 544; and
emotions 543; empathic feelings 551; as inner
perception 544–545; and lived body 546–548;
neurophysiological theories of 545–546;
of others 550–551; phenomenological
understanding of 543–544; Phenomenology
of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 546; pre-
intentional feeling 543; and suffering 548–550
Parkinson’s disease 329
partiality, solidarity 534–536, 539
Pascal, Blaise 2
passionate 190, 191
passions of soul 2
passive impressional states 154
pathos, meanings of 429
Pattison, Stephen 317, 320
“peace of mind” 75
perception: pain 544–545; theory of emotion
46, 278
perception theory 146, 264, 279
perceptual accounts of emotions 6, 24n25; see
also philosophy of emotions
personal community (Personale Gemeinschaft),
Scheler’s definition of 581, 583
personal feeling 585
personality core 127–128
Pfänder, Alexander 2, 8, 17–18, 20–21, 586n1;
actual sentiments stream 65; centrifugal
direction 66; “deep and high” sentiments
67; Einführung in die Psychologie 63; feelings,
conception of 63; genuine and non-genuine
sentiments 69–70; I-center and self 134;
logical/intellectual feelings 64; meaning
something, discussion of 66; mental subjects,
feelings as 63–64; modified sentiments
varieties 67–68; object-directed feelings,
sentiments as 64–67; sensory feelings 89;
volitive motivation 94n4
phenomenological method 210
phenomenological puzzle 235, 236
phenomenological theories of emotions 6, 9–13;
basic agreement 10; contemporary use of 41;
loving and hating 45
philosophy of emotions: bottom-up approach
276–277; feeling, unitary foundation of
279–280; general theory of feeling 281–285;
methodology of 276–277; perceptual model
of 278–279; subjectivity of 279
physical phenomena 42–43; external
perception 44
Pinscher, Doberman 241
pity 177–178, 534, 540n3
Plato 2, 337–338, 433, 575
pleasant 59, 66–67
pleasure: anticipatory configuration of 59–60;
pleasure/pain feelings 57–61, 89, 234;
sensation of 73
 Index

Plessner, Helmuth 20, 22, 28n79 quasi-transcendental approach 81

Plügge, Herbert 548 queer phenomenology 8
plural pre-reflective self-awareness 138
plural robust agents 470 racialization, phenomenology of 207–208, 212
Plutarch 567 racism 211, 568
Poe, Edgar Allan 556 radical anti-mentalism 108
Polanyi, Michael 328 radical evil 565
political emotions 478–479; agonistic dialectic rage 444, 453n3
487–489; 490n4; collective 485, 490n8, Ratcliffe, Matthew 106, 109, 360, 361
491n10; collective affective intentionality rationality 12; and emotions 4, 5; epistemic 2;
account of 481–484, 486; and fittingness rational activity 170
487; group-based 485; multi-dimensional Rawls, John 294
taxonomy 484–485; normativity of reactive attitudes 234–236, 486
486–487; overview of 480–481; shared 484; reactive emotions components 57–61
target of 483 reality of feelings 82–84
political sophistication 484 recalcitrant emotions 93
position-taking: intentional structure of receptivity, case of 116
115–116; specific characteristics of 116–117 reciprocal unification 136–137
positive affective experiences 139, 140 recognition-respect 517
positive self-evaluation 358, 362 recognition-response tie 363
Potkay, Adam 420 Reddy, Vasudevi 352
practical philosophy 5 rediscovery of emotions 2, 4–6
Pradines, Maurice 153–154 reductionist conception 3
praecox feeling 331 Reinach, Adolf 8, 15, 21, 114, 146, 586n1;
preparedness 230 account of position-taking 116; “Zur Theorie
presentation feeling 45, 240 des negativen Urteils” 115
pride: belonging, relationship of 364; feelings Reiner, Hans 20–21
and judgements, self 364; self-confidence reproduction of feeling 80, 84n5, 577, 578
level 364; self-conscious emotion 363 Republic (Plato) 337
Prinz, Jesse J. 24; see also Neo-Jamesian accounts respect-sympathy structure 293
pro-attitudes (love, joy, and worship) 45, 50 responsibility 276
proprioception 546 Ressentiment 1, 13, 18, 19, 28n80, 483–484,
Protevi, John 490n8 487, 489, 490n9; 564; Ressentiment and
provisional sentiments 68 negative attitudes 100–101, 445, 450–451,
Prütting, Lenz 28n79 453n6; see also Scheler, Max, Voigtländer,
psychiatric illness 254 Else, and aggressive emotions
psychic depth 147 retention, Husserl’s notion of 244
psychic feelings 74, 77 revenge 497–498; as borderline case of emotion
psychic realism 83 505–506; ceremonial 504; modern standard
psycho-dynamic interaction 14 view of 498; theorizing 503–504
psychologist–introjectionist–reductionist “rhythm of feeling” 59
paradigm 263 Richmond, Sarah 166
psychology: of attunements 106; Brentano’s Ricœur, Paul 21–22, 437, 499, 505
theory of consciousness 44; subject matter and Rinofner-Kreidl, Sonja 294
method 42 Roberts, Robert C. 24n25, 27n72
psycho-physical equipment 203 Roberts, Tom 306
psychophysically neutral sphere 77 romantic love see love
public passions 490n7 Rorty Oksenberg, Amelie 5
Pugmire, David 420 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1, 2, 185, 435
pure practical reason 76 Rozin, Paul 382
Purshouse, Luke 365 Rumke, Henricus C. 331, 332
Rutishauser, Bruno 84n1
qualia 9, 15, 263, 511 Ryle, Gilbert 5
qualitative attention (qualitative Aufmerksamkeit)
88–90 Saarinen, Jussi 257, 258
qualitative feeling 9, 97 Sacks, Oliver 330
quasi-things 266, 268 Salice, Alessandro 71n7, 140, 457, 460

598
 Index
Salmela, Mikko 471, 472, 474, 476n2
Sartrean theory 159, 166
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1, 3, 7, 9, 10, 13, 17, 41, 318,
349, 459, 545–548; affective experience
163–164; affective phenomenon 162–163,
396–400; analysis of emotions 162–163; Being
and Nothingness 383, 384, 547; conscious
activity 160; consciousness, notions of
162–164; emotional transformation 166–167;
emotion theory 159, 161; L’Être et le Néant
349; meaning and function 164–165; mental
machinery 164–165; Nausea 160–161; pre-
reflective consciousness 163–164; Sketch for a
Theory of Emotions 396; The Transcendence of the
Ego 396
scaffolded emotions: incorporation process
201–202; institutions process 202–204
Scheler, Max 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13–15, 18,
21–22, 24n17, 24n25, n51, n56, n58, n59,
27n67, n68, n75, 114, 146, 240–241, 275,
431, 434 –436, 438, 457, 458, 467, 468, 474,
475, 484, 487, 490n9, 514, 564, 575, 577;
emotional life stratification 73–75; emotions
theory 73; empathy theory 76; feelings of
reality 82–84; Formalism in Ethics and Non-
Formal Ethics of Values 580; four forms of
fellow-feeling 577–580; four forms of social
unit 580–584; love 79–81; metaphysical
system 80; moral judgment ethics 75–76; The
Nature of Sympathy 84n6, 144, 467, 577, 578,
580, 584; non-formal values theory 75; quasi-
transcendental approach 81; reality of feelings
82–84; Ressentiment 101; shame, sense of
81–82; stratification theory 81; sympathy,
forms of 76–79, 431; voluntative realism 83;
Wesen und Formen der Sympathie 434
Schelling, Friedrich 554, 555
schizophrenia 331–332
Schmalenbach, Hermann 3, 17, 18; “Bund”
social modal category 140; community,
example of 140; conceptual tripartition 141;
embarrassment, expression of 141; positive
affective experiences 139; see also Walther,
Gerda
Schmid, Hans Bernhard 137–138, 140, 470, 472,
540n5
Schmitt, Carl 479, 481
Schmitz, Hermann 3, 7–11, 13–14, 17, 27n64,
262, 263, 264, 453n14, 527; anger 449–450;
atmosphere model 218–219; bodily dimension
215; emotions move and motivate 217–218;
feelings, dimension of 216–217; ontological
status 221; phenomenological vocabulary 441;
thematic center 219–221
Schneider, Gregor 556
Schnittke, Alfred 556
Schopenhauer, Arthur 2, 426, 436, 584
599
Schütz, Alfred 7, 523, 586n1
scope of life concept 211
Scottish Moralists 2
Scruton, Roger 576
Sebald, W.G. 556
second wave phenomenological rediscovery of
emotions 6–8
self-affection 11, 22
self-awareness 98
self-concealing 557
self-confidence level 364
self-conscious emotions (Selbstgefühle) 89, 94n2,
314, 363, 463n1
self-deceptive mechanisms 101
self-disclosive character 361
self-esteem: ability, achievement 361–363;
background affective orientation 358–361;
cognitive self-evaluation 359; definition of
358; intrapsychic attitude 359; and narrative
structure 361–363; non-judgemental
attitude 360; phenomenal character 360;
phenomenological features of 359; positive
self-evaluation 358, 362
self-evident judgments 48–50, 51n10
self-givenness 369
self-other-conscious emotion 352
self-poisoning attitude 101
self-worth feeling concept 96–98
Seneca 512, 515, 517
sense-making 301
sense of justice 517, 518
sensory feelings (sinnliche Gefühle) 89, 90
sensory illusions 268
sensory pain 58
sensual empathy 550
sensual feelings 123–124
sentiments: aesthetic sentiments 68; affirmation/
denial act 67; centrifugal stream of feeling
67; deep and high structure 67; floating
sentiments 68; genuine sentiments 69–70;
inner unification/division 67; non-genuine
sentiments 68, 69–70; as object-directed
feelings 64–67; suppressed sentiments 68;
unification feeling 136
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper 5
shame 449, 455; behavioural manifestations of
352; and body 352; chronic shame 316–317,
319; definition of 354; directly reflexive 458;
group-based shame 460, 463n1; hetero-
induced 456–460, 463n1; indirectly reflexive
458; loving 459; moral value of 355–356; of
the world 462; and others 353–355; personal
458–459; prospective shame 353; and related
emotions 349–351; retrospective shame
353; and self-consciousness 351–352; self-
experience of 351; sense of 81–82; shame,
embodiment 313–314; social acceptability
 Index
458, 461; subordinance 461; survivor
461–463; and time 353; understanding shame
314–315; vicarious shame 354, 463n1; women
sexuality and 314
shared affectivity 467; see also joint feelings
shared emotions 134–137, 471; see also joint
feeling
shared feeling 324, 577, 578, 585; solidarity
536–538; unity in 584–585; see also joint
feeling
Sherman, Nancy 293
Sherrington, Charles Scott 545
shyness 366
Silvestrov, Valentin 556
Simmel, Georg 96, 524
simple attention (schlichte Aufmerksamkeit)
88, 89, 90
simulation theory 432
single-track dispositions 246
situated affectivity: environmental scaffolds
305–307; mind-invasions 307–309;
philosophy of emotions 300–301; trials
and tribulations 301–305; user–resource
interactions 305–307
Sjoberg, Lennart G. 353
Slaby, Jan 106, 108, 203, 255, 259n1, 307,
308, 361
slavery economy 208
Sloterdijk, Peter 269
Smith, Adam 430, 433–434
Smith, William 5, 294
social appraisal 482
social emotion 365
social identity 460
social imaginary 485
social media, affective transformation 308
social relations 533
social systems 307–308
social tools for emoting 306–307
social unit, Scheler’s formulation of 580–584
society (Gesellschaft), Scheler’s definition of 583
socio-diagnostic phenomenology 210
socio-moral functions 388
solidarity 541n16, 541n19; attitude of 532,
534; conceptual history of 533–534; debts
532–533; direction of fit 533; feeling
534–538; idea of 533, 539–540; misled
541n20; morality 538–540; notion of 540n6;
partial and reflective emotion 534–536, 539;
vs. pity 534, 540n3; promise 533–534; role of
539; sharing 536–538; Stein’s model 536–538,
540n11, 541n17; Wiggins’ model of 541n23
Solomon, Robert C. 5, 27n72, 46, 498, 503,
505, 575
spatiality of emotions 442–443; see also
anchoring point; condensation area
spatial level 372
600
species, evolution mechanisms 380
Spilliaert, Léon 556
Spinoza, Baruch 2, 23n6, 420
spiritual feelings 14
spontaneity, manifestations of 115
Steinbock, Anthony 294
Stein, Edith 3, 7–8, 10–11, 13–18, 25n45,
27n65, n69, 65, 431, 476n4, 536–539, 540n11,
541n17, 550, 575, 577; collective emotions
128–130; emotion conception 128; emotion
feeling 123–128, 128–130; Essays on Woman
130; female education 130; feminine for
emotion 130; Gemeinschaftserlebnis 128; and
gender 130–131; joy, example of 125–126;
motivation 127; personality core 127–128;
Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities 125,
585; On the Problem of Empathy 550; religion
and mysticism 130–131; smoke and sadness,
example of 125; women, writings on 130
Stephan, Achim 106, 108, 255
Sterelny, Kim 305
Stern, Daniel N. 255, 329
Stern, William 2
Stevenson, C.L. 5
Stimmung (mood) 393–394; see also mood,
Heidegger, Martin, and Bollnow, Otto
Friedrich
St. John of the Cross 378n6
Stoics/Neo-Stoics 2
Strasser, Stephan 3, 20–21, 417
stratification theory 81, 147
Straus, Erwin 548
Strauss, Leo 568
Strawson, Peter F. 234, 486, 540n4
Stumpf, Carl 2, 544; theories of pain 544
subconscious experiences 134, 136, 138
subject experiences motivation 93
subjective communities 136
subjectivity: dialectical genesis of 170;
disintegration of 171
subordinance shame 461
sui generis intentional phenomena 41, 45–46
suppressed sentiments 68
survival, mode of 407
survivor shame 461–463
Svenaeus, Fredrik 561
sympathetic pity 534
sympathy 293, 576; concept of 433;
meaning of 429
synchronic unity 70
Szanto, Thomas 71n7, 453n6, 540n10
Tangney, June P. 354
Tappolet, Christine 24n25
Taylor, Gabriele 358, 364, 365
Tellenbach, Hubertus 263
Teroni, Fabrice 243, 246
 Index

tetanisation affective 212, 213n19 vindicatory system 504

theory of mind 329 violence 182, 445
things in themselves study 43 virtue-ethical approaches 5
threateningness 56, 57 vital and psychic feelings 74, 75, 77, 98
Titchener, Edward 429 vital/common feelings 10, 14; see also general
Tönnies, Ferdinand 133, 139 feelings
Torok, Maria 406 vital feelings (Lebensgefühle) 107; see also general
touch and affective memory 209–210 feelings
transcendent movement 191 Voigtländer, Else 2, 7, 11, 17, 22, 24n13, 25n45,
tried-and-true techniques 344 27n74, 94n2, 586n1; “feelings of self-worth”
“troubled feeling” 567 concept 96–98; inauthentic feelings 98–100;
trust: affective 526; assuredness 526–528; love and sexuality 101–102; Ressentiment
atmospheric 526–527; betrayal of 530; bonds and negative attitudes 100–101; self-worth
524; compromised 530; coupling of 527–530; feeling concept 96–98; Über die ‘Art’ eines
dialogical relationship 529–530; faith in Menschen und das Erlebnis der Maske 99;
the Other’s truthfulness 523–524; loss of Vom Selbstgefühl 96
525; and love 526; mutual 530; networks volitional responses 116
523; nourishment and nurturing of 526; in volonté générale, Rousseauian notion of 179, 180
others 522, 525, 527–528; over-trust 530; Voltaire 525
possibilities of 529; relationships of 526, 528, voluntative realism 83
529; self-prescribing element of 529; self-trust
522–523; trustworthiness 522, 524; in the Waldenfels, Bernhard 430
world 523, 524 Walther, Gerda 2, 3, 4, 7, 11, 13, 17–18, 70n5,
trustworthiness of others 524 586n1; actual-present experiences 134;
truth correspondence theory 47 collective emotions theory 133; communal
Turrow, Gabe 472 emotions 137–139; community and society
emotions 139–142; I-center and self 134;
uncanny: anxiety 555–557, 561; bodies 559–561; individual emotions 136; shared emotions
concept of 553; Freud and 553–556; Heidegger analysis 134–137; subconscious experiences
and 556–558; living body and 559; Merleau- 134; unification 136
Ponty and 558–559; repression and 559 Weber, Max 22
unification feeling 136 Weil, Simone 377
unity of feeling 584–585 Wertfühlen (Scheler and Hildebrand), 120n12; see
user–resource interaction 305 also value feeling, value-ception, and value
reception
value-awareness 97 Western philosophy 2
value-ception 14; see also value feeling, value Wiggins, David 145, 539, 541n23
reception, and Wertfühlen Will, Udo 472
value-complex 80 Withy, Katherine 106
value-content 577; supra-individual accessibility Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2, 4
of 584 Wollheim, Richard 5, 24n22, 540n7
value feeling 12, 278; see also value-ception, women: condition, philosophico-political 187,
value reception, and Wertfühlen 192; self-conscious emotion 314; sexuality
value realism 146 and shame 314
value-reception 57–61 World War II 5
values/disvalues 127 Wüschner, Philipp 453n15
value theory 294
Varga, Somogy 308 xenophobia 570
Velleman, David 575
Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid 25n45, 71n7, 84n1, 294, Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 381
540n5
vengeance 498, 503–505 Zahavi, Dan 129, 140, 462
vicarious feeling 578 Zaner, Richard 560–561
vigilance 230 Zulu culture 204

601