1 The Significance of Emotional Feeling
It is central to our ordinary conception of emotions that these have a felt or phenomenal dimension . Emotions are often described as stirrings of the soul or, more evocatively, as stirrings of the sensitive mind (cf. the German term “ Gemütsbewegung ”1). In thus describing them we allude to a characteristic type of felt agitation, a certain felt inner movement, which is central to the way we experience them. This felt aspect also appears to be what we have in mind in calling them “affective”. The term “affect”, if taken literally, similarly alludes to a characteristic sense of inner movement—a sense of being touched or affected—that seems integral to emotional phenomenology. Such descriptions are, of course, generic. Considerations on the phenomenology of emotion suggest that emotions typically involve feelings which are characterized by a subtlety that is sometimes thought ineffable, yet is often surprisingly well expressed in literary narratives:
His melancholy, which was settling into a secondary stage, like a healing wound, had in it a certain acrid, palatable sweetness. (James 2013 [1877], 320)I felt so keen a longing for Mme Guermantes that I could scarcely breathe; it was as though part of my breast had been cut out by a skilled anatomist and replaced by an equal part of immaterial suffering, by its equivalent in nostalgia and love. And however neatly the wound may have been stitched together one lives rather uncomfortably when regret for the loss of another person is substituted for one’s entrails; it seems to be occupying more room than they; one feels it perpetually; and besides, what a contradiction in terms to be obliged to think a part of one’s body. (Proust 1996 [1920–1921], 131)
In line with many philosophers, past and present, I will here assume that an adequate view of emotions ought to recognize them as having a specific felt aspect.2 Accordingly, I am concerned with emotion qua conscious episode or occurrence. To deny that emotion involves a characteristic, often complex and subtle, felt inner agitation—to deny that emotions are affective—is to ignore what we would commonly recognize as their most essential and salient dimension.3 Relatedly, it would seem to severely impoverish our conception of the significance of emotions in our lives. That emotions matter to us, it seems, is in large part due to their affective character, to the often complex and subtle ways we feel in having them. Emotions make a distinctive contribution to our mental lives qua feeling.
In the philosophical literature on emotion, we find various different attempts to illuminate emotional feeling in ways that are sensitive to the significance we pre-theoretically ascribe to it. While I take it that most theorists who attempt to do so would accept the generic description I have given so far, not everyone agrees on how emotional feeling ought to be characterized in detail and what precisely its role in our psychological lives comes down to. If we survey the views that have emerged over the past few decades, it seems, however, that there is a notable consensus that an account of emotional feeling that is sensitive to its intuitive significance must reject what has traditionally been thought of as a strict conceptual dichotomy. As many have come to believe, in order to properly appreciate emotional feeling as an important aspect of our psychological lives we must not think of it as mere feeling, as the exemplification of purely phenomenal properties or qualia. Rather, we ought to conceive of it as exemplifying that feature of our minds which is arguably responsible for the fact that the emotions found their way back into analytic philosophy in the first place: as a bearer of intentionality .
Stated in general, non-technical terms, the principal intuition guiding these philosophers is that the felt aspect of emotion constitutes a certain type of psychological involvement with the world . As they propose, we render emotional feeling intelligible as making an important contribution to our mental lives by recognizing it as a specific way in which our mind is ‘directed upon’ features of our present situation or in which such features are ‘given’ to our mind. Not everyone agrees on how precisely to characterize the specific way in which we are psychologically involved with the world in emotional feeling. But there seems to be growing agreement that emotional feelings (at least in part) owe their significance to the fact that they constitute a form of intentionality.
It is important to stress that the view in question—which I will refer to as intentionalism about emotional feeling—is a view specifically of the felt aspect of emotion. Since their renaissance as a research topic in Anglo-American philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s, emotions have been widely recognized as intentional. Thus, it has been widely noted that emotions take objects, that we are afraid of people, angry at them or glad that they share our concerns.4 And much of the philosophical research on emotion since then has largely revolved around the topic of intentionality. However, in line with the standardly assumed divide between intentionality and phenomenal consciousness in philosophy of mind at the time, it was long common to suppose that in recognizing emotions as intentional one is concerned with an aspect distinct from their felt dimension. Emotions were widely conceived as compound occurrences that comprise both an intentional act or state and a separate, non-intentional feeling component (e.g. Neu 1977, 161; Thalberg 1977, 32; Lazarus et al. 1980, esp. 192 and 198; Lyons 1980, 81; Calhoun 1984; Gordon 1987). Intentionalism about the felt aspect of emotion can be seen to be, in part, a reaction against this traditional picture.5 As many suppose, in denying intentionality to emotional feelings themselves this picture leaves us with a seriously impoverished conception of them and of the emotions more generally, a conception that is bound to ignore the distinctive place of affectivity in our mental lives.6
I agree with this outlook and believe that the feeling/intentionality dichotomy that characterizes traditional philosophical theorizing about the emotions is misguided. That is, I share the intuition that emotional feeling constitutes a specific way of being psychologically involved with the world as well as the belief that it makes a significant contribution to our mental lives in virtue of being intentional. While sympathetic to the broader outlook that characterizes large parts of the more recent debate on occurrent emotion, I yet also be...