Emotional Experiences

Ethical and Social Significance

John J. Drummond, Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786601483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Emotions are among the most fundamental human capacities. They help us to adequately and quickly respond to environmental affordances of all kinds. Being capable of emotional responses we are inextricably attached to our natural and social environment. These tight emotional bonds to the world we inhabit are immediately conspicuous when we find ourselves in the grip of strong feelings like fear, love, hate or disgust. They are also present in all other kinds of emotions, for instance, feelings of awe, compassion or artistic enthusiasm. This volume tracks a variety of emotions in a phenomenological manner. It explores the intertwinement of cognitive content and feeling qualities of different emotions, their varying motivational and expressive qualities, their bodily manifestations, and social and moral implications. This focus on a phenomenology of emotion reveals the rich meaning of emotions that results from their embeddedness in our social and moral life. The authors describe the peculiar character of human emotions from the first- and second-person point of view of those subjects who undergo and regularly share these emotions.

Chapter 1

Introduction

It is no exaggeration to claim that interdisciplinary research into the emotions has exploded in recent years. From neuroscience to the cognitive sciences to psychology to philosophy, the study of the emotions – both the emotions in general and particular emotions – has developed within and across disciplines. This volume brings together new work in the phenomenology of the emotions. The term ‘phenomenology’ is used ambiguously in contemporary philosophy of the emotions. Sometimes it is used to refer simply to the subjective character of an emotion, to ‘what-it’s like’ to experience that emotion. At other times, it is used to refer to a field of study focused on the experiential aspects of emotions in general or particular types of emotion, aspects that are accessible to first-person inquiry. Even here, however, one must distinguish phenomenology done in the tradition of analytic philosophy of mind from that done in the tradition initiated in the work of Edmund Husserl.

The phenomenology of the emotions done in the tradition of analytic philosophy of mind focuses on the experiential aspects of emotional experience accessible to psychological introspection. As such, it is largely an empirically grounded study. The phenomenology of the emotions done in the tradition of Husserl, by contrast, focuses on the essential structures of the intentional correlations involved in various kinds of emotions and, in so doing, employs an a priori methodology. Insofar as the traditions concern themselves with the nature of the emotions from a first-person point of view, they have much in common. Insofar as they bring different methodologies to bear on the emotions, they diverge from one another. This volume is undertaken in the spirit of phenomenology derived from the Husserlian tradition.

It must be emphasized, however, that neither tradition proceeds in ignorance of the other. To do work in the phenomenology of the emotions involves both tapping the resources of classical phenomenology and pondering the variety of alternative theoretical accounts that can be utilized in exploring the emotions. The attempt to carve out the peculiarity and the achievements of a phenomenology of emotions goes hand in hand with digging into the vast and rapidly growing field of philosophical research on emotions in general. Moreover, it often takes account of the empirical investigations and ongoing investigations of the emotions in other disciplines. To cross borders within this more extensive field of research is today an important aspect of phenomenological research.

Much significant work done was done by major phenomenologists in the early years of the twentieth century. These philosophers stressed the importance of emotional experience, mostly with a view to ethics, and they also explored specific emotions. First among these trailblazing phenomenologists is Max Scheler. His studies of emotions such as shame, resentment, humility, and awe, though they clearly invite and provoke further thought, offer an eye-opening journey into the rich and dense emotional life of human beings. Within the past few decades, amid and fostered by the general renaissance of philosophical concern for the emotions, much new work has been done. Since there are notably different understandings of phenomenology in circulation today, this introduction will outline the guiding idea of phenomenology that underlies and motivates the work in this volume.

I

The common denominator of phenomenological approaches, however different they may be with regard to their key questions, terminologies and methods, is to take seriously the variety of human experiences as the starting point and the permanent authority of philosophical inquiries. This is why a phenomenology of emotions first addresses the questions of how emotions are experienced (lived through) by a subject and how they present the affective and evaluative features of their objects. Methodologically, this amounts to searching for accurate descriptions that disclose the essential structure of emotional experiences. This essential structure comprises those moments and aspects of the experience without which it would not be the kind of emotion it is. For example, if an essential component of hate is to harbour an intense want either to destroy someone or something by one’s own wilful action or to see the hated person or thing destroyed by another’s actions or by mere coincidence – for instance, by accidents or earthquakes – each and every instance of hate must show this specific intentionality. If it does not, it still might be a negatively assessing experience (e.g., aversion, contempt or disgust) that includes strong tendencies to avoid coming into contact with or to distance oneself from the object of the experience. Yet it will not be an instance of hate.

Given that phenomenologists do not endorse a naïve descriptivist methodology, they are well aware that undertaking essential descriptions of this kind (implicitly) commits them to an overall framework of philosophical investigations that includes certain conceptual distinctions, methodological ideals and clear purposes. Among the most important distinctions entailed in a great deal of descriptive-phenomenological work are the following: theoretical vs. practical attitudes, subject-related (e.g., attitudinal) vs. object-related orientations, feeling-qualities vs. intentional emotions. Phenomenologists for the most part agree – and this is crucial for their sharing common ground in doing philosophy – that the correct way of dealing with these distinctions is not to make decisions in terms of either/or commitments (e.g., emphasizing objectivity to the point of excluding subjective moments). Rather, phenomenologists are eager to show how such distinctions open up space for a more encompassing or inclusive mode of thinking, acknowledging, for example, subject-related aspects while endorsing a correspondingly modified account of objectivity. In general, a phenomenologist’s readiness to adjust and refine her conceptual tools will be guided by the prior demand to be faithful to the phenomena. This includes striving for apprehending all their constitutive moments and properties, instead of prioritizing a particular theoretical ideal of doing philosophy and thereby neglecting the question of its suitability for capturing the entire range and qualities of human experiences.

Phenomenologists consider their descriptive work to be fundamentally different from explanatory work. This view, however, does not preclude holding that the descriptions can function as a propaedeutic for explanations. However, we must distinguish two different functions or types of descriptions in order to forestall misguided interpretations. Descriptive work that appeals, say, to psychological introspection as an integral part of an overall explanatory project must not be confused with the essentialist descriptive methodology as practised, for instance, in Husserl’s phenomenology. This marks, as mentioned earlier, the difference between phenomenology in the analytic mode and phenomenology in the Husserlian mode. What is important for the purpose at hand is to realize how basic methodological decisions guide and control our grasp of the emotions. Phenomenologists do not inquire into the causal roles of emotions and do not consider emotions as factors operative within the framework of causal explanations. A phenomenological investigation, by contrast (although without denying the relevance of causal explanations in general), is framed by giving priority to the first-person perspective, by discussing different models of intentionality, by focusing on the correlation between types of objects, on the one hand, and modes of experiencing, on the other, and by focusing on the significance of the emotions in the course of a life to which the emotion belongs.

Imagine that you are barefooted in your garden and suddenly feel something slimy and pulpy between your toes. Or remember how it feels to hug a child tenderly or to sneer contemptuously at a political opponent. As these very different examples of emotional engagement show, emotions do not only move us inwardly, so to speak. They also represent modes of being related to something ‘out there’ in an immediately felt, embodied manner that characteristically varies according to different brands of emotion. Though this certainly is not the whole story, it is of crucial importance that emotions are bodily expressed and communicated to others. In general, phenomenologists tend to be sceptical regarding ordinary talk about inner mental states and outer objects or states of affairs. Without overemphasizing the inner/outer distinction, which can mislead,¹ we should keep in mind that living through emotions involves both being moved by something (inward direction) and taking a proper stance towards something, that is, responding to something according to its own nature or content (outward direction).

Let us assume that I look at a beautiful oak tree in front of me. In this situation, it would be odd if someone were to ask me whether I enjoyed my perception. My answer certainly would be that I am not interested in my perception but in the oak tree whose appearance I enjoy. While some emotions include myself in their intentional content (e.g., envy in which I am aware of myself as lacking what the person I envy possesses), in many cases, for example, fear, our perceptions and the emotions bound to them are simply outer-directed or other-directed. How is it that emotions succeed in referring to something (i.e., some ‘outer’ thing)? To be directed to something, and to be so in a specific manner, the emotional experience must have some cognitive or intentional content such that the object manifests itself in a particular manner or under a particular aspect. Such directedness to an object does not mean – and actually excludes – reducing it to its present mode of appearance. The object-as-presently-intended cannot, on principle, exhaust the intended object. Perceiving the oak tree in front of me, I do not grasp it as ‘nothing but’ its current appearance. On the basis of previous perceptual experiences, I have a well-founded expectation that I might activate other appearances of the same tree when moving around it. On pain of losing its object status, the appearing object must transcend each and every single appearance we gain of it in the course of time. Correspondingly, and owing to the intentional contents involved, we cannot reduce object-directed or world-disclosing emotions to pure feeling-states or feeling-qualities (so-called qualia), for example, what it is like to feel joy, disgust or compassion.

What then is the basic idea of emotions underlying a phenomenological investigation as roughly sketched earlier? Emotions are cognitively structured and embodied modes of approaching the world. Or, to be more precise: emotions are modes of being related to objects, other subjects, or certain aspects of the world as they appear with certain evaluative characters. The latter manifest themselves in evaluative features grounded in non-axiological properties. Emotions respond to the non-axiological properties of their objects. In this way, they function as our way of relating to valuable objects. However controversial the accurate description and determination of the evaluative aspect involved in emotional experiences is (among philosophers in general as well as among phenomenologists), the following thesis should be suited to function as a point of agreement: Only on the condition that emotions cannot be reduced to feeling-qualities does it make sense and is it warranted to claim that emotions appropriately respond to the valuable aspects of objects. Moreover, failure to respond appropriately – as when I feel flattered and delighted in the face of a fighting dog pouncing on me – would be impossible if emotions were nothing but feeling-qualities.

II

The descriptions in the previous section are ordered towards emotions that one might consider ‘appropriate’ or ‘normal’. But emotional experiences can also be pathological. Suppose, for example, that every time I find myself brooding over my math book I feel uneasy or frightened by geometrical objects that have an odd number of edges or acute angles. When I report this emotional response to other people, most of them will consider it deviant, strange or even pathological; they will view it as an inappropriate, ‘subjective’ experience (although it remains directed to an object). It is ‘merely subjective’ if it is unjustified to hold that the object is frightening or terrifying, or if it is unpromising to argue that it is in virtue of the intrinsic features of the geometrical object that I feel frightened or terrified. Though we may occasionally disagree on whether someone is justified in feeling frightened, there are clear-cut cases. When I come around the corner in twilight and stumble over a masked man who waves a revolver in front of me and yells: ‘Hands up! I want your money!’, I will certainly feel frightened, and I will be warranted in feeling fright. In such cases, the way I feel appropriately responds to the object and the overall situation which is frightening. My fear indicates that I find myself in an objectively dangerous situation. Given that emotional reactions and feeling-dispositions also depend on the agent’s overall bodily and mental condition, it may nonetheless be controversial to what extent an individual agent should actually feel frightened in different kinds of situations. Yet even the experience of a lesser fear (e.g., because the robber’s victim practised aikido for many years) does not annul the difference between the situation wherein one is assaulted and the experience of the math book sketched earlier.

Emotions do their important epistemic work not only in dangerous situations but also in a very great variety of other types of situations that might be positively or negatively assessed. Emotional responses to these situations can be more or less appropriate. Though we often, for simplicity’s sake, assume a clear-cut distinction between appropriate and inappropriate emotional responses, we should, to the extent we are ready to recognize degrees of appropriateness at all, be ready to recognize grey zones regarding both our emotional experiences and decisions reflectively based on them.

While sitting over my math book, I may vividly remember a conversation with my psychiatrist. Let us assume that, based on this remembrance and other coherent experiences, I believe myself to be sliding into a schizophrenic state. Let us further assume that it is in this context that the above-sketched fearful response to my math book occurs. However, in this case my fear, if warranted at all, is warranted as a response to (or an expression of ) my growing awareness of falling ill with schizophrenia: I am fearfully directed not to triangles and other geometrical objects, but towards my illness. Yet, even in such a rare case, my fear may rightly indicate a danger to my personal well-being. The usual world-directedness of my emotional engagement has tacitly turned inwards. It no longer informs me how, given the specific manner of its present appearance, an object (or the world as a whole) presumptively is. My emotional response assesses my own condition by virtue of the contrast between my present and former experiences of certain types of objects, an assessment that might include comparison with the average responses of others to similar types of objects and situations.

Insofar as the ‘inward’ direction of my emotion has been motivated by remembering the conversation with my psychiatrist and other coherent experiences, it may be more appropriate to describe my present fear as responding to my former responses to the appearances of certain objects insofar as these responses function as explananda in a causal explanation. To be sure, to put the matter this way involves a shift of attitude without which the situation could not be described and analysed as we do here. It goes without saying that this description does not reflect the intrinsic feeling-quality and intentionality of the schizophrenic person’s experience of fear as it occurs. As long as she lives through her emotional state, her fear transparently presents the world as dangerous to her.² It is only from a reflectively distanced (or theoretical) point of view that it can be warranted to hold that a specific emotion, due to pathological circumstances, gradually loses its grip on the world and approaches ‘free’ imaginations or arbitrary fancies (whose occurrence may or may not be susceptible to suitable causal explanations).

This is not to deny that non-pathological emotions harbour subject-related aspects too. However, these aspects usually do not become predominant. They do not cover up or abandon the world-directedness of the emotion at issue. Nevertheless, two restrictions need to be mentioned. First, emotions differ not only with respect to their cognitive content and feeling-qualities but also with respect to the relative weight of the subject-related aspects they entail. Second, examining the relative weight of subject-related and object-related aspects of particular emotions (e.g., determining how and when indignation changes into self-righteousness or arrogance into contempt or grief into self-pity) will be either infeasible or misleading as long as one disregards the temporal structure of emotions. The fact that temporality also comes into play in varying degrees of distinctiveness and importance, depending on the specific nature of the emotion at issue, brings us back to the assertion that we still stand in need of an encompassing and systematic study of human emotions. Bearing in mind the phenomenological interest in delivering fine-grained, bottom-up descriptions of the intentional structures involved in various types of emotions, we recognize that working on a phenomenology of emotion involves describing particular emotional experiences as much as it involves working on emotion-concepts which, by definition, are of a general stamp. As is true on other occasions as well, portraits are as good as they are subtle in terms of individualizing appearances and striking or telling in terms of invoking types, ideas or species of the appearing objects.

III

Though it is possible and desirable to give a structural view of different types of emotions, it is also important to keep in mind that our emotional life is much more complex and entangled. Making explicit and commenting upon the rational structure of emotions according to Husserl’s idea of intentional analysis does not exhaust the idea of a phenomenology of emotion. Consequently, it is also not the exclusive concern of the present volume. A shared concern of the following chapters is to highlight those aspects of emotions that go beyond their narrowly conceived cognitive core structure. Among these aspects of ‘entanglement’ are the temporal horizons unfolding in living through emotions, the multifarious impact of context-dependence and, above all, emotions’ other-dependent forms of realization. The latter aspects, in particular, include the intersubjective and political dimensions of emotions.

As entangled real-life phenomena, emotions harbour an individualizing moment although they are, to some considerable extent, unstable. Both aspects are relevant with regard to the question of how one can reliably distinguish emotions that show more or less strong family resemblances (see John Drummond’s chapter on anger and indignation). Among the various topics in a phenomenology of emotions, which are addressed in the following chapters, is the question of how the clustering of emotions with varying focal points contributes to the specific form of realization and individualization of emotions. Moreover, it is part of the nature of certain emotions, such as personal love, to trigger transformative processes. Neither of these topics, the clustering of emotions and their transformative power, can be examined (descriptively or otherwise) unless we uncover the temporal dimension of emotions. Among those issues that touch upon the intertwining of temporality and individualization is the question of whether the transformative power of emotions is correlated with their self-transcending quality and with specific forms of self-reflexivity or self-relatedness, on the one hand, and peculiar experiential features (e.g., overwhelmingness; sensing one...

Table of contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Anger and Indignation
• 3 Contempt: The Experience and Intersubjective Dynamics of a Nasty Emotion
• 4 Pride as Self-Dissimulation and Refusal of the World
• 5 Shame and Virtue
• 6 Grief: Loss and Self-Loss
• 7 Dignity and the Phenomenology of Recognition-Respect
• 8 Trust as a Moral Emotion
• 9 Love and Admiration (Wonder): Fundaments of the Self – Other Relations
• 10 Goosebumps and Self-Forgetfulness: Awe as a Hybrid Moral Emotion
• Index
• About the Authors