Abstract
In this chapter I clarify the sense in which we can speak of an essentially affective mode of intentionality. I argue that this mode of openness to a world that, to put it in McDowellian terms, is ‘embraceable in thought’ cannot be exhaustively characterized in terms of the intentionality of other mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Emphasizing the strong relationship between the intentional character of our emotions and their rational intelligibility, I argue that human emotions are best characterized as responses properly so called and examine the complex structure of our human affective responses. The chapter closes with an attempt to spell out the specificum of affective intentionality. I suggest that the best way to capture the genuinely affective nature of our emotional world-relatedness is by conceiving of this mode of openness to the world in terms of our capacity to feelingly understand particular situations as being a certain way and therefore meriting and calling for certain sorts of responses. In this context, I coin the notion of acts of felt understanding. This discussion allows me to provide an overview of the contemporary debate on affective intentionality and determine the terms in which I want the topic of this book to be discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
As we all know, we sometimes respond in an emotional way to something we have just imagined, remembered, anticipated, or erroneously taken to be the case. I should therefore better have spoken of assumed occurrences. Since this would further complicate a statement that is already intricate enough, I decided to omit the ‘assumed’ in this context.
- 2.
Aristotle does, of course, never discuss the issue in these terms. Moreover, he offers no definition of what emotions in general should be taken to be. Rather, he usually proceeds by discussing specific ‘passions of the soul’. He often does so in such a way as to bring to the fore those sorts of situations to which these affective responses may be said to be, not merely typically, but furthermore, appropriately related (cf., for instance, Aristotle 1984).
- 3.
This is a phenomenological claim Robert Roberts also makes while listing a number of facts an adequate account of emotions should be able to accommodate. He articulates the point as follows: ‘Emotions are typically experienced as unified states of mind, rather than as sets of components (for example, a belief + a desire + a physiological perturbation + some behavior)’ (1988, p. 184).
- 4.
John Searle, the contemporary philosopher who has made this notion of a direction of fit popular, acknowledges at the very beginning of his influential book Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind that one of the limitations of his account is that it does not address the intentionality of affective states (see 1983, p. vii). In the course of the discussion, however, he comes to make a strange suggestion that concerns the intentionality of an emotion. He asserts that the direction of fit of an emotion may be said to be ‘null’ (see pp. 8–9). Whatever exactly he means by ‘a null direction of fit’, Searle’s (undeveloped) view of affective intentionality is radically different from the one I am beginning to sketch here.
- 5.
I am proposing that we could take Goldie to be hinting at the fact that this idea of a direction of fit might mislead us in our attempts to capture the nature of our affective relation to the world. But not even in the section that follows the passage just quoted, and in which under the heading of the ‘recognition-response tie’ he discusses the relation between the receptive-recognitional and the responsive-expressive aspects of an emotion, does Goldie explicitly make any claim concerning what I am construing here as a sort of bidirectional intentionality characteristic of emotions. (Drawing on Richard Wollheim [1999, pp. 45–51], Goldie criticizes the notion of a direction of fit, but he clearly has other reasons for so doing [cf. 2000, pp. 25ff.].) Since this idea of a sort of bidirectional intentionality is one we shall discuss below in detail, while examining Bennett Helm’s notion of a felt evaluation (in Sect. 5.2), I shall not insist here on the possibility of reading Goldie this way. At any rate, Goldie’s point seems to be that, even though they are analytically differentiable, as far as our emotional experiences are concerned, the recognitional and the responsive aspects of our affective relation to the world are inextricably intertwined. As I shall argue in what follows, this feature of our emotional experiences is related to the venerable idea that emotions are best understood as responses.
- 6.
Although we seldom speak of an emotional answer in the sense I am trying to convey, this move is motivated by the fact that the term ‘response’ (but not the term ‘answer’) has been employed by a number of philosophers (who, in so doing, are following a usage that is common among biologists) to refer to sheer physiological reactions. As I shall argue, the idea of a response/answer (but not the idea of a reaction) is strongly related to—indeed, can be said to imply—the idea of a point of view. As we shall come to see, this idea of a point of view (or of a particular view of the world, as I shall prefer to call it) may be argued to be central to our intuitive understanding of what an emotion is.
- 7.
This holds true even in those situations in which a person’s answer does not involve any salient behavior, for instance, when someone responds by remaining silent and doing nothing, where we can take this person’s ‘doing nothing’ to express her having understood the relevant situation as being a certain way and calling for this quietness. So, in suggesting that our emotional responses should be understood as answers to certain demands posed by the world—and to this extent as acts, and not as sheer reactions—, I am not meaning to suggest that all our emotional responses could be conceived of as actions properly so called, i.e. as something we perform. I do not think that we should go so far as Jean-Paul Sartre ([1939] 2002) and Robert Solomon (1976) do in construing our emotional responses as strategies we, more or less consciously, make use of. Rather, I am interested in stressing the idea that an emotional response is a form of comportment apt to make evident the way in which the relevant subject, in understanding the relevant situation as being a certain way, is situated with regard to it.
- 8.
The positive phototaxis of a sunflower, for instance, can only metaphorically be said to amount to an answer proper. The reason is because it is hard to understand the mechanical behavior of a sunflower, which is certainly related to some worldly occurrences in a sufficiently systematic way, as a response to something the sunflower, in some not purely metaphorical sense, takes to be a certain way. It is sunlight that causes the sunflower to ‘turn its head’ in a certain direction, but it is not in light of its taking the illumination conditions to be a particular way that the sunflower does so.
- 9.
There is a further aspect of responses proper which is related to the idea that to offer a response implies having understood something as constituting a certain sort of request. This is an aspect to which Goldie devotes considerable attention in his discussion of the recognition-response tie: one can normally cultivate one’s responses in a way one cannot cultivate one’s physiological reactions, for instance. This is the reason why one is accountable even for certain responses one could be said to be in the grip of—as it is sometimes the case when one comes to be affectively touched by something. One is probably not responsible for a given emotion at the very moment one experiences it, but one is, to some relevant extent, responsible for the profile of emotional responses one has developed in the course of one’s life.
- 10.
I am well aware that this suggestion could bring some of my readers to worry at this point about the possibility that this discussion might result in a far too intellectualistic view of affective intentionality. But my hope is that, as the discussion proceeds, these worries should dissipate.
- 11.
There is no view of human emotions apt to accommodate all the diverse states, conditions, and dispositions some philosopher or scientist has at some point called an emotion. Moreover, in everyday talk we use the term ‘emotion’ to refer to a variety of conditions that could be said to, at best, constitute an extremely heterogeneous class. But I think that there are states—and I have in mind what Goldie calls emotional episodes, i.e. occurrent, experienced psychological states—that paradigmatically represent the class of emotions. A non-exhaustive list of ‘exemplary human emotions’ would include: fear, anger, joy, sorrow, shame, envy, jealousy, grief, and remorse. These are not only the sorts of emotions we most frequently invoke in everyday talk, while seeking to explain some of our acts, but also the ones scientists and philosophers usually study. As I shall remark below in a different context (cf. footnote 31), I do not take love to amount to a typical emotion. The reason is because love can be expressed by means of a variety of emotions. Nor do I understand the sudden intense feeling that brings us to, for instance, jump up after having been exposed to an unexpected and loud sound, and which we call fright, to amount to a genuine emotion. Fright—and perhaps we should better talk here of frightful surprise—, as opposed to fear, is much too similar to a reflex. The problem is not the automatic character of the reaction we call fright. The problem is that a frightful surprise does not present a given situation as being a certain way. It is normally only after having been exposed to some frightening stimulus that one, seeking to understand the situation, begins to ‘register the world’ in order to look for that which has caused one’s fright. (Even the psychologist and neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp [1998] takes surprise, in general, to be much too simple to be understood as a genuine emotion.) But the relation between fright and fear is a complicated one. Not only because they probably have a number of common biological roots, but also because we can normally assert of the intentional object of our fear that it is worth being frightened.
- 12.
This is the insight that, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, gave birth to the philosophical view of emotions that has come to be known as the cognitivist approach. We shall discuss this position and a second one (the so-called feeling theory of emotion) below (in Sect. 2.3). Together they have framed the terms in which the current debate on affective intentionality is carried out.
- 13.
Here, I am elaborating on an example offered by Goldie; an example to which we shall come back (see footnote 44 below).
- 14.
I do not mean to suggest that we live in two different worlds. Nor am I suggesting that a human behavior is either a physiological reaction or an intelligible response. The point is simply that we are likely to understand some of our human reactions as rationally intelligible responses, while others do, for different reasons, not allow for such an interpretation.
- 15.
At least certain sorts of emotions (e.g. fear) tend to be conceived of in neuroscientifically inspired theories of emotions as reflex-like reactions (cf., for instance, LeDoux 1996).
- 16.
It is important to note that the idea that conceptual capacities are involved in all those forms of ‘recognition’ that are apt to justify an act does not imply the idea that what has been recognized has to be conceptualized (i.e. at least mentally brought to words) in order to count as experience. Nor does it imply that the object of an emotional experience (or of an experience more generally) is a proposition. In general terms, the object of an emotional experience is the situation towards which the emotion is directed; a situation the emotion at issue presents as being such-and-such. The fact that the situation towards which some emotion is directed can normally be captured by means of a proposition to the effect that some state of affairs is such-and-such has misled a number of philosophers and brought them to construe human emotions as attitudes towards propositions.
- 17.
- 18.
Given the sense of ‘response’ I am interested in, the expression ‘intelligible response’ may be regarded as a pleonasm. For it is precisely to the extent to which our emotions are normally rationally intelligible that we can conceive of them as responses proper.
- 19.
To be sure, Goldie opposes rationality strictly so called to intelligibility (cf. 2000, p. 5).
- 20.
Goldie argues that actions out of emotion are fundamentally different from actions not out of emotion (see p. 12). His point is that actions out of emotion do not seem to be adequately explicable in terms of feelingless beliefs and desires (at least not from the personal point of view).
- 21.
In this context, Goldie distinguishes between objective (impersonal) explanations and third-personal explanations. He argues that third-personal accounts are still personal in the sense that, in offering such an account, one is explaining the behavior of other individuals ‘without losing sight of the fact that these other people have a point of view, just as [one] do[es]’ (p. 2).
- 22.
It may be objected that this talk of an emotional response being merited fails to capture the automatic character many of our emotional responses exhibit. It is true, I think, that this way of talking does not make sufficiently clear that the emotional presentation of a situation as being a certain way quite often urges (or immediately moves) us to respond in certain ways, and not in others. But I believe that we should be careful not to construe our emotional responses as something we cannot resist, so to say. Were it true that our emotional responses are absolutely automatic reactions (much the way reflex-like reactions are), it would make no sense to speak, as psychologists often do, of cognitive strategies of emotional regulation.
- 23.
This is one of the reasons why I prefer to frame the discussion in terms of presentations [Vorstellungen], as Franz Brentano did (cf. [1874] 1995, Book II, Chapter 1), and not in terms of representations, as it is customarily done in cognitive science. I believe that the idea of presenting something in experience—an idea that involves the image of something being ‘given’ to the mind in some particular way—is, in a respect that is relevant here, much more specific than the idea of (internally) representing something that obtains ‘outside’ (in the world). For there is a sense in which to represent just means to ‘stand for’ something else. In cognitive science the term ‘representation’ is often used in this sense, which loses track of the idea that intentional objects are ‘given’ to the mind under a certain aspect.
- 24.
Brentano’s idea of something being ‘given’ to the mind should not be confused with the idea Sellars and McDowell are criticizing when they talk of the ‘myth of the given’. For Brentano, what can be said to be ‘given’ to the mind is an intentional object, and not some sense datum.
- 25.
In claiming that our emotions are intentional in that they are typically directed towards particular objects (as opposed to being about certain states of affairs), however, Goldie conceives of our emotions as states that are intentional in a relatively strong sense of the word. For what he has in mind are objects of experience. Goldie’s notion of intentionality is by far stronger than, for instance, the one appealed to by someone who, recurring to the idea of an ‘ability to detect danger’, and given the capacity the neuronal system involving the amygdala has to systematically elicit certain physiological reactions in the presence of certain kinds of stimuli, characterizes a given state of this brain system as an intentional state, without figuring out whether or not there is something the relevant subject is (at least in principle) able to experientially understand as frightening or threatening.
- 26.
As we shall see below when discussing Bennett Helm’s notion of an emotion’s focus (in Sects. 2.3 and 5.2), what ultimately permits us to find intelligible a particular behavior as an emotional response is a particular object—and by ‘object’ I mean a diversity of things such as a material thing, a person, a particular project, or even an idea—that appears to the relevant subject as worth caring about. We shall come to understand why the fact that our emotions are always directed, in an at least indirect way, towards a particular object is not in tension with the phenomenological fact I have been stressing throughout this section: emotional experiences are typically about particular situations which they present as calling for a certain sort of response.
- 27.
Of course, to exhibit this feature is not sufficient for something to be an intentional mental state. Certain linguistic and artistic entities (e.g. an utterance or an oil painting) can be said to be intentional precisely to the extent to which they can be said to be about something, but they are not (themselves) mental states. Searle (1980) begins to solve this problem by talking of derived (as opposed to original) intentionality in the case of intentional entities that are not (themselves) mental states.
- 28.
I think that this is what ultimately brings Goldie to suggest that we should capture the intentional character of our emotions in terms of their directedness-towards, and not in terms of their aboutness.
- 29.
In the relevant passage, Blattner is tackling the issue of the significance of an articulated comportment, and not discussing the issue of the meaningful content of an experience.
- 30.
The idea that emotions are responses to the significance something has to the relevant subject is presumably what brings Robert Roberts (1988) to qualify his claim that emotions are construals by saying that emotions are serious concern-based construals. Roberts understands our emotions as states that have (and can serve as) reasons, and not merely (as) causes. On the other side of the spectrum, and as an expression of the naturalistic inclination that characterizes most of the philosophical contributions made in the frame of cognitive science, we find proposals that conceive of these ‘significant’ events as biologically relevant events and, ultimately, as survival-related events (cf., for instance, Jesse Prinz 2004b).
- 31.
It has been repeatedly argued that certain emotions are not directed towards states of affairs or situations, but only towards particular objects. Love and hate are typical examples here. As already mentioned, I agree with Roberts (1988, p. 203) who claims that love is not a typical emotion, but an attitude or disposition that can be expressed by means of innumerable emotions; emotions that are typically about certain situations. The same holds true for hate.
- 32.
It may be objected that the idea that our emotions always present a situation as being a certain way clashes with an intuition many philosophers (and non-philosophers alike) seem to share with psychoanalysts: not all our emotions are conscious (cf. Lyons 1980, p. 6). The discussion about non-conscious emotions is, however, obscured by at least two ambiguities. On the one hand, the term ‘non-conscious emotion’ could refer to either of the following: first, to an occurrent emotion that exhibits some phenomenal character of which the relevant subject is not aware (in the sense of not having noticed or identified it), or second, to an emotion that has no experiential character whatsoever. On the other hand, by ‘emotion’ one could mean an occurrent and felt emotional episode, as Goldie calls it, or a longstanding dispositional state that involves a series of thoughts, desires, tendencies to act in certain ways, and at some point emotional feelings. It goes without much argument, I think, that there is no such thing as a completely non-conscious emotional episode. As Aaron Ben-Ze’ev observes, the idea of an unfelt feeling amounts to ‘an obvious absurdity’ (2000, p. 55). (For an argument against the intuition that the notion of an unfelt feeling constitutes a contradiction in terms, see Leighton 1986.) The feelings one could take to express an emotion of which the relevant subject is not aware—an emotion she does not notice being in—normally amount to mere bodily sensations. These feelings are not of such a nature that we could take them to present a particular situation as being a certain way. Indeed, this is probably the reason why, in these situations, one does not assimilate these feelings with an emotion of this or that sort (or with an emotion at all). However, if by means of a reflective interpretation of one’s comportment one can come to the conclusion that, at the relevant point, one was experiencing this or that emotion (although one was not aware of it), it is only because one can understand this comportment as a logical consequence of one’s having understood a situation (or a series of situations) as being a certain way. The intuition that emotions typically present a given situation as being a certain way—the idea that in emotionally responding to some occurrence the situation at issue is ‘given’ to the mind—does not imply that the subject of an emotion is always thematically aware of what is being presented. It only involves the idea that this subject has evidently understood the requirement imposed by the world. Very often this understanding, which may be thematized in a further move, is eminently practical, it is a matter of ‘knowing how’ to deal with the relevant occurrence.
- 33.
In conceiving of an emotion as a state that presents something as being a particular way, one is not necessarily endorsing the idea that an emotion is a sort of perception of some objectively (subject-independently) existing value, which Jesse Prinz (2004b), for instance, explicitly claims an emotion to be. For one could conceive of our emotions—and we could take Ronald de Sousa (1987), Robert Roberts (1988), and Amélie Rorty (1980) to be doing so—, as ways of rendering certain features of a concrete state of affairs or object experientially more salient, thereby presenting the situation at issue in certain terms (and not in others). To capture this idea, Roberts appeals, as already mentioned, to the notion of a construal. As he tells us, ‘[c]onstruing seems to involve dwelling on or attending to, or at a minimum holding onto, some aspect’ (1988, p. 187). Roberts states: ‘A construal, as I use the word, is a mental event or state in which one thing is grasped in terms of something else’ (p. 190). Roberts is eager to observe that ‘[p]henomenologically […] a construal is not an interpretation laid over a neutrally perceived object, but a characterization of the object, a way the object presents itself’ (pp. 191–192). This is an important point which I shall discuss below by appealing to Heidegger’s idea that experiencing something always means interpreting some situation (in a non-necessarily thematic way).
- 34.
- 35.
Given a number of fundamental points of agreement, these separately developed theories have come to be regarded as a unique locus classicus of the view I am attempting to characterize. It is, therefore, common to speak of the James-Lange theory.
- 36.
The philosophical and the scientific literature are both full of reviews of the so-called James-Lange theory. For this reason, and given that I am interested in a particular aspect of those views on emotion I shall discuss in this section—namely their capacity to make sense of the idea of a genuinely affective and, at the same, time genuinely intentional relation to the world—, I shall abstain from offering a detailed review of the position developed by James and Lange. In what follows, I am going to emphasize some ideas that are central not only to this view, but to the debate this proposal triggered. For an informative reconstruction of the position developed by James and Lange—one which stresses the differences between James’ and Lange’s original view and the theory recently developed by Damasio—, see Prinz (2004b, pp. 4ff.). For a review anchored in an attempt to show that the view developed by James and Lange remains a dynamic force in contemporary emotion research, see Friedman (2010).
- 37.
Put in its extreme form, the main objection raised against classical feeling theories of emotions in the context of the debate on affective intentionality states that these theories leave no room for the idea of a genuinely intentional affective relation to the world. We shall immediately see to which extent this could be argued to be the case. For an introductory overview, not only of this concrete debate between ‘feeling theorists’ and ‘cognitivist and appraisal theorists’, but also of a number of different discussions that are part of the current philosophical debate on emotions, see de Sousa (2010).
- 38.
The idea that the bodily sensations referred to by Lange and James are intentional is insofar controversial as there is room for dispute concerning whether we should conceive of bodily feelings as (intentional) experiences directed towards one’s own body or as (non-intentional) mental states localized in one’s body. But independently of how this issue will eventually be decided upon, this idea of a systematic relatedness to certain bodily states is not able to explicate the intuition at issue.
- 39.
Prinz’s embodied appraisal theory can be read as an attempt to solve this concrete problem.
- 40.
As far as the philosophical discussion is concerned, Errol Bedford (1956–1957) and Anthony Kenny ([1963] 2003) have to be seen as the pioneers of the first wave of criticism of feeling theories. In psychology the criticism of feeling theories had begun earlier. However, the objections raised by psychologists have been less clearly focused on the issue of the intentionality of our emotions. For an informative review (in German) of this psychological debate, see Traue and Kessler (2003).
- 41.
- 42.
Most authors who raise this issue refer to an experiment conducted by Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer (1962). Schachter and Singer show that, depending on specific contextual clues (manipulated in their experiment), a person tends to interpret the arousal she is experiencing (as a result of her having been injected with epinephrine without knowing it) in one of two different ways: as a state of euphoria or as a state of anger. This is thought to show that the bodily sensation alone is insufficient to determine an experienced physiological arousal as an emotion of this or that kind.
- 43.
According to Matthew Ratcliffe, cognitivists have offered a distorted picture of James’ position (cf. 2008, pp. 219ff.). Even if Ratcliffe is right, it is fair to say that the picture of feeling theories I have sketched above is the one against which cognitivists have reacted.
- 44.
As Goldie points out, the target of an emotion is in a very broad sense of the term ‘object’ an object, for it can be a thing, a person, a state of affairs, an action, or an event (see 2000, p. 17). Goldie suggests that even at this apparently basic level the determination of the intentional object of an emotion is not completely straightforward. His point is one we have already touched on: the target of an emotion does not have to coincide with the physical stimulus that elicits this emotion. To illustrate the point, Goldie offers an example on which I have elaborated above. He writes: ‘the sight of red numbers on a computer screen in London might bring about your fear, but the object of your fear is falling bond prices in the Japanese markets (in which you are too heavily invested for your own good)’ (2002, p. 250, note 11).
- 45.
In his discussion of the difference between the particular (or material) object—what we have called here the target—and the formal object of an emotion, Kenny attributes to the medieval scholastics this idea of a formal object of an intentional state (cf. [1963] 2003, pp. 132ff.). As Jan Slaby (2007) observes, Martin Heidegger ([1927] 1962, §30) may be taken to have ‘anticipated’ the distinction at issue, although he addressed the issue in completely different terms.
- 46.
One of the most common objections raised against the idea of a formal object concerns the circularity of the characterization of certain emotions (e.g. joy or embarrassment) in terms of their alleged formal objects (the joyful, the embarrassing). (For a criticism along these lines, see Gordon 1987, p. 70.) As we shall see below (in Sect. 5.2), this circularity can be said to be of a non-vicious sort. Prinz (2004b, pp. 62ff.) proposes evading this circularity by conceiving of the formal object in terms of what Richard Lazarus (1991) calls the ‘core relational theme’ of an emotion. (For a summary of Lazarus’ main point, see Prinz [2004b, pp. 14ff.].)
- 47.
Of course, one could point to a further ground of intelligibility of every emotional response. In order to understand a fragment of behavior as an emotional response, we have to already have understood the individual at issue as a subject of concern; as a being that can care about certain things and occurrences. We will have time to address this point below (in Chap. 7).
- 48.
This is a fundamental insight to which we shall come back below (in Sect. 5.2). As it will become clear in the course of this discussion, Helm is not an exponent of the cognitivist view—at any rate, not an exemplary one.
- 49.
For this reason I am not going to deal with this sort of development of James’ and Lange’s view. Bennett Helm (2009) offers a critical assessment of neo-Jamesian theories in which he acknowledges that these theories can be seen as an improvement not only over classical feeling theories, but also over the cognitivist view.
- 50.
- 51.
It has to be mentioned that, as far as the tenet that an emotion essentially is a judgment is concerned—a tenet that, as Solomon himself recognizes, ‘[relegates] all [bodily feelings] to the causal margins of emotion, as merely accompaniments or secondary effects’ (2004, p. 85)—, Solomon has moderated his position. He writes: ‘I am now coming to appreciate that accounting for the bodily feelings (not just sensations) in emotion is not a secondary concern and not independent of appreciating the essential role of the body in emotional experience’ (ibid.).
- 52.
It seems to me that Goldie offers a moderate criticism of cognitive theories along these lines (cf. 2000, pp. 22ff.).
- 53.
This is the line of (more radical) criticism I take Bennett Helm, Matthew Ratcliffe, and Jan Slaby to be advancing.
- 54.
According to Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (2008), this is a view the so-called realist phenomenologists have defended at the beginning of the twentieth century.
- 55.
As Roberts observes, those philosophers who made strong the idea that emotions are not feelings failed to pose the question as to which kinds of feelings emotions are not (cf. 1988, p. 185). Roberts notes that even Gilbert Ryle (1971), who offered a very differentiated taxonomy of feelings, neglected the idea that emotional feelings could be taken to constitute a class of feelings that is distinct from all the other classes he identified. It is not only for reasons of simplicity that I have reconstructed the contemporary philosophical debate on emotions in terms of the dichotomy between feeling theories of emotions on the one side and cognitivist theories on the other. However, early enough in the course of this debate we find developments that cannot be easily classified in one of these two positions. As far as the idea that emotional feelings are feelings of a particular sort—feelings that have an intentional content proper which is evaluative—is concerned, one has to mention here Patricia Greenspan’s (1988) claim that occurrent emotions are best understood as ‘propositional feelings’. In a later paper, Greenspan articulates the idea as follows: ‘Emotional affect or feeling is itself evaluative—and the result can be summed up in a proposition’ (2004, p. 132; my emphasis). In this paper, Greenspan points to the amphibious nature of her proposal. She writes: ‘My own view emerged from modification of judgmentalism, but I have concluded that it amounts to a version of the feeling view with enough structure to allow for rational assessment of emotions’ (ibid.).
- 56.
Goldie differentiates between emotion and episode of emotional experience. He writes: ‘An emotion […] is a complex state, relatively more enduring than an emotional episode, which itself includes various past episodes of emotional experience, as well as various sorts of disposition to think, feel, and act, all of which can dynamically interweave and interact’ (2000, p. 11). This distinction allows Goldie to avoid a very strong claim: the claim that emotions essentially involve feelings. The idea is that an emotion could be said to typically involve feelings at some point during its existence.
- 57.
As already mentioned, Goldie submits that bodily feelings are intentional in the sense that they are directed towards something, namely (a part of) one’s own body.
- 58.
At this point, an objection raised by an anonymous reviewer of the manuscript of this book could be answered. The objection targets the claim that the specificum of affective intentionality concerns the inextricable intertwinement of phenomenology and intentionality in paradigmatic instances of emotion. It does so by pointing to cases in which the bodily sensations a subject is inclined to associate with the relevant emotion and the intentional object of this emotion are not brought together in a world-directed emotional experience; the point being that in these cases, the phenomenology of the relevant emotion is exhausted by the relevant (non-relational) bodily feelings. The reviewer appeals to the idea that these bodily sensations may, in a second move, acquire a ‘borrowed intentionality’ (cf. Goldie 2000, p. 57) by being (retrospectively) associated with this person’s understanding of the object as being a certain way. He argues, that such a ‘non-conscious emotion’, as we may call it (cf. the discussion above [in footnote 32] concerning the idea of non-conscious emotions), has an intentional structure even before the person has become aware of this world-directedness. He takes this to suggest that the intertwinement of intentionality and phenomenology is not a necessary feature of human emotions, but something that is contingent on the subject’s awareness and attention during an emotional episode. The reviewer concludes that a sharp differentiation between emotional feelings with borrowed intentionality and emotional feelings with intrinsic intentionality (as being different in kind) is not warranted if the difference in experience depends on whether or not the subject is aware of the particular object of emotion when the emotional reaction takes place. This interesting objection, I think, fails to note that we could never settle the question concerning whether these bodily sensations constitute a genuine emotional experience, were we not able to understand them as feelings apt to present an aspect of the world as being a certain way and meriting a certain sort of response. In other words, the act of reflection that brings to light the fact that these feelings constitute an emotional response does not retrospectively confer intentionality on a feeling that was not originally part of a world-directed evaluative state. Rather, this act of reflection discovers the fact that the relevant sensations were, in a sense, always already intentional (although the subject was, at the relevant moment, not able to recognize this world-directedness). Indeed, not every bodily sensation can acquire borrowed intentionality by means of an association of ideas. If I reflectively recognize the causal and systematic link between my toothache and the presence of the dentist, my toothache does not become an intentional experience that presents the dentist as being a certain way. To this extent it is true that an emotional feeling that ‘acquires’ borrowed intentionality and an emotional feeling that from the very beginning exhibits an intrinsic world-relatedness are not different in kind. But this is because the act that leads to a borrowed intentionality does not create intentionality. What is borrowed, to put it in a different way, is only the experiential access to the particular character exhibited by the relevant object or situation. (So it is not true, as the reviewer suggests, that theories of affective intentionality have to presuppose that our emotions are always entirely transparent to us.) Indeed, although he articulates the point in a way that makes the view liable to the mentioned objection leveled by Ratcliffe, Goldie explicates this idea of a borrowed intentionality by contrasting his theory to the one offered by James in such a way as to suggest that the bodily feelings can ‘become’ intentional not as a matter of an association of ideas, but because they are a constitutive part of an experience that is always already intentional. He writes: ‘For James, the object of the frustration […] does not become transformed into an ‘object-emotionally-felt’ until there is the bodily feeling to combine in consciousness with the ‘object-simply-apprehended’. I say, rather, that the [object of the frustration] is an object-emotionally-felt from the moment you begin to feel frustrated by it, arising (in this case) prior in time to the bodily feeling in your chest of being hemmed in; then, I say, the two feelings come together in consciousness so that the bodily feeling becomes, through borrowed intentionality, directed towards the [object of the frustration]’ (2000, p. 57).
- 59.
To be sure, one can have world-directed feelings towards one’s own body. These feelings, Goldie (2002, p. 251, note 14) writes, are not bodily feelings. For in this case the object of the emotion is the body image, and not the body schema. (For the distinction between body image and body schema, see Gallagher 1995.)
- 60.
Psychologists (appraisal theorists) have normally no problem whatsoever with the idea of a non-propositional content. This seems also to be the route Richard Wollheim (1999) takes in order to make plausible the idea that the content of an emotion is not exhausted by the content of a proposition able to specify what this emotion is about. Goldie draws on Wollheim in a number of respects and, as far as this point is concerned, one certainly could take him to be doing so. He writes: ‘I do not want this notion of content to be taken to imply that content must be capturable in terms of a proposition’ (2002, p. 241). As I shall immediately explain, one could, however, take Goldie to be following a completely different strategy; one I find more plausible.
- 61.
This notion of a primary understanding is one Heidegger begins to prepare in the frame of his winter-term lecture 1921/22 by discussing what he calls ‘the hermeneutic situation’ (cf. [1921/22] 1985). (For a reconstruction of this idea of a primary understanding that connects it to motives Heidegger believes to find in Aristotle, see Kisiel [1993, pp. 227–275] and Gutiérrez Alemán [2002, pp. 95–114].) Heidegger relates this notion of a primary understanding to the particular mode of being of Dasein, which, as he argues, is defined by a sense of potentiality-for-being (or a sense of ability-to-be, as I shall, following William Blattner [1999], call it). We will have time to spell out what this claim amounts to (in Chap. 7).
- 62.
Heidegger famously writes: ‘In [interpretation] the understanding appropriates understandingly that which is understood by it. In interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself’ ([1927] 1962, p. 188).
- 63.
As my reader shall see (particularly in Sect. 5.2), my view of affective intentionality is strongly inspired in Helm’s idea that emotions are best conceived of as felt evaluations. One could, hence, wonder why I want to populate the (terminologically overpopulated) philosophical debate on emotions with yet another term, namely with the term ‘felt understanding’. Why do I not just recommend Helm’s account at this point and make use in the rest of the work of his definition of emotions as felt evaluations? The reason is because I want to stress Goldie’s and Stocker’s idea that an emotional experience of some situation as being a certain way basically amounts to a completely different (pre-thematic) way of understanding this situation. The term ‘felt evaluation’ may instead suggest (although this is not Helm’s view of the matter) that something is given to ‘our faculty of understanding’ and then evaluated. As already stated (in the main text above), I believe that the term ‘felt understanding’ allows us to refer to the way in which the world immediately strikes the subject in emotional experience as meriting a particular sort of response.
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Sánchez Guerrero, H.A. (2016). Felt Understanding: A View of Affective Intentionality. In: Feeling Together and Caring with One Another. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33735-7_2
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