Our Ability to Feel-Towards Together: Collective Affective Intentionality Preliminarily Conceived

Abstract

In this chapter I begin to address the issue of collective affective intentionality by discussing some of the considerations that animate the general debate on collective intentionality—a debate that turns on the question of what it is to share an intentional attitude in a sufficiently demanding sense of the verb ‘to share’. I eventually express my preference for a membership account that stresses the relational nature of collective intentionality as well as the normative character of the tie between the participants. In accordance with an objection repeatedly leveled against Margaret Gilbert’s account of so-called collective guilt feelings—which constitutes one of the most prominent exceptions to the tendency to neglect the realm of the affective in the early debate on collective intentionality in analytic philosophy—, I argue that a theory of collective affective intentionality able to capture the affective, the intentional, and the collective nature of the phenomenon at issue has to take as its point of departure the idea that collective affective intentionality is a matter of joint actualizations of our human faculty to feel-towards together. My main goal here is to provide a first glimpse of what has to be done in order to offer a philosophical account of collective affective intentionality which could be considered adequate in light of important insights gained in the course of both the debate on affective intentionality and the general debate on collective intentionality.

1 Introduction

In the preceding chapter I focused on the topic of affective intentionality. I discussed some of the main issues that motivate the contemporary philosophical debate on our affective relation to the world in a way that sought to support the following claim: affective intentionality is a matter of our ability to feelingly evaluate concrete situations as being a certain way and therefore meriting and urging certain sorts of responses.

I began this discussion by examining an insight that stands at the beginning of the current debate on affective intentionality: we tend to understand human emotions as intelligible answers to some pressing questions posed by the world, as opposed to understanding them as sheer organismic-physiological reactions elicited in a purely mechanical way by certain worldly occurrences (Sect. 2.2). In this order of ideas, by drawing on Bennett Helm, I pointed out that we are inclined to understand a human emotional comportment as a behavioral segment that expresses and co-constitutes a particular evaluative view of the world. I explicated this claim by elaborating on Helm’s suggestion that there is a complex arrangement of tacit references that may be argued to form a multilayered intentional structure typical of human emotions. I suggested that the possibility we have to make sense of a human comportment as a reaction that involves all the intentional references discussed is at the core of the possibility we have to understand this comportment as a personal answer to the demands posed by a world that, as McDowell puts it, is embraceable in thought (Sect. 2.3). By means of this discussion I tried to support the claim that human emotions are best conceived of as responses strictly so called.

Against the background of this view of our emotional life, I addressed the idea that the experiential content of an emotion is not exhausted by the that-clause of the judgment by means of which one could articulate what this affective evaluation is about. Seeking to specify what is special about our capacity to emotionally evaluate a situation as being a certain way and therefore urging certain sorts of responses, I eventually recommended conceiving of our affective openness to the world as constituted by what I proposed to call acts of felt understanding (Sect. 2.4). This last move was motivated by a thought that has become central to the current debate on affective intentionality: in order to make sense of the claim that there is a properly intentional and, at the same time, genuinely affective form of world-relatedness, we are compelled to make room for the idea that the aboutness of a typical human emotion and its distinctive phenomenology are inextricably intertwined; the idea being that, for this reason, affective intentionality may be argued to amount to a sui generis expression of our human openness to the world.

In this chapter, I shall begin to address the issue of collective affective intentionality. I shall do so by exposing some of the considerations that animate the general debate on collective intentionality; a debate that turns on the question of what it is to share an intentional attitude in a sufficiently demanding sense of the verb ‘to share’ (Sect. 3.2). In the course of this exposition I shall discuss a simple classification of the positions that dominate this philosophical discussion. By these means I shall contextualize Margaret Gilbert’s account of so-called collective guilt feelings. This is an account which should be seen as one of the most prominent exceptions to the tendency to neglect the realm of the affective in the early debate on collective intentionality in analytic philosophy. I shall close this chapter by critically examining Gilbert’s proposal (in Sect. 3.3). In accordance with an objection leveled against this account as well as with some of the results of the discussion developed in Chap. 2, I shall propose to preliminarily conceive of a collective affective intentional episode in terms of a joint actualization of our human ability to feel-towards together. My main goal here is to provide a first glimpse of what has to be done in order to offer a philosophical account of collective affective intentionality which could be considered adequate in light of certain important insights gained in the course of both the debate on affective intentionality and the general debate on collective intentionality.

2 Collective Intentionality: Some Issues That Animate the Debate

There are situations in which we coordinate our actions with those of other individuals in order to achieve some common goals. At least some of the experiences we have in these situations are characteristically marked by a sense that we (the participants) are doing something together. This is a form of experience which may be argued to differ in some fundamental respect from the experience that one merely is engaged in this activity alongside the relevant others (cf. our discussion in Sect. 1.1). What exactly this difference consists in is something we have to elucidate.¹ At this point it might be suggested, though, that two individuals who are involved in a genuinely joint action understand themselves as forming some sort of plural agentic identity, i.e. that they understand themselves as performing the relevant act as one.²

There also are situations in which we do not hesitate to ascribe actions to social groups such as corporations, orchestras, committees, families, parliaments, sport’s teams, or nations, to list but a few. We are inclined to do so, even though we are perfectly aware that it is through (or in virtue of) the deeds of the individuals involved that these groups act. In these cases, the assumption that the participants share the mentioned sense of plural agentic identity may be argued to play a fundamental role in our inclination to understand the relevant deeds as constituting some collective acts.

In the course of the last 25 years, this intuition concerning a sense of plural agentic identity has motivated a number of philosophers to explore the notion of a genuinely joint agency and to speak of genuinely collective intentions.^{3 , 4} On the basis of the idea that intentional acts performed in social contexts ultimately have to be seen as acts of individual subjects, the idea of a genuinely collective intentional act has given rise to a conceptual tension which Schweikard and Schmid (2013) call The Central Problem of Collective Intentionality. Let us try to understand what this philosophical problem consists in.⁵

In the paper in which the very term of art ‘collective intentionality’ has been coined, John Searle ([1990] 2002) claims that we could never explain genuinely joint action in terms of formally individual intentions, i.e. in terms of intentions expressed in the form ‘I intend to do such-and-such’ (I-intentions). In order to explain joint actions, we necessarily have to invoke intentions expressed in the form ‘we intend to do such-and-such’; the point being that these we-intentions, as he calls them, cannot be reduced to I-intentions. Searle illustrates the point by comparing two sets of persons performing the very same sort of movements in different contexts.

Individuals enjoying a sunny day in a park compose the first set. Having been suddenly bothered by a rainfall, they, independently of each other, begin to run looking for a centrally located shelter. In this situation, Searle observes, one could take each individual’s action to rely on an intention expressed in the form ‘I am running to the shelter’. Searle concludes: ‘In this case there is no collective behavior; there is just a sequence of individual acts that happen to converge on a common goal’ ([1990] 2002, p. 92; my emphasis). This could be argued to be the case even if the individuals involved were to have mutual knowledge of each other’s intentions. The second set is composed by a number of persons who begin to run to the very same shelter as part of an outdoor ballet they are jointly performing. Searle argues that, even if the movements of the individuals who constitute these two sets were indistinguishable, the actions of the individuals taking part in the joint performance and the actions of the individuals, independently of each other, running for shelter may be said to be ‘clearly different internally’ (ibid.). The ‘internal’ difference at issue is given by the fact that in the case of the individuals involved in the ballet performance their actions may be said to rely on an intention expressed in the form ‘we are running to the shelter’. By means of this example Searle attempts to show that ‘[t]here really is such a thing as collective intentional behavior that is not the same as the summation of individual intentional behavior’ (p. 91). Regardless of whether this conclusion is warranted or not, Searle’s example allows us to appreciate the unspecificity of the phrase ‘to share an intention’. For there is a clear sense in which the individuals of the first set may be said to be sharing an intention, namely their formally individual intention to go for shelter. To the extent, however, to which it is compatible with the idea that the intentions of the involved individuals just happen to have the same content, this sense of ‘sharing’ should be taken to be too weak to serve as the basis for the concept of a genuinely joint action. In the second situation, in saying that the individuals involved are sharing an intention, we are, at any rate, making use of a clearly stronger notion of a shared intention. Moreover, in this case some of the formally individual intentions of the participants may be easily understood as intentions that are derived from their shared intention.

Philosophers interested in the idea of a collective intentional behavior are normally interested in attitudes shared by a number of individuals in a relatively strong sense of the verb ‘to share’. As we shall see, this does not necessarily commit them to the idea that we can speak of a genuinely collective intentional behavior only in case the group itself can be understood as the subject of the intention at issue. There is, thus, no agreement concerning the claim that we-intentions are necessarily intentions the bearer of which is the collective as such. Put another way, a collective intention is not always assumed to be a collective’s intention.

Although the initial interest, as mentioned above, was to explore the idea of a joint action, a series of considerations have gradually extended the scope of this line of inquiry.⁶ These considerations quite often turn on the idea of a collective responsibility that accompanies the notion of a joint action. Given that in ascribing actions and responsibilities to collectives we are ultimately attributing beliefs and desires to them—or so one could argue—, we are pressed to make an effort to understand the meaning of our (tacit or explicit) ascription of these and other propositional attitudes to groups.

The majority of the philosophers contributing to this debate seem to reject a prima facie plausible answer to the question concerning the meaning of these attributions. This answer is based on the idea that these ascriptions are always metaphorical in nature. There probably is enough room for dispute concerning whether the rejection of this view involves the rejection of the idea that attributions of intentions and intentional behavior to groups are purely instrumental in character, i.e. the idea that such an ascription is basically a heuristic tool. Most philosophers involved in the debate seem, however, to assume that these attributions are not grounded in purely pragmatic considerations concerning our capacity to predict and explain the performances of certain groups by appealing to collective intentional states; the point being that these ascriptions could be argued to refer to ‘something real’.

To account for the intuition that there is some literal sense in which we could speak of a collective intentional state has, however, not been an easy task. This is basically due to the discomfort that the idea of a group mind (and particularly the idea of a collective form of consciousness) causes in the contemporary philosophical discussion.⁷ Here we find the ground of the Central Problem of Collective Intentionality: the clash between the intuition that a collective intentional state cannot be reduced to individual intentional states and the intuition that mindfulness properly so called is always an attribute of certain organismic individuals, and never a property of groups as such.

In this context, a number of philosophers seem to have imposed on themselves a seemingly concrete task: to show that it is possible to conceive of collective intentionality in such a way as to respect, first, the assumption that only individuals can be said to be in genuine (conscious) psychological states, and second, the intuition (or set of intuitions) that underlie the sort of methodological individualism that is customary in a number of contemporary social sciences. Searle explicitly argues that any valid account of collective intentionality has to meet two conditions of adequacy. First, it must be compatible with the idea that society is nothing over and above the individuals who comprise it; the ultimate point being that any intentional state is in the brain of some individual. Second, it must be compatible with the idea that any (formally) collective intentional state may be mistakenly had by an isolated individual. Searle writes: ‘I could have all the intentionality I do have even if I am radically mistaken, even if the apparent presence and cooperation of other people is an illusion, even if I am suffering a total hallucination, even if I am a brain in a vat’ ([1990] 2002, p. 97). These are conditions Searle characterizes as ‘commonsensical, pretheoretical requirements’ (p. 96, footnote 1).

The mere formulation of this task may be thought to already contain a possible solution to the problem. Indeed, Searle catalyzed the debate I am trying to reconstruct by suggesting that the collective character of those intentions we seem to have to invoke in order to explain genuinely joint action is a matter of a formal peculiarity they exhibit: these intentions make reference to a group. On this view, collective intentions are mental states each of the participating individuals has in a ‘we-mode’. These we-intentions are primitive in the sense that they cannot be reduced to I-intentions. They can normally be understood as the result of the identification of the participating individuals with a group they jointly constitute and their corresponding willingness to cooperate with the other members of this group.⁸ The idea, as Margaret Gilbert—in the context of a critique of Searle’s position—formulates it, is as follows: ‘In order that there be collective behavior […] each individual member of the supposed collective must have an appropriate we-intention “in his head”’ (2007, p. 38).

Although Searle sets his account of collective intentions off against the one offered by Tuomela and Miller (1988)—an account Searle takes to be ‘typical in that it attempts to reduce collective intentions to individual intentions plus beliefs’ ([1990] 2002, p. 93)—the idea of a we-mode intention is traditionally attributed to Raimo Tuomela (1984).⁹ According to Tuomela, however, it was Wilfrid Sellars (1963, 1968, 1980) who first ‘argued for the necessity of employing other-regarding intentions, which he calls we-intentions’ (Tuomela 1995, p. 425). Hans Bernhard Schmid and David Schweikard (2009, p. 32) maintain that Sellars may have picked up the term from Robin George Collingwood ([1942] 1947).

The suggestion that some of our mental states are immediately understood by us (the bearers of these states) as psychological states that are common to us (the participants) is one we also seem to find—framed, of course, in a completely different way—in the continental phenomenological tradition to which the debate on collective intentionality has been rather impermeable until quite recently.

Probably influenced by Heidegger, in §55 of his Cartesian Meditations Husserl speaks, as mentioned above (cf. Chap. 1, footnote 8), of ‘the first community’ which, as he writes, is ‘in the form of a common world’ ([1929] 1999, p. 121).¹⁰ Drawing on David Carr (1973), Eric Chelstrom proposes that Husserl is arguing here for the idea of a cogitamus, which may be said to open up the intersubjective world (cf. 2011, pp. 89ff.). Chelstrom stresses the grounding character of the experiences at issue here by writing that ‘intersubjective moments of experience, instances where there is a non-reducible we, can be understood as foundational for higher order intersubjective meanings’ (p. 89). In support of this interpretation of the notion of a first community Chelstrom refers to a claim Husserl makes in §48 of the Meditations. Husserl writes: ‘not all my own modes of consciousness are modes of my self-consciousness’ ([1929] 1999, p. 105; as quoted by Chelstrom, p. 94; italics in original).¹¹ Chelstrom maintains that it is elaborating on this line of thought that Aron Gurwitsch comes to speak of ‘“mental processes [that are] appertinent to the We” [Wir-Erlebnisse]’ (1979, p. 28; as quoted by Chelstrom, p. 96). This is an idea Gurwitsch unpacks by writing:

Included in the sense of every mental process […] there is also the co-presence of those others which is co-apprehended through the ‘we’ (and, more particularly, co-apprehended as effecting these mental processes together with me). On the basis of the immanental co-presence of others pertaining to the sense of these mental processes—others together with whom I effect the mental processes in question—these mental processes are determined specifically as ours and are distinguished from those that are specifically mine (1979, p. 28; as quoted by Chelstrom, p. 96).

So the idea is that we could provide an initial characterization of a particular sort of experiences we humans can have—among them those experiences that are accompanied by a sense of joint agency—by referring to what might be called a sense of ourness.¹² The intuition that such a sense may be claimed to structure the experiences at issue has been defended in the frame of different intellectual traditions.

There is a peculiarity of these sorts of accounts that allows them to meet the first condition of adequacy stated by Searle: accounts of collective intentionality along these lines are at the same time individualist and collectivist. They are individualist concerning the subject (bearer) of the intentional sate at issue—for it is a particular individual who has the relevant intentional state—, and they are collectivist concerning the subject’s mode of the intentional state in question—for, according to this view, the self-understanding implicit in the intentional acts at issue characteristically exhibits a collective character.¹³ Seeking to capture this difference, Schmid distinguishes between subjective individualism and formal individualism (cf. 2003, p. 205). Chelstrom makes the point by writing that ‘[t]he intending subject, the conscious subject, is not equivalent to the subject of intention or subject matter of acts of consciousness, i.e. it is not the syntactical subject referenced in and through an intentional act’ (2011, p. 91).

Regardless of the preferred terminology, the recognition of this particularity of the accounts just presented allows us to provide a basic taxonomy of theories of collective intentionality. Following Anita Konzelmann Ziv (2007), I shall use the term ‘membership accounts’ to refer to those accounts that rely on the intuition that we should conceive of collective intentional episodes in terms of interrelated mental states that, in virtue of a formal feature capturable by Tuomela’s notion of a ‘we-mode’, tacitly refer to some group, but are had by a number of individuals who regard themselves as members of this group. Membership accounts are to be contrasted with a second type of accounts, for which we shall reserve the term ‘collectivist accounts’.¹⁴ A few lines below, we are going to discuss the main feature of this second kind of theories.

If we can talk of two general classes of accounts of collective intentionality it is because solutions along the lines just sketched failed to satisfy everyone.¹⁵ Particularly Searle’s account, which can be characterized further as an internalist membership account of collective intentionality, has been repeatedly criticized for allowing for the possibility of something like a solipsistic collective intention, i.e. for proposing that we could speak of a collective intention in cases in which a single individual had an intention of the form ‘we intend to do such-and-such’. The problem is not merely that, as Anthonie Meijers puts it, ‘[i]n case these participants do not exist in the real world, there is simply no collective intentionality’ (2003, p. 179). The problem is furthermore that this counterintuitive implication of the account may be taken to point to a more general inadequacy of the approach: Searle’s internalist approach fails to stress the relational nature of genuinely joint agency (and of genuinely collective intentionality). It fails to respect the intuition that the individuals’ actions that constitute a collective action—or a collective intentional behavior, as Searle prefers to call it—should be interrelated in a way that is much more substantial than the mere overlap of their plural self-reference.¹⁶ As a consequence of this failure, it has been objected, Searle’s account conceives of a collective intention as a sheer ‘correlated series of we-intentions’ (Gilbert 2007, p. 41); that is to say, as ‘a series whose elements [merely] fit together in the right way’ (ibid.).¹⁷ As should become clear in the second part of this book, I find this line of objection not only warranted, but also absolutely crucial.

Drawing on the intuition that the idea of a joint action is the idea of a plural act that arises from the coordination of the participants’ actions, Michael Bratman (1993, 1999) offers a radically different account of ‘shared intentions’, as he prefers to call the phenomenon. Referring to Alan Donagan (cf. 1987, p. 95), Bratman suggests that the thought according to which ‘“the study of intention” is in part the “study of planning”’ (1993, pp. 97–98) could ‘serve as a basis for reflection on the phenomenon of shared intention’ (p. 98). Bratman’s initial premise is the idea that one of the fundamental roles intentions in general play is to plan and coordinate the behavioral components that constitute a given action.

In this context, Bratman contends that the term ‘shared intention’ does not allude to ‘an attitude in the mind of some superagent consisting literally of some fusion of […] two [or more] agents’ (ibid.). Nor does this term refer to some overlap of individuals’ psychological states that exhibit a congruent we-mode. Rather, it refers to a particular sort of situations in which a specific kind of interpersonal relationship can be described. Such a relationship presupposes a series of interrelated (ordinary, i.e. formally individual) intentional states had by the participating individuals.¹⁸ Bratman’s idea is that the individuals’ intentions that are part of a shared intention basically coordinate the individuals’ actions that constitute the relevant joint action. They do so by making sure that the plans (and subplans) of the participants mesh together. In so arguing, Bratman ultimately construes a shared intention as ‘a [complex] state of affairs consisting primarily of appropriate attitudes of each individual participant and their interrelation’ (p. 99; my emphasis), as opposed to construing it as a particular kind of mental state.

This proposal is set up to avoid the counterintuitive implication of the internalist (individualist) view mentioned above, and it certainly succeeds in doing this. A basic problem of Bratman’s account is, however, that it may be argued to transform (or even deform) our ordinary notion of an intention (cf. Tollefsen 2004). For we normally use the term ‘intention’ to refer to a mental state the content of which specifies an aim, purpose, or goal, and not to refer to a complex state of affairs, as Bratman does here.

One could defend Bratman, however, by maintaining that, although his (technical) notion of a shared intention does not naturally extend our vernacular notion of an intention, his account succeeds in specifying what has to be the case for an ascription of a shared intention to be correct.¹⁹ In other words, Bratman makes an effort to spell out in which situations we could feel comfortable in speaking of a genuinely shared intention. This is something Searle, for instance, may be argued to not even have attempted to do in the contribution discussed. Gilbert articulates the criticism as follows: ‘It seems […] that in order fully to understand what a we-intention is one needs to understand what a we-intention is’ (2007, p. 41); the point being that ‘one needs to know what we-intentions assume or presuppose’ (ibid.).²⁰ So one could definitively argue that one of the strengths of Bratman’s approach is precisely that it makes clear that collective intentions, as Gilbert puts it, ‘are not a purely mental phenomenon’ (p. 44).²¹ This idea that collective intentionality cannot be conceived of as something that is ‘purely mental’ is particularly important. At a minimum, it should lead us to differentiate the intentional acts that are at the root of the phenomena we are interested in from the moments of intentional community I call episodes of collective intentionality.²²

But there is a second line of objection to Bratman’s account of shared intentions. To be sure, objections along these lines may also be raised against Searle’s account of collective intentions. These objections concern the idea that intending something presupposes being, at least in principle, able to bring about what one intends to do, in the sense that the intended action must be, to a relevant extent, under one’s control. The problem is that it seems that, having ruled out frank coercion, one cannot control the actions of the other individuals involved in what Bratman calls a shared intention; at least not in the way alleged to be presupposed by our vernacular notion of an intention.²³

Bratman (1999) responds to these series of objections by coining the technical expression ‘intending that’. This maneuver seems effective, but it has been protested that it changes the subject matter of discussion (cf. Tollefsen 2004). I believe that this latter objection becomes innocuous as soon as one takes Bratman to be after an articulation of that which has to be the case for an ascription of a shared intention to be correct.

At any rate, even an account along these lines, which excludes the counterintuitive idea of a solipsistic collective intention by emphasizing the relational nature of a genuinely shared intention, has failed to satisfy everyone. The problem is that Bratman’s account may be contended to also fail to show that an intention shared in a strong sense of the verb ‘to share’ is something completely different from a non-accidental overlap of individuals’ intentions. In other words, it may be objected that Bratman merely provides an account of highly coordinated aggregate action, as opposed to offering an account of genuinely joint action. To provide an account of collective intention and action, it has been objected further, is to explain in which situations—under which conditions—the relevant group, as Gilbert puts it, ‘can plausibly be regarded as having an intention of its own’ (2002, p. 123).

Following this line of objection, I find it crucial to differentiate between a highly coordinated (aggregate) pluripersonal behavior and a genuinely joint action. For one can certainly perform a number of actions alongside certain others, i.e. in a purely parallel manner, in a way that is, nevertheless, highly coordinated with certain actions and goals of the relevant others. Take the case of someone who, seeking to arrive at some particular goal without delays and accidents, coordinates his actions as a driver with those of a number of individuals who have taken the same road (on the assumption that these others have a similar goal and also coordinate their actions as drivers with his deeds). In this way he contributes to the, in a sense, shared goal of non-congested vehicular traffic.²⁴ I doubt, however, that, in order to make sense of the idea of a genuinely joint action, we have to show that there is a sense in which the pertinent group of individuals can be conceived as a sort of supraindividual centre of intentional attitudes, as the real bearer of the shared intention at issue. In particular, I believe that one does not need the idea of a supraindividual centre of intentional attitudes in order to differentiate the two sorts of cases that have to be distinguished: cases in which one does something together with certain others and cases in which one does it merely alongside these others. But let us continue to characterize the positions that determine the ‘classic’ analytic philosophical debate on collective intentionality.

On the basis of the idea that a genuinely collective intention should be construed as a collective’s intention (i.e. as an intention the bearer of which is the collective understood as a single centre of intentional attitudes), Gilbert has repeatedly argued that accounts of the two kinds considered so far fail to recognize that certain normative relations are at the core of a properly collective intention (and of a genuinely joint action).²⁵ These are normative relations that arise from the fact that the individuals involved in a truly joint action have come to constitute what Gilbert calls a plural subject of intention (and action).

Gilbert develops this thought by pointing out that to form a genuinely collective intention, for the individuals involved, means to generate a series of obligations and expectations that entitle them to rebuke each other when they fail to perform their part in the intended joint action (cf. 1990, p. 3).²⁶ Gilbert claims that a collective intention is always grounded in some joint commitment of certain members of a population ‘to intend as a body to do that thing’ or ‘to do (as a body) a certain thing’ (cf. 1989, Chapter 4; 1990). A joint commitment, Gilbert claims, comes into existence when each of the participants expresses (though not necessarily in a verbal way) his or her willingness to take part in the commitment at issue (cf. 1990, pp. 6ff.). As she puts it: ‘each must openly express his or her readiness to be jointly committed with the relevant others, in conditions of common knowledge’ (2002, p. 126).

Gilbert stresses that in a joint action not only the fact that all other relevant individuals have committed themselves to the success of the action at issue, but also the obligations and entitlements brought about by these commitments are common knowledge among the individuals involved (cf. 1990, p. 7). She is particularly eager to emphasize that a joint commitment does not amount to a set of matching personal commitments. A truly joint commitment is a commitment on which two or more persons agree together, i.e. simultaneously and interdependently (ibid.). Moreover, having generated a series of obligations and entitlements, without some additional agreement, a joint commitment cannot be rescinded unilaterally (cf. Gilbert 1990, p. 8). Only when each of the participants has agreed to rescind the joint commitment at issue the obligations and entitlements it generated cease to exist. Such a commitment could, of course, be unilaterally broken, but in so doing, the individual who is breaking the commitment would not cancel out the obligations it brought about.

On this basis, Gilbert submits that a social group should be seen as a special sort of entity that is constituted by a plurality of individuals who are strongly tied to one another by joint commitments to do such-and-such—where ‘doing such-and-such’ is broadly construed so as to include intentional states of different sorts. She goes so far as to argue that our vernacular notion of a social group is the notion of a plural subject of some intentional act (cf. Gilbert 1989, Chapter 4). The point is that, being understandable as a sort of plural subject, a social group can be regarded as the legitimate subject of certain intentional attitudes.

This idea that in cases of genuinely collective intentionality the relevant group should be understood as the proper subject of the intentional attitude at issue amounts to the basic claim of the position we are calling the collectivist view of collective intentionality.²⁷ During the last 20 years, Gilbert has defended it by extending her analysis of what it is to do something together, in a first step, to the analysis of collective beliefs, and, finally, to the analysis of what one may, at first sight, be inclined to call a collective affective intentional attitude.²⁸ In what follows, we shall take a look at the first of these developments of Gilbert’s theory. (In the next section we shall discuss Gilbert’s attempt to extend her plural subject account to the realm of the affective.)

Gilbert’s point of departure is the thought that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a number of individuals to collectively believe that such-and-such that they all believe this to be the case. Concerning the non-necessity of this condition she writes: ‘Often what is taken to determine the collective belief in such cases is a formal voting procedure where the opinion that receives the most votes is deemed, for that reason, to be the opinion of the court, the union, or whatever’ (2004, p. 97). As to the non-sufficiency of this prima facie plausible requirement, Gilbert provides the following example:

Consider a court. A certain matter may not yet have come before it. It would then seem right to say that, as yet, the court has no opinion on the matter. The individual justices may, at the same time, have definite personal opinions about it. What they now think, however, is not relevant to the question of what the court now thinks (p. 98).

So, in order to participate in a collective belief, the involved individuals do not have to also personally believe the proposition at issue to be true. Nor do they have to behave as if they personally believed it to be true. On the other hand, it does not suffice for a number of individuals to participate in a collective belief to personally take the corresponding proposition to be true and behave in a way that corresponds to their personal assent to the truth of this proposition. For they would not jointly believe what is at issue, were they to understand their respective belief as a belief they individually have alongside each other.

On this view, in order to participate in a collective belief the individuals involved have to respect their obligation to do their part to make the case that pertinent endeavors be conducted on the assumption that the belief in question is the belief of their group. According to Gilbert, we can talk here of an obligation for the following reason: ‘Once a group belief is established, the parties understand that any members who bluntly express the opposite belief lay themselves open to rebuke by other members’ (p. 99). In other words, in the case of a collective belief, too, each of the individuals involved has a standing that allows her or him to rebuke the other members of the group for expressing a view that conflicts with the collective belief at issue.

In this context, Gilbert establishes three conditions of adequacy for an account of collective belief. She writes:

It should explain how the existence of a collective belief that p could give the parties the standing to rebuke each other for bluntly expressing a view contrary to p. It should not suppose that all or most of the parties must personally believe that p. Nor should it suppose that if all or most of them believe something then they collectively believe it (p. 100).

On this basis, Gilbert claims that ‘it is both necessary and sufficient for members of a population, P, collectively to believe something that the members of P have openly expressed their readiness to let the belief in question be established as the belief of P’ (p. 100). So we can speak of a collective belief whenever the involved individuals have expressed their willingness to do their part to bring it about that they believe as a group. She brings it to the following formula we are already familiar with: ‘A population, P, believes that p if and only if the members of P are jointly committed to believe as a body that p’ (ibid.). The idea is that ‘[it is b]y virtue of their participation in a joint commitment [that] the parties gain a special standing in relation to one another’s [belief-expressing] actions’ (ibid.).

A number of philosophers (cf. Meijers 1999, 2002 and Wray 2001) have objected to this proposal by pointing to the difference between accepting a proposition and having a belief. The point is that a group might probably be said to accept a proposition, but not to have a belief properly so called. To these sorts of objections Gilbert rejoins by claiming that we should refrain from deciding whether collectives can really have beliefs based on our intuitive understanding of what it is to be in the psychological state we call a belief. One way of approaching the issue of collective cognitive states, Gilbert suggests, is by examining the contexts in which everyday ascriptions of such states are generally considered true or false ‘with the aim of arriving at a perspicuous description of the phenomena people mean to refer to when ascribing collective cognitive states’ (2004, p. 97). The idea is that, although ‘it is likely enough that collective beliefs differ in important ways from the beliefs of individual human beings’ (p. 103), ‘many of the features traditionally claimed to characterize belief in general can be argued to characterize collective beliefs’ (ibid.). This last remark suggests that Gilbert does not really expect from a theory of collective belief that it be able to show that certain groups can be understood as bearers of a psychological state of the sort we normally call a belief. She seems not to expect this, even though she, in general, requires of a theory of collective intentionality that it be able to show that the group at issue can plausibly be regarded as having some intentional attitude of its own.

The best way to make sense of this apparent contradiction, I think, is by taking Gilbert to also be articulating what has to be the case (in the world, and not merely in the head of the participants) for the ascription, in this case, of a collective belief to be correct. The key to dissolving this apparent inconsistency is, hence, to differentiate the psychological states that are at the root of a collective intentional attitude (of the relevant sort) from the state of affairs that merits being called a collective intentional episode (of the relevant sort). Such a state of affairs always involves a number of individuals who have the appropriate psychological attitudes, which, on this account, include some joint commitment to, in this case, believe as a group that something is such-and-such and act in accordance with this belief.

Before we tackle the specific issue of collective affective intentionality in the next section, I would like to briefly articulate what I take collective intentionality (in general) to be. There is nothing original in my general view of collective intentionality, since it merely integrates into a single picture diverse insights mentioned throughout this discussion.²⁹ The formulation of this view only seeks to articulate some conditions of adequacy the theory of collective affective intentionality that I shall develop in the second part of this book—qua theory of a special case of collective intentionality—has to fulfill.

To begin with, I believe that the term ‘collective intentionality’ can refer to two related but different things. First, it can refer to a capacity or set of capabilities certain minded creatures (human beings, paradigmatically) exhibit. Here I mean the capacity to be intentionally directed towards particular objects, states of affairs, values, projects, etc. in what can be taken to be a properly joint manner, as opposed to being directed towards these intentional objects in a private or purely parallel manner.³⁰ Second, it can refer to certain sorts of situations that centrally involve a number of individuals who are jointly directed towards some intentional object. These episodes of collective intentionality are not themselves mental states, but, as pointed out, they essentially involve individuals comporting themselves towards something on the basis of mental states of a peculiar sort, namely of (non-misleading) we-intentional states.³¹

As a condition of the possibility of their being jointly directed towards an intentional object two or more individuals have to (a) be similarly open to this object’s being, i.e. they have to share a basic understanding of its mode of being, and (b) be open to one another as subjects who share a common world and are, to this extent, candidates for some joint intentional act. In order to actually be intentionally directed towards something in a joint manner two or more individuals additionally have to (c) be in a particular intentional state that is directed towards the relevant object, where it is fundamental that (d) this intentional state be such that it can be argued to tacitly refer back to some particular ‘we’ they, in the relevant situation, jointly constitute. The latter is an oblique reference that points to what, drawing on Schmid (2014a), may be called the plural self of the intentional acts at issue.³² Finally, (e) the fact that the participants’ intentional states refer back to one and the same group cannot be a matter of sheer coincidence. That is to say, the individuals involved must stand in a certain objective relationship to one another. This is a relationship that warrants the claim that their understanding themselves as members of the relevant ‘we’ is not misleading.³³

So I take the criticism raised against Searle’s internalist account to be absolutely warranted. Talk of collective intentionality just makes no sense in cases in which there is only one individual involved. However, I agree with Searle (and, to this extent, with Tuomela, among others) that what makes out of an intentional state an act by means of which someone participates in an episode of collective intentionality is not exclusively the fact that it has some content that can be said to be shared. The collective character of those intentional acts through which people come to participate in a moment of intentional community is also a matter of their mode. To this extent, I do not favor accounts along the lines of the one offered by Bratman, i.e. accounts that reduce collective intentional attitudes to formally individual intentional states. I believe, however, that Bratman is pointing to something fundamental when he stresses that the intentional states of the participants in a collective intentional act have to be interrelated in a substantial way.

Agreeing with Bratman in this last respect, I believe that the eminently relational nature of collective intentionality is not exhausted by (and not grounded in) the practical coordination of the participants’ acts. A genuinely joint act is not merely a highly coordinated pluripersonal act. So I believe that Gilbert is right in claiming that, in virtue of their conceiving of themselves as constituting a group directed in a particular way towards something, the participants in a collective intentional act come to occupy a space that is normatively structured by expectations (rights and obligations) of a particular sort.³⁴

Finally, I believe that there is a sense in which the group constituted by the participants in a collective intentional episode may be understood as the subject of the relevant intentional state. It is important, however, to note that this does not imply that in a case of genuinely collective intentionality there is some additional supraindividual bearer of intentional attitudes. A collective intentional attitude is an intentional attitude had by the participating individuals as a group. Moreover, as it has been pointed out (Schmid 2014a; Tollefsen 2002; Tuomela 1992), an account of collective intentionality based on Gilbert’s idea of a plural subject can be claimed to take for granted what it aims at explaining.³⁵ In this context, Schmid (2014a) persuasively argues that there is only one way to elude this circularity, without falling into an infinite regress: one has to locate the collective quality of the intentional act at issue in the plural character of the (non-thetic) self-awareness it involves qua intentional act.³⁶ This is the sense in which the collective character of those intentional attitudes that are at the root of a moment of intentional community could be said to also be a matter of the subject.³⁷ In particular, and as we shall see (in Sect. 4.3), it may be said to be a matter of what Schmid calls the phenomenal subject.

To sum up, I believe that the most plausible account of collective intentionality construes it as a relational phenomenon at the heart of which we find intentional states of individuals that refer back to some group (they take themselves to constitute) and generate a particular sort of normatively constrained relatedness among the participants. Insofar as it is grounded in the idea of formally collective intentional states had by individuals who are not mistaken in understanding themselves as members of a particular group, the most plausible account of collective intentionality is, in my view, a membership account.

In the next section, and ultimately seeking to determine the general terms in which an adequate account of collective affective intentionality should be formulated, I shall critically examine Gilbert’s attempt to provide an account along the lines of her plural subject theory of what she takes to be a collective feeling.

3 Collective Affective Intentionality and Our Ability to Feel-Towards Together

Gilbert (2002) makes an effort to show that an extension of some of the ideas formulated in her previous works may allow us to understand the sense in which certain groups of individuals could be said to feel an emotion of a particular kind in a genuinely collective manner. Unsurprisingly, Gilbert extends her plural subject account to the sphere of the affective by discussing the issue of so-called collective guilt feelings.³⁸ Her main proposal is that collective guilt feelings could also be understood in terms of a certain joint commitment on which the involved individuals have agreed. Gilbert writes: ‘For us collectively to feel guilt over our action A is for us to be jointly committed to feeling guilt as a body over our action A’ (2002, p. 139). In accordance with the view exposed in the preceding section, Gilbert completes this thought by claiming that ‘[f]or us collectively to feel guilt over our action A is for us to constitute the plural subject of a feeling of guilt over our action A’ (ibid.).

Gilbert motivates this approach in a number of different ways. She begins by suggesting that, if people are prepared to talk of a collective guilt feeling, it is because they probably think that there is ‘something real’ to which these attributions refer (see p. 118). She continues by trying to show that the guilt of a group can, and must, be sharply distinguished from the guilt of any of its individual members (cf. pp. 129ff.). At some point she suggests—or so one could take her to be suggesting—that only an account of collective guilt feelings based on the idea of a joint commitment can explain the moral force we usually attribute to such feelings (cf. pp. 139–140).

I shall not comment on these suggestions.³⁹ Rather, in what follows I shall focus on Gilbert’s attempt to show that a collectivist view of collective guilt feelings is necessary if one is to account for what she takes to be the ordinary notion of a collective guilt feeling. Gilbert proceeds by showing that two alternative accounts of collective guilt feelings are inadequate as general accounts of collective guilt feelings; the point being that they only capture some of the phenomena we are inclined to associate with the term ‘collective guilt feelings’. These accounts are instances of the other two classes of accounts of collective intentionality we have distinguished above: aggregative accounts and membership accounts (which Gilbert characterizes as a second sort of aggregative accounts [cf. pp. 133ff.]).

The first proposal as to the nature of collective guilt feelings Gilbert explores concerns the idea that a collective guilt feeling may be understood as a summation of feelings of personal guilt. By ‘feelings of personal guilt’ she means feelings of guilt had by a particular person over an action of hers, i.e. feelings of guilt the intentional object of which is an action performed by the same person who is experiencing guilt. Gilbert argues that there are two main problems with such an account. She observes, firstly, that the intentional object of a collective guilt feeling, as we often understand this idea of a collective guilt feeling, is the collective act of a certain group, i.e. something we (the participants) have, in some relevant sense, done together. As she points out, ‘[i]t is hard to see how an account in terms of personal guilt can accommodate this [basic] consideration’ (p. 131).

For Gilbert, a second problem of these sorts of accounts is that they require that all members of the relevant population feel guilt in relation to some contributory action of their own (cf. p. 131). She takes this requirement to be implausible. Gilbert writes: ‘There surely are cases of collective action where we cannot expect all of the members to feel this way, or in which they simply do not feel this way, cases in which—at the same time—it is not obvious that a collective feeling of guilt is ruled out’ (pp. 131–132). I shall comment on this claim below.

The second proposal Gilbert examines concerns the idea that a collective guilt feeling is constituted by what she calls ‘membership guilt feelings’. This basically is the idea of a number of individuals who understand themselves as members of a given group and personally feel guilt over something their group has done.

A clear virtue of such an account is that it accommodates the fact that the term ‘collective guilt feelings’ is commonly used to refer to emotions the intentional object of which is a particular action that may be attributed to the relevant collective (as opposed to being attributed to certain members of this group). Gilbert argues that, contrary to what Karl Jaspers ([1947] 2001, pp. 80–81) seems to have thought, these sorts of feelings would be completely intelligible in case the individuals at issue were to be parties to the joint commitment that lies at the heart of the relevant collective action. However, she contends that an account of collective guilt in terms of membership guilt feelings fails to capture all the situations to which we refer by means of the term ‘collective guilt feelings’. The reason is as follows: ‘It is true that, here, a group’s action is the object of a feeling of guilt. But the feeling does not have a collective subject’ (p. 137). The problem is that ‘[t]he group itself does not seem to be the subject of a feeling of guilt’ (p. 138; my emphasis).⁴⁰

Against this background, Gilbert articulates the plural subject account of collective guilt feelings sketched above. Being aware of the puzzling character of the idea of a number of individuals who are jointly committed to feeling something, Gilbert provides a concise answer to the question concerning what exactly the parties involved in a joint commitment to feel guilt as a body are committed to. She writes: ‘They are to act as would be appropriate were they to constitute a single subject of guilt feelings. Or, perhaps better, they are to act so as to constitute, as far as is possible, a single subject of guilt feelings’ (p. 139).

The phrase ‘as would be appropriate were they to constitute a single subject of guilt feelings’ is very telling. It betrays that Gilbert does not require the individuals involved to be committed to collectively experiencing certain sorts of feelings—whatever exactly this could mean. Gilbert makes the point slightly more explicit by writing:

This does not mean that they are to act so as to constitute, as far as possible, a single individual human subject of guilt feelings (ibid.).

In the abstract of the paper I am quoting from, we find a formulation that completes this idea. Gilbert writes:

The parties to a joint commitment of the kind in question may as a result find themselves experiencing ‘pangs’ of the kind associated with personal and membership guilt feelings. Since these pangs, by hypothesis, arise as a result of the joint commitment to feel guilt as a body, they might be thought of as providing a kind of phenomenology for collective guilt (p. 115).

Since this account is meant as a response to Christopher Kutz’s (2000b, p. 196) prima facie plausible claim that a collective cannot respond affectively to expressions of recrimination—the point being that only its members can—, we have to try to understand the extent to which, according to Gilbert, we can affirm in certain situations that the collective itself is responding in an affective manner. In the course of this discussion, we shall come to understand why Gilbert stresses the expression ‘individual human’ in the remark just quoted.

Gilbert begins to argue for the idea that in certain situations the response of the relevant group may be said to amount to a genuinely emotional response by observing that there is no particular sensation that necessarily has to accompany an experience of guilt in general. She generalizes the claim by asserting that ‘[p]articular emotions may not require a specific phenomenology’ (p. 119). Gilbert concedes that a phenomenally rich state of consciousness—she calls such a state a ‘feeling-sensation’—normally accompanies our experiences of guilt. Endorsing the judgmentalist view of emotions discussed above (in Sect. 2.3),⁴¹ she argues, however, that all that is needed for us to feel guilt (both individually and collectively) is a judgment concerning the morally reprehensible character of the acts we feel guilty about. She writes:

I can imagine saying that I felt guilty about something without meaning to imply that any particular phenomenological condition was satisfied. The central if not the sole thing at issue would be my judgment that I was wrong to do whatever it is I say I feel guilty about. The very nature of any associated pangs or twinges as pangs or twinges of guilt could only be assumed if this judgment were present (p. 120).

Gilbert suggests that we should not presume that it is already clear what feeling guilt amounts to. In this context, she warns us against the temptation to construe the phenomenon of collective guilt feelings on the basis of our intuitions concerning what it is for an individual human to feel guilt. Rather, we should embrace what she calls the broad method, which, first, takes into consideration guilt feelings attributed to both individuals and groups, and in a second move, extrapolates from both of these in order to decide what it is to feel guilt more generally. Her point is that after having done so ‘[o]ne might […] want to say that groups did not feel guilt in quite the same way that individuals did. [But i]t would not be necessary to say that they did not feel guilt at all’ (ibid.).

One easily gets the impression that, when speaking of ‘collective guilt feelings’, Gilbert is using the term ‘feeling’ in a way that differs from what she has in mind when she talks of feeling-sensations. Applying the principle of charity, one could argue that Gilbert is referring to what Goldie calls feelings towards. The problem is that Gilbert could too easily be accused of assuming that bodily sensations exhaust the ‘specific phenomenology’ of emotions, to use her words. This impression that there is something strange in Gilbert’s use of the word ‘feeling’ (when she talks of guilt feelings) is in line with the fact that the most common objection raised against her account of collective guilt feelings concerns the phenomenological inadequacy of this proposal as an account of a collective affective intentional state (cf. Konzelmann Ziv 2007; Salmela 2012; Schmid 2008, 2009; and Wilkins 2002).⁴² In other words, what most philosophers involved in this discussion have tended to criticize in Gilbert’s account is not her notion of a plural subject of guilt. Rather, the problem is Gilbert’s suggestion that the possibility to invoke some collective judgment (or belief) to the effect that a particular action of the relevant group was morally wrong warrants talk of a collective guilt feeling. Burleigh Wilkins makes the point by writing that ‘[at least] the total absence of any phenomenological accompaniments would be extremely puzzling’ (2002, p. 152).

As we have seen, Gilbert does not simply neglect the phenomenal aspect of the state she calls a collective guilt feeling. Gilbert does make a claim concerning this aspect. She writes: ‘it seems most likely that there are phenomenological accompaniments of collective guilt feelings. These will include feeling-sensations experienced by individual human beings and occurring, in that sense, in the minds of these individuals’ (p. 141). To the question concerning whether these feeling-sensations should be understood as ‘pangs of personal guilt’ or ‘pangs of membership guilt’, she offers the following answer: ‘Clearly, from a phenomenological point of view there may be no way of deciding this issue: a pang is a pang is a pang. One needs to look at the context in which the pangs occur’ (ibid.).

I believe that Gilbert is correct in claiming that, first, without contextual clues a bodily sensation is just a bodily sensation, and second, it is our understanding of the pertinent situation that can bring certain sensations to be intelligible as ‘pangs’ of collective guilt. But despite Gilbert’s attempt to include in her picture the phenomenal dimension by referring to certain feeling-sensations, the account just exposed has two problems that pertain to its phenomenological inadequacy. These are problems on which we have already touched. Let me make them more explicit.

The first 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 of the relevant group to be wrong. The issue is that such a joint commitment, which in itself only amounts to a sort of evaluative norm that may be expressed emotionally, has not necessarily to give rise to a genuinely affective state.⁴³ Wilkins makes the point as follows:

It does not suffice for you to say that individual members of your plural subject may experience ‘pangs’ of guilt, because that is consistent with saying they may not…. From the point of view of philosophers trying to understand collective feelings of guilt, this is just the kind of scenario you might expect to encounter unless you provide a full blown account of such feelings as necessarily having some phenomenological component (2002, p. 153).

Appealing to a distinction made by Stocker on which we have already touched above (in Sect. 2.4), one could radicalize Wilkins’ objection by arguing that, having reduced a guilt feeling to the evaluation this emotion may be said to express, Gilbert has made it impossible to distinguish between mere pro forma and genuine (i.e. actually felt) collective guilt. To put it bluntly, Gilbert’s account may, in the best case, be argued to be a persuasive account of a group belief to the effect that a certain action of the pertinent group was wrong. But it falls short of an account of a collective affective state. This is the consequence, one could further argue, of her having endorsed a view of affective intentionality that is unable to account for the properly affective nature of our emotional relation to the world.

The second problem, which is related to the previous one, concerns Gilbert’s unthematized assumption that the ‘specific phenomenology’ of a particular emotion is determined exclusively by the accompanying bodily sensations; in this case by the, as she observes, rather unspecific ‘pangs’ that are part of some instances of guilt. As we have discussed in detail above (particularly in Sect. 2.4), the intentional character of our emotions may be said to fundamentally be a matter of certain intentional feelings that can be differentiated from these bodily sensations: of feelings towards. These feelings are not only at the heart of an emotion’s intentional character. Qua genuine feelings they co-determine the ‘specific phenomenology’ of this emotion. Indeed, one may claim that some feeling towards is always the most salient constituent of the specific phenomenal character that is proper to an emotion of a certain kind. For such a feeling corresponds to that which one is required to describe when characterizing the relevant experience as an experience of a particular emotional sort. As mentioned above, to feel fear is not basically to feel the hairs on one’s neck rising, but to feel a particular situation to be dangerous.

To sum up, having endorsed the judgmentalist view of emotions—and with it the assumption that the phenomenology of an emotion is exhausted by certain non-relational bodily sensations—, Gilbert has failed to see that to experience a guilt feeling over an action of one’s group means to feelingly understand this action as a wrong one (as opposed to merely judging it to be wrong). So one could argue that, contrary to what Gilbert asserts, there is a necessary phenomenological condition of feeling guilt. Moreover, one could maintain that the necessary phenomenological condition of feeling guilt over a personal action is clearly different from the necessary phenomenological condition of feeling guilt over an action of one’s group.

Of course, one could see oneself and certain others as blameworthy for an action of a group one together with these others constitutes and, furthermore, act in a way that corresponds to this self-understanding without having to experience full-fledged episodes of guilt. But if one is to claim that this comportment amounts to an action out of guilt—and by ‘guilt’ I mean, of course, the feeling of having done wrong, and not the fact of having committed a specified or implied offense—, at some point one has to have feelingly understood the group action at issue to be wrong. To put it briefly, the inadequacy of Gilbert’s account as an account of a collective affective intentional state is based on her failure to appreciate that there is a phenomenological condition of collective guilt which fully corresponds to the intentional condition of collective guilt she adequately characterizes.

Can this problem of Gilbert’s elaborated and, in a number of respects, illuminating account be amended? I do not want to discard this possibility. But it is important to emphasize that, if an amendment were possible, it would definitively not be a matter of stressing the salience of certain feeling-sensations that accompany actual (full-blown) experiences of guilt. If we are to take seriously the idea that affective intentionality amounts to a sui generis form of openness to the world—one in which certain sorts of feelings, namely feelings towards, play an absolutely central role—our attempt to make sense of the idea of a collective affective intentional episode has to rely on a completely different approach.

Concretely, and as Hans Bernhard Schmid (2008, 2009) has argued, we have to try to extend to the collective level the idea that affective intentionality is a matter of world-directed feelings. Put another way, we have to try to construe the phenomenon of collective affective intentionality in terms of people together feeling towards something, in terms of particular actualizations of what I shall call our human ability to feel-towards together. In closing, let me point to some ‘initial unclarities’ that might guide our inquiry—and our attempt to construe the phenomenon of collective affective intentionality in terms of interrelated actualizations of our capacity to feel-towards together.

To begin with, I think that it is plausible to assume that, as Konzelmann Ziv puts it, ‘[t]he enabling condition for sharing one feeling episode is the feeling’s immediate responsiveness to one and the same object’ (2009, p. 100). But already at this point we find ambiguities. It will be necessary to clarify what exactly is meant here by ‘object’. Do the participants’ emotional feelings have to share the target, the formal object, and/or the focus?⁴⁴

Konzelmann Ziv claims that there is a second condition fulfilled in those situations in which it is warranted to speak of a participation in one and the same feeling-episode; a condition she takes to be ‘seemingly trivial’. We have to be able to understand the participants’ emotional responses as affective states that have the same phenomenal quality (cf. p. 100). But what does this exactly mean? And is it really trivially true that the participants’ feelings have to exhibit the same quality—whatever this turns out to mean—in order for these individuals to (correctly) understand their emotional response as a joint feeling?

At any rate, Konzelmann Ziv is absolutely right in arguing that these two conditions are ‘by far not sufficient to delineate immediate co-feeling from type-identical feeling that is responding to one and the same object’ (2009, p. 101).⁴⁵ So the crucial question will be the question as to the ultimate ground of the difference between genuine co-feeling and sheer affective parallelism.

We already have an intuition that may lead us to an answer to the latter question. Part of the difference at issue can be attributed to the sense of togetherness that structures the former, but not the latter, affective experiences. That is to say, we should look for the ground of this difference in the particular relationship that holds between the individuals involved, according to these individuals themselves. Put another way, we should begin our inquiry concerning the nature of our ability to feel-towards together by exploring the basic fact that in a collective affective intentional episode the participants take themselves to be responding to the requirements of the world in a joint manner; the fact that, in actualizing their ability to feel-towards together, the participating individuals come to see themselves as standing in a particular relation to one another.

So a basic task will consist in providing an account that explains the relationship between our understanding ourselves as members of a particular social group (at a given point in time) and having affective experiences marked by the mentioned sense of togetherness (in the presence of other individuals who co-constitute this group).⁴⁶ As observed above (in Sect. 1.1), this ultimately means to articulate the central condition fulfilled in those cases in which the individuals involved are feeling towards something in a genuinely joint manner and not in those other cases in which they merely are doing so alongside each other.

Seeking to articulate a more specific question that could guide our inquiry concerning what it is to interrelatedly actualize our ability to feel-towards together, in the next chapter I shall examine Schmid’s phenomenologically inspired account of shared feelings. This is an account that, at least in the context of the current debate on collective intentionality, has to be regarded as the unique attempt so far to develop the idea that collective affective intentionality is a matter of world-directed feelings. After discussing Schmid’s view of shared feelings, I shall distance myself from his claim that, in order to provide a phenomenologically adequate account of collective affective intentionality, we have to show that feelings, despite their eminently subjective nature, are shareable in the same sense in which we, to use an example offered by Schmid, can share a bottle of wine. In my view, in so arguing Schmid is unnecessarily limiting the theoretical possibilities we have for elaborating on the intuition I have presented in this chapter as the right point of departure for a phenomenologically adequate theory of collective affective intentionality: the idea that we have to conceive of collective affective intentional episodes in terms of interrelated actualizations of our human ability to feel-towards together. The view of collective affective intentionality I am going to develop and recommend in the second part of this book should be seen as an attempt to spell out what it is to share in a moment of affective intentional community that does not take too seriously certain metaphysical worries mentioned in the introductory chapter (cf. our discussion in Sect. 1.2).