phenomenology and human emotions

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NSPCTWENTY YEARSA CELEBRATION

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Phenomenology and

Human EmotionsJohn Bennett

Johnb6604@gmail.com

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Credits

• The Dimensions of Existence Slides are from Deurzen van, E. (1997, 2010). Everyday mysteries.

• Shortened version of SEA is from: Deurzen van, E. & Adams, M. (2011). Skills in existential counselling and psychotherapy.

• Film scenes: Remains of the DayDirected by James Ivory Produced byIsmail Merchant, Mike Nichols, & John Calley. Columbia Pictures

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• Emotion is a word derived from the Latin ‘emovere’ which means to move out.

Bodily Theory of Emotions(James & Lange. James,1884)

• ‘We do not shiver because we are afraid of the lion, but we shiver, and this is what we feel as our fear.’

• Emotions are feelings of bodily change.

• This neglects the intentional content of emotions. The ‘aboutness’.

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Cognitive Theories of Emotions(Lyons, 1980; Nussbaum, 2001;Solomon, 1976; Gordon, 1987; Downing, 2000;

De Sousa, 2010).

• Here our fear of the lion consists of an act of evaluation / appraisal of the situation.

• We believe the lion to be dangerous and want to run away and this is our fear.

• The bodily experience is regarded as just an additional qual without relevance, or as serving the limited purpose of assuring us that an emotion is going on. 6

Cognitive Theories of Emotions

(Continued).• Belief based theories are unable to

capture the experiential and phenomenal aspects.

• Without referring to bodily experience cognitive approaches cannot account for the intensity of emotions, (Increased heart rate, muscle tension etc). So it’s virtually impossible to indicate what a more or less intense emotion might be like. There are no ‘intense cognitions.’

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Affect intentionality(De Sousa, 2010; Frijda, 1994; Solomon, 1976; Gibson, 1979).

• Emotions are characterized by intentionality.• Emotions relate to persons, objects, situations

and events in the world. (Lifeworld).• Intentionality is not neutral but concerns what

is valuable and relevant for the person, or what an action affords us.

• Emotions are a way of attending to salient features of our world and giving them weight they would not otherwise have.

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Affect intentionality.(Affordance: Gibson,

1979).• Things in the environment afford

weighted (emotional) opportunities; a tree is climbable, water drinkable.

• Affective affordance creates things as appearing to us with qualities such as ‘important’, ‘worthwhile’, ‘attractive’, ‘repulsive’ etc.

• Emotional meaning rather than cognitive appraisal.

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EMOTION & MEMORY• Implicit pervasive memory is

structured by the basic commitments we have made. Our intention towards the world and its return to us.

• This immediately embodied enduring experience of our existence is what we might call ‘mood’ or ‘emotion’ memory.

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• ‘the possibilities of disclosure belonging to cognition fall far short of the primordial disclosure of moods in which Dasein is brought before its being as the there.’

• Heidegger 1926 p127

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Husserlon

emotions.

• Husserl categorizes emotions as ‘positing acts’. (Logical Investigations 5 s29) and Ideas 1 s117.

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HUSSERL Logical Investigations 1900

s29Ideas 1 s60.

• Emotions are said to be involved in suppositional creativity and structural reasoning as well as being central to the aspirational movement towards meaning and purpose.

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Subjective –Objective.

• Phenomenology has the role of paying attention to the role of subjectivity in the constitution of objectivity.

• Precisely the realm of our emotions.

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Subjective -Objective

• Phenomenology offers a method of explicating the subjective in the objective and the objective in the subjective.

• Phenomenology is concerned with the uncovering of the mundane.

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Dimensions of Existence

Spiritual Intuition

Personal Thinking

Social FeelingsPhysicalSensations

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Ego of Physical Sensations with Emotions

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The Sensuous

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• ‘asks nothing of us and does not summon us to do anything.’

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• Red ‘penetrates the eye.’ • red and yellow encourage a

retreating movement of our body’s motor actions.

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• Blue ‘yields to our gaze.’• encourages a bodily turn towards the

colour that draws us out into the world.

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• yellow encourages a retreating movement of our body’s motor actions.

• yellow is ‘stinging’.

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• ‘What is called sensation is only the most rudimentary of perceptions.’

Merleau-Ponty (1962, 2003, p241).

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Empfindnisse• Spontaneously and passively given

physical sensations are the reflections and shadows (Abschattungen) of objects that in appearing give the non-intentional layer of the lifeworld to consciousness. They are the ‘Empfindnisse’ or ‘sensings’ which Husserl (1989, p152-155) refers to as bringing together the terms sensation and lived experience.

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Heidegger 1982, 1988, p131 -133.

• ‘The first determination, animateness, distinguishes man as a living being in general . . . there pertains to sensibility . . . not only the faculty of sensation but also the . . . faculty of pleasure and unpleasure, or delight in the agreeable, or the reverse. Pleasure . . . is not only desire for something . . . but always also enjoyment . . . the human being, turning with pleasure toward something, experiences himself as enjoying - he is joyous.’

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What are these people being?

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• How do you know what these facial expressions convey?

• How do you know what these people are being?

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Heidegger (1982, 1988, p132-133).

• ‘In having a feeling for something there is always present . . . a self-feeling, . . . a mode of becoming revealed to oneself . . . feeling is not a simple reflection upon oneself but rather a feeling of self in having a feeling for something . . . What is phenomenologically decisive . . . is that it directly uncovers and makes accessible that which is felt, and it does this . . . in the sense of a direct having-of-oneself.’

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Ego of Social Feelings with Emotions

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Social feeling & temporal flow

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• ‘ My passivity stands in connection with the passivity of all others; One and the same thing-world is constituted for us, one and the same time as objective time such that through this, my Now and the Now of every other - and thus his life-present - (with all immanences) and my life-present - are objectively ‘simultaneous

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these are indices for ordering my and others’ phenomenal systems, not as separated orders, but coordinated orders in ‘the same time’ . . . my life and the life of another do not exist, each for themselves; rather, one is ‘directed’ toward the other

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. . . not only has empathy ensued .

. . empathy has been ratified by the fact that . . . the other ego has expressed itself in a regular manner, and . . . newly determined and ratified my appresentations again and again. Primordial laws of genesis are laws of original time-consciousness.’ Husserl (1900, 1970, 2001, p632-633).

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Emotional movement as time

Emotional movement as time

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Ego of Personal Thinking with Emotions

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Psychological Egoof Apprehension

• This psychological ego is grounded in and therefore “presupposes the personalitas transcendentalis” (Heidegger 1982, 1988, p131) the subject ego or ego of apperception.

• We move then always towards an

unknown future presupposing the creation of meaning and with a purpose.

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• The reasoning of our personal thinking overlaps with motivating feelings and states of body-sense and in apprehending the totality of lifeworld, internal and external, attempts to action our desires. This is the ego of our personal thinking; the cogito or act of thinking the content of what is thought, the cogitatum. This is the dimension of our cause and effect thinking; our natural everyday thinking.

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(Husserl 1980, §5, p20).‘Ideas iii’

• Husserl says that in all natural scientific thinking, cause and effect thinking, ‘grounding necessarily leads . . . beyond the sphere of thinking to intuition.’

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Ego of Spiritual Intuition

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Ego of Apperception• ‘ . . .the original ground of the unity of the manifold

of its determinations . . . as ego I have them all together with regard to myself . . . combine them from the outset . . . The combining is of such a sort that in thinking I am also thinking myself . . . in all thinking I think myself along with it. ‘I am conscious of myself’ is a thought that already contains a twofold ego, the ego as subject and the ego as object . . . it looks beyond to an infinity of self-made representations and concepts {the ontological ones}.’

• Heidegger (1982, p127-131).

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• Phenomenology is the act of knowing the consciousness that I am as active flow of life rather than a container of life. And in this movement it transcends solipsism. Transcendental phenomenology places me back in the world after the epoche that removed me, partially, from it.

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• These dimensions, structured from emotions and time, are our intentional consciousness that deliver us toward the horizon that is our ‘worlding’, our lifeworld among other lifeworlds .

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SEA• Descriptive voices.• The Explicit, the Implicit and Self

Deception.• Increasing the complexity of themes.• Values and Beliefs.• Dimensions of existence: Projects

fears and tensions.• Complexity of Meaning.

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• “experience before it has been formulated in judgements and expressed in outward linguistic form, before it becomes packaged for explicit consciousness . . . all cognitive activity presupposes a domain that is passively pregiven, the existent world as I find it. Returning to examine this pregiven world is a return to the life-world (Lebenswelt)”.

• Moran ( 2007, p12).