Sensibility, Values and Selfhood. For a Phenomenology of the Emotional Life

Contemporary philosophical research on emotions has focused on their intentionality, in particular on the specific intentional work done by feeling (“feeling-towards” in Peter Goldie’s positive phrasing, as opposed to a tendency to “over-intellectualize” emotions, explaining them in terms of beliefs and desires, or to reduce them to purely subjective states or qualia). But is there any satisfactory general theory of feeling, capable of putting some order into a stunning variety of affective phenomena, often piled up quite haphazardly? After discussing Goldie’s approach, focusing on the relation between emotions and values, which is much discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy (§1), this paper, drawing on classic sources in phenomenological literature, provides three principles that define feeling’s specific intentionality (§2). On the basis of these three principles, I attempt to outline a full-fledged phenomenology of feeling (§3), showing the crucial role played by emotional life in shaping personhood, personal identity and the foundations of practical reason. Finally, I suggest some answers to questions raised in the preceding sections, including the crucial one about the connection between two levels of affective sensibility that appear to be involved in value experience: one that is basically embodied, and one that is cognitively of a “higher” level, involved in a large variety of acts and behaviors characteristic of a rational and moral agent – such as a human being (§4).