The Origin of the Phenomenology of Feelings

ABSTRACT

This paper accomplishes two goals. First, I present a distinct interpretation of the inception of the phenomenology of feelings. I show that Husserl’s first substantial discussion of intentional and non-intentional feelings is not from his 1901 Logical Investigations, but rather his 1893 manuscript, “Notes towards a Theory of Attention and Interest”. Husserl there describes intentional feelings as active and non-intentional feelings as passive. Second, I show that Husserl presents a somewhat unique account of feelings in “Notes”, which is partly different from his later theories of feelings found in Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory and Studies Concerning the Structures of Consciousness. In contrast to those mature writings, in “Notes”, Husserl describes intentional feelings while avoiding cognitivism and he analyses non-intentional feelings without employing the content-apprehension schema. On this basis, I argue that “Notes” is an important untapped resource for constructing original phenomenologies of feelings.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I provide references to the corresponding English translations where available, following a slash after the German pagination.

2 See, for example, Crowell, 479–504; Drummond, 365–9; Ferencz-Flatz, ‘The afterlife of fictional media violence’; Laasik, 747–9; Summa, ‘Are emotions „recollected in tranquility?”’; Rinofner-Kreidl, ‘Gebrauchsdinge und wissenschaftliche Gegenstände’.

3 For other examples of scholars who conclude that Husserl started his analysis of feelings in the Investigations, Quentin Smith writes, “Husserl’s first description of feeling-acts can be found in Chapter Two of the Fifth Logical Investigation” (Smith 1976, 85). Further, Zhang Wei and Yu Xin write, “[T]he issue of intentional and non-intentional feelings [was] initially proposed by Husserl in section 15 of investigation V in Logical Investigations … ” (Wei & Xin 2009, 131). Additionally, I highlight that Geniusas only claims that Husserl first addressed the feeling of pain in 1901. Regardless, the point still stands that in his many different essays that explore Husserl’s phenomenology of feelings, Geniusas never mentions the 1893 text, such that he de facto treats the Investigations as the origin of the phenomenology of feelings.

4 Even though there are several recent published works, wherein the author mentions that Husserl develops a theory of feelings prior to the Investigations, there are still no texts that are exclusively dedicated to examining Noten. To provide some examples: James Jardine writes that Husserl’s description of “the peculiar character of emotional experience can already be found in manuscripts dating from the early 1890s” (Jardine 2020, 53). In fact, Jardine refers specifically to Noten as Husserl’s earliest analysis of feelings. Yet, Jardine does not discuss the contents of Noten, but instead immediately moves on to explore Husserl’s theory from the Fifth Investigation. Similarly, Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl claims that Husserl develops an account of feelings and values in research manuscripts prior to 1901. However, just like Jardine, she does not examine any of these manuscripts, but rather also turns to explore section 15 of the Fifth Logical Investigation (Rinofner-Kreidl 2014, 193). Denis Fisette also discusses Husserl’s insights from Noten, but does so sparingly, because his article is dedicated to examining Husserl’s overarching account of feelings and moods (Fisette 2021, 226–228). Similar to Fisette, in his 2012 work, Ullrich Melle only briefly focuses on Noten, because he also seeks to elucidate the whole evolution of Husserl’s philosophy of feelings (Melle 2012, 59–62). Ignacio Ramirez provides one of the more extensive investigations of Noten (Ramirez 2015, 95–98). Yet, his analysis of the 1893 manuscript still serves as an introduction to his more robust examination of Husserl’s later account of moods. Finally, Antonio Zirión Quijano’s analysis of Noten is most helpful (Quijano 2018, 43–45). He too, however, quickly turns to examine the Investigations.

5 At the same time, Husserl’s 1893 account diverges from Brentano’s theory in three noteworthy ways. First, while Brentano asserts that feelings can be directed at the secondary object given via inner perception, Husserl instead concludes that feelings refer to what Brentano calls the “primary object” of the act (See Brentano 1894, 179–181/2009, 127–129; Jacquette 2004, 100–103; Mulligan 2004, 70–72). Second, Husserl claims that feeling acts are either positively or negatively valenced, while Brentano sees that a feeling can also be indifferent (See Chisholm 1966, 165–166). Finally, Husserl distinguishes feelings from volitional intentions, whereas Brentano infamously groups them together (Brentano 1894, 333–335/2009, 199–200).

6 My use of the term “cognitive” in this essay is largely equivalent with Husserl’s use of the term, “objectifying” and “doxic” (in both its positive and neutral sense). Cognitive or objectifying components of the act are accordingly non-axiological and non-volitional moments of the intention. To be emphasized is that not all cognitive and objectifying acts are categorial. Indeed, for Husserl, in 1901, only judgments are categorial. My perception of the red ball is not a categorially structured intention, where I am intuiting the red as a predicate of the ball-subject. Even naming, Husserl claims, in the Investigations, is not yet a categorial (kategorial) act, as it does not have the categorical (kategorisch) subject-predicate structure, which all categorial acts (judgments) have (See Byrne 2020 130, Byrne 2022a, 18–24; Byrne 2022b; 123–135; Hua XIX, 484–95/1970, 152–7; Byrne, 18–30; Byrne, 123–39). While the mature Husserl almost never describes simple perception and imagination as categorial (rather, he later defines them as pre-categorial, as they are structured by types), he does conclude in his Revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation that naming is a categorial act (Hua XX-2, 269–273; Byrne 2021b, 127–135; Byrne 2021a, 16–30).

7 Husserl here describes cognitive interests more specifically as attentive objectifying (partial) intentions, which includes theoretical acts (Hua XXXVIII, 167. See the previous footnote six above). An interest can accordingly be an attentive perception, imagination, or judgment. On the one hand, Husserl is thus here using the term ‘interest’ in a fundamentally different manner then Brentano does (See Brentano 1874, 263/2009, 153). On the other hand, Husserl’s 1893 understanding of the term interest is distinct from his grasping of it in his later works. For example, he defines interest as the striving or tendency towards the next consciousness of the object in Experience and Judgment (Husserl 1939, 87/1973, 82). These terminological circumstances consistently held in mind, there is no danger of confusion for the reader.

8 As other concrete examples of pleasure and displeasure, Husserl lists courage (Mut), despondency (Verzagen), joy (Freude), and sadness (Trauer) (Hua XXXVIII, 179). To be noted is that Husserl is not fully consistent in his classification of these experiences.

9 At one point in the manuscript, Husserl executes a non-descriptive analysis of feeling states; he looks at the grammar of the expressions we use to talk about feeling states, as a clue for understanding the nature of their passivity. With regards to pleasurable joy, Husserl writes, “How does it stand, for example, with joy? That is passive (Das ist passiv). Something inspires joy in me (Etwas erfreut mich). (‘I am myself joyed about something’ (‘Ich freue mich über etwas’) is expressed admittedly in the active form, but in the reflexive form. In any case, there is no presentation of a goal, but rather just the presentation of the arousing object)” (Hua XXXVIII, 181).

10 This description leaves the distinction between this first kind of feeling state and moods most unclear; Husserl has stated that both are non-intentional, yet have certain relationships to objects. Unfortunately, it is only in subsequent works that Husserl would come to pinpoint the divisions between them.

11 Husserl emphasizes that any feeling state that is not related to an arousing object, is also not related “to everything and anything” (Hua XXXVIII, 180). He writes that this is simply “not the correct way to grasp the state of affairs” (Hua XXXVIII, 180). Rather, my feeling state is just not related to any arousing objects or to any field of experience.

12 This method is un-phenomenological or rather, non-descriptive, because Husserl is seeking to uncover the essence of love by examining the word’s meaning, which is given to the word by a signitive or inauthentic act. Instead, this goal could only be accurately accomplished by first looking at the “things themselves” as they are given in intuitive or authentic acts.

13 In Noten, Husserl recognizes that there is a second meaning of the word love. In certain cases, when I express, ‘I love … this means, I am disposed to experience joy” about this or that (Ibid., 181). For example, when I say, “I love research”, I may not mean that I am currently executing a feeling intention that approves of the research I am carrying out (although this could be the case), but rather that I am prone to be joyed when studying Husserl’s manuscripts. Husserl’s recognition of the fact that one word can have two different expressed meanings will be important for his later philosophy of language. Se Hua XIX, 51–54/1970, 196–198; Byrne 2017a, 287–300; Byrne 2017b, 211–20.

14 In 1901, Husserl believes that feelings refer to the object, which is intended via the cognition, in a new way, but they do not add any new determination or ‘value’-property to that object. When I execute a feeling act, I am simply taking a new stance towards the same cognitively-constituted object. As Melle writes, feeling acts, “have no objective relation other than what the underlying objectifying act constitutes … According to the terms of the Logical Investigations, the [feeling] act makes no contribution to the constitution of the object” (Melle 1990, 40–41).

15 In his subsequent writings, Husserl would disavow this idea, that a cognitive act can be executed on its own, without feeling and willing. He recognizes that all three components are present in every act of consciousness. Stated in Husserlian jargon, he saw that feelings and the will are moments of acts, not pieces.

16 In practice, Husserl’s ‘accomplishment’ of this goal amounts to a violent subsumption of affection into cognition. As Steven Crowell writes, Husserl’s conclusions about feelings “are not derived from a phenomenology of the ‘other dimension’ of the passion itself, but from the analogy” (Crowell 2005, 107). At another point, he affirms that the value, which feelings ostensibly refer to, as they are conceived of by Husserl, “are theoretical postulates demanded by the analogical project … they are not phenomenological data derived from the meaning of affective life itself” (Crowell 2005, 112).

17 Husserl’s adoption of the analogy between cognitions and feeling acts allows for him to establish – as Brentano had attempted to do previously (See Chisholm 1966) – a formal axiology that parallels formal logic (Hua XXVIII, 36–68. See Byrne 2017c, 285–300).

18 Husserl echoes this sentiment from Lectures in the 1913 Ideas I. He writes, “Every act, or every act-correlate, includes in itself, implicitly or explicitly, something ‘logical’ … Even emotional and volitional acts – are ‘objectifying’, ‘constituting’ objects originaliter and therefore necessary sources of different regions of being and their respective ontologies” (Hua III–1, 272/1983, 282).

19 Husserl presents an even more extreme version of this idea when discussing “hedonic identification” in a 1910 manuscript. According to this curious account, there are intuitive and empty pleasures and pains, which fulfil each other in the same way that intuitive and empty acts do (See Hua XLIII/2, 395–405). With this conclusion, Husserl has entirely reduced these feelings to cognitive objectifications. The second doctrine of his cognitivism here achieves its full consummation.

20 As Melle points out, Husserl’s observations about non-intentional feelings from Noten foreshadows his later investigations of drive-feelings as instinctual and passive tendencies from Experience and Judgment and his Lectures on the Life-World (Melle 2012, 58).

21 I believe that Husserl’s descriptions of non-intentional feelings from Noten is – in some respects – superior, because his content(sensation)-apprehension schema is largely unjustified. This is for a simple reason. When phenomenologically examining my own experience – and I encourage the reader to do the same – I find it evident that there are no sensations or feeling-sensations (according to how Husserl understood them) swimming in the stream of consciousness. This point was also convincingly argued for by John Drummond in his 1992 book.