References
- Husserl unfolds his value theory in Hua XXVIII, within which he deals with the question of whether emotional acts are directed towards genuine values or towards an underlying object-intending act. Scheler unfolds a whole theory about the relation of feelings and emotions to values in his main work Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (1913), which unfortunately (in my view) does not receive much attention by current scholars in phenomenology. I use the following abbreviations: Being and Time = Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, tr. Macquarrie/Robinson, New York: Harper 1962; Basic Problems = Heidegger, Martin 1988, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Bloomington: Indiana UP; Metaphysical Foundations = Heidegger, Martin, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Bloomington: Indiana UP 1992. Hua = Husserl, Edmund, Husserliana, Gesammelte Werke, Dordrecht, 1952ff.; Practical Philosophy = Kant, Immanuel, Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Cambridge UP 1996.
- To summarize, Heidegger would claim that it is the self and its present past life that shows up in the “feeling” of sadness, which is, essentially, a confrontation of the self with itself. According to Heidegger, above all we are able to understand and make present through sadness the temporal dimension of our own past, which Heidegger calls “thrownness.” I shall return to this later when I further elaborate on Heidegger's approach to affections, emotions and feelings. Already in section 6, Heidegger claims that Dasein's “own past […] is not something which follows along after Dasein” (Being and Time, 41).
- As far as I can see, Husserl only reconsiders his theory in his Kaizo articles from 1923, within which he conceives ethical decisions, which he calls “renewals,” as events that change the whole reference system of someone's life. An ethical decision affects not only a part of one's life story, but infects “every act” (Hua XXVII, 29) and “every pulse of life” (Hua XXVII, 97; my translation).
- Dasein, as Heidegger puts it, does not “come across in the same way as we come across what is present-at-hànd” (Being and Time, 68p). Heidegger's approach is, therefore, as William Blattner nicely puts it, based in a “dualistic understanding of an entity” (Blattner, William, Existence and Self-Understanding in Being and Time, in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 56, No. 1., March 1996, 109).
- Some of these modes are analyzed in Being and Time. However, Heidegger does not claim that his analysis in Being and Time covers all phenomena of human reality. Angst and fear are chosen, as he clearly states in section 40, for methodological reasons (see Being and Time, 230). In addition, an existential analysis must be able to interpret other phenomena like hope, joy or enthusiasm (see Being and Time, 395).
- The form of subjectivity that Kant thematizes in his practical philosophy, according to Heidegger, must be conceived as a “specific modification of self-consciousness” (Basic Problems, 132). As Heidegger further explains, this specific kind of consciousness is—as we called it before—Kant's non-epistemic approach to the self.
- In consequence, Dasein would be the very dimension through which we are able to understand ourselves as persons (authentically) or as things (inauthentically).
- A similar formulation reads as follows: “In this feeling of respect the moral self-consciousness, personalitas moralis, man's true personality, must reveal itself’ (Basic Problems, 133; emphasis mine)
- I cannot go into detail about this Kantian problematic here, since to do so would take us too far afield from the central concern of this paper. In short, the feeling of respect is on the one hand problematic because Kant claims that respect is an intellectual feeling, while on the other hand he claims that every feeling has a sensual basis. However, according to Kant, a sensual basis can never be a motivational basis for the recognition of the moral law.
- According to Heidegger, this mode of the phenomenon would show the phenomenon in a negative, privative way. See for this distinction section 7 of Being and Time.