Abstract
In this chapter, I explore a radically new approach to emotion – new at least compared with most theories of emotion from the modern era. These theories locate emotion squarely inside the human subject, confining it there by way of physiological, neurological, or psychological models of epigenesis. I do not deny the truth of many of these theories at the level of what Merleau-Ponty calls the “objective body,” but I contest their adequacy as accounts of the actual experience of emotion. In this experience, emotion is often something that comes to us from outside ourselves: say, from a contagious mood or from a captivating environmental scene. This is to say that the where of an emotional display is just as important as the how of its generation: its exophany is as significant as its endogeny. In the last part of this essay, I pursue the fate of this view of emotion in two quite different contemporary thinkers: Anthony Steinbock and James Hillman. For both authors, emotion implicates a certain dehors or “outsideness” in Gilles Deleuze’s apposite term.
Nothing determines me from the outside, not that nothing solicits me [from there], but, rather because I am immediately outside of myself and open to the world. – Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 483
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Notes
- 1.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 150.
- 2.
See Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Theory of Values, trans. Manfred Frings (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), and The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). I treat Scheler’s account of emotion in chapter seven below.
- 3.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s: Intentionality,” in We Have Only this Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939–1975, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven, trans. Chris Turner (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), 4. I thank Bob Stone for pointing me to this translation. Yet, let us note, Sartre also asserts about emotions as such that they “cannot come to human reality from the outside” (italics in original; Sartre, Emotion, in Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans, trans. B. Frechtman [New York: Anchor, 1967], 482). This is the very converse of what I maintain in this essay. Please note that parts of the current essay are adaptations of passages from my book Turning Emotion Inside Out (to appear in 2022 with Northwestern University Press).
- 4.
Peri-phenomenology is the term I have coined for a kind of phenomenological inquiry that focuses specifically on the edges and peripheries of all that we experience as well as the edges of our own ongoing experience. For a concerted discussion of the peri-phenomenological approach, see The World on Edge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 53–56, 315–16; and The World at a Glance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 438–39. Turning Emotion Inside Out is in effect the third in a series of studies employing this peri-phenomenological method.
- 5.
Andy Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology, second ed. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013), 9; see also 10–12.
- 6.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 262.
- 7.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxiv; my italics. Merleau-Ponty is here intentionally inverting St. Augustine’s dictum, cited by Husserl: “Turn within, for truth dwells in the inner man.” It is noteworthy that both Abram and Fisher are deeply indebted to Merleau-Ponty, who stressed the interpersonal context of many major emotions including anger in his own leading example.
- 8.
Fisher hints at implications for emotion in Radical Ecopsychology (14ff., 56ff.) but does not develop a systematic view.
- 9.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 483: this sentence is in the last paragraph of this book.
- 10.
James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1992), 5, my italics; citing Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 224. See also Tom Cheetham, The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and the Angel Out Ahead (Washington, D.C.: Spring Publications, 2021).
- 11.
Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, 89.
- 12.
Anthony J. Steinbock, Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 224. “Movement” is in italics in the original statement.
- 13.
Ibid., 231.
- 14.
The phrase cited earlier in this sentence is from ibid.
- 15.
Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, 9.
- 16.
It is all the more striking that the outgoing path of the heart is charted by two such otherwise different thinkers, one focused primarily on “soul” (Hillman) and the other on “spirit” (Steinbock). Concerning the difference between these two directions, see my book Spirit and Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1991; 2nd. expanded edition 2001), Forward.
- 17.
From Amit Ray, Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity (Inner Light, 2016), 24.
- 18.
It’s Not About the Gift, p. 127
- 19.
Moral Emotions, p. 224.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 129.
- 22.
Moral Emotions, p. 7
- 23.
Moral Emotions, p. 226. Note that the “others” of love need not be human beings. I can genuinely love coffee, for example, in an example pursued by Steinbock on pp. 229–30.
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Casey, E.S. (2022). Taking Emotion Far Out. In: Steinbock, A.J. (eds) Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 117. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_4
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