Abstract
In this chapter I address two important roles feelings play in collective affective intentional episodes. I do so by elaborating on the suggestion that our emotions may disclose the significance something has for us as members of a group we care about. Seeking to anchor the notion of collective affective intentionality in the Heideggerian theme of a human care-defined way of being, I first develop the idea of an affectively enabled and essentially shareable ‘world-belongingness’. I propose the term ‘caring-with’ to refer to a mode of caring about things that may be said to rely on the fact that the involved individuals have come to share a number of concerns. Arguing that the role affective states play in cases of collective affective intentionality is not exhausted by the capacity our emotions have to disclose the mentioned structure of shared concerns, I further introduce the notion of ‘feelings of being-together’ and suggest that certain pre-intentional feelings might serve as ‘sedimented’, dynamic structures of experience that prepare us to understand certain circumstances as situations in which we are pursuing something together in an emotionally motivated way.
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Notes
- 1.
I shall discuss Bennett Helm’s notion of an emotion’s focus as well as his idea of a target-focus relation below (in Sect. 3).
- 2.
I am here extending an example offered by Helm (2001, p. 69).
- 3.
Let me emphasize that an additional condition is met in those situations in which the involved individuals can be taken to really be feeling together. For independently valuing the object in question, Adrian and Beatrice could show the simultaneous affective response just described.
- 4.
The target of an emotion is the particular object or event towards which this (token) emotion is directed. The formal object of an emotion can be understood, in turn, as an evaluative property implicitly ascribed by the relevant emotion to its target; a property that defines this token emotion as an instance of a given type of emotion. Someone’s fear, for instance, may be said to present the dog this person is afraid of as something that is dangerous for her or worth avoiding.
- 5.
Stressing the idea of some sense of familiarity that usually accompanies our everyday engagement with other worldly entities, William Blattner recommends translating Heidegger’s ‘Sein bei’ as ‘being-amidst’ (2006, p. 15).
- 6.
This suggestion, which I shall come to discuss below in some more detail, has been developed in different terms by Helm (2008) in an account to which the present paper owes much.
- 7.
The point is not that the mode of caring I am calling ‘caring-with’ has a for-the-sake-of-which that goes beyond the relevant subject of concern, as it were. Indeed, while caring-with-about-something we are not caring about this thing for the sake of someone or something else, but for our own sake, insofar as we understand ourselves as members of the relevant group; for the sake of a group we constitute.
- 8.
Of course, Dania could just have pretended to be satisfied. Moreover, even assuming that her emotional response was genuine, we could be inclined to understand it as the result merely of emotional contagion. This is the reason why I am appealing here to ‘someone who knows Dania sufficiently well’; the point being that, depending on the rational consistency between this particular emotional response and other evaluative responses of Dania, this well-informed interpreter could feel entitled to rule out these two alternative interpretations.
- 9.
This last argumentative move, I am well aware, is particularly difficult to follow. The difficulty, I think, lies in the fact that, in endorsing this phenomenological view, we are radically changing our perspective and adopting a point of view that brings us to consider the issue in terms of a series of experience-constituting acts that frame and constrain the world in which we always already find ourselves when we come to encounter other worldly beings. This is the reason why Helm’s (2001, §5.4) appeal to the idea of finding oneself in the mood to do certain things cannot offer a view on the matter comparable to the one I am recommending here. For the idea is not that the feelings in question here modulate some of our affective experiences. The point is, rather, that certain pre-intentional affective states may open up a given space of experiential possibilities marked by a sense of togetherness.
- 10.
This idea is at the base of what Husserl calls ‘genetic phenomenology’ as well as of a late development of Husserl’s philosophy Anthony J. Steinbock (1995) calls ‘generative phenomenology’.
- 11.
The present chapter develops thoughts I have earlier argued for (cf. Sánchez Guerrero 2011). This work arose in the context of the project ‘animal emotionale II’ supported by a grant of VolkswagenStiftung. I am grateful to Rudolf Owen Müllan, Jan Slaby, and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments on previous drafts of this chapter.
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Guerrero, H.A.S. (2014). Feelings of Being-Together and Caring-With. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Schmid, H. (eds) Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6934-2_11
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