The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion

Thomas Szanto, Hilge Landweer, Thomas Szanto, Hilge Landweer

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351720366
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophie
• Categoría: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

The emotions occupy a fundamental place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, the phenomenology of the emotions has until recently remained a relatively neglected topic. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion is an outstanding guide and reference source to this important and fascinating topic. Comprising forty-nine chapters by a team of international contributors, this handbook covers the following topics:

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• historical perspectives, including Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, Levinas and Arendt;
• contemporary debates, including existential feelings, situated affectivity, embodiment, art, morality and feminism;
• self-directed and individual emotions, including happiness, grief, self-esteem and shame;
• social emotions, including sympathy, aggresive emotions, collective emotions and political emotions;
• borderline cases of emotion, including solidarity, trust, pain, forgiveness and revenge.

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy studying phenomenology, ethics, moral psychology and philosophy of psychology, The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion is also suitable for those in related disciplines such as religion, sociology and anthropology.

PART 1

Historical perspectives

1

FRANZ BRENTANO

Michelle Montague

1. Introduction

In this chapter, I consider Franz Brentano’s theory of emotion. I focus on three of its central claims: (1) Emotions are sui generis intentional phenomena, (2) emotions are essentially evaluative phenomena, and (3) emotions provide the basis of an epistemology of objective value. (2) is intimately connected to (1) and (3) in that the evaluative nature of emotions not only accounts for their sui generis status but also provides the basis for Brentano’s epistemology of value.

In what follows, I will be concerned with only conscious emotion, putting aside attributions of emotional states or conditions that may be true even if the person is, say, in a dreamless sleep. Brentano himself explicitly rejects the existence of unconscious mental states, and therefore takes it that to give a theory of mind is to give a theory of consciousness.

In order to understand Brentano’s theory of emotion, one needs to know how it relates to his overall theory of mind, particularly to his claims about the intentional nature of mental phenomena, the self-intimating nature of consciousness, and the fundamental classification of mental phenomena. A full treatment of these topics is not possible here, but I hope to say enough to show how each relates to his theory of emotion.

2. Two senses of ‘phenomenology’

Most contemporary theories of emotion accept the idea that emotions ‘have a phenomenology’. Phenomenology understood in this way can be characterized in a familiar way as the phenomenon of there being ‘something it is like’, experientially, to be in a mental state, something it is like for the creature who is in the mental state. It is a matter of a state’s having an experiential character. Consider tasting warm cornbread, or feeling sleepy, or faintly uneasy, or finding something funny.

This contemporary use of ‘phenomenology’ should be distinguished from ‘phenomenology’ understood as a method of theorizing about consciousness which studies it specifically from the first-person perspective, the perspective of the experiencing subject. Husserl (1900, 1901), Sartre (1943), Heidegger (1927), Merleau-Ponty (1945), and de Beauvoir (1949) are most commonly associated with phenomenology in this sense, but Brentano is arguably its founder. In his later work, he explicitly calls his method ‘descriptive psychology’ and distinguishes it from ‘genetic psychology’ (1995[1887], 4). The aim of descriptive psychology, he says,

is nothing other than to provide us with a general conception of the entire realm of human consciousness. It does this by listing fully the basic components out of which everything internally perceived by humans is composed, and by enumerating the ways in which these components can be connected.

(1995[1887], 4)

In contrast, genetic psychology is concerned with contingent causal laws, laws governing how mental phenomena arise and the connections between the mental and the physiological.

Brentano conceived of (descriptive) psychology as a ‘Cartesian science’ in the sense that it had an epistemologically certain foundation.¹ With Descartes (1641), Brentano argued that we can know truths about our mentality with certainty. His conception of psychology was at the same time fully empirical, not because it was based on experimentation that could be repeated and observed from the third-person standpoint, but because its truths were based on experience itself. Descriptive psychology, in short, was a first-person empirical science that provided necessary truths about our mental lives.

Given this methodological approach to psychology, the connection between the two senses of ‘phenomenology’ is not hard to see: Phenomenology qua phenomenological method studies phenomenology qua the what it’s likeness or experiential character of conscious experience.

3. Demarcating the field of psychology

One of Brentano’s main goals in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint was to demarcate the field of psychology in a way that showed it to be a distinctive and unified discipline.² He had two central motivations. First, he believed that psychology contained the roots of aesthetics, logic, ethics, and politics. Logic, he thought, was rooted in ‘immediately evident’ judgments, ethics was rooted in ‘immediately evident’ emotions, and these immediately evident judgments and emotions provided us with knowledge of the necessary truths that constitute the foundations of logic and ethics.³ Second, he believed that a unified discipline could be established only by dispelling the lack of clarity and disagreement among his contemporaries about psychology’s subject matter and method. Much of the Psychology is dedicated to this second undertaking.⁴

All the sciences study phenomena, according to Brentano, where ‘phenomena’ is taken in its original meaning of ‘appearances’. Physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology all study appearances, appearances understood as the ‘data of consciousness’: What is given to consciousness, what shows up in consciousness. “All the data of our consciousness are divided into two great classes,” he says, “the class of physical and the class of mental phenomena” (1874, 59/77), and it is in terms of these two great classes that the subject matter of the natural sciences is distinguishable from the subject matter of psychology. The natural sciences study physical phenomena. Psychology studies mental phenomena: It is, precisely, ‘the science of mental phenomena’.

What are physical phenomena? What are mental phenomena? The first thing to do, perhaps, is to note the fundamental respect in which both physical phenomena and mental phenomena in Brentano’s sense are mental phenomena in our sense (i.e., our standard present-day sense), simply because they are appearances.

Brentano’s examples of physical phenomena are color, light, sound, spatial location, and heat. At first glance, this list seems like a familiar starting point for characterizing physical objects and their properties. It seems to connect directly with our ordinary view of things, according to which there is a world of mind-independent physical objects that have various mind-independent physical qualities that are the proper objects of study of the natural sciences.

In asserting that physical phenomena are mere appearances, however, Brentano is not advocating any kind of common-sense realism. On his terms, ‘physical phenomena’ are not part of any experience-transcending mind-independent reality, but only signs of something that is transcendent in this way. A physical phenomenon is an appearance created by our causal relation to something independent of us. As such, physical phenomena cannot give us knowledge of how things ‘really and truly are’:

The phenomena of light, sound, heat, spatial location and locomotion (…) are not things which really and truly exist. They are signs of something real, which, through its causal activity, produces presentations of them. They are not, however, an adequate representation of this reality, and they give us knowledge of it only in a very incomplete sense. We can say that there exists something which, under certain conditions, causes this or that sensation. We can probably also prove that there must be relations among these realities similar to those manifested by spatial phenomena, shapes and sizes. But this is as far as we can go. We have no experience of that which truly exists, in and of itself, and that which we do experience is not true. The truth of physical phenomena is, as they say, only a relative truth.

(1874, 14/19)

So the subject matter of the natural sciences, according to Brentano, is physical phenomena, for example color, sound, warmth, and odor, all of which are appearances. Natural sciences do not directly study ‘things in themselves’.

What about mental phenomena? Brentano’s examples include hearing a sound, seeing a colored object, thinking a general concept, loving a dog, and judging that grass is green. Since mental phenomena and physical phenomena are both phenomena, things ‘of the mind’ so to speak, to fully understand how psychology is distinguished from the natural sciences, Brentano must distinguish mental phenomena from physical phenomena. Examples provide a sense of their difference, but Brentano needs a principled way of distinguishing them.

Of the four distinct criteria for distinguishing mental and physical phenomena that Brentano considers, his preferred and most well-known proposal is that all and only mental phenomena have intentionality:

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on (…) This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.

(1874, 68/88–89)

This passage has resulted in much debate, but for present purposes, we can put these aside and accept the intuitive characterization of Brentano’s claim that all mental phenomena are intentional phenomena in the sense of being ‘of’ or ‘about’ something.

4. Psychology’s evidence and Brentano’s theory of consciousness

With Brentano’s criterion for determining the subject matter of psychology in hand, we can now ask for more detail about its method and source of evidence. This requires turning to his theory of consciousness.

The fundamental pillar of Brentano’s theory of consciousness is that conscious mental phenomena are constitutively self-intimating. That is, in addition to any external phenomena that may be its objects, a conscious mental act⁵ or mental phenomenon takes itself as object, not as the focus of attention, but only ‘in passing’ or ‘by the way’. Its taking itself as object in this way is constitutive of its existence as a conscious mental phenomenon—essential to its existing at all as a conscious mental phenomenon.⁶ One shouldn’t, therefore, suppose that to say that a mental act takes itself as object only ‘in passing’ is to suggest that this taking itself as object is unimportant or inessential.

Brentano calls this essential self-intimation ‘inner perception’⁷ and distinguishes it from external perception. External perception is always of physical phenomena in Brentano’s sense—color, sound, and spatial location. Inner perception is always of mental phenomena, and it is in Brentano’s view immediate and infallibly self-evident (1874, 70/91). We can know that mental phenomena are real and we can know their real nature through inner perception: “The phenomena of inner perception (…) are true in themselves. As they appear to be, so they are in reality, a fact with is attested to by the evidence with which they are perceived” (1874, 15/19–20):

Psychology, like the natural sciences, has its basis in perception and experience. Above all, however, its source is to be found in the inner perception of our own mental phenomena. We would never know what a thought is, or a judgement, pleasure or pain, desires or aversions, hopes or fears, courage or despair, decisions and voluntary intentions if we did not learn what they are through inner perception of our own phenomena. Note, however, that we said that inner perception (Wahrnehmung) and not introspection, i.e. inner observation (Beobachtung), constitutes this primary and essential source of psychology. These two concepts must be distinguished from one another.

(1874, 22/29)

‘Inner perception’ is not what contemporary theorists typically call ‘introspection’, or what Brentano and his contemporaries also call ‘inner observation’ (Beobachtung). Introspection or inner observation is one mental act taking a distinct mental act as an object or as the focus of attention. In contrast, inner perception is built into the very act it is perceiving.

For Brentano, there is a very tight connection between (1) what makes a conscious state conscious, (2) the correct method of theorizing for psychology, and (3) psychology’s fundamental source of evidence. It is in virtue of what a conscious state is—a self-intimating phenomenon involving inner perception—that it provides the best and most certain evidence for our psychological theorizing. Since this unassailable evidence can only be delivered from the first-person perspective, the phenomenolog...