Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart (Contributions to Phenomenology, 117) 3030919277, 9783030919276

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Contributions to Phenomenology 117

Anthony J. Steinbock   Editor

Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart

Contributions to Phenomenology In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology Volume 117

Series Editors Nicolas de Warren, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA Ted Toadvine, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA Editorial Board Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium David Carr, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong James Dodd, New School University, New York, USA Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy Burt Hopkins, University of Lille, Lille, France José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of) Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany William R. McKenna, Miami University, Ohio, USA Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, Ohio, USA J. N. Mohanty, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, Memphis, USA Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany Gail Soffer, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy Anthony Steinbock, University Stony Brook, New York, USA Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA

Scope The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than 100 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship,the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phenomenological research. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance. The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology.

Anthony J. Steinbock Editor

Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart

Editor Anthony J. Steinbock Department of Philosophy Stony Brook University Stony Brook, NY, USA

ISSN 0923-9545     ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic) Contributions to Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-030-91927-6    ISBN 978-3-030-91928-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my brother, Ben In memory of my brother, Bernie

Introduction to Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart

The matter of the “heart” is attaining a notable prominence in contemporary philosophical discussions for motives the reader will discern below. But it is only seemingly a new topic. The heart is only seemingly new because there are long and varied traditions dealing with the heart, traditions that reach back thousands of years in a variety of Eastern and Western cultures; they firmly recognize the importance of the heart as an emotional center and cognitive source. In the Western philosophical tradition, the heart has come to the fore in the retrieval of the emotional center of our lives, the significance it has in interpersonal and interspecies frameworks, and its evidential cognitive dimension, a dimension that has been excluded in the dualism of rationality and sensibility.1 In this dualism, evidence and knowledge had been restrictively assigned to rationality, while the heart (with the emotions, as well as the entire affective life) had been relegated to sensibility, where the latter achieves its meaning-justification only by being tethered to a rational custodian. Part of the effort of retrieval consists in putting our contemporary concerns in dialogue with the past appreciation and negotiation of the heart in our lives; it involves examining the makeup of the heart, while challenging long-accepted presuppositions, and investigating more critically certain key emotions of the heart. Such a retrieval can be discerned in the chapters making up this volume. The first part, “In Dialogue with the Heart,” is composed of an examination of the heart by Jeffery Bloechl’s Pauline personalist anthropology (Chap. 1). Bloechl critically discerns the meaning of heart/kardia in Paul of Tarsus as well as its complex place among other key concepts in Paul’s anthropology. Chapter 2, by Christina M. Gschwandtner, thoroughly explores early Christian desert ascetics in the context of their practices pertaining to purifying the heart. By relating the process of heart-­ attentiveness to self-understanding in the pursuit of holiness, she suggests the phenomenological import of such practices. Antonio Calcagno takes up the treatment of the constitutive roles of the heart and heartlessness where personhood is 1  A very brief and initial overview of this is presented in the introduction to Anthony J. Steinbock, Knowing by Heart: Loving as Participation and Critique (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021).

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concerned and, in a pioneering interpretation, develops it in the phenomenological thought of Edith Stein and Gerda Walther (Chap. 3). Part II of this volume, "Orientations and Dimensions of the Heart," begins with Edward S. Casey’s challenge to prejudices present in most theories of emotions in the Modern era, namely, that they are placed “inside” the subject (Chap. 4). His original approach suggests how emotions come to us from the outside of ourselves, circulating in the interstices of experience. Further examining the structure of the heart in Chap. 5, Anthony J. Steinbock distinguishes between feelings as dynamic relational movements, and feeling-states as “states” and conditions, showing the way in which they are related through auto-affection. In Chap. 6, Ignacio Quepons clarifies the fundamental dimension of vulnerability in affective experience. Through nuanced analyses, Quepons interprets the place of vulnerability in the constitution of human existence and the sources of normativity. Concluding this part (Chap. 7), Natalie Depraz deploys what she calls a “cardio-phenomenology,” innovatively exploring the relation between the body and the emotions at the intersection of the heart. She does this by focusing on the practice of praying (e.g., the “heart prayer”), with a phenomenological sensitivity to first- and second-person investigations, with the possibility of integrating third-person ones. Part III, “Emotions of the Heart,” highlights key emotions, like love and joy in a phenomenology of the heart, signifying the heart’s cognitive and critical roles. Ellie Anderson leads the part in Chap. 8 with her subtle examination of affective consciousness in various figures within the phenomenological tradition and by evaluating the revelatory character of loving: she shows how we not only receive others in loving, but how loving and being loved reveal us to ourselves. Developing the theme of personal love, Sara Heinämaa creatively elaborates upon Edmund Husserl’s late ethical reflections. In so doing, she distinguishes a range of values of loving in order to explicate the emotive and axiological features of intersubjectivity and a human community of love (Chap. 9). Appealing to similar resources, Rosemary R.P. Lerner examines the role of instincts in Husserlian phenomenology. Lerner investigates in Chap. 10 the ways in which even theoretical rational activity is related to the emotions and the lived body. Chapter 11 closes the volume with Mariano Crespo’s contribution on emotional intentionality. Using the experience of joy as his guiding thread of phenomenological interpretation, Crespo highlights the cognitive as well as the ethical and intersubjective character of such an emotional experience. This volume, Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, is a collection of papers inspired by a conference sponsored by the Phenomenology Research Center and the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. Held in October of 2020, it was relegated to an online format, like so many other planned in-person events during this time. The unanticipated silver lining was that well over 200 people from 33 countries were able to register and attend this 3-day event. I would especially like to thank Stephanie Struble who assisted me in converting this conference from an in-person gathering to a successful online format. Her assistance was invaluable in negotiating time zones, communicating with presenters, and in coordinating the moderators for each presentation from the pool of our graduate students at Stony Brook.

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Regarding the publication of this volume, I am grateful to Springer Publishers, and especially to Christopher Coughlin, Senior Editor, for his immediate and unbridled encouragement of this project. It is a pleasure working with him. I would also like to thank the series editors, Nicolas de Warren and Ted Toadvine, for their interest and support in publishing this collection. I am grateful to Stephanie Struble for her editorial assistance with the first draft of articles that compose this volume. I am likewise grateful for Caleb Faul’s editorial assistance, and for assiduously assembling the bibliography for each individual article presented here. Stony Brook, NY, USA

Anthony J. Steinbock

Contents

Part I In Dialogue with the Heart 1 Kardia in the Pauline Anthropology������������������������������������������������������    3 Jeffrey Bloechl 2 Guarding the Heart: The Phenomenality of the Heart in Early Christian Asceticism ����������������������������������������������������������������   19 Christina M. Gschwandtner 3 The Constitutive Roles of the Heart and Heartlessness for Personhood in Edith Stein and Gerda Walther������������������������������   51 Antonio Calcagno Part II Orientations and Dimensions of the Heart 4 Taking Emotion Far Out ������������������������������������������������������������������������   71 Edward S. Casey 5 Feelings and Feeling-States in the Schema of the Heart����������������������   85 Anthony J. Steinbock 6 Feeling Vulnerable: Phenomenological Dimensions of Affectivity ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  105 Ignacio Quepons 7 Measuring the Cardiac Lived Bodily Rhythms of the Heart of the Praying Person: An ‘Irréalisable’?������������������������  127 Natalie Depraz Part III Emotions of the Heart 8 My Heart Is Yours: The Phenomenology of Self-Revelation in Affective Consciousness����������������������������������������������������������������������  145 Ellie Anderson xi

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9 Personal Love: Feeling from the Depths������������������������������������������������  165 Sara Heinämaa 10 From Reason to Love? Or from Love to Reason? The Role of Instincts������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  185 Rosemary R. P. Lerner 11 The Phenomenology of Joy: A Case Study in Emotional Intentionality��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  213 Mariano Crespo Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  229

Part I

In Dialogue with the Heart

Chapter 1

Kardia in the Pauline Anthropology Jeffrey Bloechl

1  Introduction The notion of “heart” enters the Christian tradition as an inheritance of its Jewish root. When Jesus enjoins his listeners to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mk 12:30), he repeats what has already been written in Deuteronomy 6:5. We find an attempt to define the place of this notion in a complex understanding of human being in the letters of Paul of Tarsus, himself at once Jewish and a follower of Jesus. For Paul, we are flesh, mind, spirit, and heart, with these various aspects both qualifying and enriching one another without final reduction to any single one of them. Paul thus is a personalist—avant la letter, if one insists. This cannot be said of a great deal of modern thought, and of the modern ethos that it informs. In order to understand the Pauline anthropology, it is necessary to rid ourselves of certain modern prejudices, not least of which thinks in terms of subjectivity. A person is not merely a subject standing over against objects. There are other difficulties. Paul is not a theorist or even a teacher, but a preacher. His discourse is adapted to the needs of each community, though this does not mean that it is without a reasonably stable core. Paul’s thinking is neither fully Greek not fully Hebraic, though as we will see the latter is, for present purposes, decisive. As for what Paul precisely means by “heart,” this is elusive. One must approach this matter by way of distinguishing it from what it is not. We have already anticipated a central claim: it is by “heart” that one is open to God. This enables us to risk a general proposition: Paul’s religious personalism contains a theory of being in the world, among things, and with other persons. J. Bloechl (*) Department of Philosophy, Boston College, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_1

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2  Person and Heart In contemporary philosophy, interest in the notion of “heart” generally goes together with an understanding of human being as person rather than as subject. Whether or not the philosophy that would think of us as subjects is keyed by an epistemological concern, as some readings of Kant and Husserl might suggest, it lends itself to the thought that we are first of all, most fundamentally, one thing or capacity on which the others rest (will, cognition, drive, etc.). Is the effort sustainable? Let us only note that the legacy of Cartesian philosophy, in which this approach is first sketched, is impressively uncertain. On one hand, the effort to ground the subjectivity of the subject, whether in itself, God, or others, appears unresolved nearly three centuries after Descartes’ Meditations. On the other, those who refuse the effort from the beginning—Nietzsche, Freud, and their schools, for whom we are most fundamentally an unresolvable conflict—are still kept at the margin of a great deal of philosophical research. Much to their liking. All of this time, there has also been the possibility of a richer and less hierarchical conception of human being in the concept of “person.” Without questioning the reality and importance of mind or will or desire, one might instead consider them to be aspects or facets of a being who is irreducible to any one of them, and then seek the riddle of our existence in their relation. All of this time, because the word itself and eventually the sense that we have just given to it have been with us since Antiquity. The Greek antecedent, prosopon, originally characterized a role, or rather the surface, face, through which it was expressed in drama. According to Maurice Nedoncelle, this word, which was eventually translated into Latin as persona, did not signify human being in the ontological sense until called upon to augment the legal definition that was for a time invested in “body.”1 It is of course difficult to say of those with full rights that only they are “body” when it is all too evident that so, too, are those without rights. In response to this difficulty, the word persona was reserved for those with full rights, which is to say with freedom, creativity and a range of expressivity. It is not difficult to see already in this new term an interpretation of the human face as exhibiting any number of facets emanating, as it were, from within. It was for the biblical traditions, with their conception of a personal God, to go further. In Genesis 1:26, God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And after he does so, he addresses them and permits himself to be addressed as a person. So then, what of heart? The notion is on rare occasion present in Greek literature before the Jewish and Christian faiths come into contact with it. In the Iliad, Zeus laughs deep in his heart (kardia), which appears indistinctly as the seat of feeling and thought (XXI 441). Yet such instances are quite rare, certainly in comparison with the large number of close approximations of the term that are found in the Hebrew scriptures. In these writings, the theme of heart is underdeveloped not 1  M. Nédoncelle, “Prosopon et persona dans l’antiquité classique. Essai de bilan linguistique,” in Revue des Sciences Religieuses, 22, 3–4 (1948): 277–299.

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because it simply comes up too little, but instead because little attempt is made to gather numerous subtle differences under a single definition. Neither of these things can be said of the writings ascribed to Paul of Tarsus, where the two traditions do flow together. The Pauline letters refer to “heart” several dozen times, and moreover with a usage that is sufficiently consistent as to offer us at least the outline of a clear definition. In order to see this, it will also be necessary to recognize, however briefly, that the Pauline anthropology is in some important respects a personalism, and indeed one in which the human is understood in and through a specific experience of the divine.

3  Notes on Reading the Pauline Letters No serious reading of the relevant texts can do without mention of some hermeneutical complications. To begin with, there is the fact that scholars are not in perfect agreement about which texts traditionally ascribed to the author Paul were in fact written by him. Fortunately, however, there is something close to consensus that a common theological vision is shared, to varying substantial degree, by the letters included in the canonical bible. One thus speaks of the Pauline letters and Pauline theology, even if one hesitates to affirm that Paul is the author of a second letter to the Thessalonians, or letters to the Colossians and Ephesians. As for the epistolary nature of the texts, it is not enough to remind ourselves that what is said is directed to a range of communities with different problems and a different relationship with the author (e.g., the people of Thessalonika needed encouragement to remain watchful for the second coming of Jesus; in Corinth the problem lay more straightforwardly with their morality). This is true enough, but does not reach the fact that in all cases, the letters are written specifically to preach and exhort. Yet this is where the Pauline theology, which necessarily contains an anthropology, is worked out— which is to say in a discourse that is kerygmatic and hortatory rather than analytic or demonstrative: the people of Thessalonika, Corinth, Galatia and so forth are called to recognize a particular content and urged to live up to its implications. As one might expect, a preacher is not necessarily as concerned with conceptual rigor and strict consistency, as with hitting the mark of a specific pastoral concern. This aspect of the Pauline discourse simply has to be recognized and sifted in order to get to some theological and anthropological bedrock. Meanwhile, though, there is also the matter of development to consider. After all, even if we restrict ourselves to the letters that scholars all agree were written by Paul himself, authorship is extended over a period of fifteen to eighteen years (roughly AD 51–68), during which time Paul is evidently forced to reconsider, deepen and reformulate various aspects of his preaching and exhortation. In short, even as he addresses himself to a series of communities which, again, have different problems and different relations with Paul himself, his thinking is maturing. Together, these features of the Pauline corpus can fairly seem to weigh against assuming that the same term necessarily means the

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same thing from text to text and even against assuming that the author himself has complete control over its meaning. There is also the considerably more difficult, and deeper matter of the relation between Greek and Hebraic elements in Pauline thought. Greek thought is oriented to distinctions taken to express parts. A Greek conception of human nature thus proceeds partitionally, by distinguishing and then relating body and soul, and then within soul its appetitive, spirited and rational parts (respectively, epithumetikon, thumetikon, and logistikon). In comparison, Hebraic thought is oriented to a whole that exhibits different dimensions or aspects each of which permeates the entire person, and which are therefore articulated with somewhat less precision than are the Greek “parts.” This puts us on notice in two more ways. First, as one sorts through the possible Hebraic and Greek antecedents of a particular key Pauline concept, it sometimes turns out that the Hebraic and Greek instances do not line up, as seems to be the case for the Greek sense of soma, or lived body, which seems without strict correlate in Hebraic thought, and which appears in many of the Pauline letters.2 Of course, this much amounts only to confirming that the two sources truly are different. Second, however, the Pauline conception is, as we will see, rarely if ever dualistic about key pairs of concepts, as if there were boundaries of mutual exclusion between them (and the anthropology does involve a number of them). It is more often a matter of relations among aspects that flow in and through one another. This suggests the predominance of one strongly Hebraic element in Pauline thought, though it does not at all rule out the presence of others that are more clearly Greek, at least in the terms proposed a moment ago.

4  Key Terms in the Pauline Anthropology There can be no question that the theme of “heart” is of great importance for Pauline thought. The letters make use of the word over fifty times, not counting variants like “hardness of heart” (sklérokardia), and so forth. It is not known whether Paul came into contact with the oral accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus that later made their way into the written gospels,3 but if he did then he may have known of passages like Matthew 5:8, in which Jesus says “blessed are the pure in heart [katharoi 2  “Strict separation between body and soul is [in Hebraic thought] unknown. Man does not have a body and a soul,he is both of them at once.” W. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, vol. 2, trans. J. Baker (London: SCM, 1967), p. 124. 3  Dunn outlines what I take to be a moderate position, when he claims that “The largest consensus [among biblical scholars] still maintains that Paul knew or cared little about the ministry of Jesus apart from his death and resurrection, though the theological corollaries of that conclusion are less often pursued.” J.D.G. Dunn, “Jesus Tradition in Paul” in Studying the Historical Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 1994), p. 155. This would seem to leave aside the passage in 1 Timothy that warning that “If any one teaches otherwise and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness, 4 he is puffed up with conceit,” (1 Tim 6:3–4), but for the fact that authorship of the letter is disputed.

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kardia], for they will see God” (I will come back to this passage briefly). He certainly did have a deep understanding of the Hebrew scriptures, in which there are many dozens of direct occurrences of the corresponding Hebrew word, lêḇ, and its close cognates.4 Moreover, one finds among them, in the Psalms, an interesting cluster of references that are plainly congruent with Matthew 5:8. God saves, bestows living kindness on, and grants refuge and glory to the “upright in heart” (Ps 7:10, 36:10, 64:10). One does not need a primer in Pauline thought to know that these passages bring us to the question of the difference between the Jewish experience of heart in accord with the law and the early Christian experience of heart in accord with the example of the self-emptying Christ. Given these stakes, it is disappointing to find that a rich and nuanced understanding of heart in the Pauline anthropology proves elusive. There are nonetheless important clues. The anthropology itself is developed around six concepts, which appear organized in three pairs, and in this context accords a recognizable place for “heart.” Let me first review simple definitions of the six terms, in their respective pairings:5 1.a. Soma is the Pauline word for body, understood in what the phenomenologists remind us is the ordinary sense, that is to say lived body and not at all—never in any of passage in any of the letters—corpse. 1.b. Sarx is flesh, in the sense of primary attachment to the world and to everything in it; flesh has multiple valences ranging from weakness in the sense of perishable (as in 1 Cor 15:50) to a dimension that is hostile to God and to God’s law (Rom 8:7). The nature of the relationship between soma and sarx shows up in the fact that whereas body is a dimension of our being in the world, flesh is the form of our belonging to the world. 2.a. Nous can be translated as mind, if by this we mean only the thinking by which the person is integrated in his or her diverse aspects sufficiently for interaction in the world and with others. 2.b. Kardia, heart, represents a person’s innermost dimension, the seat of the emotions and, it would seem, also the seat of thought and will (1 Cor 7:37 observes that the one who is “firmly established in his heart and under no constraint [….] will do well.”). The nature of the relationship between nous and kardia shows up in Paul’s indications that heart is not without reason, but instead has a reasoning of its own (Eph 1:18: “the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know”). 3.a. Psyche, or soul, has a sense close to the life force of the whole person, and not only what animates the material body. Whether this is sometimes meant in a  See Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, pp. 142–147.  I closely follow J.D.G.  Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1998), pp. 70–77. 4 5

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sense close to the Greek and robustly Christian notion of a soul that survives dissolution of the body or only as life of the whole body until death is not easily discerned. To the degree that the former, Greek sense comes into it, as one would think it must for a thinker as intent on resurrection as is Paul, this is an instance of a Greek inflection in Pauline thought. 3.b. Pneuma, spirit, designates the dimension by which a person is related directly to God. Many passages in the letters underline the close affiliation of human spirit with Holy Spirit. One important conclusion to be drawn from what is said about soul and spirit is that according to Paul we are more than soul and indeed more than soul and body, or as the phenomenologists put it, more than our being in the world. We may also surmise that psyche would be brought into close agreement with pneuma in the course of efforts to live in the world as God wills. This is already enough for it to be clear that there are important insights to be gained by way of exploring distinctions between terms that appear to be particularly close. Moreover, this will involve points of considerable overlap among some of them even if also tension among others. Whatever their differences, both body and flesh are modes of corporeality, heart is not strictly opposed to mind, and soul can be brought into agreement with spirit. Greater differences no doubt lie between the distinct pairs, but once again without sharp opposition. If our corporeality includes impulses emanating from flesh that are at odds with the tendency of reasoning to seek an integrated engagement of the world and everything in it, each of these must surely permeate the other, or else our corporeality is sheer animality and our minds and hearts are disincarnate. Likewise, whereas our reasoning is not strictly one with our orderedness to God, it is still necessary to think that there is important affinity between them, or else spirit suspends our reasoning which for its part knows nothing of God’s call to us. All of this means that the Pauline anthropology is relational, in the sense of a reciprocal implication of the components and the whole. In short, our nature is both one and many, as is the God who Christian theology would soon understand as triune—and indeed, sometimes with an explicit interest in exploring analogies between the two.6 It is here, in its religious root, that the Pauline anthropology becomes a personalism. For Paul, a human being is a person, richly multifaceted, fundamentally according to his or her relation with a God who is also a person, or perhaps better, who is revealed as the original person. The insight does not solve every difficulty. When, as does sometime happen in the scholarship, the complex set of relations that is our make-up is reduced to only a tripartition, or triad, and when the three parts or aspects in question are specifically sarx and some combination, often uncertain, of pneuma and psyche, the theme of kardia is necessarily marginalized. Of course, the danger is increased by the fact that, due to the hortatory nature of Pauline discourse, the theme itself is not as clearly defined as we philosophers might like. With little difficulty, we know what 6  I leave aside the disputed question of whether Paul himself recognized God as Trinity. The major effort in illumining the divine and the human along these lines is of course Augustine’s De Trinitate.

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body is and what flesh is, and with only slight exertion we recognize what distinguishes soul and spirit. Of heart, we have just said that it is both like mind inasmuch as it reasons and unlike mind inasmuch as it does so in its own way. We are also able to say, with little difficulty, that Paul must align it with spirit, since he has written that those who are rightly resolved at heart are in full accord with God. This remark, furthermore, closely matches his thought that human spirit is that dimension of ourselves which is, as Dunn puts it, “Godward.”7 The fact that these relations—heart and mind, heart and spirit—are positive might lead one to think that heart is therefore opposed or resistant to flesh and for that matter, body as well. And yet, heart is plainly an anatomical metaphor, albeit indeed, a metaphor: there appears not to be a single case in the Pauline letters where heart is meant only or strictly in the anatomical or biological sense.8 What are we to make of this? At minimum, the anatomical sense of heart inscribes it in space, so that it can be expected to exhibit relations with other dimensions of our personhood that plainly move and are moved in space. If we conceive of heart as an organ, we thus conceive it as in the world, among things, with others and, as Paul would hasten to add, all in the presence of God (coram Deo). Let us therefore consider heart in relation to living body (soma) and its close affiliate, flesh (sarx), on the understanding that what we learn in that context might also shed more light on the agreement of heart with mind (nous) and spirit (pneuma), where Paul has rested his call for believers to bring themselves to God (I will in fact only barely touch on heart and mind, since that theme is developed at length in Crina Gschwandtner’s essay in this same volume). I have already observed that in the Pauline letters soma never signifies corpse. But it is also not merely the living physical mass—flesh, bones, blood—of a sentient being. To be sure, the word is sometimes used in a somewhat neutral sense that might suggest such an understanding, as when Paul writes from Ephesus to the people of Corinth that although he is absent in body, he nonetheless is present in spirit (1 Cor 5:3). But simple and after all unimportant passages like this should not lead us to overlook a more important, moral sense in which soma seems not at all negative. And this shows up when one contrasts living body with flesh. In comparison, the dimension of flesh is much more consistently negative, as the principle of an attachment to the world that threatens to occlude a higher relation with God. Of course, as I have also noted, flesh is sometimes only barely negative, as when the expression “in the flesh” (en sarxi) only means life on earth. But then this “life on earth” is haunted by a vulnerability that renders us prone to a more robustly negative grasping for security that readers of Heidegger will associate with Dasein’s flight from its own death into the vicissitudes of care for its own existence. Yet Paul has the relation with God in mind, and so the flight that seizes finally upon this world and its things is the fall into the experience of sin that Heidegger’s analyses suspend

 J.D.G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul, p. 76.  It is a metaphor with some extension. Still among the Pauline letters, Eph 1:18 refers to “eyes of the heart.” A few centuries later, the Rule of St. Benedict refers to “the ear of the heart.” 7 8

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from the interpretation of Dasein. Not that Pauline theology would have us think that sinfulness and personhood are one and the same. In his letter of the Romans, Paul admits “I myself am fleshly [sarkinos]” (Rom 7:14) but also frequently lets it be known that even while the flesh serves sin, one may strive to serve God (and implies, unmistakably, that he has done this well). This possibility helps us to see the important difference between living in the flesh, which is simply necessary for a being who has mortal needs and desires, and living according to the flesh (kata sarka), in which case those needs and desires have become central and definitive. It falls to the proper exercise of mind, nous, to focus our thinking in a manner that refuses the subtle depictions of flesh. The tension between nous and sarx thus is essentially moral and spiritual; if by flesh one would be dissipated in things of the world, by mind one may be joined to God (e.g., Rom 7:25). If the dimension of living body is distinct from the dimensions where this moral and spiritual tension is found, it has a neutrality of considerably greater importance than that of mere physical presence and absence. But this still does not mean that the living body is without consequence of its own. As living body, a person is the unity of a sustained relation with the world and everything in it. It is thus as living body that we perceive what we encounter, and on that basis, interact with it. There is in this feature of Pauline thought a remarkable step toward positions taken by Merleau-­ Ponty nearly two millenia later, but with the crucial difference that for Pauline thought the specific nature of our perception is always already an expression of our moral and spiritual condition—which, as no one will deny, varies in time. What does this mean? Put crudely, perception can be wrong because one sees under the domination of flesh, which is to say fundamentally in the service of need and desire. What mind knows is that everything we perceive—the world, things, other persons—are created by God, and therefore given to us already before any claim to possess and enjoy them. Furthermore, if Paul is consistent to the end, this must also be said about our own living body in all that it entails: the living body is our insertion into the limitless domain of creatureliness that we can either disrupt and abuse under the domination of flesh, or else freely participate in according to the created nature that is specific to human persons.9 It seems to me that this free participation in the created order as properly understood would be the proximate effect of prayer.10 Prayer, in turn, grounds a form of perception that is essentially theological. For Paul, the evident way to this outcome is identification with Christ. This is made clear already in passages where the letters are still focused on the living body. To the Corinthians, he preaches, “Your bodies are members of Christ” (1 Cor 6:15), and to the Romans he seems to suggest that this means that in faith the living body is the very thing that must be given up to Christ (cf. Rom 12:1: “present your bodies 9  The point seems to coincide with what Anthony Steinbock calls “participating-being” in his Knowing by Heart: Loving as Participation and Critique (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021), Chapter 3 passim. 10  Whether the proximate effect would also be the ultimate effect is far from certain. One would have to show that the flourishing of our creatureliness in a worldly activity fully coincides with the union with God that is sought in highest prayer.

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a sacrifice”). How are we to hear such exhortations? Do they not situate the living body of the believer squarely in contradiction? At least once, according to the letters, Paul himself will have crossed out the singularity of his embodiment—or had it crossed out—so that the sacrifice was briefly perfect even this side of death. Although there is nothing to be gained [from this sort of boasting], I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one may utter. (2 Cor 12.2-4; emphasis mine)

I will forego any attempt here to develop what is implied by the fact that a loss of unified identification with the body also places great pressure on the efficacy of language, and that this happens specifically beyond the heavens of atmosphere and then cosmos—which is to say, once again taking a word from phenomenology, beyond the inverse possibility of any spatial horizon. Let us instead follow the obvious theological clue toward the matter close at hand. The letter, in fact like all of the Pauline letters, is written in the grips of an identification specifically with the suffering Christ, who submitted his human will, and all of his human inclinations, to the will of the Father. The fact that this is most explicit during periods when Paul himself faces one or another kind of distress invites some suspicion that the identification serves to appease an underlying anxiety, but we might instead take the view that in binding himself to Christ on the Cross Paul traces a path away from the limited goods of the world toward a good that is unlimited and eternal. All of this is invested in the seemingly innocuous expression found in the passage I have just cited, and in many others, “a man in Christ” (en Christo).11 Now, if it is a matter of identifying with Christ on the Cross, then we are suddenly close to the theme of heart, for theologians tell us that the center of gravity for Jesus’s suffering is precisely his pure heart. Kierkegaard framed this matter of a pure heart memorably, when he observed that it consists in willing one thing, and of course the only thing worth willing absolutely. According to his most general formulation, “the Good without condition and without qualification, without preface and without compromise is, absolutely the only thing man may and should will, and is only one thing.”12 In terms much closer to Paul’s own (but they were not unknown to Kierkegaard), purification of the heart consists in withdrawing the will from all that is not willed by the divine will, until one is open to God alone in the innermost depth of one’s being. Recall what heart, kardia, means in the Pauline letters: seat of emotions, and of thought and will, wherein matters of choice are deliberated and action is decided (1 Cor 7:37; 2 Cor 9:7). If as Paul preaches, the way to union with God is through identification with Christ, then we for our part must take his heart as the paradigm for our own. In faith, one understands Jesus to have defeated the  The expression appears between 150 and 200 times in the letters, depending on which variations are counted. For Albert Schweitzer it is the key to the whole of Pauline thought. A. Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 3. 12  S. Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1994), p. 37. 11

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incitements of the flesh, thus relinquishing the world as flesh would have us know it, even losing that world, but in this way regaining it no longer as possession but now as gift of the Father. This is enough to tell us a little more about prayer in the Pauline mode: one meditates on the image of Jesus, taking its lessons past the obstacles of the flesh into one’s own heart, which by this means may enter into conformity with His. Heart thus is not the living body itself, but the dimension by which, as living body, we may perceive the world as the Father creates it. This alone, we should note, is enough for us to understand the importance of the anatomical metaphor, with its spatial extension. By heart, a person has access to things in their concrete givenness, in the phenomenological sense of that word. Heart is also not flesh, but the seat and origin Kierkegaard of affects capable of betraying what flesh would have us see and wants, betraying any movement toward addiction to the world and its things. Heart is not mind, it seems to me, but something more like the touchstone and familiar of mind, as mind conducts the image of Jesus to a place where it is already recognized and thus may be received. And finally, heart is not soul, or psyche, if this latter only means the life-force of the person; heart is animated by soul, but soul also animates the other aspects or dimensions of our personhood. Of the relation of heart to the five other key concepts in the Pauline anthropology, this leaves only the one with spirit, or what I earlier said Dunn calls the “Godward” dimension of our personhood. This last relation calls for separate attention.

5  Circumcision of the Heart The Pauline exhortation to open our hearts fully to God does not rest solely on appeals to imitate and identify with the suffering Christ. Among other things, we may note that if it did, the figure of Christ would be reduced to that of a great spiritual exemplar whose status, allowing for certain cultural differences, could not be appreciably different than that of the great souls in whom Aristotle would have us see the fullness of virtues that we ourselves may still stand in need of improving.13 But the anthropology already grounds a claim for somewhat more than this. As spirit, we are already attuned to God and seeking God, whether or not we know it and whether or not we have achieved the proper focus. In theological terms, this sense of spirit evidently anticipates some of what Augustine will begin calling “grace”: God has already provided us with an intimation of salvation, or if one prefers, the Holy Spirit is already acting in us (Rom 8:16). As for the matter of proper focus, this will evidently mean ordering one’s heart truly to the God of Jesus Christ. Paul’s striking expression for what is required is “circumcision of the heart.” The expression is not a hapax legomenon. It appears

13  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics IV.3 1123b. Status, not specific character or deeds. Notably, Jesus Christ not only does not, but necessarily would not possess all of the virtues mentioned by Aristotle.

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three times in the Pauline letters—once explicitly (Rom 2:29), and twice by clear implication (Eph 2:11; Col 2:11)—as well as at least three times in Hebrew scriptures that would have been known to Paul (Deut 10:16, 30:6, Jer 9:26). In terms of the Pauline anthropology, what stands out is that it is the heart, not the living body and not the flesh that is circumcised. It is the heart, in other words, that is submitted to the law of separation, for those who are circumcised are thus separated from those who are not. The Hebrew bible has been clear about precisely this since the beginning, when physical circumcision sealed the special relation that Abraham and, though time, his descendants would have with YHWH (Gen 17.7). Circumcision is the mark of the covenant and of election, of a people set apart. It is also the mark of subjection and obedience to a supreme authority, though this was not immediately codified. All that changes when it is instead a circumcision of heart is that the external mark of election, and of fidelity to God, is now the behavior of the people. In Jeremiah, the people are commanded to “remove the foreskins of their hearts” or else divine wrath will strike them for evil deeds committed in breaking the covenant with God (Jer 4:4). The perspective taken in Deuteronomy is perhaps more interesting. God circumcises the hearts of a people who are commanded to love him and who will in that way avoid the curses that are to fall on their enemies. And yet, this love is not in itself enough—or rather, it is not separable from the actions that express it: one verse after linking circumcision of the heart to love of God, it is said that in this way the people will “return to the commandments” that are given to them. We know enough about the Pauline anthropology to understand that on its terms any reference to “circumcision of the heart” must be emphatically inward, even if Paul does not doubt that what is determined in the heart must necessarily yield corresponding action. There is no use speculating here on the sources for this emphasis, which may include a contemporaneous Chassidic strand in Judaism itself,14 and that may have influenced Jesus before Paul. Whatever the case, to the degree that Pauline thinking finds the common seat of emotion, thought, and will in heart, and considers heart a sort of inner organ of the living body, whereby the world is perceived in accord with its condition—to the degree that Pauline thinking holds this view, circumcision of the heart is an inward matter. And this in turn means that the relation with God is rooted there, though it is certainly not contained there. None of this is to say that Paul has no further relation with what might rightly pass as “law.” Rather, he envisions a law, and an application of the law, that is internal before any external expression of it. Earliest Christianity frequently talks of overcoming the law, in the sense of prescriptions and restrictions imposed on outward action, but already with Jesus himself the sense of this is far from cancelation or suspension. The gospel of Matthew recounts Jesus’s claim to fulfill the law, and his admonition that it be followed and even taught (Mt 5:17–19). Paul’s more complex notion is of a suspension of its limitations in order to admit a more robust

 Chassid: gentle, pious, heartfelt. During Jesus’s own time, a current of Jewish teaching emphasized this approach to law. The locus classicus for research into this hypothesis is G. Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (London: William Collins, 1973).

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relation.15 Without a vital root in the heart, obedience to the law is not a corruption of the relation with God but only a truncation. One will certainly want the relation to yield specific actions, but the actions are committed most fully in the course of a life that is grounded in the inner surrender that would be circumcision of the heart. What real difference can this make? Here is what Paul actually says about circumcision of the heart, at greatest length: Now you, if you call yourself a Jew; if you rely on the law and boast in God; if you know his will and approve of what is superior because you are instructed by the law; if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of little children, because you have in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth […] You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? As it is written: “God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised. So then, if those who are not circumcised keep the law’s requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised? The one who is not circumcised physically and yet obeys the law will condemn you who, even though you have the written code and circumcision, are a lawbreaker. A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a person’s praise is not from other people, but from God. (Rom 2:17–29)

It is a dense passage that deserves lengthy study, but we may be content with just a few remarks: first, the alleged hostility of Paul the Christian to his former Judaism comes down here only to an observation that the religion of outward acts and outward marks is exposed to charges of visible contradictions, both between what the believer claims to be and what he or she really does, and between the believers who do not in fact act in accord with the law and non-believers who appear to do so (and this leads non-Jews to blaspheme, which is undoubtedly to say, scoff at the Jewish faith); second, there is a warning against becoming too proud and trusting of the outward marks and laws that belong to Jewish life; and third, there is a claim that if someone is truly Jewish, in fact, she or he is so inwardly, which is to say at heart. Let us review the three in turn. The observation about inconsistencies surrounding a commitment to outward acts and marks is probably of little interest, since it is familiar to most of us who have had to follow rules of any kind. The warning about undue pride and trust in outward marks and laws is a strike against what we might call ethnic Judaism. The religion of obedience in outward acts is a religion in which it is all too easy to become sure that one is fully in accord with God’s wishes. Given the long record of doubt, guilt and anxiety in the Jewish relation to the law, it is difficult to think that what Paul has in mind is the real possibility of individual pride and boasting. It is far more likely that his concern is with the attitude of an entire people who may conclude from their experience of election that, whatever their individual failings, they  Paul’s word is katargein (see, e.g., Rom 3:31). Many English bibles translate it as “nullification,” but this misses the positive aspect of the idea, and moreover suggests, against what Paul actually writes, that the law must be set aside in order for faith to unfold.

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can be sure of what is required, what they will need to do in order to meet the requirement, and perhaps that they are the only people who can do this. At that point, the relation with God truly would be reduced to its outward elements. The last of the three claims, that the true Jew is inwardly a Jew, can be startling, since it seems to suggest that what Paul is in the process of preaching—what he thinks he has learned from Jesus, and believes as his follower—would also be true of every true Jewish believer. It is specifically in this context that he uses the expressions “circumcision of the heart,” not the flesh or the body, and “by the Spirit,” not the written code and outward actions. With regard to an eventual theory of community, we are reminded of things written in the letter to the Galatians concerning a faith for which there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, and male nor female (Gal 3:28). This language should not be taken to mean that the faith and the community that are universal are therefore also lawless. Instead, both this faith and its community are themselves the effect of a law in its own right—one that stands over any other law that only regulates particular peoples. Against such particular laws, the law of universality is written on the heart that only orients and informs the living body, and not on any part or surface of it that might be encoded by a lineage or a territory. Would such a writing, such a circumcision, set apart the one who has been circumcised in any way that resembles the setting apart that accompanies physical circumcision? Those whose hearts are circumcised would no longer be wholly of the world, since they now perceive the world and interact with everything in the world according to an anterior relation with God. In this sense, they are set apart from those for whom the world is somehow the first and last word for what they see and interact with. The community of those whose hearts are circumcised would then be the community of those who are committed to God before and outside their nationality, ethnicity and class, though of course these things belong inevitably to our being in the world.16 Finally, we should not overlook the fact that the Pauline manner of knotting inwardness and universality in the circumcised heart raises the question of a desire that would be properly religious, as distinct from the craving that belongs to flesh. We have found the means to say that mind, or nous, opposes itself to the wanting that would only satisfy the worldly ego, and we have likewise found the means to say that the specific focus that this will require is provided by the image of the Jesus who suffers to defeat that wanting. But we have only noted in passing, though more than once, that by pneuma, or spirit, we are oriented to God. We may now put the two together. Between the ideas of a nous that opposes the flesh and of a pneuma  Were there time for an entirely different discussion of Paul, we could explore the manner in which Agamben, for example, has interpreted all of this in support of his philosophy of radical, antinomial plurality. But then we would have to look more closely at the vision of community that is worked out in passages like 1 Cor 12, where it seems to matter that the image of community and body of Christ approaches plurality through a commitment to organic unity. See G. Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); and my expression of grave doubts in “Inventions of Christianity: Preambles to a Philosophical Reading of Paul,” in G.-J. van der Heiden, G. van Kooten, and A. Cimino, eds., Saint Paul and Philosophy (Berlin: de Gruyter), pp. 53f.

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that, as we have just heard, circumcises the heart, we have the basic elements for a dynamic conception of the relation with God: in spirit, we are oriented to God in a manner proceeding from heart toward God himself, and in mind we can act on this orientation—again, versus flesh—by providing heart with the paradigm by which to order feeling, thinking and willing. When one does so, or to the degree that one does so, Paul is prepared to recognize a human spirit acting in consonance with the Holy Spirit, which aids us both by preparing the heart, whose created state is openness to the word of God, and by infusing mind with a capacity to recognize and convey what is good and true. As I have said earlier, the Pauline conception of spirit thus seems to anticipate the notion of grace—of a supplemental aid to nature alone— even if there is no developed sense of it in the texts. With regard to a schema of the heart—to what Steinbock calls “the articulated dimensionality of relations and interrelations,” as the primary seat of willing, thinking, and feeling17—in the present case of a Pauline anthropology, we must distinguish between what is first and what is nonetheless more fundamental. Our thrownness is what is first. We find ourselves already in the world, among things and with others in a manner that is not fully in agreement with conditions that we are led to recognize are most desirable. Our basis for seeking those higher conditions lies in the articulated nature of what is most fundamental. The letters express this in the form of a conviction that we have always already belonged to God, even while a great deal in mundane life causes us to forget it. But the passage to greater fidelity to this deeper truth certainly requires more than words and lessons. Exhortation and lessons are only very little unless what one learns from them is put into practice. On Paul’s own understanding, preaching, teaching, and practice will have to open an inner life that is found, as we have said, prone to dissipation and prone addiction, instead to an end that is entirely transcendent. Unless they prove able to liberate and sustain a desire that truly goes to the God of Jesus Christ, in all that this means in the Pauline letters, we will have to conclude that the desire and indeed the faith that would ground it, are no less limited than those of the various peoples and nations evoked in Galatians. In order to escape this outcome, Paul must exploit what only appears to be a contradiction. For the call to love God in one’s heart, and thus to know God through loving God, everything depends on establishing claims that would be universal with the success of words and actions that no one will deny are nonetheless particular.

Bibliography Agamben, G. (2005). The time that remains: A commentary on the letter to the romans (P. Dailey, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

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 A. Steinbock, Knowing by Heart, p. 8.

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Bloechl, J. (2017). The invention of Christianity: Preambles to a philosophical reading of Paul. In G.-J. van der Heiden, G. van Kooten, & A. Cimino (Eds.), Saint Paul and philosophy: The consonance of ancient and modern thought (pp. 47–66). De Gruyter. Dunn, J. D. G. (1994). Jesus tradition in Paul. In B. D. Chilton & C. A. Evans (Eds.), Studying the historical Jesus (pp. 155–178). Brill. Dunn, J. D. G. (1998). The theology of Paul the apostle. William B. Eerdmans. Eichrodt, W. (1967). Theology of the Old Testament (Vol. 2) (J. A. Baker, Trans.). SCM. Kierkegaard, S. (1994). Purity of heart is to will one thing: Spiritual preparation for the office of confession (D. V. Steere, Trans.). Harper Torchbooks. Nédoncelle, M. (1948). Prosopon et persona dans l’antiquité classique. Essai de bilan linguistique. Revue des sciences Religieuses, 22(3–4), 277–299. Schweitzer, A. (1998). The mysticism of Paul the apostle (W.  Montgomery, Trans.). The Johns Hopkins University Press. Steinbock, A. J. (2021). Knowing by heart: Loving as participation and critique. Northwestern University Press. Vermes, G. (1973). Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s reading of the gospels. William Collins.

Chapter 2

Guarding the Heart: The Phenomenality of the Heart in Early Christian Asceticism Christina M. Gschwandtner

He who stays in the desert in hēsychia is released from fighting on three fronts: hearing, speaking, and seeing. He has only one to contend with: the heart. Sayings of the Desert Fathers

What might it mean to undertake a “phenomenology of the heart” or to examine the “phenomenality” of the heart? Is the heart a phenomenon that can be put under phenomenological scrutiny? What do we mean by the heart and how does it manifest in experience? The present contribution investigates an unusual example for such a phenomenological examination of the heart: that of the ancient Christian desert ascetics who made it their goal to become intensely familiar with the movements of their hearts so as to gain control over their thoughts and passions and to purify the heart from anything distracting them from their pursuit of holiness. They developed an extensive and cohesive tradition of advice and models for such self-­ understanding and for guidance of the movements of the heart that may well be called proto-phenomenological in character. They obviously had no philosophical goals in the contemporary sense of the term—although ascetics were actually often referred to as philosophers and their pursuit described as philosophy—yet their practices of careful analysis of the phenomena appearing to them and their advice about how to handle them display definite phenomenological characteristics and may well provide us with some insight about how such a phenomenological analysis of the heart might proceed even today. The examination will proceed in several steps. The first two parts will provide a brief introduction to this ascetic pursuit and justify why it can be put under phenomenological scrutiny or generate phenomenological insights. The following two parts will examine the language about the heart C. M. Gschwandtner (*) Fordham University, Bronx, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_2

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in this literature, showing how it is associated with both thinking and emotion. Then the most prominent and almost constant refrain to “guard” the heart will be investigated more closely. The concluding section will draw out what insights the ascetic language about the heart may generate for phenomenological analysis today.

1  The Context of Asceticism It may seem surprising to attribute even latent phenomenological tendencies to what is often perceived as a primitive religious movement featuring sleep-deprived lunatics battling demons in the desert. In his famous History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon encapsulates the image often drawn of ascetics: “The peace of the Eastern Church was invaded by a swarm of fanatics, incapable of fear, or reason, or humanity.” Of the texts about them he says: “These extravagant tales, which display the fiction, without the genius, of poetry, have seriously affected the reason, the faith, and the morals, of the Christians. Their credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.”1 Asceticism, in his view, is in direct conflict with philosophy and any rational thinking; it is rampant superstition and actively destructive of sense and morality. In the fourth and fifth centuries countless people—both men and women of all social classes—abandoned their homes, family members, and societies for the pursuit of personal holiness in solitude, deprivation, and poverty, in what became the beginnings of the later Christian monastic movement. Many of them were anchorites, living in relative isolation in individual cells under the guidance of a spiritual elder, although they increasingly also gathered in larger communities.2 Some of them became famous, such as Antony the Great (c. 254–356), of whom Athanasius claims that the whole world came out to see him and that he had turned the desert 1  Cited in William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 468, 469. See also Alexander Ryrie, The Desert Movement: Fresh Perspectives on the Spirituality of the Desert (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2011); Richard Finn, Asceticism in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). There is also a very helpful introduction in Evagrius of Pontus, The Greek Ascetic Corpus, trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xvii-xi. All references to Evagrius are from this work, cited first by his own title and section number, then providing the page number to the English translation. (Similar conventions will be followed for other patristic sources that compile several ancient texts.) 2  These were called coenobia—what later became monasteries, thus the distinction between anchorite and cenobitic monasticism; I use “ascetic” here to refer primarily to the anchorite version in lower/northern Egypt. For cenobitic monasticism, see Philip Rousseau, Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) and Harmless, Desert Christians, 115–163. For the main primary sources, consult Pachomian Koinonia, 3 vols., trans. Armand Veilleux (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications Inc., 1980, 1981, 1982).

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into a city. While this might be exaggerated, many people did seek out these “abbas” (and occasionally ammas3) with reputations for holiness for a “word” or saying, and they preserved stories about them that were told and retold as models for living a holy life.4 An extensive literature developed around guiding people into living this sort of life and training them in how to analyze the movements of their minds and hearts in the process. These manuals for prayer and pursuit of the ascetic life often include acute observations about the phenomenality of human affects and dispositions. Stories about these desert ascetics—mostly those living in northern or lower Egypt in the areas of Nitria, Kellia, and Sketis5—are collected in the late fourth century text The History of the Monks of Egypt (Historia Monachorum in Aegypto),6 the early fifth century Lausiac History by Palladius of Aspuna,7 and the Apophthegmata Patrum or “Sayings of the Fathers” (active 330s to 460s), although reports can also be found in some other texts, especially ecclesiastical histories (such as that of Eusebius) and hagiographic accounts.8 The advice given in the form of stories in the Apophthegmata and the Lausiac History, already systematized in

3  On the role of women in asceticism, see Harmless, Desert Christians, 24, 440–45; Ryrie, Desert Movement, 99–117; Verna Harrison, “Women in the Philokalia?” in The Philokalia, ed. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 252–61. There are several interesting stories about transvestite ascetics. Two representative stories (of Athanasia and Anastasia) are included in the accounts of Daniel of Scetis. See Witness to Holiness: Abba Daniel of Scetis, ed. Tim Vivian (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2008), which collects the various accounts about him in Greek, Coptic, Ethiopic, Syriac, Armenian, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, and Arabic sources. 4  “Give me a word” is the phrase often employed for the advice sought from the ascetic guides. See Harmless, Desert Christians, 171–73. 5  The monastic communities in Sketis, Kellia, and Nitria (all in lower/northern Egypt) are the most famous and most well-known, but there were desert ascetics (both anchorite and coenobitic) in other areas as well (such as upper Egypt, Gaza, Judea, and Syria). See Ryrie, Desert Movement, for discussion of some of these less known versions. See also Journeying into God: Seven Early Monastic Lives, trans. Tim Vivian (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), which includes both Egyptian and Palestinian lives, including that of one woman: Syncletia of Palestine. 6  The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, trans. Norman Russell (Mowbray: Cistercian Publications, 1980). See also John Moschus, The Spiritual Meadow, trans. John Wortley (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992); the Greek text can be found in SC 12. 7  Palladius of Aspuna, The Lausiac History, trans. John Wortley (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2015). 8  The Book of the Elders: Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The Systematic Collection, trans. John Wortley (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2012). This is an English translation of the Greek in the three volumes (SC 387, 474, 498) of the Sources chrétiennes series of the Apophthegmata patrum. A slightly different collection was translated by Benedicta Ward as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Mowbray: Cistercian Publications, 1975). [The Wortley translation will be used in this paper.] For a critique of the “lure of Egypt,” see Andrew Louth, “On Being a Christian in Late Antiquity: St Basil the Great between the Desert and the City,” in Christians Shaping Identity from the Roman Empire to Byzantium, ed. Geoffrey D.  Dunn and Wendy Mayer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 85–89.

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some of the collections, is given succinct theoretical development in the writings of Evagrius of Pontus (c 345–399) and the Institutes and Conferences (composed 425–428) of John Cassian (c. 365–c.435).9 Further texts of advice and instructions include the discourses of Isaiah of Scetis (fifth c.),10 the writings of Mark the Monk (fifth c.),11 the letters of the ascetics Barsanuphius and John (early sixth c. Gaza),12 the discourses of Dorotheos of Gaza (sixth c.),13 the “ladder of divine ascent” of John Climacus (probably sixth c., possibly seventh c. Sinai),14 and texts from the Philokalia, an extensive collection of spiritual writings from the fourth to fifteenth centuries.15 Evagrius’ suspect association with the Origenic tradition and the resulting upheaval in Egyptian monasticism around 400 pushed some of his teachings underground (and some texts are only extant in Syriac and Armenian, where they were immensely popular),16 but their spirit is preserved and carried forward in many of the writings collected in the Philokalia. Evagrius and Egyptian asceticism also had a profound influence on Western monasticism through the writings of John Cassian. It has sometimes been claimed in fairly facile fashion that asceticism replaced the Greek philosophical focus on the mind with a more biblical emphasis on the heart.17 Often Cassian is given credit for revising Evagrius’ supposedly still too 9  John Cassian, The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Paulist Press, 1997) and idem, The Institutes, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Newman Press, 2000). The Latin texts can be found in SC 109, 42, 54, and 64. 10   Abba Isaiah of Scetis, Ascetic Discourses, trans. John Chryssavgis and Robert Penkett (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2002). 11  Mark the Monk, Counsels on the Spiritual Life, trans. Tim Vivian (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009). For the Greek texts, see SC 445 and 455. 12  Barsanuphius and John: Letters, trans. John Chryssavgis, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006, 2007). A shorter selection was published earlier as Letters from the Desert. Barsanuphius and John: A Selection of Questions and Responses, trans. John Chryssavgis (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003). For the Greek texts, see SC 426, 427, 450, 451, and 468. For a study of the letters that focuses especially on the structure of monastic authority, see Jennifer L. Hevelone-Harper, Disciples of the Desert: Monks, Laity, and Spiritual Authority in Sixth-Century Gaza (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 13  Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings, trans. Eric P. Wheeler (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1977). For the Greek text, see SC 92. 14  John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1978). 15  The Philokalia: The Complete Text, 4 vols., trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1979, 1981, 1984, 1995). (The first volume of the Philokalia includes texts by or selections from Evagrius, Cassian, Mark the Monk, and Isaiah the Solitary, thus duplicating some of the texts already mentioned.) There is also extensive Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Georgian literature, but for the sake of coherence I will focus here primarily on the Greek sources, with some supplementary references to Cassian. 16  On the Origenist controversy, see Harmless, Desert Christians, 359–63. Cassian gives a personal account at the start of his Tenth Conference. 17  Biblical passages are indeed important inspirations for use of heart language. The most crucial and most often cited verse is Matthew 5:8: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Purity of heart is thus seen as what makes possible the divine vision, which is the singular goal of the ascetic life. This is often paired with the psalmist’s prayer for a pure heart (Ps. 51) and may be

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“Platonic” or Stoic language of nous and apatheia into a more Christian focus on the heart.18 While it is true that Cassian employs the language of purity of heart often in places where Evagrius used language of apatheia, scholars now recognize that there is little difference between them in terms of the meaning of this terminology. In fact, the language of nous was and remained far more dominant than that of kardia in the Byzantine East (albeit not in Syriac-speaking areas, whose language is close to Aramaic and Hebrew19). Nemesius of Emesa (late fourth c.) still speaks of the heart solely in the physical or medical sense employed by Galen, i.e. as the center of the blood stream, the seat of anger as a boiling of the blood that generates bile.20 Evagrius does use language of the heart (more in some texts than in others),

one of the reasons why the heart appears most frequently in discussions of contrition or repentance. Other important passages include those that counsel vigilance in regard to the heart: “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Prov. 4:23) and “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life” (Lk. 21:34). Such guarding is possible through constant prayer: “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Lk. 18:1). A link is implied by several passages between the thoughts inside the heart and the actions outside it: “The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of the evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks” (Lk. 6:45). Similar passages can be found in Matt. 12:34–35 and Matt. 15:17–20: “Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile” (Matt. 15:17–20). Matt. 9:4 asks: “Why do you think evil in your heart?” while Matt. 6:21 emphasizes that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” There is also the repeated suggestion that things might happen in the heart before they are manifested in action: “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:28). Writers also often appeal to the prophetic promise of a new heart: “I will give them a new heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, so that they may follow my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them” (Ez. 11:19–20). In general, both the Hebrew tradition and early Christian texts, such as the Gospels, think of the heart as the center of the person and use such language with far more frequency than Greek language of soul or mind, yet the ascetic literature is also deeply shaped by Greek psychological and cosmological assumptions that are adjusted only when they are in explicit contradiction with theological convictions. Otherwise, the biblical language is simply inserted into the more technical Greek discussion, which accounts partly for the interchangeability of the language of heart and mind/intellect. On the broader role of Scripture in ascetic discourse, see Elizabeth A.  Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 18  The essays in Purity of Heart in Early Ascetic and Monastic Literature, ed. Harriet A. Luckman and Linda Kulzer (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999) already challenge this stereotype, especially the essay on Evagrius (141–59). 19  This is the reason why this literature is quite different; the language of the heart is far more frequently used in Syriac because it employs it like the Hebrew or Aramaic does, to which it is closely related. 20  Nemesius of Emesa, On the Nature of Man, trans. R. W. Sharples and P. J. van der Eijk (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), Sections 2 (p. 56), 16 (pp. 129–31), 20 (pp. 141–42), 23 (p. 146) and 24 (p. 150).

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but often employs it synonymously with mind or intellect.21 Climacus actually explicitly claims that the psalmist’s reference to the whole heart (Ps. 119:145) refers to “body, soul and spirit.”22 Even in later texts, such as those collected in the Philokalia, the language of heart and mind or intellect are still often employed interchangeably. Many of the ascetic texts thus simply pair the two or use them in identical fashion. Hesychios of Sinai (eighth or ninth c.) identifies the heart with the “inward parts.”23 Diadochus of Photike (c.400–c.486) often employs kardia and nous as synonyms. Peter of Damaskos (11th or twelfth c., the most voluminous writer in the Philokalia aside from Maximus the Confessor) still does this: “From this [a Psalm passage] it is clear that the heart, that is, the intellect, comes into possession of itself through the patient endurance of what befalls it.”24 Thus heart and mind are either equated in this literature or the heart used as the biblical term to refer to the whole person, while Greek philosophical terms are employed for distinguishing the parts of the soul. Accordingly, although the present examination focuses on passages that explicitly mention the heart, there would be plenty of justification for including the more technical and more developed analysis of the movements of the mind.

2  Phenomenology and Asceticism In what sense might these writings be called “phenomenological” in spirit or tenor? First, one might say that they develop an analysis of consciousness that involves a kind of focus, discernment, and bracketing of distractions that is not unlike the phenomenological reduction. Much of the ascetic literature either constitutes or counsels deep self-examination, which is conceived precisely as an examination of consciousness. The ascetics constantly exhort their charges to pay attention to movements of their mind. Sometimes the English translations employ the terminology of consciousness explicitly, generally a translation of dianoia (mind or reason), although the language of the “heart” (kardia), the “soul” (psyche), or the mind/intellect (nous) is more prominent. In either case, what they are counseled to observe is  That is, he speaks of the harmful thoughts of the heart, describes the heart as the locus of thoughts and imaginations, sees affects as arising from the heart, and counsels purity of heart as the stillness of apatheia. One must watch over the heart, judge the thoughts of the heart, and not hand the heart over to the consideration of material things or other distracting reflections. He says all of these things also about the mind. The terminology of the heart is almost entirely absent from his most famous text, The Praktikos, which is what may have given rise to the facile claim that he does not use terminology of the heart. It is far more prominent in To Eulogios and in On Thoughts, and is mentioned in other texts as well. 22  Climacus, Step 38.61 of Ladder of Divine Ascent, 220. 23  “On Watchfulness and Holiness,” Philokalia I, 177. 24  “Twenty-Four Discourses, Book II,” Philokalia III, 269; emphasis added. Language of the heart in the Byzantine tradition explodes after the Palamite controversy, which is therefore deliberately set aside here. 21

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the activity of mind and heart, the movements and developments of thoughts, the experience of affects or emotions, and the processing of sensory perceptions.25 This almost constant examination of consciousness is possible through cultivating an attitude of attention or watchfulness. Watchfulness (nēpsis) is the kind of vigilance or intense focus that tries to keep one’s consciousness or heart constantly in view. Hesychios` provides an entire treatise on watchfulness and, in fact, the full title of the Philokalia is “The Philokalia of the Neptic Fathers,” i.e. watchfulness or attentiveness is identified as their main characteristic. This is seen to be achieved through stillness (hēsychia), which quiets the movements of the heart so they can be observed more closely. Such an examination proceeds via something that might well be identified as a kind of epochē, a deliberate setting aside of a “natural attitude” and of all distractions. The move to the desert already constitutes a deliberate physical and bodily removal from the “natural” or normal in order to enable focus on the interior movements of the mind and emotions, including an attempt to eliminate bodily distractions via extensive fasting and curtailing of sleep.26 Yet even beyond this physical removal from society, the ascetics are counseled to set aside distractions and to focus solely, deliberately, and carefully on the movements of their consciousness and to examine them in detail. This attentiveness of focusing on keeping one’s heart free from distractions by withdrawing to the desert and remaining in one’s cell constitutes a radical shift in attitude, a new and fundamentally different way of looking at one’s heart and consciousness. The ascetics set aside, bracket, remove the world and the natural attitude in order to examine their minds, the meaning of their thoughts, and ultimately to cultivate a different kind of attention. Their reason for doing so may differ from the phenomenological reduction, but it involves a very  Cassian compares the workings of the mind to the turning of a water mill: “In the same way [as is the case for a water wheel] the mind cannot be free from agitating thoughts during the trials of the present life, since it is spinning around in the torrents of the trials that overwhelm it from all sides. But whether these will be either refused or admitted into itself will be the result of its own zeal and diligence.” Cassian, Conferences I.XVIII.2; 57. 26  Especially in the early stages, the ascetics are told repeatedly to refrain from reactions, to let things be, to withdraw into their cells, and to remain there; “your cell will teach you everything” is a common phrase. It is first attributed to Abba Moses who is reported to have said: “Go and stay in a cell; your cell will teach you everything.” Book of the Elders, 19. To focus their minds and hearts, they deliberately set aside their participation in regular life in the most radical manner, but also their involvement in the very thoughts themselves. The goal is to be able to contemplate a thought or emotion or imagination that might arrive without jumping into it or participating in it, to consider and evaluate it without immediately being “within” it. It is clear, however, that despite all their warfare against the passions, the ascetics do not counsel a total disregard for the body. Already the Apophthegmata counsel: “Our body is like a garment: if you take care of it, it holds up; but if you neglect it, it wastes away” (Book of the Elders, 79). Such sage advice is often reiterated by other thinkers. Isaiah of Scetis, for example, says: “Adorning the body is the destruction of the soul, but caring for it with godly fear is good.” Discourse 16; Ascetic Discourses, 123. On the topic of the body, see also Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 25

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similar activity of bracketing.27 It is maybe also worth pointing out that like the epochē, it does not deny the existence of the world or pretend that it is not there, but instead sets it aside as of no importance for the ascetic’s focus on consciousness. The ascetic could re-immerse in the world—and, in fact, some did—but chooses to remove from it in order to focus on what is more important. Furthermore, it is crucial that these are not simply personal accounts, but an examination of fundamental structures and patterns of the movements of consciousness that try to penetrate to the Wesen or nature of what they scrutinize. Despite the stories told about individual ascetics, these accounts are not (or at least not only) about an ascetic’s individual consciousness or self-understanding, but the guidance is to provide a structural analysis that describes how thoughts and emotions work in the human mind and heart more generally. That is to say, it involves the description of patterns and structures, not just particular examples, although examples are employed by some of the writers to illustrate a given point. To a large extent, the very reason for writing the texts was as manuals for others to follow, which meant that they depict not idiosyncratic personal experiences, but instead structures or patterns of behavior and thought that are determined to be characteristic of the general movements of the human mind and heart. The stories told about the desert ascetics are not necessarily particularly accurate historical accounts; that was not the goal of the texts. Instead, they were meant to emulate a practice or present a model (as is also true of many hagiographic writings). They are, one might say, exemplary rather than empirical. The patterns and structures of experiences and of the stages of the spiritual life more broadly, are stressed throughout this literature.28 This is evident already in  Natalie Depraz has actually argued for several “reductions” in the ascetic and philokalic literature, corresponding to Husserl’s various reductions. She contends that the practice of the prayer of the heart, especially in its bodily techniques, constitutes a kind of reduction, a gesture of epochē or of placing false habits and prejudices into parentheses. The ascetic stages of vigilance, stillness, and attention, she suggests, map onto Husserl’s insistence on the turn of the gaze or psychological reduction, the Heideggerian notion of Gelassenheit, and the maintaining grasp of the phenomenological epochē. See her Le corps glorieux. Phénoménologie pratique de la Philocalie des pères du désert et des pères de l’église (Louvain: Peeters, 2008), 32–37. While I’m not sure that exact equivalences can be established here, the overall thrust and impetus of the practice of suspension does seem parallel to phenomenological bracketing or setting aside of distractions. Although hēsychia is clearly not identical to the Husserlian phenomenological and transcendental reductions, I think it is considerably closer than various questionable applications of the terminology of epochē in current phenomenology. In the case of the desert ascetics, the bracketing does actually entail a turning away from a natural attitude, without doubting the existence of the world, but suspending its relevance for the ascetic’s new focus. Interestingly, they actually often interpret this new attitude as ultimately more “natural,” because it returns the heart to its original condition. In either case, it involves a detachment from the normal lifeworld and its occupations for a singular, rigorous, deliberate attention to the movements of consciousness, an examination of one’s awareness and experience. In that respect, it is considerably closer to the thrust of Husserl’s initial formulations than are Marion’s, Kearney’s, or Falque’s more recent versions. 28  This is vividly illustrated by the many depictions of stages or patterns, of which probably the most well-known is Climacus’ “Ladder of Divine Ascent,” often pictured on the outside (or sometimes inside) walls of monasteries. Climacus’ famous text, drawing on the imagery of Jacob’s 27

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Evagrius and refined by later writers into a three-fold path of praktikē (abstaining from vices and pursuing virtues, often called “practical philosophy”), physikē or theoria (natural contemplation, referred to as natural or theoretical philosophy), and theologia (contemplation of God, referred to as theological philosophy).29 Evagrius sees a “negative” and a “positive” move: a purgation of distractions and sins, which are combatted by a development of virtues, and a higher stage of combatting ignorance and acquiring knowledge. What gives this phenomenological import, however, consists less in the details of how these stages are seen to be organized or how they are worked out by a particular writer, than in the insistence that there are such patterns and stages that can be discerned and described. That is to say, the claim in the ascetic literature is that these experiences are not arbitrary, individual, or purely personal, but that they are indicative of the structures of human experience more broadly, and that the patterns they display can guide anyone’s experience should they wish to pursue this path. It is, then, an examination of the structures of consciousness or the patterns of the movements of the heart as they manifest under careful attention. This means that this examination constitutes an attempt to get at the nature or Wesen of the matter, to determine what sort of thing it is, to investigate its constitutive nature or kind, so as to distinguish it from other kinds. Such discernment is one of the most important and most frequent topics in this literature, obviously closely linked to the insistence on vigilance, attentiveness, and silence. The writers seek to ascertain, for example, whether a certain movement of the mind or heart is self-­ generated or other-generated, whether it comes from the core of one’s heart or from the habits one has established, whether it is made up by one’s imagination or is put into someone by demonic or other misleading influence. Each “source” requires a slightly different response.30 Over time the suggestions regarding how to make proper distinctions between different kinds of images, thoughts, memories, sensory perceptions, and other aspects of consciousness develop a remarkable consensus

dream of a ladder reaching to heaven, depicts the spiritual life as a ladder with 30 rungs or steps, one for each year of Christ’s purported life on earth. For Climacus the process begins with renunciation, detachment, repentance, and contrition, then moves to the combatting of vices like slander, lying, despondency, gluttony, and avarice, culminating in discernment, stillness, prayer, and love. This is a manual for climbing the ladder, for pursuing the different steps, replete with warnings about falling off or stumbling, vividly illustrated in many icons and paintings by the demons trying to pull or push the climbing ascetic off the ladder in various ways. Climacus’ text begins with a prologue, presumably added by a later editor, that claims that the book serves as a guide for pursuing this path safely. It ends with an exhortation to ascend the ladder and work diligently toward its goal. 29  See the helpful description of this in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996), 35–38, where he explains the stages in Evagrius and their alteration by Maximus. See also Blowers’ and Aquino’s essays in Bingaman & Nassif, The Philokalia, 216–29, 240–51. 30  Andrew Louth says of Evagrius: “The point of this analysis is diagnostic: if one understands what kind of passion one is suffering from, then one can begin to learn how to deal with it.” He contends that this analysis “manifests considerable psychological subtlety.” Louth, Maximus, 36–37.

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and in this respect they may well provide profound phenomenological insights into the workings of the human mind and heart. Although the advice is partly concerned with detecting the source or origin of thoughts and to be able to root them out, i.e. the guidance has concrete ethical application, interestingly, the analysis is not usually overly preoccupied with establishing precise correlation between what is occurring within the mind or heart and the existence of something “out there” in external reality. Sometimes thoughts, memories, or imaginations are attributed both to demonic influence and to one’s own imagination indiscriminately. The focus is almost exclusively on the experiences and movements of consciousness itself, of how they appear and manifest in the heart. This is what needs to be addressed, not necessarily what is happening in the “outside” world. Thus, even if an ascetic’s imaginations or dreams do not objectively represent some external reality, they are still of immense relevance and can lead the person astray as much as some external temptation. The analysis, then, is a diagnosis of the heart or mind, not of the physical or even the spiritual world. Ultimately, their examination of the contours and contents of the consciousness of the self leads to what might be considered a kind of reformed intentionality. Admittedly, the goal of this examination of mind and heart is quite different from a Husserlian goal, although it might not differ as much from some other phenomenological thinkers.31 The goal is transformation of the self, stilling of the passions, understanding of the logoi of creation, and ultimately knowledge of the divine. But

 Husserl himself described the epochē at times as a kind of metanoia or radical turning around and urged a fundamental transformation of the self: “Perhaps it will even become manifest that the total phenomenological attitude and the epochē belonging to it are initially essentially called to a complete personal transformation, which might at first be compared to a religious turn-around [Umkehrung], but which beyond this harbors within it the significance of the greatest existential transformation assigned to humanity as humanity.” Husserl, Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, §35; Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992), 140. Many of his students did, in fact, develop strong religious commitments of various sorts and there are reports of Husserl likening the phenomenological pursuit to a kind of quasi-religious commitment of search for ultimate truth. I’m not sure what to make of these reports, nor do I wish to claim that the ascetics have the same goals in mind as phenomenologists do, but I do think there are intriguing parallels in methodology. More broadly (and at the same time more narrowly), I would suggest that the careful and penetrating “look” at emotions and affects in a “stilled” heart, as undertaken by the ascetic literature, provides us with much insight into the movements of human consciousness, including the phenomenality of affect and corporeality. I would want to distinguish this claim, however, from the sort of assertions made by Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, or Emmanuel Falque. I do not think that the ascetics are doing phenomenology before Husserl and can serve as some sort of correction for it. Rather, the ascetic examination of the movements of the heart and mind that are undertaken for their own, quite different, purposes, are sufficiently rigorous and disciplined to provide us with insight into certain states of consciousness associated with religious experience, but also with broader human experience as it is either exposed to such thoughts and emotions in other contexts or tries to discipline heart and mind in similar ways but for other reasons. Ascetic practices are not characteristic only of religious traditions, although they are maybe more deliberately practiced there and thus can make these particular movements of consciousness more transparent than is true of other forms of asceticism, as for example of athleticism, although these broader claims cannot be pursued in this context.

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the rigor of the pursuit, the deep ploughing of the heart and mind that has to occur, is not unlike the kind of self-examination proposed by phenomenology. One might say that the ascetic texts—from Evagrius and Cassian to the later texts in the Philokalia—are most fundamentally concerned with shaping the intentionality of the mind and ultimately the heart. Theirs are not descriptions of abundant spiritual experience, not accounts of mystical rapture; indeed, these are almost entirely absent. Nor are they reports of encounter with the divine. The analysis of experience here is not an analysis of spiritual or mystical experience in the way we usually conceive of this or in the manner in which much recent phenomenology of religion has depicted it. The examinations of consciousness, the analysis of mind and heart that is undertaken here, is not an account of abundant intuition, but instead a guideline for shaping and transforming intentionality. This is an intentionality directed wholly to the phenomenon that has been sought through the various stages of purification and contemplation with single-minded attention, but the focus is not so much on this phenomenon per se as on the nature of the attention and the rigors of the preparation and attitude required. If it can be said that the ascetic self-examination displays quasi-­phenomenological structures, what does this say about the heart specifically? Three dimensions are especially prominent in the texts: the heart as the locus of thoughts, the heart as seat of affect, and the heart as inner core of the person. All three of these are closely connected, although they will be here examined one at a time.

3  The Heart as the Locus of Thoughts In a way that might be startling to the contemporary reader, the heart is most often discussed in terms of thinking.32 Many of the references to the heart speak of it as harboring harmful thoughts, as the battlefield of thoughts fighting with each other, either being assaulted by inappropriate thoughts coming from the outside or overtaken by thoughts lurking on the inside. The admonishment to guard the heart against thoughts is a constant refrain. The Greek term translated as “thought” is logismos, terminology employed to refer to the movements of thoughts or desires in the mind or heart that tempt us to action. They can be generated by the passions or by external temptations and if we give in to them, they become entrenched as dispositions and habits. Some scholars therefore translate logismos not simply as “thought,” but as “train of thought” or even “disposition.” Despite the focus on temptations or vices, there are also positive or neutral thoughts; logismoi are most fundamentally thoughts that move the heart in some way or other.33 It is also worth  The Sayings of the Desert Fathers often refer to the thoughts of the heart in neutral fashion; the heart is simply the locus where thinking happens (e.g. Book of the Elders, 308). 33  Letters from the Desert, 63. The translators of the Philokalia indicate in their glossary that logismos refers to thought provoked either by the demons or inspired by God, but can also mean conceptual image “intermediate between fantasy and an abstract concept” (Philokalia I, 367). 32

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remembering that the goal for Evagrius, Maximus, and many other writers, is knowledge (gnostikē) and contemplation (theoria), first of the logoi of creation and ultimately of the divine.34 One combats logismoi to refine one’s logos in order to have a clear vision of the logoi in all things and ultimately of the divine and incarnate Logos, Christ. It is only when the heart is not distracted by logismoi that it can see even the natural world clearly and ascertain truths and insights about it. The ascetic writers distinguish different forms of logismoi: they can refer to perceptions, to imaginations or fantasies (for which the more technical fantasia is also used), to dream images, to conceptual notions or ideas (noēmata is also employed for this), or to memories. All of them can come in ways that involve images or in ways that do not, i.e. that are more abstract. The thoughts or imaginations themselves come to us (either from an external source or through the workings of our subconscious) and move us; they are not at first self-generated. This also means, as is pointed out repeatedly, that they do not involve fault; we cannot help remembering or seeing something or a thought occurring to us. They become problematic only when we deliberately begin to dwell on them, entertain them, or even act on them. This is when they move from the mind into the heart.35 For example, “Abba Amoun asked him about certain unclean logismoi that a person’s heart generates and about vain desires.” The response emphasizes that “there is no condemnation whatsoever for having logismoi.”36 In a different context, an elder stresses: “We stand condemned not because logismoi come into us but for putting the logismoi to bad use. It is possible to be shipwrecked as a result of logismoi, and it is possible to be crowned as a result of logismoi.”37 Mark the Monk similarly says that provocations that move the heart without mental images do not incur guilt.38 In Evagrius, the logismoi are almost exclusively negative and do not primarily refer to the initial thoughts or memories, but rather to the full-blown dispositions. He calls the initial “thought” a “mental representation” that develops into a logismos only after a long process of repeated exposure: “Let no anchorite take up the anchoretic life with anger or pride or sadness, nor flee his brothers while troubled by such thoughts. For attacks of folly arise from such passions, when the heart moves from one mental representation to another and from this to another and from

Sinkewicz argues that Evagrius often uses “thought,” “demon,” and “evil spirit” interchangeably (Ascetic Corpus, xxv). Louth says that logismos in Evagrius means something “like a train of thoughts set in motion by one or more of the passions” (Maximus, 36). See also Harmless, Desert Christians, 229–32, 263–64. 34  “He who has made his heart pure will not only know the inner logoi of what is sequent to God and dependent on Him, but, after passing through all of them, he will in some measure see God Himself, which is the supreme consummation of all blessings.” Maximos the Confessor, “Second Century on Theology,” Philokalia II, 158. 35  Diadochus speaks of the “outward organs of perception” of the heart. “On Spiritual Knowledge,” Philokalia I, 285. 36  Book of the Elders, 157, 167. 37  Book of the Elders, 174. 38  Mark the Monk, On the Spiritual Law 141–42; Counsels on the Spiritual Life, 105.

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that to still another, falling little by little into a pit of forgetfulness.”39 But there are plenty of writers who acknowledge also positive or neutral thoughts. For example, a brother asks an elder in the desert: “What kind of logismoi ought I to have in my heart?” The response counsels focus on God and argues that one “ought to be attentive to God with heartache and watchful logismoi.”40 It is what we do with the thoughts in our heart that matters and determines the sort of influence we allow them to have over us. Insight regarding how these movements of the heart and mind develop and gain a hold over us is increasingly refined and handed down in the tradition. Philotheos outlines the usual process as follows: “First there is provocation; then a coupling with the provocations; then assent to it; then captivity to it; then passion, grown habitual and continuous. This is how the holy fathers describe the stages through which the devil gets the better of us.”41 There is some slight variance in the order of the stages, but basically the consensus is that first a thought, imagination, or memory arises in consciousness on its own accord; then this perception, memory, imagination or thought may disturb one’s consciousness and begin to preoccupy it; third, one begins to entertain this thought or idea further, to dwell on it; fourth, this can  Evagrius, On Thoughts 23; Ascetic Corpus, 169. For more on mental representations (noēmata), see Sect. 41 in the same treatise (ibid., 180–81). 40  Book of the Elders, 222. 41  “Texts on Watchfulness,” Philokalia III, 29. This description of the stages, including the affirmation that the mere arising of a thought or temptation is without sin because it comes without our doing, is fairly uniform throughout the ascetic tradition. A more detailed account, traditionally attributed to John of Damascus, but of undetermined authorship, summarizes the matter as follows: “You should also learn to distinguish the impassioned thoughts that promote every sin. The thoughts that encompass all evil are eight in number: those of gluttony, unchastity, avarice, anger, dejection, listlessness, self-esteem and pride. It does not lie within our power to decide whether or not these eight thoughts are going to arise and disturb us. But to dwell on them or not to dwell on them, to excite the passions or not to excite them, does lie within our power. In this connection, we should distinguish between seven different terms: provocation, coupling, wrestling, passion, assent (which comes very close to performance), actualization and captivity. Provocation is simply a suggestion coming from the enemy, like ‘do this’ or ‘do that’, such as our Lord Himself experienced when He heard the words ‘Command that these stones become bread’ (Matt. 4:3). As we have already said, it is not within our power to prevent provocations. Coupling is the acceptance of the thought suggested by the enemy. It means dwelling on the thought and choosing deliberately to dally with it in a pleasurable manner. Passion is the state resulting from coupling with the thought provoked by the enemy; it means letting the imagination brood on the thought continually. Wrestling is the resistance offered to the impassioned thought. It may result either in our destroying the passion in the thought—that is to say, the impassioned thought—or in our assenting to it. ... Captivity is the forcible and compulsive abduction of the heart already dominated by prepossession and long habit. Assent is giving approval to the passion inherent in the thought. Actualization is putting the impassioned thought into effect once it has received our assent. If we can confront the first of these things, the provocation, in a dispassionate way, or firmly rebut it at the outset, we thereby cut off everything that comes after.” “On the Virtues and the Vices,” Philokalia II: 337–38. The English translators of the Philokalia summarize the overall insight into six stages of temptation (peirasmos): beginning with provocation (prosbolē), then momentary disturbance (pararripismos), followed by communion or coupling (homilia), assent (synkatathesis), and prepossession (prolēpsis), ultimately leading to full-blown passion (pathos). “Glossary,” Philokalia I, 366–67. 39

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lead to an inner assent, one is now willing to “go with it,” so to say; fifth, one becomes predisposed to it by repeated indulgence in it, that is, it becomes ingrained in the mind or heart; finally, such repeated thoughts and attitudes develop into a full-­ blown habit or disposition of the respective passion. Significant Aristotelian and Stoic influence can be discerned here, in terms of the cultivation of virtues and vices as habits or dispositions of the soul, in terms of the pursuit of apatheia so as to avoid disturbing pathei, and in terms of the much-discussed distinctions between what is in our power or “up to us” and what unintentional or involuntary.42 The ascetic literature takes over and refines these distinctions, adapting them to their particular Christian context and their own “philosophic” pursuits of holiness. While this progression does not always explicitly employ the language of the heart, one can extrapolate its role from other texts: First, the thought, memory, or imagination comes to us, suggests itself to us. At this point, we might say, it is only at the door of the heart. We then allow the thought or memory to trouble us; it disturbs our internal peace; the gate of the heart has been opened to it. Increasingly, we dwell on it, mull it over in the mind, and allow it to enter all the way into our heart. Theodoros compares this to keeping a serpent at one’s breast; one will invariably be bitten by it.43 Then we increasingly adopt it as our own, begin to agree with it, allow it to determine and direct our patterns of thought. It has now firmly settled down in the heart; is no longer just a passing visitor but an inhabitant. Mark claims that “one kind of evil takes possession of the heart through long predisposition; another kind wages war against our thoughts through everyday activities.”44 And finally, the logismos has become a firm disposition; it has shaped the very dwelling of the heart, moved its furniture, rearranged it to its pleasure, and established itself permanently as owner. Once such a disposition has become firmly established, the heart also itself begins to generate good and bad logismoi, as Diadochus points out: “It is true that the heart produces good and bad thoughts from itself (cf. Luke 6:45). But it does this not because it is the heart’s nature to produce evil ideas, but because as a result of the primal deception the remembrance of evil has become as it were a habit.”45 Diadochus of Photike’s insights here are interesting, as he tries to reconcile the biblical passage that suggests that evil thoughts arise in the heart with his psychological and theological insight that the heart itself is not the origin of evil:

 For relevant discussions of this in Stoicism, see Margaret R.  Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); James A.  Francis, Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); Margaret E. Reesor, The Nature of Man in Early Stoic Philosophy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); André-Jean Voelke, L’idée de volonté dans le Stoïcisme (Paris: PUF, 1973). 43  Theodoros, “Century of Spiritual Texts” 35, Philokalia II, 20. 44  Mark the Monk, On the Spiritual Law 184; Counsels on the Spiritual Life, 109. 45  Diadochus of Photike, “On Spiritual Knowledge,” Philokalia I, 284. 42

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But we feel that all these evil thoughts arise in the heart, and for this reason some people have inferred that sin dwells in the intellect along with grace. That is why, in their view, the Lord said: ‘But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, adulteries’, and so on (Matt. 15:18-19). They do not realize, however, that the intellect, being highly responsive, makes its own the thoughts suggested to it by the demons through the activity of the flesh; and, in a way we do not understand, the proclivity of the body accentuates this weakness of the soul because of the union between the two. The flesh delights endlessly in being flattered by deception, and it is because of this that the thoughts sown by the demons in the soul appear to come from the heart; and we do indeed make them our own when we indulge in them. ... Is it not clear that whoever indulges in the thoughts suggested to him by Satan’s cunning and engraves them in his heart, produces them thereafter as the result of his own mental activity?46

Mark insightfully recommends that “unless you have eradicated the evils in your heart, do not obey it, because the heart seeks to increase what it has already stored inside.”47 The heart, then, neither is itself evil nor generates evil, but becomes occupied by it. Only when it has succumbed to the enemy does it also send out evil messengers. The ascetics argue that these negative or evil logismoi can be combatted by the pursuit of positive or excellent action, what we usually translate as virtue. It is worth remembering, however, that this term in Greek describes not some elusive attribute or property but an acquired characteristic or the habitual disposition of excellence achieved through repeated action and refined by deliberation and the cultivation of wisdom.48 The ascetic struggle consists in keeping negative or destructive thoughts and habits from invading and overtaking the heart and instead cultivating positive and healthy thoughts, habits, and dispositions. That is to say, humility instead of pride, peace and joy instead of resentment and despondency, perseverance and dedication instead of listlessness and laziness, gentleness and kindness instead of anger and irritability, self-control and restraint instead of greed and indulgence. This takes single-minded devotion, strenuous efforts of concentration, and constant labor of attention. Evagrius points out that “he who applies great ascetic effort to seeking which thought is countered by which ascetic labour finds himself an expert in the struggle against error.”49 This expert is not unlike the phronimos in Aristotle’s

 Ibid. Philotheus of Sinai negotiates the biblical passage in similar ways: “Texts on Watchfulness” 16, Philokalia III, 22. 47  Mark the Monk, On the Spiritual Law 178; Counsels on the Spiritual Life, 109. 48  The Aristotelian language of cultivating virtues or succumbing to vices by repeated action that becomes habitual is especially prominent in Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings, 89, 131, 154, 164, 168, 174, 179–80, 188. Dorotheos also provides particularly colorful imagery for the progression from initial thought to established habit: on the one hand comparing a careless remark to a spark that is easily put out or can be fanned into a flame through successive stages of adding fuel to the fire (ibid., 150); on the other hand to a series of saplings or trees with increasing sizes that initially are easily uprooted, but if they grow large cannot be removed even by force and the involvement of several people (ibid., 174). 49  Evagrius, Eulogios 15.16; Ascetic Corpus, 42. 46

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account of the development of virtue or excellence and, indeed, various ascetics are presented as models in this sense. What might one do concretely to combat these thoughts when they come to invade us? Evagrius counsels rigorous examination and counter-attack: “Judge the thoughts in the tribunal of your heart... for one who is a rigorous examiner of his thoughts will also truly be a lover of the commandments. Thus, whenever there arises in the heart a thought that is difficult to discern, then ignite all the more against it intense ascetic labours for either it will depart, unable to bear the heat of its opposite, or else it will persevere because it belongs to the straight path.”50 He describes the heart as a “troubled workplace.”51 The desert ascetics counsel: “When an [adverse] logismos arises in your heart, do not seek to replace some things with others by prayer but sharpen the sword of tears against the adversary.”52 Thoughts give notions to the heart, which are then entertained and possibly acted upon. Evagrius repeatedly admonishes the reader not to heed the harmful thoughts seeking to invade the heart, either from other people: “Do not bend your ear to their words and give no reception to the thoughts of their hearts”53 or from one’s own dwelling on them: “Do not give your soul to evil thoughts, lest they defile your heart and place pure prayer far away from you.”54 Indeed, he is clear that we are often assailed by inappropriate thoughts that come from the outside and that these try to generate a battle of thoughts going on in the heart, a temptation we must resist.55 Yet, one must also discover the thoughts that lurk inside, within the secret of the heart.56 The ascetics are advised to combat these evil thoughts with positive ones. Mark says that “just as fire cannot last long in water, a shameful thought cannot last long in a heart that loves God.”57 Evil thoughts “snatch understanding from the heart,” while “the hearts of the holy will be filled with knowledge”; indeed, “knowledge of God” is an “adornment for the heart” and “in a gentle heart wisdom will find a resting place.”58 We are to fill the heart with thoughts of the divine; make the heart  Evagrius, Eulogios 13.12; Ascetic Corpus, 38–39.  “In this way, the double-tongued serpents of the thoughts hiss within the troubled workplace of the heart.” Evagrius, Eulogios 21.23; Ascetic Corpus, 49. Maximos uses the same imagery. “First Century of Various Texts” 73, Philokalia II, 181. 52  Book of the Elders, 217. 53  Evagrius, Foundations 7; Ascetic Corpus, 8. 54  Evagrius, Exhortation to a Virgin 38; Ascetic Corpus, 134. 55  Evagrius, Eulogios 9.9; Ascetic Corpus, 35; Eulogios 5.5; Ascetic Corpus, 33. The imagery of warfare is actually quite frequent: “A brother was harassed by porneia, and the warfare in his heart was like a fire burning day and night. ... [thanks to his patient endurance] repose came into his heart” (Book of the Elders, 64). For Evagrius, the heart must undergo warfare to achieve virtue (Eulogios 3.3). The demons attack the heart and try to invade it (Eulogios 7.6, 21). 56  Evagrius, Eulogios 14.14; Ascetic Corpus, 41. 57  Mark the Monk, Those Who Imagine That They are Justified by Works 77; Counsels on the Spiritual Life, 122. Evagrius says: “One who prays without ceasing escapes temptations; but thoughts trouble the heart of the negligent.” To Monks 37; Ascetic Corpus, 124. 58  Evagrius, Eulogios 30; Ascetic Corpus, 37; To Monks 24, 27, 31; Ascetic Corpus, 124. 50 51

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mindful of God, filling it with the fear or awe of God. Abba Epiphanius stresses that “the true monk must unceasingly have prayer and psalmody in his heart.”59 Abba Isaiah summarizes: “One living in hēsychia needs these three things: to fear God without ceasing, to intercede with patient endurance, and not to release his heart from being mindful of God.”60 Evagrius assures us that the demons—unlike God—do not know the inside of our hearts, but must guess at them via the signs we give of what is inside.61 We must seek God with the “toiling of the heart.”62 In such seeking, the “eyes of the heart” will be enlightened.63 The biblical imagery of the treasure in the field is often combined with the biblical reference to thoughts as being inside the “treasure” of the heart in order to suggest the positive thoughts one ought to have in the heart.64 The heart, then, is the place or inner space that serves as workshop and battlefield, where evil thoughts and temptations war with good thoughts and wisdom to gain possession of the heart in order to make a permanent dwelling there. While the ascetics are interested in combatting evil and preparing themselves for the divine, the insights about how destructive patterns of thought come to be established within us and reshape our hearts may well be of much broader application.

4  The Heart as the Seat of Affect The heart is also often described as the seat of affect and, indeed, in this literature thought and emotion are not as far away from each other as they may seem to the contemporary reader. The eight Evagrian logismoi became the pathei, the passions or vices, and in the West, the seven “deadly sins.” Indeed, often the expression “passionate thought” is used.65 Pathos is a term just as or maybe even more ambivalent than logismos. It can mean suffering, undergoing, or passion. Like logismos, it is used both negatively and positively by the ascetic writers, even if the negative connotation predominates for both terms: positive pathos as suffering refines and cleanses us, while negative pathos as passion overwhelms us and leads us astray. There are also neutral uses: when one is sick one experiences pathos (suffering) from illness or pain, but clearly no blame is attached to this. Yet one can be overtaken by pathei, give way to emotion in a way that is unhealthy, because one is swayed or even conquered by such passions. To be passive is rarely a good thing for the ancients and that includes the ascetics. To suffer pathos is to be taken over by a  Book of the Elders, 217.  Book of the Elders, 19. 61  Evagrius, On Thoughts 37; Ascetic Corpus, 179. 62  Book of the Elders, 194. 63  Book of the Elders, 210. 64  For example, Maximos the Confessor, Fourth Century on Love 70–71, Philokalia II, 109. Maximos here also uses passages from Paul about the treasures of wisdom hidden in Christ. 65  E.g. a brother asks: “If a passionate thought enters my heart, in what way should I reject it?” Letters from the Desert, 117. 59 60

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power stronger than ourselves, often an evil power. Just as the logismoi seek to enter the heart, captivate the heart, and ultimately rule over it, so the passions assume control over the heart and subdue it forcefully, making it incapable to act on its own. In today’s language they are closest to something like addictions and may have potential application in a phenomenological analysis of addiction or of the development of mental and emotional illnesses. Interestingly, the most frequent mention of the heart in regard to affect is in conjunction with sadness, sorrow, or mourning. Evagrius identifies “two kinds of sadness” in the heart, one having an external and one an internal cause.66 The desert ascetics often speak of sorrow in connection with the heart.67 Both laughter and weeping are seen to proceed from the heart as the source of such emotions.68 Tears, which are often interpreted as absolutely essential for the ascetic life of repentance, generally come from the heart: “Goading his heart, he pours forth tears.”69 Often, “hardness of heart” is contrasted with the pliability and softness produced by tears: “A brother asked an elder, ‘How is it that my heart is hard and I do not fear God?’ The elder said to him, ‘I think that a man will acquire fear of God if he maintains [the habit] of reproaching himself in his heart’.”70 Tears of contrition are very frequently mentioned also by other writers. Barsanuphius and John repeatedly discuss hardness of heart and “the fountain of the heart’s tears.”71 One may be heavy-hearted or weighed down by the heart, afflicted by sorrow in the heart.72 Here again an essential ambivalence is evident: while excessive grief or despondency is condemned as a vice and to be avoided, sorrow and mourning are actively sought out as a measure of healing for sin. Climacus is an interesting case here, because he does not develop a systematic examination of the heart, and it is hardly mentioned in his treatise at all, with the notable exception of the section on mourning, sorrow, and the tears of compunction (Step 7). He clearly associates sadness and sorrow with the heart: “Mourning according to God is sadness of soul and the disposition of a sorrowing heart, which ever madly seeks that for which it thirsts; and when it fails in its quest, it painfully pursues it, and follows in its wake grievously lamenting. Or thus: mourning is a golden spur in a soul which is stripped of all attachment and of all ties, fixed by holy sorrow to watch over the heart.”73 One must concentrate on this holy sorrow by  Evagrius, Eulogios 7.7; Ascetic Corpus, 34.  Book of the Elders, 27. 68  Book of the Elders, 28. 69  Book of the Elders, 32. 70  Book of the Elders, 34. “Just as we carry our own shadow around everywhere, so we must have weeping and sorrow for sin with us wherever we are.” Book of the Elders, 34. 71  Letters from the Desert, 65, 71, 157, 185. See also Mark the Monk, Those Who Imagine That They are Justified by Works 196; Counsels on the Spiritual Life, 136. 72  Letters from the Desert, 76, 110. See, similarly, Theodoros, “Century of Spiritual Texts,” Philokalia II, 29 and Isaiah of Scetis, Discourse 6; Ascetic Discourses, 78; Discourse 8; Ascetic Discourses, 94; Discourse 9; Ascetic Discourses, 96; Discourse 26; Ascetic Discourses, 218. 73  Climacus, Step 7.1 of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 70. 66 67

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withdrawing into one’s heart.74 Climacus acknowledges the difficulties and ambiguities inherent in the topic: “Many of the Fathers say that the question of tears, especially in the case of beginners, is an obscure matter and hard to ascertain, as tears are born in many different ways. For instance, there are tears from nature, from God, from adverse suffering, from praiseworthy suffering, from vainglory, from licentiousness, from love, from the remembrance of death, and from many other causes.”75 The “right” sorrow or mourning is closely connected with contrition or compunction, that is to say, with sorrow over one’s sins and the resulting repentance.76 This is partly due to the psalmist’s insistence on a “contrite heart” (Ps. 51:17) in the psalm used by far the most frequently in both liturgical and personal prayer in the eastern tradition. Barsanuphius and John also comment repeatedly on the healthy sadness created by contrition: “There are two kinds of disregard of oneself: one is from within the heart, and the other from injuries received from the outside. The second is greater, namely the one that comes from the outside. For the one that comes from the heart requires less labor than the one that comes from other people, because the latter creates more pain in the heart. Guarding one’s own heart is contrition of heart.”77 Compunction starts in the heart and must be maintained there.78 Sometimes this insistence on sorrow or mourning and the accompanying tears becomes quite excessive; Climacus reports: “I have seen some who had attained to the last degree of mourning; for I saw them literally pouring out of their mouths the blood of a suffering and wounded heart.”79 Mark the Monk insists that “unless a heart is shattered by contrition, it is absolutely impossible to free oneself from evil” and goes on to explain how such contrition works.80 Besides sadness or sorrow, the most frequently mentioned emotion or affect related to the heart is anger or wrath. Going all the way back to Galen—the most highly consumed writer of antiquity—anger is seen as a result of the pulsation of the heart that generates hot humors and bile. Nemesius of Emesa, who provides the fullest Christian exposition of ancient philosophical teaching on the human person and was read extensively, explains: “Anger [thymos] is the boiling of the blood in

 Climacus, Step 7.15 of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 72.  Climacus, Step 7.32 of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 74. 76  “Compunction is a perennial trial of the conscience, which brings about the cooling of the fire of the heart through mental confession.” Climacus, Step 7.2 of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 70. 77  Letters from the Desert, 113. 78  Letters from the Desert, 84, 109, 112, 136. 79  Climacus, Step 7.65 of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 79. One should remember, however, that this is step 7 of 30! 80  Mark the Monk, Those Who Imagine That They are Justified by Works 197; Counsels on the Spiritual Life, 136. Indeed, contrition is a frequent theme in his work, as it the case for countless other eastern writers, including later ones. Symeon the New Theologian especially stressed the importance of tears. See especially Discourses IV and V, although it is a theme that pervades his writings. Symeon the New Theologian, The Discourses, trans. C.  J. deCatanzaro (New York: Paulist Press, 1980). 74 75

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the region of the heart arising from an evaporation of bile or from turbidity. That is why it is called bile [kholē] and also anger [kholos].”81 Wrath [orgē] and anger [thymos] are often identified with the heart.82 Evagrius describes wrath as a “conflagration of the heart.”83 Barsanuphius similarly argues that when one’s heart is “blinded by envy and jealousy,” one brings “turmoil upon” oneself.84 Sometimes this can be identified through exterior corporeal expressions: bloodshot eyes, for example, indicate a troubled heart, one full of resentment.85 Again, a structure is worked out here. Already the Apophthegmata describe the process of giving in to passion, which begins in the heart: “This passion works in four ways: first, in the heart; second, in the sight; third, in the tongue; fourth, in doing evil in response to evil. If you can purge your heart, it does not come into sight. If it comes into sight, take care not to speak of it. If you do speak of it, quickly prevent yourself from rendering evil for evil.”86 Thus, the heart is the first locus where emotion is generated. To purge it there is to get at its root. Barsanuphius advises that “wrath dies in you when anger is choked from your heart.”87 Purity of heart is often associated with being free not only of thoughts but of the passions: “This is a good thing, and it is proper for a love that is according to God. Hold your heart in purity before God, and this will not cause you harm. Now, having your heart in purity means not saying anything against anyone out of vengeance, but only for the sake of good itself.”88 Interestingly, a battle can ensue between thoughts and emotions, in which the heart finds itself torn between them: “When the mind, having grown to full maturity in the Lord, releases the soul from its long-held preoccupations, then the heart, since the mind and the passions pull it in opposite directions, is tortured as though it were on the rack in the hands of public executioners.”89 Whatever troubles the heart or mind must be avoided as harmful or dangerous, even if it may appear otherwise useful or necessary.90 Stillness of heart

 Nemesius of Emesa, On the Nature of Man, Section 20, 141. Maximos the Confessor and John of Damascus draw on him extensively for “philosophical” topics. 82  This is also characteristic of Dorotheos of Gaza who probably had medical training, is certainly familiar with Galen, was head of the infirmary at the monastery of Thavatha, and frequently employs medical imagery in his discourses. For example, he refers to the “movement of anger or resentment” as experienced in the heart: Sayings and Discourses, 115. See also especially the discourse “On Rancor or Animosity,” where he repeatedly links anger to its origin in the heart. Ibid., 149–55. Isiah of Scetis also associates anger and the heart in Discourse 8; Ascetic Discourses, 90; Discourse 10; Ascetic Discourses, 99. 83  Evagrius, Eulogios 20.21; Ascetic Corpus, 47. 84  Letters from the Desert, 159. 85  Evagrius, On the Eight Thoughts 4.10, 4.13–16; Ascetic Corpus, 80–81. 86  Book of the Elders, 322. 87  Letters from the Desert, 61. 88  Letters from the Desert, 199. 89  Mark the Monk, Those Who Imagine That They are Justified by Works 68; Counsels on the Spiritual Life, 121. 90  Cassian, Conferences I.VII.4; 46. 81

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tries to prevent violent emotions, passionate attitudes, destructive actions, and ultimately evil dispositions by combatting them at their very origin. Finally, the heart is also often linked to compassion, presumably especially because of the biblical precedent.91 The ascetics are frequently counseled to have or cultivate a compassionate and merciful heart. Mark the Monk assures the reader that “a compassionate heart will receive compassion, and a merciful heart will likewise receive mercy.”92 Our hearts must be open to compassion.93 Evagrius also insists that one should gladden the hearts of others: “If your brother is grieved comfort him, and if he is in pain share his suffering, for in doing this you will gladden his heart.”94 Barsanuphius and John similarly say that you must “understand and love your brother with all your heart” and tell their listeners to incline their hearts toward mercy.95 Cassian often simply equates love and purity of heart.96 Climacus also establishes a link between the heart and compassion, albeit here as imagery for God’s compassion, which is indeed often seen as the model for human compassion.97 Love is frequently discussed in the later ascetic literature, although the heart is not always explicitly mentioned in that context, maybe because they think of love as an action, not an emotion.98

 Interestingly, Max Scheler links compassion to our limited ability to know another’s heart: “The consciousness that we finite humans cannot look into each other’s ‘hearts’—cannot even ascertain our own ‘heart’ fully and adequately, much less the ‘heart’ of another—is an essential element accompanying the phenomenon of any experience of compassion (and even of all spontaneous ‘love’).” Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1973), 77. The ascetics, by contrast, did seem to think that looking into the heart of another might be possible to those especially trained in guiding other people’s hearts through much wisdom. This is why the heart must be exposed as fully as possible to the gaze of the spiritual elder or guide: “For the sake of obedience, I speak that which I have in my heart.” Letters from the Desert, 104; 106. On the heart in Scheler, see Peter H.  Spader, “The Primacy of the Heart: Scheler’s Challenge to Phenomenology,” Philosophy Today 29.3–4 (1985): 223–229. 92  Mark the Monk, On the Spiritual Law 27; Counsels on the Spiritual Life, 95. 93  Mark the Monk, The Mind’s Advice to Its Own Soul 4; Counsels on the Spiritual Life, 181. 94  Evagrius, To Monks 87; Ascetic Corpus, 128. 95  Letters from the Desert, 64, 119. 96  E.g. Cassian, Conferences I.VII.4; 46. 97  Climacus, Step 7.43 of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 75. 98  E.g. Book of the Elders, 288, 303. Dorotheos gives the imagery of a circle where God is at the center and people’s lives at the periphery; the closer to we draw to each other in love, the closer we also come to God and the reverse: “The closer they are to God, the closer they become to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God. ... the more we are united to our neighbor the more we are united to God.” Discourses and Sayings, 139. 91

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5  The Heart as the Core of the Person Probably the most frequent reference to the heart in all of this literature is the counsel to watch or guard over it and the biblically informed admonition to pursue “purity of heart.” This is closely connected to the notions of the heart as locus or origin of thought and affect. It employs the heart as a sort of shorthand for the very core of the person. Evagrius admonishes the reader over and over again to guard the heart against evil thoughts,99 as do many of the other ascetic writers.100 Cassian insists: “All the secret places of our heart, therefore, must be constantly scrutinized and the prints of whatever enters them must be investigated in the most careful way.”101 The texts are full of both reports of such self-examination and advice on how to undertake it oneself. This investigation is primarily concerned with the thoughts that pass through our mind and may enter our hearts. Abba Philimon advises: “Strive to keep your mind undistracted, always being attentive to your inner thoughts.”102 Hesychios explains: “Watchfulness is a way embracing every virtue, every commandment. It is the heart’s stillness and, when free from mental images, it is the guarding of the intellect.”103 Distractions are to be eliminated in order to focus single-mindedly on what goes on in consciousness. This examination of consciousness is both extensive and intensive. For example, it is reported of one of the Abbas that he would sit examining himself for at least an hour before every eucharistic service.104 Many ascetics are told to stay in their caves and observe their thoughts for much of the day, sometimes with the accompaniment of physical labor, but the sort of labor that was highly repetitive—like the weaving of baskets—and thus conducive to concentration. Hesychios explains that this attention is “a spiritual method which, if assiduously practiced over a long period, completely frees us with God’s help from impassioned thoughts, impassioned words and evil actions. ... It teaches us how to activate the three aspects of our soul correctly, and how to keep a firm guard over the senses.”105 Therefore, in Philotheos of Sinai’s words: “Let us go forward with the heart completely attentive and the soul fully conscious.”106 This is encapsulated in Isaiah the Solitary’s counsel: “Stand guard,

 Evagrius, Eulogios 18.19; Ascetic Corpus, 44; To Monks 44–45, 58–60; Ascetic Corpus, 125, 126.  For example: Philokalia I, 171, 195, 269, 180, 24–27, 76; II, 38; III, 16, 25, 286, 313, 338–39. The term “heart” is employed in almost every other sentence in the English translation of the discourses of Isaiah of Scetis. [Unfortunately, I was unable to confirm that this is also the case in the original language.] It is often employed as a short-hand for the person as a whole or for one’s inner intentionality. 101  Cassian, Conferences I.XXII.1; 62–63. 102  “A Discourse on Abba Philimon,” Philokalia II, 351. 103  “On Watchfulness and Holiness,” Philokalia I, 162–63. 104  Book of the Elders, 202. 105  “On Watchfulness and Holiness,” Philokalia I, 163. 106  “Texts on Watchfulness,” Philokalia III, 26. 99

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then, over your heart and keep a watch on your senses.”107 The sayings of the desert fathers are full of such admonishments to watch over or guard one’s heart.108 Abba Bessarion is reported to say that the ascetic should be “all eyes”; Abba Peter counsels alertness, vigilance, and attention; Abba Poemen responds to a question by exhorting his listeners to be “attentively vigilant”; Abba Ōrisios insists that the ascetic “must be vigilant and keep a watch on himself securely.”109 References to similar exhortations could easily be multiplied. The theme is especially prominent in the Philokalia, where it is often linked to the repetition of a short mantra or prayer line. Abba Philimon in the story most influential for the much later famous text The Way of the Pilgrim counsels: “This is what you should always be doing in your heart: whether eating or drinking, in company or outside your cell, or on a journey, repeat that prayer with a watchful mind and an undeflected intellect; also chant, and meditate on prayers and psalms.”110 Hesychios counsels: “With all your strength pursue the virtue of attentiveness—that guard and watch of the intellect, that perfect stillness of heart and blessed state of soul when free from images, which is all too rarely found in man.”111 Clearly, one of the main goals of this attentiveness is to protect the ascetic from sinful thoughts and actions, to prevent temptation or at least the giving in to temptation.112 For Hesychios such attentiveness is able to free us from evil influence: “An intellect that does not neglect its inner struggle will find that—along with the other blessings which come from always keeping a guard on the heart—the five bodily senses, too, are freed from all external evil influences.”113 In this respect, keeping watch means to commit to phenomenological examination, to depict the phenomena that manifest and are experienced. A recalcitrant monk is told: “Brother, when you are alone in your cell, examine your heart, and you will discover whence this hardness came into your

 “On Guarding the Intellect,” Philokalia I, 24. The fuller edition has many such statements. To cite just one further representative one: “Examine yourself, therefore, brother, in observing your heart every day.” Discourse 24; Ascetic Discourses, 196. 108  “So whatever you observe your soul wishing to do for God, do it—and watch over your heart” (Book of the Elders, 11). 109  Book of the Elders, 191, 192–93, 201, 205. The whole chapter (of the English translation) is entitled “Being Ever Watchful” (189–215). 110  “Discourse on Abba Philimon,” Philokalia II, 351, 348. The discourse is full of similar exhortations. 111  St Hesychios the Priest, “On Watchfulness and Holiness,” Philokalia I, 182. 112  Philotheos combines watchfulness and prayer: “Combine prayer with inner watchfulness, for watchfulness purifies prayer, while prayer purifies watchfulness. It is through unceasing watchfulness that we can perceive what is entering into us and can to some extent close the door against it, calling upon our Lord Jesus Christ to repel our malevolent adversaries. Attentiveness obstructs the demons by rebutting them; and Jesus, when invoked, disperses them together with all their fantasies.” “Forty Texts on Watchfulness,” Philokalia III, 26. He continues: “Be extremely strict in guarding your intellect. When you perceive an evil thought, rebut it and immediately call upon Christ to defend you” (ibid., III, 26). 113  “On Watchfulness and Holiness,” Philokalia I, 171. 107

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heart.”114 To examine one’s heart allows one to penetrate it more deeply and understand it more fully. The attitude of vigilance must be maintained consistently or it will be lost again: “if a person does not guard his own heart well, he forgets and disregards everything he has heard.”115 The ascetics are constantly counseled to “guard” the heart in order to instill and maintain this healthier attitude. The goal of many of their practices is stillness, which Hesychios compares to a spider waiting for its prey.116 It is also often likened to a still lake or to water in a bowl that can serve as a mirror of the self.117 If the heart is turbulent, its movements cannot be perceived, but by stilling one’s mind and heart, bracketing out anything distracting and moving it aside, one’s heart and consciousness can become sufficiently still for observing even the most hidden thoughts and smallest movements. Such stillness is necessary for the examination of consciousness, the detection and analysis of thoughts, the evaluation of perceptions, and the weighing of affects and emotions. Actual silence is essential for cultivating the attitude of watchfulness or stillness. In one of the stories told about Abba Sisōēs he is asked: “I want to keep a watch on my heart, but I am not able.” The response by the elder is: “How are we to keep a watch on the heart when the door of our tongue lies open?”118 For Barsanuphius and John, too, praying to God in secret means to shut one’s mouth.119 Yet, Evagrius reminds us: “Let not only the mouth but also the heart maintain its guard.”120 Abba Poemen counsels: “Teach your heart to observe whatever your tongue teaches.”121 Cassian stresses that “just as we draw the bars of our mouth and hold back the flow of our words when silence is demanded of us, we may likewise be able to keep a gentle heart, because sometimes even though the tongue is restrained one still loses one’s state of peacefulness within.”122 Abba John tells a deacon that “silence is nothing other than restraining one’s heart from giving and taking.”123 Such silence is seen as a means for separating from the world, from external distractions, but also from internal movements and preoccupations.

 Letters from the Desert, 157.  Book of the Elders, 205. 116  “On Watchfulness and Holiness,” Philokalia I, 166. This is obviously the proximate, not the ultimate goal, i.e. it is a tool for the examination of consciousness and the focusing of attention. 117  “After a brief silence, he poured water into a bowl and said to them, ‘Look carefully at the water,’ for it was disturbed. Then, after a little while, he said to them again, ‘Now look carefully [and see] how the water is stilled,’ and as they looked at the water, they saw their faces as in a mirror. Then he said to them, ‘It is like that too for somebody amidst people; he cannot see his own sins for the tumult; but when he practices hēsychia, especially in the desert, then he sees his own shortcomings.” Book of the Elders, 21–22. 118  Book of the Elders, 203. 119  Letters from the Desert, 132. 120  Evagrius, Eulogios 18.19, Ascetic Corpus, 45. 121  Book of the Elders, 128. Indeed, “whoever says one thing and wickedly has another in his heart, the worship of such a person is worthless” (Book of the Elders, 150). 122  Cassian, Conferences XVIII.XII; 644. 123  Letters from the Desert, 118. 114 115

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Hesychios of Sinai speaks several times of the heart as the mirror of the self.124 Indeed, the image of the mirror is often employed for this self-examination. Only when the heart is still can it become fully transparent to itself and can one come to true self-knowledge. Self-knowledge in the sense of self-transparency is a primary goal of ascetic practice. Only with such intimate knowledge and full awareness of the self can the roots of any problems be uncovered and dealt with. The point of self-knowledge is obviously not, as in much of today’s self-help literature, self-­ affirmation or increased self-esteem, but their opposite: a radical divestment of the false nature of the self in order to adopt a healthier and leaner version of the self. The heart, then, stands in as the core of this self, as an encapsulating mirror of the person as a whole.125 Yet, the heart does not merely convey a sense of self in some abstract fashion; it is spoken of as the inner core of the person in quite physical terms. By serving both as the place where thoughts invade us and the location where emotions originate, the heart is conceived as a kind of room or space within the person. In this sense it can also serve as a dwelling for the divine.

 Hesychios, “On Watchfulness,” Philokalia I, 163, 166, 171.  Chrétien reminds us that for the biblical and ascetic tradition: “Far from being merely a bodily organ, the heart is the very place of our identity, of our ipseity; it is what we are most properly [le plus en propre], and thus also the place where we can strip down to who we most fully are [le plus en propre].” Jean-Louis Chrétien, Symbolique du corps (Paris: PUF, 2005), 16. The early phenomenological thinker Hedwig Conrad-Martius similarly often refers to the heart as middle or center of the person, where everything is connected and from which everything is poured out. Personhood is rooted in this core of the self. In the Metaphysical Conversations she says: “Does it not seem to you as if it would be an absurdity to speak of humans ‘without heart’? In that case, they would be without this middle into which their entire being is taken and placed, as it births, unfolds and pours itself into soul, body, and spirit. They are, as it were, centrally knotted and fastened into this center. All the ‘blood streams,’ all the paths of personal life run together in it, in order to go out again from there. The human can say, desire, and do nothing as a whole, wholly personally, that does not stem from this middle of the self, in which alone one’s whole being is posited in one. Everything else is empty, unsubstantial and in a personal sense without being.” Metaphysische Gespräche (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1921), 240 [translation forthcoming]. In her text The Human Spirit-Soul, she speaks again of the heart as the middle and core of life. Referring to Pascal, she notes that “the heart [is] the deepest source of intuitive ‘evidences’.” Geistseele des Menschen (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1960), 76. In a different sense, in his final lectures and texts Michel Foucault suggested that early Christian asceticism (Cassian is his prime example) develops a new “technology of the self” that makes self-interpretation central: “I think that in Christianity we see the development of a much more complex technology of the self. This technology of the self maintains the difference between knowledge of being, knowledge of word, knowledge of nature, and knowledge of the self, and this knowledge of the self takes shape in the constitution of thought as a field of subjective data which are to be interpreted. And, the role of interpreter is assumed by the work of a continuous verbalization of the most imperceptible movements of the thought—that’s the reason we could say that the Christian self which is correlated to this technique is a gnosiologic self.” Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,” Political Theory 21.2 (1993): 198–227. See the fuller account in Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France. 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador: 2005). He is probably right about practices of confession, although the analysis of self and the desire for self-understanding goes far beyond this and is more positive and more productive than Foucault acknowledges.

124 125

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Although the literature often stresses the “negative” dimension of turning away from the world and its thought patterns, there is obviously also the “positive” dimension of turning toward the divine. The various ascetic practices are ultimately seen to open the heart to God: “Indeed, inner work with labor of heart brings purity, and purity brings true quiet of heart, and such quiet brings humility, and humility renders a person the dwelling-place of God, and from this dwelling-place the evil demons are banished, together with the devil who is their captain, as well as their unworthy passions. Then, that person is found to be a temple of God, sanctified, illumined, purified, graceful, filled with every fragrance and goodness and gladness.”126 The ascetic must remember God in the heart: “Remember that he knows people’s hearts and pays attention to your heart. So, go ahead and say his name in your heart... This means that we are to shut our mouth and pray to him within the heart. Therefore, one who shuts one’s mouth and says God’s name, or else prays to him in one’s heart, is fulfilling Scripture. Even if you do not mention his name in your heart, but simply remember him therein... it is still sufficient for you to receive divine assistance.”127 God speaks in the heart128 and knows its secrets.129 Thus, one must devote oneself wholeheartedly to God “with an upright heart.”130 Cassian reminds us that “the end of every monk and the perfection of his heart incline him to constant and uninterrupted perseverance in prayer.”131 Abba Philimon claims that his thoughts have remained focused in his cell since coming to Scetis. This is a dedicated concentration of the intentionality on what is considered of highest value: “Pondering these things, I constrain all other thoughts; and I can no longer be with people or concern my intellect with them, lest I be cut off from more divine meditations.”132 The pure heart is entirely focused on God and mirrors the divine in its thoughts.133 God can enter into the heart or withdraw from it and the divine can be encountered in the very depths of the heart. Diadochus assures his readers that “when we fervently remember God, we feel divine longing well up within us from the depths of our heart.”134 God may seem to withdraw from the heart to induce greater humility, but if we “offer Him ceaseless confession of our sins and incessant tears, and practice a greater seclusion from the world... we may eventually induce Him to reveal His presence in our hearts as before.”135 Fear of God in the heart illuminates

 Letters from the Desert, 87.  Ibid., 132, see also 180. 128  Ibid., 100. 129  Book of the Elders, 270; Evagrius, To Monks 104; Ascetic Corpus, 129; Exhortation to a Virigin 33; Ascetic Corpus, 133. 130  Evagrius, Exhortations 2.19; Ascetic Corpus, 221. 131  Cassian, Conferences IX.II.1; 329. 132  “Discourse on Abba Philimon,” Philokalia II, 353. 133  Ibid., 354. 134  “On Spiritual Knowledge,” Philokalia I, 280. 135  “On Spiritual Knowledge,” Philokalia I, 287. 126 127

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a person like a lamp.136 It is possible to focus on God and not allow one’s heart to separate from the divine even in the bustle of city life.137 This requires single-minded devotion: “And the palm tree has a single heart; it is light and is the source of the tree’s entire activity. Something similar is to be found in the righteous man: his heart is single and uncomplicated, looking to God alone. It is light, suffused by the light of faith, and the entire activity of the righteous man is located in his heart.”138 Like the heart of the palm tree the human heart is the center of the person, open to God. A purged and stilled heart permits all of the activity of the person to occur there; it creates a centering space that allows the person to act from the core of his or her being. In that sense, this “space” of the heart is a gathering place, not some elusive “essence” of the self but a spacious locus out of which the self operates. In many ascetic practices, not just in the Christian tradition, meditation is seen to gather and focus attention into the heart, to move one’s patterns of thought into an interior core that is often referred to in spatial terms.

6  Phenomenological Implications What sort of implications might this analysis of the ascetic literature on the heart have for contemporary phenomenological reflection? There may well be very concrete ways in which the analysis of stillness for attentive focus, some of the particular insights about the role of sadness in contrition, or the phenomenality of expressions of anger might prove useful in phenomenological analyses of emotion, affect, or dispositions, although a full examination of this is not possible here. Instead, two broader implications will be highlighted briefly in closing: the relationship between thought and affect and the idea of the heart as center of the person. While this cannot be developed here in any great detail, there may well be a significant phenomenological insight in the ascetic linking of thought and affect in the heart in regard to the connections between thoughts and emotions, between emotional “bents” and patterns of thought. Affects can manifest in cognitive ways. Perhaps “understanding” and “affectivity/Befindlichkeit” (or even speech/Rede) are not merely “equiprimordial,” as Heidegger claims, but linked far more profoundly. Not only can moods or emotions be expressed in words and our thinking and  Book of the Elders, 28. Interestingly, the presence of demons is often associated with stench. In one colorful story, a burning lamp exits the chest of the disciple with the smell of burning sulphur. Book of the Elders, 44. On the issue of smell in ascetic literature see Harvey, Scenting Salvation, especially the chapter on “stench” (201–21). 137  Book of the Elders, 323. Harmless concludes his magisterial study of asceticism with a quote from Abba Agueras: “I went one day to Abba Poemen and said to him: ‘I have gone everywhere to [find somewhere to] live, but I have not found any peace. Where do you wish me to live?’ The old man had responded to him: ‘There is no longer hardly any desert in our days. Go, look for a good-­ sized crowd. Go live among them and conduct yourself like someone who does not exist. Say to yourself: “I’ve got no worries.” Then you will taste a royal peace.’” Desert Christians, 473. 138  Book of the Elders, 329; trans. lightly modified. 136

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speaking are always colored in affective fashion, rarely emotionally neutral, but some recurring emotions that color moods and shape dispositions may manifest phenomenologically in ways that are similar to patterns of thoughts. When one remembers an insult from a colleague or betrayal by a friend, begins to dwell on it, mulls it over in one’s mind, becomes increasingly angry or despondent over it, is it thought or emotion that is at stake? Can they be separated? Is not one’s memory or imagination for such cases always already both affective and cognitive? More positively, even the wonder or excitement over an abstract philosophical idea or concept already has affective dimensions in a way that is often disregarded. Why do we do philosophy? Because it moves us, matters to us, because we think it to be of profound importance for our lives, that of others, and for our society. Indeed, scholars often devote their lives to ideas or theories that are of existential import for them personally. This is a matter of the heart in ways that make distinction between thought and affect artificial, maybe even misleading. In this respect, the heart refers to the innermost sense of the person where emotion and thought originate but also come to settle and develop, shaping us in profound fashion. In this respect, the ascetic literature may be especially relevant for an analysis of destructive patterns of thought or addictions that have important emotional valence and often become such mental patterns precisely because of the way in which they are deeply linked to affect. This is the case not only for “medical” addictions like those to nicotine, alcohol, or opioids, where neural pathways are altered by an addiction that functions through the ways in which it holds emotion hostage and continues as a pattern of behavior because of its strongly affective dimensions that have profound corporeal and cognitive manifestations. It is also true of what may seem as more “cognitive” commitments to ideologies, from political fanaticism to religious fundamentalism. These are often dismissed as mere doctrinal commitments to particular ideas or belief system and it is assumed that if people are shown the error of their beliefs or made aware of the “facts” they will easily shift their attitudes or leave the extremist groups that seek to control them.139 This is patently untrue and one of the reasons may well be that these do not function simply on cognitive levels, but have profoundly affective dimensions that cannot be separated from the “mental” ones. Ideologies are patterns of affect as much as they are patterns of thought. They require not only openness to a different kind of thinking, but also a redirection of emotion and affective disposition. It is also worth stressing more fully that these phenomena of the heart involve entire processes, not isolated moments. A thought or emotion at the “door” of the

 In this respect, Dorotheos of Gaza’s insight is astute, here focusing on suspicions one monk might have about another: “Suspicions are falsehoods and blind your mind. ... Nothing is more serious than suspicion, nothing brings the mind so much blindness, because if we entertain them for a while they begin to persuade us, until we are convinced that we have seen things which do not exist and never could exist.” He goes on to tell the story of a monk who “was repeatedly misled by his own suspicions; he was indeed completely convinced that each of his conjectures was a fact and that everything was always exactly as he thought and could not possibly be otherwise” even when profoundly mistaken. Discourses and Sayings, 158.

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heart is only the starting point. It leads to decisive action or is cultivated into attitude not immediately but through dwelling on it, turning it over, mulling on it, allowing it to capture the heart or consciousness by coming to inhabit it. This, again, has both cognitive and affective dimensions that are not easily separable. One falls into patterns of thought because of their attractive affect, because they become comfortable and familiar. To think one is “right” is to feel good, like one is on the right side of things. One becomes increasingly blinded to alternatives; they now seem absurd, feel wrong, no longer seem convincing to either mind or affect. This neither happens suddenly nor can it be overturned all at once. And obviously the process applies not only to dangerous or despicable attitudes, but also to salutary ones. Virtues, dispositions of mind and heart, are shaped only slowly over time, via repeated action and through their deep impact on thought and emotion as they confirm themselves in dedicated practice. One becomes neither vicious nor virtuous, neither foolish nor wise overnight. These attitudes and dispositions have to “settle down,” so to speak, they have to come to inhabit the heart, to enter deeply within us. In this regard, it is striking how often the ascetic writers employ spatial imagery for the heart. It is pictured as a chamber, an altar, a vessel, a shrine, a church, a workshop, even a tomb.140 It serves as a place for God, a haven where one might take refuge, where “because of God’s presence no demonic army dares to make a stand.”141 Or, in Maximos’ imagery: “a pure heart is perhaps one which has no natural propulsion toward anything in any manner whatsoever. When in its extreme simplicity such a heart has become like a writing-tablet beautifully smoothed and polished, God comes to dwell in it and writes there His own laws.”142 Mark talks about the turning of attention to the heart as an “advance into the interior.”143 This develops later in the mystical literature into frequent imagery of the heart as a chamber, temple, or even a city, the most famous of which is probably the “interior castle” of Teresa of Avila.144 There is, so to say, a spiritual geography, a spatiality to the interior self. It is telling that the physical and metaphorical space of the desert is so crucial to the ascetics—far more important than any kind of temporality. Time is suspended in the desert, but space is essential. The heart ultimately becomes such an empty place that can be filled with the divine presence.

 Philokalia I, 261 (“shrine”), II, 181, 252 (workshop), III, 334 (church), III, 335 (altar), III, 337 (tomb). 141  Philotheos of Sinai, “Texts on Watchfulness,” Philokalia III, 17, see also 25, 26. 142  Maximos the Confessor, “Second Century on Theology,” Philokalia II, 158. 143  Mark the Monk, “Concerning Holy Baptism,” Counsels on the Spiritual Life, 317. 144  Chrétien has explored this beautifully for the Western tradition in his L’espace intérieur (Paris: Minuit, 2014), where he focuses on the idea of the “chamber of the heart” in Augustine and other thinkers. For other phenomenological discussions of the heart, see E. Kohak, “An Understanding Heart: Rationality, Value and Transcendental Phenomenology,” Filosoficky Casopis 49.4 (2001): 559–576; Andrew Tallon, “The Concept of the Heart in Strasser’s Phenomenology of Feeling,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66.3 (1992): 341–360; Robert E. Wood, “The Heart in Heidegger’s Thought,” Continental Philosophy Review 48.4 (2015): 445–462. 140

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This also has important implications for corporeality. Although asceticism is often imagined as a denial or combatting of the body, the phenomenological investigation shows otherwise. The spatial imagery employed for the heart reveals the importance of a locus or seat—or body—for thoughts and emotions. The logismoi would not be such a problem if they did not become expressed in actions and dispositions, in bodily habits that shape and express who we are. The ascetics’ almost obsessive attentiveness to their bodies in regard to food, sleep, and sex—usually by abstaining from them as much as possible—demonstrates the immense importance they attribute to the body, even when that importance is interpreted negatively. Furthermore, the more positive attitudes they seek to cultivate are usually pursued also through essentially corporeal actions and dispositions, often postures of the body in prayer or physical activities like weaving that were taken to still the mind.145 The ascetics are deeply convinced that body and mind are inseparable, in both positive and negative ways. The spatial language employed of the heart may well encapsulate that conviction. It gives a kind of physicality or embodiment to the self that resides at the center of the person as if in a physical space. The self, one might say, is experienced as fully “inside” of us, in every part of us, yet not fully co-extensive with our physical body, because it can shift within it, take on new attitudes, open its “doors” to thoughts and emotions, dwell fully in the heart or merely hover there in peripheral fashion.146 This spatial imagery is intriguing also from a phenomenological perspective. Much of phenomenology is concerned with overcoming a Cartesian dualism in regard to the self and stressing our embodied nature more fully. But at times one wonders whether this attempt to hold body and soul or mind together has been fully successful. Is not consciousness still often privileged and merely “housed” in a body?147 Have we taken sufficiently seriously the deeply corporeal nature of our patterns of thought and affect, the ways in which they can be generated in physical ways and become embedded in corporeal actions and dispositions? We obviously recognize the importance of spatiality for our bodily existence, our orientation in space, our need to dwell in the places of the lifeworld. Does our inner self also require a place for becoming itself and for enabling it to welcome others in intersubjective relations? Is the heart such a locus of the self? Although we obviously “are” ourselves in some way from the time we have a physical body, we are certainly familiar with the experience of “becoming” a self, of owning ourselves in new ways throughout our lives in response to particular encounters or experiences of maturation. Might the ascetic idea of the heart as a “locus” of the self help us think more deeply about these ways of becoming who we are? Maybe, ironically, asceticism  See also Depraz, Corps glorieux, 37–97.  Conrad-Martius explores this in great detail in her Metaphysical Conversations. 147  This is what Conrad-Martius claims in the Metaphysical Conversations: “According to the prevailing view the soul or even the spirit (or ‘consciousness’) always seems to collapse into the I as such, while the body only seems attached to the I in some external fashion, so that it seems to require a sort of transposition to see body, soul and spirit as belonging equally to the I or to see them as particular areas of configuration of the one and only I.” 145 146

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can teach us again that “passionate thoughts” have a place and that place of the self is the heart of our body.

References Ancient Sources Barsanuphius and John: Letters (J. Chryssavgis, Trans.) (2006, 2007). 2 Vols. Catholic University of America Press. Greek text in SC 426, 427, 450, 451, and 468. Daniel of Scetis. (2008). Witness to holiness: Abba Daniel of Scetis (T. Vivian, Ed.). Cistercian Publications. Dorotheos of Gaza. (1977). Discourses and sayings. (E. P. Wheeler, Trans.). Cistercian Publications. Greek text in SC 92. Evagrius of Pontus. (2003). The Greek ascetic corpus. (R.  E. Sinkewicz, Trans.). Oxford University Press. Isaiah of Scetis. (2002). Ascetic Discourses (J.  Chryssavgis & R.  Penkett, Trans.). Cistercian Publications. John Cassian. (1997) The Conferences (B. Ramsey, Trans.). Paulist Press. Latin text in SC 42, 54, 64. John Cassian. (2000). The Institutes (B. Ramsey, Trans.). Newman Press. Latin texts in SC 109. John Climacus. (1978). The Ladder of divine ascent. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. John Moschus. (1992). The Spiritual Meadow (J.  Wortley, Trans.). Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications. Greek text in SC 12. Journeying into God: Seven early monastic lives (T. Vivian, Trans.) (1996). Fortress Press. Letters from the Desert. Barsanuphius and John: A selection of questions and responses (J. Chryssavgis, Trans.) (2003). St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Mark the Monk. (2009). Counsels on the spiritual life (T. Vivian, Trans.). St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Greek texts in SC 445 and 455. Nemesius of Emesa. (2008). On the nature of man. Liverpool University Press. Pachomius. (1980, 1981, 1982). Pachomian Koinonia. (3 vols., A.  Veilleux, Trans.). Cistercian Publications Inc.. Palladius of Aspuna, The Lausiac history. (J. Wortley, Trans.). (2015). Liturgical Press. SC: Sources chrétiennes. Éditions du Cerf. Symeon the New Theologian. The Discourses (C. J. deCatanzaro, Trans.). (1980). Paulist Press. The Book of the elders: Sayings of the desert fathers. The Systematic Collection (J. Wortley, Trans.) (2012). Liturgical Press. Greek text in SC 387, 474, 498. The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto (N. Russell, Trans.) (1980). Cistercian Publications. The Philokalia: The complete text. (4 Vols, G. E. H. Palmer, P. Sherrard & K. Ware, Trans.) (1979, 1981, 1984, 1995). Faber & Faber. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (B. Ward, Trans.) (1975). Cistercian Publications.

Contemporary Sources Brown, P. (1978). The making of late antiquity. Harvard University Press. Chrétien, J.-L. (2004). Symbolique du corps. Presses Universitaires de France. Chrétien, J.-L. (2014). L’espace intérieur. Éditions de Minuit. Clark, E.  A. (1999). Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and scripture in early Christianity. Princeton University Press.

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Conrad-Martius, H. (1921). Metaphysische Gespräche. Max Niemeyer. Conrad-Martius, H. (1960). Geistseele des Menschen. Kösel Verlag. Depraz, N. (2008). Le corps glorieux. Phénoménologie pratique de la Philocalie des pères du désert et des pères de l’église. Louvain: Peeters. Dihle, A. (1982). The theory of will in classical antiquity. University of California Press. Finn, R. (2009). Asceticism in the Graeco-Roman world. Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (1993). About the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self: Two lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory, 21(2), 198–227. Foucault, M. (2005). The Hermeneutics of the subject: Lectures at the Collège de France. 1981–1982. (G. Burchell, Trans.). Picador. Francis, J. A. (1995). Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and authority in the second-century Pagan World. Pennsylvania State University Press. Graver, M. R. (2007). Stoicism and emotion. University of Chicago Press. Harmless, W. (2004). Desert Christians: An Introduction to the literature of early monasticism. Oxford University Press. Harrison, V. (2012). Women in the Philokalia? In B. Bingaman & B. Nassif (Eds.), The Philokalia: A classic text of orthodox spirituality (pp. 252–61). Oxford University Press. Harvey, S.  A. (2006). Scenting salvation: Ancient Christianity and the olfactory imagination. University of California Press. Hevelone-Harper, J.  L. (2005). Disciples of the desert: Monks, laity, and spiritual authority in Sixth-Century Gaza. Johns Hopkins University Press. Husserl, E. (1992). Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 8. Felix Meiner Verlag. Kohak, E. (2001). An understanding heart: Rationality, value and transcendental phenomenology. Filosoficky Casopis, 49(4), 559–576. Louth, A. (1996). Maximus the Confessor. Routledge. Louth, A. (2015). On being a Christian in late antiquity: St Basil the Great between the desert and the city. In G. D. Dunn & W. Mayer (Eds.), Christians shaping identity from the Roman Empire to Byzantium (pp. 85–89). Brill. Luckman, H. A., & Kulzer, L. (Eds.). (1999). Purity of heart in early ascetic and monastic literature. Liturgical Press. Miller, P. C. (2009). The corporeal imagination: Signifying the holy in late ancient Christianity. University of Pennsylvania Press. Reesor, M. E. (1989). The nature of man in early stoic philosophy. St. Martin’s Press. Rousseau, P. (1985). Pachomius: The Making of a community in fourth-century Egypt. University of California Press. Ryrie, A. (2011). The Desert movement: Fresh perspectives on the spirituality of the desert. Canterbury Press. Scheler, M. (1973). Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. Francke Verlag. Spader, P. H. (1985). The Primacy of the heart: Scheler’s challenge to phenomenology. Philosophy Today, 29(3–4), 223–229. Tallon, A. (1992). The Concept of the heart in Strasser’s phenomenology of feeling. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 66(3), 341–360. Voelke, A.-J. (1973). L’idée de volonté dans le Stoïcisme. Presses Universitaires de France. Wood, R.  E. (2015). The heart in Heidegger’s thought. Continental Philosophy Review, 48(4), 445–462.

Chapter 3

The Constitutive Roles of the Heart and Heartlessness for Personhood in Edith Stein and Gerda Walther Antonio Calcagno

Edith Stein and Gerda Walther left behind rich phenomenological bodies of work marked by originality and insight. Both philosophers were students of Edmund Husserl, and though they were deeply influenced by his thinking, they possessed unique understandings of what phenomenology is and could achieve as a philosophical method, much to the chagrin of their teacher. One of the unique contributions of both thinkers is their rich understanding of psyche or the human soul. The concept of the heart comes to occupy an important place in their respective accounts of the soul. This chapter examines the phenomena of the heart and heartlessness and their relationship to human personhood. I argue that if we accept Stein’s and Walther’s claim regarding the defining reality of the heart and its constitutive role in the very essence of personhood, then moments of heartlessness pose significant challenges for the being of personhood. Heartlessness can come to connote a real absence of or rupture in the soul, resulting in soullessness, which ultimately ruptures the lived unity of body, psyche, and spirit that defines the nature of personhood. Ultimately, heartlessness can break or diminish the soul that is constitutive of personal identity and personhood, thereby challenging the phenomenological claim concerning the irreducibility of human personhood: human personhood is fragile and can be destroyed. It is not inalienable. In her early phenomenological works, Stein does not substantially develop the concept of the heart other than to describe it in an everyday way as the locus or

A. Calcagno (*) Department of Philosophy, King’s University College at Western University, London, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_3

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cause of a specific kind of physical bodily sensation. In On the Problem of Empathy1 and Einführung in die Philosophie,2 we find references to the heart as an organ that is distinguishable from the brain or the head and that can receive certain stimulation and undergo certain affective movements, for example, it can beat faster on account of various emotional experiences. It is only in Stein’s later phenomenologically inflected philosophy that we find a more robust account of the heart, from her writings on women in Woman3 to her magnum opus Finite and Eternal Being,4 to her Münster philosophical anthropology,5 to her last very moving work on John of the Cross, The Science of the Cross.6 Stein wrote this last book with the knowledge of her impending annihilation by the Nazis. She develops the concept of the heart throughout her later corpus in a period marked by her religious conversion to Roman Catholicism and by a reevaluation and deepening of her own sense of what it is to be a Jew. Undoubtedly, her encounter and relationship with the Divine helped Stein develop her thinking of the unique aspect of human being that she identifies as the heart. In Woman and Finite and Eternal Being, the heart is described in both psycho-­ physiological and theological terms. In the case of the former, the heart is the organ that bears and expresses various forms of emotion, for example, the heart can be filled with joy. Concerning the latter, the heart defines a unique inner space for the relationship between God and humans. Drawing on the writings of St. Paul, God speaks to our heart and we are invited to love God with our whole hearts. Both cases use the concept and metaphor of the heart in the very typical fashion found throughout western literature and thought. Philosophically speaking, Stein begins to develop the idea of the heart in her Münster anthropology and in her last work, Science of the Cross. In these texts, the heart comes to define a realm or region of the soul or psyche and it demarcates both a unique and intimate expression of our innermost personality or personal core while also being a locus of encounter with God and others. Gerda Walther, Stein’s student, was raised and educated in a decidedly atheist, socialist home. She reports having her first major mystical religious experience while a philosophy student at Freiburg, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism in midlife. Like Stein, Walther’s earlier phenomenological and social-political

1  Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989), 50. 2  Edith Stein, Einführung in die Philosophie [Introduction to Philosophy], ed. Claudia Mariéle Wulf (Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Herder, 2003), 189. 3  Edith Stein, Woman, trans. Freda M. Oben (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2017), 52–58. 4  Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being, trans. Kurt Reinhardt (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002), 434–435. 5  Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person [The Structure of the Human Person], ed. Beate Beckmann-Zöller (Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Herder, 2004), 81. 6  Edith Stein, Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel OCD (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002), 177.

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philosophical works, largely contained in manuscripts in the Munich Staatsbibliothek,7 make no mention of the heart. The heart becomes an important concept for Walther in her famous work, Phenomenology of Mysticism.8 Christina M. Gschwandtner notes, “The second ground of being of the self is the soul, which refers to the “psychic” reality of the self. This includes desire, emotion, affect, even rudimentary thinking. Feelings like love or joy can ascend from the very depth of one’s being, seemingly from the “heart” but certainly not from the body. This source of feeling is “essentially different” in the manifestation of its phenomenality from the physical heart. Encounters with a beloved person or with something highly valued call forth distinct experiences in the “heart” (or soul).”9 For Stein and Walther, the heart emerges as a unique aspect of the human soul or psyche. In Stein’s early work, soul and psyche are used interchangeably, whereas in her later work she prefers the term soul to delineate a unique phenomenological realm of human experience and being. I am unable to present here the evolution of the concept of the heart in both Stein’s and Walther’s later works as this would be an enormous undertaking; rather, I wish to focus on one aspect, namely, the claim that the heart represents a unique, inner aspect of the soul, what Stein calls the innermost part of the soul, where one experiences intimately and intensely one’s personal core and interiority, and where one encounters God, self, and others in the most deeply personal way possible. The concept of personhood requires the very possibility of the heart, as described above. If we accept Stein and Walther’s phenomenological claim that there is a unique realm of the human soul or interiority that we can call the heart and that it makes possible deeper personal relations with oneself, others, and God, what happens to the heart when the life of the soul is lost, broken, or eliminated? What happens to us as persons when we become soulless and, therefore, heartless? Stein ponders this possibility in her treatment of Seelenlosigkeit or soullessness,10 whereas Walther never admits such a possibility, though she recognizes the diminishment of the life of the soul, spirit, and the heart, especially in emotional and psychic breaks or trauma. Stein considers the possibility of a real rupture in the fundamental essence of the human being, understood as soullessness, whereas Walther maintains the perduring possibility of a person’s fundamental essence that is ultimately unbreakable, though it can suffer certain diminishments. I argue here that both Stein and Walther present two coinciding possibilities, namely, a full heartlessness and a diminished sense of the heart, both of which have profound implications for our constitution as persons and as social/communal beings. Stein’s  Held under signature ANA 317 Gerda Walther Nachlass, Munich Staatsbibliothek.  Gerda Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik [Phenomenology of Mysticism] (Freiburg-imBreisgau.: Walter Verlag, 1955). 9  Christina M. Gschwandtner, “Körper, Leib, Gemüt, Seele, Geist: Conceptions of the Self in Early Phenomenology,” in Gerda Walther’s Phenomenology of Sociality, Psychology, and Religion (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018), 88. 10  Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, trans. Mary Catherine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2000), 234–236. 7 8

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treatment of soullessness and, therefore, heartlessness, means that one could neither experience the soul as depth nor live the personal unity of body, soul, and spirit that typifies human persons. Also, in Stein’s account, deep personal communal relations become impossible. The implications are clear: if soullessness and heartlessness are possibilities in Stein’s phenomenology, then the essential structure of the human person can be broken, destroyed, or interrupted—an insight Hannah Arendt chronicles in her treatment of the sustained and targeted breakdown of legal and moral personhood, resulting in the easy extermination of individuals in the camps, as described in Chap. 9 of The Origins of Totalitarianism.11 Walther maintains that though there may be diminishment of heart and soul, once can never eradicate the fundamental essence of personhood. In the end, both phenomenologists show how personhood admits vulnerability in its own structure: personhood can be broken and or diminished. For both philosophers, this possibility is painful and disturbing. They do, however, see in others and God the possibility of the restoration of the fullness of personhood. Most scholarship on Stein and Walther tend to view the structure of human personhood as universal, immutable, and necessary: the structure is absolutely essential. I show instead that it essentiality admits a vulnerability and fragility of a breakable personhood, which in a deep sense may be read as making possible the Levinasian appeal: “Here I am, do not kill me,” the appeal that is the phenomenological origin of ethics.

1  Stein on the Soul, Heart, and Soullessness What is the soul for Stein and where does one find the heart in it? Stein’s phenomenology ab initio is deeply concerned with the life of the soul and she defines it as one of the constituent layers of human person. In early twentieth century German philosophy and psychology, psyche and soul are often used interchangeably, and Stein certainly did so in her early work. By the time she moves to her Einführung in die Philosophie in 1918–1919 we find in her hand-written manuscripts the crossing out of the term psyche and the insertion of the term soul or Seele.12 Again, in her early phenomenological texts, she deploys the word psyche or soul to describe both a life principle as well as a developed seat of sense impressions like touch and sight, sensations like pleasure or comfort, affectivity, emotion, as well as psychic causality. Psyche also plays its role in the life of motivations, though they are largely set within the sphere of the freedom and reason of Geist or spirit. In the Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, psyche is also defined as the seat of the life force or Lebenskraft that keeps us living. We experience the life

11  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2001), 144–145. 12  See Claudia Mariéle Wulf’s Introduction to the Einführung in die Philosophie.

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force acting in us, for example, when we feel tired or are more refreshed. It is in and through psyche that character development unfolds, and the life of psyche is marked by certain qualities, dispositions, habits and capacities for development and change.13 Psyche is an intermediary layer of the person and works together with the lived body and the realm of spirit to create a sense of ourselves as persons marked by both a unique personality and profound lived experience of the union of body, soul, and spirit. The capacities, qualities, and descriptors Stein gives to psyche or the soul are fairly consistent with what we find in traditional philosophical psychology. Phenomenologically speaking, however, she maintains that the being of psyche is experienced differently than its capacities or functions, that is, the being of psyche is not reducible to its qualities.14 For Stein, the being of the soul is marked by the lived experience of depth. The soul is an internally-lived depth, das Tiefe. Stein will consistently come back to this sense of the soul in all of her writings, especially her later writings. Also, her philosophical conversations with her fellow phenomenologist are marked by this understanding of the soul as depth. Stein even describes this depth as having no limit or end point. But just as the being of the soul is marked by depth, not all that it experiences need be experienced purely as depth. One can experience things superficially, Stein says: “Superficiality” and “depth” themselves belong to that which makes up the substance of your soul in its being-by-itself. As for the rest, the static qualities divide themselves into

 “Das Leben der Psyche ist ein Entwicklungsgang, in dem ihre Fähigkeiten zur Ausbildung gelangen. Bedingungen dieser Ausbildung sind die Kräfte, über die die Persönlichkeit verfügt, und die äußeren Umstände, unter denen das Leben verläuft, schließlich die »ursprüngliche Anlage«, die in dem Entwicklungsprozeß mehr oder minder zur Entfaltung gelangt. Die äußeren Umstände spielen eine doppelte Rolle: Sie bedingen einmal das Ab und Zunehmen der Lebenskraft und sie bestimmen außerdem die Richtung der Entwicklung, allerdings nur in dem Spielraum, der durch die ursprüngliche Anlage offengelassen wird. Wer keine mathematische Begabung besitzt, den wird auch der trefflichste Unterricht nicht zum Mathematiker machen. Aber welchem Spezialgebiete der Begabte sich zuwendet, das kann davon abhängen, in welche Richtung sein Blick durch äußere Einflüsse gelenkt wird. Die ursprüngliche Anlage liegt der Entwicklung zugrunde und entwickelt sich nicht selbst. Unter günstigen Umständen tritt mehr von ihr zutage als unter ungünstigen, aber sie selbst nimmt nichts Neues in sich auf und verliert nichts aus ihrem Bestande.” For the sake of precision, I cite the German original of the Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities in order to avoid errors in the English translation. Edith Stein, Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften, ed. Beate Beckmann-Zöller (Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Herder, 2010), 193–194. Hereafter parenthetically cited as B. 14  Stein remarks, “Die Vermögen selbst und als solche sind aber ursprünglich psychische. Im Wesen der Psyche gründet solche Fixierung. Ein leiblichseelisches Wesen kann den Mechanismus der psychischen Struktur (ebenso wie die »erdenschwere« Leiblichkeit, wenn auch vielleicht nicht alle Leiblichkeit schlechthin) abstreifen und doch seine Seele und die von ihr unabtrennbare ganz andersartige Schwere behalten. Es hört nicht auf, aus seiner Seele heraus zu leben wie aus einem »jenseitigen Grunde«, ihr Sein leuchtet in der Aktualität des Lebens, das aus ihrer Tiefe hervorgeht, auf, ohne restlos darin aufzugehen. Und dieses Sein der Seele ist kein Zusammen dauernder Eigenschaften wie die Psyche, es läßt sich überhaupt nicht durch angebbare Eigenschaften aussprechen.” Ibid., 192. 13

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A. Calcagno [two kinds. There are] some that fill all layers of your soul and imprint their trademark on every experience in which your soul is involved – like purity, gentility, or meanness. [There are] others that certainly also belong to your soul as an undivided whole, yet show a particular affinity to certain value domains and predominantly make their appearance in the manners of behavior corresponding to [those value domains] and to the layers from which they arise. That’s how it is with kindliness, moral values and acting. Yet it’s always possible that the quality in question also is radiating outward in other experiences.15

In a curious few pages of the Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities and dialoguing with Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ ideas on the nature of the soul and the different kinds of souls, Stein ponders the possibility that one may be soulless or without soul [Seelenlosigkeit].16 One may also be full of soul or soulful [Seelenvoll]. The depth that marks the being of the soul may never come to exist or it may be eliminated or diminished. How? Stein identifies five possibilities.17 First, the soul may never have been awoken. Second, one may find oneself moved from the depths to the periphery of the soul, and she even suggests that one may choose or be forced to stay in a “crowded periphery.” Third, one may find oneself lost and in the middle of an ego dwelling in nothing, a kind of nihilism of sorts. Fourth, there may be some emotional cause, for example, feeling embittered may cut oneself of from experiencing the depths of the soul. Finally, a blow of fate or a trauma can cause the being of the soul to not appear, disappear, or be experienced in a very diminished form. One may be conscious or not of feeling soulless. Stein’s discussion of being soulless raises a dilemma for her phenomenology. On one hand, her phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy, from beginning to end, maintain the tri-partite structure of the human person as a union of body, soul, and spirit. In the aforementioned discussion, Stein ponders the possibility that this personal structure maybe broken or incomplete. The implication for the concept of personhood is clear: Those scholars who maintain that the Steinian person is an essential and, therefore, necessary human structure that belongs to all human beings will have to account for the possibility of soulless individuals who somehow remain persons though they may be soulless. Turning to the question of the heart and its relation to the soul, Stein maintains in the Science of the Cross that the soul delineates a realm of interiority [das Innere] whose innermost region can be called the heart. Accessibility to this region of human personhood is accessible through interior perception: The thoughts of the heart are the original life of the soul at the ground of her being, at a depth that precedes all splitting into different faculties and their activity. There the soul lives precisely as she is in herself, beyond all that will be called forth in her through created beings. Although this most interior region is the dwelling of God and the place where the soul is united to God, her own life flows out of here before the life of union begins; and this is so, even in cases where such a union never occurs. For every soul has an inmost region and its being is life. But this primary life is not only hidden from other spirits but from the soul herself. This is so for various reasons. Primary life is formless. The thoughts of the  Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, 237–238.  Ibid., 234–236. 17  Ibid., 234–240. 15 16

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heart are absolutely not thoughts in the usual sense of the word; they are not clearly outlined, arranged, and comprehensible constructions of the thinking intellect. They must pass through various formulations before they become such constructions. First, they must rise out of the ground of the heart. Then they arrive at a first threshold, where they become noticeable. This noticing is a far more original manner of being conscious than is perception by the intellect. It too lies before the splitting into faculties and activities. It lacks the clarity of purely sensible perception; on the other hand, it is richer than a bare grasping by the intellect. That which arises is perceived as bearing a stamp of value on the basis of which a decision is made: whether to allow what is rising to come up or not. It must be mentioned here that, already, what rises in purely natural ways and becomes noticed, is no longer the purely interior life of the soul, but is rather already an answer to something that she has brought into motion. But this leads in a direction in which we cannot follow further here. At the threshold where the rising movements are perceived, types of recognizable spiritual faculties begin to split off and conceivable structures are formed: to these belong thoughts elaborated by the intellect with their reasonable arrangement (these are interior words for which, then, exterior words can be found), movements of the mind, and impulses of the will that, as active energies, enter all that is connected with the spiritual life. Spiritual life is now no longer the primal life in the depth, rather it is something that can be grasped by interior perception. And interior perception is a totally different art of comprehending than is that first noticing of what arises out of the depth. So, too, this emergence out of the depth is different from the surfacing of an already formed image that was stored in the memory and now has become alive again. By no means is all that rises and becomes perceptible actually perceived. Much rises up, becomes interior and exterior word, turns into wish and will and deed “before one is aware of it.” Only those who live completely recollected in their inmost region keep faithful watch over these first movements.18

In the foregoing passage, Stein identifies the thoughts of the heart, which have to become more inwardly conscious through interior perception, as the primary layer of the heart. In addition to the heart being the innermost ground of the soul it is also defined as deep locus of personal encounter with other persons, including God. Stein writes, “…the inmost region of the soul is the heart and fountainhead of her personal life and at the same time the actual place where she meets other personal life. It is only possible for one person to touch another in their inmost region; through such a touch one person gives the other notice of his presence. When one feels one has been touched interiorly in this manner, one is in lively sentience with another person. This is not yet a union, but merely the point of departure thereto.”19 If the heart is the innermost, grounding aspect of the soul or psyche and the locus of intimate personal encounter, and if the possibility of soullessness exists, then the real possibility of heartlessness also exists. Stein never develops what heartlessness looks like, but based on her descriptions, once could infer that heartlessness would consist of an absence or diminishment of that innermost grounding layer that make possible both the birth of the thoughts of the heart and deep personal encounters. In a deep way, Stein clarifies what she introduced in her earlier work about soullessness: soullessness is the absence of that primary and originary ground of sentience or awareness of a unique form of thought and personal presence. Thought and other 18 19

 Edith Stein, Science of the Cross, 157–158.  Ibid., 177.

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persons, God and human, are unable to enter the innermost region of the soul. They cannot be brought to higher consciousness and so cannot be fully lived in a meaningful manner.

2  Gerda Walther on the Soul and Heart Let us turn to Gerda Walther and her account of the soul and heart. In the Phenomenology of Mysticism, Walther focuses her phenomenological gaze on the essence of mystical experience, generally understood as a religious encounter with a divine being/reality.20 The work is not interested in explaining the content of various religious traditions’ account of human experiences with specific divinities in, for example, Islam or Roman Catholicism; rather, Walther wishes to understand the conditions that make possible mystical experience, which include a real outside Other or divinity and its encounter with a human being. The encounter is experienced largely from within the life of a human being and is phenomenologically graspable as an Urphänomen [originary experience] much like a tone, color, or value.21 Walther spends a large part of her work on mysticism uncovering the essence of a human being, who has the capacity for a religious encounter with the divine. It is the very structure of the human being that makes mystical experience possible. What is the human being that is capable of mystical experience? The fundamental essence [Grundwesen] of the human being is described by Walther as a lived unity of body, psyche, and spirit. Turning to reports of mystical experience, including some of her own, Walther claims that all mystical experience is localized within human bodies. The lived body, the body that is experienced from within inner experience, is described by Walther as a living, sensate organism that is animated by psyche and displays embryonic signs of the life of spirit,22 for example, kalokagathia or the transfiguration of the body by the good and the beautiful of spirit.23 Her description of the person notes the intimate connection between body, psyche, and spirit. Though the body remains distinct, it does not function separately from psyche and spirit. All three aspects are interwoven into one another, confirming the existence of a fundamental unity that marks the essence of the human person. Walther also remarks that the two dominant philosophical views of the body, either as the prison of the soul and spirit or the brain as generating epiphenomena like the lived experience of the body as well as the experience of psyche and spirit,24 must be rejected, for the former position does not give full recognition to the real lived experience of being embodied and how crucial it is for the life of psyche and spirit,

 Gerda Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik (Freiburg-im-Breisgau.: Walter Verlag, 1955), 22–23.  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 21. 22  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 100–103. 23  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 102. 24  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 100–101. 20 21

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especially in terms of expression, and the latter view is materially reductive and does not acknowledge the distinct lives of spirit and psyche, in particular, the force of the will, which Walther stresses as fundamental for the constitution of human personhood, and more so than reason or intellect. Walther describes the flow of psyche and spirit through the body as a kind of canalisation.25 The unique lived experience of the body is described as a living the flow of the life force within one’s being, one feels the energy of a life force flowing within and animating one’s physical being.26 Psyche or soul is identified as distinct realm of human being in which one lives feelings and affects like love, hate, desire, etc. The content of the experience of one’s own psyche flows in a particular fashion: not from top to bottom, but from the bottom up or from the back forward, all directed to an I center.27 One lives this experience of psychic flow, Walther says, as if it were a flow from the “heart,” from the depth of one’s being.28 Psyche is described as the source of feeling: This is well observed in lived experiences of telepathy in which non-essential but supplementary elements are lacking. In these cases, an aversion, sympathy, or any other feeling of the heart (including, wonder, surprise, etc.) comes to be lived as stemming from a one who transmits the experience, Likewise, a current of love is perceived by the receiver as coming from the transmitter within the region of “heart.” Often, the receiver responds in a similar manner with an analogous personal experience in which his or her I-center is immediately immersed. Both experiences of the transmitter and sender live…simultaneously one’s own and the other’s experience of love, pain, etc. up to the point they do not merge and the I of the receiver lives contemporaneously the love of the other and his or her own in that intimate region of the heart out of which sentiments arise.29

The “interior region”30 of the heart is vital for mystical experience and one finds reference to it in various cultural and historical traditions, from Christianity to yoga.31 The sentiment of the heart can be experienced as distinct from the cause or object of a certain emotion. One can experience an emotion or feeling in and of itself, says Walther, and this can only be grasped internally through the life of psyche. Citing Simmel,32 Walther notes that psyche also gives or manifests another unique experience of itself, namely, a “feeling of oneself.”33 Walther claims that the feeling of a self undergoing emotional experiences or feelings marks the interiority of psyche. One experiences this auto-affection as having its own coloratura, depending on what is being felt. For example, intense feelings of joy accentuate the feeling of oneself as undergoing and being affected by joy. Likewise, painful or emotionally  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 104.  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 107–108. 27  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 111–112. 28  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 112. 29  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik. Translation mine. 30  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik. 31  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 113. 32  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 116. 33  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik. 25 26

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distressing experiences diminish the feeling of oneself: the self is suffused with pain or distress, and the self is not felt as strongly. Walther notes that psyche will express itself in and through the body, and this coloratura of the self may be observed in others. We can see and understand the emotions or feelings of others: we can see the heart of another34 by the intensities of the emotions expressed by the other to us. It is the manifestation of the inner life of psyche that grants us access into the psychic life of another. In her earlier text on the social ontology of communities, Walther notes that empathy is the key that allows us to grasp the psychic life of others.35 In the Phenomenology of Mysticism, Walther concentrates on telepathy and not on empathy.36 Spirit [Geist] is identified by Walther as the most unique aspect of our humanity, and it seen as vital for the very possibility of an encounter with the divine in mystical experience. It is deeply interconnected with body and psyche, but it also possesses uniquely distinguishing features. How does Walther phenomenologically justify the existence of spirit as a unique realm of interiority? If the body is lived as a site of sensation marked by sexuality and the flow of life power, and if psyche is lived as a site of deep feeling and a sense of the self—a reflexive self-awareness— spirit comes to manifest itself in the experience of an inner voice, a voice that guides the human being: one sees the depth of the heart and one seeks truth. In spirit, the inner voice guides one to carry out meaningful actions. Walther writes: When I am conscious of being fully drowsy, I think with the spirit alone, from the well of my heart. The spirit can see more, whereas the psyche sees otherwise. In this earthly life, we can only see what is here (we cannot see the great beyond, the realm of fundamental being)…The interior life lies dormant principally in persons who dwell, so to speak, in the head or intellect, who rarely allow themselves to be moved by feelings and the interior voice. To heed these two things is the to follow the true guide of human beings’ lives. In a conscious state of drowsiness the interior human being emerges and with its gaze it is able to penetrate the exterior world, which occurs neither in dreaming nor sleep. In many respects, drowsiness is the clearest state of awareness because here the interior, spiritual human being lives unfettered and free from the body! Hence, in states of drowsiness the interior human being or the state of spiritual awareness emerges. These states occur only in moments in which the sleeping person can lose him- or herself in oneself or exit from oneself. Here, the spirit is completely free and can separate itself from the I and the body; it can go where it wills, much like a ray of light. Whereas psyche is primarily lodged in the brain, spirit has its seat in the well of the heart.37

The life of spirit can be experienced in states of mind in which one is between consciousness and sleep. In such states, one experiences the inner voice that is not purely the expression of body or psyche. Here, one experiences the free movement of the inner voice and “the inner human being” [innere Mensch] emerges. In such states, the inner voice dominates and guides the human being. One of the more powerful aspects of Walther’s phenomenology is that she turns to other forms of  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 117.  Walther, Ein Beitrag zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften, 86–87. 36  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 82–85. 37  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 113–114. Translation mine. 34 35

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consciousness in order to draw out aspects of our being that are not always visible within more traditional acts of consciousness, including representations, presentifications, memory, empathy, imaginations, etc. The exploration of in-between states of consciousness provides her with the manifestation of unique content, which she identifies as belonging to the life of spirit. Walther, in many of her works, mines unique states of mind to uncover knowledge about who and what we are. She explores telepathic, unconscious, pathological (e.g., schizophrenia), mystical, ecstatic, paranormal states, to name the more important ones. Like Stein, Walther does view the heart as a unique realm of interiority, but, unlike Stein, Walther sees the heart as being largely spiritual as well as psychic. Stein preserves the two traditional understandings of soul as psyche and the divine, immortal soul. In the aforementioned interior region of spirit, one finds the highest I, which is distinct from the I centre. Walther announces another form of I experience than the orientational I of the I center.38 Here, we find a spiritual love, judging, and valuing that arise in the life of spirit. She is very clear, however, to note that, unlike Stein and Husserl, the aforementioned acts are not identical with acts of the intellect. The intellect and its capacity for reason can guide an individual, and its work can be seen in the life of higher animals,39 but Walther ascribes to spirit a capacity distinct from intellect. Again, she turns to a unique mental state to make her case. She gives the example of a person who is tormented by an irresolvable problem. Reasoning gives multiple possible solutions, but it cannot arrive at a definitive solution. It can bring no clarity to the problem or crisis. All remains dark and obscure, Walther says.40 All of a sudden, from within one’s interiority, one experiences an illumination, a solution to the problem, which comes spontaneously from nowhere. Walther also describes the experience of receiving the solution as coming from elsewhere, from behind, above, etc. Light is the metaphor she chooses to describe the reception of the solution. The I-centre is displaced, and it is not the source of the solution. A solution to the crisis appears, but it is not of my own doing or origin. Walther does not deny that such I-based solutions are possible. But there are also situations in which one feels that something from the outside brings some kind of illumination and understanding: one feels as if a ray of light surrounds and lifts one out of distress, ultimately bringing ease, clarity, and comfort.41 In spirit, one lives fully as oneself, in oneself as an individual: here one finds a spiritual light that burns within the human being.42 Walther is very clear that the spiritual realm of the human being is not simply a personal space: it is also a world.43 The individual spirit is part of a broader spiritual world, which need not be human and, therefore, not rooted in psyche (with the heart) and body. What could this mean? Citing philosophers like

 Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 138.  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 119. 40  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 120. 41  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik. 42  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 122. 43  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik. 38 39

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Avicenna and Averroes, Walther conceives of the realm of spirit as a kind of Agent Intellect.44 In the life of spirit, one can plug in to and be activated by a larger form of active intellect that supersedes human knowing, which many philosophers have described as the divine intellect.

3  R  uptures and Displacements of the Soul and Heart in the Person For Stein, soullessness means that the innermost region of interiority cannot exist and, therefore, the ability to experience self, other, world, and God become severely compromised. First, we glean from her analysis that the heart is a place where fundamental insights, knowledge, or feelings are given, which later can be amplified and brought to fuller awareness through interior perception. The heart, in this sense, is an originary place of manifestation of some given, which can be made fuller in one’s soul and person. Second, not only is this originary region of manifestation compromised but also the ability to experience deep relationships with others, heart-filled unions, which, in a deep sense, may be read as an even more intense experience of the lived experience of solidarity and community [Gemeisnschaftserlebins] that Stein, in her early and middle works, defends as the highest form of sociality. In the realm of the heart, we not only live in and with the life of others, but we also experience the most intimate personal core of an individual, thereby allowing us to experience a deeply personal, unique, and robust form of collectivity and intersubjectivity. It would be fair to say that with the heart a new form of collective sociality emerges that is not taken up in Stein’s earlier work. Perhaps we can call this sociality a heart-filled or heartfelt lived experience of intersubjectivity and community. The defining trait of this sociality is the relationship marked by a personal core to personal core, personality to personality, relationship. In the earlier form of the lived experience members of a community can experience together a much wider array of solidary experiences, for example, certain emotions and feelings about events or other people, for example, the solidary experience of the loss of the beloved troop leader taken up in the Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Third, like Walther, Stein maintains that the heart is a place where one can encounter the divine, and both can exist in a deep, intimate personal relationship with God. Stein and Walther maintain there is a phenomenologically accessible realm of human being and lived experience that Stein calls the personal core or the personality core and that Walther describes as the fundamental essence. Both philosophers argue that the personality core and the fundamental essence delineate an aspect of human being that is uniquely personal: personhood is largely rooted within the aforementioned aspects. In soullessness, the foregoing aspects of the heart cannot 44

 Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 123.

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exist and they certainly would diminish both the life and being of the person; they also do not allow the personal core to unfold, either individually or collectively. The corollary is also true: when the soul is fully active, the personal is intensely and meaningfully experienced, both collectively and individually. I think that Stein captures something about human fragility and brokenness in and through her discussion of soullessness. It can cause suffering but it also can lead to diminished sense of values and value-making, which can lead to diminished ethical capacities. More importantly, if soullessness exists, Stein’s phenomenological insistence on the necessary personal unity of body, soul, and spirit as typifying personhood or the irreducibility of the ownness of the I cannot hold. Also, psyche or soul, understood as the important bridge between body and spirit, no longer functions as a bridge, creating the possibility of a schizoid individual that experiences themselves as both body and spirit, but without psyche. The integrity of the I, which Stein, like Husserl, maintains is fundamental for conscious experience and personhood is challenged within her own account of psyche. Stein wants both a perduring and necessary structure of I-ness and personhood while also announcing a possible break in the necessity and universality of the structure. By contrast, Walther’s idea of the person is more porous. The I and person can fuse with others and identify with them in collective communal experience. Unlike her teachers Husserl and Stein, Walther maintains that the very unity of the elements constitutive of personhood are neither absolutely individual nor indissoluble. In fact, the defining experience of personal unity may be understood not only as individuating and unifying of parts to form a whole but also as fusional or collectivising and rupturable. Given her own studies of and interest in a broader range of psychological experience, Walther rethinks the legacy of the Cartesian ego and its capacity to be the source of its own certainty and clarity. The Husserlian and Steinian view of a highly individuated, rational and eternal ego or monadic structure of the person is tempered by Walther in the sense that though the I, self, and fundamental essence of personhood are unified and work together to create interiority, which Walther does not emphasise as being marked by a strong sense of ownness, the person can find itself in situations and encounters in which the personal sense of the whole or unity is broken or transcended. This is different than the Ich-Spaltung of Husserl, which tries to account for different I experiences, including the personal, transcendental, phenomenological, and the I of the natural attitude. Walther focuses on the possibility of the very unity of the ego. Psychotic breaks, deep mental anguish, psychological crises, and certain pathologies can cause one to lose a sense of oneself or feel trapped in a very confined mental space, thereby causing suffering. In the case of feeling trapped, one loses a broader sense of the self or one’s interiority as one feels pressure and confined. The I, self, and person of interior life may be diminished or disappear. Walther describes being on the train and feeling very depressed by the recent news of her father’s declining health. She feels great anguish and is consumed by sadness. At a certain moment, her grief is lifted. Rodney Parker writes,

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A. Calcagno It was also during this period that Walther turned toward mysticism. In November of 1918, while on a train to Freiburg after visiting her dying father, she underwent an intense spiritual encounter. Walther claimed that she was touched by a presence that enveloped her in a sense of warmth and goodness, which she took to be an experience of the Divine. This event prompted her to pen “Ein Beitrag zur (bewusstseinsmäßigen) inneren Konstitution des eigenen Grundwesens als Kernpunkt der Persönlichkeit (und Gottes)” in early 1920. A version of this text was presented to Pfänder in honour of his 50th birthday, and served as the basis for her Phänomenologie der Mystik (1923). Shortly after her experience on the train, Walther stumbled upon copy of Stefan George’s Der siebente Ring while visiting Karl Löwith’s apartment. She found the writings of the members of the George-Kreis c­ ompelling, and after returning to Munich she became romantically involved with Percy Gothein, a close associate of [Stefan] George.45

On one hand, Walther is consumed and weighed down by the illness of her father and, on the other hand, Walther describes the feeling of being engulfed by another presence. If we bracket the content of the experience, we are left with a description of interiority that finds itself pressured and sad yet consoled by an outside source. Walther’s understanding of interiority reveals that it can be severely limited but also porous, in the sense that what comes in can cause great psychological and spiritual diminishment but also intense relief and pleasure. Walther views the person as permeable such that it can also telepathically receive and experience the very life of another person, not as mere presentification of another’s experience (as in empathy), but as the very life of the person him- or herself. She describes how, after fighting with a friend L., she returned to her apartment and began to read her book. While reading her book, she feels herself being solicited by something form the “outside” and she cannot return to her book. Something is nagging at her. She lies down and closes her eyes in order to rest and try to gain back her concentration. She then experiences her friend and his apartment; she feels his feelings and thoughts. Her own I has been set apart. She lives the very experience of her friend.46 Walther notes that telepathic experiences, unlike empathy, not only displace the I, but show that others can live intimately within our interiority. Telepathic experiences do not seem to be I-dependent: The other comes to live in us, displacing our I, thereby challenging the centrality of the individuating I as the source of all phenomenological experience. Marina Pia Pellegrino notes, From the beginning, the experience of telepathy is saturated by this aura that stems from the transmitter. Walther returns to the image of the ancient lamp, the image to which she compared the human person. The I-center is similar to a wick that burns and floats upon a combustible liquid [Flüssigkeit], which in ancient times was oil and which can be said to be like an embedment or the subconscious. All is surrounded by a container (namely, the lamp), strictly understood, to which the body is compared. By drawing upon reported experiences of telepathy, Walther observes that we are each a different lamp with our own wicks that burn our own flames (our I-centers). However, the oil in the lamps seems to be able to flow from lamp to lamp, which means that each wick can be fed simultaneously by the oil

 Rodney K.B.  Parker, “Gerda Walther (1897–1977): A Sketch of a Life,” in Gerda Walther’s Phenomenology of Sociality, Psychology and Religion, ed. Antonio Calcagno (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018), 6. 46  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 64–66. 45

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of another person. The two lamps remain distinct. Often, the oils may not mix, and even in cases where the oils do mix, an individual wick may decide to withdraw from the oil of the other and burn one’s own oil. Walther affirms, based on her studies, that one is able to preserve one’s own freedom within the lived experience of telepathy insofar as that one is able to shake oneself off or even take one’s own position vis-à-vis the lived experience of the other. Telepathic union, then, is achieved only in embedment and not in the I-center.47

Walther shows the porosity of the I and, therefore, the heart in that others can telepathically enter our interiority, enabling us to live the interiority and life of another. Also, the I can be displaced such that we may experience a divinity that enters and brings consolation in times of anguish and distress. For example, while imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1941, Walther describes a sudden spiritual light that gave her great strength to persist and endure her suffering. The strength that came about through prayers offered by a friend shows how others can work through prayer for divine intercession.48 For Walther, The I can also be displaced into community. Intense forms of sociality, for example, community, result in the I being taken up and fused into a larger union of a we. In her treatise on the social ontology of communities, Walther makes the case that the most intense form of sociality is fusional community. Communities come in various forms, sizes, and intensities. From small communities of friends and families to larger ones like political parties, what typifies them is a feeling of inner unity (Vereinigung/Einigung). In intense forms of community, the bond between members is so strong that they form a collective whole: all members become a unit. This means that individual members’ egos are displaced and in its stead one experiences the intense pleasurable and warm feeling of fusion or collective union. A collective person emerges, which has a unique spirit and one whose behalf one can speak (Einzelperson/Einzelpersönlichkeit).49 Walther notes that communities can bond internally in the sense that members unify with one another, but they also indirectly bond together by subscribing to an external object, ideal, wish, or project. Such indirect, externally motivated communities are unified through knowing.50

 Marina Pia Pellegrino, “Gerda Walther: Searching for the Sense of Things, Following the Traces of Lived Experiences,” in Gerda Walther’s Phenomenology of Sociality, Psychology and Religion, ed. Antonio Calcagno (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018), 19. 48  Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik, 125. 49  Walther, Ein Beitrag zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften, 102–103. 50  Walther observes, “Dies Wissen-um-einander braucht nun allerdings nicht immer notwendig direkt zu sein, es kann auch vermittelt sein. Die Art des Wissens der Mitglieder umeinander, die für eine Gemeinschaft erforderlich ist, dürfte von dem jeweiligen Wesen der betreffenden Gemeinschaft, vor allem auch von ihrer intentionalen Fundierung in der Einigung abhängig sein. Je mehr eine Einigung von Menschen durch die Einigung mit irgendwelchen Gegenstandlichkeiten (Zwecken, Zielen, Idealen usw .) als solchen bedingt ist, desto weniger wird unter Umständen eine direkte, unvermittelte, leibhafte (originäre) wechselseitige Erfahrung und Gegebenheit voneinander der betreffenden Menschen vonnöten sein. So ist etwa eine Gemeinschaft von Gelehrten sehr wohl denkbar, bei der ihre Mitglieder nur durch wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen u. dgl. Voneinander wissen, ohne sich 47

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Though human beings are social by nature,51 the inner experience of community can be so strong that it can create a collective personality or spirit that expresses the inner life of that community to the external world. A “we” comes to manifest itself in community that can carry out various social acts, for example, it can carry out a collective act or make promises or undertake a specific task. The collective life of a we, that takes up and even displaces the life of an individual ego, has a personality, spirit [Geist], and life. And this we of a community has an inner expression as well as an outer expression, both in terms of the bonding between members and what externally may drive members to form a union. Following the logic of Hegel, Walther fortifies her claims about the unique sociality of community by noting that it must be understood as having an an- sich and für-sich, an in-itself and for-itself.52 The we subsumes the I, thereby signalling a loss of individual personhood and an emergence of a collective personality.

4  Conclusion Both Walther and Stein develop a notion of the heart to delineate a unique realm of interiority. They describe the heart as an essential part of the structure of human personhood. They also describe situations in which the soul and, therefore, the heart, either are not present or disappear, or is so deeply porous that fusion and identification with others becomes possible. Stein’s phenomenology faces in this respect a profound internal contradiction between an essential soul (a necessity) that has the potential of not actualising itself in human beings (a contingency), whereas Walther diminishes the force of the essence of the soul as constitutive of personhood. Once could devote one’s energies to exploring what the difference means for the question of the status of personhood, but here I wish to focus on what is unique to both thinkers’ phenomenology of the heart, namely, the delineation of inner realm of personal being that brings forward possibilities of intimate depth, self-­ knowledge, and intense and deeply personal encounters with others and God. Also important is the fragility and vulnerability of the experience of personal unity and uniqueness. Being or becoming heartless and soulless, then, need not be understood in the common language of one’s being heartless (that is, cruel) and soulless (that is, without passion or imagination), both senses being purely the disposition of a personality or as denoting the quality of an act or value lodged somewhere between persönlich zu kennen, während ein intimer Freundschaftsbund oder elne Ehe fast undenkbar ist, bei der die Mitglieder nur durch ihre Beziehung zu irgendwelchen Gegenständlichkeiten voneinander wüßten.” Walther, Ein Beitrag zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften, 82. 51  Julia Mühl, “Human Beings as Social Beings: Gerda Walther’s Anthropological Approach,” in Gerda Walther’s Phenomenology of Sociality, Psychology and Religion, ed. Antonio Calcagno (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018), 71–84.. 52  Walther, Ein Beitrag zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften, 82–83.

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causality, motivation, and will; rather, if the heart is an ontological feature of our human being and if is diminished, broken, not actualised, or porous, it bespeaks a unique feature of our humanity that may be destroyed. When destroyed, it compromises or breaks our personhood and or personality: we are no longer the same. I believe that this fragile aspect of our being calls to us, elicits an ethical response: we must protect, nurture, and cultivate it, for the wellbeing of humans depends upon it. I end with a gesture or a question: If we accept the vulnerability and fragility of the Steinian and Waltherian heart, if we accept that we can ontologically or essentially all become heartless and soulless, then do we have an obligation to protect it, as Simone Weil rightly observed? If so, how? The soullessness and breaking of psyche and the heart that lies within can be read as announcing something about our personal human weakness and possible brokenness—a vulnerability of our personhood that may be read as eliciting a response to others, to the self, to God for a restoration of personhood, an alleviation of our personal suffering. As Emmanuel Levinas argues, the vulnerability and utter nudity of the face makes an appeal to us, an ethical call for responsibility. Steinian and Waltherian heartlessness, which comprises the possibility of full personhood, manifests a fragility and vulnerability of persons that call us to bring forward a response. Perhaps the heart of others can be mobilized to help those suffering from heartlessness, perhaps we have before us an appeal to help the broken heart and, ultimately, person.

Bibliography Arendt, H. (2001). The origins of totalitarianism. Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt. Gschwandtner, C. M. (2018). Körper, Leib, Gemüt, Seele, Geist: Conceptions of the self in early phenomenology. In A. Calcagno (Ed.), Gerda Walther’s phenomenology of sociality, psychology, and religion (pp. 85–99). Springer. Mühl, J. (2018). Human beings as social beings: Gerda Walther’s anthropological approach. In A.  Calcagno (Ed.), Gerda Walther’s phenomenology of sociality, psychology, and religion (pp. 71–84). Springer. Parker, R.  K. B. (2018). Gerda Walther (1897–1977): A sketch of a life. In A.  Calcagno (Ed.), Gerda Walther’s phenomenology of sociality, psychology, and religion (pp. 3–9). Springer. Pellegrino, M. P. (2018). Gerda Walther: Searching for the sense of things, following the traces of lived experiences. In A. Calcagno (Ed.), Gerda Walther’s phenomenology of sociality, psychology, and religion (pp. 11–24). Springer. Stein, E. (1989). On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications. Stein, E. (2000). Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Translated by Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications. Stein, E. (2002a). Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Translated by Kurt Reinhardt. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications. Stein, E. (2002b). Science of the Cross. Translated by Josephine Koeppel O.C.D.  Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications. Stein, E. (2003). Einführung in die Philosophie. Edited by Claudia Mariéle Wulf. Vol. 8 of Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe. Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Herder. Stein, E. (2004). Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person. Edited by Beate Beckmann-Zöller. Vol. 14 of Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe. Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Herder.

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Stein, E. (2010). Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften. Edited by Beate Beckmann-Zöller. Vol. 6 of Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe. Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Herder. Stein, E. (2017). Woman. Translated by Freda M. Oben. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications. Walther, G. (1923). Ein Beitrag zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften. Max Niemeyer. Walther, G. (1955). Phänomenologie der Mystik. Walter. Walther, G. Gerda Walther Nachlass. Munich Staatsbibliothek.

Part II

Orientations and Dimensions of the Heart

Chapter 4

Taking Emotion Far Out Edward S. Casey

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

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.

E. S. Casey (*) Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_4

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Urgent times such as ours call for a reexamination of human emotional life, a life we tend to take for granted in more halcyon moments. As Edmund Burke wrote, “these waters must be [experienced as] troubled before they can exert their virtues.”1 Among these virtues are their exact descriptions. Philosophy, and phenomenology in particular, is in a privileged position to provide descriptive accounts of our emotional bearings or their lack in this dürftiger Zeit, a time of collective crisis and personal desperation. A comparable emotional turmoil, much more highly intensified, was experienced in much of Europe in the Nazi period, although few philosophers rose to the challenge – most notably not Martin Heidegger. Max Scheler, had he lived into the 1930s, would have had a lot to say about the Nazi-Zeit as the premier thinker of emotion in the early stages of the phenomenological movement.2 My hope is that a careful assessment of emotion, such as this collection offers, will be of value to those living through our own version of what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.” In this assessment, I shall concentrate on the public face of emotion, trusting that this will illuminate aspects of our immediate period that might otherwise remain concealed. This may not lead to direct alleviation of the suffering undergone in this time, but it might allow us to understand better how it operates and how it impinges on us in the emotional sphere. As a phenomenologist, my aim is to arrive at a more precise sense of the emergence of emotion in terms of where it comes from, not as construed causally but as felt experientially. Accordingly, I shall pursue the paths traced by some of the multiple manifestations of emotion, emphasizing how they are shown to oneself and to others. On my view, much emotion – much more than has been recognized previously  – emerges from a scene of monstration in which we witness as happening outside us what we all too often think of as belonging inside of us – whether by starting or ending there. In that surrounding scene, emotions are not only accessible; they are there, out there, before us rather than in us. Even if felt within us, their appearing occurs in a space beyond the privatized self, situated around us, located in front of us, and even under us. If the life of emotion is all too often a Trail of Tears, this is because we suffer from who we are: ineluctably emotional creatures who have no un-emotional way out: no exit from our own and others’ emotions. Each of us, in our own distinctive way, walks the demanding and urgent path of emotions that are often beyond our private province or personal control. They take us out into the world where, as Sartre wrote just before the German occupation of Paris, human intentionality always takes us – hurling us “into the dry dust of the world, onto the rough earth, among things”  – onto the via dolorosa of a forced migration in our affective experience. Being on this road (and there is no other)  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. 1

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amounts to living with the consequences of the manifestation of emotions, what I have come to call their periphaneity.3

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The recurrent question we should ask is not: how did a given emotion come about, via its internal or external generation but rather: where is emotion? What is its actual place-of-presentation? Does this place reside within us, as we too often assume? If the emotional response to Trump’s ascension to the American presidency in 2017, and to his subsequent actions in office, is any indication, this place is not merely within me, in my strictly subjective responses of anger or disdain but somewhere beside or beyond me, in a charged space, at once expressive and demanding, that I share with others. But how can this be? How can emotions that I feel intensely to be mine, and often primarily so, be situated somewhere other than in me – located somewhere outside me, in the words and actions of others? Just where is this outside, and how can we better understand it? Minimally, it is a matter of tracking the felt spatiality that is characteristic of various emotional states: how some emotions present themselves as expansive, others as contractive, still others as uncomfortably uneven, all situated beyond the narrow compass of subjective experience. Emotions have their own distinctive placements  – the characteristic scenes in which they appear, by which we not only identify them but through which we feel them intensely. They often emerge at the outer edges of our experience, as when they are presented in certain gestures in which our hands and head figure as extremities that carry emotion outward to others (and just as often back to ourselves). Many such scenes of emotional presentation are found in places that modern philosophy has conspicuously neglected: in crowd behavior, entire atmospheres, and various environments. In this chapter and the recently completed book upon which it draws – whose title is Turning Emotion Inside Out  – I offer what I have come to call a “peri-­phenomenological description” of certain major such places where emotions emerge and show themselves at the perimeters of ongoing experience.4 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

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The phrase turning emotion inside out denotes the effort to understand emotion by way of its literal extra-version – relocating it outside rather than inside, where “inside” signifies being contained within the subject, where feelings fester and emotions remain “cabined, cribbed, and confined” in interior regions such as the gut or heart. The temptation in modernity has been to take them there and to keep them there despite all the counter-evidence provided by the intentionality and expressivity of emotion – which makes itself known outwardly, both to oneself and to others, and which is not only generated in the company of others but in decidedly extra-­ human settings. The outwardness of emotion has been misconstrued, in my view, and literally misplaced – interred in the innards of the self of modernity, whether this self is understood as the Cartesian cogito or Kantian Gemüt, pure intentional consciousness or the human brain. How to show that the ongoing self is often radically extraverted in its emotional life, continuously turning to what is outside itself so as to take it in? This is the question that will guide my considerations I shall pursue in this essay. A comparable question has been raised by certain other contemporary thinkers. Andy Fisher, in Radical Ecopsychology (2002), speaks of “turning the psyche inside out” in an effort to make mind continuous with the natural world.5 Similarly, in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) David Abram urges us to “turn inside-out, loosening the psyche from its confinement within a strictly psychical sphere, freeing sentience to return to the visible world that contains us.”6 In parallel with these declarations, my own task is to free emotion from its confinement within the human subject – from its imprisonment in the “inner man”  – and in doing so I follow Merleau-­ Ponty’s dictum: “There is no ‘inner man,’ man is in and toward the world, and it is in the world that he knows himself.”7 Merleau-Ponty only briefly pursues his own emphasis on outering with regard to its implications for emotion, and the same is true for Abram and Fisher.8 In my conception, the relevant outering is social, political, and environmental, while being found in still other formats such as the artistic, the ethical, and the spiritual.

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.

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I here give a brief sketch of the larger project from which this essay stems. I start by a consideration of early Greek views of emotion – most notably as conceived by Plato and Aristotle – in order to indicate that these Greek thinkers converged on a conviction that emotion is a largely public concern: if not always expressly so, then certainly by its direct consequences. I link this emphasis to the rise of democracy in ancient Athens. In contrast with most early modern thinkers, ancient Greek philosophers took a major step toward the notion that emotion is primarily located in public space, beyond the shutters of the self-enclosed subject – in the agora or the forum, where its display intensifies and underlines what is being said in public discourse. From there I consider Seneca’s detailed analysis of anger, a scrutiny that looks both backward in its appeal to deliberative reason and forward to modern subjectivism, especially that found in Descartes’s theory that emotions are the private property of individual minds and bodies, generated endogenously within the human subject. I take this to be an emblematic early modern view of emotion as inherently subjectivist. It contrasts starkly with the position of Spinoza, who forcefully extricates emotion from the toils of subjectivity by bringing emotion out – out into intermodal interaction  – far enough out to appeal to the likes of Gilles Deleuze, the self-proclaimed philosopher of the Outside (le Dehors) who developed his own take on affect as an active force that comes to the human subject much more than it comes from this same subject. The struggle to determine the proper location of emotion continues with Kant’s notion of the sublime. When we experience sublimity, is it something generated from within our mind or is it somehow found in the very scene that has elicited this experience? Situated as he was in late modernity, Kant would like to have it both ways: in the awesome spectacle before us yet only as engendered within the subject’s mental machinations. Against this view, I argue that emotions associated with the sublime are situated in entire placescapes, which captivate us by their sheer force and outreach. This suggests that the experience of the sublime in its several affective avatars is inextricable from the vistas that hold out before us a uniquely powerful emotionality to which we give the names “awe” or “wonder.” From there I move to Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that emotion is not located in individuals but between them; the anger I feel is not merely mine but something that arises in my interaction with you. This inter-personalist view was anticipated by Max Scheler, who traces out several of its main variants in The Nature of Sympathy. Starting from the same basic stance on emotion as intersubjective, contemporary philosopher Sara Ahmed gives this view nuanced focus by situating it in concrete racial and political contexts: in her featured example, Audre Lorde sees the contempt of the white woman who disdains her on the subway. Others I consider in this vein include Daniel Stern on affective attunement between mother and infant, as well as Gustav Le Bon’s pioneering work on crowd psychology, focusing as it does

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on suggestibility in the generation of emotional contagion. Revealingly, none of these thinkers locates emotion squarely in the individual conscious subject but rather somewhere between human subjects, most typically in crowds where, as we say revealingly, “emotion runs high” – high above the strictly individuated level of experience in these interpersonal settings. Drawing from such examples and experiences, I explore the thesis that emotion is elastic in such a way as to be inherently transmissible rather than being something contained in separate subjects. Taking up clues from the work of Teresa Brennan, I investigate the specific means by which emotions are transmitted to us from others, including other species, as well as from the particular places where we experience them. The very recent work of Marjolein Oele on e-co-affectivity of environmental interfaces gives further support for a broadly-based notion of affective transmissibility. To claim this and to demonstrate how this can be so in the context of affective fields that populate whole place-worlds is to make a further case for the extra-­ subjective locus of emotion. A more complete statement of this approach considers ways in which emotion comes to us from beyond ourselves in entire atmospheres, and can be regarded as “airborne” as it were. In this context, I argue that much emotion belongs finally to the environments which surround us and of which we are integral parts. I cite my experiencing exuberance while at a Lamala Beach on the California coast, where the exuberance itself was experienced as suspended above the scene, manifesting itself there as if it belonged to the clouds and sky. Pursuing this direction with other examples – including the way that weather conditions present their own characteristic emotionality (as with “oppressive” clouds that hang heavy over us), I emphasize how affective environments deliver emotions to us from sundry regional directions, each of which constitutes a distinctive mode of emotional implacement. All this allows me to conclude that we pursue emotion in vain if we look for it as primarily within ourselves. As felt – as experienced in first person – it is indeed part of our subjectivity. But to do full justice to the range of ways that emotion enters our lives, we need to look for it in the outward placescapes of its emergence and full appearance, including diverse temporal and gesticular edges – the poignant peripheries of emotional experience in which we are immersed more frequently and significantly than has been acknowledged in traditions that attempt to bury it in our self-enclosed subjectivity. Compared to such internment, I argue that a major part of emotional experience is of something far out – far out beyond the closed perimeters of such subjectivity: hence the title of this essay. Merleau-Ponty got it right when he wrote that “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.”9 My take on this is that it is above all in emotionality that I find myself outside myself and open to the world.

9  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 483: this sentence is in the last paragraph of this book.

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You may well be asking yourselves: am I not going altogether too far out in my claims for the exteriority of emotion – too far in any case beyond the subject who feels emotion from within? In particular, too far beyond the emotionality of the heart: the thematic focus of this book? Does not the literal location of the human heart – intensified by its many metaphorical extensions – suggest, indeed require, a move within? But is such a move justified? The answer to such skeptical questions is at once Yes and No: NO: if the move to heart signifies a retreat into the heart as a central organ in the endogeny of emotion: as it is for Descartes, for whom animal spirits pass through the heart on the way to the brain and back again; nor will it do to say we are dealing with the psychical heart, as in the psychology of empathy (though this is a step in the right direction, since empathy is directed onto others in distress); nor if we are just talking metaphor, for then another part of us could serve just as well: say, human touch (as is emphasized by Irigaray and Nancy and Kearney); and certainly not if “heart” means just a container for diverse emotions, including love, sympathy, fellow feeling, etc.: such a container would be intrinsically empty unless and until it fills up with these various emotions. Nor will it do to speak with Plato of thumos, the “chest” as the container of courage, a quasi-military virtue. Even Pascal’s recourse to the human heart in his celebrated pensée, attractive and intriguing as it is, is problematic as stated: “the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” For we are not informed as to what kind of reasons these may be – nor why it is a matter of reasons when we might have thought that it is a matter of emotions as that of which reason is conspicuously ignorant? YES: if heart can be re-envisioned in a very particular way: as self-transcending. Pascal himself hints at this in the words that follow the better-known part of the pensée I have just quoted: “We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason.” Here the heart serves not merely as an internal organ or psychical center – as something self-enclosed and a site of endogeny, or as a mere container or way-station for emotions. Instead, heart now signifies the propelling force by which the human being moves beyond it own internal limits – reaches out even to God, the ultimate transcendency. Better yet, we are said to feel the heart “in a thousand things.” This latter claim is of special interest. For it clearly avers that the heart, including its emotionality, becomes evident, shows itself, outside itself – in many diverse things. These “things,” being located outside the human subject, must therefore be displayed in manifestations that are extra-subjective places-of-presentation, the very modes of presentation where emotions are shown as experiential outliers. Suddenly we are on the very ground to which I have been pointing in this essay. This is a ground beyond the abyssal space of interiority. It is a ground found anywhere but inside us; instead, it is all around us, above us and beyond us, in a thousand places. These are the places of emotion to which I have pointed under the headings of environmental and atmospheric emotions, as well as emotions shared out between individuals and members of a crowd.

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In short, if “heart” signifies the agency whereby we come to experience emotions in places and regions that do not belong to us as isolated individuals – but rather to which the heart gives access, we are on the way to a very positive take on the heart. This take I take to be consonant with the deeper intention of this book. Let us call this intention the heart as a way out: a way out of separate egos, social isolation, and self-absorption. A way out for which the heart provides the energetic basis, the means for overcoming the self-delimitation and self-aggrandizement that characterize so much of modernity as favoring my gain at the expense of your loss, and that valorizes emotions such as greed and possessiveness as paradigmatic for the human subject as self-serving. It is not accidental that the most insistent models of emotion as self-contained arose in early modernity, extending from Descartes through Hume and Bentham. For these models, the heart (if it is mentioned at all) is the locus of my own feeling in ways that cannot be shared with others, much less as a means of encountering emotions in the outside world. There is a strange and telling convergence between Descartes and Pascal, both writing on emotion (which they labeled “passion”) at the same historical moment: in the very middle of the seventeenth century. Between them, they stake out two fatefully different destinies for emotion: one concertedly keeping it within the circuit of the self, the other boldly envisioning a radical alternative: emotion outside us, en dehors – out there, over there, in very different kinds of place-of-presentation than inside the human subject.

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I shall end with a brief discussion of two contemporary thinkers who explicitly endorse their own versions of the Pascalian view that heart is a means of self-transcendence: James Hillman and Anthony Steinbock. One is a depth psychologist, the other a phenomenologist. Despite their manifest differences of background and basic orientation, they converge in ways that are highly pertinent for the main drift of my own thinking about emotion. I shall be drawing on Hillman’s emblematic essay, “The Thought of the Heart,” and on Steinbock’s Moral Emotions and his forthcoming book significantly titled Knowing by Heart: Loving as Participation and Critique. Hillman and Steinbock, each in his own way, maintain that the heart is the nonanatomical locus out from which emotion reaches into regions that are no longer the province of the isolated human subject but are situated well beyond this subject. Hillman takes up Henry Corbin’s description of the notion of himma in Ibn ‘Arabi: “This power of the heart is what is specifically designated by the word Himma … which signifies the act of meditating, conceiving, imagining, projecting, ardently desiring.” Hillman comments: “Himma creates as ‘real’ the figures of the imagination … the angels and daimones who, as Corbin says, are outside the imagining faculty itself. Himma is that mode by which the images, which we believe we make

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up, are actually presented to us as not of our [own] making, as genuinely created, as authentic creatures,” adding significantly that “without the gift of himma we fall into the modern psychological illusions.”10 (These are precisely the illusions of self-­ control and self-containment.) It follows that the heart considered as the avenue to himma, though found in each of us as an abiding faculty or “power,” is a means of transcending our own interiority by way of an active imagining that takes us out of ourselves into another realm, that of archetypal presences that exceed anything merely human. As Sendivogius has put it it, “the greater part of the soul is outside the body.”11 On this conception, the heart literally e-viscerates itself in the outward movement of an archetypal imagination. In his discussion of “moral emotions,” Steinbock relies on the imagery of the heart no less than do Hillman and Ibn Arabi. For Steinbock, heart comes into its own when it is the locus of loving construed as an “act-movement” toward the loved person. As a “creative, initiated, and improvisational act,” loving is a “movement peculiar to the level of spirit, revelatory of the human being as person.”12 In this movement, the self of the loving person transcends itself in and for the other in an action that can be characterized as “infinitizing,” that is, going beyond any set limits in an action that is de-limiting, a term employed by Steinbock to designate actions of expanding in the moral realm. If loving comes from the heart, it moves beyond the finite heart of the loving being toward the beloved construed as of another order than the egoic, self-identified subject. Loving is “an immediate and direct opening to another  – any other … in and toward the fullest realization of what it is with respect to its own sphere.”13 Especially striking here is how loving, like imagination as understood by Ibn ‘Arabi and Hillman, moves us out from the heart’s inwardness into another realm, whether that of imaginal figures or that of the beloved qua person. In both cases, “the focus is on the other” (in Steinbock’s phrase) rather than on the self-sufficiency or internal integrity of the human subject.14 Further, these two movements out from the heart – toward the imaginal other and the loved other – are expressly linked by Hillman in his claim that “depth psychology is caught by the necessary connection of love and imagination, which it has not yet had the philosophy to place.”15 Hillman and Steinbock, writing quite independently of each other, both find in the human heart a way out of the “illusion of self-containment” (in Teresa Brennan’s phrase) that has so captivated philosophical thinking about emotion. What has  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. 10

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served so often in modern Western thinking as a place for the entrapment of emotion is hereby re-envisioned as a source of liberation from any such self-captivation. From enclosure in the heart as a “central organ” we move by way of the heart itself to the radical dis-closure of the Other, whether imaginal or beloved in status.16 As the Indian spiritual teacher Amit Ray puts it: “The center of your heart is the center of the universe. Go to that center and radiate positive vibration for the well-being of humanity.”17 The larger lesson here is that even when one begins from something as presumptively “inner” as the heart, one can enter into an outreach well beyond the epidermis of the body that houses the anatomical heart as well as the defensive structures of the conscious ego. However tempting it is to “put your heart and mind back in your body” (as my yoga instructor admonishes) and to live within the perimeters of your conscious self, it is by means of mind and heart as well as imagination that we move beyond the delimitations of the anatomical body and the personal self. Better put, it is by their agency that we move with and through them into realms not otherwise accessible. For it is by means of the ecstatic body and the self-transcending mind that we move to the other side of the body and the far side of the conscious persona of the finite individual. Steinbock’s work on moral emotions strengthens this outwardizing momentum in two other ways. First, the verticalizing dimension that he has emphasized since his early book, Phenomenology and Mysticism, could not be more explicit in its insistence on transcending the self-enclosure of the self-defining human subject. The directionality here is resolutely up and out, and given these two vectors I would insist on the “out” as more critical than “up” for understanding the full range of emotionality; indeed, on my view what is “up” is included in what is “out”: up there is on way of being out there. The exuberance I saw manifested at Lamala Beach in California unfurled above me in the sky overhead: that far up, though no further. I consider this as a case where emotionality once more presented itself in a discernible even if capacious place, though not one in which the verticality exceeded what Steinbock calls “presentation” – that is, a matter of what one actively perceives in a sense congruent with Merleau-Ponty’s model of perception. On my take, emotions  – even high-flying ones – do not lead us beyond the finitude of the presentational world of perception and orientation in the concrete life-world. This is because on my view emotions that emerge outside us do so in concrete places that we can take in perceptually, including those that are markedly vertical in relation to our own current position on earth.

 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. 16

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Second, Steinbock singles out what we could call the horizontalizing transcendence of love. This movement is from the loving subject to the beloved person considered as a being capable of possibilities of evolving into something more than they are at present – in terms of what they can be, at least within the limits of what is possible for them. In Steinbock’s words, it is a matter of “direct loving participation with another… out of ebullient fullness felt in their presence.”18 Love is “an act originating from the person”19 – that is, from myself as “first person” – and proceeding toward the loved other (who need not be a human being): meaning the the other, the “second person” is ethically as first person with whom we should concern ourselves. It is the “generative flourishing” of the beloved that is here at stake – “letting the other become such that he or she ‘can’ realize him- or herself.”20 I can help accomplish this through various means of accompaniment that range from listening to the beloved attentively to being at their side when they are in urgent need. In these ways, I help to bring about “co-liberation”21 in Steinbock’s judicious term – as if to say that we both transcend what we were previously thanks to a dynamic bonding. It is this co-liberatory relation that is horizontal, since it must give space for the loving relation to happen in the present historical moment. This space functions as an arena of love, providing room for it to effloresce. Notice what has happened in this extraordinary account of the moral emotion of love. Where the emotions that I have taken as paradigmatic for my own model of emotion – anger, high-flying exuberance, the contagion of racial hatred – exceed the domain of subjectivity by finding more or less bounded places in which they appear and present themselves to us, in contrast moral emotions such as love, hope, and trust are matters of transaction between human beings. Their being consists largely, if not entirely, in their happening in settings in which action of certain sorts is called for (such as valorizing the beloved’s possibilities for ethical growth). Each sphere of emotionality has “its own kinds of evidence, modalizations, and so on” – a phrase from the Introduction to Moral Emotions22 – but more particularly each has its own scene of enactment. In one case – that which I emphasize in my just-finished book – it is a matter of a scene in which those emotionally engaged bear witness to the presentation of emotion: to where it appears. In the other, favored by Steinbock’s model of loving, what matters most is the transformation of those engaged in emotion, how they evolve through this engagement. In a third model – that of Hillman via Ibn ‘Arabi – there is a movement toward archetypal presences through imaginative activity that stems from the heart: where such presences inspire self-­ transcendence in the spiritual realm.

 It’s Not About the Gift, p. 127  Moral Emotions, p. 224. 20  Ibid. 21  Ibid., p. 129. 22  Moral Emotions, p. 7 18 19

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Despite these striking disparities, each of these three models exhibits one basic trait: the eclipsing of the emotional subject regarded as a guardian of its own feelings, thoughts, and personal history. Steinbock – joined by Hillman – employs the language of “the evidence of the heart” (words that are found in the subtitle of Moral Emotions) – whereas I focus on the ways by which emotionality is shown to the human subject who is otherwise is hemmed in by its own thoughts, feelings, and personal history. But each of us aims at demonstrating that it is by way of our emotional life that we escape the sequestration of the closed-in human subject. All three approaches agree to this basic claim: it thanks to emotions, we are taken out of ourselves. Whether this exiting is done by way of an active archetypal imagination or via moral emotions that entail active engagement with others – potentially changing both ourselves and these others in an “infinitizing de-limitation”23 – or through the apprehension of the places-of-presentation wherein emotions appear and draw us out so as to apprehend certain emotions out there, in those very places: in any of these three ways, the self-circumscribed human subject is literally ex-tended into an entourage where presence emerges on its own terms and otherwhere than in human interiority. Whether this presence consists of other moral subjects, imagined beings, or special places-of-presentation, in encountering them we move out from secluded states of self-absorption and self-incarceration. In Walt Whitman’s words, we move “outward and onward”: outward from self-subjected selves and into other scenarios than those we experience in that part of our lives that is predominantly unimaginative, insensitive, and bound to places all too familiar. By pointing out the parallel between various models of self-transcending actions, I don’t mean to imply that they are of equal importance or value. In any case, it is not a matter of a contest between them but of pointing out very different ways in which emotion and imagination can take us out of the self-enclosure of the human subject – decisively so. There are still other means of significant self-eclipsing: the transcendental dimension for Kant, Absolute Spirit for Hegel, the dissemination of meaning for Derrida, the invisible side of visibility for the later Merleau-Ponty, and still others. But there is something especially intense and impactful about the ways that emotions take us out of ourselves, and it is for this reason that I have emphasized their course and fate in this essay  – especially those that take us expressly beyond our customary limits. Ordinary language already underlines this outwardizing directionality: being “beside oneself” with rage, getting “carried away” with jealousy, and so on. But our own experience is our best guide. In that experience, we find ourselves delivered over to something we were not – not until then at least. Even a repeating emotion takes us somewhere else: somewhere other than earlier repetitions did, their penumbral shadow reaching outward in the new repetition. The word “emotion” itself says as much. Emotions e-move us: move us out – out of our self-conscious, habitual selves, taking us elsewhere, whether dramatically or subtly, painfully or delightfully. Just how they do so is various – more various than

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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can be discussed in the limited compass of this essay. But I have pointed to several of the most significant ways in which this happens insofar as they bear upon the major theme of this book – ways that emotions, whatever their epigenesis and ultimate fate may be, take us beyond any circumscribed sense of being contained in discrete subjects, including the hearts of these same subjects regarded as internal organs of reception and registration rather than as agencies of transmission and transformation.

Bibliography Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous. Pantheon. Burke, E. (1990). A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. Oxford University Press. Casey, E. S. (1991). Spirit and soul: Essays in philosophical psychology. Spring Publications. Casey, E. S. (2001). Spirit and soul: Essays in philosophical psychology (2nd expanded ed.). Spring Publications. Casey, E. S. (2007). The world at a glance. Indiana University Press. Casey, E. S. (2017). The world on edge. Indiana University Press. Casey E. S. (2022). Turning emotion inside out: Affective life beyond the subject. Northwestern University Press. Cheetham, T. (2021). The world turned inside out: Henry Corbin and the Angel out ahead. Spring Publications. Corbin, H. (1969). Creative imagination in the sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi (R. Manheim, Trans.). Princeton University Press. Fisher, A. (2013). Radical ecopsychology: Psychology in the service of life (2nd ed.). State University of New York Press. Hillman, J. (1992). The Thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Spring Publications. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. Ray, A. (2016). Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity. Inner Light. Sartre, J-P. (1967). Emotion (B. Frechtman, Trans.). In Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation (J. J. Kockelmans, Ed. ). Anchor. Sartre, J-P. (2013). A fundamental idea of Husserl’s: Intentionality (C. Turner, Trans.). In We have only this life to live: The selected essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939–1975 (R. Aronson and A. van den Hoven, Eds.). New York Review of Books. Scheler, M. (1973). Formalism in ethics and non-formal ethics of values. (M. S. Frings and R. L. Funk, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Scheler, M. (2017). The nature of sympathy. (P. Heath, Trans.). Routledge. Steinbock, A. J. (2014). Moral emotions: Reclaiming the evidence of the heart. Northwestern University Press. Steinbock, A. J. (2018). It’s not about the gift: From givenness tolLoving. Rowman & Littlefield International.

Chapter 5

Feelings and Feeling-States in the Schema of the Heart Anthony J. Steinbock

1  Introduction The heart has had a profound role in human experience, historically and cross-­ culturally. However, its cognitive dimension as a sphere of evidence and as holding a central place in the human person, while patent at other times and in various cultures, has been obfuscated in Western modern social imaginaries and epistemologies. It tends to be identified with subjective sentiments, either tallied on the side of sensibility and instinct, or made meaningful by being subordinated to a rational calculus or by needing reason as its chaperon. Even today, cognitive psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy have pushed the term “cognition” in an objectivist, quasi-scientific direction. In either case, the heart and its own cognitive dimension is granted no distinctive purchase in this dualism of reason and sensibility. As relating to the person, the heart is more than a dimension or sphere, but what I call a schema.1 It expresses in its own way the whole of human experience. I reserve

1  I am not using “schema” in a Kantian sense. The notion of the schema in Kant is itself ambiguous. On the one hand, it is a third thing, a representation of a universal rule for providing an image for a concept; on the other hand, it is not a third mediating thing at all, but the name of a reciprocal determination, or again, the name for the intuition given in terms of the categories as modes of time consciousness. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1998), B 138-39, B 177–79. See too Robert Paul Wolff, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973).

A. J. Steinbock (*) Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_5

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other terms commonly associated with this schema (such as feelings, emotions, passions, etc.) for discriminations that make up the schema of the heart. By schema, I mean an articulated dimensionality of relations and interrelations. It is a dimensionality that has its own structures of cognition, of intentionality and non-­intentionality, which are irreducible to a presentational style of cognition characteristic of judicative or perceptual knowing. Presented below in outline form is the schema of the heart. In this chapter, I focus on the important distinction between feeling and feeling-states. Schema of the Heart • Feelings – Emotions (dimension of person/revelatory of person/movement) metaphysical/ontological emotions interpersonal emotions transitive personal emotions – Attunements (dimension of person/revelatory of personal being/temperament) – Psychophysical Feelings (dimension of vital beings /exposing embodied beings/function) Non-personal feeling: Lived-body with lived-body Lived-body with environment • Feeling-States – Passions (yielding a felt-ness or sentiment) – Affects (yielding the body locally and globally) – Conditions (yielding object-like psychic states)

For Edmund Husserl, a schema is a sensuously filled bodily extension, or a unity in the manifolds of adumbrations for the material thing. See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), esp., §32. Maurice Merleau-Ponty also employs the term “schema” (i.e., schéma corporel), but uses it as the experiencing of the body global dynamic attitude of my lived-body in relation to the world (or the dynamic “I can” peculiar to the body-world relation or perception). In Kant’s technical language, it would be more like an image than a schema, and this gives some support for Colin Smith’s earlier translation of Merleau-Ponty’s expression as a body-image—though in English, the latter can be misleading. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 114. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans., Donald Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 127.

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2  Distinction Between Feeling and Feeling-States The first general distinction internal to the schema of the heart is that between “feelings” and “feeling-states.”2 Let me note the obvious but overlooked fact that feelings are not feeling-states.3 In the literature on what I call more broadly “the heart,” the choice of terminology varies widely. Such experiences are called, sometimes interchangeably, emotions, sentiments, passions, affects, feelings, emotive states, etc. The terminology that I use here is not intended to create a new vocabulary, but to provide some consistency in an exposition of the heart. More importantly, I find these terms to be more evocative of the experiences of the heart. In any case, even if the choice of terminology varies, there is an unquestioned conflation of experiences like joy, sadness, anger, happiness, disgust, and the like (i.e., feeling-states), and experiences like trusting, loving, hoping, repentance, sympathy, and so forth (feelings).4 The conflation is understandable because they all belong to the schema of the heart; but this does not mean that such a conflation is therefore justified. Feelings (emotions, attunements, psychophysical feelings), in general, have an intentional structure all their own. I mean by intentional that feelings are not detached from a relation to otherness; they are relational. By “all their own,” I mean that they exhibit a structure of intentionality that is peculiar to them with a distinctive kind of openness, disposition, receptivity, and givenness. Although feelings are kinds of intentionality, for their part, they do not necessarily entail a noesis— noema (that is, an act—sense) correlation with that style of intention, inadequate

2  I elaborate upon the distinctions made above in Anthony J. Steinbock, Knowing by Heart: Loving as Participation and Critique (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021), Appendix 1, “More Technical Distinctions within the Schema of the Heart.” 3  An observation first made, as far as I know, by Max Scheler in Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wertethik, ed. Maria Scheler, vol. 2 of Gesammelte Werke (Bern: Francke, 1966), 262–63; Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 256. An implication of it can be found in von Hildebrand between what he calls “affectivity” as a value-response and non-intentional “passions.” See Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity, ed. John Henry Crosby (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007), esp., 35–40, 69. Even though Sartre does deal with psychic states in relation to unreflective consciousness, he does not take this up in relation to the heart proper, especially as a relation of feelings as intentionality movements in relation to feeling-states. See Jean-Paul Sartre, La transcendance de l’ego: esquisse d’une description phénoménologique (Paris: Vrin, 1966). 4  This seems to be the case in all sorts and range of thinkers. To take a sampling, one could examine Descartes [René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989)], or Smith [Adam Smith, The Early Writings of Adam Smith, ed. J.  Ralph Lindgren (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1967)]. In contemporary philosophers, one could consult Solomon, [Robert C.  Solomon Love: Emotion, Myth, and Metaphor (New York: Prometheus Books, 1990); Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993)], or Nussbaum [Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015).] Again, Sartre also tends to reduce all feelings (or emotions) to feeling-states. See Sartre, La transcendance de l’ego, for instance, 47–9, 75–6.

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or even apodictic fulfillment, and which are susceptible to intersubjective/objective adjudication.5 While there is a relation to what is other in feelings, the givenness might be absolute, experienced fully, in one stroke, and not a gradual unfolding; the other in question might overflow what could in principle be intended; the initiation of an act might be incited by the other, and neither be motivated in the traditional sense, nor begin with the egoic self; it can be initiatory, originary, and responsive; its temporality may not follow the pattern of self-genesis. I have attempted to show this previously in the case of religious experience and in interpersonal emotions, but I suggest that this holds for the sphere of the heart in its complexity and as integral to the human person as a whole.6 I have already suggested in another work that becoming “person” can in principle be realized in any species; in our case, human beings have revealed themselves as persons, and this takes place through emotions as act-movements (and most deeply, loving).7 Human reality is personal most deeply in and through the mode of loving. I understand by loving a dynamic movement “participating” any other, a movement elicited as from this other as bearer of value. By act-movement or simply movement, I mean a dynamic, revelatory feeling that is carried out or lived through on the dimension of spirit as intrinsically related to any another (including myself) as bearer of value. Value (which is irreducible to feeling) is the messenger of or guide to sense, as the integral “coloring” of the givenness of what it bears in relation to those beings who feel. I do not think it is entirely accurate to restrict emotional intentionality to acts as does Scheler, though I understand why he does this, namely, in order to distinguish them from functions and states, for example. But not all emotional experiences on this level are act-orientations—as if they only had a place of departure—since some are responsive and others are receptive. The expressions, movement or act-movement, however, do more accurately evoke the dimension and dynamic generative characteristic of the emotions. They are relational, and to this extent are not found in subjects. I understand emotions to be carried out within the domain of spirit. They are neither, for instance, psychological disturbances or visceral functionings; nor are they result of a system of judgments.8 Both of these main alternatives are expressive of the rationality-sensibility dualism. Rather, by being attentive to different kinds of 5  Even though this latter style can be quite dynamic—co-dynamic, a “constitutive duet,” as Husserl calls it. 6  See Anthony J. Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), ch. 5. 7  Anthony J.  Steinbock, Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), “Introduction.” 8  Thomas Paul Young, Emotion in Man and Animal. Its Nature and Relation to Attitude and Motive (New York: Wiley, 1947), 51: “An emotion is an acute disturbance of the individual, psychological in origin, involving behavior, conscious experience, and visceral functioning.” Solomon, Love: Emotion, Myth, and Metaphor, 46–7. Feelings, especially emotions, in distinction to Nussbaum’s account, are not judgments of value. See also, Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp., part 1, sec. 1.

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givenness, phenomenologists have been able to show how emotions have their own kind of evidence and their own cognitive structure. Furthermore, all emotions are creative. By “creative” I understand a movement that not only exceeds a mere reaction (which can be the case for psychophysical feelings), but that is improvisational as generative beyond the givens, and in this sense arising freely. Following from this, persons need not be restricted to human beings; they are revealed in and through emotional act-movements and as such can never become reduced completely to the status of objects. This is why Art Luther has described person as an intrinsic coherence of dynamic orientation. This formulation, which is rather complex, is nevertheless instructive for keeping us attentive to the fluid, dynamic, and generative dimension of the person revealed through the emotions. First, coherence concerns the way in which the person is sustained as this unique person, in her unique personhood (i.e., she is not a mere concordance of appearances susceptible to identification in terms of an optimal objective-sense); the modifier “intrinsic” expresses that the coherence is not garnered from a third-person perspective, but self-coheres in a lived manner—but it is not internal as opposed to external. “Intrinsic” further communicates the sense in which the person as living in and through act-movements is revealed as unique over time and in relation to others even though the person may change. Third, the person becomes “in” or “as” dynamic movement and is never at a resting or neutral stopping point. Finally, by “orientation,” Luther wants to suggest an engaged, en-acting or in-acting dimension of the person as becoming-being. It is this process that I attempt to convey with the expression, act-movement.9 Feeling-states—another dimension of the schema of the heart—in distinction to feelings occur on the basis of a feeling-givenness of the living experience. (I explicate the meaning of this feeling-givenness under the heading of “auto-affection” below.) Rather than a dynamic movement like an emotion (loving, hating, etc.), which cannot remain an act-movement and become objectified, a feeling-state is precisely that, a state, such that it can become an explicit object without losing its character as feeling-state. In this sense, feeling-states (what I understand as e.g., passions, sentiments, affects, conditions) are static, whereas feelings as act-­movements can never become objects as such. A feeling-state can be lived as (1) a felt-ness, i.e., a passion or sentiment, (2) an affect, or (3) a condition (in which case I am aware of the feltness or the affect as an object). Thus, I may not be aware of my feeling-state in its disclosive capacity as a feeling-state while I am living through it. This is the case if it is particularly intense. I may be all the less aware of the feeling-­source of the feeling-state!10 It is only subsequently that I can reflect on the feeling-­state and become explicitly aware that I feel “low,” I am depressed, I am excitable. I may still never know why. But being asked why can at least be the catalyst for such a selfreflection on a feeling-state: for example: “Why am I so angry?” Or the feeling-­state

9  Since as indicated above in some cases “orientation” or “directedness” are suitable expressions, but in other cases, they are not. 10  See Scheler, Formalismus, 262–63; Scheler, Formalism, 26–57.

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can be called to my attention by a friend: “Why are you so sad”? or “What are you so excited about”? Accordingly, we have three levels of experience that can be seen in the following example: I can love or hate another (feeling/emotion, dynamic act-movement) (ii); I can feel in love or have hatred (feeling-state, passion, like a hatred suffered, a joy lived, as felt); (iii) I can be aware of my being in love or my hatred (the condition of being in love or hatred as observed or as a condition, given through a reflection on the feeling-state). In sum, whereas feelings are dynamic, are realized as movement, and have an intentional structure all their own, feeling-states are static, capable of being objectified, and do not have an intentional structure. Further, in and through my feeling as act-movement being engaged with any other as bearer of value, a feeling-­state emerges and is given with that feeling. For example, while hating something as bearer of value (namely, the feeling as act-movement), I can have Schadenfreude and feel joy (feeling-state). Likewise, in the emotion of fearing something, I can feel angry, I can be afraid, or I can be excited (where “being” in this case is taken statically). In sympathy with another, I can have felt sorrow or I can be disgusted at something that happened. In loving another, I can be “in” love or “feel” joy, or be sad at the events affecting her.

3  A  uto-Affection and the Relation Between Feelings and Feeling-States It is one thing to suggest that feelings and feeling-states are different (but related) phenomena, and another more difficult task to describe how feelings and feeling-­ states are related. If they are distinctive experiences, do they arise independently? Are they co-dependent? Does one arise from another such that there is an order of foundation and dependence? In what follows I suggest that feelings and feeling-­ states are related, and while they belong to different orders of experience, feeling-­ states are both directly and indirectly emergent from and founded in feelings. Auto-Affection in Feelings  Feeling-states are directly and indirectly emergent from feelings. If a direct reflection on an experience of the heart produces a condition, as defined above, something else must be taking place such that an experience can be lived through (a feeling-state, i.e., a passion or sentiment), but is neither itself an act-movement or function, nor is (yet) the object of a reflection (i.e., a condition). The process through which such a relation between feeling and feeling-states takes place is what I call auto-affection. This is the most basic kind of “emotional-­ consciousness” or “heart-awareness.” It is in part because of a non-intentional retentional hold of the present that there can be self-awareness. In the presentation of an object-like formation (an intentional relation), and in retaining its own retentional magnitudes, there is an awareness

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without there being an infinite regress of intentional conscious relations of the self upon the self.11 Because the unity of time-consciousness is constituted in and through affection, as Husserl demonstrated in his phenomenology of association and affection, it is possible to claim that this takes place through the intentional relation of a presentation and the non-intentional retentional affection of affection, i.e., a self-affection. There is an affective holding onto a presented affection without the ego directly turning from the affective object-like formation and toward the affection itself. Allow me to explain this process by articulating my preference for this expression, auto-affection, where the relation between feelings and feeling-states are concerned. First, affection. I call this process an auto-affection (rather than, say, an auto-­ intention, auto-attention, or auto-reflection) because what is taking place belongs to the heart, and not, for instance, to a mental or intellectual operation. Furthermore, rather than a term like intention—which rightly or wrongly conveys an active doing something, or an I am doing something with some goal—the term affection suggests that something is happening; it suggests a being affected (in Husserl’s terms, “passive”). Second, auto. The expression, “auto-affection,” conveys several important features of this process. (1) The term “auto” here is used as a reflexive pronoun, and as such suggests the reflexive aspect of this process without it being an active reflection on something. In this way, a feeling as movement affects itself or is being affected without any intention toward itself. This is not a process of “a feeling of a feeling,” nor is it yet a feeling of a feeling-state (which would yield a condition). In the first instance, it would lead to an infinite regress; in the second, it would presuppose what it needs to explain. (2) Picking up on the passive sense of this process (“passive” in the way Husserl uses the term), the expression, auto, has the further advantage of resonating with being automatic, and again not something I personally do or accomplish as a subject. It is pre-personal, but which itself is not a feeling.12 (3) What takes shape, takes shape in and from feeling as it redounds upon itself without the explicit reflection upon a self or as something that an ego-self does. There is no “self” there that is doing the affecting, even if the auto-affection of feeling can yield a psychic-feeling-state. (4) Finally, “auto” also suggests belonging. That is, the feeling-state that is constituted through the auto-affection of feeling belongs to me in a two-fold sense.

 See my “The Workings of Retention and the Dynamics of Affectivity,” forthcoming, Festschrift for John Drummond. See Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 12  For this sense of “passivity,” see “Translator’s Introduction” to Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001). 11

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(i) As the self-same feeling-state, it is my (possibly our) own, and belongs to me (and possibly to us) as a possession; it is my feeling-state, something I have and something I can return to in reflection. (ii) The feeling-state (given through the auto-affection of feeling as relating to another as bearer of value) is given as together, along with the feeling. This aspect of the process falls under the general category of what Husserl would call, “synthesis.” As a whole, such an auto-affection could have the features of passive genesis or passive synthesis, which has its own regularity or regular lawfulness vis-à-vis feeling, although as far as I know Husserl never described such a process in which a feeling-state is given through feeling. Thus, a feeling-state in the sense of a passion or sentiment having an object-like structure as state emerges through the auto-affection of feeling. It is important to note two things. First, the auto-affection only occurs in the feeling as relating to some other as bearer of value. To suggest that a feeling-state is given through auto-­ affection then, means that the generation of a feeling-state occurs through a feeling-­ intentionality—which has its own structures peculiar to this sphere of experiencing. This is why some clarifications are in order to avoid misunderstanding. For example, contrary to the way in which Michel Henry might use the expression, I do not mean that a feeling, which is an act-movement, is a radically immanent process.13 For, it is through the feeling movement in relation to something other as bearer of value that auto-affection takes place and is constitutive of irreducible feeling-states such that there is an essential relation of dependence and an essential relation of belonging. It is not the process of a radically immanent self-affectivity.14 The latter could not account for the ultimate meaning of something psychic or object-like (i.e., transcendent), which would in turn be susceptible to being reflected upon in a way that would not be forgetful of its origins. As noted above, the auto-­ affection that takes place through feeling is not the process of feeling a feeling. This would never come to an end and stands in need of an explication as much as its product; and it is not the process of a feeling that turns back onto an already given feeling-state. This would presuppose what it is meant to explain. Second, the feeling-state as lived through without a direct reflection on it is the passion or sentiment—as Dan Zahavi would put it in a slightly different context— as mine: it is not able to be just anyone’s in this experience.15 The lived-through sorrow that is not yet (or ever) the condition is my or our sorrow, sorrow for me or for us. It is a feeling-state, static, implicit affective self-awareness (auto), but not  Which would be the process of absolute Life immediately affecting itself without distance in the mode of revelation. See Anthony J. Steinbock, It’s Not About the Gift: From Givenness to Loving (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), ch. 3. 14  It can be understood as intimate (integral to feeling) rather than being immediate and radically immanent. 15  See Dan Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 22, 39–41. See also Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, ch. 8. See, too, Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), esp., chs. 3–5. 13

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yet an explicit self-awareness as a feeling-state (condition). This primary sense of feeling-­state is constituted through the process of auto-affection through the feeling intentionality (see pt. 1 below in the section “Structural Relations between Feelings and Feeling-States”). However, as I suggest below, while the feeling-state is mine, a feeling-state can be shared. It is even possible for a feeling-state to be lived through as “ours,” as in the case of generative homeworld experiences. In any case, where the feeling-states as passions are concerned, we can undergo them as they echo within and throughout us. They are mine or ours, but I “only” live through them. It is when there are identified as such, when the feeling-states become what I call “conditions,” that they can be explicitly identified as mine or ours. Interplay Between Feelings and Feeling-States: Other Considerations  Feeling-­ states can be given in ways that are founded in feeling, but do not seem to be the direct result of an auto-affection as in the examples above. For instance, Scheler cites the example of mass contagion, and this can yield infectious feeling-states: I can show up at a party in a bad mood and be swept up in the celebratory atmosphere of the moment such that the joviality infects me; even the laughter becomes contagious!16 It may be the case that I sought out such an atmosphere to cheer me up or not, but in either case, it takes hold of me. But Cynthia Willett and Julie Willett note in their marvelous work on humor how laughter is not only a socially contagious affect, but exhibits a transpersonal power in social transformation and in challenging fear and hate. It is noteworthy that the Islamic mystic, Rūzbihān Baqlī, characterizes one of the mystical stations (or grace) that he experienced as the station of laughter.17 In short, some feeling-states originate in being with personal others, while other feeling-states originate in feeling any other (world, environment, body). Accordingly, the joviality in question would not consist in a feeling-intention toward the joy or sorrow of another, and it would not consist in a participation in the other’s lived-­experience. It is possible that I only first notice the joviality hours later after I left the party, and that the joy (or perhaps in different circumstances, say, sorrow) came unawares from the gathering I visited. Casey gives an excellent account of the circulation of such experiences of states appearing around us or “in place,” what he calls, periphanetic phenomena.18 It is therefore a characteristic feature of infection that it takes place without intentionality, without feeling, and without presupposing a knowledge of the other’s

 Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, in Wesen und Formen der Sympathie  – Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart, ed. Manfred S.  Frings, vol. 7 of Gesammelte Werke (Bern: Francke, 1973), 25–26. 17  Cynthia Willett and Julie Willett, Uproarious: How Feminists and Other Subversive Comics Speak Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), esp., 49–52, 140–42. See also Cynthia Willett’s earlier work, Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 18  See Edward S. Casey, Turning Emotion Inside Out: Affective Life Beyond the Subject (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022). 16

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joy, but takes place simply between feeling-states. Such co-feeling is blind to value, which is one reason infection can work in this way: The other’s experiences of feeling are not necessary in order for such an infection to take place. (But if we were to consider this on a personal level, we would see a value or disvalue in acts of loving and hating. For example, in the case of cruelty, loving another may make it difficult for us to bear that our beloved could take pleasure in “something like that.”19) Not only is there such a transmission between feeling-states; feeling-states can also be transmitted from an environment. Even sentiments like the serenity of a spring landscape, the gloominess of a rainy day, the dankness of a room, can infectiously influence our feeling-states.20 On the other hand, it seems that contagion is not a self-sufficient phenomenon. I mean by this that a feeling-state contagion is only possible because I am connected lived-bodily with another or others through—most primordially—an eroticfeeling relation, and founded on this, empathy.21 Insofar as empathy is a feeling, namely, as a psychophysical feeling, the feeling-state contagion is founded in feeling. Accordingly, as Scheler writes, the mimetic impulse only first arises when we have grasped the gesture already as expressive of joy or fear.22 This takes place without an intellectual understanding; that is, it takes place as an infection, like we see in herds and masses, through an affect coming from the outside. Thus, the fear of a herd can emerge by sensing fear in the behavior of its leader; this presupposes a lived-bodily connection that is not on the level of a mutual understanding.23 What is sensed is the value of life, even if it is not given as value. Finally, while it is not possible to have a co-pain as a simple affect, it is possible to co-feel, e.g., a feeling-state like a passion, for instance, sorrow. At most, we could only have compassion for the suffering of the pain of another. In the case of co-­feeling, Scheler cites the possibility of parents feeling the same sorrow together over the loss of a child, without it being one feeling sorrow, the other feeling sorrow,

 Scheler, Sympathie, 17–18: “Nevertheless, co-feeling can itself be a bearer of value, independently of the value situation which gives rise to the joy or suffering of another; but in this case, the value is itself not to be derived from it.” For further on such environmental transmission, see Casey, Turning Emotion Inside Out., ch. 9, “Emotional Elasticity, Transmissibility, and the Affective Environment.” 20  Scheler, Sympathie, 26. 21  For the foundational character of erotic-feeling, see Steinbock, Knowing by Heart, chapter 4, on erotic feeling as the instauration of intercorporeality. 22  According to Scheler, a consciousness of similarity does not have to be given with this objective similarity of lived-experiences; it does not have to be given with the intentionally directed act of “understanding,” “relating-to,” “getting it.” That I have a lived-experience “similar” to another one of my own, or a lived-experience “similar” to another person’s is not a matter of “understanding.” Scheler, Sympathie, 21–2. 23  Only secondarily, writes Scheler, is it a matter of producing similar affects, strivings, and intentions of action in the respective imitative psychophysical behavior. It is initially a process of joining in the expressive movements (as in the case of the infectious fear of a herd sensing the fear in the leader. Scheler, Sympathie, 23. For further on herd affectivity, see Casey, Turning Emotion Inside Out, ch. 8, “Emotion in the Crowd and Under the Subject: Stern/Le Bon/Freud.” 19

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and both knowing they feel it. The feeling-state of sorrow is immediately given— according to my analyses here—through a co-auto-affection; it is only then subsequently given as an object to their friend, for instance, who approaches the parents and has compassion for them.24 There is a feeling-with one another that yields the feltness or sentiment of sorrow. Structural Relations Between Feeling and Feeling-States  The descriptive confusions that might obtain when we do not see the proper ordering between feelings and feeling-states are certainly understandable. This is in part my reason for addressing this issue here. While “falling in love” as a feeling-state can “lead to” devotion and commitment, there is no causal relation or relation of dependence leading from falling in love, for example, to loving as act-movement (feeling/emotion). In fact, there can also be lived obfuscations that result in a confusion of the heart because the feelings and the feeling-states are structurally distinct, and because the feeling-­ states are dependent upon feelings. For example, being “in love”—a feeling-state—is given as static, and could be lived as something I want to hold onto, to have as a possession. In becoming a state that I want to have (implicitly, at my disposal), that I want to enjoy, I might become oriented toward possessing it, e.g., having the euphoria of being in love. If I am directed toward being in love, say, I might only be striving to enjoy my feelings (which now have become objects). But now I am no longer loving the person as absolute value—in and from which the feeling-state of being in love could arise (as one possibility among others).25 Further, the other person could become, inversely, a means for me to hold onto the feeling-state of being in love (and certainly not responding to the other person). This in turn would shut down how another can appear as value, not letting another change or grow or become who she is. Loving is not an inner possession, a psychic reality. In going after the feeling-state (the sentiment or passion), I am no longer loving the person. However, I cannot love a feeling-­state; I love another as bearer of value. My attachment to a feeling-state could devolve into a hating of the other as the negation of the other as absolute value, because what I would become preoccupied with is trying to feel a feelingstate of being in love, etc.—and in trying to hold on to this, I could even do violence to that person. How, then, are we to understand the relations obtaining between feelings and feeling-states? The enumeration that follows concerns the structural relations between feelings and feeling-states. While the following list is not exhaustive, the points listed below are especially important for the eventual focus on the movements of loving and hating (which I treat in a different work).26  Scheler, Sympathie, 23–4.  See Hart, who also makes this point in the context of Husserl’s thought. James G. Hart, Who One Is, Bk, 1, Meontology of the “I”: A Transcendental Phenomenology (Boston: Springer, 2009), 204–205. 26  See Steinbock, Knowing by Heart. 24 25

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(1) All Feelings are Accompanied by Feeling-States. In the case of feelings, feeling-­ states are generated through auto-affection, and their feeling-states are structurally dependent upon the feeling—as this feeling relates to another as bearer of value such that there are always feeling-states that are given with that feeling and through that feeling. What those feeling-states are, however, is not determined in advance. Even being dispassionate is a feeling-state, which is why we can hate with a banality of evil (as Hannah Arendt has shown in her own way), 27 or as Jean Améry writes, “with the good conscience of depravity.” I can hate another (emotional feeling as act-movement) but have no feeling-state of hatred, let alone recognize or reflect on this feeling state of hatred as a feeling-state. To say that feelings are intimately accompanied by feeling-states also means that feeling-states, while being states, are not objects in the world. That is, feelingstates are generated on the side of feelings and are not originally noematic entities. They are given opaquely—not transparently—with feelings, namely, through auto-­ affection and not through a reflection. Otherwise, I would not be able, for instance, to hate with rage. This is, mutatis mutandis, contrary to Sartre who holds that intentional feelings are either transparent or it is reflection that yields noematic opacity.28 However, feeling-states can become objects of reflection—namely, as a condition (see pt. 10 below)—without sacrificing their character as feeling-states. In this case, conditions are noematic correlates of a reflection. When I say that I can hate with rage, temporally, it may look like I act from or out of rage (which would misleadingly imply that rage causes hating). But as I indicate under the next point, structurally, this does not mean that I hate out of rage. Rather, rage (or some other feeling-state) is auto-affectively generated from hating and immediately accompanies the feeling without being an object of it. (2) Feeling-States as Founded upon Feelings. Feelings and feeling-states are not coeval in the sense of being co-founding.29 Rather, feeling-states are essentially dependent upon feelings and founded upon feelings, whereas the reverse is not true. Anger is a passion such that the connection between my anger and the “about” of my anger is neither original nor intentional. In this case, seething anger or indignation may arise through the auto-affection of a feeling in which, e.g., a horrifying injustice is given as founded in the positive value of the person (another or myself) who is its victim.30

27  See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994). See also Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P.  Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 31. See Steinbock, Knowing by Heart, ch. 8 on “hating and hatred.” 28  Sartre, La transcendance de l’ego, esp., section 2. 29  I give a more detailed account of the relation of foundation in Steinbock, Knowing by Heart, ch. 8 in the context of hating’s relation to loving. 30  See John J. Drummond, “Anger and Indignation,” in Emotional Experiences: Ethical and Social Significance, ed. John J. Drummond and Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), 15–30

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To take a recent example from the coronavirus pandemic, it is reported that when people see, e.g., a neighbor or a co-shopper in a store not observing social distancing, they can easily go from irritation to lack of patience, to frustration, to rage, just as others may approach those with masks and violently tear them off. But rather than this being a result of a “fight or flight response,” these feeling-states are founded in feeling.31 As Scheler points out, certain evils must be comprehended beforehand in feeling if anger is to be aroused.32 If there were not this founding-founded relation between feelings and feeling-states, one could not even recommend overriding this “emotional” [sic] response by engaging in compassion. This founding-founded relation obtains even if the feeling-states may have arisen directly from a personal feeling (loving, hating, shame, etc.), or an attunement (anxiety, awe), or through a psychophysical feeling (like erotic intentionality, empathy, etc.). Accordingly, being in love, happiness, or sadness might be by-products or states emergent from loving, though there is no one-to-one correspondence or necessity between them. However, being in love cannot motivate or cause loving as if the latter were a reaction to a state of being, or as if it were shared through infection or identification. (Loving, in which the uniqueness of the person is revealed would rule the latter out a priori.) Loving and hating are spontaneous act-movements in contrast to reactive responses, e.g., revenge. I can be disposed to another in anger or joy; these might be invitations or refusals, but my anger or joy do not cause the emotion as act-movement. The former, contrary to Nussbaum, are not judgments, but can nevertheless be understood as “background emotions.”33 The latter (emotions as act-­movements), however, do arise “through” the creative, improvisational “free” center of the becoming-person. Accordingly, I can love in spite of a previous hatred, even though hatred is not a result of loving. In this regard, it is important to note that there is a difference between the temporal occurrence of a feeling vis-à-vis a feeling-state, and the structural relation between a feeling and feeling-state. I can obviously experience a feeling-state and a feeling at the same time. For example, I can be sad and love. However, the feeling is structurally prior to or founding for a feeling-state, where the sadness does not found the loving. Accordingly, we can have the situation in which a feeling-state is given auto-affectively through a feeling, but lingers as I live through and carry out a new feeling. I may have experienced anger through a hating, and the anger may persist for a time, even while I show compassion for another or engage in acts of loving the other person who angered me. In this case, however, the anger and the loving are not in a co-founding relation. Even in the case of anger and hating, the hating of the other as bearer of value is

 Jen A.  Miller, “Neighbors Not Practicing Social Distancing? Here’s What to Do: Tips for Keeping Yourself Safe, Even When Others Aren’t,” New York Times, April 17, 2020, https://www. nytimes.com/2020/04/17/smarter-living/neighbors-not-practicing-social-distancing-heres-whatto-do.html?referringSource=articleShare. 32  Scheler, Formalismus, 264; Scheler, Formalism, 258. 33  Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, esp., 69–79, 110–27, 150. 31

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realized in the movement of negating this value-bearer.34 The hating neither emerges from my anger, nor is directed toward my anger. Likewise, I do not love (loving act-­ movement) the euphoria of being in love. Even if I might be more susceptible to loving while being in love, or inclined to hating while enraged—the latter are founded in the former. For this reason, loving is not a more intense enjoyment or liking. I don’t love pain, though I may love the other through which I may experience pain, or even enjoy a certain kind of pain, etc. Finally, one might object: What about those instances where acts of violence seem to be caused by physical stimuli? How can it be said that feeling-states are founded in feelings, when feelings seem to be produced by feeling-states anywhere from affective displeasure to psychological rage? Not only are there correlations between summer heat and road rage, for example, but researchers have calculated that for every half degree of global warming, we will see a 10 to 20 percent increase in social violence and armed conflict.35 I suggest that affective states and passions can dispose us to act out of rage; but states do not motivate or cause acts (say, acts of hating or acts of loving). The temporal relatedness of their occurrences are not causal relations, and does not mitigate the ontological differences between feelings and feeling-states. The same can be said regarding how feeling-states can also be transmitted in relation to a past in which I was not directly present, for instance, in the case of the anger or joy of my ancestors regarding a past situation, and my anger and joy, or again, how I can experience indignation about that terror in my history’s past. In short, if feeling-states can be regarded as conditions for feelings, they are not sufficient conditions, but like so many acquired significations, they are that through which persons transcend in creative movements (here, feelings as act-movements), and through which we are borne to others of all kinds. (3) Positive Indeterminacy of Feeling-States Associated with Feeling. It is impossible to determine in advance what feeling-states might emerge from feelings. Feelings as movements are essentially creative and fluid, and what might emerge as derivative of feelings, especially given the dynamic nature of person, is open. This is the case even if a particular feeling-state might be more commonly associated with the feeling (i.e., hatred with hating). This positive indeterminacy of what feeling-states might emerge is also due to the fact that there are changing circumstances involved not only when I love, hate, hope, fear, etc., such that I may suffer it, endure, be joyful, and so forth. Becoming aware of the feelingstate in the feeling, however, does not necessarily mitigate the feeling itself. (4) Multiplicity of Feeling-States Associated with Feeling. Not only is it impossible to determine in advance what feeling-states might emerge from feelings, it is also not possible to exhaust the number of feeling-states emerging from feelings. This is due to the dynamic nature of feelings. Further, more than one  See Steinbock, Knowing by Heart, ch. 8.  David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019), 124–25.

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feeling-state can emerge in relation to its feeling, even though there may be one that we notice as particularly prominent, though of course, we may not notice any at all explicitly. The point here is that multiple feeling-states (or a feeling-state complex) can be contemporaneously given with a feeling. For example, I could experience positive and negative feeling-states together: being disgusted, being ashamed, relief, and joy in an emotional act of repentance; I could experience sadness, comfort, and suffering in sympathy, or again, joy, sincerity, fondness, hopefulness, and nervousness when loving, etc. Pride could yield vanity, and then I could be ashamed of my vanity while still living in acts of pride, and then be happy and proud of accomplishments at the same time. Some of these may occur on the same level of experiencing (say, all spiritual, or variegations within the spiritual) or simultaneously on difference levels (psychophysical, spiritual, etc.). Not only can feeling-states be multiple and shared (e.g., through contagion), because feeling-states are founded in feelings, feeling-states are subject to manipulation. I might try to get another to feel a certain way, that is, to motivate or manipulate another’s feeling-state: to be happy, to be sad, get angry, get enraged, feel dependent, be in a good mood, etc. But strictly speaking I cannot manipulate another’s feeling as act-movement. The feeling as responsive originates from the “creative” center of the person, for instance, through incitement and in an interpersonal nexus. Here there is no manipulation, at least on this dimension of experiencing. Exemplarity, for example, is distinct from the relation that obtains between leaders and followers, which does admit of coercive relations. It is in the paradigm of leaders and followers that feeling-states can be manipulated. In this context, I could do things that a figurehead may want me to do, e.g., act out of anger, attack foreigners, and so forth. But my hating, as act-movement, would only be carried out by me personally identifying positively the value of what is exemplified in that figurehead that I myself affirm. In this case, I would be drawn positively by the (objectively) negative value.36 But this itself is not the manipulation of feeling as such, though again, the feeling-states could be affected in this way.37 (5) The Deeper the Feeling, the More Exposure to Feeling-States. The deeper the feeling (and the more expansive it is, the more founding, the more able it is to endure through time), the more it infiltrates or imbues various levels of reality. Where feeling-states are concerned, the deeper the experiencing, the more connections that are made among feeling-states from this level of feeling. Feeling-­ states are not related to one another by the fact that they might be lived side by side, or by attempting to juxtapose one to the other, but in their connection to founding feelings. For this reason, the deeper the founding feeling, the more connections among feeling-states that are possible and that can emerge  I treat the relation of exemplarity and its distinctiveness from leadership in the work on Vocations and Exemplars (in preparation). 37  I would like to thank Donna-Dale Marcano for raising this problem of manipulation where feeling and feeling-states are concerned. 36

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in relation to their founding feeling. For example, a spiritual feeling like loving touches the core of reality in a way that psychophysical feelings do not— though they are both relations to value. However, as encompassed by spirit, or as ­de-­limited through loving, psychophysical feelings are not restricted in themselves to the vital level; they serve as opening to their interpersonal nexus beyond themselves.38 (6) Some Feeling-States are Less Possible. As a corollary to the above, it is possible to suggest that the more expansive or the more encompassing the feeling, the less possible for contrary feeling-states to emerge. For example, the more profound and encompassing is the loving, the less possibility there is for negative feeling-states such as jealously, being vengeful, hatred and the like, to emerge in other areas of my life or on other occasions.39 Put in a more positive register, the more profound and encompassing is the loving, the more this loving tends toward other emotions like compassion or feeling-states like joy, consolation, delight, even if surrounding circumstances might be experienced in terms of sadness. (7) Some Feeling-States are Essentially Excluded. Given the creative nature of feelings, given the impossibility of determining feeling-states in advance, and given the variety of feeling-states that can emerge in feelings that are deeper and more encompassing, we can ask if any feeling-states are excluded a priori. While there is a wide-open possibility of what feeling-states might emerge from feelings, there are some feeling-states that are essentially excluded vis-à-vis a feeling; that is, certain feeling-states “cannot” emerge from certain feelings. For example, it is impossible for impatience to emerge as a result of hoping. A similar observation can be made with respect to hatred arising from or while loving.40 ( 8) Levels of Feeling-States. Feeling-states can emerge on all levels of existence: sensible feeling-states like tickling and startle; vital feeling-states like agreeableness, enjoying; personal feeling-states like hatred, disgust, sadness, anger, rage, being in love, and so on. But there are also “spiritual” or “religious”/ personal feeling-states that emerge in relation to the Holy. Bliss and despair are common examples, but there is quite a developed vocabulary for such feeling-states in the Abrahamic religious traditions. For example, St. Teresa of Avila describes the feeling-states as “prayer” or experiences from the presence of  Hence, trust as an interpersonal emotion is “deeper” than reliability (which is a mode of practical functionality), even though there is nothing problematic with reliability. (See, Steinbock, Moral Emotions, ch. 6.) 39  Rooted in her loving of God, St. Teresa of Avila writes that we should even show compassion to the devil. See the Book of Her Life, in vol. 1 of The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1976). Although I have identified various aspects concerning the temporality of feeling, there is also a spatiality of feeling. This is suggested by the expressions: depth, height, opening, expansiveness, broadening, narrowness, closing. Indeed, feelings as vertical and as de-limiting evoke such a spatiality. 40  On the latter point, see my Moral Emotions, 5. 38

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God: consolation, spiritual delight, prayer of quiet, wounds of love, etc. Rabbi Dov Baer, a Chassidic mystic, describes them relative to these kinds of “soul”: nefesh/‫נפש‬, ruach/‫רוח‬, neshamah/‫נשמה‬, chayyah/‫חיה‬, yechidah/‫יחידה‬. Rūzbihān Baqlī, the 12th century Islamic mystic, articulates over a thousand, such as: patience, acceptance, laughter, striving for people of witnessing, praise and glory, light of manifestation, and so on. But in all cases, these accompany the religious, dynamic experiencing given from the Holy (thus a different kind of intentionality), and are as multiple and as unique as the dynamic experiences themselves. That these feeling-states are distinct from feeling—here as a religious kind—that they are founded in feeling, and that they can be objectified is evident even in the case of the experiences of the mystics themselves. For example, Teresa writes of a locution in which God appeals to her, saying that the point of the relation with God consists not in the enjoyment of the spiritual states, but in loving and in serving.41 It is also common among the mystics of the Abrahamic tradition, as well as “contemplatives” in other traditions, not to place too much stock in what feeling-states can tell us about the depths of experience or the lack of so-called progress in spiritual matters. For instance, what we experience as periods of “dryness” might actually be testimony of spiritual growth, etc. The point here is that these observations illustrate in a different way the susceptibility of feeling-states being objectified, and that they are derivative of feeling, and in any case, irreducible to feeling. (9) Variability of Feeling-States Among Levels. It is important not to determine a feeling-state restrictively. For example, the same nominal feeling-states might emerge on different levels of experience and be transformed accordingly, depending upon the dimension from which they emerge: Personal contentment with another can be “deeper” than being physically comfortable at that moment, though they are by no means exclusive. We can also identify, e.g., contentment, joy, satisfaction, quiet, and peacefulness, taking place on various levels of our existence, but they will be different depending upon the dimension from which they emerge.42 (10) Feeling-states are Susceptible to Objectification. Unlike a feeling, a feeling-­ state can be objectified in reflection without it losing its essential structure as a feeling-state. A passion (say, being sorrowful or being happy) can become what I call a condition—that is an explicit object of self-awareness—without the latter (the condition) losing its character as a feeling-state. An act-­ movement would lose its character as act-movement in such a reflection; with respect to its dynamic movement, the reflection would miss the movement through objectification. Here, an intimate feeling-state that occurs in and

 Teresa of Avila, Obras completas de Santa Teresa de Jesús, ed. Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1997), 606; Teresa of Avila, Spiritual Testimonies, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1976–85), 32. 42  See Scheler, Formalismus, 99-126; Scheler, Formalism, 81–110; Scheler, Sympathie, 23. 41

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through feeling something as bearer of value (this is how a feeling-state is lived as I am living through a feeling as act-movement)—this feeling-state is modified such that it remains a feeling-state, but now as a condition. For ­example, in hating, I could feel the negative movement as a feeling-state in its negative valence. In this case, an immediate and direct valuing-feeling is given on the basis of which I may then cognize the affected feeling-state such that it coincides with the negativity in hating.43 This would constitute the passion or sentiment as condition—both are feeling-states, but lived differently.

4  Conclusion I have suggested that the heart is a distinctive structure of experience that has its own evidence, a dimensionality or openness that I have called the schema of the heart. I have articulated this schema in terms of the broad distinction between feeling and feeling-states (emotions, attunements, psychophysical feelings in the former; passions or sentiments, affects, and conditions in the latter). Feelings have a direct relation to feeling-states through the process of auto-affection, yielding the lived-through experience that can be an implicit object of experience without necessarily having an explicit awareness of it. These, like affects, can be objectified in explicit awareness, without losing their character as feeling-states. I then delineated ten features that articulate the relation between feeling and feeling-states. Although I do not go into this here, this distinction is fundamental when giving an account of emotions of all sorts, especially core ones like loving and hating. It is a distinction that is key for moral and religious experiencing, and for discerning the normative dimensions to loving, and the relation of loving to hating in interpersonal contexts.44

Bibliography Améry, J. (1980). At the mind’s limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities (S. Rosenfeld & S. P. Rosenfeld, Trans.). Indiana University Press. Arendt, H. (1994). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Penguin Classics. Casey, E. S. (2022). Turning emotion inside out: Affective life beyond the subject. Northwestern University Press. Descartes, R. (1989). The passions of the soul (S. Voss, Trans.). Hackett Publishing. Drummond, J. J. (2018). Anger and indignation. In J. J. Drummond & S. Rinofner-Kreidl (Eds.), Emotional experiences: Ethical and social significance (pp. 15–30). Rowman & Littlefield International.

 See Scheler, Formalismus, 253; Scheler, Formalism 247.  I wish to acknowledge Northwestern University Press and to express my gratitude for allowing me to use a version of Chapter 1 of Knowing by Heart: Loving as Participation and Critique (2021) for the purposes of this edition of Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart. 

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Hart, J. G. (2009). Who One Is. Bk. 1, Meontology of the “I”: A transcendental phenomenology. Springer. Husserl, E. (1952). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch; Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. In M. Biemel (Ed.), Vol. 4 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke. Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (2001). Analyses concerning passive and active synthesis: Lectures on transcendental logic (A. J. Steinbock, Trans.). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kant, I. (1998). In J. Timmermann (Ed.), Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Meiner Verlag. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. Miller, J. A. “Neighbors not practicing social distancing? Here’s what to do: Tips for keeping yourself safe, even when others aren’t.” New York Times, April 17, 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/04/17/smarter-­living/neighbors-­not-­practicing-­social-­distancing-­heres-­what-­to-­do. html?referringSource=articleShare. Nussbaum, M. C. (2008). Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2015). Political emotions: Why love matters for justice. Belknap Press. Sarte, J.-P. (1966). La transcendance de l’ego: esquisse d’une description phénoménologique. Vrin. Scheler, M. (1966). Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wertethik. In M. Scheler (Ed.), Vol. 2 of Gesammelte Werke. Francke. Scheler, M. (1973a). Formalism in ethics and non-formal ethics of value (M. S. Frings & R. L. Funk, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Scheler, M. (1973b). Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. In Wesen und Formen der Sympathie – Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart. In M. S. Frings (Ed.), Vol. 7 of Gesammelte Werke. Francke. Smith, A. (1967). In J. R. Lindgren (Ed.), The early writings of Adam Smith. Augustus M. Kelly. Solomon, R. C. (1990). Love: Emotion, myth, and metaphor. Prometheus Books. Solomon, R. C. (1993). The passions: Emotions and the meaning of life. Hackett Publishing. Steinbock, A. J. (2007). Phenomenology and mysticism: The verticality of religious experience. Indiana University Press. Steinbock, A. J. (2014). Moral emotions: Reclaiming the evidence of the heart. Northwestern University Press. Steinbock, A. J. (2018). It’s not about the gift: From givenness to loving. Rowman & Littlefield International. Steinbock, A. J. (2021). Knowing by heart: loving as participation and critique. Northwestern University Press. Steinbock, A. J. (n.d.-a). Vocations and exemplars: The verticality of moral experience. Unpublished manuscript. Steinbock, A. J. (n.d.-b). “The workings of retention and the dynamics of affectivity.” In Festschrift for John Drummond. Forthcoming. Teresa of Avila. (1976–85) The collected works of St. Teresa of Avila (K. Kavanaugh & O. Rodriguez, Trans.). 3 vols. ICS Publications Teresa of Avila. (1976a). The book of her life. In vol. 1 of The collected works of St. Teresa of Avila (K. Kavanaugh & O. Rodriguez, Trans.) (pp. 15–368). ICS Publications. Teresa of Avila. (1976b). Spiritual testimonies (K. Kavanaugh & O. Rodriguez, Trans.). Vol. 1 of The collected works of St. Teresa of Avila. ICS Publications. Teresa of Avila. (1997). Obras completas de Santa Teresa de Jesús. Edited by Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos. von Hildebrand, D. (2007). In J. H. Crosby (Ed.), The heart: An analysis of human and divine affectivity. St. Augustine’s Press. Wallace-Wells, D. (2019). The uninhabitable Earth: Life after warming. Tim Duggan Books. Willett, C. (2008). Irony in the age of empire: Comic perspectives on democracy and freedom. Indiana University Press.

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Willett, C., & Willett, J. (2019). Uproarious: How feminists and other subversive comics speak truth. University of Minnesota Press. Wolff, R. P. (1973). Kant’s theory of mental activity: A commentary on the transcendental analytic of the critique of pure reason. Peter Smith. Young, T. P. (1947). Emotion in man and animal: Its nature and relation to attitude and motive. Wiley. Zahavi, D. (1999). Self-awareness and alterity: A phenomenological investigation. Northwestern University Press. Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and selfhood: Investigating the first-person perspective. The MIT Press. Zahavi, D. (2014). Self and other: Exploring subjectivity, empathy, and shame. Oxford University Press.

Chapter 6

Feeling Vulnerable: Phenomenological Dimensions of Affectivity Ignacio Quepons

We are, at root, loss and ruin, sin and lack Emilio Uranga

1  The Concept of Vulnerability In a broad sense it is possible to to understand vulnerability as an accidental and circumstantial disposition that arises between the vulnerable and that which is able to harm it.1 Nevertheless, the notion of vulnerability does not necessarily correspond to mere physical fragility, nor to the possibility of undergoing damage; instead, it is possible that its primordial meaning lies in the possibility of being harmed, or even better to say wounded, which calls into consideration an undeniable affective dimension of experience. More specifically, however, our experience or realization of vulnerability appears in essential correlation to encountering the harmful. In this regard (and in contradistinction to the notion of harm as physical damage to physical fragility), harm, in the context of vulnerability, seems to be a dynamic notion that could perhaps be understood with regard to a frustration of the continuity of an ongoing process of experiencing, resulting in a deprivation or a decrease of practical capabilities.2  Ada C. Rogers, “Vulnerability, Health and Health Care,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 26, no. 1 (1997): 65–72. See also Vanessa Heaslip, “Understanding Vulnerability,” in Understanding Vulnerability: A Nursing and Healthcare Approach, ed. Vanessa Heaslip and Julie Ryden (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 6–27. 2  George W.  Harris, Dignity and Vulnerability: Strength and Quality of Character (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 1

I. Quepons (*) University of Veracruz, Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_6

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Given that the most original potentiality of the lived body is self-motivated movement,3 we may refer to vulnerability as the horizon of the anticipation of being subject to being suddenly, and almost always painfully, deprived of a practical potentiality, beginning with the potentiality of self-movement. Thus the practical horizon of as yet indeterminate determinations of such disruptions pertaining to experience (and their consequences) corresponds to what we may call the dimension of what we feel, within this sphere of practical possibilities, as harmful; vulnerability then emerges as the dimension in which what is understood as harmful reveals a sense of intimate fragility that may still involve being physically exposed to damage, but is especially concerned with the eventual frustration or decrease of practical capabilities. However, in the immediate context of our corporeal vulnerability, most of the time the awareness of our condition is not grounded in thematic expectations of failure or in representations of ourselves as exposed to hazards. On the contrary, what seems to belong to the sense of vulnerability as experienced in an immediate situation is the indeterminacy involved in predicting the precise manners and possible outcomes of a situation that we nevertheless may affectively feel as harmful. We may feel vulnerable under certain circumstances and without full understanding of the situation, and the anticipation of eventual harm that belongs to such situations (or even experiences of being afraid of someone) may arise in the form of non-­ thematic motivations stemming from our current interactions with the surrounding world and emerging in such emotions as discomfort, fear, or anxiety. Thus, the correlation between vulnerability and the proximity of something harmful or threatening calls into consideration the intrinsic and dynamic relation of the self with its own body, which in this case is not grounded in the mere physical “fragility” of the corporeal body. Instead, from the point of view of vulnerability understood as a phenomenon of sense, it seems to happen the other way around: the emotional awareness of risk is precisely that which constitutes the primordial meaning of feeling vulnerable, because it points to a horizon of possibilities belonging to an individual person and to his/her embodiment, thereby opening a non-transferable dimension of being exposed to harm. Now since vulnerability is rooted in an inner horizon of an intimate “fragility” that can be described not only in terms of the anticipation of physical harm, but also in terms of the development of a sense of affective self-awareness—we may raise a question regarding the emotional dimension involved in this form of consciousness. Is fear an emotive realization of vulnerability as the condition of being affected by something harmful? All this seems to be obvious. The problems come, however, when we point

3  Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch; Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel, vol. 4 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 261 and 330. See also Ludwig Landgrebe, Faktizität und Individuation: Studien zu den Grundfragen der Phänomenologie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1982), 83. See also Elizabeth A.  Behnke, “Interkinaesthetic Affectivity: A Phenomenological Approach,” Continental Philosophy Review 41, no. 2 (2008): 148.

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to the way we consider ourselves as vulnerable with regard to something that is indeterminate, but nevertheless motivates the lived experience of fear. While fragility is an accidental, external, and circumstantial predicate that only makes sense with regard to the comparison and interaction of the physical features of things, vulnerability, as I argue in the following pages, may still include the possibility of corporeal physical damage, yet refers to an intimate and essential dimension of human existence where affective experience, in a broad sense, is its locus of revelation. In order to outline some relevant aspects of a preliminary phenomenological account of the phenomenon of vulnerability, I start describing how the sense of vulnerability arises with regard to the practical horizons of embodiment. Next I point out the relevance of a phenomenological account of moods, presenting a critical revision of Heidegger’s description of fear with regard to “harmfulness” in order to specify the “location” of the phenomenon of vulnerability. By following Heidegger’s descriptions of fear it is possible to address the experiential dimension of the correlation between fear and harmfulness and the particular sense of “being exposed to harm” that belongs to vulnerability, beyond the circumstantial predicate of fragility and damage. Heidegger’s early account of moods finds important continuations, although in a different orientation that includes the centrality of corporeality, in other phenomenologists such as Ludwig Landgrebe. On the one hand, by using these contributions as a point of departure, I attempt to show how the awareness of being vulnerable displays a sense of emotional risk connecting the perceptual horizons of embodiment to the practical sphere and revealing; on the other hand, I show an essential link between the condition of vulnerability and the claim that there is a normative perspective in our experience of the world—one that is grounded in our embodied condition. Finally, in the last section of the paper, I address the issue of the way in which the perspectives disclosed by Husserl, Heidegger, and Landgrebe may lead to the presupposition of a “negative” account of vulnerability, emphasizing either the possibility of the frustration of a practical capability or the feeling of being afraid of the harmful. Moreover, on the one hand, we might recognize the relevance of such negative features for making values themselves prominent. On the other hand, however, we might contrast a Husserlian account of values and the route opened by Emmanuel Levinas, who in contradistinction to both Husserl and Heidegger opens up the possibility of reframing the valence of vulnerability and considering it not only as something positive, but also as constitutive of and essential to the configuration of the ethical meaning of what we are.

2  Understanding Harm: Bodily Horizons of Vulnerability According to Husserl, the concrete and fullest sense in which we may understand subjectivity, or in his words the monad, is as a dynamic unity of the stream of consciousness and the progressive constitution of his/her own corporeality with regard

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to the surrounding world.4 Such constitution presupposes two levels that it is possible to analyze according to the constitutive synthesis involved in each field of experience. On the one hand, we have the constitution of corporeality understood as a field of sensitive affections and kinaesthetic activities developed on several levels from potentialities to actualities, the so-called lived body (Leib); on the other hand, we have the material or physical dimension of corporeality, the corporeal body (Körper), which is the result of the constitutive synthesis of physical interactions and causality. In either case, at the core of the constitution of the materiality of one’s own corporeal body there is a motivational synthesis consistent with the progressive agency over the body I “own.” However, such command over my own body does not mean that the body is given as if it were something independent or distant from my will. On the contrary, embodiment is the very expression of my will: the primordial dimension of all practical capabilities consists in the preeminence of the potentiality “I move” (Ich bewege) over the ability, “I can” (Ich kann),5 which allows us to consider the relevance of corporeality in the configuration of other practical potentialities in general. Thus, the body is our very means of practical access to the surrounding world, since embodiment is constituted by syntheses of motivation unified by the preeminent potentiality of self-movement. The increase of my sense of control over the movement possibilities at my disposal—and thus over my corporeal lived body (Leib-Körper)—results in the development of a series of habitualities configuring on the one hand a “personal” style of being, who I am with regard to the way I orient myself to the multifarious display of the perceptual world. On the other hand, such progressive development of an “optimal” control over the body (allowing perceptual objects to come to optimal givenness) entails the formation of a sense of normality and familiarity with the environment, resulting in a sense of comfort and security. In other words, under the label “familiarity” we should consider both the normality of perception and the emergence of an axiological dimension of a pre-reflective sense of normativity, namely, the feeling of “being at home.”6 Here my lived bodily habitualities, in their interaction with my physical body (which follows its own synthetic process), have their role in the configuration, in different stages of constitution, of the progressive development of a stable surrounding horizon of other objects and the regularities of their respective behaviors.7 Therefore both in the constitution of my own personal style of inhabiting my corporeality and in the display of physical interactions developing the perceptual field of 4  Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephan Strasser, vol. 1 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 102. 5  Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch, 258. See also Landgrebe, Faktizität und Individuation, 83. 6  Cf. Anthony J.  Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 188. 7  Cf. Victor Biceaga, The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 101.

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the surrounding world, the kinaesthetic synthesis involved in both processes runs in two different directions: on the one hand, in static-phenomenological terms, the sensible synthesis of self-motivated movement is the constitutive condition for the progressive exhibition of physical objects, along with their perceptual features, through adumbrations, including cases where the perceptual object is my physical body. But on the other hand, in genetic-phenomenological terms, we also may consider that such a progressive exhibition of the objects of perception presupposes that the acquisition of the synthesis of the unity of the lived body in its primordial potentiality—self-movement—has already been accomplished.8 Moreover, sensitive affections arising in the exhibition, through self-movement, of our own physical bodies are intertwined with explicit affective or emotive sensations (Gefühlsempfindungen) that are already experienced as the result of a passive synthesis of motivation, linking the incitement of sensations with the awakening of an active disposition we may understand, following Landgrebe, as the expression of the way we encounter ourselves in the world (Befindlichkeit).9 Thus, since sensibility entails, in a genetic perspective, a primitive form of intentional direction synthesized by the self-motivated movement of the body, the primordial exhibition of the surrounding world already involves a “meaning” or valence that results, on further levels of constitution, in the development of the axiological sense. The bridge between the primordial constitution of embodiment (in parallel with the disclosure of the surrounding world) and the understanding of the world as a field of axiological significance is found in the interplay between the increase of the sense of control over my body and its limits, namely, the development of the awareness of our vulnerability. In this regard—and turning back to our early analysis of embodiment—we find on the one hand that the unity of the ongoing process of embodiment involves an inner horizon referring to the inner kinaesthetic system grounded in a set of potentialities of self-motivated movement; on the other hand, we have an external horizon of the lived body, one that we may describe in terms of its limits and exteriority. Such “external limits” correspond not only to the physical limits of the corporeal body, but to the entire situation of immediate resistance to the free flow of self-­ motivated movement. Thus the same experiential structures of kinaesthetic horizons and bodily capabilities functioning in the set of habitualities gathered under the expression “I can” (ich kann) allow their own limits to be confirmed through the negative fulfillment of the operative intentionality of the lived body in the interaction with the surrounding world. Vulnerability accordingly refers in this regard to a constitutive sense of “localized” individuation of myself in the world disclosed as a field of possibilities. However, this dimension of nature reveals my own body and the surrounding environment in a material dimension of otherness manifested in the bare materiality of 8  Edmund Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten (1918–1926), ed. Margot Fleischer, vol. 11 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 13ff. 9  Landgrebe, Faktizität und Individuation, 83 and 112.

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affectivity, such as, for instance, the experience of pain. Here instead of revealing itself as the absolute here, the body becomes the “absolute there,”10 where I am firmly fixed to the natural world. Therefore, since vulnerability, as a situational phenomenon, is opened not only through the motivational nexus and its temporal structure but through spatial horizons, then it is not only the specific place where I am, but the very condition of such spatial constitution—namely, embodiment—that from its very origin makes me vulnerable. The field of experience is not a mere exhibition of correlates of acts of perception, but a “leeway” for performances of the free flow of lived-bodily movement that perceptual activity presupposes. However, such a “leeway” does not always appear as an “open field” for my freely motivated movement; instead, another original mode of its manifestation is exactly the opposite: resisting my movement, sometimes with harmful consequences. For instance, in the case of pain, what is revealed is a sort of intimate exteriority frustrating the most primitive potentiality of embodied subjectivity—agency over one’s own movement. Pain reveals a potentiality of the lived body that runs counter to this presupposed constitutive sense in normal perception. According to Geniusas, in pain we experience the lived-body’s resistance to its constitutive appropriation. This resistance takes the form of a refusal on the part of the lived-body to be the zero point of orientation, the organ of the will, as well as the expression of the spirit. These three determinations are not just absent during the experience of pain. Rather, it is the “heavy” presence of this threefold privation that makes up the painfulness of pain. Thus the experience of pain is marked by the reversal of these three functions of the body.11

And this is precisely the reason why we need to distinguish between vulnerability and fragility. While damage is something that happens to a system of functions that for any reason stop working as expected or break down, harm is experienced as an unpleasant subjective affection and as the frustration of a primitive practical potentiality interrupting an inner flow of ongoing movement tendencies. In this case, pain does not manifest the body in terms of damage: pain as a localized sensation manifesting a particular area of the lived body is experienced not only as an unpleasant sensation, but as harm to the individual subject, connecting the sensitive affection to other layers of association—which results in the unity of an upper level emotional dimensions we may consider under the spectrum of suffering. In this regard, as Agustín Serrano de Haro has pointed out in his phenomenological analysis of pain, it seems to be clear that pain pulls attention to the part of my body that hurts; in addition, we feel this disturbance of attention in terms of a discontinuity in the flow of a practical direction,12 and such a disturbance affects not only the current practical activity, but the entire field of practical capabilities. However, the decrease in awareness of the environment increases our situational vulnerability because it  Saulius Geniusas, “The Subject of Pain: Husserl’s Discovery of the Lived-Body,” Research in Phenomenology 44, no. 3 (2014): 403, https://doi.org/10.1163/15691640-12341294 11  Ibid. 12  Agustín Serrano de Haro, “Atención y dolor: Análisis fenomenológico,” in Cuerpo vivido, ed. Agustín Serrano de Haro (Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 2010), 124. 10

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affects our sense of control over what we take for granted as the regular normality of the surrounding world. In other words, the sudden affection of pain is experienced as a crisis of experience: it means a partial or even a total destruction of the sense of the normality of the lifeworld.13 Furthermore, pain is never a mere isolated sensation; it is an affection arising in a crisis of experience, since it not only commands our attention regardless of the I’s engagement with the objects relevant to its own projects, but threatens the agency of the I in terms of the crucial dimension of control over one’s own body. Thus vulnerability is the shadow line between a fragile articulation of meaning and the horizons of an experience of the total devastation of sense. Indeed, in the experience of pain, not only is there an associative continuity and delineation of horizons, but it seems to be essential to this experience that there also arises a sense of alienation from myself—a sense that nevertheless comes “from within.” The paradox emerges when I consider the unity of the lived body from the point of view of the potentiality of self-motivated movement. Pain makes the absolute here of my own embodiment coincide with a sort of alienation of my agency over my body. The involuntary trembling of the body in pain has its own direction or tendency of movement, as if the body is paradoxically trying to escape from itself. Thus, vulnerability expresses the constitutive correlation of sense in terms of a subjective fragility with regard to our capabilities of performing the objective constitution of the surrounding world. However, the negative effect of vulnerability is not limited to sheerly objective constitution. Within the sphere of the constitution of values, much of the time I come to realize the relevance of certain values by becoming aware of the possibility of being deprived of capabilities and goods. In many respects, then, the axiological significance of the surrounding world arises from the realization of the horizon of fragility derived from being vulnerable. In this regard vulnerability does not just refer to the horizon of anticipation of harm, but also refers to the horizon of manifestation of a dimension of materiality beyond the expectations and habitualities that support the active syntheses I carry out while I am assuming that I am who I think I am. Somehow in pain I myself become something that undeniably belongs to me, yet at the same time I experience my own body as manifesting a dimension of otherness14; in pain I paradoxically become a stranger for myself precisely because this very possibility—a possibility that lies at the heart of embodiment itself—is the basis of the revelation of my condition as essentially vulnerable.

 Cf. Steinbock, Home and Beyond, 134.  See C. Jason Throop, “Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain,” in Anthropology and Alterity: Responding to the Other, ed. Bernhard Leistle (London: Routledge, 2017), 185–206.

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3  Feeling Vulnerable, Fear, and Harmfulness Given the dynamics involved in the intertwining of perceptual sensibility, feelings, and the kinaesthetic synthesis unifying the continuity of embodiment, we also have a protentional horizon related to bodily movement that allows us to experience the sudden discontinuity of the experience of harm as the frustration of a passive expectation of continuity. However, in the case of vulnerability, we additionally have a sort of affective anticipation of harm, which is not the act of anticipating a full-­ fledged object, as when we wait for the bus at the bus stop, but emerges when a series of events—such as the lights suddenly going out everywhere, accompanied by a loud noise—motivate a state of alertness that prevails for some moments, even when nothing else happens afterward. In this case the emotional disposition is neither of the type of a sensible feeling nor of the type of an actual emotion oriented toward an object, but is the arousal of an affective state of mind lingering for an indeterminate time while nevertheless entailing a certain orientation toward an indeterminate object. The phenomenological tradition refers to this condition under the label of “moods.” The expression Stimmung points at the same time both to embodied ways of “finding oneself in the world” in a kind of attunement and to an emotive background of experience that exhibits the surrounding world as somehow illuminated under an affective light. And within the phenomenological tradition, we have multiple descriptions coinciding in the idea of the formation of an atmosphere or “light”15 as an emotive resonance that involves the lived body itself.16 Even though there is not a univocal meaning for the expression Stimmung in Husserl’s manuscripts,17 some of his descriptions can be understood in terms of the affective unity of the stream of consciousness,18 and even as a form of emotive background of the experience.19 On the other hand, even if moods may not refer to an object that explicitly motivates them, Husserl acknowledges that moods do preserve a sort of  Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924, ed. Henning Peucker, vol. 37 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), 176. See also Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989), 92. See also Moritz Geiger, “Das Bewusstsein von Gefühlen,” in Münchener philosophische Abhandlungen: Theodor Lipps zu seinem sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Alexander Pfänder (Leipzig: Barth, 1911), 138. 16  Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, 326. 17   Antonio Zirión Quijano, “Colorations and Moods in Husserl’s Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (With a Final Hint Towards the Coloring of Life),” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 16 (2018): 41–75. 18  Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. Walter Biemel, vol. 9 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 415. See also Edmund Husserl, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte; Metaphysik; Späte Ethik; Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr, vol. 42 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 427. 19  Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, 327. 15

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intentionality20 that can be systematized in terms of non-thematic forms of intentionality such as horizon-intentionality.21 The first to attempt to work out this possibility was Ludwig Landgrebe in his work The concept of experiencing published after his death.22 Husserl had notice of this early work and disagreed with the attempt of Landgrebe to give moods an “elemental” (primär) role in the constitution of the world as horizon. For Husserl, Landgrebe was following a Heideggerian interpretation of his notion of horizon by making this claim.23 Nevertheless, even in the context of the founded (fundierte) acts, there is a kind of horizon-intentionality involved in the emotive background-­ consciousness present in moods24 and their correlates as founded in primitive acts of representations.25 However, Heidegger’s existential account of Stimmungen reframed the entire understanding of moods in a complete different direction beyond the psychological presuppositions still present in Husserl and other phenomenologists. Even though for Husserl, Stein, and Geiger it is possible to claim that emotional dispositions such as moods project an emotional atmosphere in the surrounding world, such expansion (Ausbreitung) is still a subjectively oriented way in which the environment is exhibited. On the contrary, for Heidegger, “mood has always already disclosed being-in-the-world as a whole and first makes possible directing oneself toward something. Being attuned is not initially related to something psychical, it is itself not an inner condition which then in some mysterious way reaches out and

 Edmund Husserl, Verstand und Gegenstand: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1909–1927), pt. 1 of Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, ed. Ulrich Melle and Thomas Vongehr, vol. 43 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Springer, 2020), 103. 21  This claim is sustained by Nam-In Lee, “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Mood,” in Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl, ed. Natalie Depraz and Dan Zahavi (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), by Ignacio Quepons Ramírez, “Intentionality of Moods and Horizon Consciousness in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in Feeling and Value, Willing and Action: Essays in the Context of a Phenomenological Psychology, ed. Marta Ubiali and Maren Wehrle (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), and by Roberto J. Walton, Intencionalidad y horizonticidad (Cali: Editorial Aula de Humanidades, 2015), 231. For a critical assessment of these appreciations, see Zirión Quijano, “Colorations and Moods.” 22  Ludwig Landgrebe, Der Begriff des Erlebens: Ein Beitrag zur Kritik unseres Selbstverständnisses und zum Problem der seelischen Ganzheit, ed. Karl Novotný (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2010). 23  Edmund Husserl, Die Freiburger Schüler, pt. 4 of Briefwechsel, ed. Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann, vol. 3 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 305–6. 24  Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, 327 and 342–7. See also Rudolf Bernet, “Zur Phänomenologie von Trieb und Lust bei Husserl,” in Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven der Phänomenologie: Neue Felder der Kooperation; Cognitive Science, Neurowissenschaften, Psychologie, Soziologie, Politikwissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft, ed. Dieter Lohmar and Dirk Fonfara (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 49. See also Nam-In Lee, Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), 33–7. 25  Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch; Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann, vol. 3 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 272. 20

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leaves its mark on things and persons.”26 Thus for Heidegger, moods and modes of attunements are constitutive dimensions of human existence and refer to the “there” of being-in-the-world. As Throop points out in this regard, “to be attuned is thus to precisely find oneself already in relation to the world and responsive to it.”27 Additionally, Heidegger’s description of the attunement of fear allows an interesting clarification of the sense of “harmfulness” that is not explored from the perspective of a present or eventual infliction of bodily harm, but from the broader perspective of the ontological possibilities of human existence. Heidegger outlines his description of the phenomenon of fear in three moments: “that before we are afraid”—which is not an object, since it is not given, but refers to that in the face of which we fear; the “fearsome” as such; and “that about which fear is afraid.” However, that in the face of which we fear is characterized as threatening. Thus we fear what we feel as threatening and therefore as harmful or detrimental. Here Heidegger is attempting to describe a more general dimension of fear and threat than what is at stake in our attempt to describe vulnerability, in this case bodily vulnerability as the condition in which we relate to what threatens our bodily integrity. However, Heidegger’s the description of fear allows us to understand vulnerability as a non-ontic dimension of corporeality which is not a thing, but the unity of an ongoing process of formation of sense.28 In this particular case, the harmful has as its target the living body as part of the “definite range of what can be affected by it.”29

26  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 129. I find a detail missing from this passage in both English translations of Sein und Zeit (that of Macquarrie and Robinson, i.e., Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper & Row, 1962], and that of Stambaugh, cited just above). What is left out is a detail that belongs to the verb “abfärben” (which does not of course mean that these translations are wrong); it concerns the root “färben” or coloring in the verb “abfärben,” which in this context may indeed mean “leaving its mark on,” but more literally means “leaving its color on”: “Das Gestimmtsein bezieht sich nicht zunächst auf Seelisches, ist selbst kein Zustand drinnen, der dann auf rätselhafte Weise hinausgelangt und auf die Dinge und Personen abfärbt” (Martin Heidegger, “Sein und Zeit,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 8 [1927]: 137. Also Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, ed. F. W. von Herrmann, vol. 2 of Gesamtausgabe [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977], 182). Heidegger’s use of this expression in this context is significant, since the metaphor of the emotive coloration (Gefühlsfärbung) of things and persons is present in almost all accounts of phenomenological psychologists speaking about moods (including, of course, Husserl). Heidegger seems to be explicitly refering to a specific tradition of psychological accounts of moods that he is leaving behind. In the case of Husserl the expression appears on numerous occasions (see Zirión Quijano, “Colorations and Moods”), but most explicitly with regard to the topic of moods, as in the recently published manuscripts of Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Heidegger reports reading these manuscripts in his letter to Husserl of 22 October 1927 (Husserl, Die Freiburger Schüler, 145). 27  C. Jason Throop, “Being Open to the World,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, no. 1–2 (2018): 202. 28  Elizabeth A. Behnke, “Bodily Protentionality,” Husserl Studies 25, no. 3 (2009): 194. 29  Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Stambaugh, 132.

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It is interesting to consider not only how Heidegger describes the relation between this target and the harmful in terms of proximity and distance, but also how this points to fear: “As it approaches, harmfulness radiates and thus has the character of threatening,” while “the ability to draw near is itself freed by the essential, existential spatiality of Being-in-the-world.”30 Additionally, according to Heidegger, “the about which fear is afraid is the fearful being itself, Da-sein.”31 Here is where vulnerability comes into consideration because it seems that vulnerability not only refers to the potential interruption of an ongoing synthesis of my bodily movement or bodily capabilities, but entails a deeper sense of being exposed to potential affliction of the self in the most concrete sense possible. Again, it is not just that I fail to perform a movement or I am affected in my interaction with others, as if it were just a matter of fragility and damage; vulnerability in this case refers to something to come that threatens what matters most: my own integrity. Similarly, to fear for someone is to understand that given certain circumstances, s/he is vulnerable and his/her integrity under threat is significant for me. During the course of this description of fear, however, Heidegger does not refer to the body, and according to what we indicated above regarding the body and its practices in Landgrebe and Husserl, we may say that the possibility of moving away from what is threatening and the inclination to get closer to what feels comfortable or pleasurable motivates the resulting movement. Heidegger may say that these dispositions are founded and are secondary with regard to the more original display of affective structures involved, but here everything depends on how we are to understand the corporeal dimension of human existence. Heidegger explicitly distances himself from the primacy of sensibility—and especially sentiments—in the context of his own account of attunements, and this explains why he disregards pain or suffering in his broader account of harmfulness. But whether the bodily tendencies are grounded in more original attunements or the attunements themselves are the emotive expressions of syntheses of sense that it is possible to describe in accordance with a reflective account of intentionality, the experience itself of finding oneself faced with the threatening still motivates a question regarding a paradoxical sense of being exposed to what is threatening, one whose field of disclosure is one’s own body. Heidegger explains why the sequences of non-objective relations configure the field of the relation between fear and the threatening in the context of being-in-the-­ world. Fear is the fear of getting stuck “in the middle” of a situation with no room for actualizing the display of other possibilities. The fear is more intense after experiencing something threatening where my control over my own body as a free flow of movement and affective fields has already become beyond me. The body is annulled in its dispositional abilities and the experience of feeling trapped in my own body arises. It is my own body, then, that exposes what I am: namely, something the threat can reach.

30 31

 Ibid.  Ibid.

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After Heidegger, but with a strong influence of Husserl, Ludwig Landgrebe outlined his own description of moods. In contradistinction to Heidegger, Landgrebe explicitly emphasizes the importance of considering the topic within a broader account of sensations and corporeality, closer to the idea of a transcendental constitution of the lifeworld in Husserlian terms.32 Furthermore, one of the most relevant aspects of Landgrebe’s attempt at reconciling Husserl’s descriptions (particularly those produced by Husserl during Landgrebe’s time in Freiburg) with Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit33 is the claim that it is possible to trace the genesis of intentionality back to the lived body’s original capability for self-motivated movement, with the lived body understood as the result of a kinaesthetic and affective synthesis.34 For Landgrebe, the “there” that Heidegger refers to in Sein und Zeit as the original dimension of our being thrown into the world—a dimension revealed through Befindlichkeit—is related to the most original dispositional capabilities (Vermöglichkeiten) of Leiblichkeit. Thus Landgrebe attempts to describe the individuation and facticity of the transcendental I in terms of its relation to its primordial capability: the self-movement of the lived body revealed in an attuned movement. Moreover, according to Landgrebe, the access to the field of sensations is co-­ originary with the constitution of lived corporeality. The lived body is the primordial access to the sensible surrounding world, providing a synthetic schema for the latter correlative to bodily movement.35 In analogy to Husserl in Ideas II, for Landgrebe the lived body is understood as the organ of perception, and it is through the lived body that the world of natural perception acquires its sensible configuration. On the other hand, the body is understood by Landgrebe as a synthetic unity of free and self-motivated movement involving an essential connection between feeling and movement understood as “sensible consciousness of movement” or kinaesthesis. Nevertheless, the central point is that the kinaestheses involve intentional syntheses constituting in one direction the unity of the lived body and in the other direction the field of free movement. Thus, for Landgrebe, the kinaestheses are at the same time sensing and the consciousness of the movement that brings sensing about.36 Moreover, since every sensation is a feeling of oneself through the constitution of the body as the progressive result of a synthesis of kinaesthetic motivation,37 it allows a primordial form of unreflective consciousness related to the practical potentiality “I move,” which is an “I feel my own movement” and within my own  Landgrebe, Faktizität und Individuation, 78. See also Roberto J. Walton, Husserl, mundo, conciencia, y temporalidad (Beunos Aires: Editorial Almagesto, 1993), 107. 33  Roberto J.  Walton, “El lado natural de la subjetividad trascendental,” Revista de la Sociedad Argentina de Filosofía 5, no. 3 (1985): 89. 34  Landgrebe, Faktizität und Individuation, 83. 35  Walton, “El lado natural,” 92. 36  Ludwig Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phänomenologie: Das Problem einer ursprünglichen Erfahrung (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1963), 117. 37  Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, 15. 32

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life is most originally given as the sensible field of manifestation of every sensible being. According to Landgrebe, such “sensibility” is not only a mere sensation of touch, but refers to a wider dimension involving the existential affectivity of Befindlichkeit. Thus in each case, this self-affection of the sensibility manifest in corporeality is always a dynamic structure oriented toward affective impulses of different degrees and complexity, a structure that at the same time lends an affective tonality to every impulse of movement, particularly in the practical sphere. Therefore, according to Landgrebe, the exhibition of sensible qualities such as sounds or colors is grounded in the kinaesthetic field of sensible affection, and in this regard the entire affective field is supported by the constitutive synthesis of the lived body. For Landgrebe, the fundamental structure of Befindlichkeit or attunement is essentially connected to a sensible affectivity. Thus the fundamental contribution of Landgrebe in this regard lies in his description of the spatial field in terms of a practical and pregiven horizon of possibilities constituted in passive synthesis prior to reflection, possibilities that find their articulation in the progressive constitution of the lived body. And it is the form “I move,” as a primordial potentiality taking precedence over all other “I can” potentialities, that allows any possible synthesis of habituality. Thus, the constitution of the surrounding world as a field of significance is the correlate of a progressive synthesis of motivation and dispositional tendencies of movement in different degrees of affective interests, and such movement is genetically prior to the emergence of an “I” who moves: What kind of “knowing” or “being-aware” (Innesein) do we have prior to a developed I-consciousness? This “knowing” is prior to reflection and is one with the performance of the kinaestheses as a satisfied or unsatisfied “body-feeling” (Leibgefühl). To be sure, the term “body-feeling” is not entirely fitting insofar as it means something “inward” where an inwardness that knows itself is not yet given. Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit could more aptly characterize this “being-aware,” since it is not mere “feeling,” but points toward being situated in the middle of that which affects and that toward which kinaesthetic movement is directed. In this sense it is the first opening of the world.38

For Landgrebe, moods are accordingly not subjective affective dispositions, but the expression of the affective practical horizon of the lifeworld grounded in the constitutive dimension of the lived body in movement. Given Landgrebe’s alternative description of moods, we may come back to Heidegger’s famous description of fear as a mode of attunement in order to point out how a phenomenology of the horizons of embodiment that considers Landgrebe’s remarks on dispositional corporeality allows us to have a particular appraisal of Heidegger’s description of fear with regard to “harmfulness” and to our topic of vulnerability. If according to Landgrebe, moods are to be understood as dispositions for performing actions with regard to a determinate way of experiencing the surrounding world, what we have in the condition of vulnerability is exactly the opposite: namely, being deprived of capabilities as being deprived of the very basis for performances. It is important to remark that the sense of fragility that emerges in realizing  Landgrebe, Faktizität und Individuation, 83.

38

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one own vulnerability does not point to a merely accidental circumstance, but to the constitutive contingency that belongs to the materiality of our existence. Following De Warren in this context, we may even suggest that what it at stake in a radical experience of vulnerability such as torture is the fragility of our trust in the world.39 The dimension that emerges in vulnerability is the world as a precarious field of practical potentialities; however, to feel vulnerable is not only to feel oneself under constant threat, but also to experience a decrease of the range of possible actions. It is to feel that our actions fall short with regard our possible aims; it is a constant sense of failing to be able to display our practical capabilities. To feel vulnerable is to experience an imbalance in the immediate expectations that nevertheless persist without finding a determinate resolution, provoking a particular sort of distress and sorrow, one that may linger for a long time as an emotional disposition such as the one described by Emilio Uranga with the Spanish expression “zozobra.” Zozobra, says Uranga, “refers to a mode of being that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects without knowing which one of those to hold onto, to grab as justification, discarding the opposite extreme without mercy.”40 The importance of a phenomenologically oriented reflection in cultural anthropology with regard to the moral dimension of moods is present in the research agenda of scholars like C. Jason Throop, who developed an investigation based on ethnographic research on experiences of affliction. An interesting point from Throop’s investigations is the fact that he emphasizes the moral dimension of moods, which is crucial for understanding how our sense of normativity is rooted in basic emotive experiences, and in this case, the role of vulnerability in these contexts.

  Nicolas de Warren, “Torture and Trust in the World: A Phenomenological Essay,” Phänomenologische Forschungen (2015): 83–99. 40  Emilio Uranga, Análisis del ser del mexicano, y otros escritos sobre la filosofía de lo mexicano (1949–1952), ed. Guillermo Hurtado (Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas Editores, 2013), 105. Emilio Uranga explains that the expression zozobra comes from Latin and in Spanish has the meaning of anxiety, with connotations recalling a boat being on the verge of capsizing. By using this expression to describe a mode of attunement, Uranga aimed to carry out an ontological analysis as an existential hermeneutics of culture based on the circumstances of Mexicans in the middle of the twentieth century; his analysis takes as its leading clue the poetry of López Velarde, in analogy to Heidegger’s own recourse to poetry. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that Uranga’s aim was not to depict Mexicans from a psychological point of view, but to develop an ontology of the human condition taking as its point of departure the self-reflection of a given culture with regard to specific historical conditions—namely, the end of the Mexican Revolution and the project of modernizing a country. In this regard, his point was not to give an account of something like the essence of the Mexicans, but to give an account of the roots of the understanding of what is to be in the historical circumstance of the people of Mexico in those years, in an approach closer to a certain cultural anthropology in contemporary contexts. The social struggles with the different scenarios of violence and insecurity, the lack of definition of a national project, and the failure of the modernization of Mexican democracy already resound in Uranga’s assessment, originally offered almost 70 years ago. 39

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Moral moods are thus embodied responses to the problem of “keeping alive” particularly existentially resonant and yet unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) moral concerns. As such, moods are both potentially context-defined and context-defining affairs. At times outstripping the particularities of a given act, situation, narrative or experience, however, moods have the potential to take a transgression, a moral failing, worry, or assessment into past or future experiences extending well beyond the moment of its occurrence.41

It thereby seems that the emergence of a sense of wrongness—or at least of unfairness regarding the anticipation of harmfulness—belongs to the experience of feeling vulnerable. It is one thing is to accept death as something irrevocable and unavoidable, but it is something else to be thrown into a condition of misery and intolerable violence. To remain worried about the conditions of vulnerability in a given context—for example, the uncertainty regarding the development of the pandemic crisis in social contexts of poverty marginality, and especially regarding the consequences of the inequality of access to health security and the minimal conditions in the hospitals, all the while feeling deeply interconnected in our intercorporeal condition—makes possible a sense of awareness of our shared vulnerability and an assessment of our condition.

4  T  he Fragility of Values: The Positive Valence of Vulnerability According to our preliminary results, consciousness of vulnerability involves an emotional anticipation of harm, accompanied by such emotive dispositions as fear, concern, or anxiety. In the reflective sphere, the consciousness of vulnerability appears as a belief motivated by former experiences of the failure of my practical capabilities to perform actions; of the eventual consequences of such failures; and of the fact of being physically exposed, especially because we expect such failures to lead to external affections. The anticipation of the failure of any possible project is an implicit recognition of the limitations not only of my body, but of my entire life, and this results in a pre-reflective and practical awareness of myself as subject to harm. In this regard, we may raise the question regarding those modes of intentional reference that reveal, through their own horizons, the realm of the worth of our life as a personal and individual life given prior to any theoretical account of ourselves.42 We described vulnerability both in terms of a fundamental experience of our own corporeality in the circumstance of eventually being deprived of the field of practical potentialities and in terms of a field of potential harm beyond our control. However, there is also a normative sense that belongs to vulnerability, a sense  C. Jason Throop, “Moral Moods,” Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2014): 72, https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12039 42  Anthony J.  Steinbock, Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 11–26. 41

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grounded in what Steinbock, following Waldenfels, calls “limit-claims” as a modification of Grenzachtung and Grenzverlezung, since those limits are not respected. It corresponds to vulnerability as the understanding of harm and harmfulness not only as potential damage, but as something that is wrong and unfair. In the context of vulnerability with regard to a scenario of violence, the performance of a violent action toward someone presupposes a claim of limits as an unthematized standard that gives violence its sense as a transgression. As Steinbock remarks, “violence (in Latin, violentia) is literally the violation of limit-claims. The violation of limitclaims can take place in two ways, both of which attempt to make inaccessible accessible.”43 I would add that this is not only a matter of making someone accessible or available for those who impose their will over others violently. As a matter of fact, there are also nonviolent forms of attempting to gain access to what Steinbock calls the inaccessible—for instance, when we aim to honor the trust of others. Nevertheless, we may suggest, also with Steinbock, that this possibility includes how we ourselves become vulnerable before those we trust. In this case the subject agrees to become vulnerable and reveal him/herself before others; in violence this happens precisely the other way around, but under the common presupposition of vulnerability as the opportunity of being harmed. At the end, we may raise the question regarding the positive valence of vulnerability. In the case of Husserl, it is important to mention some aspects of his account of experiencing values. On the one hand, as Roberto Walton has correctly remarked, for Husserl “a value may only affect if it reaches the condition of a motive, and the motive may only promote an inclination if it exercises affective influence. Therefore the openness toward values runs in parallel with the breadth of corporeal affectivity.”44 Affectivity is certainly essential for the disclosure of values. But valuing and value do not necessarily run in parallel; for instance, the temporality of valuing does not necessarily correspond to the temporality of the value, and we may also suggest in this case that the valence of present experiences of affliction may point to positive values that become prominent in their absence. Thus vulnerability opens up the possibility of normative claims with regard to values we are committed to—values that become prominent in the realization of certain eventualities, as is the case with dignity. As Habermas remarks, the claim of human rights, particularly in the case of dignity, becomes prominent in its relevance precisely from considering the need for normative orientation concerning cases of outrageous violations such as torture and other scenarios: The appeal to human rights feeds off the outrage of the humiliated at the violation of their human dignity. If this forms the historical starting point, traces of a conceptual connection between human dignity and human rights should be evident from early on in the development of law itself. Thus we face the question of whether “human dignity” signifies a substantive normative concept from which human rights can be deduced by specifying the conditions under which human dignity is violated.45  Steinbock, Home and Beyond, 250.  Walton, Intencionalidad y horizonticidad, 245. 45  Jürgen Habermas, “The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights,” Metaphilosophy 41, no. 4 (2010): 466. 43 44

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Moreover, for Husserl, values are not only a matter of feeling, since their constitution also involves an axiological commitment that entails acts of will and the configuration of a personal project. “The rational subject does not ‘experience’ the value, but is ‘committed’ to it.”46 Additionally, in particular contexts it is possible to claim that the normative sphere is not necessarily grounded in the positive fulfillment of value-perceptions; instead, the experience itself points toward something to be done in a different way rather than how it is actually given, making room for the possibility of critique: The world that is there is not as it should be; it is this not as nature, but as a spiritual world. As a spiritual world, it is a world “created” by humankind, although a very badly created world. It should also be re-created by humanity: a practical ideal lights up—that of a new, completely norm-conforming spiritual world, which in its future genesis is constantly measured in terms of the normative ideas of all realms of truth.47

However, the centrality of vulnerability in the work of philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas stands out in comparison to other accounts in the phenomenological tradition, especially with regard to the ethical dimension of this experience, including the one we outlined following Husserl’s description of experiencing values. I cannot explore in depth all the details of Levinas’s systematic account of vulnerability in the full context of his claim for reframing the very idea of first philosophy in the direction of ethics. But I can at least point out how a critical comparison of approaches inspired in Husserl, Heidegger, and Landgrebe with the work of Levinas allows us to reconsider the positive valence of vulnerability beyond the detrimental frustration of potencies. First of all, for Levinas, sensibility and its passivity points to a different dimension rather than to its cognitive function in acts of apprehension. By exploring the affective dimension of sensibility in experiences like touch, he suggests that sensibility exhibits a sense of “being exposed” that consists in a radical passivity prior to any egoic activity, a sense that he calls the condition of “having been offered without holding back.” And such a condition is at the core of vulnerability: Sensibility is exposedness to the other. Not the passivity of inertia, a persistence in a state of rest or of movement, the capacity to undergo the cause that would bring it out of that state. Exposure as a sensibility is more passive still; it is like an inversion of the conatus of esse, a having been offered without any holding back, a not finding any protection in any consistency or identity of a state. It is a having been offered without any holding back and not the generosity of offering oneself, which would be an act, and already presupposes the unlimited undergoing of the sensibility. In the having been offered without any holding back the past infinitive form underlines the non-present, the non-commencement, the non-­ initiative of the sensibility. This non-initiative is older than any present, and is not a passivity contemporaneous with and counterpart of an act. It is the hither side of the free and the non-free, the anarchy of the Good. In the having been offered without any holding back, it is as though the sensibility were precisely what all protection and all absence of protection already presuppose: vulnerability itself.48  Husserl, Verstand und Gegenstand, 510.  Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, 318. 48  Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being; or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 75. 46 47

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In contradiction to the phenomenological tradition—including not only Husserl and Heidegger, but also Scheler—Levinas raises the question of a different understanding of affectivity, one that does not involve acts of cognition displaying the structure of empty intentional acts of sense-bestowal and acts of fulfillment, even in the case of revelations of values. If we return to Husserl, vulnerability and being exposed to harm are understood as negative fulfillments of active performances or empty intentional tendencies toward an anticipated content, even in the practical sphere. With Heidegger we already observed an alternative way of understanding this correlation, one that does not presuppose a subject-object–oriented schema but has the structure of a mode of attunement revealing the “there” of our condition of being-in-the-world. According to this Heideggerian approach, such a condition is at the basis of the constitution of the vulnerable body; thus vulnerability is not a merely accidental predicate that depends upon external conditions, but refers to the core of human existence, the Dasein itself, revealed in the mode of attunement of fear and its direction toward the harmful. Levinas insists on the need for a reconsideration of sensibility in order to take into account a sense of exposure that reveals the self and its givenness with regard to “being offered without holding back”; such a condition allows us to point out the centrality of vulnerability in the original access to sense— not as the result of an intersubjective dynamics of accomplishments, as is the case in Husserl, but with regard to something that according to Levinas is more original: alterity. We are vulnerable before others, and this does not necessarily have a negative sense. On the contrary, it is precisely by referring to this original sense of radical passivity that it is possible to overcome the centrality of subjectivity and make room for the dimension of alterity as the space where this sense emerges in an ethical orientation. In a similar context, Anthony Steinbock also remarks on the positive valence of vulnerability in his account of moral emotional dispositions such as trust: it is because of this exposure related to vulnerability that we may be bound to others in contexts of trust.49 As a result of our investigation, then, we have delivered some descriptive accounts from the phenomenological tradition that yield possible explorations of the experience of feeling vulnerable from an experience-oriented perspective. And what lies at the core of the notion of vulnerability is not just the physical dimension related to fragility; from the beginning, our aim has been to point out how bodily vulnerability reveals a dimension of corporeality irreducible to a merely physical or physiological account of experiences of affliction. Additionally, we suggested how emotional modes are projected toward the anticipation of harm beyond the cognitive emphasis on the anticipation of precise manners of eventual damage. What is at stake in vulnerability is something more profound regarding the constitution of human existence, something that is certainly circumstantial and relational.50 Yet this

 Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 207ff.  Elodie Boublil, “The Ethics of Vulnerability and the Phenomenology of Interdependency,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 49, no. 3 (2018): 183–92.

49 50

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does not necessarily mean that it should be considered a sign of weakness or of something accidental or negative. By interrogating the condition of vulnerability, it is possible to understand the roots of our need for an ethical orientation, which—in contradistinction to more formal accounts that presuppose the abstraction of subjective autonomy—allows a consideration closer to the concrete experience of the lifeworld.

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Husserl, E. (1976). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch; Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. In K. Schuhmann (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 3). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1994). Die Freiburger Schüler. Part 4 of Briefwechsel. In K.  Schuhmann & E. Schuhmann (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente (Vol. 3). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (2004). Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924. In H.  Peucker (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 37). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (2014). Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte; Metaphysik; Späte Ethik; Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937). In R.  Sowa & T. Vongehr (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 42). Springer. Husserl, E. (2020). Verstand und Gegenstand: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1909–1927). Part 1 of Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. In U. Melle & T. Vongehr (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 43). Springer. Landgrebe, L. (1963). Der Weg der Phänomenologie: Das Problem einer ursprünglichen Erfahrung. Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn. Landgrebe, L. (1977). Das Problem der Teleologie und der Leiblichkeit in der Phänomenologie und im Marxismus. In B. Waldenfels, J. M. Broekman, & A. Pažanin (Eds.), Phänomenologie und Marxismus, vol. 1, Konzepte und Methoden (pp. 71–104). Suhrkamp. Landgrebe, L. (1982). Faktizität und Individuation: Studien zu den Grundfragen der Phänomenologie. Felix Meiner. Landgrebe, L. (2010). Der Begriff des Erlebens: Ein Beitrag zur Kritik unseres Selbstverständnisses und zum Problem der seelischen Ganzheit (K. Novotný, Ed.). Königshausen und Neumann. Lee, N.-I. (1993). Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Lee, N.-I. (1998). Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of mood. In N.  Depraz & D.  Zahavi (Eds.), Alterity and facticity: New perspectives on Husserl (pp. 103–120). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than being; or, beyond essence (A.  Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press. Melle, U. (2012). Husserls deskriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse. In R. Breeur & U. Melle (Eds.), Life, subjectivity & art: Essays in honor of Rudolf Bernet (pp. 51–99). Springer. Quepons Ramírez, I. (2015). Intentionality of moods and horizon consciousness in Husserl’s phenomenology. In M. Ubiali & M. Wehrle (Eds.), Feeling and value, willing and action: Essays in the context of a phenomenological psychology (pp. 93–103). Springer. Rogers, A.  C. (1997). Vulnerability, health and health care. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 26(1), 65–72. Stein, Edith. (1989). On the problem of empathy (W. Stein, Trans.). ICS Publications. Steinbock, A.  J. (1995). Home and beyond: Generative phenomenology after Husserl. Northwestern University Press. Steinbock, A.  J. (2014). Moral emotions: Reclaiming the evidence of the heart. Northwestern University Press. Svenaeus, F. (2014). The phenomenology of suffering in medicine and bioethics. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 35, 407–420. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-­014-­9315-­3 Throop, C. J. (2014). Moral moods. Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 42(1), 65–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12039 Throop, C. J. (2017). Pain and otherness, the otherness of pain. In B. Leistle (Ed.), Anthropology and alterity: Responding to the other (pp. 185–206). Routledge. Throop, C. J. (2018). Being open to the world. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 8(1–2), 197–210. Uranga, E. (2013). Análisis del ser del mexicano, y otros escritos sobre la filosofía de lo mexicano (1949–1952) (G. Hurtado, Ed.). Bonilla Artigas Editores.

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Walton, R.  J. (1985). El lado natural de la subjetividad trascendental. Revista de la Sociedad Argentina de Filosofía, 5(3), 89–108. Walton, R. J. (1993). Husserl, mundo, conciencia, y temporalidad. Editorial Almagesto. Walton, R. J. (2014). Facetas de la coporalidad en la ética husserliana. Eidos: Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad del Norte, 21, 237–259. Walton, R. J. (2015). Intencionalidad y horizonticidad. Editorial Aula de Humanidades. Zirión Quijano, A. (2018). Colorations and moods in Husserl’s Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (With a final hint towards the coloring of life). In The new yearbook for phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy (Vol. 16, pp. 41–75). Routledge.

Chapter 7

Measuring the Cardiac Lived Bodily Rhythms of the Heart of the Praying Person: An ‘Irréalisable’? Natalie Depraz

The difficulty lies in taking into account the differences of level between the joy of a ‘peaceful soul’, the ‘tormented’, passionate joy, the overflowing joy and the surprise of joy. The heart stands still and a great wave of bliss flows into the wide open heart, then there is panic or painful joy, the heart threatens to explode with joy, and there is a uniform love, without passion. (My translation. E. Husserl, Studien zur Struktur des Bewußtseins. Teilband II Gefühl und Wert. Texte aus dem Nachlaß (1996–1925), Hua XLIII/2, hrsg. U. Melle & Th. Vongehr, Heidelberg, Springer, 2020, chapitre VI “La conscience affective—conscience des sentiments, le sentiment comme acte et comme état,” §5, p. 176: “Die Schwierigkeit ist es, der Schicht gerecht zu werden, in der die Unterschiede der „still beseligten,” der « stürmischen,” leidenschaftlichen Freude, der Freudenüberwältigung und –überraschung—das Herz steht still und eine große Woge der Seligkeit strömt in das weitgeöffnete Herz hinein, dann Aufregung oder Freudenschmerz, Herz droht zu zerspringen vor Freude— der ausgeglichenen sonstigen Liebe ohne Leidenschaft usw. .” French translation in preparation with Vrin, Paris, under the title: E. Husserl, Phénoménologie des émotions, by N. Depraz and M. Gyemant: “La difficulté consiste à tenir compte des différences de niveau entre la joie éprouvée avec une ‘tranquillité d’âme’, la joie ‘tourmentée’, passionnée, le débordement de joie et la surprise de la joie. Le cœur se tient tranquille et une grande vague de félicité afflue dans le cœur grand ouvert, puis il y a affolement ou joie douloureuse, le cœur menace d’exploser de joie et il y a amour uniforme, sans passion.”)

N. Depraz (*) University of Rouen, Rouen, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_7

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N. Depraz — Monkey, what have you understood from your work here?—My body is my house, my heart is my garden. I keep cleaning the first one for the second one to blosson. (L’épopée du Roi Singe, racontée par P. Fauliot Paris, Castermann, 2012, p. 37: “—Singe, qu’as-tu compris de ton travail ici ?—Mon corps est ma maison, mon cœur est mon jardin. Je ne cesse de balayer l’un pour que l’autre fleurisse. ” (My translation into english.) From a classic chinese epic which appeared as an oral tradition during the 12th century.)

1  Introduction I chose to mention these two small quotations at the beginning of the present contribution in order, as it were, to settle the framework and the scope of my inquiry. First, Husserl’s quotation is probably a quasi-apex in his whole work, here drawn from the recently published Studien zur Struktur des Bewußtseins; it is as precious as it is seldom, and is said to be Husserl’s early phenomenology of emotions. This passage, which is quite rich, and which would require an entire contribution for elaboration, magnificently describes the heart as an open center from the inside, permeated by the dynamics of its inner explosion and producing many emotions— here particularly fine nuances of joy, to the point of the spiritual antinomy of the “painful joy,” so well described for example by hesychast monks such as Diadochos of Photiki in the fifth century of the Christian era.1 Second, the fleeting dialogue between the monkey and his master or spiritual elder in this well-known Chinese epic of the monkey-king from the twelfth century, also a children’s book, interestingly compares the body with the house, and the heart with the garden. In fact, it soberly presents a dynamic analogy according to which my heart is to my body what my garden is to my house, and also shows how the heart is in fact the very fructification of the body. More specifically, cleaning my body (also understood as the earth you plow) allows for the flowering (understand: the growth) of the heart. On the edge of my presentation, these two quotations offer, to my mind, quite dense, deep and intense indications of the dynamic and fruitful interactions between the heart, the emotions and the body, and thus nicely sketches the preliminary perimeter of my inquiry. 1  Diadochos of Photiki, Œuvres spirituelles, Paris, Cerf, SC n° 5, 1943, réimpr. avec add., 1997 (n°5bis), dernière édition 2011, édition et Introduction très fournie pp.  9–83 par E. des Places; Myrrha Lot-Borodine, “Mystère du ‘don des larmes’ dans l’Orient chrétien,” in: La douloureuse joie. Aperçus sur la prière personnelle de l’Orient chrétien, Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1993, p. 162 sq. We have no reference to Diadochos and more generally to the hesychasts in Husserl, but it is intriguing to read in this heart-manuscript the very expression used by hesychasts to describe the antinomic (joyful-painful) dynamics of the struggle in spiritual life and quest for plenitude in the union with God. About such emotional antinomies, see N. Depraz, “La place de la surprise dans les émotions antinomiques: Effroi du beau, sobre ivresse, douloureuse joie” in: Phénoménologie des émotions, N. Depraz & M. Gyemant eds., Paris, Hermann, 2023.

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2  T  he Heart: A Twofold Cardial Unity as a Theme for a Research Program The heart is a twofold human reality and experience. It is at one and at the same time an organ, a muscle, the central pump meant to irrigate my whole body including my brain through the circulation of blood, and the seat or locus of my feelings and emotions. As early as 1628, in his Latin book De Motu Cordis (On the Motion of the Heart), the quite well-known english medical doctor William Harvey,2 who discovered and demonstrated the blood circulation in the body, stressed how it is our emotions that produce crucial effects on our heart as an organ; in a similar move 20 years later, 1649, the French philosopher René Descartes, in his Traité des passions de l’âme (The Passions of the Soul),3 described in turn the peculiar psychosomatic dynamics of passions: my desire for another person for example, or my striving for eating the chocolate cake I see at the bakery near my house, shakes my heart; that is, it spontaneously generates an acceleration and often a disregulation of my cardiac rhythm. In other words, both Harvey and Descartes suggest that my lived emotional experiences have an effect on my physical cardiac movements rather than the reverse. It is only with the French physiologist and medical doctor Claude Bernard in his Etude sur la physiologie du cœur, 1865, that feelings and emotions, on the one hand, and spontaneous automatic cardiac motions, on the other, are presented as parallel and co-incidental: The feelings that I have are always accompagnied by reflex actions of the heart…4

The scientific standard of the psychophysiology of the heart tends today to adopt Claude Bernard’s view, while observing and claiming the parallel existence of our heartbeat rhythm and of our emotional movements.

2  W. Harvey, De Motu Cordis, trad. du latin par Charles Richet (1869), De motu cordis (de la circulation du sang), Paris, Christian Bourgeois, coll. “Epistémè Classiques,” 1990. 3  R. Descartes, Les passions de l’âme, in Œuvres philosophiques III, Paris, Garnier, 1973, english translation The Passions of the Soul, trans. S. H. Voss, Hackett Publications, 1989. 4  I translate. In French: “Les sentiments que nous éprouvons sont toujours accompagnés par des actions réflexes du cœur…” in: Cl. Bernard, Etude sur la physiologie du cœur, Revue des Deux Mondes, 35ème année, 2ème période, tome 56, 1865, pp. 236–252, here p. 250. https://fr.wikisource. org/wiki/%C3%89tude_sur_la_physiologie_du_c%C5%93ur Et, plus largement: “Pour le physiologiste, le cœur est l’organe central de la circulation du sang, et à ce titre c’est un organe essentiel à la vie; mais par un privilège singulier, qui ne s’est vu pour aucun autre appareil organique, le mot cœur est passé, comme les idées que l’on s’est faites de ses fonctions, dans le langage du physiologiste, dans le langage du poète, du romancier et de l’homme du monde, avec des acceptions fort différentes. Le cœur ne serait pas seulement un moteur vital qui pousse le liquide sanguin dans toutes les parties de notre corps qu’il anime; le cœur serait aussi le siège et l’emblème des sentiments les plus nobles et les plus tendres de notre âme. L’étude du cœur humain ne serait pas uniquement le partage de l’anatomiste et du physiologiste; cette étude devrait aussi servir de base à toutes les conceptions du philosophe, à toutes les inspirations du poète et de l’artiste.” (op. cit., p. 236.)

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In this presentation, I would like to show the relevance of a co-generative model of emotional movements and heartbeat rhythms. Actually, such a co-generation is more than only testifying to the parallel coexistence of both as Claude Bernard as a pionneer and most contemporary scientific studies now contend.5 It claims that emotional movements on the one hand, and heartbeat rhythms on the other, are mutually effective and co-generate a more complex organic-emotional experience, irreducible only to the one or to the other. I already began to demonstrate such a complex generative contention along the Emphiline Reseach Program I directed, which was focussed on surprise as a twofold organic and lived experience of startle and amazement.6 Surprise indeed is primarily observable while focussing on the heart-level, both cardiac and affective: “cardial” as I call it. This echoes the Latin and French word “cordial,” which includes in its etymology cors, cordis, the heart, so as to show through this unique word “cardial,” the one and unique reality of the organic-affective fold of the heart.7 In order to show and demonstrate further the relevance of this co-generative model of the heart I christened a “cardiophenomenology.” I would like now to tackle the challenging issue of the relevance and of the possibility of the third-person measurement of the heartbeat rhythms of emotional movements during our (and especially my) praying lived experience. Before I begin, I wish to say that at this stage, this is not a fullfledged research program, even if I intend very much to develop it on the basis of the present initial framework. These are rather first hints, questions, and possible hypotheses of how possibly to begin to frame and to settle the possibility of such a research program. So, first I will present some key notions and experiences that I was able to collect when carefully studying and analyzing the self-descriptions of the prayer of the heart in the way that the eastern Greek hesychast monks recorded them for centuries.8 I will examine to what extent these first-person testimonies may serve as preliminary fruitful materials and serve as a basis for a more thorough microphenomenological inquiry of the first-person emotional movements of the person during the prayer of the heart. Second, I will summarize some of the main descriptive and epistemological results of the Emphiline Research program on 5  A. D. Craig, “How do you feel—now? The anterior insula and human awareness,” https://www. nature.com/nrn volume 10, 2009, pp. 9–70, and Babo-Rebelo, M. C., Richter, G., & Tallon-Baudry, C. (2016). Neural responses to heartbeats in the default network encode the self in spontaneous thoughts. The Journal of Neuroscience, 36(30), 7829–7840 782. 6   N.  Depraz, Th. Desmidt, “Cardiophenomenology: a refinement of neurphenomenology,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (3), pp. 493–507 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11097-018-9590-y 7  N. Depraz, La surprise du sujet. Un sujet cardial, Bucharest, Zeta Books, 2018. 8  N. Depraz, Le corps glorieux. Phénoménologie pratique de la prière du cœur des pères du désert et des pères de l’Eglise, Bruxelles, Peeters, Bibliothèque de philosophie, 2008; see also “Pratiquer la réduction: la prière du cœur” in: Laval théologique et philosophique, Vol. 59, n°3, octobre 2003, pp.503–519, in a reworked version in Alter n°11, Paris, 2003, and: “Le corps de gloire. Phénoménologie et religion: une méthode non-dualiste” in: Klarheit in Religionsdingen (W. Deppert & M. Rahnfeld Hrsg.), Leipziger Universitâtsverlag, Leipzig, Grundlagenprobleme unserer Zeit, Bd. III, pp. 43–73.

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surprise, emotions, and depression in order to check what may be of use, and also possibly transposable for the present research.9 Third, I will present a recent research program dealing with the observation and measurement of the specific attentional rhythms and variations occurring for buddhist monks and secular practitionners during seated meditation, and I will ask whether such an epistemological framework can be of interest and relevant to a comparative inquiry for my research. Finally, I will ask some questions about the goal and the problems raised by such an attempt to integrate these different levels of experience such as first- and third-­ person ones for a better, that is, a more refined understanding of what is going on for the person during the experience of the prayer of the heart.

3  T  he Self-Descriptions10 of the Prayer of the Heart by Hesychast Monks: With What Kind of First-Person Experience of the Prayer of the Heart Do We Have to Do? Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, poor sinner!

Here is the simplest formulation of the prayer of the heart, which is also named the “Jesus prayer” because of its beginning: “Lord Jesus Christ…”. This is quite a sober praying practice, and it aims at a union with God beyond images, concepts, and language. It exemplarily traces back to the experience and writings of the Greek Orthodox monks Evagrius of Pontus (345–399) in his referential book The Praktikos Chapters on Prayer,11 and Diadochos of Photiki (c. 450), who appears to be the first one to mention the prayer of the heart as the concrete quest for union with God.12 Later on Greek monks developped and commented on this practice, such as Maximus Confessor in the seventh century13 and Symeon the New Theologian in 9  ANR EMCO Emphiline (Archives-Husserl) (2012–2015) Research progamm: “La surprise au sein de la spontanéité des émotions: un vecteur de cognition élargie” (Archives-Husserl/ENS/ CNRS): “The surprise at the core of the spontaneity of emotions: a vector of enlarged cognition”: http://www.umr8547.ens.fr/spip.php?rubrique159 Bilan déposé sur Hal Normandie au lien suivant: https://hal-normandie-univ.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02120313 10  I borrow this expression of “self-description” from Karl Jasper, Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913), Berlin-Heidelberg, Springer, 1996, englisch translation: General Psychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and M. W. Hamilton, JHUP, 1997. 11  Evagrius of Pontus, The Praktikos Chapters on Prayer, Cistercian Publications, Liturgical Press, Minnesota, 1972, et more recently, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, R. E. Sinkewicz, Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199259939.001.0001 12  Diadochos of Photiki, Œuvres spirituelles, op.  cit. About Diadochos, see for example my “Diadoque de Photicé (Διάδοχος Φωτικής): L’invocation continue du nom de Jésus au prisme de la grâce “Journée d’études: « La prière en partage: une rencontre empirique de l’anthropologie et de la phénoménologie,” Symposium, vendredi 27 novembre 2020, Faculté de théologie de Genève, org. Chloé Mathys, to be published. 13  Maximus Confessor, Selected Writings, Paulist Press International, U.S., 1985.

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the tenth and eleventh centuries.14 This is actually an ongoing praying tradition that runs through the centuries and spreads out in multifarious countries. It was eventually collected in the writings as a textbook, The Philokalia, edited by Nicodemus the Hagiorite.15 It also became popular in Russia in the nineteenth century with the Pilgrim’s Tale.16 It is still very much practiced today in monasteries all over the world, both Orthodox and Catholic, but also in parishes and at home by secular Christians. The peculiarity of the prayer of the heart is its continuous repetition of Jesus’ name, as a verbal and then gradually as a silent support for inner stability of the body-soul. This bodily-psychic grounding being is in turn an experiential condition for a gradual move of possible becoming one with God. The persons who practice such a type of prayer are called “hesychasts,” from the greek term ἡσυχία (hesychia), which means “peace,” “inner appeasement.” According to the multifarious testimonies of the hesychast monks, this state of advanced peace is eventually obtained through a cultivated repetition of Jesus’ name. Cultivation or exercize (ἄσκησις) is therefore the root-process of “asceticism.” It is not meant—not necessarily—as a severe deprivation of life pleasures as it is understood in its common-­ sense meaning. More precisely, it refers to a concrete open attention to clear out my thoughts as so many diverting and temptings thoughts. Now, such an attentional thoughts-clearing out process is achieved, thanks to the verbal and inner concrete repeated invocation of Jesus’ name, as the already mentioned formula testifies: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, poor sinner!” Here thoughts are equivalent to passions (πάθηματα: pathemata), that is, emotional movements (like anger, fear, sadness, pride, desire or greed, just to name a few), insofar as they produce in my mind a tension and a general tendency to be locked up in my own egoic mind and in my self-will. In that respect, they need to be set aside: while converting into obsessions, they produce distractions in the praying person. They therefore generate oblivion, forgetfulness of the central axis of her genuine spiritual life, which is union with God. However, thanks to a continuous cultivated attention understood as vigilance (nepsis), this open attention (προσοχή) to my wording of the prayer as synchronized with my breathing rhythm, I may manage to put aside passionate thoughts which lock me up in my egoic mental space, therefore opening up the inner open space of my heart. More precisely, as it is stressed in the psychosomatic developments of the prayer of the heart, the more and more conscious synchronisation of the words with the breath and heartbeat may intensify the regularity and stability of the whole person as she gets more and more anchored in her heart-center. Furthermore, as it is commonly said, the long-term effect of such a synchronisation may help the mind going down into the heart and opening it inwardly.  Symeon the new theologian, The Discourses, Paulist Press International, U.S., Paper back, 1980.  St. Nikodimus the Hagiorite, The Philokalia. The Complete Text. Compiled by St. Nikodimos of th Holy Mountain and St. Makarious of Corinth, translated from the greek by G. E. H. Palmer, Ph. Sherrad and K. Ware, Faber and Faber, 1983. 16  The Pilgrim’s Tale, Paulist Press International, U.S., 2000. 14 15

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Emotional movements however are not as such mis-oriented passions. In an exemplary way, if it is God-directed, desire and eros may be well-oriented. If on the contrary it is self-oriented, then it ends up into philautia (φιλαυτία), that is, self-­ love or egotism; if it is God-oriented, it opens up into compassion, which places the love for the other (even for the ennemy) before the love for myself.17 Clearly the prayer of the heart is a practice which offers beneficial ressources for the praying person. In that respect, the reading of the self-descriptions to be found in the Philokalia text-book or in The way of the Pilgrim are a precious help for entering into the first-person lived experience of the monks as heart-prayers. As a reader namely, I experience while reading—in a second-person manner—the very experiential texture and dynamics of the attentional and emotional movements occuring during the praying experience and described by the monks. I may also experience the diving of the mind-concentration into the heart-opening, and I may start synchronizing in turn my breathing and my wording of the prayer. While relying on these fine and subtle self-descriptions, which detail the different micro-­ processes of diversion and reorientation of the flow of my thoughts, I may enter more deeply and more consciously into my own praying inner space. I may start to self-explicitate it for myself or be helped to do so through a microphenomenological interview. I thus may be able to describe further and in a more refined and conscious way some of the most salient micro-moments of it. For example, while reading Hechysius of Batos’ description of the way his mind is being captured by the thought of the carnal desire for a woman while he pledges allegance to God and chastity,18 I become aware—through an imaginative transposition of his experience to mine19—of the moment when I am caught in thoughts directed to a beloved person I would so much like to be with while I know she now lives with somebody else, and I then stop being careful of my wording of the prayer: in short, the emergence of this thought which creates a distraction. Or while reading Diadochos’ chapters, where he names the feeling of being one with God as a lived bodily psychic and spiritual plenitude (πληροφορία),20 I feel in my lungs while beathing a greater fluidity and expansion and at times an inner heat in my heart. So here is the virtue of what I call an “experiential reading.” This reading does not trigger an intellectual understanding while only looking for concepts and

 For a more extensive presentation and analysis of the prayer of the heart from a phenomenological approach, see my Le corps glorieux. Phénoménologie pratique de la Philocalie des Pères du désert et des Pères de l’Eglise, op. cit. 18  Hechychius of Batos, in: St. Nikodimus the Hagiorite, The Philokalia. The Complete Text. Compiled by St. Nikodimos of th Holy Mountain and St. Makarious of Corinth, translated from the greek by G. E. H. Palmer, Ph. Sherrad and K. Ware, Faber and Faber, 1983. 19  Such an imaginative transposition from myself to the other or vice-versa is a central phase of the description of empathy in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity. About the description of this imaginative dynamics between the self and the other, which Husserl names Hineinphantasierent, see my Transcendance et incarnation. L’altérité à soi chez Husserl, Paris, Vrin, 1995. 20  Diadochos of Photiki, Œuvres spirituelles, op. cit. 17

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demonstrations, but directly speaks to the heart and the body while inviting me sensorily and intuitively to enter into the experience that is described in the text.21

4  S  ome Results of the Emphiline Research Program on Surprise, Depression and Emotions Now I would like, as a second step, to present some of the results of the cardiophenomenological model that I am proposing. It was built, tested, and put to work in the framework of the ANR Emco-Emphiline Research Program I conducted in Paris at the Husserl-Archives (ENS) during three years between 2012 and 2015. This research program is multifaceted. Due to its pluridisciplinary scope, it has philosophical, epistemological, and psychopathological implications. On the philosophical level stricto sensu, the program aims at thematizing surprise as a virgin experience in the history of philosophy and it proposes to read philosophy anew at the prism of the experience and of the notion of surprise; on the psychopathological level, it suggests understanding depression as a surprise disorder, more precisely: it firstly hypothetizes that depression as a tendency to melancholic states refers to a hypo-reactivity to surprise, but it finally ends up showing how anxious depressions also create surprise disorders and generate emotional hyper-reactivity22; on the epistemological level, which is the one I am focussing on for the present contribution, its main goal is to refine the neurophenomenological model created by the neurobiologist Francisco Varela about perception and time, while transposing it to the experience, description, and analysis of the emotional lived body. With surprise as a key twofold everyday experience, both physiological organic and lived emotional, I conducted 42 microphenomenological interviews focussed on twofold moments of startle-amazement. Then we synchronized the lived experience of these moments with the recording of the physiological variations of the heartbeat rhythm during this lived present moment. It means that, with the inspiration of Husserl’s understanding of the lived present as a dynamic extended present in mind, I understood the very instant of startle-amazement (impression, crisis) as inherently containing the preceding microphase of awaiting-protention and the succeding micro-phase of retention-aftermath. As a result, on the basis of these 42 testimonies and recordings, we were able to synchronize the microdynamics of the heart-movements, both physiologically in its heartbeat rhythm and emotionally as a  About the experiential reading as different from an intellectual conceptual reading, see my Lire Husserl en phénoménologue: les Idées directrices…I, Paris, P.U.F.-CNED, 2008, and N. Depraz, “Consciousness and First-Person Phenomenology: First steps towards an Experiential Phenomenological Writing and Reading (EWR), Sangeetha Menon, Anindya Sinha & B. V. Sreekantan eds., Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Consciousness and the Self, Heidelberg, Springer, 2014 (NIAS Conference in Bangalore, India, January 2012). 22  N.  Depraz, M.  Gyemant, T.  Desmidt, “Dépression et vulnérabilité. Esquisse micro-phénoménologique,” Colloque de l’AEPP, novembre 2018, édition Michèle Gennart, in press. 21

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lived experience, and we produced fine results about the emotional heart-laden lived experience of surprise. Indeed, the synchronization of both third-person and first-person dynamics of the heart-experience provides a crucial and precious refined understanding of the different aspects of the rhythmic experience of the heart. First, we could confirm that its movements of deceleration/slowing down and acceleration/increasing precisely relate to attentional cognitive processes or emotional disrupting peaks, respectively. Second, some disregulations and even chaotic breakings out often relate to what we called either mixed cognitive emotions like perplexity, curiosity, or ambivalent feelings mixing pain and joy, rejoycing and jealousy, or again guilt and denial. To give a few examples, what we observed in a recurrent way in the first anticipation phase is the synchronicity of an experience of anxiety (or even anguish) and of increasing heartbeats while awaiting the surprising image of a violent wound. Or, conversely, with some other persons, a move of appeasement-relaxation (with persons for example trained with the use of yoga-technics) while awaiting, which was readable at the physiological level as a slowing down of the heartbeat rhythm. In the third aftermath phase, we observed that the emotion of anxiety may carry on as a kind of chronizised emotion and correspond to disregulations of the heart rhythms; or conversely, some cases of perplexity prove associated with non-linear micro-successions of accelerations and decelerations at the physiological level. Actually, the disregulation of the heart rhythm alone does not allow, here, the interpretation of the kind of emotion associated with it. So the description and analysis of microphenomenological interviews prove to be crucial in order to provide us with the valence of emotion (here negative with anxiety or positive with perplexity) and also, still more concretely, with the singular emotional content. We observe a similar enrichment of the physiological dynamics through the first-­ person description of emotions during the second phase of crisis. For example, at the very moment of the appearing of an erotic image, the mention of a painful joy relates to a heightened heart-acceleration. But a similar heightened heart-­acceleration may also refer to an emotion of extreme disgust or again of high elation. So we obtained either congruent results between first- and third-person analysis, the latter physiological dynamics bringing an objective confirmation of lived experiences; or the first-person descriptions enrich and provide finer meaning and understanding to physiological dynamics that by themselves remain insufficiently interpretable. It would be quite interesting to rely on these first analyses of the twofold first-­ third person experience of the heart in order to examine more closely what is going on in the lived experience we have while praying. At this stage of research, which still remains preliminary, I only have questions and hypotheses. I am therefore quite open to suggestions and ideas. Here are some of the questions that come to my mind as a direct transposition of some results of the Emphiline Research Program: is the continuous repetition of Jesus’ name self-generating of such an emotional appeasement that it synchronizes with a strong deceleration of my heartbeat rhythm, but also with its notable

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regularity? Are there levels and degrees of appeasement and regularities that could be identified, according to the depth and intensity of the immersion of the praying person into the core-opening of her union with God (also with her long-term practice)? Another group of heuristic questions are more directly linked to my ongoing research investigations dealing with chronic pathologies.23 During this research I observed for example that chronic stabilized schizophrenic patients, who no longer have critical paranoiac episodes, often dive into the vegetative state with highly diminished (e.g. cardiac) reactions of surprise (as we already mentioned, besides, with respect to depressed melancholic patients). Now, we know that a entirely flat electrocardiogramm refers to the death-state of the person. It means that life is associated with necessary variations and variabilities of the heartbeat rhythm. Then the question would be: the following to what extent do the massive regulation of the heart-variations go hand in hand with a stable and stabilized life? In other terms: is a stabilized life deprived of any intense emotional movements? If emotional intensity is a criterion of genuine vitality, how could a “one-in-God” life be a-pathetic, un-emotional, echoing the Greek απάθεια, understood for example by Evagrius as the accomplishment of the spiritual path,24 since it also ends up being physiologically identified as a heartdeath? Actually, these questions are hypotheses for a future research program inquiring into the interest and fruitfulness of measuring heartbeats for a refined self-­ understanding of what is going on in me when practicing the prayer of the heart.

5  M  easuring the Attentional Moves of Buddhist Monks: Some Recent Thrusts As a third step, I would like to bring another pionneering epistemological thrust into this still germinal research. I will account now for some hypotheses and preliminary results provided by the French neuroscientific team led par Antoine Lutz and his team at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research Center. As a long-term  See on this matter the Research Program Adochroniq (2014–2016): “Les adolescents face à la maladie chronique. Philosophie et médecine” (ERIAC/GRR Normandie), and 2016–2019: http:// eriac.univ-rouen.fr/ecole-rouennaise-de-phenomenologie/adochroniq-les-adolescent-e-s-face-ala-maladie-chronique-a-la-croisee-de-la-philosophie-phenomenologie-de-la-medecine-et-des-sciences-de-leducation/ and: http://eriac.univ-rouen.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ Adochroniq-GRR-Bilan2.pdfand, and the forthcoming book: La chronicité. Aspects théoriques et pratiques dans les maladies chroniques (diabète, anorexie, schizophrénie) chez des adolescents, edited by Natalie Depraz, Martine Janner Raimondi, Pierre Legrand, Frédéric Mauriac with de Boeck (submitted in July 2021). 24  Evagrius of Pontus, The Praktikos Chapters on Prayer, Cistercian Publications, Liturgical Press, Minnesota, 1972, et more recently, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, R. E. Sinkewicz, Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199259939.001.0001 23

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investigation, this team is interested in attention regulation and monitoring in meditation, and was able to examine how mental training enhances attentional stability.25 Meditation (here Buddhist meditation) is basically characterized as a practice of calming down one’s mind while observing the flow of my thoughts, and one-pointed experience (as in the shamatha practice) through attentional and emotional regulatory training processes.26 Therefore it may seem fruitful to check to what extent meditators (monks but also secular practitionners) who testify about their practice of sustained attention and thus calming down movements may be observed and recorded. And also how their first-person description may eventually be confirmed through third-person experimental protocols, while the recorded third-person dynamics might be enriched by the experiential attentional and emotional content of the first-person testimonies. Antoine Lutz’ team pursues the one-sided goal of confirming first-person descriptions through third-person neural recordings. It is a modest goal, since it does not involve leading microphenomenological first-person interviews with meditators in order to invite them to describe in a deeper and refined way the micro-time sequences and the synchronic emotional volume (either diffusive or focused) of their attentional support and regulation. In that respect, Antoine Lutz’ research, although it includes the spontaneous first-person lived experience of the meditators in the broad sense of the term, makes use of it as such without further refined first-person exploration.27 In a sense, it instrumentalizes the lived meditative experience in order to show the relevance of the scientific objectifying confirming goal. As such, it makes the lived experience of meditators onesidedly dependent for its validity and truth on the so-called objectivity of experimental results, even though it plays an important part in making meditation a valid experience in the eyes of the contemporary scientific community, and more broadly of our highly scientifically modelled societies. With these limitations in mind, such scientific research however appears to me to be a useful and fruitful thrust. Indeed it brings to light the importance today, for our modern epistocratic societies, of combining and mutually generating meditative

 Antoine Lutz, Heleen A. Slagted Richard J. Davidson, “Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation,” in: Trends in Cognitive Science, 2008, Apr; 12(4): 163–169. 26  About shamatha training and emotional tonglen training, see Ch. Trungpa’s Path of ShamathaVipashyana, Seminar at Naropa Institute, 1974, RimeShedra. NYC; Ch. Trungpa, Training the mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Shambhala, 20,005. See also more recently, A. B. Wallace, Stilling the Mind: Shamatha Teachings from Dudjom Lingpa’s Vajra Essence, Wisdom Publications, 2011. 27  In a sense, this research is in line with F. Varela’s neurophenomenological research program, which seeks to co-generate third person neuro-dynamic results and first person phenomenological Husserlian descriptions, without, though, putting to work genuine first person explicitation microphenomenological descriptions. See F.  J. Varela, “Neurophenomenology: A remedy to the hard problem,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, (4):330–49, 1996. A. Lutz’ research does not appeal to Husserl descriptions but to the long-term personal experience of meditators, without inviting them either to explicitate their own meditative experience thanks to the tool of microphenomenology. 25

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contemplative states and processes—here for my purpose, contemplative praying states and processes—with the third-person observation of attentional and emotional regulations. What remains open at this stage is the use of refined self-descriptions provided by microphenomenological interviews for a deeper and more detailed exploration of contemplative experiences. And what remains here also obviously missing in the scientific exploration of this meditative Buddhist experience and analysis is the heart as the springing source of emotions. In this regard, it would be interesting— even though it exceeds the scope of my article, and also of the present research project (but as an invitation to the scientific community)—to inquire further about the key-role of compassion in the Mahayana Buddhism as a deeply rooted emotional attitude originarily directed toward others, so deeply rooted that it is anchored beneath the division of self and other in the “ki” or “chi” source of being. If the ki is the core-vital energy of the body, doesn’t it describe a amazingly similar process to the one describing the heart as the core-body of the body in Christianity? “Miséricorde” (mercy) (including in its etymological root in French the Latin “cors, cordis,” e.g., the heart) then appears as a nice equivalent to compassion…28

6  C  oncluding Perspectives: The Epistemological Framework of the Heart as a Twofold Experience To conclude with what is more an opening field for future research than a clearclut delineated statement, I would like to take a step back and to raise a few self-critical questions about the relevance and the sustainability of this research. I therefore will here deal with the last word of my title, the French term “irréalisable.” First let me dissipate a misunderstanding. I don’t take “irréalisable” in its common sense, as something that it would be “impossible to make real,” that is, as an imaginary world or as a failure. “Irréalisable” as you may know is an existential concept drawn from Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy. In Beauvoir’s Old Age and in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, “irréalisable” designates the very structure of my experience as inherently needing the other to be genuinely lived through and accomplished.29 In short, for both existentialists, irrealizability frames the very structure of my experience as intrinsically intersubjective. But

 The english equivalent is “mercy,”. It does include the reference to the heart (cors), but only the meaning of “miserere,” which relates to the emotion of “pity,”. (dev.) Let’s notice as well that “compassion” in french and in english include the reference to “suffering” (pathos) and to the sharing of suffering (“co”), which is not directly available in “miséricorde” and in “mercy,”. 29  S. de Beauvoir, La vieillesse (1970), Paris, Gallimard, 2020, engl. Trans. The Coming of Age, London: André Deutsch Ltd and George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 1972; retitled Old Age, Penguin Books 1977, Northwestern University 2011 (numeric version).; J.-P. Sartre, L’être et le néant (1943), Paris, Gallimard, 1976, engl. Trans., Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, Routledge Edition,1956. 28

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instead of stating it in a positive way as did Husserl or Merleau-Ponty as the inter-­ bodily experience of the other, they both define it through the negative prism of the structural impossibility of a lonely, “by oneself,” experience. I want to use “irrealizability” as an operative existentialist concept and transpose it to my epistemological phenomenological framework. In short, I want to make of the two-fold organic-emotional heart-experience, the “cardial” experience as I name it, an “irrealizable,” that is, an experience that is only inherently experiencable with, through, and thanks to the other. But what do I mean by “other”? Of course, first, the other is the other person, who is a true part of myself in every action I undertake, in every thought that emerges, in every social, political and cultural framework that I engage in, even though it is sometimes a preconscious and an implicit guiding presence. In a deeper way, the other is ontologically situated within myself: opening up myself, lodging deep inside myself as my very core, therefore decentering myself to the point of dissolving the very self. On such a radical basis, the other becomes the otherness, and truly, we should say that there is no first-­ person perspective stricto sensu, but only a second-person perspective. Only the second person perspective is, as the very meaning of relation between I and You, the experiential fold between the first and the third person perpectives. In that sense, engaging the “perspectives on the heart” according to the general title of the present book is in my view anchoring the twofold dimension of the heart, physiological and emotional, into this experiential second-person-fold. In that respect, the existentialist “irrealizable” is the relational-fold. As Gilles Deleuze showed quite convincingly in his own way in his 1988 book Le pli. Leibniz et le baroque,30 the concept of the fold eludes the clearcut binary distinction self-other, or, in other words, inside/outside, and provides a nice epistemology of exploring the heart in a twofold way. Indeed, the concrete experience of the fold of a sheet of paper for example shows at once the distinction of the cutting and the relation of the stitching, that is, both unity and duality.

Bibliography Babo-Rebelo, M., Richter, C. G., & Tallon-Baudry, C. (2016). Neural responses to heartbeats in the default network encode the self in spontaneous thoughts. Journal of Neuroscience, 36(30), 7829–7840. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0262-­16.2016 Bernard, C. (1865). Etude sur la physiologie du cœur. Revue des Deux Mondes 2nd period, 56, 236–52. https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Étude_sur_la_physiologie_du_cœur. Craig, A. D. (2009). How do you feel – Now? The anterior insula and human awareness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 59–70. de Beauvoir, S. (1970). La vieillesse. Gallimard. de Beauvoir, S. (1972). The coming of age. André Deutsch/George Weidenfeld and Nicolson. de Beauvoir, S. (1977). Old age. Penguin.

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Deleuze, G. (1988). Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque. Minuit. Deleuze, G. (1992). The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (T. Conley, Trans. into English). University of Minnesota Press. Depraz, N. (1995). Transcendance et incarnation: Le statut de l’intersubjectivité comme altérité à soi chez Husserl. Vrin. Depraz, N. (2003a). Le corps de gloire: Phénoménologie et religion; une méthode non-dualiste. In W.  Deppert & M.  Rahnfeld (Eds.), Klarheit in Religionsdingen: Aktuelle Beiträge zur Religionsphilosophie (Vol. 3, pp. 43–73). Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Depraz, N. (2003b). Pratiquer la réduction: la prière du coeur. Laval théologique et philosophique, 59(3), 503–519. Revised version in Alter: Revue de phénoménologie 11 (2003). Depraz, N. (2008a). Le corps glorieux: Phénoménologie pratique de la Philocalie des Pères du désert et des Pères de l’Église. Peeters. Depraz, N. (2008b). Lire Husserl en phénoménologue: Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie (I). P.U.F.-CNED. Depraz, N. (2014). Consciousness and first-person phenomenology: First steps towards an experiential phenomenological writing and reading (EWR). In S. Menon, A. Sinha, & B. V. Sreekantan (Eds.), Interdisciplinary perspectives on consciousness and the self (pp. 127–149). Springer. Depraz, N. (2018). Le sujet de la surprise: Un sujet cardial. Zeta Books. Depraz, N. (2023). La place de la surprise dans les émotions antinomiques: Effroi du beau, sobre ivresse, douloureuse joie. In N. Depraz & M. Gyemant (Eds.), Phénoménologie des émotions. Hermann. Depraz, N. (forthcoming). La prière en partage: Une rencontre empirique de l’anthropologie et de la phénoménologie. Paper presented at the symposium of the Faculté de théologie de Genève, organized by Chloé Mathys, 27 Nov 2020. Depraz, N., & Desmidt, T. (2019). Cardiophenomenology: A refinement of neurophenomenology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 18(3), 493–507. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11097-­018-­9590-­y Depraz, N., Gyemant, M., & Desmidt, T.. (forthcoming-a). Dépression et vulnérabilité: Esquisse micro-phénoménologique. Presented at the AEPP conference, November 2018. Depraz, N., Raimondi, M. J., Legrand, P., Mauriac, F., with de Boeck (Eds.). (forthcoming-b). La chronicité: Aspects théoriques et pratiques dans les maladies chroniques (diabète, anorexie, schizophrénie) chez des adolescents. Descartes, R. (1973). Les passions de l’âme. In D. M. F. Alquié (Ed.), Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 3, 1643–1650. Garnier. Descartes, R. (1989). The passions of the soul (S. Voss, Trans. into English). Hackett Publishing. Diadochos of Photiki. (1943). Œuvres spirituelles. Cerf. Reprinted with additions 1997. Reprinted with an introduction by Édouard des Places, 2011. Evagrius of Pontus. (1972). The Praktikos and chapters on prayer (J. E. Bamberger, Trans. into English). Cistercian Publications. Evagrius of Pontus. (2003). The Greek ascetic corpus (R.  E. Sinkewicz, Trans.). Oxford University Press. Published to Oxford Scholarship Online 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/acpro f:oso/9780199259939.001.0001. Fauliot, P. (2012). L’épopée du Roi Singe. Casterman. Harvey, W. (1990). De motu cordis (de la circulation du sang) (C. Richet, Trans. into French). Christian Bourgois. Hechychius of Batos. (1979–1999). Selection in The Philokalia: The complete text; compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth (4 vols) (G. E. H. Palmer, P. Sherrard, & K. Ware, Trans. into English). Faber and Faber. Husserl, E. (2020). Gefühl und Wert: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1896–1925). Part 2 of Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. In U. Melle & T. Vongehr (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 43). Springer. Husserl, E. (forthcoming). E. Husserl, Phénoménologie des émotions (N. Depraz & M. Gyemant, Trans. into French). Vrin.

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Jaspers, K. (1996). Allgemeine psychopathologie. Originally published 1913. Springer. Jaspers, K. (1997). General psychopathology (J. Hoenig & M. W. Hamilton, Trans. into English). Johns Hopkins University Press. Lot-Borodine, M. (1993). Mystère du ‘don des larmes’ dans l’Orient chrétien. In La douloureuse joie: Aperçus sur la prière personnelle de l’Orient chrétien. Abbaye de Bellefontaine. Lutz, A., Slagter, H. A., Dunne, J. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2008). Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation. Trends in Cognitive Science, 12(4), 163–169. Maximus the Confessor. (1985). Selected writings (G.  C. Berthold, Trans. into English). Paulist Press. Nikodimus the Hagiorite. (1979–1999). The Philokalia: The complete text; compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth (4 vols) (G.  E. H.  Palmer, P. Sherrard, & K. Ware, Trans. into English). Faber and Faber. Sartre, J.-P. (1943). L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Gallimard. Sartre, J. -P. (1956). Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (H. E. Barnes, Trans. into English). Routledge. Smith, T. A. (Trans.) (1999). The pilgrim’s tale. Translated into English. Paulist Press. Symeon the New Theologian. (1980). The discourses (C.  J. deCatanzaro, Trans. into English). Paulist Press. Trungpa, C. (1974). Path of Shamatha-Vipashyana. Seminar at the Naropa Institute, RimeShedra.NYC. Trungpa, C. (2005). Training the mind and cultivating loving-kindness (J. L. Lief, Ed.). Shambhala. Varela, F.  J. (1996). Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3(4), 330–349. Wallace, B. A. (2011). Stilling the mind: Shamatha teachings from Düdjom Lingpa’s vajra essence (B. Hodel, Ed.). Wisdom Publications.

Part III

Emotions of the Heart

Chapter 8

My Heart Is Yours: The Phenomenology of Self-Revelation in Affective Consciousness Ellie Anderson

1  Introduction From its beginnings in the work of Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Max Scheler, phenomenology has taken affective consciousness to be the unique mode of consciousness that reveals other persons as persons. Other persons are not primarily given to us through cognition or perception, as much of the history of philosophy has suggested, but rather are immediately revealed to us through feelings and emotions. In this article, I argue that a corollary to this insight is that affective consciousness also reveals us to ourselves. Focusing on the existential phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre in particular, I suggest that the encounter with the other makes me feel like an object. This feeling of being an object for others conflicts with my feeling of being a subject, and this tension catalyzes the dynamic of selfhood. Selfhood is mediated through the affective encounter with the other, which then generates a reflective relation with oneself whereby one unsuccessfully tries to grasp oneself as an object by developing self-images of oneself through the imagined eyes of the other. The reflective process of crafting self-images, while necessarily falling short of its aim of self-objectification, nonetheless reveals the self to itself as a dynamic relation of identity-in-difference. Loving relationships in particular illuminate the affective consciousness of feeling like an object for an other, as well as the reflective process of self-image creation that this consciousness generates. In Sect. 1, I examine the phenomenology of affective consciousness and its self-­ revelatory character. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of “the look” as affectively revealing others as persons and ourselves as objects, I suggest that selfhood involves a dynamic relation between feeling one’s subjectivity and feeling one’s E. Anderson (*) Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_8

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objecthood in the face of the other. In Sect. 2, I examine how the notion of auto-­ affection as developed by Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida deepens Sartre’s insight into the exposition of the self to otherness by articulating auto-affection as auto-hetero-affection. In Sect. 3, I examine the dynamics of affective consciousness as self-revelatory by focusing specifically on the affective consciousness of love. I claim that, in loving relationships, lovers are uniquely given to themselves by experiencing themselves as beloved and receiving self-images mediated by the other that disclose new possibilities. I conclude by engaging Anthony Steinbock’s schema of the moral emotions, claiming that love not only is a moral emotion of otherness—as Steinbock argues—but also may be considered a moral emotion of self-givenness and a moral emotion of possibility.

2  Affective Consciousness and the Feeling of Being an Object In this section, I lay out the basic contours of affective consciousness as a unique source of evidence. My guiding hypothesis is that affective consciousness is self-­ revelatory because it furnishes a felt sense of one’s human condition as both subject and object. This conception of the human condition is most evident in existentialism, with its most explicit formulation in Sartre, but may also be broadly seen in the phenomenological tradition to which Sartre contributes. Here, it is misleading to describe the self as an object or entity, because selfhood is instead dynamically temporal and linked with the subjective first-person perspective. And yet, phenomenologically speaking, there is a limited truth to speaking of the self as an object because others experience me as an object. When others perceive me, think about me, or care for me, they are directed toward me as an object of their consciousness. There is a tension between the fact that I can never be an object for myself, but that I am an object for others. This tension between self-as-subject and self-as-object (for others) is felt as a phenomenological dilemma. In Sartrean phenomenology, it is considered necessary for selfhood, since to be a self is to be both for oneself and for others. In this section, I first outline Sartre’s theory of affective consciousness, and then describe how it reveals us to ourselves as objects through the “look.”

2.1  Affective Consciousness First let us say something about the phenomenology of affective consciousness. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre, following Husserl, distinguishes affect from cognition.1 On Sartre’s view, philosophy has usually assumed cognition as a model for 1  This marks a break with The Imaginary, where Sartre equivocates about whether affect is a form of knowledge. See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination, trans: Jonathan Webber (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 69.

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consciousness in general. This assumption reaches its apotheosis in Hegel, for whom the fullest development of consciousness is absolute knowing. Sartre takes one of phenomenology’s major contributions to be its assertion that consciousness is not a mode of knowing; rather, knowing is a mode of consciousness.2 Only through this reframing can the nature of affective consciousness be understood.3 When philosophy models affect on cognition (by taking cognition to be the single fundamental form of consciousness), it tends to treat affect as a deficient mode of knowing. Even Spinoza, who grants affect a far greater role than most philosophers, emphasizes reason’s “dominion over the affects,” and suggests that passive affects must be transformed into adequate ideas.4 For phenomenology, consciousness is intentional: it intends, or is geared toward, an object. However, not all modes of consciousness intend their objects in the same way. Sartre, again following Husserl, contends that cognition intends its object as opposed to it: knowledge involves a subject-object duality. In knowing, the knower (subject) opposes itself to the known (object), and the knower is invisible to itself in this experience.5 All that the knower is aware of is the known object ‘out there’ beyond itself; and this known object appears as a fullness of being unto itself, completely separate from the knower.6 But there are modes of consciousness, especially pre-reflective ones, where the subject-object relation is not oppositional. Thus, “the reduction of consciousness to knowledge in fact involves our introducing into consciousness the subject-object dualism which is typical of knowledge.”7 This is a problem in part because it offers no adequate way to explain self-consciousness: for Sartre, self-consciousness cannot be dual. He argues that a pre-reflective, non-­ cognitive self-consciousness must be posited in order to avoid an infinite regress.8 Reflective consciousness depends on pre-reflective (self-) consciousness.9 And—as Sartre hints in Being and Nothingness, but which subsequent French phenomenologists will more explicitly argue—pre-reflective self-consciousness is affective. What is the nature of affective consciousness, then? While Sartre’s position on this is not always clear or consistent, there are recognizable features of his account in Being and Nothingness that set up his claims about the importance of affect for “the look.”10 Affective consciousness is simply feeling and is disclosed in particular emotions. Sartre does not distinguish ‘affect’ from ‘feeling,’ generally using the 2  Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans: Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), 10. 3  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 11. 4  Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans: Edwin Curley (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 70. 5  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 12. 6  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 245–6. 7  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 12. 8  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 12; and, Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 52. 9  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 13. 10  I am here limiting myself to the account in Being and Nothingness. For a helpful account of inconsistencies in Sartre’s earlier writings on the emotions, see Sarah Richmond, “Magic in

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adjective “affective” in tandem with the noun “feeling.”11 Like other modes of consciousness, affect is intentionally geared toward an object.12 However, unlike in cognition, the object of affective consciousness can be the same as its subject. Feelings are intentional acts of consciousness directed toward an object, but they immediately implicate the feeling subject. Shame, for example, is shame of self: the subject that feels shame is none other than the object of shame. The shameful self does not posit itself in opposition to itself, but rather feels glued to itself in an identity it cannot escape.13 And even when the feeling’s intentional object is not the self, the relation between subject and object is non-oppositional. The subject feels its distinction from its object as a tension or friction, rather than an opposition: the subject does not disappear from view as it does in cognition. Desire, for instance, is an affective intentionality the object of which is the transcendent other.14 Sartre states that the desiring subject is present in this experience, however, albeit pre-­ reflectively: the one who desires is troubled in their very body and feels itself as such.15 Hence, affective consciousness can be (and even, to some extent, is) auto-­ affective. The subject feels its distinction from its object as a tension rather than an opposition. The subject does not ‘fall away’ or appear transparent to itself, as in cognition, but rather obtrudes in the experience. This is not to say, however, that in its presence to self the affective subject achieves a closed circle of self-coincidence. On the contrary, in being glued to itself, the subject is most distinctly obscure to itself. The self-presence of affective consciousness is haunted by nothingness, even in affects such as shame where the subject and object of the affective consciousness are the same. There is a gap between myself as feeling and the object of my feeling (even when the two are the same).16 This gap is especially salient when affective consciousness takes itself as object, because it can only do so through the mediation of the other-as-subject—as we will see shortly with “the look.” Sartre states here that “Everything takes place as if I had a dimension of being from which I was separated by a radical nothingness; and this nothingness is the Other’s freedom.”17

Sartre’s Early Philosophy,” In Reading Sartre, ed. Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2010), 145–61. 11  It is unclear whether he intends ‘emotion’ to mean something different from ‘feeling’ in Being and Nothingness. He does not articulate a technical distinction between them here, but does speak frequently of affect and feeling in Part Three, “Being-for-Others,” while reserving a discussion of emotion for Part Four of the text, entitled “Having, Doing, and Being.” For this reason, I limit myself to ‘affect’ and ‘feeling’ in discussing Sartre’s account here, since my argument hinges on affect’s role in being-for-others. 12  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 435. 13  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 350. 14  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 500–1. 15  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 502–3. 16  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 351. 17  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 351.

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We see here that Being and Nothingness depends on a distinction between affect and cognition, viewing affective consciousness as a unique source of evidence (for instance, of the other, as we will see in the next subsection). This puts Sartre in line with Anthony Steinbock’s suggestion that phenomenology takes affective consciousness to be a unique source of evidence. Such a view is in contrast with philosophy’s historical emphasis on reason (in rationalism and idealism) and/or sensibility (in empiricism) as the only admissible sources of evidence.18 As Steinbock notes, the work of phenomenologists beginning with Husserl, Edith Stein, and Max Scheler foregrounds the importance of affective consciousness in disclosing personhood in particular. Husserl and Stein argue that the primary relation to other persons is empathy (Einfühlung); Scheler suggests that the emotions present a distinct structure of evidence that he calls the order of the heart (ordo amoris), which orients us toward others as absolute values.19 Sartre is not usually considered as being a contributor to this orientation of phenomenology. However, I show in the following subsection that Sartre explicitly argues that affective consciousness is a unique source of evidence for others as other (a term he prefers to ‘person’). Moreover, Sartre shows how affective consciousness is also a unique source of self-revelation, inasmuch as being-for-others is revealed through the affective encounter of “the look.”

2.2  Affective Self-Revelation in “The Look” While “The Look” chapter is one of the most commented upon in Being and Nothingness, a crucial component of it is often overlooked: namely, the emphasis on affective consciousness as opposed to cognition.20 Sartre argues that the problem of solipsism is irresolvable from the perspective of knowing, which can at most give me a sense of probability about the other’s existence. I may, for instance, reason by analogy that, given that the structure of the other’s body is similar to mine and that they appear as an embodied, synthetic whole that undertakes actions purposively, they are most likely also a person endowed with consciousness and moral  Anthony J. Steinbock, Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 5–6. 19  See: Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989) and Edmund Husserl, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910-1911, trans. Ingo Farin and James G. Hart (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2006). See: Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications. 1989). And, see: Max Scheler, “Ordo Amoris,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David R. Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), esp. 98–135. 20  Ellie Anderson, “Sartre’s Affective Turn: Shame as Recognition in ‘The Look.’” Philosophy Today 65, no. 3 (Summer 2021). 18

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standing.21 However, I can never be certain that this reasoning is justified, because I can never experience the other’s perspective for myself. I cannot know that they are a person rather than a convincing machine. Luckily, however, cognition is not the primary way that we experience others—and so skepticism about their existence is not insurmountable. I escape the problem of solipsism because the other co-­ constitutes me in my very being by means of affective consciousness. Specifically, I feel shame in the face of the other because I become suddenly aware of myself as an object for the other. That is, for Sartre, I need no further proof of the existence of others than my feeling of being an object for them.22 My feeling like an object for the other is equally a feeling of their subjectivity.23 Affective consciousness attests to the fact that I always already find myself bound up in the world with others, and that I am an object for them.24 This does not mean that I do not know the other, nor that the other does not know me: indeed, our senses furnish us with knowledge of each other.25 However, the affective consciousness of the look is the ground on which knowledge of each other as other rests. The revelation of others through affective consciousness is in turn a revelation of myself, since to experience others is to experience myself as an object for them. When the other turns to look at me, I encounter the other-as-subject. I feel myself slip away from myself because an other is experiencing me, here at this very spot where I stand. The gaze of the other fixes me into an object, leaving me vulnerable. It is through the other’s look that I first receive my objecthood. “For me the other,” Sartre says, “is first the being for whom I am an object.”26 While the look of the other gives me to myself as an object, this occurs on the level of feeling, not of knowing.27 I can never cognitively grasp the object that I am for the other, because to do so would require the subject-object opposition that characterizes knowledge— and I cannot achieve this opposition with respect to myself. Not only do I not experience the other primarily through knowledge; I also do not experience the other’s experience of me through it. Instead, the other’s possibility of knowing me—of perceiving me as an object—is disclosed through my “being-as-object for the Other.”28

 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 1973), 91; and Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 340–341. 22  This does not mean we can never be mistaken about the presence of a particular other, but rather that such mistakes are ontologically grounded in the actual existence of others (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 370). 23  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 386. 24  The feeling of shame, for instance, is the authentic attitude “by which I recognize the Other as the subject through whom I get my object-ness.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 386. 25  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 448. 26  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 361. 27  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 383. 28  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 447. 21

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This feeling of being an object for the other, for Sartre, reveals a truth about myself. I am an object for others, and this objecthood is constitutive of my selfhood. It reveals my being-for-others.29 My being-as-object “will be realized only in existence for-others.”30 Hence, the look of the other is self-revelatory. The look of the other expropriates me and, paradoxically, constitutes me by the same stroke. I suddenly feel the fact that I am vulnerable to others by virtue of appearing to them in a way I cannot appear to myself. I am not the locus of my judgments about myself. The other has an access to me that I do not have: although I am as the other sees me, I cannot see myself as the other does.31 I feel known by the other, but I cannot know myself with any kind of immediacy. This feeling of being an object for the other generates reflective attempts to see myself as others see me, in part because it is threatening to feel that I am judged as an object by the other. It is through this shift from pre-reflective affective consciousness to reflection that I first appear as a self, ego, or person.32 “The person is presented to consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the Other,” Sartre states.33 In the process of reflection, where I see myself as a self, I divide myself cognitively into the reflecting and the reflected-on. I mimic the look of the other by trying to see myself as outside myself.34 But this process is doomed to fall short of its aim. While I can feel my objecthood, I cannot know the object that I am for the other, because I am in “absolute proximity” to myself.35 Far from indicating a full presence-to-self, this absolute proximity indicates the self’s inability to coincide with itself. It indicates the self’s lack of knowledge about itself, and its inability to be self-grounding.36 Despite the failure of reflection to achieve its goal of full self-knowledge, reflection is an important response to the look that is ultimately self-revelatory. Through feeling like an object for others, I start to imagine how they might view me, reflecting on how my behaviors might appear as if from the outside. I may also communicate with others through language about our perceptions, including our perceptions of each other. Additionally, I experience my body as it might look or feel to others, getting a sense of its contours that I would otherwise lack. As Sartre states, “It is therefore on the level of the reflective consciousness that the Other’s knowledge [of me] can be brought into play.”37 In this way, the affective consciousness of the look gives way to a reflective consciousness that reveals me as an object for others with specific personality traits and embodied styles. We might call these products of

 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 380.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 218. 31  (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 302). 32  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 350. 33  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 349. 34  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 218. 35  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 218. 36  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 216. 37  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 464. 29 30

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reflection self-images. Whether vague or specific, these self-images always have something of the fictional to them. We can never see ourselves as the other sees us. Yet they are not mere projections. They emerge within complex relational dynamics, including the unique structure of evidence offered by affective consciousness. This is what makes them self-revelatory. Contemporary phenomenology sometimes makes it sound as though feeling like an object is misguided—or even that it indicates moral harm. Such a view generally associates feeling like an object with being reduced to objecthood: that is, being harmed in one’s personhood by having, or at least feeling like one is having, one’s subjectivity denigrated or overlooked. This is a prominent line of thinking in feminist phenomenology. The idea is that individuals should be affirmed in their subjectivity, rather than made to feel like objects. A somewhat different line of thinking is taken by phenomenologists influenced by Heidegger, who criticizes the subject/ object distinction and its prevalence within the history of philosophy. For these phenomenologists, most prominently Maurice Merleau-Ponty and those who take inspiration from him, describing persons as subjects and/or objects relies on a dualistic metaphysics that is outmoded and misleading. For these reasons, phenomenologists today do not often write about feeling like an object—or when they do, it is to describe the harms done to those who are objectified and ‘othered’ by unjust social dynamics. However, an important retention of the subject/object distinction is discernible in the phenomenological tradition, even if few retain it as explicitly as Sartre. Perceptually speaking, others always experience me as an object. This is not to say that they dehumanize me or treat me badly, but rather simply to say that their consciousness is intentionally directed toward me as an object. It is not even to say that others experience me as objects in the world like nonhuman or inanimate objects— phenomenologically speaking, to say something is the object of consciousness is to say nothing of what sort of object it is. It is merely to say that the object of consciousness is distinct from the consciousness of the object. In the case of affective consciousness, the affecting is distinct from the affected. But, as we have seen above, this distinction is not a duality, let alone on ontological dualism. Rather, it is what Nancy Bauer calls a “phenomenological dilemma.”38 I am both subject and object at the same time. I can feel this, but I cannot make sense of this through cognition.

 Nancy Bauer, 2011. “Beauvoir on the Allure of Self-Objectification,” In Feminist Metaphysics, ed. C. Witt (New York: Springer, 2011), pp. 117–129, esp. 125.

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3  Auto-Affection and the Fissure of Selfhood Derrida and Nancy are critical of Sartre’s emphasis on subjectivity, but their views on auto-affection and the heart share substantial overlap with Sartre. They too emphasize that the relation to the other cannot be captured by cognition but is fundamentally affective: in Nancy’s and Derrida’s language, it is a matter of the heart.39 As noted above, Sartre’s account emphasizes the irreducible gap in self-presence; in their work on auto-affection, Derrida and Nancy develop a similar position while more radically highlighting the themes of expropriation and difference. For Sartre, the other’s presence inaugurates a dynamic interaction between my subjectivity and my objecthood. Nancy suggests that such a dynamic radically expropriates the subject, rupturing any dialectic or return to self. Derrida describes the rupture in self-­ identity as auto-hetero-affection. As he compellingly argues, this rupture is both the condition for the possibility of selfhood and the condition for its impossibility as pure autos. For Nancy as for Sartre, the encounter with the other destabilizes me by revealing that others have an access to me that I do not have to myself. Exposition, Nancy writes, “is the condition of that whose essence or destination consists in being presented: given over, offered to the outside, to others, and even to the self.”40 To be exposed is to be outside of one’s subjectivity, in a domain where no closed circle of a return to self is possible. Exposition pertains to what Nancy calls the regime of the heart. He contrasts exposition with dialectic, which Nancy associates with the regime of the subject (the self-possessed, transparent subject of modern philosophy). In exposition, we are given over to others and to ourselves. No dialectical appropriation is possible. Mastery and control are inconceivable. This dynamic between self and other, and even between the self and itself, involves a fissure. Following Sartre, we might describe this is a fissure of non-knowing. In being exposed to the other, I sense that the other knows me in a way I cannot know myself. I lack access to, let alone control of, their perceptions and judgments about me. All the same, this fissure is the condition for the possibility of selfhood, even as it is the condition for its impossibility as pure return to self in an imagined closed circle. Derrida asserts that auto-affection, or self-touching, is always already auto-­ hetero-­affection. For Derrida, to be affectively related to oneself is to be affected by the other. “Even self-touching touches upon the heart of the other,” he writes.41 For Derrida, auto-affection does not simply name the self-relation of a being “that

 Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 290 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A.  Rand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 252. 40  Jean-Luc Nancy, “Shattered Love,” In A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, trans. Lisa Garbus and Simona Sawhney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 252–3. 41  Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 273. 39

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would already be itself (autos).”42 Rather, “Auto-affection produces the same as the self-relation in the difference with itself.”43 That is, auto-affection produces and interrupts the self.44 Paradoxically, it doubles the self into subject and object, while also being the very possibility of subjectivity.45 Put in phenomenological terms, auto-affection accompanies intentional consciousness and is crucial to it.46 If auto-affection is requisite for selfhood, but is also irreducibly dependent on hetero-affection, then I am always in a sense outside myself. As in Sartre’s look, I am the object of unknown experiences and value judgments that come from the other. I am exposed, to go back to Nancy’s term for the regime of the heart. Although Sartre does not employ the term ‘auto-affection,’ his argument that self-­consciousness (in particular, one’s immediate consciousness of being an object) is affective strikingly resonates with Derrida’s account of auto-affection.47 Moreover, Sartre’s argument that the encounter with the other is required in order for this dynamic to be possible suggests that for Sartre, as for Derrida, auto-affection is always already auto-hetero-affection.48 While Derrida and Nancy are closer to Sartre than is often assumed, they offer a more detailed account of the identity and alterity involved in affect than Sartre does. While Sartre importantly develops the claim that affect is a distinct mode of consciousness that should not be modeled on cognition, he does not explicate the relation between the subject and object of affective consciousness. Recall his contention that there is no subject-object duality in affective consciousness, as opposed to cognition; nonetheless, inasmuch as affective consciousness is intentional, it has an object in a minimal sense. Sartre’s argument here implies that there is generally still a distinction between subject and object in affective consciousness: it is just that this distinction does not rise to the level of duality. If there is still a distinction between subject and object in affective consciousness, but this distinction is not a duality, then how might we understand it? I have suggested above that we might think about it as a tension. Consciousness cannot be transparent to itself, but feels itself affected by the world and in an interminable dynamic of self-relation. This dynamic indicates a minimal distinction between subject and object (affecting and affected) in auto-affection. Derrida and Nancy articulate this minimal distinction in ways that deepen the Sartrean account. Derrida  Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 71. 43  Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 71. 44  Derrida On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 271. 45  Derrida Voice and Phenomenon, 68. 46  Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, 124; Anthony J. Steinbock, Knowing by Heart: Loving as Participation and Critique (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021), 15–17. 47  For a similar analysis, but emphasizing how Sartre’s negative structure of the for-itself prefigures Derrida’s différance, see: Christina Howells, “Conclusion: Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 318–52, esp. 333. 48  Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, 129–134. 42

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describes it as involving a unique kind of identity, which he describes as “the same as the non-identical.”49 Capturing this insight requires resisting the impulse to model identity on the identity of entities in the world. In their writings on auto-affection, Derrida and Nancy attempt to accomplish such a rethinking of identity-in-­difference by turning away from Sartre’s use of visual language (“the look”) in favor of haptical descriptions. For Derrida and Nancy, understanding self-relation and the relations to others cannot successfully be accomplished using the metaphor of sight on which Sartre focuses. Focusing on seeing the other, Derrida contends, implies a level of specular reflection that fails to capture the claim the other places on me.50 Touch disrupts the presumed specular distance of Sartre’s account, and, with it, more successfully disrupts the notion of a self-possessed subject. This is why Derrida associates auto-­ affection with auto-eroticism in his early work, and in his late work follows Nancy in associating auto-affection with the heart. And in Corpus, Nancy describes self-­ touching precisely as a way of becoming oneself without returning to oneself.51 In touch, distinctions are flexible and dynamic. The opposition presumed by knowledge disappears, giving way to a relational identity-in-difference. This is evident, for example, in the well-known phenomenological scene of two hands touching, which originates in Husserl and is developed by Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. When I touch my left hand with my right hand, both hands are touching and touched. Taking just my left hand in isolation, there is a distinction between the left hand as touched and as touching, even as the same hand is both at once (a double sensation). Derrida takes a Sartrean line here in suggesting that we temporally oscillate between experiencing the touching and touched: “Even between me and me […] there is no such ‘original’ contemporaneity,” but rather an “irreducible gap”52 Thus, the temporal distance of auto-affection is connected to its haptic distance: pure presence to self is impossible. Derrida and Nancy, then, offer a more nuanced account of Sartre’s contention that, in affective consciousness, subject and object can be the same. To say they are the same is to say they are the same but non-identical, because haptically dynamic. I want to connect this back briefly to Sartre’s account of reflection and ask: given this irreducible gap between the touching and touched in auto-affection, is the attempt at self-knowledge fruitless? Recall that, for Sartre, one way we tend to respond to the look of the other is to attempt to see ourselves as the other sees us: that is, to know ourselves. This task is in principle impossible: it is what Sartre calls an “unrealizable.”53 And yet, I want to suggest that it is valuable, not to mention inevitable, for the self to try and know itself (as others do). The attempt to know oneself does not yield

 Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 71.  Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 290. 51  Nancy, Corpus, 39. 52  Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 193. 53  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 675. 49 50

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knowledge in the Sartrean sense—which is why he describes it as a failed task—but it is a key component of self-revelation. As seen above, the encounter with the other brings about a new feeling of my being: namely, the feeling of being an object. Affective consciousness is a distinct mode of consciousness, disclosing the other and myself by making me feel my objecthood. Inasmuch as the feeling of being an object comes into contact with my feeling of being a subject, it inaugurates a dynamic of selfhood. This dynamic is auto-affective, radically temporal, and inextricably bound up with my relations with others. I can never have a closed circle of a ‘return to self,’ but am rather always in a sense outside myself. Nonetheless, attempts to know myself by imagining how the other experiences me reveal not only that I am a self-relating being always already in relation to others, but also that I relate to my own possibilities.

4  Love as Self-Revelation In this section, I explore the dynamics of affective consciousness and auto-affection outlined above within the context of loving and being loved. In loving, the sense of oneself as both subject and object are vividly disclosed. Sartre goes so far as to describe love as “the primitive relation to the Other.”54 Here, I analyze love in terms of the structure of auto-hetero-affection laid out above in the analysis of affective consciousness in Sartre, Derrida, and Nancy.55 I focus on reciprocal loving relationships between persons, which reveal the lovers to each other and to themselves as unique values. Paradoxically, love liberates lovers for new possibilities in part by revealing lovers to themselves as beloved objects in the eyes of their loved ones. The loved one offers a privileged refraction of myself-as-object inasmuch as our relationship furnishes me with the sense of myself as beloved. And, because of the intimate knowledge of each other that lovers share, the self-images each generates in relationship by imagining what the other thinks of them can be especially meaningful. Toward the end of this section, I put this analysis into dialogue with Steinbock’s analysis of love as a moral emotion, arguing that love is not only a moral emotion of otherness, but also a moral emotion of self-givenness and possibility.

 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 477.  For the purposes of this article, I find it more fruitful to apply the dynamics of affective consciousness in “the look” to loving relationships than to engage explicitly Sartre’s controversial account of love in Being and Nothingness. While Sartre’s account of love here does broadly parallel the dynamics of the look (see, for instance, Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 484), his argument that the ideal of love is contradictory and deceptive is not one I find to be entailed by this parallel (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 491).

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4.1  Love as Self-Constituting and Self-Interrupting In the phenomenological tradition, loving is a mode of affective consciousness that apprehends and affirms the value of the loved one.56 Because classical and existential phenomenologists do not distinguish ‘affect’ from ‘feeling,’ we may just as well say that love is a feeling. Yet this is not to say that it is a sheer, fleeting whim or irrational impulse. Feelings, including love, in phenomenology are generally intentional acts of consciousness directed toward the loved one. As intentional feeling-­ act, love is not separate from the realms of evidence or even of ethics. Instead, love is a moral emotion.57 Its object is the loved one as a bearer of value. As Steinbock argues, “some emotions are directly moral, and further that moral judgments have an evidential dimension and are not merely supports for judgments.”58 Love is one of these emotions. Within ongoing loving relationships in particular, the reciprocity of loving and being loved unfolds in a rich temporal dynamic within an embodied situation shared between lovers. Loving and being loved by another person institutes an intense process of self-revelation that may at once be experienced in momentary feelings as well as in ongoing developments with varying levels of depth. Although I have been using the language of self-revelation freely above to describe the ways that being-for-others reveal the self to itself as both subject and object, Steinbock uses ‘revelation’ in a technical sense to describe the distinct style of evidence found in loving.59 For Steinbock, revelation is distinct form other styles of evidence, which include presentation, manifestation, and disclosure.60 As revelatory, love “is the movement which ‘allows’ the other to become more fully who he or she is.”61 As such, loving does not simply reveal a pre-existing object. Rather, it orients itself toward the loved one in a direction of “deepening or enhancement.”62 Loving affirms the loved one in their process of becoming. And I would add that it additionally reveals the self. Loving is the movement that affirms the self in its process of becoming: hence, it is self-revelatory. Additionally, being loved is self-revelatory. Inasmuch as love is an affective consciousness in relation to an other, the same structure of evidence described in “the look” holds here as well. The encounter with the loved one gives them an access to me that I do not have to myself, and I feel like an object for them. But far from being threatening or demeaning, in reciprocal loving relationships this feeling can be a joyful source of affirmation. As Nancy  Peter Hadreas, A Phenomenology of Love and Hate (New York: Routledge, 2016); Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 228; Anderson, “Phenomenology and the Ethics of Love,” In Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (forthcoming). 57  Steinbock, Moral Emotions. 58  Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 6. 59  Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 223–4. 60  Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 224. 61  Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 224–5. 62  Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 225; see also Steinbock, Knowing by Heart, 35. 56

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describes it, love does not mean a loss of self. Rather, in loving, the self takes joy in its own presence in the presence of the other.63 This means being bedazzled by oneself, yet not in a narcissistic fashion. One’s awe of oneself in love is the awe of being oneself facing another, or of experiencing oneself with another—as beloved.64 Loving another person expropriates me, following the contours described for affective consciousness above but also deepening them in specific ways. Loving does this, casting me outside of my subjectivity, in two interrelated respects. First, the experience of loving makes me feel as if my center of gravity is outside myself. Attracted in the direction of the other, I feel destabilized in my experience of the world and my own place within it. I feel outside of myself, because my heart belongs to the other. I may be preoccupied or even obsessed. In his essay “Shattered Love,” Nancy describes this as the “love break”: love shatters my illusion of independence by revealing that I depend on the lover’s love of me, though I cannot grasp this. He writes, “The love break simply means this: that I can no longer, whatever presence to myself I may maintain or that sustains me, pro-pose myself to myself…without something of me remaining, outside of me.”65 My love for another arrives as if from outside myself and remains, to some extent, there. This is one explanation for both the anxiety and the joy associated with love: passion for another person can bring about a sense of dis-ease, but can also make me feel expansive. As Derrida writes in On Touching: “No one should ever be able to say ‘my heart,’ my own heart, except when he or she might say it to someone else and call him or her this way—and that is love.”66 The second form of expropriation of self in love is that a loving relationship makes me feel loved. Feeling loved involves my sense of myself as an unknown object for the other. It is as if there is a crucial version of myself that another knows but I cannot. This version of myself feels important to grasp: how does the one I love see me? What do they think of me? I might try to imagine myself as the loved one sees me, if only so that I can have a better understanding of them—the one I long to know inside and out. But, as we have seen above, I am unable to grasp myself through the eyes of the other. As Nancy describes it, love brings about an “ontological fissure” within subjectivity. Love involves “a break in [one’s] self-­ possession as a subject; it is, essentially, an interruption of the process of relating oneself to oneself outside of oneself. From then on, I is constituted broken.”67 This does not mean, however, that it is pointless to our imagining ourselves as the loved one sees us. Recall Sartre’s suggestion that reflection is one way we respond to feeling like an object. In trying to see ourselves as if from outside, we attempt to know ourselves. This attempt, though unsuccessful in its supposed aim, can still be an illuminating form of self-revelation. In loving, take the way that new self-images

 Nancy, “Shattered Love,” 272.  Nancy, “Shattered Love,” 273. 65  Nancy, “Shattered Love,” 261. 66  Derrida, On Touching, 273. 67  Nancy, “Shattered Love,” 261. 63 64

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emerge in relation to another person. In seeking and developing a relationship with another, it is common to try and envision how they see you. When the other person is communicative, these self-images can be specific and nuanced. Through compliments, conversations, and shared experiences, one can sense the contours of how the loved one views oneself. When the other is not communicative, the lover’s image of themselves may be vague, leaving us to fill in more blanks for ourselves. This sense of mystery can be highly erotic, even as it also frequently produces dissatisfaction. Imagine a couple, Krishna and Devon, who have been in a loving relationship for a few months. Krishna is a television writer and Devon is a nurse practitioner. They initially connected over their shared passion for travel and leftist politics. Their conversations about these topics were compelling to both, not only because they respect each other’s opinions on the topics, but also because they feel ‘seen’ or recognized through their conversations about them. They are both affirmed in their images of themselves as people who enjoy travel and are politically engaged. Yet they also value their differences. Krishna values Devon’s self-motivation and penchant for advance planning. Devon appreciates Krishna’s go-with-the-flow personality and concern for others. Both appreciate being in a relationship with someone whose career and personality is starkly different from their own. In addition, they each value being appreciated as different by the other person. It makes them feel that they each have something to bring to the table as individuals. Now, this might sound shallow. Are Krishna and Devon simply seeking in the other a narcissistic reflection of their own desirable self-images? I would argue no: the affirmative feelings of self-worth that each receives in the relationship go much deeper than this. As I have suggested above, the self-images they have of themselves through the imagined eyes of the other are not mere projections, but are genuinely self-revelatory. Imagine that Devon surprises Krishna with a birthday trip to the desert. Krishna is delighted by this in part because it is a fun activity to share with Devon, and because it reveals that Krishna is important to Devon. But Krishna is also delighted by the fact that the surprise trip reveals that Devon sees Krishna as someone who will enjoy such a trip: that is, as an adventurous and outdoorsy person. Krishna feels understood and appreciated in this mediated self-image. In addition, let’s say that Devon has arranged for an evening of stargazing, having rented a telescope so the lovers can look at the stars together under the desert sky. Devon isn’t big on stargazing, but knows Krishna had a passion for it in childhood and frequently stargazed on family trips. While Devon and Krishna look at the stars together, Krishna points out various constellations to Devon and explains just how many millions of lightyears away they are. This information fills Devon with wonder. The couple’s enjoyment of the activity is intimately shared, but its pleasure for Krishna is in part that it makes Krishna feel recognized in a way that few others are able to see. Krishna receives a self-image mediated through Devon of a learned and passionate stargazer. Being able to share this experience makes Krishna feel affirmed in a role that does not get much airtime in their relationship. Recall that this does not require that Krishna be sure of how Devon sees Krishna. Krishna’s

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self-images always have something fictional about them; the circuit of selfhood is never closed. Yet these self-images nonetheless are revelatory. This example has focused on existing facets of Krishna’s self-image that are affirmed in relationship with Devon. But the dynamic of self-revelation may also be found in relational settings where a brand-new self-image is brought about. This can occur when a loved one sees strengths in us that encourage us to embark on new life paths that we previously did not consider possible. This might occur when a lover suggests a new career, hobby, or other opportunity that we would not have envisioned for ourselves. Now, we can see that love does not only expropriate me. It also individuates me. The loved one offers a privileged refraction of the self-as-object, providing a key basis for selfhood. The self-images described above are modes of auto-affection (qua auto-hetero-affection). The tension between my attempted self-understandings mediated through the other and my subjective experience (of being riveted to myself) produces individuation. This individuation is self-revelation.

4.2  Love as a Moral Emotion of Self-Givenness and Possibility As noted above, Steinbock’s phenomenology of the emotions identifies love as a moral emotion. Steinbock distinguishes three primary groups of moral emotions. First are moral emotions of self-givenness: these “reveal the moral sense of the person in the dynamic process of becoming.”68 Moral emotions of self-givenness, which include shame and pride, generally imply a self-assessment, although they need not rise to the level of reflection. In fact, the basic sense of self-givenness is an intimate or direct givenness of oneself to oneself, as when I feel my objecthood in shame. Second are moral emotions of possibility, which, “express the transformation in relation to the way things have been or the way things are, a liberation from otherwise fixed predictable meanings, and a liberation for something becoming otherwise.”69 These emotions, which include hope and repentance, modalize our ways of existing in the world by liberating us for something to become otherwise, enabling transformation. Third are moral emotions of otherness. While all moral emotions concern our relations to other persons, Steinbock contends that emotions of this type “are directly engaged with ‘otherness’ in a way that is exemplary,” because these emotions essentially hinge on our relations to others.70 The interpersonal sphere is not the ground for moral emotions of possibility, but rather is their very content. Trust, for instance, is directly an interpersonal relation.71 Steinbock also considers loving and humility to be emotions of this third type.

 Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 28.  Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 135. 70  Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 195. 71  Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 195. 68 69

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It is understandable that Steinbock categorizes love as a moral emotion of otherness. Love is a form of valuing another “as given in his or her uniqueness,” which involves accepting the other as they are and as they are unfolding.72 He describes love as a “dynamic transcending” that is oriented toward the irreducibly other person in their process of becoming.73 However, my argument thus far implies that we may additionally understand love as a moral emotion of both other types. Using Steinbock’s framework, I argue that love is also a moral emotion of self-givenness and a moral emotion of possibility. Love may be considered an emotion of self-givenness inasmuch as it reveals us to ourselves as an object for the loved one. This revelation of self-as-object inaugurates a dynamic relation between my sense of subjectivity and my feeling of objecthood, as well as my pre-reflective self-consciousness and my reflective attempts to grasp myself by imagining the other’s perception of me, as outlined in Sect. 2.2. Loving reveals how the dynamic between self-as-subject and self-as-object is not enclosed, but rather always an unfinished project in the face of the other. Loving individuates and expropriates me. It both reveals my self-givenness, not in the sense of uncovering a pre-existing relation, but rather in the sense of bringing about a new mode of self-givenness by giving me to myself as an object—an object that I can never grasp but that I sense is already known by others. Second, love may also be considered an emotion of possibility. Steinbock argues that moral emotions of this type have a “structure of liberation: to free from something and to free for something, and to realize personal freedom as a being bound to others.”74 Recall Derrida and Nancy’s claim that, in loving, my heart is the heart of the other: I am bound to others and free for developing a relation to them. In addition, loving relationships encourage us to become other than who we are today. At their best, they lead us toward personal enhancement. In my view, this has precisely the structure of liberation Steinbock describes; loving relationships allow me to realize personal freedom inasmuch as this freedom is as a being bound to others. Loving can free us from the hold our dominant self-images have over us. It can also free us for new realizations of ourselves: the sense of objecthood we receive in a relationship can be a crucial starting point for such new self-realizations by giving us a felt sense of ourselves as other to ourselves—and spurring us toward the reflective process of imagining ourselves as the beloved that we are for the other. Here, we might think of the adage “seeing is believing.” To see myself as I imagine the other sees me might help me to realize my possibility of becoming that person. Those we love have a privileged status here relative to other others by virtue of our shared intimacy and their orientation toward us as unique bearers of value. As such, the dynamic of expropriation and individuation that I have argued is key to love may also be described as possibilization. To use a Sartrean turn of phrase, I am in the mode of being what I am not: I am my possibilities.

 Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 227.  Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 225. 74  Steinbock, Moral Emotions, 135. 72 73

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5  Conclusion The phenomenological claim that the emotions have a distinct style of evidence is useful for describing our relations to other persons. However, I have argued here that it is also essential for describing our relations to ourselves. Affective consciousness furnishes us with the feeling of being an object for others, and this leads to a dynamic of self-as-subject and self-as-object. It also triggers a process of reflection on oneself that, while unable to furnish the kind of self-knowledge it seeks, is self-­ revelatory due to the way that it opens up new insights and possibilities for the self. Loving relationships in particular illuminate this dynamic, in part because they involve the attempt to see oneself through the eyes of the lover. This is a form of auto-affection as Derrida and Nancy describe it, which is always auto-hetero-­ affective, and develops the dynamic that Sartre articulates in “the look.” The experience of self-revelation in love is not an experience of narcissistic appropriation: it does not succeed in giving me a grasp on myself as any kind of fixed entity. Rather, it is a self-givenness that is given to the other and frees me for new possibilities.

Bibliography Anderson, E. (2021, Summer). Sartre’s affective turn: Shame as recognition in ‘the look’. Philosophy Today, 65(3). https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday2021524415 Anderson, E. (forthcoming). Phenomenology and the ethics of love. Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy. Bauer, N. (2011). Beauvoir on the allure of self-objectification. In C. Witt (Ed.), Feminist metaphysics: Explorations in the ontology of sex, gender and the self (pp. 117–129). Springer. Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). The Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (2005). On touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (C. Irizarry, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. (2011). Voice and phenomenon: Introduction to the problem of the sign in Husserl’s phenomenology (L. Lawlor, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Hadreas, P. (2016). A phenomenology of love and hate. Routledge. Howells, C. (1992). Conclusion: Sartre and the deconstruction of the subject. In C. Howells (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Sartre (pp. 318–352). Cambridge University Press. Husserl, E. (1973). Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology (D. Cairns, Trans.). Springer. Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, second book (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (2006). The basic problems of phenomenology: From the lectures, winter semester, 1919–1911 (I. Farin & J. G. Hart, Trans.). Springer. Nancy, J.-L. (2003). Shattered love. In S. Sparks (Ed.), A finite thinking. Stanford University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2008). Corpus (R. A. Rand, Trans.). Fordham University Press. Richmond, S. (2011). Magic in Sartre’s early philosophy. In J. Webber (Ed.), Reading Sartre: On phenomenology and existentialism (pp. 145–161). Routledge. Sartre, J. -P. (1984). Being and nothingness (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Washington Square Press. Sartre, J. -P. (2004). The imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination (J. Webber, Trans.). Routledge. Scheler, M. (1973). Ordo Amoris. In Selected philosophical essays (D.  R. Lachterman, Trans.) (pp. 98–135). Northwestern University Press.

8  My Heart Is Yours: The Phenomenology of Self-Revelation in Affective Consciousness 163 Stein, E. (1989). On the problem of empathy (W. Stein, Trans.). ICS Publications. Steinbock, A. J. (2021). Knowing by heart: Loving as participation and critique. Northwestern University Press. Steinbock, A.  J., & Emotions, M. (2014). Reclaiming the evidence of the heart. Northwestern University Press. Zahavi, D. (1999). Self-awareness and alterity: A phenomenological investigation. Northwestern University Press.

Chapter 9

Personal Love: Feeling from the Depths Sara Heinämaa

Husserl’s late reflections on values entail an important but largely neglected argument about the role of emotions in the formation of human communities. In his research manuscripts and essays from the 1920s and 1930s, Husserl introduces and develops the concept of personal value (ein personaler Wert) and argues that the values thus identified are specific in binding us into enlarging circles of solicitude and care. Husserl calls personal values also “values of love” or “love-values” (Liebeswerte). The point, however, in this is not to promote any form of sentimentalism or emotivism. Rather, the idea is to accentuate and theorize the specific kind of creativity and productivity of the connections that personal values establish between human individuals. Husserl’s account of personal values of love depends on his understanding of human persons as essentially developing beings constantly in a state of structural change and becoming (Hua4; Hua4/5; Hua41). Persons unfold themselves in interpersonal relations and can reform themselves by self-reflective and self-critical acts. They are constitutionally connected to one another by multiple relations of empathy and communication. Communicative ties connect them to their contemporaries but also to past and future fellow beings across the boundaries of birth and death. The essential dynamism of persons entails that, whatever interpersonal love may mean, it is not a relation between stable or fixed beings but a connection between unique ways of becoming. Husserl introduces the concept of the personal value of love while rethinking the structures and conditions of the good life and critically inspecting his earlier

S. Heinämaa (*) Academy of Finland, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_9

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contributions to value theory and ethics from 1900–1910s.1 These late reflections are found in his research manuscripts from the 1920s and 1930s, published in Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie (Hua42), Einleitung in die Philosophie (HuaMat9), and Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstsein II: Gefühl und Wert (Hua43/2). The descriptions, analyses and lines of reasoning that Husserl develops in these manuscripts cohere with the arguments that he presents in his late publications, most importantly the so-called Kaizo essays in ethics, published in Aufsätze und Vorträge (Hua27), and his seminal work in cultural philosophy, The Crisis of European Sciences, and related research manuscripts and lectures (Hua6; Hua29). These argumentative contexts are very different in their goals and interests, and thus Husserl’s concept of love remains fragmented. In order to get at the core of his idea, one needs to combine separate reflections and remarks, capture their common meaning and develop the main elements into a well-defined concept. This is the task of the paper at hand. In the following, I will articulate and explicate Husserl’s conceptualization of values of love by distinguishing between five related features of these values. More specifically, I will argue that values of love (1) are rooted in egoic depths, (2) draw their living force from these depths and as are endlessly self-disclosing, (3) ground vocations and organize our lives into axiological wholes, (4) differ from objective values (gegenständliche Werte, objektive Werte) in being absolute and non-­ comparative, and (5) establish transitive relations of care between human beings. This five-partite explication is my own and cannot be found in a unified form in Husserl’s explorative investigations. However, I will demonstrate that Husserl’s discussions of love in the manuscripts mentioned above and the examples that he offers of the emotion substantiate my analysis. On the basis of this reconstruction, I argue that Husserl’s discussion of love reveals the dynamic character of human intersubjectivity.2 Finally, I will contend that his conceptualization of personal values of love allow us to understand what he means by the community of love (Liebesgemeinschaft), capable of enlarging into an all-embracing charity.

1  These are the early lecture courses on axiology and ethics, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, published in volume XXVIII of the Husserliana collection (Hua28). 2  My account draws from several earlier contributions that have touched upon the topic but not worked it out. Husserl’s concept of personal love has been discussed in several interpretative contexts, most importantly when dealing with his late ethical reflections, his theory of values, and his reformulations of the categorical imperative (cf. Melle, 1991; Hart, 1992; Melle, 2002; Hart, 2006; Melle, 2007; Peucker, 2008; Hart, 2009; Römer, 2011; Loidolt, 2012; Drummond, 2015a; Crespo, 2015; Drummond, 2018). In this paper, I will not take a stand on the question of the changes that the concept of personal values brings about in Husserl’s axiology and/or value theory. Nor will I compare Husserl conceptualization to the alternatives offered by other early phenomenologists, Scheler, Stein and Heidegger, or his contemporary neo-Kantians, e.g., Fichte and Rickert (cf. Steinbock, 2015; Staiti, 2017; De Monticelli, 2021). Comparisons with Husserl’s own earlier value theory as well as with the alternative theories of his contemporaries are a separate issue and require a full-length paper to be handled properly. Here I focus on the primary tasks of reconstruction and leave the comparative problems for further inquiries. The aim is purely systematic, and it is motivated by the conviction that any exegetic or comparative examination will benefit from a robust reconstruction of the key operative concept.

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1  The Egoic Depths of Loving The most striking and fundamental feature of personal values of love is that they are rooted in the deepest center of the person. In other words, they emerge from the deepest egoic cores of persons. As such they differ from all values that gain their direction, valency and/or intensity from targeted objects. In the Grenzprobleme volume, we read: [L]ove-inspired valuation flows from the subject toward the individual object and imparts or bestows a value to the latter that does not derive from the object itself but, ultimately, from him [the ego]. From this value follows a practical duty which is not determined by an objective value (that emerges from the object through affection) (Hua42, 352).

This implies that love-values have a double relation to the ego-pole of experiencing: On the one hand, like all intentional experiences, experiences of these values are egoic in the sense that the valued something is given to an ego. But on the other hand, unlike any other emotive and affective experiencing, the feeling essential to genuine love also originates from the ego (and not from the object pole). So, in the intentional acts of personal love, the ego operates in a more complex manner than in other emotive acts, such as joy, fear and anger, or in cognitive and practical acts in general. This is reflected in the form of the duties and obligations that stem from such values; they overrule or nullify all other kinds of duties and obligations (Hua42, 624). Husserl draws attention to this dual structurl fact by writing that “not all [acts] are similarly ego-centered” (Hua42, 358). The directionality of the personal emotion of love is, of course, outward but the grounding affection or feeling, the one that “colors” the experience and supports and feeds it, is not worldly but egoic, not centripetal but centrifugal (Hua42, 624–625). Like all intentional acts, personal love is then ego-centered, but the role of the ego is more complex in this emotion than in any other manners of intending, axiological and non-axiological. It is not only that personal love differs from the cognitive acts of knowing and the practical acts of desiring; it also differs from other feelings and other manners of loving, which all have their affective grounds “out there” (e.g., Husserl, [1939] 1985). On closer inspection, however, the structure of genuine love turns out to be even more complicated. This is because for Husserl, all loving involves two components: an affective component of feeling and a deciding egoic act which is responsible for the permanence of the emotion (cf. Heinämaa 2022a).3 An emotion is thus a position taking in respect to a feeling.4 But not all emotive deciding and not all loving is grounded in the depths of the ego. Only genuine love finds both its aspects, the 3  In Husserlian framing, values in general are the correlates of axiological acts, i.e., feelings, emotions and valuations (cf. Melle, 2007; Drummond, 2006, 2009, 2015b, 2018; Jardine, 2020, 2021). As such, they differ, on the one hand, from goals that are the correlates of the practical or conative acts of willing and deciding and, on the other hand, from percepts, things, events and facts that are the correlates of the doxic acts of cognition, belief and their modifications. 4  The freedom of the ego consists of its possibility to accept, reject or ignore the affection and the feeling (e.g., Hua4, 213–214/224–225, 278–280/291–293; Hua42, 359).

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feeling and the deciding, rooted in the depths of the self. In the series of manuscripts titled “Schönwert und Gutwert: Weltkonstitution und Gefühl”, we read: Genuine or true falling in love, to grasp a genuine love,  – this is not just to establish a habitual feeling [Gefallen] by a ‘vivid’ emotion [Gefühl] but means that one decides for the person on the basis of the depths (Hua43/2, 508).

So, in the case of genuine love, also the deciding moment, and not just the feeling, emerges or, rather, is grounded in the deepest core of the self. Thus understood, loving deciding has a special kind of stubbornness to it; it decides permanently, and its permanence is secured by the egoic depth as its source. As such genuine love is resistant to changing conditions, both external and internal, changes in its object and changes in the subject. This implies that the blindness, often attributed to erotic, romantic and maternal love, and supposedly characteristic of womanly existence, may better be understood, not as any form of sentimentality or single-mindedness, but as a special form of engagement and commitment (cf. Stein [1928–1932] 2002, e.g., 85–87/93–96, 3–4/255–256; 1917, 119–121/101–102; Hanley & Valiquette, 2002; Urban, 2016; Heinämaa, 2017). The Husserlian argument about the deeply egoic sources of love illuminates the inner structures of the personal ego. The personal ego is not a mere pole of acts or a center from which acts radiate; it is not just a temporal formation established in the habituation of lived experiences and position-taking acts in internal time; nor is it merely a monad, harmoniously resonating with other egos (Hua1, 100ff./66ff.). In addition to these structures – polar, habitual and monadic – the ego also has a depth: The ego is a pole but is not an empty point. It is not an empty and dead substrate for qualities, but is an ego-center of actions that has its own egoic depths (...) A distinctive feature, however, is that the ego is not only a polar centering inwardness, thereby accomplishing sense and value and deed out of itself, but that it is also an individual ego, who, in all its presenting, feeling, valuing, deciding, has a deepest center, the center of love in the distinguished personal sense; the ego who in this love follows a ‘call’, a ‘calling’, an innermost call, that strikes the innermost center of the ego itself, and that becomes determined for new kinds of decisions (Hua42, 358–359).

This in two related senses. First, the metaphor of flow captures the idea that the personal ego is an open-ended becoming, and its acts are analogous to the self-­ forming movements of a river or a stream (cf. Hua4, 250–251/262–263; Hua5, 17; Hua27, 37; Hua38, 104–105; Hua41, 242–243; Hua42, 145–146). Second, the ego also operates as a headspring or mother source from which valuing acts emanate, the roots of which are buried deep under the ground of our object-directed lives. We are not “plane-beings”, as Husserl argues in The Crisis, but are beings of fathomless depths (Hua6, 120–123/118–121, cf. 173/170; Hua4, 273/286).

2  Endless Self-Disclosure The deeply egoic structure of love-values makes them endlessly self-disclosing: each instant of such valuing feeds new ones and thus it goes endlessly. Husserl formulates the idea by saying that values of love have infinite feeling-horizons: “when

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one opens oneself to them, then one pours ever more richer streams of the valuing feeling from oneself, and enters delight. And the more this happens, the greater depths of the self are activated” (Hua42, 358). In the section already quoted above, in which Husserl discusses the doubly egoic nature of genuine love – having the source of both feeling and deciding in the self – he continues by describing how such an emotion deepens itself and discloses itself in ever new formations: Genuine or true falling in love, to grasp a genuine love, – this (...) means that one decides on or chooses the person on the basis of the depths, that one penetrates into one’s own inner depths, into the emotions that rise from the depths of one’s self, and tries to awaken such emotions in these depths, to find and enfold their immanence (Hua43/2, 508).

In Husserl analysis, the depths of the person entail the intentional acts habituated in the course of experiential life and the meanings sedimented upon one another on the basis of egoic activities, and so secondary passivity, but also the primary passivity of obscure drives, instincts, desires and feelings. In the second volume of Ideas, Husserl characterizes the latter explicitly by the metaphors of depths, root soil (Wurzelboden) and undergrounds (Untergründe) (Hua4, 279/292; Hua4/5, 527–529), and states that we touch here upon facticities which are “beyond our comprehension” (Hua4, 275–276/288; cf. Hua4/4, 573; Hua1, 106–108/72–73, 117–118/84–85, 156/181–182, 167–168/141). As such the person is not transparent to herself, but she is able to penetrate through the experiential levels of her life into her own depths. This cannot be accomplished by solitary self-reflections or self-variations merely but requires that the person exposes herself to new situations and unexpected events and, most importantly, to unfamiliar and alien others. By thus venturing into intersubjective relations, the person can also learn to love herself genuinely, not as a possessor of goods, powers or excellences, but as a lover that unconditionally and in enlarging circles cares for other persons (Hua42, 469–470). One further implication deserves attention. Namely, the constant deepening of personal love entails that this emotion cannot be satisfied or fulfilled in the same manner as other emotions and other experiences can. For comparison, consider the case of fear. The approaching storm satisfies our fearful intending of it as dangerous when its lighting hits the forest near the house and sets trees on fire. In contrast, an encounter with the loved one does not similarly comply to the loving intending; none of the person’s manifest qualities or excellences meets the intention separately or in conjunction. Rather than being brought to rest in the encounter, the intending gains strength and intensity. This aspect of loving is captured aptly by Emmanuel Levinas when he states that the emotion moves “beyond everything that can complete it” (Levinas, [1961] 1988, 22/34). However, the analysis that Husserl gives to the “insatiability” of love is very different from, and even oppositional to, the one that we find in Levinas. For Husserl, it is not that the loved one elicits ever new loving feelings from the subject and thus enriches and enlarges her emotive commitment. Rather the subject herself is able to extract more feeling from her own core, and endlessly so.

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Both philosophers draw here from a long tradition. The ultimate source is in Plato who, in Symposium and Alcibiades I, depicts the path to self-knowledge as proceeding via erotic love (Plato, 1997a, 1997b; cf. Rider, 2010, 404–405; Gordon, 2003). From this tradition Husserl retains the idea of the insatiability of genuine love and the vertical function of love in our lives: each fulfilment of this particular form of loving, rather than settling or levelling down the emotion, allows us to draw new instances of feeling from our egoic sources. Like all other emotions – and experiences in general – love involves an intention that can be fulfilled by the evident givenness of its object, but in addition to this general structure of intending-­ fulfilment, love also involves a simultaneous intensification in which the intention is reformed on the basis of newly released axiological forces.

3  Principles of Organization In Husserl’s understanding, all genuine vocations, that is, all resolutions to dedicate one’s practical life to certain tasks or kinds of tasks, are grounded in values of love.5 Values of love are thus the emotive units with which we identify as feeling and willing persons and to the promotion of which we devote our lives as wholes. In their case, we are insightfully certain that these values are necessary for us as who we are and that we need to strive for them, and thus we decide to dedicate our life unconditionally to the realization of these values (Hua27, 28; cf. Hua4, 265–268/277–280; cf. Hua29, 363–365; Hua41, 303). In the Kaizo essays, we read: In overviewing and evaluating one’s possible future life, someone may become certain that values of a particular type (...) have the character of absolutely desired values, without whose continual realization one’s life can have no satisfaction (Hua27, 27).

In the introductory lectures to philosophy from 1919, Einleitung in die Philosophie, the argument that vocations are grounded in values of love is even more explicit. Husserl writes: The daimon that leads to true calling or vocation speaks through love. So, it arrives not only at objective goods and the objectively greatest good, but each has her sphere of love and her ‘duties of love’ (HuaMat9, 146 n.1; cf. translation in Loidolt, 2012).

In the Grenzprobleme volume, Husserl continues this line of thought by characterizing love-based obligations as absolute ones: A value that springs or stems from [myself], which I myself decide for as who I am, on the basis of an originary loving dedication, is a practical unconditional, an absolute ought, and binds me as the one who I am. To decide against it is to be untrue to oneself, to lose oneself, to sin against oneself, to betray one’s true self, to act against one’s true being ([which is] an absolute practical contradiction) (Hua42, 356; cf. translation in Loidolt, 2012, 15).

5  For an explication of Husserl’s account of vocations and their dependence on the habituation and institution of intentional acts, see Heinämaa, 2021a.

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A vocational commitment, grounded in personal acts of loving, establishes an ordering among the many practices, activities, actions and motivations that belong to our lives.6 It regulates the whole of our practical life and brings unity to its different aspects. This means that a personal emotion of love and the values that it discloses function as organizational principles. They arrange our actions, practices and capacities in dynamic relations of dependency, and structure our lives as wholes.7 Thus personal values of love define who we are as agents and persons (Hua43/2, 507).8 So art is a vocation for the genuine artist, and science is a vocation for the true scientist (the philosopher); it is a field or region of spiritual activities and accomplishments, for which she knows that she has a calling, so that only the pursuit of these goods can give her the most ‘inner’ and most ‘pure’ satisfaction, and each succeeding can give her the consciousness of ‘happiness’ (Hua27, 28, cf. 38; Hua37, 245–246).9

As organizational principles, values of love must not be understood as rules or laws that would regulate our actions and practices from inside or from outside. Nor do they function as axiological axioms from which we could derive the directions of our actions or the contents of our choices and decisions in altering circumstances. Rather, the principal status of values of love means that they operate as living sources of axiological meanings that organize, format and animate our comportment from within. Concrete examples of such vocational decisions include Franz Kafka’s dedication to literature and Paul Gauguin’s dedication to painting (Williams, 1981b, p.22ff.; Heinämaa, 2014). Kafka decided to work as insurance officer on the basis

6  A vocation can thus be defined as an inner calling that regulates life as a whole (cf. Crespo, 2015, 709). In The Crisis, Husserl defines it as an interested attitude (Interesseneinstellung) (Hua6, 139/136). 7  In the Kaizo essays, Husserl argues that even though vocational loves (love-values) organize our lives as wholes they do not and cannot, by themselves, regulate each and every action or decision. For that purpose – which is the fully ethical purpose – the reflective capacity of self-critique must be practiced universally and habitually, i.e., in respect to each possible personal action and practical capacity (“I can”), but also in respect to each type of intending, cognitive, axiological or practical. 8  Husserl’s theory of personhood is most systematically exposed in the second volume of his Ideas (Hua4; Hua4/5). However, the idea of a person as a dynamic whole is articulated in all his major works (see, e.g., Hua1, 101–102/66–67; Hua4, 266–277/278–290; Hua5, 17; Hu6, 233–235/230–231; Hua4/5, 189–197, 205–229; cf. Hua3, 136–137/164–165, 163–164/194–195; Hua41, 242). For explications, see, Luft, 2006; Heinämaa, 2021b; Hahn, 2009; Jacobs, 2010, 2014; Heinämaa, 2019; cf. Hart, 1992, 2009. 9  Husserl distinguishes between thematically specific vocations and the ethical vocation to become a true human being, that is, self-responsible in a balanced way that covers all three forms of reason – the cognitive, the practical and the axiological – and is grounded in radical self-critique (e.g., Hua27, 29–45; Hua42, 269, 322, 492–494; HuaMat9, 133–134, 142, 167). Answering to the calling of becoming a true human being does not, however, mean that one abandons one’s specific vocation(s) but means that one elevates them by positioning them in the field of human vocations, actual and possible. Husserl writes: “The true artist (...) as such is not yet a true human being in the highest sense. An authentic human being can, however, be a true artist, but can be such only if ethical self-regulation demands this from him” (Hua27, 29; cf. Hua37, 238; Hua42, 35, 353–354).

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of economic considerations. By this decision he did not, however, dedicate his life to the furthering of clerkship practices. Instead he devoted his life to the activity of writing fiction. Gauguin resolved to become a painter and, even more demandingly, to experiment with the goals and techniques of modern painting, and for this purpose moved to Tahiti in French Polynesia, abandoning his family and friends. These real cases of vocational decisions are illuminated by fictional ones. In Henry James’ ghost story, Owen Wingrave decides against family traditions that valorize military service and thereby risks his life in an unexpected manner (Williams, 1981a, 1981b); and in Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina decides on Vronski against all social norms but also against her own love and care for her children, and thus endangers everything that she has (Heinämaa, 2017).10 The destructive results described by these fictional cases are not meant to scandalize or moralize the agents but to highlight the specific character of vocational decisions: what is at stake is the person as such and her life as a concrete whole. Husserl’s own examples of objects of vocational decisions based on genuine love include child for the mother, or more generally for the parent, friend for any non-­ recluse person, home country for the patriot, music for musicians and music lovers, art in general, science for scientists and philosophers. He discusses all these examples in parallel, but the paradigm of love for him is love for persons, epitomized by the case of the loving mother. The example of the mother may be disturbing for female professionals and female philosophers in particular, not because Husserl himself would idealize or sentimentalize the case but because it is often used in such ways in professional contexts. Much is still associated with the motherly condition, in terms of female duties and tasks but also in terms of female dispositions and capacities and, by implication, female incapacities. And much of what is thus associated and implied is simply ideological or invalid (cf. Stone, 2012; Søndergaard Christensen, 2020). Husserl’s main aim, however, is not to praise or prioritize maternal or parental love but to use it to illuminate the general structure of all genuine love. Erotic love does not serve this task, since its modern conceptualizations are laden with sensualistic, sexual and reproductive connotations11; and love between friends and siblings implies symmetry which should not be taken for granted in the analysis.12 So, in order to avoid hasty conclusions and one-sided models, one must pay attention to the other examples that Husserl parallels to the case of the mother, and  My aim here is not to take a stand on the interpretation of Tolstoy’s novel but merely to use the case of Karenina to illuminate the possibility of a (female) person who makes the unconventional decision to dedicate her life to her lover rather than to her children. 11  In Works of Love, Kierkegaard argues that erotic love and friendship cannot serve as models of love because both involve a serious limitation. In both case, Kierkegaard contends, the lover finds it difficult to sacrifice his own feeling for the good of the loved one. She hesitates in giving up her love even when “the other’s distinctiveness requites this very sacrifice” (Kierkegaard, [1847] 1995, 273; cf. Ferreira, 2001, 167). 12  The Aristotelian tradition offers philia as a model for mutual or symmetrical relations between persons. Husserl’s concept of love, however, does not require such reciprocal relating. It covers also one-sided and unrequited ways of loving. 10

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these are several: love of siblings, parents, friends, partners, colleagues, nations, communities of various types, art works, nature, the cosmos, and ultimately beauty and truth. In Einleitung in die Philosophie, we read: [I]n contrast to the general human love there is a personal love that has its own right and gives to the loved one an individual value [in the eyes of] the loving subject. Such is love for friends and motherly love. Also, for higher personalities: love for nation, which does not exclude the general love for each nation (HuaMat9, 146 n.1, cf. 132n1; cf. Hua42, 356–357, 391–392, 420, 624–625).

Our life can contain several love-values, and when these values conflict, endorsing one rather than the other means that we have to make sacrifices and possibly also tragic ones. Husserl’s examples of such situations include the conflict between one’s care for the family and one’s care for the people, the conflict between the demands of one’s vocational profession and those of family and friends, and the conflict involved in decisions to develop certain personal skills and capacities while neglecting others (e.g., Hua42, 390, 465–467; cf. Donohoe, 2010, 129; 2016; Loidolt, 2012, 26). The problem of conflicting love-values and sacrifice is already formulated in the early lectures on value theory and ethics from 1908–1914 where it is exemplified by the dilemma of choosing between two different gifts: “Someone sacrifices her musical joy, neglects the development of her musical gifts in order to develop exceptional gifts in science, in order to gain exceptional knowledge” (Hua28, 420). Some of the cases that Husserl discusses involve a momentary sacrifice which allows the pursuit of both vocations in the future. But comprehensive and global sacrifices are also possible, sacrifices in which we do not just momentarily abandon our love-value in order to endorse another love-value – perhaps one that is more fragile or demands a more acute care – but in which we abandon the whole project of caring for one of the persons or the things that we love. Such sacrifices are tragic in that they entail irrecuperable loss and self-loss. Husserl himself repeatedly refers to the experience of a parent who is torn between two options, whether to support a son’s decision to join the army in a situation of national danger or to draw the child’s attention to the likelihood of death, injury and trauma (e.g., Hua42, 310, 400–401; HuaMat9, 146 n.1). Here the love for one’s own child and the love for one’s country conflict. The paradigmatic example of a tragically sacrificial decision, however, is that of Abraham when he determines to obey the command of God and sets out to murder his son Isaac. In Husserl’s analysis, Abraham is faced with an irresolvable inner conflict between his love for Isaac and his love for God (Hua42, 466; cf. Drummond, 2018, 144).13 To choose one of the options is to neglect the other, and since both love-values oblige the agent completely and unconditionally  – and deeply from within – he cannot avoid grief and, moreover, is bound to face a grief that colors his life as a whole.

 See, Kierkegaard’s original formulations of the paradox at the beginning of his Fear and Trembling ([1843] 1983).

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A mundane version of the same tragic decision operates as the culmination point in William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice: a mother is forced to choose between her two children, one of which will be abandoned to suffering and death.14 The alternative of grabbing both children and making a hopeless gesture of escape with them, and thus risking being killed together, is not an option since the mother’s love for both children commands her to secure their lives without compromise (Hua42, 391–392). In all these cases, sacrifice is tragic and entails that one “sins against oneself”, as Husserl formulates. What he emphasizes by the religious term “sin” is that such a decision violates an absolute obligation of loving care and that consequently no such decision can be accompanied by joy, relief or comfort but all entail lifelong sadness or grief for loss and self-loss. The point here is not to suggest that love would fail or always fail when encountered by insurmountable counterforces or devastating circumstances. Rather, the point is that even in unrelentingly harsh and inescapable conditions there is time and space for acts of love that protect, care and promote the loved ones.15 Ultimately, there is the choice between caring for the good of the loved one – a particular person or persons  – or abandoning them due to some other emotion, hope, desperation, trust or anger.16

14  In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt analyses totalitarianism in terms of the process of institutionalizing policies that generate such alternatives: “When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family – how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed?” (Arendt, [1951] 1968, 452). 15  This means that hope is the constant companion of love, and hopelessness signals its absence. 16  Values of love can be realized in the harshest conditions. This possibility is pictured by Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia in which a family faces global destruction of an apocalyptical scale beyond escape. In a Kierkegaardian vein, the film portrays three alternative manners of reacting to the prospects of global destruction, one aesthetic, the other rationalistic and the third one loving. The aesthete, the mother of the family, comes to think that the majestic dimensions of destruction could perhaps be marveled or honored. The rationalist, the father, when realizing that he cannot do anything to save his family, takes his own life and dies in solitude. The loving person sets out to construct a tent by erecting nine branches and crossing their tops. She takes the mother and the child inside the symbolic shelter, asks the child to hold her hand and close his eyes. In the last scene of the film, the three sit in a tiny circle under an enormous planet that covers the sky, protected by the construction that is physically more fragile than their bodies but emotionally impenetrable.

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4  Incomparability and Absoluteness Husserl argues that love-values differ essentially from objective values; they are not objective or objectifiable. Three senses of “objective” combine here but can be distinguished: First, as we saw above, values of love do not derive their force and intensity from the object poles of experience but from egoic depths.17 Second, unlike objective values, they cannot be grasped by each and every subject equally but are evidently discovered by lovers and originally given merely to them (Hua42, 350–351; HuaMat9, 132 n.1, 146 n.1; cf. Hua1, 117ff./84ff.). Thus, all other subjects, the ones who lack love for the particular person, practice or thing at issue, are dependent on the lover in their capacity to grasp the value. They may endorse and promote the value of the object for diverse reasons, but they are not self-sufficient in their valuations. Less technically put, values of love are not (just) intersubjectively recognizable but are personally crucial to us (cf. Williams & Smart, 1973, 100ff.; Frankfurt, 2004). Our original relation to them cannot merely be that of a non-participating observer nor that of the sympathizing partner (Hua42, 351; cf. Hahn, 2009; Drummond, 2018, 142), since we operate as their living sources. So, as lovers we operate like explorers who venture into unknown depths to reveal exceptional wealth. This does not entail that love values would be subjective in any detrimental sense: they are not uncommunicable or private, and they do not count as “mere appearances” of some objective events (cf. Hua41, 64–65; Husserl, [1939] 1985, 39–41/42–44). On the contrary, they are indispensable to us as human beings, even if they are not detectable by us in the same manner. Third, and this is most crucial to Husserl’s analysis, values of love are not quantifiable and do not allow for comparisons (Hua42, 356–537, 390). Quantifiable values can be compared with one another as greater or smaller, higher or lower, and thus contrasted and weighted against one another. They can also be organized into hierarchical structures on the basis of their relative weights.18 Unlike quantifiable  For the basic sense of non-objectifying acts, see, Melle, 1990; Bernet, 1994.  Husserl’s disciple and colleague Moritz Geiger presented the case of the loving mother as a counterexample to Husserl’s early Brentanian axiology and praxis, formulated by the concept of the best possible and a purely formal categorical imperative. In the 1919–1920 manuscripts for the lecture course titled “Introduction to Philosophy” (Einleitung in die Philosophie), Husserl adds a self-critical note, writing: “It is obvious that an ethics which is carried out according to the mere categorical imperative like it was, following Brentano, taken as the basis here, is not ethics at all. I have already reverted back to my old lines of thought, although Geiger already made the justified objection to me in 1907 that it would be ridiculous to demand of a mother to deliberate first, if the fostering of her child would be the best [thing to do] within her practical domain” (Hua28, xlvi, cf. 419–422). For more detailed accounts of Geiger’s influence on Husserl, see, Melle, 1988, xlvi– xlviii; Sowa & Vongehr, 2013, c–cii, civ; Averchi, 2015; Drummond, 2018, 140–142; cf. Loidolt, 2012, 4ff.; Crespo, 2015, 722. For the neo-Kantian contexts of Husserl’s early prewar and late postwar ethics, see, Staiti, 2017. For Husserl’s reading of Fichte, see Welton, 2000, 372–392; Staiti, 2017; Drummond, 2018.

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values, values of love do not allow any calculative considerations, and not even comparative reflections or deliberations (cf. Drummond, 2016). We are called to care, further and promote the loved one in all situations and circumstances, without exception, and not only on the condition that some other values can be suspended.19 Love thus orders us unconditionally, absolutely (Hua42, 624–625). The absolute unconditional character of personal love-values is manifested in the phenomenon of sacrifice discussed above: when such values conflict in our lives, then any final decision for one rather than another is experienced as a tragic sacrifice. In Grenzprobleme, Husserl explains: In the case of one [type of] values [objective values], I have the choice; the choice only has to be reasonable, I ought to choose the best among the practical goods. In the case of values that receive their personal sense from the depths of the personality and her personal love, there is not choice and no ‘quantitative’ differences, namely no differences of weight/iness, the overriding and the overridden. A value that springs or stems from [myself], on which I myself decide as who I am, on the basis of an originary loving dedication, is a practical unconditional, an absolute ought, and binds me as the one who I am. To decide against it is to be untrue to oneself, to lose oneself, to sin against oneself, to betray one’s true self, to act against one’s true being ([which is] an absolute practical contradiction) (Hua42, 356).

This implies that our absolute values of love “outshine” all objective values that we may endorse, enhance or pursue (Hua42, 377, 624). In Ulrich Melle’s terms, they “have an absolute priority over the objective values” (Melle, 2007, 13).20

5  Transitivity of Care As we already have seen, genuine love entails the absolute obligation to care for the good of the ones that we love. This holds equally for persons, human practices and their products, for example, works of art and scientific outcomes (Hua43/2, 508). However, when we love another person, then our emotion is directed at someone who is the subject of her own axiological activities, independent of our valuations, emotions and feelings. In this case our obligation to care for the good of the loved one entails the obligation to care also for her axiological commitments, whatever these may be. The mother is under the absolute ought of her motherly love to care for her loved one. But in this intentional direction of care for child(ren) there is the promotion of growth of the child in the direction of its own personal values of development, and even to the direction that makes humans in general and this particular human valuable (i.e., all kinds of capaci Husserl also uses his early concept of isolation to characterize this feature of love-values: according to him, all values are isolative but unlike quantitative objective values, values of love are irreversibly isolative (Hua42, 357). 20  In order to avoid quantitative juxtapositions and comparisons between love-values and other values, Husserl invokes the metaphors of sunlight when describing the supreme function of lovevalues: “[W]hile streaming out from the self, pure love, as fully unfolded, outshines [überstrahlen] all objective values and lets their weight disappear” (Hua42, 624; cf. Hua41, 242–243, 262–266). 19

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ties and also in the direction of the child’s personal action from personal volitions) (Hua42, 356–357; cf. Hua27, 46).

The point here is not to prioritize or idealize maternal or parental love but to study this kind of love as an example of a specific form of dedication that ties us not just to the wellbeing and flourishing of another person but more specifically also to the emotive valuations that stem from this other person and are foreign to us. I call this feature of love-values “the transitivity of loving care” since it implies the idea that in the case of other valuing subjects, our care for their wellbeing and flourishing entails care for their valuations and emotive experiences. In so far as the valuations and emotions stem from the deepest core of the person, they are absolute for her. Thus, if we love someone in this deep and deeply personal way, then we must also care for her valuations and manners of valuing. This implies as special interest in whatever the other happens to love genuinely from her own personal, egoic cores. Moreover, since persons are for Husserl essentially developing temporal beings, our care for our loved one covers not just her actual emotions but also her future possibilities as a subject of feeling and valuing. Our obligation thus concerns the unfolding of her potentials as a lover and our task is to care for her becoming as an emotional and axiological subject in her own right. A child rejoices music but then decides to devote her life to sports; another child is talented in mathematics but falls in love and establishes a family. A philosopher loses his eyesight and cannot read or write anymore; another one grows tired with professional battles and abandons her life in the academia; a third one falls ill with Alzheimer’s and step by step is deprived of intellectual capacities, memory, language and cognition. In all these cases, our love obliges us to promote our loved one’s capacity to love something – anything – in the way that draws feeling and commitment from her core self, however fragilely or transiently. The situation is further complicated by the fact that we ourselves, as persons, are also unfinished beings in the process of constant becoming. This means that, as lovers, we have to care for other axiological subjects and their loving commitments while changing and developing ourselves. Moreover, our relations to our loved ones are crucial for our own development as subjects of emotion and valuation, capable of feeling and deciding about our feelings. This dynamic transitivity of loving care adds significantly to the problems of sacrifice. If our loved one is devoted to a person or activity that we ourselves find insignificant or even harmful, and if her devotion is deep and personal in the manner discussed above, then we are, again, faced with the problem of value conflict. On the one hand, we must care for our loved one, and this entails the task of fostering her capacities of valuing and loving in a genuine way. On the other hand, some of our other values, and deeply personal ones, may conflict with this task. The time-worn story of Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague illuminates this possibility: the parents of the two young lovers cherish their children and love them unconditionally but cannot accept their mutual devotion due to an old family feud and enmity. The axiological conflict experienced by the parents may be alleviated

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by arguing that in the course of the tragic events the parents come to realize that the values of family honor that they took to be absolute for them were actually only relative and comparative and that they thus deceived themselves all along (cf. Hua43/2, 510). But one may also argue that a true conflict is experienced by the parents between two absolute values, the child’s happiness and the family’s honor, and one of these is sacrificed for the other. In this case, the reconciliation between the two families at the end of the story would mark a radical revaluation and remorse (cf. Hua42, 198–199), rather than an overcoming of self-deception. Ultimately, Husserl seems to claim that our personal values of love oblige us to promote and enhance the love-valuings of all others who have similar deeply egoic and absolutely obliging values, be these others our near ones or foreign to our lives and lifeworlds. We read: Of course, the fulfilment of my personal absolute ought is an originary lived experience only for me and as such preferential. But the law of love reigns here. As soon as I have the other given as the subject of her personal ought in empathy (...) I ‘have to’ sympathize with her, love her; and to encourage or promote her is my absolute ought (Ms. F I 24, 38a, b, cited in Loidolt, 2012, 25, italics added; cf. 13–14; cf. Hua42, 337).21

Husserl argues here that the empathetic apprehension of the other as a subject of her own genuine love is enough to oblige me to care for her as such, that is, as a loving subject with her own axiological objects, goals and projects which are not mine and may radically differ from my own. In so far as I love something from my own egoic depths and can empathetically understand that others love in the same manner, I am obliged to love them all, independently of possible differences in the contents of our emotions. We must ask how this follows, by what kind of reasoning. Let me end by providing a stepwise interpretation: Husserl explicitly says that the care for the loved one’s love follows from a certain kind of empathy, an empathetic apperception of the other as a subject of genuine emotion and the absolute ought that emerges from her loving: as if I were her and her deepest values and obligations were my own (Hua42, 337, 470). What is thus needed is that I empathize with the other, not just as some kind of subject – sensing, moving, experiencing, believing, feeling and willing –, but as a specific kind of subject who is motivated by love-values equal in their nature and origin to the one that I experience in relation to her. Her values may be different from mine in their content, but they are equally fundamental to her life, that is, their structural position and their motivational role in the other’s life is equal to the position and role that my own love-values have in my life. They are equally central, they stem from sources or cores equally deep and awaken and activate feelings equally endless. If I care for the other person, and care for her in the unconditional sense

 Cf. the negative imperative formulated in Grenzprobleme: “It is an absolute obligation for each one, so a general [law], a law of the ought, that each one’s absolute obligation belongs in the realm or circuit of my absolute obligation, in the circuit of my absolute ethical responsibilities and values. Therefore, I must not hamper anyone’s engagement nor distract them from their duties, without sinning against myself” (Hua42, 390).

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dictated by genuine love, then I must also care for the thriving and flourishing of her valuations. It seems to me that three new perspectives on human intersubjectivity open up from this discussion of the structural features of love-values. First, as I argued above, our genuine love for a particular person binds us to her valuations and thereby to whatever this person truly loves. We may not be able to love what our loved one loves but we are obliged, by our own deeply personal emotion, to care for the other’s capacity of valuing in an equal manner. I have called this “the transitivity of care” involved in genuine love. Second, in so far as we genuinely love some being that entails infinite horizons – be it a person, a practice, a science, an art, a god, the world, or life itself – we are bound to all other valuing subjects who share our love and who, on the basis of their own loving, have devoted their lives to the promotion and enhancement of the commonly valued being. This type of binding depends, in Husserl’s analysis, on our finitude as human persons. We are not just mortal but are also finite in our powers and limited in our achievements (e.g., Hua42, 317–318; cf. Hua17, 176). Thus, we can truly serve a value that bears infinite horizons only if we operate jointly in mutual communication with other human beings who share the same value. This does not include just contemporaries but also past and future fellow subjects. Thus, in order to cherish a value in its infinity and to promote the goals determined by it, we need to relate to whole chains of generations in their open-ended continuity and branching (e.g., Hua42, 327; Hua29, 363–364; cf. Heinämaa, 2013). How far can we proceed with such considerations? Personal love, be it directed at human beings or human activities and accomplishments, does not cover the whole of human intersubjectivity, and not even a major part of it. Our personal love is able to single out only few individuals, and in any case a minimal number of human beings. Moreover, most of the people that we encounter in our lives do not share our deepest vocations and vocational values but serve very different ones. In terms of love, most human beings seem either emotively indifferent to us or just comparatively valuable. A third consideration, however, becomes possible when we focus, not on the contents of the shared values but on the structural similarities in our manners of valuing. Most human beings, if not all, relate to something – a person, an activity or a thing – in the same deeply emotive manner in which we relate to our own loved ones. Some people serve the sciences and music, while others are devoted to sports. Some dedicate their lives to a religion, while others decide for war reportage or environmental causes. Someone sacrifices her professional aspirations for the care of a child, while the other sacrifices the care for her family for the promotion of some theoretical or political end. Such structural sameness of emotion may not be enough to make us love all such axiological subjects, but it motivates us to esteem or respect them as our equals (cf. Drummond, 2006, 2018). Husserl, however, puts forward the more demanding idea, as we saw above: we are not just bound to respect others as deeply emotive subjects in their own right but also bound to love them as such. In light of the explication given here, it seems to me that this idea depends on Husserl’s late analysis of persons as endless and

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original sources of value production. All genuinely loving others, whatever the content of their love may be, realize in their own particular valuations what is most significant and exquisite in our personal love for persons: the infinity of axiological formation and production (Hua43/2, 511; Hua42, 307, 316, 324–325, 336–337, 424). In so far as we become conscious of the specificity of our manner of loving valuing, its modality, and intend it as such, we are bound to value similarly any other who exhibits the same manner. We are axiologically bound to such others by chains of love that link our own emotions to the emotions of our loved ones, and from there further to the emotions of their loved ones, and so on, endlessly.22 Husserl calls “community of love” (Liebesgemeinschaft) the type of intersubjective unity that is established in relations of love. In this, he is strongly influenced by the Christian and Kantian traditions. But unlike numerous predecessors and contemporaries, Husserl does not conceptualize the universalism of the Christian caritas as being dependent on something over and above individual persons, be it God, the Idea of reason or that of the will. In his analysis, we do not love all humans as equal instances of the ideal concept of self-reflective reason or that of autonomous will but love them as living nodes in a network of empathetic and communicative relations that bind similarly loving subjects into one another in endlessly enlarging circles.23

References Arendt, H. ([1951] 1968). The origins of totalitarianism. Harcourt. Averchi, M. (2015). Husserl and Geiger on feelings and intentionality. In M. Ubiali & M. Wehrle (Eds.), Feeling and value, willing and action (pp. 105–118). Springer. Bernet, R. (1994). An intentionality without subject or object? Man and World, 27, 213–255. Crespo, M. (2015). Husserl on personal aspects of moral normativity. Ethical Perspectives, 22(4), 699–722. De Monticelli, R. (2021). Towards a phenomenological axiology: Discovering what matters. Palgrave/MacMillan. Donohoe, J. (2010). The vocation of motherhood: Husserl and feminist ethics. Continental Philosophy Review, 43(1), 127–140.

  Husserl conception of the community of love recalls the Stoic notion of cosmopolitanism and its circles of care and obligation. 23  Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the international workshop, Perspectives on the Hearth (Stony Brook, 2020); the annual meeting of The German Phenomenological Society / Deutsche Gesellschaft für Phänomenologische Forschung, Fact, Facticity, Reality / Faktum, Faktizität, Wirklichkeit (Vienna, 2019); and the 17th annual meeting of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology (Södertörn UC 2019). I would like to thank Professor Anthony Steinbock and Professors Georg Stenger (Vienna), Sergej Seitz (Vienna) and Inga Römer (Grenoble) for these invitations, and also express my gratitude to the participants at the three events for their stimulating comments and suggestions. Portions of the paper, lightly revised and further developed here, were previously published in Sara Heinämaa, “Values of love: Two forms of infinity characteristic of human persons”, in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 19, no. 3, pp.431–450. 22

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Donohoe, J. (2016). Husserl on ethics and Intersubjectivity: From static and genetic phenomenology. University of Toronto Press. Drummond, J. (2006). Respect as a moral emotion: A phenomenological approach. Husserl Studies, 22(1), 1–27. Drummond, J. (2009). Feelings, emotions, and Wertnehmungen. Paper presented at a conference in Würzburg 2009. Drummond, J. (2015a). Exceptional love? In M. Ubiali & M. Wehrle (Eds.), Feeling and value, willing and action (pp. 51–69). Springer. Drummond, J. (2015b). Husserl’s phenomenological axiology and Aristotelian virtue ethics. In M. Tuominen, S. Heinämaa, & V. Mäkinen (Eds.), New perspectives on Aristotelianism and its critics (pp. 179–195). Brill. Drummond, J. (2016). Time and the “antinomies” of deliberation. In R. Altshuer & M. J. Sigrist (Eds.), Time and the philosophy of action. Routledge. Drummond, J. (2018). Husserl’s middle period and the development of his ethics. In D. Zahavi (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the history of phenomenology (pp.  135–154). Oxford University Press. Ferreira, M. J. (2001). Love’s grateful striving: A commentary on Kierkegaard’s works of love. Oxford University Press. Frankfurt, H. G. (2004). The reasons of love. Princeton University Press. Gordon, J. (2003). Eros and philosophical seduction in Alcibiades I. Ancient Philosophy, 23(1), 11–30. Hahn, C.J. (2009). The concept of personhood in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Doctoral dissertation. Marquette University. Hanley, K. M., & Valiquette, J. (2002). Edith Stein: Woman as ethical type. In J. J. Drummond & L. Embree (Eds.), Phenomenological approaches to moral philosophy (pp. 451–473). Kluwer. Hart, J. (1992). The person and the common life. Springer. Hart, J. (2006). The absolute ought and the unique individual. Husserl Studies, 22, 223–240. Hart, J. (2009). Who one is, Volumes 1–2. Springer. Heinämaa, S. (2013). Transcendental intersubjectivity and normality: Constitution by mortals. In D. Moran & R. T. Jensen (Eds.), The phenomenology of embodied subjectivity (pp. 83–103). Springer. Heinämaa, S. (2014). Husserl’s ethics of renewal: A Personalistic approach. In M.  Tuominen, S.  Heinämaa, & V.  Mäkinen (Eds.), New perspectives to Aristotelianism and its critics (pp. 196–212). Brill. Heinämaa, S. (2017). Love and admiration (wonder): Fundaments of the self-other relations. In J. Drummond & S. Rinofner-Kreidl (Eds.), Emotional experiences: Ethical and social significance (pp. 155–174). Rowman and Littlefield International. Heinämaa, S. (2019). Two ways of understanding persons: A Husserlian distinction. In R.  De Monticelli & F. De Vecchi (Eds.), Phenomenology and mind (Vol. 15, pp. 92–103). Heinämaa, S. (2022a). Phenomenology as vocation – A project instituted and habituated by the will. In K. Romdenh-Romluc & J. Dunham (Eds.), The history of habit (tentative). Forthcoming. Heinämaa, S. (2022b). Self – A phenomenological account: Temporality, finitude and intersubjectivity. In A. Bortolan & E. Magri (Eds.), Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and the social world: The continued relevance of phenomenology. De Gruyter. Forthcoming. Husserl, E. (Hua1). Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, Husserliana I (S. Strasser, Ed.). Martinus Nijhoff, 1950. In English: Cartesian meditations (D. Cairns, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. Husserl, E. (Hua3). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, Husserliana III (W. Biemel, Ed.). Martinus Nijhoff, 1913. In English: Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, First book: General introduction to a pure phenomenology (F. Kersten, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983.

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Husserl, E. (Hua4). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, Husserliana IV (M. Biemel, Ed.). Martinus Nijhoff, 1952. In English: Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, Second book: Studies in the phenomenological constitution (R. Rojcewicz, & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Kluwer, 1993. Husserl, E. (Hua5). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaft, Husserliana V (M. Biemel, Ed.). Martinus Nijhoff, 1952. Husserl, E. (Hua4/5). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution und Wissenschaftstheorie, Husserliana IV/V (D. Fonfara, Ed.). Springer, forthcoming 2021. Husserl, E. (Hua6). Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, Husserliana VI (W.  Biemel, Ed.). Martinus Nijhoff, 1954. In English: The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy (D.  Carr, Trans.). Northwestern University Press, 1988. Husserl, E. (Hua17). Formale und transzendentale Logik, Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, Husserliana XVII (P. Janssen, Ed.). Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. Husserl, E. (Hua27). Aufsätze und Vorträge 1922–1937, Husserliana XXVII (H.  R. Sepp, & T. Nenon, Eds.). Kluwer, 1989. Husserl, E. (Hua28). Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, Husserliana XXVIII (U. Melle, Ed.). Kluwer, 1988. Husserl, E. (Hua29). Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Ergänzungsband: Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937, Husserliana XXIX (R. N. Smid, Ed.). Kluwer, 1993. Husserl, E. (Hua37). Einleitung in die Ethik, Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924, Husserliana XXXVII (H. Peucker, Ed.). Springer, 2004. Husserl, E. (Hua38). Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912), Husserliana XXXVIII (T. Vongehr, & R. Giuliani, Eds.). Springer, 2004. Husserl, E. (Hua41). Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der eidetischen Variation, Husserliana XLI (D. Fonfara, Eds.). Springer, 2012. Husserl, E. (Hua42). Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte, Metaphysik, Späte Ethik, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937), Husserliana XLII (R. Sowa, & T. Vongehr, Eds.). Springer. 2013. Husserl, E. (Hua43/2). Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, Teilband II: Gefühl und Wert (Texte aus dem Nachlass 1896–1925). Husserliana XLIII/2 (U.  Melle, & T.  Vongehr, Eds.). Springer, 2021. Husserl, E. (HuaMat9). Einleitung in die Philosophie, Vorlesungen 1916–1919, Husserliana Materialien IX (H. Jacobs, Ed.). Springer, 2012. Husserl, E. ([1939] 1985). Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik (L. Landgrebe, Revised and Ed.). Felix Mayer Verlag. In English: Experience and judgement: Investigations in a genealogy of logic (J. S. Churchill, & K. Ameriks, Trans.). Northwestern University Press, 1973. Jacobs, H. (2010). Towards a phenomenological account of personal identity. In C.  Ierna, H. Jacobs, & F. Mattens (Eds.), Philosophy, phenomenology, science: Essays in commemoration of Edmund Husserl (pp. 333–361). Springer. Jacobs, H. (2014). Transcendental subjectivity and the human being. In S. Heinämaa, M. Hartimo, & T. Miettinen (Eds.), Phenomenology and the transcendental (pp. 87–105). Routledge. Jardine, J. (2020). Edmund Husserl. In T. Szanto & H. Landweer (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of phenomenology of emotions (pp. 53–62). Routledge. Jardine, J. (2021). Empathy, embodiment, and the person: Intersubjectivity and selfhood in Husserl’s ideas II. Springer. Kierkegaard, S. ([1843] 1983). Fear and trembling  – Repetition, Kierkegaard’s writings VI (H. V. Hong, & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

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Kierkegaard, S. ([1847] 1995). Works of love, Kierkegaard’s Writings XVI (H.  V. Hong, & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton University Press. Levinas, E. ([1961] 1988). Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité. Kluwer. In English: Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press, 1969. Loidolt, S. (2012). The “Daimon” that speaks through love: A phenomenological ethics of the absolute ought – Investigating Husserl’s unpublished texts. In M. Sanders & J. J. Wisnewski (Eds.), Ethics and phenomenology (pp. 9–38). Lexington. Luft, S. (2006). Husserl’s concept of the “transcendental person”: Another look at the Husserl-­ Heidegger relationship. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 13(2), 141–177. Melle, U. (1988). Einleitung des Herausgebers. In U. Melle (Ed.), Edmund Husserl: Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, Husserliana XXVIII (pp. xiii–xliv). Kluwer. Melle, U. (1990). Objektivierende und nicht-objektivierende Akte. In J. C. Ijsseling (Ed.), Husserl-­ Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung (pp. 35–49). Kluwer. Melle, U. (1991). The development of Husserl’s ethics. Études phénoménologiques, 13–14, 115–135. Melle, U. (2002). Edmund Husserl: From reason to love. In J. Drummond & L. Embree (Eds.), The phenomenological approaches to moral philosophy (pp. 229–248). Kluwer. Melle, U. (2007). Husserl’s personalistic ethics. Husserl Studies, 23, 1–15. Peucker, H. (2008). From logic to the person: An introduction to Edmund Husserl’s ethics. Review of Metaphysics, 62, 307–325. Plato. (1997a). Alcibiades I (D. S. Hutchinson, Trans.). In Plato, Completed Works (J. M. Cooper, Ed.). Hackett Publishing Company. Plato. (1997b). The Symposium (A. Nehamas, & P. Woodruff, Trans.). In Plato, Completed Works (J. M. Cooper, Ed.). Hackett Publishing Company. Rider, B. A. (2010). Self-care, self-knowledge, and politics in the Alcibiades I. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, 15(2), 394–413. Römer, I. (2011). Von der wertmaximierenden Leistungsmachinen zur vernünftigen liebenden Person: Subjektivität in Husserls Ethik. Phänomenologie, 36, 21–35. Søndergaard Christensen, A.-M. (2020). Løgstrup, Levinas and the mother: Ethics, love, and the relationship to the other. The Monist, 103, 1–15. Sowa, R., & Vongehr, T. (2013). Einleitung. In R. Sowa & T. Vongehr (Eds.), Edmund Husserl: Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte, Metaphysik, Späte Ethik, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937), Husserliana XLII (pp. xix– cxv). Springer. Staiti, A. (2017). Husserls Liebesethik im südwestdeutschen neukantianischen Kontext. Paper presented at Università Vita e Salute, San Rafaele. Stein, E. ([1917] 2008). Zum problem der Einfühlung, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 5. Herder. In English: On the problem of empathy, The collected works of Edith Stein, Vol. 3 (W.  Stein, Trans.). ICS Publication, 1989. Stein, E. ([1928–1932] 2002). Die Frau: Fragestellungen und Reflexionen, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 13 (M. A. Neyer, Ed.). Herder. In English: Essays on woman, The collected works of Edith Stein, Vol. 2 (2nd, revised edition. F. M. Oben, Trans.). ICS Publications, 1996. Steinbock, A. (2015). Moral emotions: Reclaiming the evidence of the heart. Northwestern University Press. Stone, A. (2012). Feminism, psychoanalysis and maternal subjectivity. Routledge. Urban, P. (2016). Edith Stein’s phenomenology of woman’s personality and value. In S. Regh & A. Speer (Eds.), “Alles Wesentliche lässt sich nicht schreiben”: Leben und Denken Edith Steins im Spiegel ihres Gesamtwerks (pp. 538–555). Herder. Welton, D. (2000). The other Husserl. Indiana University Press. Williams, B. (1981a). Internal and external reasons. In “Moral luck”: Philosophical papers 1973–1980 (pp. 101–113). Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1981b). Moral luck. In “Moral luck”: Philosophical papers 1973–1980 (pp. 21–39). Cambridge University Press. Williams, B., & Smart, J. J. C. (1973). Utilitarianism: For and against. Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 10

From Reason to Love? Or from Love to Reason? The Role of Instincts Rosemary R. P. Lerner

Liebe im echten Sinn ist eines der Hauptprobleme der Phänomenologie, und das nicht in der abstrakten Einzelheit und Vereinzelung, sondern als Universalproblem. (Edmund Husserl, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte; Metaphysik; Späte Ethik; Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr, vol. 42 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 524.)

1  Introduction Moral emotions, theory of values, and ethics have never been my areas of expertise. But perhaps due to my life experiences, they have always been of interest to me. In 2003, after two years of investigation, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC)  concluded its Final Report on twenty years of insurgent terrorism and internal violence with an appalling statement: “the most probable number of fatal victims [...] surpasses 69,000 Peruvian men and women dead or disappeared, in the hands of subversive organizations or of State agents,” 75% of them Quechua-speaking and 90% peasants, a sector “historically ignored by the State and the urban society, [...] who do enjoy the benefits of the political community.”1 In spite of the detailed and sustained report, as well as of the advanced  Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Final Report, 2003, http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ ifinal, 1. These figures stem from a conservative statistical projection based on nearly 17,000 testi1

R. R. P. Lerner (*) Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Lima, Peru e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_10

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techniques used for the statistical calculation of the losses, many interested sectors of the population—including subversive and state agents, political parties, party-­ controlled media, and groups that remain culturally and economically distanced from the peasant Quechua population—have denied that the report has any validity, thereby perpetuating what the report denounced, namely, “a double scandal: that of massive assassination, disappearance and torture, and indolence, ineptitude and indifference of those who could have prevented this human catastrophe and did not.”2 Four years later, I concluded that the limits of the PTRC Final Report concern difficulties deeply rooted in Peruvian society: on the one hand, a difficulty of emotional order, an incapacity that affects essential human emotions, such as compassion for the suffering of other human beings, or indignation regarding injustices and extreme cruelty; and on the other hand, a difficulty of ethical order, concerning the disposition to “goodwill” and free, self-responsible commitment to human solidarity.3 As a phenomenologist, I understand that the human difficulties regarding the acceptance of moral truths and responsibilities are not merely due to the open-ended character of their evidence. They further involve the need to highlight the emotional dimension of the constitution of moral truths. Today’s interest in emotions is gradually enabling us to overcome traditional prejudices stemming from the modern notion of reason.4 Reason was erected upon a pedestal and shielded against the natural contingency that is the site of the violent cycles of birth and death, passions and instincts. The European trust in theoretical certainty (reinforced by mathematical evidence) gave rise to political-utopian projects undertaken in the name (and claim) of progress. But theoretical-scientific and practical-technological rationality became an exclusively male province, the source of the “objectivity” of scientific laws and of the universal norms of a republic of citizens—the “kingdom of freedom.” In contrast, the “kingdom of necessity,” of the subjective submission to the sphere of the contingent reproduction of the species, became the province of feminine confinement, deprived of the civil rights of autonomy and self-determination. The course of history gradually revealed the “ominous side of the Baconian ideal”: namely, that it harbors within itself its pure and simple opposite.5 Its disproportionate growth sought to ward off obscurantism and violence definitively. Yet during and alongside the Enlightenment, a huge shadow grew that it couldn’t control. Rational autonomy and unconditional, monies voluntarily given to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, mostly by victim survivors, comparing different data bases with the first and last names of nearly 35,000 victims among those murdered and those reported missing. 2  Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Final Report, 1. 3  Rosemary R. P. Lerner, “Between Conflict and Reconciliation: The Hard Truth,” Human Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 115–130. 4  See Anthony J. Steinbock, Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014). 5  Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas with David Herr (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), ch. 5, §2.

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absolute, and universal freedom, equality, and fraternity degenerated in a sequel of man-made tragedies for five hundred years all around the globe—from wars and outrageous social and economic gaps6 to the current ecological crises.7 Husserl, however, held that rational life is guided and surrounded by a “non-­ actualized” (implicit) horizon of varied interests that are motivated by passive life. On this occasion, I wonder specifically whether the properly theoretical rational activity (praxis)—an activity that claims to attain the unquestionable and purely cognitive objectivity enshrined since the modern age—is ever wholly dissociated from its emotional and somatic roots.

2  Vicissitudes of Love A phenomenological approach to what love can be “in general,” and what the relation of its romantic variant is to friendship, is founded on first-person experiences. There is no adequate way to define it in an objective, third-person approach, mainly because only exact entities such as geometrical figures or the like may be defined, while other things are only susceptible to descriptions of the varied modes in which they manifest themselves. And as with other phenomena of our natural and human environment, after “imaginary variations” of those varied modes, we can only attempt to see whether there are some stable and typical (“normal”) traits that appear in most of the cases. We are all acquainted with this method whereby phenomenology approaches its understanding of what something is: it questions how phenomena appear and are experienced by us under different guises, and it attempts to describe the phenomena as given in such experiences. But in this way phenomenology can only attain mere approximations to the subjects it explores. Martin Heidegger once said that the first phenomenologist, and one of the best, was Aristotle. In Books 8 and 9 of his Nicomachean Ethics, along its 26 chapters, he carries out a long and detailed descriptive account of the multiple forms in which philia—friendship—manifests itself.8 Husserl drew from both Aristotle and Plato in many senses. Already in his Symposium or Banquet, Plato had dealt with love, eros, gradually approaching its nature by the mediation of several discourses in which love revealed itself through multiple and varied appearances. To be sure, Plato’s strategy and goals involved gradually ascending from the manifestation of sensuous experiences toward a more intellectual notion of love, the correlate of which was transcendent beauty. What is more interesting in this dialogue, in my view, is the intentional structure of the love experience that Plato expresses by saying that “the

 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004).  Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unified Vision (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 341–452. 8  Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H.  Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) 450–575. 6 7

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craving and pursuit of that entirety is called Love.”9 The “entirety” to which Plato refers is never wholly fulfilled; it is the “optimal” normative ideal toward which the soul endlessly strives. And since one desires what one does not have, every desirable and beautiful object that one reaches belongs, for Plato, to a “wider whole.”10 Indeed, every conscious human experience is directed in empty intentions toward correlates that it longs to achieve, but that are only given partially. Thus our aspirations always aim toward a plus of intention (Mehrmeinung), in endless temporal processes that are only imperfectly realized and never concluded. The “perfection” of absolute knowledge or the “full satisfaction” of the act of will regarding the object of love and desire always leaves a remainder beyond our reach. This characteristic of every human experience is the one described by the Platonic eros, such that the attempt to fulfill its emptiness with the possession of beautiful sensible bodies does not satiate its craving. Indeed, eros is driven by nothing other than the inextinguishable desire of the Beautiful and Good in itself, beyond the sensible world.11 Philia in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a crucial ethical virtue to reach happiness12, is also the object of a multiplicity of descriptions of different experiences. Aristotle asks himself: What does friendship seek? Where, how, and among whom is it given? Is there more than one type? Does it require reciprocity? After all, philia appears under different guises in family, work, and political relations13. Its motives may be the utility that a friend has for one’s own objectives, or the pleasure obtained by the friend’s company14. These motivations may be necessary for friendship, but they are insufficient, for they are neither solid nor durable. Such transactional friendships tend to break down, for when founded in utility, they are taken as a loan in exchange for something that is not returned; the same occurs if they are based on pleasure15. True friendship is virtuous, and only takes place among good people16 who wish each other well-being, trust each other, give more than they seek to gain, and are not prone to flattery. It consists more in bestowing than in receiving affection17. For Aristotle, love is thus a virtue that pertains to friendship. Justice and the unjust also belong to it, giving love its political dimension under the form of goodwill18 and concord19 among members of any community—although “the claims of

9  Plato, Symposium, trans. Harold N. Fowler, in vol. 9 of Plato in Twelve Volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 192e–193a. 10  Ibid., 203, 206–7. 11  Ibid., 210a–212a. 12  IX, ix. 1–10. 13  VIII, I, i. 1–5. 14  VIII, I, iii. 1. 15  VIII, I, iv. 1–2. 16  VIII, I, iii. 6ff. 17  VIII, II, ix. 1. 18  IX, v. 1–4. 19  IX, vi. 1–4.

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justice also differ in different relationships”20. Hence Aristotle conceives the political community as the macrocosm of friendship. The corruption of political communities is thus reflected in the microcosm of daily life, their example being the proto-marital communities, including conjugal, parental, and fraternal friendship— all being small versions of a city21. Finally, “political friendship” is forged among those that “are of one mind”22. However, if friendship is given as goodwill in political communities, it is only “intense” (affectionate or intimate) among few23. And it is in misfortune that we need it the most24. Again, there is no definition of friendship in Aristotle, but only varied descriptions of it and of the different conditions under which it is attained or dissolved. Another term used by some Greek philosophers to refer to family “affections” or to characterize a vocation besides philia and eros—the connotation of the latter being rather sensuous or romantic—was agapē. With the advent of Christianity, this term was increasingly used as a sort of universal and absolute love for truth or for humanity in general, inspired by the figure of Christ and his sacrifice for the redemption of humanity. Thus a certain sense of the reciprocal character of Aristotle’s senses of philia was absent in the use of agapē as a giving without expecting anything in return, or as refraining from reciprocating a wrong suffered (“turning the other cheek”). However, and inversely, this form of “love” or “charity” was also related to the meals that gathered the first Christian communities around a table where they reinforced their ties—a custom abolished in the churches by Augustine of Hippo. Beyond its Christian sense, the “love for humanity” has also been historically associated with compassionate altruism—for orphans, widows, and the sick. A last Greek form used to refer to love is the term storgē, employed precisely to refer to the family love and friendship that Aristotle had mentioned in his Ethics. Yet it had the additional sense of unconditionality, forgiveness of faults, and sacrifice for the loved ones.

3  Experiential Stages of Love History has added to these rich Greek descriptions many others that have attempted to fix various experiences of love and friendship in concepts. Do they share a common core? Phenomenologically speaking, the first thing to indicate is that our experiences are lived as belonging to us, in the first person. And we live them not only as psychophysical unities, but also as personal, spiritual beings. However,

 VIII, II, ix. 2–5.  VIII, II, x–xiv. 22  IX, vi. 3. 23  IX, v. 1. 24  IX, xi. 1–6. 20 21

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modern dualism between body and soul found a way to catalogue these different forms of love, compartmentalizing them. Currently, a certain naturalistic reductionism attempts to explain human consciousness and subjectivity in merely neurobiological terms wherein mental functions such as perceiving, feeling, thinking, and planning are each detected by neuroimaging specific parts of the brain. Without denying the contributions of the neurosciences to medicine and psychiatry, we must nevertheless acknowledge that they obliterate the lifeworld with all of its qualitative, holistic, and first-person properties.25 According to neuroscientific accounts, then, human freedom is no more than the brain’s self-deception, one that gives us the impression of self-control, when it is neurons that make the decisions.26

This is no way to explain the properly subjective component of the experience as mine. The subject is not in the brain. All discourse about the brain presupposes the subject that carries out the description. As subjects we live as integrated psychophysical and personal unities. Both the neurological system and the cardiac system are organs that mediate between the unified psychophysical and personal totality and its surroundings.27 Furthermore, humans’ higher mental functions depend on their living experiences in a shared social world. They accordingly depend on a “cultural biology,” as Thomas Fuchs, a phenomenological psychiatrist,

 Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt: Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution; Texte aus dem nachlass (1916–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa, vol. 39 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008). 26  The following diagram taken from Thomas Fuchs, Ecology of the Brain: The Phenomenology and Biology of the Embodied Mind, trans. Nuala Hughes, Rudolf Müllan, and Susanne Kirkbright (Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 2018), 79. 27  See Natalie Depraz, “The Rainbow of Emotions: At the Crossroads of Neurobiology and Phenomenology,” Continental Philosophy Review 41, no. 2 (2008): 237–59. See also Natalie Depraz, “Cardiofenomenología,” in La racionalidad ampliada: Nuevos horizontes de la fenomenología y la hermenéutica, ed. Mariana Chu García and Rosemary Rizo-Patrón (Bogota/Lima: Aula de Humanidades / Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica des Perú, 2020), 212–79. 25

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puts it.28 We don’t experience our “non-extended inner mind.”29 Instead, phenomenologically speaking and as embodied subjects, our “living body” (Leib) and our “physical body” (Körper) exhibit the double aspect of being a coextended unity.30 As persons, as subjects, we experience our bodies as “the living center and medium for the enactment of life” (as Leiber).31 As physical bodies (Körper), our life (Leben) is observed as a materially composed object in a world of physical bodies. Thus “processes of life (Leben) and of experiencing life (Erleben)”32 “are essential aspects of one and the same life process,”33 but they belong to different experiences, one “naturalistic” and one “personalistic.”34

Living being

Integral acts of life Subjective/ intersubjective experience

First/second·person perspective Personalistic attitude

Living body

Lived body Person

Physiological processes Organism

Third·person perspective Naturalistic attitude

In this way, our apprehension of the psychophysical or animate world, including our apprehension of ourselves as living beings in it, necessarily depends upon our apprehension of the physical world. This apprehension is carried out within a naturalistic attitude by conscious, first-person experiencing subjects. However, a third, higher-stratum apprehension that “supervenes” upon previous apprehensions (those of the physical and psychophysical strata) is only attainable in a personalistic, not a naturalistic, attitude. Here persons become mutually manifest and communicate with each other as moral subjects of rights—members of a social community in a surrounding common world. As persons, we are conscious of the surrounding world and we comport ourselves in it by feeling, valuing, acting, longing, being “motivated” by persons and things—but not in the way “exact sciences” refer to causality among  Fuchs, Ecology of the Brain.  Ibid., 240. 30  Ibid., 232–78. 31  Ibid., 234. 32  Ibid., 251. 33  Ibid., 304. 34  Ibid., 88 passim. The following diagram taken from Fuchs, Ecology of the Brain. 28 29

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mere things. On the contrary, “experienced things” motivate us theoretically, evaluatively, and/or practically, engaging our interest “in their beauty, agreeableness, and usefulness,” stimulating our “desire to delight in them, play with them, […], etc.,” whether we give in to motivations or resist them.35 Persons are thus spiritual psychophysical unities socially communalized. Their onto-phylogenetic development begins with the flow of the purely instinctive and impulsive life of the pre-ego of the unborn and the newborn (vorkindlichen Monaden or Urkind).36 And love already manifests itself in instinctive life prior to the constitution of the lived experiences of empathy and sympathy. For example, it is the instinctive love of the mother for the newborn or the love of parents in the instinctive care of their children; it is the type of love that immediately manifests itself when we suffer the pain or enjoy the happiness of someone close. It is the one that is manifest in sexual desire and its temporary satisfaction; it is even the one that is sought from egotistic impulses, without concern for the couple’s enjoyment; it is even—as Husserl adds—the type of desire (camouflaged as “love”) that is manifested by violently forcing the partner against her will, as a mere object of lust.37 At this instinctive level, love and hate are not given as properly social acts: not only paternal love (determined by an interest in the children’s development), but the interested hate and wish that the other be harmed or disappear are all instinctive acts. They are not properly social, for they do not correspond to the relation among persons, in the full sense of the word. The first properly social act is the “I and thou” personal relation, whereby empathy is experienced. No predicative language is needed here. My wife, says Husserl, leaves me an apple beside my hat before I go for a walk so I won’t forget to have lunch. A mere indication suffices. With a glance, I awaken the interest of others, I point my finger to attract their attention toward something. I understand their intention. Linguistic expressions only manifest and articulate our purposes more clearly. Each personal, individual subject is a pole of the flowing affections and actions, with their multiple motivations and longings, that only attain self-consciousness in the I and thou relation, through communication. Only in this way do social acts emerge whereby humans relate to each other not only as entities “standing side by side,” but rather as individuals that mutually motivate each other, directing themselves “in their spiritual activity […] toward one another,” constituting—in

 Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch; Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel, vol. 4 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 189. 36  Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass; Dritter Teil; 1929–1935, ed. Iso Kern, vol. 15 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 604ff. 37  Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass; Zweiter Teill; 1921–1928. Edited by Iso Kern. Vol. 14 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 177. 35

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voluntary acts and common aspirations—voluntary communities with practical common goals.38 In this context, personal love emerges as a disposition (Gesinnung), and even as an abiding, practical, fulfilling habit. Indeed, it also entails joy for the loved one. Furthermore, in order to reach its highest realization by enjoying the personal contact with the loved one, it also entails a longing to constitute with him or her a community of life whereby one’s own life is constituted. Certainly, this relation does not always prosper, establishing a mutual community whereby “lovers do not merely live side-by-side and one-with-the-other, but one-in-the-other (ineinander) actually and potentially. That way they also jointly carry with them all of their responsibilities, and their faults and blames are also empathetically united.”39 Thus, personal love presupposes instinctive love, but adds to it a spiritual dimension that may or may not thrive.

4  From Love to Reason: Husserl’s Fichte Husserl starts reading Fichte’s popular works intensely—at first critically, irritated by the argumentative “stunts” and “logical transgressions” in his Wissenschaftslehre.40 But later, as he offers seminars in 1903, 1915, and 1918 on Fichte’s 1800 The Destination of Man (Die Bestimmung des Menschen), and as he becomes more familiar with Fichte’s 1806 The Way to a Blessed Life (Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben), he concedes in 1915 to Heinrich Rickert that “Fichte attracts me in increasing measure.”41 According to Husserl, the principle that sustains Fichte’s entire writings is phenomenological, for he interprets his dialectics as a living genesis that determines our worldviews and freedom, including our lived experience of “absolute knowledge.” But in addition, for Fichte (unlike Hegel), the ethical element is irreducible to any conceptual knowledge insofar as it is phenomenological or lived. The foundation and end of Fichte’s metaphysics is thus ultimately moral, expressed in the longing for and acquisition of a blessedness that lies beyond the life of humans and consists of participating in divine life. The Destination of Man (of humanity), which is at the core of Fichte’s anthropology, is to carry out the Aufhebung (in the sense of suppressing, overcoming, and preserving) of every dualistic ontology:

 Ibid., 192.  Ibid., 174. 40  This is especially true with regard to the 1804 edition (Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921): Mit ergänzenden Texten, ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans-Rainer Sepp, vol. 25 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke [Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987], 269). Initially, Husserl rejects “German idealism” and Fichte’s theory of the “pure I,” but he gradually acknowledges that “he feels at home” in that tradition. 41  Edmund Husserl, Die Neukantianer, pt. 5 of Briefwechsel, ed. Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann, vol. 3 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 178. 38 39

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namely, the Aufhebung of the abyss between the I and the non-I, between reason and matter, and finally between freedom and nature. Husserl’s three lectures on “The Ideal of Humanity in Fichte” (“Fichtes Menschheitsideal”),42 read between 1917 and 1918,43 make clear his admiration for Fichte’s ethics and humanistic passion, which he recognizes as being continuously referred to its theoretical foundations. He agrees with Fichte that “one can do some things for secondary or egotistical reasons, but the philosopher can only be an ethical personality; if he is not, he is nothing.”44 Husserl’s 1919, 1920/21, and 1924 offerings on ethics,45 his 1921–22 texts on the common spirit (Gemeingeist), as well as his 1922–1924 Kaizo articles,46 also reveal Fichte’s strong influence, although the latter’s name is not mentioned in them.47 In my view, this period appears to be an intermediary stage between the early ethics lectures48 and the later texts,49 where love seems to supersede reason. However, I believe there is an unbroken continuity between them. The framework of the three lectures on Fichte’s ideal of humanity is the ravages of war and the despondency of defeat, a hundred years after Germany was fighting for its existence after the Prussian defeat at Jena by the Napoleonic armies. As death is spreading all over Europe, having snatched Husserl’s youngest son at Verdun, Husserl wonders whether the values that provided German idealism and modern humanity’s spiritual life with their impetus are being crushed by the advancement of the exact sciences and their technologically determined culture, and whether philosophy has no more to say. Although the situation had changed since Fichte’s  Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), 267–93.  He first read them to soldiers who had returned from the front in November 1917 and repeated them twice in 1918 for students and faculty members of the University of Freiburg (ibid., xxviii–xxxiii). 44  Edmund Husserl, Die Göttiger Schule, pt. 3 of Briefwechsel, ed. Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann, vol. 3 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 294. See also James G.  Hart, “Husserl and Fichte: With Special Regard to Husserl’s Lectures on ‘Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity,’” Husserl Studies 12, no. 2 (1995): 138. 45  Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1924, ed. Henning Peucker, vol. 37 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004). 46  Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937): Mit ergänzenden Texten, ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans-Rainer Sepp, vol. 27 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 3–94. 47  Moreover, toward the end of his 1924 course on ethics, in a footnote (Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, 255), Husserl regrets that during that course he has not had the opportunity to develop the kinship between his phenomenological-scientific foundation of ethics and Fichte’s ethics. 48  Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (1908–1914), ed. Ullrich Melle, vol. 28 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988). This lecture course on Ethics and Theory of Values was read in 1908, 1911, and 1914. 49  Edmund Husserl, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte; Metaphysik; Späte Ethik; Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937), ed. Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr, vol. 42 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 265–530. 42 43

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time (for Comte’s positivistic naturalism and scientism had already overpowered Western culture after the “downfall” of German idealism and Hegel’s death50), the essentially “practical” course of Fichte’s thought—as the work of an ethical-­ religious reformer, an educator of humankind, a prophet, and a seer—encourages Husserl to reconsider what Fichte’s work offers for the ongoing development of philosophy.51 The first lecture (“The Absolute I of Action”)52 begins by exposing the initial audacious Fichtean theses, influenced by Kant yet having overcome the prevailing scientific worldview as well as having erased all mention both of the Kantian noumenon and of passive affection.53 The practical orientation of his thought shapes his concept of an acting and productive subjectivity. “The subject is thoroughly, and nothing else than, what acts. And whatever the subject has in its presence, as substrate of action, as object of its activity, that must be something immanent in it, something already enacted. Therefore, there coincides being a subject and being one who acts; but also, being-an-object-for-the-subject and being a product of acting. Prior to the acting, when we go to the origin, there lies nothing.”54 Thus at the beginning, there “is not a fact (Tatsache) but an ‘action’ (‘Tathandlung’)” that progressively unfolds in history, in a productive development of continuous tasks “in infinite succession.”55 The goal of each task is teleologically connected to “the highest moral end.”56 Hence the Fichtean “I” or “Intelligence” that Husserl so much admires is not a mere object of experience, but a metaphysical force capable of splitting itself and reconstructing the teleological process of its own experiences in such a way that the meaning that we confer upon the world and upon ourselves is produced or constituted.57

 Indeed, a new situation emerged since approximately 1830, yet as Husserl points out in the Crisis, what later developed was still a consequence of previous problems that remained prevalent and widespread (Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, vol. 6 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954). Moreover, for Husserl, the positivistic nineteenth century interpretation of the “definitive” overcoming of the theological and metaphysical stages of human history with the rise of scientific culture forgets that the development and creation of the epistemological tools and techniques that have enabled the triumph of the rigorous sciences and technology, with their mastery of nature, since modern times is the upshot of centuries of huge efforts that emerge precisely from philosophical and scientific spirits guided by brilliant intuitions. But above all, Husserl emphasizes that the philosophical premonitions of the past have offered “decisive stances for the dignity of an authentic humanity” with the rigor of theoretical ideals (Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), 270). 51  Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), 270. 52  Ibid., 268–75. 53  Ibid., 274. 54  Ibid., 275. 55  See also Husserl, Die Krisis, §44 (“Am Anfang ist die Tat”). 56  Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), 275. 57  Ibid., 276. 50

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In the second lecture (“The Moral Order of the World Principle as the World-­ Creating Principle”),58 Husserl wonders, with Fichte, where this teleology is heading, a teleology “pervaded by an infinite drive longing for satisfaction.” And what is its ultimate meaning? His answer is that it is heading “toward that which alone can guarantee pure satisfaction, what alone can be an end in itself, what alone contains absolute value in itself.”59 That end in itself, that absolute value and foundation that humanity strives for, is the teleological production of a human world, of a moral world order by the ethical action of free spirits.60 Mere natural causality is incapable of discovering—within our experience—the teleological-­practical drive that longs for satisfaction. What Fichte’s idealism accomplishes in Husserl’s 1917 reading of his work is a summons “for an inner transformation of the human through a manifestation of the ends to which humanity is devoted.” Husserl quotes Fichte as saying: “Nothing has unconditional value and meaning except life; all the rest of thinking, poeticizing, and knowing has value only in so far as it, in some way, is related to life, proceeds from it, and intends to return to it.”61 Fichte’s philosophy propounds a “completely new and genuine Ideal of humanity” that requires—in Husserl’s words that recall Nietzsche—a “reversal of all values” (Umwertung aller Werte),62 an expression that further evokes how Husserl himself has previously described his “transcendental reduction.”63 This new philosophy lies in and emanates from pure immanence, and from the value of personality as teaching the way to salvation and to the genuine ideal of a humanity that lives in ethical freedom. Even if, in Fichte’s words, “Morality and religion are absolutely one,”64 his views are a reversal of ordinary Christian religious views. It is to “denigrate God in a moral respect” to present him “as substance, as reality, yes, even as personality,” as a “giver of all enjoyments, as a distributor of the always sensibly envisaged ‘happiness’ or unhappiness of finite beings,” and as a God “whose heaven is a welfare institute for voluptuaries,” with whom the believer “makes a contract, whose document is the Bible.” Husserl comments: “how pitiful!” to envisage morality as buying for oneself “earthly and other worldly delights” purchased “through

 Ibid., 275–84.  Ibid., 277. 60  Ibid. 61  J.  G. Fichte, Werke: Auswahl in sechs Bänden, ed. Fritz Medicus (Leipzig: Fritz Eckardt, 1908–1912), vol. 3, 557ff. Also Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), 278. 62  Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), 279. 63  Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch; Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann, vol. 3 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), §76. See Edmund Husserl, “Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity [Three Lectures],” trans. James G. Hart, Husserl Studies 12, no. 2 (1995): 133 (translator’s footnote 12). James Hart’s note adds “Husserl avails himself of this Nietzschean phrase for elucidating the transcendental reduction” and cites Rudolf Boehm, Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phänomenologie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 223, 237–41. 64  Fichte, Werke, 169. 58 59

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obedience toward God.”65 Instead, for Husserl, “The truly religious person wants nothing to do with this idolatry. He needs no Elysium in the other world; he possesses already in this world all conceivable blessedness in his free ethical agency. The infinity of the moral task thereby includes in itself immortality.”66 Husserl’s third and last Fichte lecture (“The Self-Revelation of God in the Levels of Humanity”)67 refers to the final mature reformulation of the relationship between human beings and God in Fichte’s 1806 work, The Way to a Blessed Life (Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben).68 In this period, “religious life now no longer coincides with moral life, but rather the moral is a lower level which fulfills itself first of all in religious life as a higher level.”69 Fichte presents a view inspired by NeoPlatonism whereby the eternal and immutable God, “the Hen, the One or the Good”—which should not be confused with the creative I or subjectivity, but is “the eternal unchanging unique Being (Sein)”—reveals itself in infinite degrees and “in an eternal irradiation as a gradation of an increasing estranging formative process from the primal light down to the completely God-alienated physical world.” Fichte understands this self-revelation as a continuous self-mirroring “in the form of consciousness,” whereby the divine must simultaneously and increasingly “conceal itself.”70 Consequently, human beings must reverse this downward gradation of Being by elevating themselves in an upward movement toward the Ideal, passing through “five levels of world-perspectives, five levels of remoteness or approximation of humanity to the divinity,” moving from darkness to light.71 Thus, in different modes of self-consciousness, individuals first obscurely and then in continuous ascent can freely choose to strive toward pure self-consciousness. “Our freedom”— Husserl adds—“is a ray of the divine freedom, our will a ray of the divine will.”72 “To choose the higher humanity is to decide for God.”73 Fichte mentions five stages of divine self-revelation within human immanence (Wissen). The first level is excluded, since it is purely negative and corresponds to the search for and the hope of finding happiness in mere sensual pleasure. As a hedonistic dogmatism, it is “the lowest level of revelation of God in the human soul” (in the Da of the Dasein), and corresponds to God’s “complete concealment,” whereby the human soul deceives itself by confusing happiness with the longing for the ultimate blessedness that alone can satisfy.74 The remaining four stages thereby correspond to four different anthropologies, worldviews, and ideal human types in

 Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), 281.  Ibid. 67  Ibid., 284–93. 68  Ibid., 284. 69  Ibid., 282–3. 70  Ibid., 283. 71  Ibid. 72  Ibid., 284. 73  Ibid., 284–5. 74  Ibid., 285. 65 66

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increasing ascent but always freely chosen. The first type, ethicality (Sittlichkeit), corresponds to the rigorously Kantian legality and submission to the voice of duty, when the soul has managed to free itself from the “sensible ‘affect of Being.’” Nevertheless, for Fichte and Husserl, this type is also a negative and formal one, for it merely mirrors the “cold and empty autonomy in Stoic apathie.”75 The second type corresponds to “the higher and proper morality (Moralität),”76 that of the positive and pure love of something “for the sake of itself (and no way as a mere means),” namely, for the sake of the loved object’s value (e.g., ideal beauty) as such. This human type is expressed in varied manners: in the creation of the artistic genius;77 in the genuine scientific researcher, where the divine idea put forth is “that of the theoretical or practical truth”; in the “noble technologist whose love aims at creating dominion of nature for humans (and not for lower sensuous goals)”; and in the “noble politician, who finds his blessedness in working on the preservation and formation of the order of an ideal community in accord with the particular Ideas which are normative for this community.”78 They all aspire to shape higher Ideas and deeds, although they may not be entirely aware that their work and love is ultimately inspired by a higher yearning (a yearning for ultimate blessedness). The third stage corresponds to one who loves his neighbor insofar as this love emanates from God’s infinite love. It is the morality of the religious person who “knows himself as a sanctified vessel of the divinity”79 and “sees also that God lives in each human in a unique guise, even if also very much concealed.”80 Regarding this concealment, Husserl quotes Fichte: “Do you want to see God as He is in Himself, face to face? Do not seek him on the other side of the clouds. You can find Him everywhere where you are. Look at the life of those devoted to Him and you are looking at Him. Dedicate yourself to Him and you will find Him in your breast.”81 The explanation regarding this religious “knowledge of God” is only given at the final, highest, and fourth level, whereby the ideal of a scientific humanity elevates “simple faith” to the philosophical knowledge of a “seeing” of the “Why and How.” Nevertheless, this “scientific clarity,” as Husserl immediately warns, is only an indirect inkling that the “all-encompassing knowledge of God,” which “includes an all-encompassing knowledge of the world” and the “boundless joy” that it entails, cannot be merely “the satisfaction of a theoretical interest.” Instead—when intertwined with religious blessedness82—this “scientific clarity” consists of the practical realization of infinite tasks.

 Ibid., 287.  Ibid., 286. 77  Ibid., 288. 78  Ibid., 289. 79  James Hart’s footnote refers the reader to a similar view in ibid., 65–6. 80  Ibid., 290–1. 81  Fichte, Werke, 184. Cited in Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), 291. 82  Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), 292. 75 76

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In Husserl’s 1921 Gemeingeist I, the ethical love and friendship that deploys itself in ethical communities such as political, scientific, technological, or artistic “communities of love” (Liebesgemeinschaften) is related to Fichte’s third anthropological type. The love of these communities differs from personal love, although it also implies a love or care for others, for their well-being and ethical renewal, as a practical possibility in communal (not personal) relations. Human life develops along those levels: the higher ones include the lower in a sublimated form. Hence, for instance, instinctive relations of family personal associations undergo historical transformations giving rise to other forms such as religious communities, etc.83 Referring to “Fichte’s ideal of humanity” as well as to Plato regarding the “philosophical form of life,”84 Husserl claims that a philosophy of “ultimate grounding” is a philosophy of “ultimate self-responsibility.”85 Its “genuine radicalism”86 is nevertheless radically finite, for its legitimacy is not sub specie aeternitatis, but only “realizable in the style of relative, temporal validities and in an infinite historical process.”87 Although for philosophical purposes, Husserl holds that the “highest responsibility” is rational (“theoretical responsibility”),88 this should not be interpreted as a mere intellectual prejudice. Indeed, Husserl’s early and late notion of reason “allow[s] for no differentiation into ‘theoretical,’ ‘practical,’ ‘esthetical,’ or whatever.”89 Instead, “these Ego-functions do not all simply lie next to one another but rather interpenetrate.”90 Thus “[a]ll scientific knowledge is [...] a ‘doing,’ a ‘conduct,’ and the scientist professionally dedicated to truth has—if it is fully understood—an ‘ethical-cognitive behavior.’”91 Hence although cognition indicates to the will “the right goals and paths” of action, the intellect “is servant of the will,” and  Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass; Zweiter Teil, 179.  Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1922/23, ed. Berndt Goosens, vol. 35 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 314 passim. 85  Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Drittes Buch; Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. Marly Biemel, vol. 5 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 139. 86  Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923–1924): Erster Teil; Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. Rudolf Boehm, vol. 7 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 159–60. 87  Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Drittes Buch, 139. 88  Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923–1924): Zweiter Teil; Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. Rudolf Boehm, vol. 8 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 25. 89  Husserl, Die Krisis, 275. Also Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch, §139. Also Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), 9. 90  Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923–1924): Zweiter Teil, 23–4. 91  Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), 40. 83

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the “ultimate” responsibility of its functions “arises in cognition from the transcendental orientation toward the ultimately constitutive achievements of the heart and will.”92 The novelty of Husserl’s conception is not limited to pointing out the aforementioned intertwining among the different spheres of reason (cognitive, valuing, and willing), but highlights the fact that judgment and rationality stricto sensu take roots in and emerge from a pre-rational background.93 Each one of those spheres has its own pre-rational background and sources such as loving and hating, being attracted or repelled, yearning, desiring, craving, etc. Thus, human reason is subject in general to a teleological development—both in individuals and communities—in levels of increasing self-awareness and self-responsibility.94 This is the driving life force that is headed toward the highest stage of a humanity “understanding itself as rational” precisely “in seeking to be rational.”95 A Leibnizian echo is felt in the description of this teleological development from the passive pre-egos to the active and reflexive primal egos striving to constitute themselves as rational, authentic persons or “authentic human communities.”96 “Personal life” is thus conquered in an individual and communalized “becoming” “through a constant intentionality of development.” Consequently, “Human personal life proceeds in stages of self-reflection and self-responsibility from isolated occasional acts of this form to the stage of universal self-reflection and self-­ responsibility.”97 But this is an unending task. Indeed, Husserl’s philosophical ideal “lies in infinity.”

5  From Reason to Love98 Initially, Husserl conceives ethics sensu stricto as a discipline. On the one hand, it is understood as a practice, a sort of ars or technē (Kunstlehre) that contains a group of rules that serve to attain the supreme goals of action. But on the other hand, founding this “technology” (in a broad sense), he conceives ethics as a “normative science” interested in the rightfulness and legitimacy of the goals of the will and of action. In sum, the “practical rules” of ethics as Kunstlehre must be founded on a priori, rational principles pertaining to a pure normative science, a fundamental a priori discipline of evaluative and willing reason in general. Thus, whereas  Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923–1924): Zweiter Teil, 25, 194.  Ibid., 23, 193. 94  Husserl, Die Krisis, 272. 95  Ibid., 275. 96  Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), 55. 97  Husserl, Die Krisis, 272. See also Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923–1924: Zweiter Teil, 11. 98   I borrow this title from  Ullrich Melle, “Edmund Husserl: From  Reason to  Love,” in  Phenomenological Approaches to  Moral Philosophy: A  Handbook, ed. John J.  Drummond and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 229–48. 92 93

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theoretical reason is subordinated to the formal laws and principles of “pure formal logic”—the discipline that holds the formal conditions of possibility of all true knowledge and objective being—,  in a parallel fashion, evaluative and practical reason must be subordinated to the formal a priori laws and principles of a “pure ethics,” understood as a “formal axiology and practice” that comprises the conditions of possibility of every rightful valuation, every rightful action, every rightful orientation to rightful goals, and everything that may hold good as a “duty” or an “absolute” ought.99 Formal laws and principles of “formal practice” are condensed in the “formal categorical imperative” that Husserl understands as an “a priori law of motivation” and as a “criterion for the ethical quality of will”: “Do the best possible among the attainable goods within your respective total sphere.”100 Regarding the laws of “formal axiology,” the “law of absorption” stands out, whereby “in each choice, the best absorbs the good and the maximum absorbs all the rest, and should be treasured as a practical good.”101 But all of these formal laws require a material complement to determine “the best possible” choice in concrete situations. Husserl does not propose a “material” hierarchy of values (a hierarchy according to their contents) that may have universal validity for all times and places. Only circumstances determine in each case what kind of good should be regarded as “the best possible.” This notion of ethics, opposed to hedonism, not only stems from Husserl’s debate with the Western tradition, but basically from his intentional phenomenological analyses of the structure of lived intentional experiences or acts of the will and of conscious aspirations. The type of “causality” that rules spiritual life (intentional acts not only of practical and evaluative life, but of cognitive life as well) is what Husserl names motivation.102 There are, in general, two types of motivations intertwined in spiritual life: the rational ones and the pre-rational, irrational, or “passive” ones.103 The former correspond to the spirit’s higher and active spheres, the latter to the lower, passive, or affective spheres of instincts or drives.104 But Husserl’s ethical reflections do not end there. As we have already suggested, pure formal ethics and its categorical imperative—characterized by the a priori construction of “absolutely justified” ethical, “objective” ideals founded in purely rational motivations—soon evolves toward an ethics conceived as the “life form of an authentic humanity” (cf. Sect. 3 above) that takes into account the decisions that affect the future of individual and collective persons and of historical nations and cultures. The categorical imperative is then formulated in a different manner: “Be a

 Husserl, Grenzprobleme, xcii. Also Edmund Husserl Einleitung in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1916–1920, ed. Hanne Jacobs, vol. 9 of Husserliana: Materialen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 155. 100  Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik, 137. 101  Ibid., 136. 102  Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch, §§54–61. 103  Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, 107ff., 331ff. 104  Husserl, Grenzprobleme, 83ff. 99

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truthful human being; lead a life such that you may justify it in a cogent (einsichtig) manner, a life out of practical reason.”105 Yet rationalism along with all of its justifications—no matter how broadly it may be conceived—is inevitably erected upon the dark irrational background of nature and history, of the deaths of individuals and of humanity, and of the ominous possibility of the universe’s destruction. Finally, it is erected upon the possibility of revealing the ultimate futility and senselessness of all acting and making, and even of humanity’s possibility of a “permanent accumulation of rational values.” A cosmic disaster could suddenly annihilate life and its sense, along with history and the universe in general. In light of this, Husserl asks: What would a mother do with her child when facing the certainty that the “end of the world” was to occur the next day? In these last hours she would not cease to provide it with “care and comfort.” Husserl asks whether this extreme situation does not characterize everything ethical.106 With these reflections and in his final texts, Husserl considers that the ethical motivation of rightful and valuable actions, in every case and in concrete situations, is always love in its diverse forms. He then asks what these “duties of love” would look like. He finds paradigmatic examples of them again in motherly love, in selflove, and in love of our neighbor.107 From this moment on, Husserl subjects to severe critique his own previous ideas of a “formal practice” and a “formal axiology,” as well as his former ethical rationalism. On the one hand, he argues that they can no longer stand for “any ethics,” but on the other hand, if they were to survive, he reduces their application only to “objective values.” “The problem of love” thus raises the possibility of “subjective (individual or personal) values” that are neither measurable nor organizable in a hierarchy as “objective values” are, but are preferable and more meaningful than the latter.108 The “categorical imperative” receives a new reformulation: it prescribes a mandatory “absolute ought,” here and now. In cases of conflict, the subjective values of love are preferable to objective values. But in cases of mutual conflict between subjective love values, there is no formal “law of absorption” that may rationally resolve the conflict by subordinating the good under the better. Because both have the same hierarchy, the only way out is to “sacrifice” (Opferung) one of them—in the context of love—in favor of the other.109 And unlike the hedonistic values of desire and pleasure that are ruled by the “law of absorption” (whereby the more pleasant absorbs the lesser, in such a way that the latter totally loses its value), the subjective value of love does not lose its character of absolute value when the subject sacrifices itself for its loved ones.110

 Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, 36.  Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1916–1920, 169, 130, 126. Also Husserl, Grenzprobleme, 304–13. 107  Husserl, Grenzprobleme, 333ff., 354ff. 108  Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1916–1920, 146. 109  Husserl, Grenzprobleme, Text. Nr. 25, 352ff. 110  Ibid., 346. 105 106

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As intimated above, the values of love or goods of love are not only the source of “absolute duties” or “categorical imperatives” in the personal domain, such as the love of mothers or love for our neighbors. There are also “values of love” in “other domains” such as the call or vocation to assume a life task or a profession, a call that compels consciousness in such a way that moral persons “are not able to act otherwise.” Consequently, “the Daimon that guides true professions” and determines their correlative “interests” (for science, philosophy, painting, music, politics, sport, and the like) “speaks through love.”111 Now instincts, discoverable at the passive and irrational beginnings of life, do not lose their meaning for ethics in the sense that they function as the first blind intentionality directed toward goals. Instinctive life rises both teleologically and gradually toward a reasonable, responsible life. Finally, reasonable and responsible life, recognizing its ultimate impotence, abandons itself to the driving force of love whereby—as Plato’s eros, and thanks to a belief stemming from practical reason motivating an open-ended striving—there emerges a hope for an end (telos) of blessed fulfillment, where everything worldly, including evil and senselessness, acquires meaning once again.

6  Intriguing Questions I have often wondered why Husserl decides, between 1906 and 1907, to undertake a radical critique of reason by means of the method of reduction. He had previously endeavored to unveil the mystery of the “universal a priori of correlation”112 between the objective and ideal transcendence of abstract entities such as those of logic and mathematics (purportedly “in themselves”) and a certain type of subjective-rational activity (theoretical-cognitive, “for us”). Although the Logical Investigations had taken a step forward, they did not satisfy him. During his 1904–1905 courses on “Principal Parts of the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge,” he deepened his analyses of the sensuous and passive basis of active and rational life in such a way that his critique was not limited solely to a theory of knowledge and objectivity, but was a critique of evaluative and practical reason as well.113 Why this urgency? A  Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1916–1920, 146 n. 1. If “values of love” in “other domains” do not seem to have the force of the “absolute duties” or “categorical imperatives” that are found in the personal domain, it is not difficult to think of cases of their applicability in the public sphere. For example, facing the ruling at the second impeachment Senate trial of the 45th President of the United States on February 2021, due to his criminal intent to subvert the United States Congress’s counting of electoral votes and for having incited the 6 January 2021 assault on the Capitol, the “absolute ought” of a condemning vote would have had to be guided by love for the higher principles of a democratic republic expressed in the United States Constitution and the separation of powers. 112  Husserl, Die Krisis, §46. 113  Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie: Vorlesungen 1906/07, ed. Ullrich Melle, vol. 24 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus 111

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plausible hypothesis is that as he dug into passive life, the ghost of the relativistic and skeptical subjectivism against which he had so vehemently fought began knocking at his door again. The threat of skepticism could have surfaced with his increasing descent to the depths of preconscious and irrational life. In 1906–1907, he still did not believe that epistemological skepticism was a real menace, for the sciences would nevertheless still claim objectivity. But its impact on ethics and axiology was much more serious for him.114 Thus the need for the “reduction” becomes clearer to us. He needed it both to check the revival of any form of naturalism and to offer a path toward a viable solution to the “enigma of transcendence.” His phenomenological analyses gradually revealed that rationality in general, and the properly theoretical-cognitive activity (praxis) that claims “apodicticity” and “objectivity,” does not manage to free itself from its emotional and somatic roots. A recent study by the University of South Carolina, published in Scientific Reports,115 used neuroimaging on subjects with strong political convictions, showing how the most primitive and central parts of the brain in the central lobe (insula) and amygdalae, which harbor the most intimate and emotionally rooted convictions, “lit up” in the face of any rational counterevidence that contradicts them.116 Treating opposing evidence as existential “threats” to their personal identities, they shut down and their brain areas went into overdrive, thus reinforcing their primitive convictions. But the same reaction did not occur in the face of “neutral” rational evidences regarding the outer world. Another study, popular in political and business circles, refers to how to motivate or inspire others with arguments in favor of a political option or a commercial product.117 It also leans on the fundamental character of the brain’s emotional limbic center and two amygdalae (the “psychophysical heart”) to determine why people do what they do (“very few know” that). This is the site of trust and mistrust, and it is responsible for sensory and emotion processing (fear, sadness, etc.). It differs from the brain’s middle brain, which is the site of the will and of the decision-making that controls how we do things (“many know” that). It also differs from the most recent, Nijhoff, 1984), 216, 442–7. See also Edmund Husserl, “Persönliche Aufzeichnungen,” ed. Walter Biemel, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 16, no. 3 (1956): 297. 114  Husserl, Einleitung in die Logik, 217. 115  Jonas T. Kaplan, Sarah I. Gimbel, and Sam Harris, “Neural Correlates of Maintaining One’s Political Beliefs in the Face of Counterevidence,” Scientific Reports 6, 39589 (2016), https://doi. org/10.1038/srep39589 116  The subjects’ convictions in the study mentioned were strongly held political and non-political views (religious, ideological, or intellectual). The deep limbic system (or center) is the oldest ontophylogenetic part of the human brain (as big as a nut), and it produces the most primitive emotions such as fear, love, sadness, joy, ire, surprise, disgust, anxiety, and depression. The amygdalae connect that center with the more developed regions of the brain in the frontal cortex, the functions of which are attention and memory. Its location is the temporal lobe, and its processing center (the amygdalae) stores memories, especially those laden with positive and negative feelings that originate in personal and collective experiences and that flow during the temporal course of human life. 117  Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).

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frontal, and external brain (the neocortex) involved in advanced cognition, rational analytic thought, and language that determines what we do (“everybody knows” that). Now the physiological basis of why we act or decide is situated in the emotional brain (outside the language area), and is thus the hidden and anonymous physiological motor of our preconscious, primitive, pre-objectifying, pre-egological tendencies and motivations toward certain beliefs, purposes, or tasks. It has been proven that the arguments that succeed in convincing third parties are directed from within toward the periphery (from the why to the what). And those that motivate less are the more “rational” ones (a fortiori, the theoretical analytical ones), directed from the clearest (outside) toward the fuzziest (inside): from the what to the how. Sinek illustrated this with a graphic that he named the “Golden circle.”118

This model could perhaps explain why it is demagogues who tend to win elections rather than their more rational and analytic rivals. One may be inclined to believe that the previous studies tend to show what happens in the conscious and rational spheres related to ethical and aesthetic evaluations or practical decisions and actions as a result, they are more “colored” by the emotional and passive stratums of subjective life than cognitive activities.119 But I wonder whether the motive that led the Nobel Prize Winner in Physics (1973), Ivar Giæver, to renounce his membership in the American Physical Society in 2011 does not stem from his emotional rather than from his intellective sphere. That institution had expressed its official position regarding the “incontrovertible evidence on anthropogenic global warming” (AGW), a position that the Norwegian scientist had denounced some years before as a “new religion.” To conclude: the static, eidetic analyses of our daily and scientific intentional experiences, with their respective validations, necessarily refer to their genesis in a lower stratum from whence they stem. From the higher level of predicative (logical, mathematical, and the like) constitutive experiences they can be traced back to a more primitive stratum—that of perceptual, evaluative, practical lived

 Ibid: 37–52.  Antonio Zirión Quijano, “Colorations and Moods in Husserl’s Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (With a Final Hint Towards the Coloring of Life,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 16 (2018): 41–75. 118 119

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experiences—and from there to the deepest strata of the primitive flux of the subject’s temporal life.120 Secondary passivity is gradually configured as the functions and noetic-noematic experiences of the active (conscious and rational) subject recede into “sediments” deposited in that deepest strata of preconscious and unconscious life. It is the non-­ actual horizon of conscious life that tends to sink gradually until it vanishes at the zero point of the unconscious level. Secondary passivity also records the subject’s personal history and the brand of its radical existential individuation, the source of motivations or acquired instincts that may in principle be reactivated, transformed, or changed in their direction during the course of life.121 Primary passivity is, on the contrary, the primordial level (Urstufe) of the pre-­ ego, in which there exists a purely subjective, undifferentiated unity of primal kinaestheses (Urkinästhesen), primordial feelings (Urgefühle), primordial affections (Ur-Affektion), and primordial willings (Urwollen), “before” any worldencounter has taken place—thus “before” any hetero-affection has occurred.122 This unity is directed (also in an undifferentiated manner) toward a primoridal undifferentiated hyle (Urhyle) that fills the course of our entire life. A pre-world (Vor-Welt)—namely, “the universe of pre-Being” (das Universum des VorSeiendem)123—is constituted at this level,124 prior to the constitution of the “world in the proper sense” (eigentliche Welt).125 This primitive configuration—related to a still unidentified experience—precedes the intentional correlation.126 Thus the properly “subjective” (egological) configurations of the course of life, together with the primordial kinaesthetic sensations, first take place “as emotion, as mood, as a universal horizonal ‘vital feeling.’”127 This stratum conditions the manner in which the pre-ego takes charge of the hyle that is produced when the external

 Truly, this process can only be analyzed by “deconstructing” the primary strata that are still accessible to an intuitive description. Thus it leads to the beginnings of human life in the unborn pre-ego (vor-Ego), a life that extends onto-phylogenetically in its radical individuation until the death of the individual person. At a static level, the analyses tackle the noetic-noematic correlation and the constituting of senses and validities (noemas—concepts, values, norms, and culture and science in general, etc.) thanks to psychic lived experiences (noeses belonging to spiritual persons), unthinkable without their embodiment in psychophysical unities and without the historical association of their experiences. 121  Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephan Strasser, vol. 1 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), §32. 122  Edmund Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar, vol. 8 of Husserliana: Materialen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 199, 335. 123  Ibid., 187. 124  This constitution takes place as a “primordial temporalization wherein a hyletic quasi-world alien to the I (eine ichfremde hyletische Quasi-Welt) has its pre-being (Vor-Sein)” (ibid., 350). 125  Ibid. 126  Roberto J. Walton, “El problema trascendental en la obra de Paul Ricoeur,” in De las Ideas al tiempo de la historia: Edmund Husserl y Paul Ricoeur, ed. Luis Rabanaque and Francisco Bodean (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2018), 13. 127  Husserl, Späte Texte, 362, 320. 120

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world sensibly affects it. Thus beginning with affection, a hyletic undifferentiated flux is unleashed, giving rise to associative subjective processes whereby the first “hyletic unities” (the tactile, visual, auditive, olfactive, and taste-sensitive fields, as well as the feeling-sensations, tendencies, drives, instincts, desires, etc.) are passively constituted. Here one finds “the ego for whom this pre-world (Vor-Welt) exists such that thanks to its functioning in affection and action, the world in the proper sense (die eigentliche Welt) is created in a plurality of levels of creation to which relative worlds (relative Welten) belong.”128 Eventually, the objectivating instinct directs this vital flux toward consciousness and reason. In sum, as Walton remarks, “affective life conditions (ergo, motivates) objectivation, rather than presupposing it.”129 Husserl puts it this way: The question regarding the original instinct that has as correlate nature’s objectivation, and the question regarding how the primal hyletic affections of feeling—when in the same manner they are affections either of pleasure or of displeasure—ought to motivate objectivation.130 Mere sense-data, and, at a higher level, sensible objects, as things that are there for the subject but are there “free of value,” are abstractions. Nothing can be given that does not concern affectivity, and what is indifferent is only an intermediate stage between satisfaction and dissatisfaction [...].131

*** We have seen that for Husserl—as well as for the Western tradition—love is a polymorphic phenomenon of life. More than a virtue, a particular feeling-sensation, or a habit at the basis of feeling-acts, love is a pervasive teleological force that unfolds during the entirety of the living process, from primal impulses and self-­preservation instincts to a “progressive bringing into play”132 of higher-level, intersubjective activities of life-care and self-preservation, and finally to an ethical-­rational lifeform that performs a “true-self-preservation”133 whereby “self-­ satisfaction and  Ibid., 350.  Walton, “El problema,” 13. 130  “[…] die Frage nach dem ursprünglichen Instinkt, der die natürliche Objektivierung als Korrelat hat, und die Frage, wie die urhyletischen Gefühlsaffektionen, wenn sie in gleicher Weise bald Lust-, bald Unlust- Affektionen sind, Objektivierung motivieren sollen” (Husserl, Späte Texte, 321). See also Walton, “El problema,” 13–14. 131  “Bloße Empfindungsdaten und in höherer Stufe sinnliche Gegenstände, wie Dinge, die für das Subjekt da sind, aber ‘wertfrei’ da sind, sind Abstraktionen. Es kann nichts geben, was nicht das Gemüt berührt, und das Gleichgültige ist nur ein Zwischenstadium zwischen Lust und Unlust […]” Husserl, Struktur des Bewusstseins, vol. 3, 465. I am deeply indebted to Roberto Walton for reading a previous version of this paper and for sharing with me some passages of Husserl, Späte Texte that were relevant for my argument. 132  Husserl, Späte Texte, 187. See also Roberto J.  Walton, “Self-Preservation and Teleology in Monadic History,” paper presented at the 2nd Research Summer School in Genetic Phenomenology, Graduate School of Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, September 2019, 11. 133  Husserl, Grenzprobleme, 394. 128 129

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happiness also include a ‘loving care’ (liebende Sorge) or a ‘living solicitude’ for others.”134 But this pervasive teleological unfolding in the life-span of individual monads and in the historical life-span of cultural generations is not a one-­way track, but rather takes place in a “feedback-loop motivational pattern”135 or “functional circle”136 between active and passive life, and between primary and secondary passivity. Thus it appears to be a nonlinear and complex entropic force137 that aims at reaching its highest levels of fulfillment in blessedness, but can deviate and remain stalled at its lowest levels. In this sense, rational life, including its theoretical functions, remains inextricably interwoven with its preconscious and irrational genesis and its primal emotional source. Man is suspended between rationality and irrationality. Everything rational has its horizons of irrationality. But irrationality is itself a structure of the rationality that is apprehended with a broader scope (eine Gestalt der weiter gefassten Rationalität).138

Thus perhaps we can conclude that love is the alpha and omega of life.

Bibliography Aristotle. (2003). The Nicomachean ethics (H. Rackham, Trans.). Harvard University Press. Boehm, R. (1969). Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phänomenologie. Martinus Nijhoff. Capra, F., & Luisi, P.  L. (2014). The systems view of life: A unified vision. Cambridge University Press.  Ibid., 397, 513. See also Walton, “Self-Preservation,” 3, 5–7.  Capra and Luisi, The Systems View, 101ff. I have changed the expression used in The Systems View of Life and in dynamic systems theories from “feedback loop causality pattern” to “feedback loop motivational pattern,” which in my view corresponds to the dynamics between active and (primary and secondary) passive consciousness in the context of transcendental subjects and spiritual persons. 136  Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, with a Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 137  I use “entropy” drawing from the new discoveries in physical sciences regarding mutations, changes, and new orders (“history”) that have been shaking the foundations of Newtonian causal determination and predictability, established since the reformulation of the second law of thermodynamics. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (see Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, De máquinas y seres vivos: Una teoría sobre la organización biológica, rev. ed. [Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1995]), founders of the “Santiago cognitive theory,” ceased to deal with mind as a res, and rather dealt with it as a process of autopoiesis (life’s self-production and selfpreservation) and cognition (its constructive interaction with its surroundings). To those properties were added those of “nonlinearity” and “complexity”—developed between 1940 and 1979 by the classical systems theories and cybernetics—and the so-called “feedback loop causality pattern” (feedback loop pattern) developed by Norbert Wiener with contributions by John von Neuman, Alan Turing, etc. Several decades previously, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll had anticipated this cybernetic notion of a “loop causality pattern” (or feedback) in living organisms that he named the “functional circle,” referring to the systemic cycle between passive sensors and active effectors in each organism with its Umwelt (von Uexküll, A Foray, 44). 138  Husserl, Grenzprobleme, 489. Cited in Walton, “Self-Preservation,” 14. 134 135

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Depraz, N. (2008). The rainbow of emotions: At the crossroads of neurobiology and phenomenology. Continental Philosophy Review, 41(2), 237–259. Depraz, N. (2020). Cardiofenomenología. In M. C. García & R. Rizo-Patrón (Eds.), La racionalidad ampliada: Nuevos horizontes de la fenomenología y la hermenéutica (212–279). Aula de Humanidades/Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica des Perú. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Weidenfeld. Fanon, F. (2004). The wretched of the earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. Fichte, J.  G. (1908–1912). Werke: Auswahl in sechs Bänden (6 Vols.) (F.  Medicus, Ed.). Fritz Eckardt. Fichte, J. G. (1974). Die Bestimmung des Menschen. Reclam. Fuchs, T. (2018). Ecology of the brain: The phenomenology and biology of the embodied mind (N. Hughes, R. Müllan, & S. Kirkbright, Trans.). Oxford University Press. Hart, J. G. (1995). Husserl and Fichte: With special regard to Husserl’s lectures on “Fichte’s ideal of humanity”. Husserl Studies, 12(2), 135–163. Husserl, E. (1950). Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. S.  Strasser (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 1). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1952a). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch; Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. M.  Biemel (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 4). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1952b). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Drittes Buch; Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften. M. Biemel (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 5). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1952c). Nachwort. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Drittes Buch; Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften (138–162). W.  Biemel (Ed.),  Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke  (Vol. 5). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1954). Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. W.  Biemel (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 6). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1956a). Erste Philosophie (1923–1924): Erster Teil; Kritische Ideengeschichte. R. Boehm (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 7). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1956b). “Persönliche Aufzeichnungen.” W.  Biemel (Ed.). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 16(3), 293–302. Husserl, E. (1959). Erste Philosophie (1923–1924): Zweiter Teil; Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion. R. Boehm (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 8). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology (D. Cairns, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental philosophy: Introduction to phenomenological philosophy (D. Carr, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Husserl, E. (1973a). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass; Zweiter Teil; 1921–1928. I. Kern (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 14). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1973b). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass; Dritter Teil; 1929–1935. I. Kern (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 15). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1976). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch; Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. K.  Schuhmann (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 3). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: First book; general introduction to a pure phenomenology (F. Kersten, Trans.). Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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Husserl, E. (1984). Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie: Vorlesungen 1906/07. U. Melle (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 24). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1987a). Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921): Mit ergänzenden Texten. T.  Nenon & H.-R.  Sepp (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 25). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1987b). Fichtes Menschheitsideal. In Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921): Mit ergänzenden Texten (267–293). T.  Nenon & H.-R.  Sepp (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 25). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1988). Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (1908–1914). U.  Melle (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 28). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (1989a). Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937): Mit ergänzenden Texten. T.  Nenon & H.-R.  Sepp (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 27). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (1989b). Epilogue. In Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: Second book; studies in the phenomenology of constitution (405–430) (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (1989c). Fünf Aufsätze über Erneuerung. In Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937): Mit ergänzenden Texten (3–124). T. Nenon & H.-R. Sepp (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (vol. 27). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (1989d). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: Second book; studies in the phenomenology of constitution (R.  Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (1994a). Briefwechsel. K. Schuhmann & E. Schuhmann (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente (Vol. 3). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (1994b). Die Göttinger Schule. In Briefwechsel, Part 3. K. Schuhmann & E. Schuhmann (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente (Vol. 3). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (1994c). Die Neukantianer. In Briefwechsel, Part 5. K. Schuhmann & E. Schuhmann (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente (Vol. 3). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (1995). Fichte’s ideal of humanity [three lectures]. (James G. Hart, Trans.). Husserl Studies, 12(2), 111–133. Husserl, E. (2002). Einleitung in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1922/23. B.  Goosens (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 35). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (2004). Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1924. H. Peucker (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 37). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (2006). Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte. D. Lohmar (Ed.), Husserliana: Materialen (Vol. 8). Springer. Husserl, E. (2008). Die Lebenswelt: Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution; Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937). R.  Sowa (Ed.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 39). Springer. Husserl, E. (2012). Einleitung in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1916–1920. H.  Jacobs (Ed.), Husserliana: Materialen (Vol. 9). Springer. Husserl, E. (2014). Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte; Metaphysik; Späte Ethik; Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937). R.  Sowa & T. Vongehr (Eds.), Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 42). Springer. Husserl, E. (2019). First philosophy: Lectures 1923/24 and related texts from the manuscripts (1920–1925) (S. Luft & T. M. Naberhaus, Trans.). Springer. Husserl, E. (2020). Ms. A VI 26. Husserl Archiv. Jonas, H. (1984). The imperative of responsibility: In search of an ethics for the technological age (H. Jonas with D. Herr, Trans.). The University of Chicago Press. Kaplan, J. T., Gimbel, S. I., & Harris, S. (2016). Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence. Scientific Reports, 6, 39589. https://doi.org/10.1038/ srep39589 Lerner, R. R. P. (2007). Between conflict and reconciliation: The hard truth. Human Studies, 30(2), 115–130.

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Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1995). De máquinas y seres vivos: Una teoría sobre la organización biológica (Rev. ed.). Editorial Universitaria. Melle, U. (2002). Edmund Husserl: From reason to love. In J. J. Drummond & L. Embree (Eds.), Phenomenological approaches to moral philosophy: A handbook (229–248). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (2003). Final Report. http://www.cverdad.org. pe/ifinal Plato. (1925). Symposium (H. N. Fowler, Trans.). In Plato in Twelve Volumes (Vol. 9). Harvard University Press. Sinek, S. (2009). Start with why: How great leaders inspire everyone to take action. Penguin Publishing Group, Ltd., Kindle Edition. Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, Teilband III. Wille und Handlung. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1902–1934), U. Melle & T. Vongehr (Eds.). Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 43/3). Springer. Steinbock, A.  J. (2014). Moral emotions:  Reclaiming the evidence of the heart. Northwestern University Press. von Uexküll, J. (2010). A foray into the worlds of animals and humans, with a theory of meaning (J. D. O’Neil, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Walton, R.  J. (2018). El problema trascendental en la obra de Paul Ricoeur. In L.  Rabanaque & F. Bodean (Eds.), De las Ideas al tiempo de la historia: Edmund Husserl y Paul Ricoeur (19–44). Editorial Biblos. Walton, R.  J. (2019, September). Self-preservation and teleology in monadic history. Paper presented at the 2nd Research Summer School in Genetic Phenomenology, Graduate School of Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw. Zirión Quijano, A. (2018). Colorations and moods in Husserl’s Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (with a final hint towards the coloring of life). The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 16, 41–75.

Chapter 11

The Phenomenology of Joy: A Case Study in Emotional Intentionality Mariano Crespo

1  Introduction I would like to begin with a story from Miguel de Cervantes’ book Don Quixote de la Mancha. This book is, no doubt, the most important book ever written in the Spanish language. The work was written at the beginning of the seventeenth Century and is a satire of chivalry books, which were very popular at this time. The main character is an old man named Alonso Quijano, who went crazy after reading too many of these books. He wanted to become a knight to fight against all kinds of injustices. He took the name of Don Quixote de la Mancha (La Mancha is the name of a region in central Spain). But before becoming a knight, he had to watch over the weapons for a whole night. After doing that, he comes out of the inn where he felt like he has been knighted. Look how Cervantes writes about it: It was about break of day, when Don Quixote issued forth from the inn, so satisfied, so gay, so blithe, to see himself knighted, that the joy thereof almost burst his horse’s girths.1

Don Quixote’s joy undoubtedly consists of a network of pleasant affective sensations with certain qualities, intensity, and duration. They even seem to translate visibly into the joy of our hero, who, as Cervantes recounts, almost burst the girths of his long-suffering horse, Rocinante. However, this joy seems to be a much more

A first version of this text was published in Spanish in Anuario filosófico, 53/3 (2020), pp. 471–494. 1  Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha. Translated by C. Jarvis. Edited with an introduction by E.C. Riley (Suffolk: Oxford University Press, 2008), First Part, Chapter, IV, p. 12 M. Crespo (*) University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_11

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complex experience than it appears at first glance. Certainly, Don Quixote’s joy is founded on having been knighted. He understands this fact as pleasant, and it arouses in him a reaction of joy. At the same time, the joy that overwhelms Alonso Quijano is not limited to the moment in which he first becomes a knight, but rather “colors,” so to speak, his entire life of consciousness, at least for a certain time. It does not seem then that joy is limited to a specific act and instead somehow remains in his consciousness, just as a sound resonates after being heard. This implies that Don Quixote’s joy is not limited to pleasant affective sensations, or to the apprehension of the pleasant character of being knighted, or even to the affective reaction that said apprehension causes. Initially aroused by a given state of affairs, joy resonates in his consciousness, washing a variety of facts and circumstances in a cheerful light. Herein I do not intend to carry out a systematic reconstruction or a detailed critical analysis of the way in which Edmund Husserl analyzes affective experiences such as joy (or sadness), which would far exceed the limits of this presentation. I also do not intend to offer a detailed analysis of mood, a task that my colleagues Antonio Zirión and Ignacio Quepons, among others have already admirably completed. Rather, I aim to offer a relatively broad explanation of Husserl’s discussions and analyses of joy, including its intentionality and rationality, as well as its ethical and intersubjective nature. Therefore—as stated—my contribution has rather the character of a brainstorming. This explanation is framed by Husserl’s four-distinctions as follows: (1) The feelings or sensible sensations (Empfindungsgefühlen) of joy, (2) what is usually characterized as liking (Gefallen), that is, an affective act or intentional sentimental act (Gefühlsakt) directed toward the pleasant character (erfreulich) of a state of affairs and, therefore, an act of appreciative mention (wertende Meinung), (3) joy as an affective reaction (Gefühlserregung, Gefühlsreaktion), and (4) joy as a mood.2 I will focus above all on points (2), (3) and (4), although I will also refer to (1). After that I will refer to the object of joy in order to refer later to the interesting and difficult question of its appropriateness or legitimacy. Thirdly, and within the framework of the relationships between joy and its object, I will refer to what could be called the “laws of joy.” Finally, I will briefly point to a question that opens up a series of ethical considerations, namely the relationship between joy and alterity. With it, I point to the question of the legitimacy of joy when it takes into account the joy of others, including both those closest to me and all human beings in general.

2  There are several texts in which Husserl refers to these sensations or moments of joy. As shown in the following fragment from the Studien Zur Struktur des Bewusstseins manuscripts, and in which the relationship between the second and third sensations are alluded to: “(1) A capture of value belongs to the essence of the consciousness of explicit, realized joy, a process of development that realizes values, namely, the values that make one rejoice. (2) Joy itself is the feeling founded on or motivated by the apprehensive or capturing consciousness of values” (E. Husserl, Ms. A VI 12 II, 131b). Unless otherwise indicated, the Husserlian manuscripts cited herein belong to the aforementioned Studien Zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, forthcoming in the Husserliana series. The English translations therefrom are the work of the author.

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2  Moments of Joy 2.1  The Moment of Valuing Directed at an Object In a well-known passage from § 15b of Husserl’s fifth Logical Investigations, he points out the following: Joy, e.g. concerning some happy event, is certainly an act. But this act, which is not merely an intentional character, but a concrete and therefore complex experience, does not merely hold in its unity an idea of the happy event and an act-character of liking which relates to it: a sensation of pleasure attaches to the idea, a sensation at once seen and located as an emotional excitement in the psycho-physical feeling-subject, and also as an objective property – the event seems as if bathed in a rosy gleam.3

Joy is therefore always based on a state of affairs, for example, Don Quixote’s experience when he found that he had been knighted. It involves an intentional affective act directed at an object that is perceived as valuable—in this case, as likable based on certain feelings of pleasure.4 In any case, it is important to emphasize that in the case of joy turning toward an object as pleasant is completely different from turning toward a perceived, remembered, or judged object. It also differs from reference in a categorical judgment.5 It is, of course, an intentional act, but has a peculiar type of intentionality. His insistence on this peculiarity leads Husserl to maintain that, “Nothing appears in joy; nothing is mentioned in it as joy in the strict sense of a mention.”6 In Ideas I (1913), Husserl continues his investigation into the specific intentionality of evaluative acts, pointing out that “intentional object” can be taken in a double sense. On the one hand, the simple grasping or attending to is what is proper of theoretical “heeding,” and on the other hand, a mode that corresponds to the affective level when we refer to a value, i.e., when we address a thing in terms of valuation. This latter way of turning toward or being directed is different from the former. It has its own intentional object, which is the “full intentional object,” the valued

 Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Erster Teil, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Ed. Ursula Panzer. Husserliana (henceforth Hua.), Band XIX/1 (Springer: Dordrecht, 1984), 409. Logical Investigations, Translated by J.N. Findlay from the Second German Edition of Logische Untersuchungen, Edited by Dermot Moran, Vol. II (New York: Routledge 2001, p. 110). 4  The term Husserl uses is erfreulich, which could be translated as “pleasant.” See: Michela Summa, “Are Emotions ‘Recollected in Tranquility’? Phenomenological Reflections on Emotions, Memory, and the Temporal Dynamics of Experience,” in Feeling and Value, Willing and Action: Essays in the Context of a Phenomenological Psychology, ed. Marta Ubiali & Maren Wehrle, (Switzerland: Springer, Cham, 2015), 167. 5  Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, ed. Ullrich Melle. Husserliana (henceforth Hua), Band XXVIII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988) 335 ff. 6  Husserl, Hua XXVIII, 339. 3

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thing.7 The objectifying “heeding”, which may or may not occur after an affective experience, is a new act, although still doxic and objectifying, but subsequent objectification of the object of the affective experience does not modify its non-­ objectifying nature. Husserl argues that in the act of joy we are turned toward what brings joy without grasping any of it. What makes us joyful “becomes an object seized upon only in a particular ‘objectifying’ turn (vergegenständliche Wendung).”8 In being turned toward that which brings joy is enclosed the apprehension of the thing that brings joy, but the full intentional correlate of the act of being joyful is not just the mere thing, but the thing-which-brings-joy. Therefore, to be turned toward a thing in rejoicing does not mean to have the pleasant thing already as an object, in the specific sense of an attended object, as we need to have it to predicate about it. It is through a change of attitude with respect to the affective act that its full intentional object becomes an object attended to, represented, and consequently, “capable of serving as substrates for explanations, relations, conceptual apprehensions, and predications.”9 In this way, the object of joy can be attended to in a non-affective, doxic-theoretical way. Along with the above, Husserl mentions two facts that I consider relevant in a phenomenological analysis of joy. Firstly, in the passage from Logical Investigations that I referred to above, Husserl affirms that, for joy, the representation of the joyful subject is “linked” with a sensation of pleasure “at once seen and located as an emotional excitement in the psycho-physical feeling-subject.”10 Thus, the event appears “as if bathed in a rosy gleam (rosiger Schimmer)” and as such, is, “the first foundation for the joyful approach (freudige Zuwendung), the liking for, the being charmed.”11 Secondly, there are several passages in which joy appears as an erfüllendes Phänomen, i.e., a phenomenon that happens when a desire is fulfilled (erfüllt), as a state in which wishful intentionality ends. Joy arises when the object of desire is realized, when what is desired takes place, when, ultimately, desire is fulfilled. In short, the first moment or sense of joy refers to it as an affective act or intentional feeling directed at a pleasant object.

7   See: Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie. Erstes Buch. Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. 1. Halbband. Text der 1-3- Auflage, ed. K. Schuhmann. Husserliana (Hua) III/1 (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1976, 77). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by F. Kersten (Martinus Nijhoff. The Hague 1982, 77). See also: P. Fernández Beites, Razón afectiva y valores: más allá del subjetivismo y el objetivismo, en Anuario filosófico, 45/1 (2012), 41. 8  See: Hua III/1, 76 (Ideas I, 76). 9  See: Husserl, Hua III/1, 77 & Husserl, Ideas I, 78. 10  Hua XIX/1, 408 (Logical Investigations, 110). 11  Hua XIX/1, 408 (Logical Investigations, 110).

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2.2  Joy as a Reaction Apprehending the pleasant character of a certain state of affairs usually arouses in the subject a reaction of joy, an affective excitement directed at this point, so to speak, from the object to the subject.12 In the case of joy, pleasant bodily sensations usually accompany this excitement, while unpleasant ones are associated with sadness. In fact it is possible, as Melle points out that when someone rejoices, instead of remaining directed toward the state of affairs apprehended as pleasant, she stops and rejoices in these sensible sensations.13 In any case, when it comes to affective excitement I am not properly turned toward the object apprehended as pleasant, unlike in the first instance of joy. In a sense, we can say that here the intentional direction does not go from the subject to the object, but to the contrary, from the object to the subject. The intentionalities behind apprehending a state of affairs as pleasant and that of affective excitement caused by this apprehension are, therefore, different. In a manuscript that is part of the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, Husserl distinguishes between these two types of intentional references: If by joy we understand affect, the excitement of joy that arises from the valuable object as such, then it is evident that the intentionality of this affect is different from that of considering it valuable; this is so because the ‘intentional’ relationship of the affect of joy for that which makes me joyful is different from the feeling of pleasure for a thing. Considering an object valuable is directed to the object considered valuable. In pleasure, I address the object and, in any case (although attention is not necessary), insofar as pleasure is there, it is consciousness, there is a well-founded consciousness of the object. Conversely, excitement affected by joy does not amount to awareness of turning toward the exciting, valuable object. It is related to this object as exciting, as motivated. It comes from a pleasant object, but it does not itself address the object that excites it. Therefore, what does the apperception of an object as pleasant mean? It happens in such a way that it can arouse joy, add to the excitement of joy, and this by virtue of its 'value,' of the fact that it is pleasant.14

 The interesting question that Melle raises refers to whether we are here dealing with two aspects of a unitary act of liking or two different phenomena. The former would seem to conflict with the existence of so called, “cold appreciations,” as when something experienced as valuable (in the case of the emotional act of joy as pleasant) does not arouse in us any emotional excitement and “leaves us cold.” See: U.  Melle, Husserls deskriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse, in R.  Breeur, U.  Melle (eds.), Life, Subjectivity & Art: Essays in Honor of Rudolf Bernet (The Netherlands: Springer Netherlands, 2012), 92. 13  Ulrich Melle, Husserls deskriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse, en R. Breeur, U. Melle (eds.), Life, Subjectivity & Art: Essays in Honor of Rudolf Bernet (The Netherlands: Springer Netherlands, 2012), 92. 14  E. Husserl, Ms. A VI 8 I/50a. 12

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2.3  Joy as a Mood Joy commonly lingers even when a given pleasant object has disappeared; it can take root in and color the life of consciousness, thus becoming a mood.15 This is what happens, for example, with the exhilaration that seizes Don Quixote after being knighted or when beauty contemplated in nature or in a work of art provokes in us a “current of joy” that may even translate into sensible moments. Once good news is received, I remain in a “retention of liking” (retentionales Wohlgefallen) without, however, remaining continually turned towards what gratified me.16 There is a kind of “resonance” (Nachklang) associated with the joyous event that, as Quepons points out following Husserl, can be understood first, “as a kind of bodily agreement between bodily pleasure and the emotional atmosphere and second as a kind of associative synthesis that connects current experience with our memories of similar experiences based on emotional aspects,” that can, at the same, time engender expectations for the future.17 If we now look at joy specifically as a mood, it is worth asking after its object or, put another way, what its “intentionality” or its reference to its object is.18 As mentioned above, joy makes a given event appear as if, in Husserl’s words, washed in a “rosy gleam,” in a “beautiful light.” There is a sort of transfer of joy, originally aroused by a specific state of affairs, to other states of affairs that present themselves to my consciousness. It thus involves an intentionality that, as Zirión and Summa, among others, have pointed out, is not unirradially directed at a singular object or state of affairs, but rather multiradially directed at a complex arrangement, at an indeterminate horizon of elements that are often quite diverse. If I’m in a joyful mood, everything around me seems to have a positive connotation. If my mood is negative or sad, something similar happens to the point that it prevents me from rejoicing in events or situations that may be joyful.19 In Husserl’s words, “This is a sentimental unity that paints everything with a color, with a cohesive gleam—a cohesive gleam of joy, [or with] a cohesive, dark gleam of sadness.”20 Returning to our initial example, after Don Quixote was knighted, everything appeared to him in a new, positive, favorable light, not just the fact of acquiring said  “Joy as a state, living in a state of joy, without turning toward what you are joyful about...” (E. Husserl Ms. A VI 12). 16  See: A. Zirión, Colorations and Moods in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 16, 58. 17  See: E.  Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1924, ed. H.  Peucker. Husserliana (Hua), Band XXXVII, Springer, Dordrecht 2004. 343; I.  Quepons, Horizons of Vulnerability and the Problem of Human Dignity: Ethical and Phenomenological Assessments, “Acta Universitatis Carolinae. Interpretationes. Studia Philosophica Europeanea” (2017) 2, 160. 18  See: E. Husserl, Ms. A VI 12 II/132a–132b; A. Zirión, Colorations and Moods in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, 62–63. 19  A. Zirión, op. cit., 64; M. Summa, 618. 20  E. Husserl, E., Ms. A VI 12 II/72a. 15

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condition. Certainly, his mood is determined by that fact, but he now contemplates a whole set of facts in said light rather than just this one fact. In Husserl’s own words, “When I am in a cheerful mood, everything has a rosy gleam, but not as a gleam of its own.”21 This extension of joy’s “rosy gleam”—and its going beyond just the pleasant event—highlights that moods have horizontal intentionality.22 In a 1911 manuscript, quoted by Quepons, Husserl explains with an example the way in which this type of intentionality operates.23 I am talking to a charming person. She is in her corporality before me, I listen to her words, I observe her gestures, but all of these characteristics remain in the background because I am not addressing them as such. Rather, they are presented to me as endowed with “emotional coloring” (Gefühlsfarbung). As the conversation progresses, my joy increases. However, I somehow live in my joy, rather than just being turned toward it. This joy may resonate (nachklingen) for some time, even when speaking to a different person. It is not a simple bodily feeling of pleasure, a kind of “well-being in the bosom” (Wohlsein in der Brust), but rather an emotional state or feeling that refers to the surrounding world. In short, all joy refers to something that brings joy, something that founds it. However, as we have seen in Husserl, this “something” need not be the content of consciousness during the entire duration of joy; but can also put us in an “excited disposition” (erregte Disposition). Husserl gives the example of how a sublime

 “Furthermore, in ‘acts of pleasure,’ in affects of ‘joy,’ it should be noted that said rosy gleam either has the character of something that corresponds to the object, such as the halo that infuses the object thanks to that which it is or corresponds to, or it has the character of a borrowed glimmer. If I am in a joyful mood, everything has the gleam of joy, but not everything has its own gleam.” (E. Husserl, Die von Gegenständen ausgehende Erregung von Gefühlen gegenüber der auf die Gegenstände hinzielenden Wertung. Die Frage nach dem Gefühlscharakter des Wertens, (Ed.: U. Melle), in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 80 (2018), 304). In the case of sadness, the opposite is true: “To the grief-stricken everything appears in a gloomy light, but the objects that are illuminated in this way are not the objects of his sorrow, at least not the primary ones. The grief-stricken well knows what is he sad about; his sentiment is specifically determined by this object. The objects he is contemplating now are not what he feels sorrow about, although perhaps he is inclined to see in these objects too something unfavorable and in general something apt to nourish his grief. But this unfavorable something is often of another specific determination than that of the sorrow that fills him.” (E.  Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912), eds. T. Vongehr und R. Giuliani. Husserliana (Hua), Band XXXVIII, Springer, Dordrecht, 2004, 176). All translations of this text herein are from A. Zirión, Colorations and moods in Husserl’s Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (with a final hint towards the coloring of life), 46. 22  Various works from Ignacio Quepons refer to this in detail: Intencionalidad de horizonte y reducción trascendental en la fenomenología de Husserl, “Investigaciones Fenomenológicas,” 9 (2012), 269–289; El temple de ánimo como horizonte de la reflexión: autoexamen, decisión y consideración emotiva, Valenciana, 7 (13), 2014, 83–111; lntentionality of Moods and Horizon Consciousness in Husserl’s Phenomenology, in M. Ubiali & M. Wehrle (Eds.), op. cit., 93–103; Horizonte y temple de ánimo en la fenomenología de Edmund Husserl, en Diánoia, vol, 61, n° 76 (2016), 83–112. 23  E.  Husserl, Ms. A VI 8 I/45 (cited by I.  Quepons, Intentionality of Moods and Horizon Consciousness in Husserl’s Phenomenology. 99–100). 21

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religious service puts us in a festive, solemn spirit which lasts even after the end of the service itself. We left church with this feeling precisely, without explicitly bearing in mind the thoughts and ideas that the service gave rise to. It is possible that the later feeling no longer has the fullness of the first one, but it surely has the same specific character. We are in a solemn mood, but without the content that founds it present. If we ask ourselves what is the basis of this mood, what the sentiment aims toward, we will not err in referring to the religious service. The same happens when we experience a pure aesthetic pleasure and the work of art is no longer present. The feeling does not disappear at once, although there is no longer a living representation of the fantasy. Obviously, we are capable of calling on it again, which is in fact often the case. But in the meantime, the feeling does not disappear; it lingers. A piece of news brings me joy. It cannot be said that, during this state, I continually think about the news, which, so to speak, I am looking at.24

This reveals once again the peculiar type of intentionality that operates in joy.

3  The Object of Joy Husserlian analyses of joy’s specific intentionality contains an important aspect related to joy’s intentional object. These analyses consider various aspects of this object, especially focusing on that which refers to its temporality in contrast to the temporality of the lived experience of rejoicing. In this order of things, joy, unlike volition, can refer to a past event. In a way, we can want something that we already wanted in the past, but, in that case, it would be a new volition, namely a current volition and a new intentional object. I cannot, therefore, want in the proper sense a past event. However, it is possible to rejoice over something that lies completely in the past, which corresponds to a present joy for something past. This past in which I currently rejoice can, in turn, be a joy in itself. I rejoice in having been joyful—I’m joyful because I experienced a past joy. This is what Husserl calls a “double phenomenon” (Doppelphänomen).25 It may also happen that I am not joyful about a past joy, and now rather regret what happened. This entails a modified consciousness of joy that has the same representative foundation as unmodified joy. On the contrary, when it comes to unmodified experiences, it is impossible to establish such links. As Husserl himself points out, being joyful about A and not joyful about A, in the same sense, are mutually exclusive. In his words, Current joy over victory for a good cause overlaps, with respect to its conceptual essence, with the memory of previously experienced joy and, nevertheless, they remain two things: We remember the joy based on the victory and we rejoice in the victory itself.26

 Hua XXXVIII, 175–176.  E. Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925), ed. E. Marbach. Husserliana (Hua) Band XXIII, (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1980), 105–106. 26  Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, 105–106. 24 25

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It is also possible to rejoice today about a future event that is considered, in one way or another, as valuable. This joy is not only an anticipation of the valued thing’s coming into being, but also anticipates the value of the thing. This value is fully realized when what is about to happen happens. Then, we can fully rejoice. Or, our expectations can be disappointed when what we had been joyful about in advance does not turn out as we had imagined. We realize that what was going to happen does not have the value that we had previously assigned to it. Here we see, as the founder of the phenomenological method points out, that an anticipated joy (Vorfreude) can be disappointed insofar as anticipatory evidence of the value of a future event is possible, but it does not therefore have the character of evidence in the strict sense.27 Variations on joy are not just related to the temporality of its intentional object. They also have to do with its character of being. In this order of things, it is possible to rejoice in an ideal object, such as establishing a mathematical relationship or showing the validity of a proposition or a proof. Certainly, a distinction must be made here between the objects’ ideal being and the real being of manifesting these ideal objects.

4  On the Appropriateness or Legitimacy of Joy Another part of analyzing the peculiar type of intentional correlation between joy and its object has to do with the question of what we might call the “appropriateness” or legitimacy of joy. By this I mean, in very general terms, the question of “correspondence” between the very experience of rejoicing and the object of this experience. This correspondence seems to be present in rejoicing over a friend’s recovered health and in the joy experienced through knowledge itself and absent when rejoicing over an evil that befalls others. The example that Husserl uses is when animals are tortured.28 In this sense, we can speak of legitimate joys or sorrows and illegitimate joys or sorrows. Husserlian analyses on this aspect, which are found in his Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory, share a common thread in that they consider the similarities and differences between the sphere of volitional acts and that of acts of joy (or sadness).29  See: E.  Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie. Vorlesungen 1922/23, ed. B.  Goossens. Husserliana (Hua XXXV), Springer, Dordrecht, 2002, 163 and Hua XXVIII, 106. 28  “In the same way, we say of a want that is appropriate and, in this sense, well-oriented and that the respective end (the analog of the logical proposition) is adequate, whomever the subject to whom we attribute the respective want may be. For example, pure joy in knowing is a value in itself and, therefore, a want that is oriented towards that joy is in itself appropriate and an end that follows it is appropriate, in the same way as a want that is directed towards a vile joy, for example, the joy felt in torturing animals, is in itself inappropriate and, as a subsequent consequence, an impairment from the axiological point of view, regardless of who the subject who so wants is” (Hua XXVIII, 148). 29  See: Hua XXVIII, 126ss. 27

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Both acts are based on valuation acts. In the same way that the appropriateness of volitional acts is defined by the appropriateness of the valuation that is at its base, the same happens with the acts of rejoicing. Appropriate desire and joy are governed by appropriate valuation. The value of emotionally warm acts depends on the value of the ends toward which they are directed (only they point to something). If I value something as good, joy in it or the desire for it, etc. is justified… A is more pleasing than B, objectively; this means that A is more valuable than B, to which joy is directed. But not just this. Joy for A is better than joy for B. Joys are valued.30

Now, the above does not mean that valuing and rejoicing are the same. Unlike rejoicing, valuing is not the final culmination of a tending act, like desiring when the desired is achieved: The ‘being interested’ of joy and sadness, of hope and fear, of desire in all its forms and even of wanting, is completely different from valuing and from a valuation of existence or non-existence. The former acts are, strictly speaking, tending or terminal, while valuing is not.31

5  The Laws of Joy Another important aspect of the analysis of the correlation between rejoicing and its intentional object is related to the question of the rationality or irrationality of joy, a question that is framed within the more general problem of the relationship between reason and emotional acts. In turn, this question arises within the framework of the relationship between emotional acts themselves and the representations and judgments on which they are based. For example, a joy is irrational when it is based on the existence of a pleasing object that does not actually exist. Here again a parallel arises with volitional acts. A joy founded on the conviction of the non-existence of a pleasing object is irrational, just as it is irrational to want a means that is inadequate for the realization of a given end. In this sense, it would also be irrational to want the end and not want any of the means that can achieve it. In this context of the connection between emotional acts and judgments, we turn to the question of whether there are a priori laws that govern the acts of rejoicing and the representations and judgments that serve as their basis.32 Examples of these laws are as follows:  Hua XXVIII, 156.  Hua XXVIII, 155. 32  In any case, Husserl limits this question to what might be called “spiritual joy:” “For sensible pleasure, it makes no sense to talk about reason and unreason. No specific axiological objectivity is constituted here. On the other hand, all ‘spiritual’ pleasure, all liking, is under rational norms and constitutes specific objects of value.” (E. Husserl, Die von Gegenständen ausgehende Erregung von Gefühlen gegenüber der auf die Gegenstände hinzielenden Wertung. Die Frage nach dem Gefühlscharakter des Wertens, 303). 30 31

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1. If a positive existential judgment motivates joy, the corresponding negative existential judgment motivates sadness. 2. If joy emerges from A being rational, then sadness emerges from A being irrational. 3. “If someone is hypothetically joyful, namely, in the thought that V exists, and then takes into account the fact that V only exists if A exists, then joy over V is rationally transferred to A. A gains value based on V. The hypothetical thought that A might exist, therefore, also motivates an equally hypothetical joy over the fact that if A were to exist so would V.”33 4. “Given the same matter to evaluate and the same motivational situation, if positive valuation is rational, negative valuation of the same thing is irrational and vice versa. In correlation, given equal presuppositions (premises) of value, values ​​that, referring to the same content, are opposed are ‘contradictorily’ excluded (for example, the same content is pleasant and not pleasant ‘S is p’). It would be irrational, an axiological contradiction, to be happy that S is p and, for the same reason, to be sad because S is p.”34 5. It is wrong to rejoice less intensely for a higher value than for a lower one.35 6. “If a positive judgment motivates joy, then the corresponding negative judgment motivates non-joy, and vice versa.”36 7. “Someone who is certain that something beautiful exists must therefore rationally rejoice. Joy would be a rationally motivated act here. To rejoice in this case would be a demand of rationality.”37 8. “We said that he who, on the basis of mere representation, values​that through which A presents itself as something beautiful in a non-existential way (as we said by extraordinary extension of the expression), must rationally rejoice in the certainty that this beautiful thing indeed exists and be saddened by the certainty that it does not exist. The probability, preponderant in conjecturing, that the beautiful thing exists motivates hope; an abundance of the rational joy of hope is determined by the strength of the conjecture.”38 9. “Degrees of probability ‘rationally determine’ here the fullness of the joy of hope and, similarly, in the opposite case, of fear.”39 In short, and as can be seen in the above laws, Husserl considers that the question of the legitimacy of joy is linked to existential values. The object of joy is therefore always something existent that is recognized as valuable in the broad sense. This

 Hua XXVIII, 75, 124–125.  Hua XXVIII, 81/131. 35  Hua XXVIII, 99. 36  Hua XXVIII, 73–74. 37  Hua XXVIII, 73–74. 38  Hua XXVIII, 73–74. 39  Hua XXVIII, 73–74.ß. 33 34

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means that if a pleasing object exists or is presented as existent, then it is necessarily and universally the object of legitimate joy.40

6  Joy and Alterity Our final question about the intentionality of joy corresponds to the role that other subjects, and their joys, plays in my own joy. To what extent is my joy true joy if it does not take into account the joy of others? Can I really rejoice if others are not rejoicing or if they themselves are sad or sorrowful?41 Certainly, joy seems to be part of happiness. Joy at the fulfillment of a long-held wish or desire is part of a happy life. In this sense, the desire to live in joy is just. Yet, as Husserl purports, placing joy, enjoyment, or perpetual pleasure as the highest end in life is irrational, since I know beforehand that such a desire is not attainable. True happiness is the joy of achieving the best that you intend, the best for everyone you love, and ultimately, the best for all human beings. The magnitude and purity of my joy depend on the joy of others. By virtue of their closeness, others’ joy conditions my joy. It is even possible that approaching others’ pain may actually limit and even suppress my own joy. The extent to which I should do this, as Husserl notes, is an ethical question. In this sense, a life of pure joy is impossible for the just man who participates in the life of other men. A happy life in this world (and perhaps essentially in a world in general, in any case in a world of this kind) seen as a life of pure joy and, in that sense, of 'the greatest,' the highest possible joy (not disturbed by sorrow) is impossible; and if it were possible to the extent that I deafen myself to others’ pain and to my own, then that life would be unworthy and bad.42

Loved ones’ joy thus play an important role in my own joy. This is so much so that Husserl argues for a kind of “unified” joy by virtue of a unitary tendency in love: Love is not simply seeing and rejoicing when the other rejoices, when things are going well for the other, and regretting when this is not so. Rather, it is being one with his being, completely seeing the joy of others as directly related to one’s own joy. It is believing that others’ tendency is (or will be) my tendency, that the other[’s self-preservation] is included in my true self-preservation and that both preservations are one. This is not universal love of

 Hua XXVIII, 47. It is certainly possible to rejoice in objects that, in their own sense, do not exist. In that case, one could speak of a quasi joy: See: Hua XXVIII, 48. 41  Husserl dedicated a series of interesting reflections to this question in a 1923 text entitled Wert des Lebens. Wert der Welt. Sittlichkeit (Tugend) und Glückseligkeit published by U. Melle in 1997 (Husserl Studies, 13 (1997), 201–235) and afterwards in E.  Husserl, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachlass, eds. R.  Sowa und T.  Vongehr. Husserliana (Hua), Band XLII, (Springer, Dordrecht 2013), 297 ff. 42  Hua XLII, p. 330. 40

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one’s neighbor, but something completely unique and exceptional; it is a [love] for given individual human beings that cannot be easily described here.43

In short, from this perspective, rejoicing in the other’s joy constitutes a component of love.44 This is possible by virtue of a community of love (Liebesgemeinschaft) established with loved one(s). Here it entails identification of affective and volitional subjectivities, an identification of a multiple life.45 Furthermore, taking joy in the other can make us humbler, whereas joy centered exclusively on the self can be “paralyzing” (lähmend) and “tempting” (verführend).46 This type of consideration is obviously relevant to, for example, a phenomenological consideration of compassion.

7  Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to highlight the central aspects of a specific type of what, in very general terms, can be called emotional intentionality, that is, the intentionality of joy. Many of these aspects require a more detailed analysis than time allows here. On the other hand, what is offered here also needs to be completed by corresponding parallel analyses of other moods or emotional experiences in general (especially sadness).

References Primary Texts from Husserl Aktive Synthesen: Aus der Vorlesung ‘Transzendentale Logik’ 1920/1921. Ergänzungsband zu ‘Analysen zur passiven Synthesis’. Hrsg. v. R.  Breeur. Husserliana (Hua) XXXI, Springer, (2000). Die von Gegenständen ausgehende Erregung von Gefühlen gegenüber der auf die Gegenstände hinzielenden Wertung. Die Frage nach dem Gefühlscharakter des Wertens. (U.  Melle, Ed.), „Tijdschrift voor Filosofie“, 80 (2018). Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1924. Hrsg. v. H. Peucker. Husserliana (Hua), Band XXXVII, Springer (2004). Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie. Vorlesungen 1906/07. Hrsg v. U. Melle. Husserliana (Hua) XXIV, Martinus Nijhoff (1894). Erste Philosophie. (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion. Hrsg. v. R. Boehm. Husserliana (Hua) VIII, Kluwer (1996).

 Hua XLII, 467.  Hua XLII, 514. 45  Hua XLII, 301. 46  Hua XLII, 287. 43 44

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Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Hrsg. v. R. Sowa und T. Vongehr. Husserliana (Hua), Band XLII, Springer (2013). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie. Erstes Buch. Allgemeine Einführung in die Psychologie. 1. Halbband. Text der 1–3- Auflage. Hrsg. v. K. Schuhmann. Husserliana (Hua) III/1, Martinus Nijhoff (1976). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Hrsg. v. M. Biemel. Husserliana (Hua) IV. Martinus Nijhoff (1991). Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Erster Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Hrsg. v. Ursula Panzer. Husserliana, Band XIX/1, Springer (1984). Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925). Hrsg. von E.  Marbach. Husserliana (Hua) Hua XXIII, Martinus Nijhoff, (1980). Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914. Hrsg. v. Ullrich Melle. Husserliana (Hua), Band XXVIII, Kluwer Academic Publishers (1988). Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912). Hrsg. von T. Vongehr und R. Giuliani. Husserliana (Hua), Band XXXVIII, Springer (2004). Wert des Lebens. Wert der Welt. Sittlichkeit (Tugend) und Glückseligkeit [Ms F I 24], en Hua XLII, 297ss. Manuscript (Ms.) A VI 8 I. Manuscript (Ms.) A VI 12.

Secondary Texts Cervantes, M. de (2008). Don Quixote de la Mancha (Translated by C.  Jarvis. Edited with an Introduction by E.C. Riley). Oxford University Press, Suffolk. Crespo, M. (2015). Moritz Geiger on the consciousness of feelings. Studia Phaenomenologica, 15, 375–393. Crespo, M. (2017). Toward an a priori Gefühlsmoral: Husserl’s critique of Hume’s theory of moral sentiments. In R. Walton, S. Taguchi, & R. Rubio (Eds.), Perception, affectivity, and volition in Husserl’s phenomenology (pp. 97–11). Springer. Fernández Beites, P. (2012). Razón afectiva y valores: más allá del subjetivismo y el objetivismo. Anuario filosófico, 45(1), 33–67. Marcos Del Cano, J. M. (2019). Una aproximación general al problema de los sentimientos en Husserl. Pensamiento, 75, 809–823. Melle, U. (2012). Husserls deskriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse. In R. Breeur & U. Melle (Eds.), Life, subjectivity & art: Essays in honor of Rudolf Bernet (pp. 51–99). Springer. Melle, U. (2015). Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins’: Husserl Beitrag zu einer phänomenologische Psychologie. In M. Ubiali & M. Wehrle (Eds.), Feeling and value, willing and action. Essays in the context of a phenomenological psychology (pp. 3–11). Springer. Quepons, I. (2012). Intencionalidad de horizonte y reducción trascendental en la fenomenología de Husserl. Investigaciones Fenomenológicas, 9, 269–289. Quepons, I. (2014). El temple de ánimo como horizonte de la reflexión: autoexamen, decisión y consideración emotiva. Revista Valenciana, Estudios de Filosofía y Letras, 13, 83–111. Quepons, I. (2015). Intentionality of moods and horizon consciousness in Husserl’s phenomenology. In M. Ubiali & M. Wehrle (Eds.), Feeling and value, willing and action. Essays in the context of a phenomenological psychology (pp. 93–104). Springer. Quepons, I. (2016). Horizonte y temple de ánimo en la fenomenología de Edmund Husserl. Diánoia. Revista de Filosofía, 61(76), 83–112.

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Quepons, I. (2017). Horizons of vulnerability and the problem of human dignity: Ethical and phenomenological assessments. Acta Universitatis Carolinae. Interpretationes. Studia Philosophica Europeanea, 2, 153–168. Stumpf, C. (1907). Über Gefühlsempfindungen. In Zeitschrift Für Psychologie Und Physiologie Der Sinnesorgane (Vol. 44). Barth. Summa, M. (2015). Are emotions ‘recollected in tranquility’? Phenomenological reflections on emotions, memory, and the temporal dynamics of experience. In M. Ubiali & M. Wehrle (Eds.), Feeling and value, willing and action. Essays in the context of a phenomenological psychology (pp. 163–181). Springer. Zirión Quijano, A. (2009). El resplandor de la afectividad. In Acta Fenomenológica Latinoamericana (pp.  139–153). Círculo Latinoamericano de Fenomenología/Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú/Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. Zirión Quijano, A. (2018). Colorations and moods in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 16, 41–75. Zirión Quijano, A. (2019). Coloraciones emotivas y temples anímicos en los Estudios acerca de la estructura de la conciencia de Husserl. Isegoría, 16, 123–145.

Index

A Ab initio, 54 Abraham, 173 Abram, David, 74 Absoluteness, 175, 176 Absolute proximity, 151 Act-movement, 92 Actual silence, 42 Affection, 207 Affective act, 214 Affective consciousness, 145–149, 157, 158 hypothesis, 146 self-as-object, 146 self-as-subject, 146 Affective practical horizon, 117 Affective self-revelation, 149–152 Affective states, 98 Affective structures, 115 Affective transmissibility, 76 Affectivity, 110, 120 Affects, 86 Agamben, 15 Alterity, 224, 225 Améry, Jean, 96 Anatomical metaphor, 9 Anderson, Ellie, viii ANR Emco-Emphiline Research Program, 134 Anthropogenic global warming (AGW), 205 Apatheia, 23 Apophthegmata, 38 Appreciative mention, 214 Appropriateness/legitimacy of joy, 221, 222

Arabi, 79 Archetypal imagination, 79, 82 Arendt, Hannah, 174 Aristotelian tradition, 172 Aristotle, 12, 188, 189 Aronson, Ronald, 73 Asceticism, 20–24 Attunements, 86 Aufhebung, 193 Augustine of Hippo, 189 Authentic human communities, 200 Auto-affection, 90–93, 148, 153–156 Auto-hetero-affection, 156 Auto-intention, 91 Axiological commitment, 121 Axiological significance, 109 B Barsanuphius, 36–39, 42 Befindlichkeit, 117 Being-in-the-world, 115 Belonging, 91 Bentham, 78 Bernard, Claude, 129 Bessarion, Abba, 41 Biblical passages, 22 Bodily vulnerability, 114 Body-feeling, 117 Brennan, Teresa, 76 Brentanian axiology, 175 Buddhist monks attentional moves of, 136–138

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Steinbock (ed.), Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart, Contributions to Phenomenology 117, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3

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Index

230 Burke, Edmund, 72 Byzantine East, 23

Cultural anthropology, 118 Cybernetics, 208

C Capulet, Juliet, 177 Cardiac lived bodily rhythms of heart attentional moves of buddhist monks, 136–138 Emphiline research program, 134–136 epistemological framework, 138, 139 twofold cardial unity, 129–134 Cardiac rhythm, 129 Cardio-phenomenology, viii Caritas, 180 Cassian, John, 22, 44 Cenobitic monasticism, 20 Christian monastic movement, 20 Christian tradition, 3, 180 Circumcision, 13, 14 Climacus, John, 22, 36, 37, 39 Coenobia, 20 Cognition, 208 Cognitive behavioral therapy, 85 Cognitive psychology, 85 Cold appreciations, 217 Common spirit, 194 Community of love, 180 Complexity, 208 Compunction, 37 The concept of experiencing, 113 Conditions, 86 Conrad-Martius, Hedwig, -Martius, Hedwig, 43, 56 Consciousness, 40, 107 Consciousness of vulnerability belief, 119 emotional anticipation, 119 pre-reflective and practical awareness, 119 Constitutive correlation of sense, 111 Constitutive dimensions, 114 Contagion, 94 Corporeal body (Körper), 108 Corporeality bodily habitualities, 108 constitution, 108 familiarity, 108 genetic-phenomenological terms, 109 kinaesthetic synthesis, 109 motivational synthesis, 108 movement possibilities, 108 practical potentialities, 108 Corporeal physical damage, 107 Craig, A.D., 130

D das Tiefe, 55 de Cervantes, Miguel, 213 de la Mancha, Don Quixote, 213 De Motu Cordis, 129 Deepening/enhancement, 157 Deleuze, Gilles, 139 Depraz, Natalie, viii Derrida, Jacques, 146, 153–156, 158, 161, 162 Descartes, René, 78, 129 Destination of Man, 193 Deuteronomy, 13 Diadochus of Photike, 32 Dispositional corporeality, 117 Dorotheos of Gaza, 46 Dualism, 48 E Early Christian asceticism phenomenality of heart asceticism, 20–24 heart as the core of the person, 40–45 heart as the locus of thoughts, 29–35 heart as the seat of affect, 35–39 phenomenological implications, 45–49 phenomenology and asceticism, 24–28 Egoic depths of love, 167, 168 Einführung in die Philosophie, 52, 54 Embodied subjectivity, 110 Embodiment analysis, 109 Emotional and somatic roots, 187 Emotional coloring, 219 Emotional disposition, 112, 113, 118 Emotional excitement, 216, 217 Emotional intentionality, 225 Emotional movements, 130, 133 Emotions, 73, 77, 82, 86, 88 of the Heart, viii outwardness of, 74 possibility, 160, 161 self-givenness, 160, 161 Empathy, 149 Emphiline research program, 134–136 Empty intentional tendencies, 122 Endless self-disclosure personal love, 168–170 Enigma of transcendence, 204 erfreulich (pleasant), 215 Eros, 203

Index Evagrius, 20, 23, 27, 30, 34–36, 38, 39, 42 Evagrius of Pontus, 20, 22 Experience-oriented perspective, 122 Exposure, 121 Expression Stimmung, 112 Expropriation of self, 158 F Failure anticipation, 119 Falque, Emmanuel, 28 Fear, 114, 117 Fearsome, 114 Feedback loop causality pattern, 208 Feelings, 86–90, 112, 148, 214 auto-affection and relation, 90–96 Feeling-states, 86–90 auto-affection and relation, 90–96 essentially excluded, 100 as founded upon feelings, 96–98 less possible, 100 levels of, 100, 101 more exposure to, 99, 100 multiplicity of, 98, 99 positive indeterminacy of, 98 susceptible to objectification, 101, 102 variability of, 101 Fichte, 193, 194, 196 Fisher, Andy, 74 Flesh, 7 Formal axiology, 202 Fragility, 106 Free emotion, 74 Fuchs, Thomas, 190 Functional circle, 208 G Gauguin, 172 Geiger, Moritz, 175 Gibbon, Edward, 20 Givenness, 89 God, 11, 12, 15, 44 God of Jesus Christ, 12, 16 “Godward”, 9 Grenzprobleme, 170, 178 Gschwandtner, Christina M., 53 H Habitualities, 109, 111 Hardness of heart, 6 Harm, 110 Harmfulness, 114, 115

231 Harmless, William, 20 Harvey and Descartes, 129 Harvey, William, 129 Heart, 12, 51, 53–58, 85 as the core of the person, 40–45 circumcision of, 12–16 epistemological framework, 138, 139 person and, 4, 5 phenomenological perspectives on, vii, viii ruptures and displacements of, 62–66 as the seat of affect, 35–39 Walther, Gerda, 58–62 Heartbeat rhythms, 130 Heartlessness, 51, 57 Hechychius of Batos, 133 Hedonism, 201 Heidegger, Martin, 72, 187 Heidegger’s description of fear, 107 Heideggerian approach, 122 Henry, Michel, 28, 92 Hesychios, 25, 41 Hesychios of Sinai, 24, 43 Hillman, James, 78, 79, 81 Himma, 78 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 20 Holy Spirit, 12, 16 Hopelessness signals, 174 Horizon-intentionality, 113 Horizon of manifestation, 111 Human dignity, 120 Human reality, 88 Husserl, Edmund, 28, 51, 86, 128, 166, 167, 175, 178, 180, 190, 193, 199, 203, 206, 215, 216, 220, 222 novelty of, 200 theory of personhood, 171 Husserlian account of values, 107 Husserlian framing, 167 Husserlian terms, 116 I I-centre, 61 Idealism, 149 Incomparability, 174–176 Indeterminate object, 112 Inner kinaesthetic system, 109 Insatiability, 169 Intelligence, 195 Intentional sentimental act, 214 Intentionality, 113, 220 Intercorporeal condition, 119 Interior region heart, 59

Index

232 Intersubjectivity, 166, 180 Intrinsic, 89 Irrational motivations, 208 Irrationality, 208 Irrealizability, 139 Isaiah, Abba, 35 Isolated sensation, 111 J Jean-Luc Nancy, 146, 152–158, 161, 162 Jean-Paul Sartre, 145–156, 158, 162 Jeremiah, 13 Jew, 15 John, Abba, 42 Joy, phenomenology of, 213, 214 and alterity, 224, 225 appropriateness/legitimacy of joy, 221, 222 joy as a mood, 218–220 joy as a reaction, 217 laws of, 222–224 moments of joy, 215–216 object of joy, 220, 221 K Kaizo, 171 Kant, 75 Kantian traditions, 180 Kardia, 7, 11 Kellia, 21 Kierkegaard, 172 Kinaestheses, 116 Kinaesthetic horizons, 109 Kinaesthetic motivation, 116 Kinaesthetic movement, 117 Kinaesthetic synthesis, 112 Kingdom of freedom, 186 Kingdom of necessity, 186 Kunstlehre, 200 L Lamala Beach, 80 Law of absorption, 202 Laws of joy, 214, 222–224 Le Bon, Gustav, 75 Legitimacy of joy, 221, 222 Leibnizian echo, 200 Lerner, Rosemary R.P., viii Levinas, Emmanuel, 67 Limit-claims, 120 Lived-bodily movement, 110

Lived body, 108, 116 Localized sensation, 110 Logical investigations, 203, 216 Logismoi, 30, 31, 48 Logismos, 29, 32, 35 Loop causality pattern, 208 Lord Jesus Christ, 41 Love, 39, 81 auto-hetero-affection, 156 experiential stages of, 189–193 intriguing questions, 203–208 moral emotion, 160, 161 myself-as-object inasmuch, 156 from reason to, 200–203 to reason, 193–200 self-constituting, 157–160 self-interrupting, 157–160 subject and object, 156 vicissitudes of, 187–189 Love break, 158 Love-values, 165 Loving, 79 Lutz, Antoine, 136 M Marion, Jean-Luc, 28 Meditation, 4, 137 Melancholia, 174 Melle, 217 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 74–76, 82, 86 Mode of consciousness, 147 Montague, Romeo, 177 Mood, 214 joy as, 218–220 Moral emotion, 79, 81, 146, 156, 157, 185 Moral failing, 119 Moral moods, 119 Motivation and dispositional tendencies, 117 Movement, 88 Multiplicity feeling-states, 98, 99 N Nedoncelle, Maurice, 4 Nemesius of Emesa, 23, 37 Nicodemus the Hagiorite, 132 Nitria, 21 Non-cognitive self-consciousness, 147 Nonhuman/inanimate objects, 152 Non-initiative, 121 Nonlinearity, 208

Index Non-objective relations, 115 Non-ontic dimension, 114 Non-thematic motivations, 106 Normative science, 200 Norm-conforming spiritual world, 121 Nous, 7 O Objective values, 202 On the Problem of Empathy, 52 Ontological fissure, 158 Organization principles personal love, 170–174 Orientation, 107 Origins of Totalitarianism, 54, 174 Ōrisios, Abba, 41 Outrageous violations, 120 P Palladius of Aspuna, 21 Participating-being, 10 Pascal, 78 Passions, 86 Passive synthesis, 117 Pathos, 35 Paul of Tarsus, 3 Pauline anthropology, 3, 5–11, 13, 16 Pauline letters, 5, 6 Perceptual sensibility, 112 Periphaneity, 73 Peri-phenomenology, 73 Personal identity, 51 Personal life, 200 Personal love, 165, 193 argumentative contexts, 166 conceptualization of values, 166 egoic depths of, 167, 168 endless self-disclosure, 168–170 five-partite explication, 166 incomparability and absoluteness, 174–176 principles of organization, 170–174 transitivity of care, 176–180 values of, 165 Personhood, 43, 53, 54 Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 185 Peter of Damaskos, 24 Peter, Abba, 41 Phenomenology, 91 and asceticism, 24–28 dilemma, 152

233 Jean-Paul Sartre (see Jean-Paul Sartre) tradition, 112, 121, 122 Phenomenology, joy, 213, 214 and alterity, 224, 225 appropriateness/legitimacy of joy, 221, 222 joy as a mood, 218–220 joy as a reaction, 217 laws of, 222–224 moments of joy, 215–216 object of joy, 220, 221 Phenomenology of Mysticism, 53, 58, 60 Philia, 172, 188 Philokalia, 21, 24, 25, 29, 41 Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, 54, 56 Philotheos of Sinai, 40 Phronimos, 33 Plato, 199, 203 Pneuma, 8, 15 Poemen, Abba, 42 Political friendship, 189 Positive indeterminacy feeling-states, 98 Possibility, 160, 161 Practical direction, 110 Practical potentialities, 118 Praktikē, 27 Prayer of the heart, 130–134, 136 Primary passivity, 206 Primordial constitution, 109 Primordial exhibition, 109 Probability, 149 Prosopon, 4 Psyche, 7, 12, 59 Psychological presuppositions, 113 Psychophysical feelings, 86 Pure ethics, 201 Q Quechua population, 186 Quepons, Ignacio, 214, 218, 219 Quijano, Alonso, 213 Quijano, Antonio Zirión, 205 Quixote, Don, 213, 214 R Radical Ecopsychology, 74 Rational autonomy, 186 Rationalism, 149, 202 Rationality, 208 Reflective consciousness, 147

Index

234 Retention of liking, 218 Rocinante, 213 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 73 Sartre’s theory, 146 Sarx, 7 “Sayings of the Fathers”, 21 Scheler, Max, 39, 72, 75, 88, 93, 94, 97 Schema of the heart, 86 The Science of the Cross, 52 Secondary passivity, 206 Seele, 54 Seelenlosigkeit, 53 Sein und Zeit, 116 Self-affection, 91 Self-as-object, 146, 160 Self-as-subject, 146 Self-coincidence, 148 Self-constituting, 157–160 Self-givenness, 156, 160, 161 Self-grounding, 151 Selfhood, 145, 146, 153–156 Self-images, 145, 152, 156, 159–161 Self-interrupting, 157–160 Self-knowledge, 43, 151 Self-knowledge fruitless, 155 Self-motivated movement, 106, 111, 116 Self-motivation, 159 Self-movement, 109, 116 Self-possessed subject, 155 Self-relation, 153–155 Self-revelation, 156–158, 160 Self-revelatory, 145, 151, 152, 157, 159 Self-transcendence, 78 Self-transcending, 77, 82 Self-transparency, 43 Self-worth, 159 Sense of awareness, 119 Sense-bestowal, 122 Sense of exposure, 122 Sense of fragility, 117 Sense of wrongness, 119 Sensibility, 109, 117, 121, 149 Sensible configuration, 116 Sensible consciousness of movement, 116 Sensible qualities, 117 Sensible sensations, 214 Sensitive affections, 109 Shamatha training, 137 Sheerly objective constitution, 111 Simmel, 59 Sisōēs, Abba, 42 Situational vulnerability, 110 Sketis, 21

Sociality, 65 Soma, 7, 9 Soul, 54–57 ruptures and displacements of, 62–66 Walther, Gerda, 58–62 Soullessness, 53–58, 62 Spanish expression “zozobra”, 118 Spatiality, 73 The Spell of the Sensuous, 74 Spirit, 12, 60 Staatsbibliothek, 53 St. Paul, 52 Stein, 53, 62, 66 soul, heart and soullessness, 54–57 Stein, Edith, 51, 52 Steinbock, Anthony, 78–82 Steinbock’s framework, 161 Stern, Daniel, 75 Struble, Stephanie, viii Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, 217 Subject/object distinction, 152 Subjective autonomy, 123 Subjectivity, 145, 150, 152–154, 158, 161 Subject-object dualism, 147 Subject-object duality, 147 Subject-object opposition, 150 Subject-object–oriented schema, 122 Superficiality, 55 Sympathy, 90 T Target and harmful relation, 115 Telepathy, 64 Theologia, 27 Throop’s investigations, 118 Thumos, 77 Transgression, 119, 120 Transitivity of care, 176–180 True happiness, 224 True-self-preservation, 207 Turning Emotion Inside Out, 73 Twofold cardial unity, 129–134 U Uncertainty, 119 Upper level emotional dimensions, 110 Urphänomen, 58 V Valence of vulnerability, 122 Value, 88, 90 Value-perceptions, 121 Values of love, 165, 174

Index van den Hoven, Adrian, 73 Vicissitudes of love, 187–189 Vocations, 166, 170, 171, 179 von Uexküll, Jakob, 208 Vulnerability accidental and circumstantial disposition, 105 and proximity, 106 centrality, 121 condition, 107 emotional awareness, 106 eventual frustration, 106 eventual harm, 106 experience/realization, 105 fragile articulation, 111 fragility, 106 indeterminate determinations, 106 normative claims, 120 physical features of things, 107 physical fragility, 105 presupposition, 107, 120 realization, 106 sense of “localized” individuation, 109 situational phenomenon, 110 thematic expectations, 106

235 W Walther, Gerda, 51–53, 64–66 soul and heart, 58–62 Walton, 207 Ward, Benedicta, 21 Watchfulness, 25 The Way of the Pilgrim, 41 Wesen, 26, 27 Western philosophical tradition, vii Whitman, Walt, 82 Wiener, Norbert, 208 Willett, Cynthia, 93 Willett, Julie, 93 Wingrave, Owen, 172 Woman and Finite and Eternal Being, 52 Y YHWH, 13 Young, Thomas Paul, 88 Z Zahavi, Dan, 92 Zirión, Antonio, 214