STUDIA PHÆNOMENOLOGICA XV (2015) xx–xx

The Emotions in Early Phenomenology

Íngrid Vendrell Ferran
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

Abstract: This paper offers an overview of certain key features of the accounts
of emotion defended by the early phenomenologists. After briefly presenting
the movement of early phenomenology and describing its historical context, I
shall elaborate the main claims about the emotions defended by this group, ar-
ticulating them through the following five topics: 1) the stratification of emo-
tional life; 2) the qualitative aspect of emotional experience; 3) the foundation
of the emotions in cognitive acts; 4) the intentionality of feeling and the emo-
tions; and 5) their moral dimension. The paper finishes with some concluding
remarks about the significance of the early phenomenological discussion of the
emotions for the debate on this topic in contemporary analytical philosophy.

Keywords: Emotional Response, Intentional Feeling, Affective Intentionality,

Value, Early Phenomenology.

1. Exploring terra incognita: Early Phenomenology and the Emotions

1.1. Origins and Historical Context

One of the most regrettable consequences of the neglect in scholarship
suffered by the first period of the phenomenological movement is that the de-
tailed and complex accounts of affective life developed by the first students of
Husserl and Pfänder, as well as Scheler, remain largely unknown even to many
phenomenologists. The “early phenomenologists”—as this group of think-
ers has been called—contributed highly original analyses to the philosophy
of the emotions. Most of these analyses, written mainly between 1905 and
1925, have yet to have received the attention they deserve.1 They constitute an

1
Fortunate exceptions to this neglect can be found in the work of Eberhard Avé-Lallemant,
Manfred Frings, Dermot Moran, Kevin Mulligan, Juan Miguel Palacios, Barry Smith, Anthony
Steinbock, Kenneth Stikkers and Dan Zahavi.
330 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

extraordinary case of “philosophical terra incognita” for research. This paper

attempts to start filling this lacuna, offering an overview of the main claims
about emotional life defended by the early phenomenologists, and showing
their relevance to contemporary discussion. Decades before analytic philoso-
phy developed its accounts of “affective intentionality” which conceives of
the emotions as intentional, cognitive and social phenomena, the early phe-
nomenologists defended the primordiality of the affective sphere and its own
domain of evidence.2 While the main aim of this paper is reconstructive, I
will also mention, where pertinent, the importance of phenomenological con-
tributions to contemporary philosophy of the emotions. I will explicate the
phenomenological account, but rather than following its historical evolution
I will systematically examine five main topics that are important to enrich the
current debate: 1) the stratification of emotional life; 2) the qualitative aspect
of emotional experience; 3) the foundation of the emotions in cognitive acts;
4) the intentionality of feeling and the emotions; and 5) their moral dimen-
sion. My aim therefore is twofold: to bring to light a period of the history of
philosophy that has been largely neglected and obfuscated by later develop-
ments in phenomenology, and to emphasize the remarkable force of these
early phenomenological claims for current research.
I shall begin with a characterization of “early phenomenology” that identi-
fies four traits shared by all the thinkers belonging to this group: a) a historical
period; b) a methodological attitude; c) a conception of the mind inspired
by Brentano; and d) a moral interest in values. According to this character-
ization, “early phenomenology” is constituted by a heterogeneous group of
thinkers active during the first period of the phenomenological movement.
These thinkers developed their research under the auspices of Husserl in
Göttingen—and later Freiburg—and Pfänder in Munich, and were highly
influenced by Max Scheler. The inaugural works of the phenomenological
movement are Husserl’s two-volume Logical Investigations (1900–1901) and
Pfänder’s Phenomenology of the Will (1900). Scheler came later, but his work—
in particular the efforts of his Formalism to offer an alternative to the Kantian
ethical paradigm—strongly influenced the budding phenomenological move-
ment, despite the eclectic nature of his thought and his understanding of
the phenomenological attitude, which differs in important ways from that of
Husserl and Pfänder. We can talk of a “Göttingen” and a “Munich circle” of
early phenomenologists around these main figures (and also to some extent
around the psychological philosophy of Lipps), although these two circles
were interrelated, exchanging philosophers and insights.
This movement lasted approximately from 1905 to 1925, but after 1915
the group experienced a loss of cohesion, the reasons for which were manifold.

2
This new paradigm is nowadays illustrated by Peter Goldie’s concept of “feeling towards”
(Goldie 2002).
 The Emotions in Early Phenomenology 331

On the one hand, one could mention the vicissitudes of the First World War,
and the loss of one of its main figures in Adolf Reinach. This last event proved
particularly devastating for the group as a whole. On the other hand, Hus-
serl’s “idealistic turn” after the publication of Ideas disappointed those of his
pupils who had a more realistic orientation, fracturing the unity of the earlier
years. After the later transformations of phenomenology through the work
of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty—thinkers who certainly exercised
a greater influence upon the developments of 20th century philosophy—the
lively debates and rich analyses of the early movement fell into oblivion.
Consequently, and with a few exceptions, the authors under consideration
here remain largely unknown, despite the detailed analyses of the affective
life undertaken during this period. In fact, two systematic accounts of the
emotions can be found in early phenomenology: Pfänder’s work on the will,
motivation, and the sentiments and Scheler’s reflections on the relation be-
tween feeling and value, as well as in his detailed analyses of specific emotions,
including love, resentment, humility, shame, and sympathy, to name just a
few.3 Aside from these two broader theories, we can also find detailed accounts
of specific emotional phenomena. Else Voigtländer wrote a dissertation on
self-directed emotions; Willy Haas focused mainly on the authenticity of the
emotions; Moritz Geiger worked on emotional atmospheres, empathy and
emotional delusions; Edith Stein offers the first detailed account of empathy
and intersubjectivity; and Gerda Walther considered the ontology of social
communities. Also in the line of the early phenomenologists are Dietrich von
Hildebrand’s analysis of value-perception and social communities, José Orte-
ga y Gasset’s studies of emotional expression, types of love, and their relation
to history and culture, and Aurel Kolnais’ essays on disgust, pride, and hatred.
While these texts were written after the early phenomenological movement
had reached its peak, they can be regarded as belonging to this group never-
theless, because they share not least a methodological attitude, a conception of
mind, and the conviction that emotions are relevant to ethics.4
The philosophical context in which the early phenomenological contri-
butions emerged was dominated by feeling theories, which conceived of the
emotions as felt qualities. Two models were widely discussed at the time. On
the one hand was Wundt’s tridimensional theory, according to which all feel-
ings oscillate in three dimensions, pleasure-pain, excitement-inhibition, and
tension-relaxation, the first one of these dimensions being the most impor-
tant (Wundt 1887). On the other hand, was the James-Lange theory of the
emotions, according to which emotions are reducible to complexes of bodily
feelings (James 1905). In contrast to these dominant theories and following

3
For a detailed account of Scheler’s theory of feeling, see Henckmann 1998 and Mulligan
2008.
4
Cf. Vendrell Ferran 2008.
332 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

Brentano, the early phenomenologists maintained that a sufficient account

of the emotions must consider, not only their qualitative ‘feel’, but also their
cognitive and moral aspects. The novelty of the early phenomenological ac-
count consists precisely in putting the accent on this.

1.2. The Eidetic Reduction as Methodological Attitude

All of the authors comprising this movement shared a common method-
ological approach towards philosophical problems: the “eidetic reduction”.5
Following Husserl’s well-known motto “Back to the things themselves”
(“Zurück zu den Sachen selbst”), they attempted to liberate the phenomena
from theoretical constructs, and take only what is given in experience as their
point of departure.
The “eidetic reduction,” developed by Husserl in his Logical Investigations,
aims towards a novel analysis of reality (Husserl 1992a).6 This method devel-
ops out of and must be understood in relation to his concept of intentionality.
With this concept of intentionality Husserl tries to connect the pole of the
subject and the pole of the object (the things themselves) by considering both
poles just in the way they are directly manifest in conscious experience. To
say that consciousness is intentional means that it is always consciousness of
something, that each cogitatio is directed towards a cogitatum. An intriguing
implication of this conception is that the studied phenomena determine the
way in which they are given (Husserl 1992b: 169–170).
This concept of intentionality can be interpreted in two different ways.
Both are legitimate and related to each other, but respectively imply a differ-
ent understanding of phenomenological method. According to one under-
standing, the direction of analysis prioritizes the pole of the subject. On this
view, the phenomenologist is less concerned with attending to the intentional
object, granting priority instead to the way in which the object is given, thus
considering consciousness in its constitutive dimension. This interpretation
is associated with the subjective and idealistic strand in the movement, and
traces of it can be found already in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, although
it is arguably further emphasized in his later work, and particularly in his
conception of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. On the other
hand, it is also possible to focus on the given phenomena. In this case there is
a “turn to the object” (Geiger 1933: 15). This focus on the object is precisely
what characterizes the early phenomenological investigations of the emotions.
The authors belonging to this group elucidate the nature and structure of

5
The early phenomenologists applied the eidetic reduction without performing the tran-
scendental reduction. It is nevertheless possible to apply the eidetic reduction to the results
obtained from a transcendental one.
6
The way in which Husserl understood phenomenological methodology in his Logical
Investigations differs significantly from his later understanding after the “transcendental turn”.
 The Emotions in Early Phenomenology 333

affectivity with a common methodological orientation, in that they analyse

the phenomena in accordance with the way in which they are given in expe-
rience.7 Phenomenology in this sense is not a specific method of research but
more the name for an attitude (“Einstellung”) and an “art of seeing” (“Kunst
des Schauens”), one which is understood in a singular way by each of the
authors we are here considering (Scheler 1973a: 137; Reinach 1989: 532).
The singular way in which each author approaches the phenomena she or he
discusses makes it difficult to speak of early phenomenology as a school of
thought. In the early phenomenologists, then, we find a heterogeneous group
of thinkers who share a common attitude (not a method) towards philosophi-
cal problems, and who focus on the objects in the way they are given.
The central tool of this shared attitude is the “eidetic reduction”. Its aim
is to move from the facticity of a phenomenon towards its essence. The goal
is to discover and to describe the rules and regularities essential to a phe-
nomenon. Two steps describe it in a very general way. The “eidetic variation”
consists in producing different variations of a phenomenon and observing
what is essentially characteristic of it and what is not. The “eidetic intuition”
(“Wesensschau”) consists in the description of these aspects essential to the
phenomenon. As the result of this twofold movement we obtain an a priori
knowledge of the phenomenological situation. This conceptual tool promises
interesting discoveries in the field of affectivity.

1.3. The Conception of the Mind Inspired by Brentano

Common to all early phenomenologists is also a conception of the mind
inspired by Brentano’s descriptive psychology of consciousness. In his seminal
book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) Brentano argued that all
psychic phenomena are characterized by intentionality. This being directed
towards an object can, however, adopt three different forms: presentation
(such as perceptions), judgment (such as beliefs and suppositions) and emo-
tion —also named “love and hate” or “interest”) (Brentano 1924: 125). The
third class includes a broad and heterogeneous set of affective phenomena. As
the designation “love and hate” reveals, each of the phenomena belonging to
this class involve either pro- or contra-attitudes towards their object, and these
attitudes can take the form of feelings, desires and volitions. Brentano argued
that there is only a difference of degree between a feeling and an act of the will.

7
My interpretation of Husserl’s account of intentionality and the conception of phenom-
enological method may seem one-sided to contemporary Husserl scholars. Nevertheless, my
understanding of the concept of intentionality, following a distinction between a “subjective”
and “objective” phenomenology and its methodological implications, follows a possible line
of Husserl interpretation inaugurated by Geiger. Without ignoring the fact that other inter-
pretations are possible, Geiger’s interpretative line is useful for explaining the methodological
attitude of the early phenomenologists as focusing on the object as given (Geiger 1933: 13).
334 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

This controversial thesis was later discussed by his pupils in the Graz School
(Ehrenfels, Meinong and Höfler) and within phenomenology (Stumpf, Hus-
serl and Scheler). Their alternative thesis will consist in dividing this class in
two main types: emotions and volitions.
The second Brentanian claim developed by his pupils was the thesis that
emotions depend on cognitive acts. According to Brentano each psychic act
is a presentation or is itself founded on a presentation (Brentano 1924: 112).
Thus, judgments and emotions (in Brentano’s general sense) are founded acts.
For the emotions, this means that they are necessarily founded on presenta-
tions and on judgments. Also this thesis of the dependence of emotion on
cognition was inherited by the early phenomenologists, although they intro-
duce at least three important alterations. In their accounts, the term “emo-
tion” becomes used in a more restrictive sense—a sense closer to our cur-
rent use, and of which shame, fear, disgust etc. count as paradigmatic cases.
Further, they consider the cognitive basis of the emotions in a broader sense
which does not necessarily imply judgments. Finally, in contrast to Brentano’s
intellectualistic model, they give a greater primacy to the affective dimension
of human experience than to its cognitive one.

1.4. The Project of an Ethics of Values

The early phenomenologists also inherited Brentano’s conception of the
emotions as bearing moral relevance and being related to what is valuable.
The Kantian question “What should I do?” receives in this framework an anti-
Kantian answer that can be summarized as follows: What one ought to do is
not determined by rational norms, but is rooted in affective experience. Modi-
fying some of Brentano’s claims, the early phenomenologists will develop the
thesis that affective phenomena are those acts that show us what we value and
at the same time motivate our actions. The early phenomenological ethics is
an ethics of value, in contrast to the Kantian ethics of norms. Our affectivity
is responsible for disclosing a distinctive region of being: the values. Because
we are able to feel, we have access to values and in showing us what is valuable,
our capacity to feel simultaneously provide us with both a moral orientation
and with motives for ethical action. Values as a specific realm of being can
only be given in the affective experience.

2. Towards a Taxonomy of the Feelings: The Stratification of Emotional Life

In what follows I will focus on five topics around which the authors of
this group articulated their discussions. I begin here with the taxonomy of the
emotional life according to different levels of depth. The stratification of the
emotional life is one of the most important discoveries of early phenomenol-
ogy. These authors recognized that affective phenomena are not all of the same
 The Emotions in Early Phenomenology 335

type, and they rather attempted to do justice to their heterogeneity. Consider

our ordinary usage of the concept of “feeling” (“Gefühl”). Under this con-
cept can be subsumed phenomena which are quite different in nature. While
pleasure, wellbeing, joy, happiness, and bliss can be all classified as feelings, a
closer look will reveal that we are dealing here with very different phenomena.
The most detailed development of this claim was offered by Max Scheler in
his Formalism. As reported by him, feelings can be classified according to their
level of depth. Each one of these strata constitutes a class and is responsible
for grasping specific value-complexes (Scheler 1973b: 330). The metaphor of
“depth” does not relate to differences in quality or intensity, but to differences
in the degree of subjection to the will (Mulligan 1998a). Those phenomena
that we can easily manipulate belong to more “peripheral” strata, whereas
those which cannot be changed occupy a more central position in our per-
sonality.
Such a stratified conception of affective life gains support once we note
that feelings belonging to different levels can coexist simultaneously, despite
having opposing valences. Consider the martyr who can feel blissful whilst be-
ing tortured, or that even those in a state of desperation are able to experience
sensuous pleasure (Scheler 1973b: 330–331). The simultaneous coexistence
of feelings with opposing valences, and the fact that these opposed feelings do
not blend into a single total feeling-state, can be considered the first proof of
the stratification claim. The second argument, closely related to the first one,
consists in showing how feelings belonging to the same level tend to blend
into a unitary feeling. For example, Scheler claims that one cannot at the same
time feel woeful and sad because both feelings tend to blend in a unified one.
Within the early phenomenological movement Scheler’s taxonomy was
broadly accepted, although it was also developed in a peculiar and idiosyn-
cratic way by each of the authors who took it up. According to Scheler, feel-
ings can be classified within four different strata: sense-feelings, vital feelings,
psychological feelings and feelings of personality. The last two classes include
those feelings that, in contemporary vocabulary, we would term “emotions”.
Following this terminology, I speak of “the feelings” (“Gefühle”) in this gen-
eral sense; with the term “emotion” I will refer only to classes of psychological
and personality feelings. Later in this essay I will introduce the concept of
“feeling” (“Fühlen”) which following Scheler I will employ in a specific sense.
The first layer is that of the “sense-feelings” (also named feeling-sensations
or sensual feelings) to which such phenomena as bodily pleasure and pain
belong. The nature of these “sense-feelings” was a widely discussed question
at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. According to the
line of thought inaugurated by Brentano, pleasure and pain are emotions and
therefore intentional. A second position defended by Titchener, one of Wundt’s
disciples, maintained that they have a hybrid nature that combines bodily
sensations and emotions (Titchener 1973). The claim that proved to be more
336 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

attractive to the early phenomenologists, however, was the thesis defended

by Stumpf according to which pleasure and pain are a special kind of bodily
sensation and as such should not count as emotions (Stumpf 1907: 209–213
and 1928: 55). All the early phenomenologists adopted this last position and
claimed that the couple pleasure and pain is a special kind of sensation, lo-
calised in a specific part of the body and without being intentionally directed
towards the world.
Scheler established a clear distinction between “sense-feelings” as a class
of sensations and the vital, psychological and spiritual feelings (the last two
classes constitute what we call “emotions”). His arguments can be summarised
in the following points. 1) Pleasure and pain can be bodily localised in the
sense that I can say I have a pain in my back or in my tooth. Vital feelings and
emotions, on the contrary, are not localised in a special part of one’s body but
rather affect it in its totality. 2) Pleasure and pain as sensations are not inten-
tional, while the vital feelings and emotions are necessarily directed towards
objects.8 3) Sensations are always in actual time while vital feelings and emo-
tions can also exist in memories. 4) Sensations can be isolated and localized
in a specific part of the body, while vital feelings and emotions require the
entire involvement of the person. 5) A further difference concerns the role of
“attention”. We can attend to a sensation as we undergo it, as is the case for
the gourmet who is attentive to the pleasure aroused by a delicious dinner, at
which point the pleasure might even become richer for her. When we try to
reflect upon an emotion while living through it, however, this emotion will
likely disappear.9 6) Finally, a sensation can be more easily controlled by the
subject undergoing it than an emotion.
The second of the layers or strata of the personality is the level of the “vital
feelings” or “feelings of the body,” such as the feeling of vitality, tiredness,
freshness or illness. Even though these feelings are bodily felt, they cannot be
localized in a specific part of the body. We feel fresh or tired or ill in our entire
body. In a very pregnant way Stein writes: “Not only the ‘I’ feels vigorous or
sluggish, but I ‘notice this in all my limbs.’” (Stein 1989: 49 and similarly
100–101) These non-localized feelings are intentional in the sense that they
are directed towards the vital values of the noble and the mean and that with
them we experience the climax and decadence of life.
“Emotions” in the pregnant sense of the word, and in the sense that we
use it nowadays, belong to those phenomena constituted in the third and
fourth of these levels. The third level corresponds to psychological feelings
(“seelische Gefühle”) such as joy and sadness. Psychological feelings have a

8
Scheler follows in this respect Husserl’s critique of Brentano’s thesis that all psychic phe-
nomena are intentional. According to Husserl, sensation does not bear intentionality. Cf. Hus-
serl 1992a: 383
9
An interesting discussion of the different ways one can attend to an emotion can be found
in Geiger 1911b.
 The Emotions in Early Phenomenology 337

bodily moment, i.e. they are bodily felt, even though we cannot localize them
in a specific part of the body. They are also intentional, directed towards ob-
jects and related to the following couples of values: “beautiful” and “ugly,”
“fair” and “unfair,” and “true” and “false”.
The fourth stratum belongs to the “spiritual feelings” (“geistige Gefühle”)
or “feelings of the personality,” such as bliss or desperation. There are two
very controversial theses related to this kind of feelings. According to Scheler
spiritual feelings are related to a special kind of value, those of the sacred and
the profane. With this claim one can see the influence of a book that was
very popular at the time, namely Otto’s Das Heilige. In my opinion, however,
a further study of the spiritual feelings or feelings of the personality should
examine the possibility that other values might be included in this domain.10
The other controversial claim defended not only by Scheler, but broadly by
the early phenomenologists, is that spiritual feelings do not have a bodily mo-
ment, i.e. that they are not “body-bound” (Scheler 1973b: 332 and 336; Stein
1989: 50). The argument for this claim is as follows: any given spiritual feeling
will remain wholly intact if we abstract from the stratum of bodily experience,
thus disregarding such felt phenomena as the quivering of the hands or the
rapid beating of the heart. The feeling in its purity will remain, even while the
bodily sensations disappear. Despite the appeal of this thought experiment,
the notion of a type of feeling that is not bodily felt is strikingly odd, or at
least in need of further clarification. It certainly may be the case that the “way”
in which a feeling of this sort is experienced bodily is very different from the
way in which shame, disgust or envy is felt. But this difference need not entail
that the feeling involves no bodily moment. In section 3 I will return to this
question, making use of the phenomenological distinction between physical
and living body.
I argued earlier that feelings which belong to different layers can co-exist
without blending into a unique general feeling. It should be noted, however,
that this impossibility of fusion does not necessarily exclude their mutual in-
fluence. In fact, on this point the early phenomenological accounts are not
in unanimous agreement. For Scheler, on the one hand, the strata are quite
independent of each other. Two feelings that are opposed in their valence but
belong to different strata, such as pain and bliss, can co-exist simultaneously
without influencing one another. Stein’s view, on the other hand, seems to me
more plausible, as the following illuminating example encapsulates: “For ex-
ample, suppose I take a trip to recuperate and arrive at a sunny, pleasant spot.
While looking at the view, I feel that a cheerful mood wants to take possession
of me, but cannot prevail because I feel sluggish and tired” (Stein 1989: 49).
Such examples seem to suggest that feelings belonging to different strata may
in fact exercise influence on one another.

10
Cf. For a detailed account on mystical experiences Steinbock 2007.
338 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

We cannot conclude this taxonomy of the affective sphere without men-

tioning two other important phenomena which also belong to the affective
dimension of the human experience: moods (“Stimmungen”) and sentiments
(“Gesinnungen”). Moods, of which we could mention melancholy or cheer-
fulness, constitute an affective species of their own; while they play a pivotal
role in our psychological and practical lives, they are not primarily bodily felt,
nor are they directed towards specific objects. Moods and emotions stand in
relation to each other in various different ways. A mood can become focussed
on an object and transform into an emotion. For example, while suffering an
objectless depression, one might begin to think about a possible bad situation,
at which point the mood will focus on this object and transform into sad-
ness about that situation.11 According to this claim, there is a gradual, rather
than an essential difference between moods and feelings. Another of Stein’s
interesting claims about moods is that feelings have a “mood-component”
or “coloration”. This component is responsible for the capacity of feeling to
expand and fill the different layers of the personality to a greater or lesser
extent (Stein 1989: 104 and 2000: 217). Given that not all feelings have
mood-components to the same extent, those that do not have a strong mood-
component are more focused on their objects than those feelings with a stron-
ger mood-component, which can expand within a stratum of the personality
until it is filled up.
Finally, sentiments (“Gesinnungen”), such as love or hatred, benevolence
or malevolence, are characterized by their being directed towards the essence
of a person (Pfänder 1922, Voigtländer 1910: 58 and Stein 1989: 101). It is
important not to conflate the class of the “sentiments” with the class of the
“emotions”. While emotions oscillate between the poles of pleasure and pain,
sentiments are not subjected to this qualitative polarity: love can be painful
and hatred can be felt with pleasure (Pfänder 1922, I: 35). Furthermore, there
is a “centrifugal movement” from the subject to the object of a sentiment,
that is, a movement that directs us towards the kernel of the other’s personal
essence and that cannot be found in the class of the emotions (Pfänder 1922,
I: 9 and 15).
Despite the attractions of this “stratification model,” later philosophers
instead preferred to ground their classifications of emotional life according
to different criteria.12 More recently, however, we can find in contemporary
philosophy two models which take into consideration the criteria of “depth”
for a classification of the emotions: that offered by Kevin Mulligan, who takes
direct inspiration from Scheler (Mulligan 1998a), and independently of early
phenomenology, the model defended by Pugmire (Pugmire 2005: 50).

11
Similar considerations concerning the relation between emotions and moods have been
recently articulated by Peter Goldie (Goldie 2002: 8).
12
Compare for example Ryle’s classification of the emotions in The Concept of Mind (Ryle
1949).
 The Emotions in Early Phenomenology 339

3. The Phenomenal Aspect of Emotional Experience

The aspect of the feelings with which we are more familiar is their “felt”
dimension, i.e. the qualitative phenomenal way in which they are given to us
in experience.
Early phenomenologists claimed that the feelings (with the notable excep-
tion of the spiritual ones) characteristically involve a phenomenal aspect. This
bodily felt dimension of an emotion should not be understood as a complex
of concomitant sensations, that is, of sensations that appear in addition to the
emotion as a pure mental act. The bodily dimension of shame, for instance,
cannot be reduced to the acceleration of the cardiac rhythm, or to blushing
and sweating. It is also essential to this emotion that we experience a “pre-
formed action,” an “intention to move” or an “action tendency” to leave the
shameful scenario (Ortega y Gasset 1966; Scheler 1973a: 234; and in the
current literature Elster 1999: 246), and that we feel as if our body were be-
coming smaller.
Such qualitative aspects of emotional experience cannot be easily explained
with sole recourse to bodily sensations, but they nevertheless constitute an im-
portant part of the experience. In order to do justice to this aspect of the emo-
tions, the early phenomenologists introduced a helpful distinction between
“physical body” (“Körper”) and “living body” (“Leib”). The “physical body”
is given to us in external perception, and just like any other physical thing
it can be considered in quantitative and objective terms. To consider again
the bodily dimension of shame, we can exactly measure the pulsations of our
heart, the intensity of the blushing in our face, the warmth of the skin, and so
on. The “living body,” on the other hand, is that dimension of our body that
can be felt without our making use of sense perception. The felt dimension of
vitality, tiredness, or shame cannot be measured, and is rather a phenomenon
of the living body.
One can find rich descriptions of the living body in the work of Scheler,
Ortega y Gasset, and Kolnai, but it seems to me that Stein’s definition of the
living body is the most accurate:

For even if we shut our eyes tightly and stretch out our arms, in fact allowing
no limb to contact another so that we can neither touch nor see our physical
body, even then we are not rid of it. Even then it stands there inescapably in
full embodiment (hence the name), and we find ourselves bound to it per-
ceptually. Precisely this affiliation, this belonging to me, could never be con-
stituted in outer perception. A living body [Leib], only perceived outwardly
would always be only a particularly disposed, actually unique, physical body,
but never “my living body”. (Stein 1989: 42)

Unlike the physical body, the living body is always given to me as a whole,
and simultaneously as the “zero point” in my orientation towards the world.
340 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

With the living body we have an intimate awareness of our own body and its
surroundings, one that doesn’t involve the externality or objectivity of outer
perception. While a detailed elaboration of the distinction between living and
physical body would move beyond the scope of this article, my aim is to focus
on its implications for the early phenomenological theory of the emotions.
I am especially interested in applying the concept of the living body to the
different strata of “feelings” mentioned in the previous section. I will focus
mainly on the question of how one could, without abandoning the early phe-
nomenological framework, consider the spiritual feelings as essentially bodily
felt—a proposal that stands in contrast to the position actually defended by
the early phenomenologists.
In light of the distinction between physical and living body, it is possible
to account for the qualitative aspect of emotional experience in a detailed
way, one which takes into consideration the complexity of the phenomenon.
Whereas the physical concomitant manifestations of an emotion on the side
of the physical body are not essential to the emotion itself, it is impossible to
dissociate the emotional experience from the way in which it is qualitatively
experienced in the living body. Thus, with respect to shame, while blushing
or sweating may occur during an episode of shame, they are not essential to
this emotion; what is essential to it is rather the action tendency to abandon
the situation and the feeling of our body becoming smaller. This way of ex-
periencing an emotion can only be described with reference to the body as
a living body (“Leib”), as opposed to as a physical body. This idea that the
emotions are felt in a particular way, that is, that each emotion is characterised
by a particular phenomenology of the body, can also be found in the work of
Ortega y Gasset, who distinguishes between the body as a mineral and as flesh
(Ortega y Gasset 1966), as it can in Kolnai when he, for instance, claims that
emotions are “body-bound” (“Leibgebundenheit,” Kolnai 1974: 120). This
aspect of the corporeality of feeling has been further developed by Hermann
Schmitz in the framework of the “New-Phenomenology” (Schmitz 1998: 12).
The early phenomenologists, however, claim that this thesis does not ap-
ply to the class of the “spiritual” or / and “personality feelings”: They do not
require a living body to be felt. While this thesis was consistently defended
within early phenomenology, it seems to me difficult to give any sense to the
notion of a feeling being experienced in a wholly disembodied fashion. While
spiritual feelings are not bodily-bound in the sense of the physical body—
since their concomitant manifestations are inessential to their phenomenolog-
ical structure—if we interpret the importance of the body for the emotions in
the sense of a living body, then we can also maintain that spiritual feelings are
bodily-bound. The distinction between physical and living body, then, enables
us to give sense to the claim that spiritual emotions are body-bound. Spiritual
desperation and bliss, paradigmatic cases of spiritual feelings, are “felt” in the
sense that our living body is experienced in a certain way. In appealing to the
 The Emotions in Early Phenomenology 341

concept of the living body to account for the qualitative dimension of the
emotions, then, we are able to say that all feelings are bodily felt.

4. Emotions and Their Cognitive Bases

Early phenomenological accounts of the emotions defended a version of

“cognitivism” according to which emotions are grounded in and dependent
on “intellectual” or “cognitive” phenomena. They follow in this point a line
of thought inaugurated by Brentano, although they modify it slightly. As we
saw in section 1, Brentano defended the claim that the third class of psychic
acts, what he called the emotions, comprises a set of phenomena which are
essentially grounded in presentations and judgements.
The claim that emotions are grounded in cognitions can be interpreted
in a strict and in a broad sense. According to the strict version, emotions are
exclusively based on judgements: they require a belief as their basis. To feel
fear means to believe that something is dangerous, to feel disgust means to
believe that something is contaminated, etc. The early phenomenologists do
not defend this strong form of cognitivism. While strict forms of cognitivism,
according to which emotions are dependent upon judgements, may sound
odd, they have, however, been very popular during the second half of the 20th
century. Among analytical philosophers, strongly cognitivist theories of the
emotions have made up the dominant paradigm until very recently. Anthony
Kenny in Action, Emotion, and Will (Kenny 1963) already defended that emo-
tions are grounded on beliefs. Since then more radical versions emerged which
attempt to assimilate emotions to beliefs or to a combination of beliefs and
desires (Solomon 1993, Nussbaum 2005 and Green 1992). These radical ver-
sions have been overcome in the current analytical paradigm of the “affective
intentionality” which conceives emotions experiences which have a cognitive
and a phenomenal dimension.
The account defended by early phenomenologists, on the other hand, can
be classified as a “broad” cognitivism, since it stresses that not only beliefs, but
also suppositions, perceptions, and perceptual fantasies, can function as the
basis for emotions. Alexander Pfänder claims that the basis of an emotion “can
be a perception, an intuitive representation, or even a non-intuitive ‘thinking
in something’” (Pfänder 1922, I: 16).13 In a similar vein, Edith Stein charac-
terizes the “feelings in the pregnant sense” as follows:

[…], these feelings are always feeling of something. Every time I feel, I am
turned toward an object, something of an object is given to me, and I see a
level of the object. But, in order to see a level of the object, I must first have
it. It must be given to me in theoretical acts. Thus, the structure of all feelings

13
“Es kann ein Wahrnehmen, ein anschauliches Vorstellen oder auch ein unanschauliches
‘Denken an etwas’ sein.”
342 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

requires theoretical acts. When I am joyful over a good deed, this is how the
deed’s goodness or its positive value faces me. But I must know about the deed
in order to be joyful over it— knowledge is fundamental to joy. An intuitive
perceptual or conceptual comprehension can also be substituted for this this
knowledge underlying the feeling of value. (Stein 1989: 100–101)

In this paragraph Stein speaks about the double aspect of the intentionality
of feelings. Feelings are characterised as intentional, they are always feelings of
something. They are “intentional” and according to Stein’s quotation they are
simultaneously directed towards two different kinds of objects: we are turned
towards a given object and we see a level of this object. Using the current
terminology of the analytical philosophy introduced by Kenny and adapted
from Scholasticism, I will refer to the given object of a feeling as the “mate-
rial object” and to refer to the level of this object I will speak of the “formal
object” (Kenny 1963). In this section I will focus only on the “material object”
and how it is given to me in the experience. In the next section I will develop
further the notion of “formal object”.
Stein claims that being directed towards the given object of a feeling (the
“material object”) requires that this object has first been given to me. This
having or representing the object can only be achieved by means of acts which
are “theoretical”—in contemporary language we would say “cognitive”—in
nature. The idea here is that experiencing an emotion is a matter of being di-
rected towards a specific “material object”. The reference to a “material object”
in this context should be understood in a very general sense, such that it can
apply to a thing, a person, a situation or a state of affairs. The important point
for Stein is rather that we need to first be conscious of something in order to
experience it emotionally, and for this it is necessary that we have perceived,
imagined, or thought about it.
The virtues of the broad form of cognitivism are fairly obvious. It accom-
modates certain cases that the strict version simply cannot account for. Con-
sider, for example, the disgust that we occasionally feel without passing any
judgement on the object which disgusts us, and which is rather based on
our perceptual experience of it. There are also cases in which an emotion is
grounded in imagination or supposition, such as when a child is fearful of a
ghost in her room, despite knowing it to be merely imaginary. That is, the
strong cognitivist is unable to account for those emotions that base themselves
in perceptions, fantasies or suppositions. To illustrate that such emotional
phenomena are in fact possible, we can consider a series of cases in which fear
is grounded in different cognitive bases: a) perception: The perception of a
dog, i.e. my seeing or hearing it, may suffice to arouse fear in me; b) fantasy:
just as my merely imagining it can do; c) belief: I may feel fear when I posi-
tively believe that the cage in a zoo is not strong enough to contain the gorilla
 The Emotions in Early Phenomenology 343

inside it; d) supposition: I can also feel fear based on the mere supposition
that the gorilla is strong enough to break open its bars. It is worth noting
that broad cognitivist positions, resembling in many respects those offered by
early phenomenologists, can also be found in some contemporary analytical
accounts of the emotions (Goldie 2002, Mulligan 1998b).
The thesis that emotions are grounded in cognitive acts, does not apply
to all affective phenomena. On this point we can see a further difference be-
tween Brentano’s cognitivism and the modified form of it defended by early
phenomenologists. Whereas for Brentano, all psychic phenomena of the third
class are based on presentations and judgements, this claim is not defended by
the early phenomenologists. In early phenomenology, love and hatred count
as exceptions to the cognitivist model. This concession is based on a peculiar
feature of these affective phenomena, namely that when we love or hate some-
body it is not simply because we judge or perceive this person to be in a cer-
tain way. After all, it is possible to love somebody despite his mistakes and the
imperfections of his character, and to hate somebody despite all his virtues.
The early phenomenologists understand love and hate, not as emotions in the
strict sense, but rather as primary attitudes towards the world. Love and hate
are affective ways of being in the world, and such attitudes are not only pos-
sible without being grounded in “theoretical” or “cognitive acts,” they rather
constitute a basis for cognition and volition. I will come back to this point at
the end of the paper with the concept of “ordo amoris”.

5. Intentional Feeling, Emotional Response and Value

5.1. Emotions and Their Objects

In my opinion, the most challenging thesis defended in the early phe-
nomenological discussions of the emotions is that affectivity has a cognitive
function. Affectivity constitutes a dimension of human experience which can-
not be reduced to perception and belief and which possesses its own kind
of evidence: it makes us accessible a specific realm of reality. This claim was
challenging in the historical context in which it was formulated, a context
dominated mostly by feeling-theories and despite that some claims in the
current paradigm of the “affective intentionality” point in the same direction,
it remains a bold position in the contemporary debate. What is the kernel of
this position?
The early phenomenological accounts, despite recognizing the importance
of individuating the different kinds of affective experiences in accordance
with their bodily and qualitative aspects, are particularly attentive to their
distinctive intentionality. According to the early phenomenologists, feelings
are directed towards objects of the world, what I called in the previous section
“material objects,” but they also exhibit intentionality in another respect, in
344 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

that they are directed towards aspects of the object. These aspects of the object
which feelings are directed towards are “values” or—as we can say using the
current terminology—“formal objects”. To clarify this idea, we should recon-
sider Brentano’s famous claim that intentionality is “the mark of the mental,”
his analogy between emotions and judgements, and the further developments
of this claim among early phenomenologists.
According to Brentano, the different classes of psychic phenomena each
involve a distinct way of being directed towards an object. The intentional
directedness of the class of the emotions consists in “loving” or “hating” their
objects, i.e. in positioning us with a pro or contra attitude towards them. This
intentionality is specific to the emotions and cannot be founded in presen-
tations—which are characterized by a neutral way of being related to their
object—or in judgements—which aim at the truth or falsehood of the state of
affairs they intend. For the Brentano of the Psychology, the objects of the emo-
tions are simply ordinary things, such as persons, animals, objects, situations
and the like. We can, however, interpret Brentano as proposing that emotions
are related to objects of another kind. In particular, in his short treatise The
Origins of Our Knowledge of Right or Wrong he offers some suggestive hints
on the essential relation between the emotions and value. More precisely, he
argues in this text that it is correct to love the good and bad to love the bad,
and he spells this idea out in terms of the ‘fittingness’ of the emotions to the
things they are directed towards (Brentano 1921: 11). Emotions, thus, are not
only directed towards material objects but also to formal objects, i.e. to values.
Values are thus the formal objects of the emotions.
An interesting consequence of this definition is that while the range of
possible material objects for a specific emotion are individually and culturally
variable, the formal objects are always the same. While I can fear an inexistent
ghost, a storm, a dog, a situation or a state of affairs (i.e., a variety of different
material objects), my fear always announces that the feared object is some-
thing “dangerous” (i.e., a unitary formal object). A similar claim has been
defended by Ronald de Sousa (de Sousa 1987: 149 and 159).
A further consequence of this claim concerns the fact that emotions can
fit their formal objects or not. To illustrate this point, Brentano introduces
an analogy between emotions and judgements that was also developed by
the early phenomenologists. Emotions—just like judgements—have condi-
tions of satisfaction with respect to their objects. But while judgements can
be true or false it would be inadequate to speak about truth conditions for the
emotions, and Brentano and the phenomenologists will rather refer to their
appropriateness or inappropriateness. Brentano claims that when the love for
the lovable object is right, we speak of an appropriate emotion. He defends a
so called “fitting attitude theory” of value, a concrete form of “dispositional-
ism,” according to which values are assimilated to our possible dispositions
 The Emotions in Early Phenomenology 345

to feel an affective phenomenon in the case that the material object has some
properties. The early phenomenologists, on the contrary, defend a more ro-
bust form of value realism. Like Brentano, they also maintained that emotions
have “conditions of satisfaction”. Value qualities demand certain emotional
responses and these reactions “reach their goal” in the value qualities. This
demanding character is clear when a value-demand remains unfulfilled and
we suffer as a result: “we are sad because we cannot be happy about an event
to the degree that its felt value deserves, or we cannot be as sad as the death of
beloved persons ‘demands’” (Scheler 1973b: 259).14 Values are the objective
correlates of the emotions. Following the line of argumentation developed
in the last two sections, we can specify two conditions which, for the early
phenomenologists, an emotion must fulfill in order to be appropriate: 1) its
“material object” is given by a perception, a fantasy, a judgement or a supposi-
tion; and 2) its “formal object” or “value” is the one that corresponds to the
emotion in question. An example in which the first condition fails is the case
of a person who feels disgust but no material object is given; a person feeling
disgusted by something fearful would fail to satisfy the second condition.
Brentano’s account of value is not a realist account, but it leaves the door
open for realism. He does not claim that “love and hate” discover the good or
the bad, but that we discover that something is good, because we love it (Bren-
tano 1921: 11). The early phenomenologists, on the other hand, speak of the
objective correlates of the emotions. On their accounts, values are regarded
as axiological properties that exist in an “objective” way—and this despite of
the fact that to be grasped they need the existence of subjects equipped with
the corresponding capacities needed to grasp them. One of the advantages of
value realism is that it permits an explanation of the “contrast phenomenon,”
i.e. the possibility of feeling a value from a determinate valence despite being
in another emotional state. We are able to grasp the charm of a landscape de-
spite being sad. Those accounts that make values dependent upon a subjective
stance encounter difficulties in accounting for this phenomenon.
Such a realist ontology requires a special epistemology, an account of how
it is possible for us to gain access to value. On the early phenomenological
account, human beings can grasp value in virtue of their capacity to feel, just
as we can grasp sounds through our capacity to hear and colours due to our
visual capabilities. The strong epistemological thesis defended by early phe-
nomenologists is the following one: the domain of values is only accessible
to affective beings because it is a domain of reality inaccessible to reason. As
Scheler claims reason is blind to values. Talking about feelings he puts it: “It is
a kind of experience that leads us to genuinely objective objects and the eternal

14
The case is different, however, for affects such as anger which are—according to Sche-
ler—not intentional. In this case, anger is caused by a thought, a representation or a perception
but it is in itself not an emotional response to a felt value.
346 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

order among them, i.e., to values and the order of ranks among them” (Scheler
1973b: 255). In a similar vein, Stein writes as follows: “For, as physical na-
ture is constituted in perceptual acts, so a new object realm is constituted in
feeling.” (Stein 1989: 93). As affective beings equipped with the correspond-
ing epistemic tools, those that enable us to grasp values, we have access to a
domain of reality hidden to mere reason. The cognitive role of affective acts
consists in the disclosing or grasping of values. They have intentionality in
the strong sense of the word: they are not only directed to values but also are
responsible for their apprehension.
While unanimously agreeing that affective acts are responsible for grasp-
ing, apprehending and disclosing values, the early phenomenologists disagreed
about which concrete affective acts are responsible for such value-apprehen-
sion. Within the group, two distinct positions were formulated. While some
of the early phenomenologists maintained that the emotions (“Gefühle”) and
the feelings of value (“Fühlen”) comprised two distinct classes of affective ex-
perience, others rejected such a distinction and claimed that emotions are
feelings of value. Both positions are analysed in what follows.

5.2. Emotions as Feeling of Values

According to a fairly wide shared view amongst the early phenomenolo-
gists, one which can be found in Stein and Kolnai, emotions have inten-
tionality in the strong sense of the word: they grasp values. This thesis wasn’t
only endorsed by the early phenomenologists; it was also popular in the Graz
School (Meinong 1968: 32, 118 and 129).
Stein clearly articulates this position in the following passage:

People want to distinguish between “feeling” [Fühlen] and “the feeling” [Gefühl].
I do not believe that these two designations indicate different kinds of experi-
ences, but only different “directions” of the same experience. Feeling is an expe-
rience when it gives us an object or else something about an object. The feeling is
the same act when it appears to be originating out of the “I” or unveiling a level
of the “I”. (Stein 1989: 98–99; in a similar sense Stein 2000: 159)

Similar claims can be found in Kolnai’s work on the standard modes of

aversion, which refers directly to Meinong’s considerations regarding the link
between emotion and value (Kolnai 1974: 128 and 166; 1998: 581). In clas-
sical phenomenology, it is not uncommon to find references to “value-percep-
tion” (“Wertnehmen”), by which is meant an act that has certain analogies
with the perception of objects (“Wahrnehmen”), and this analogy permits
us to understand the claim that emotion and value are intimately connect-
ed. When perceiving an object we live through a perceptual experience, and
likewise, when we feel a value we live through an emotional experience. In
finding an object disgusting, we simultaneously become disgusted ourselves.
 The Emotions in Early Phenomenology 347

The argument here is that the feeling of a value is also a way of experiencing
ourselves in an emotional experience. To this argument we can add a second.
While it seems coherent to think that the feeling of values is also bodily felt
in an emotion; it seems absurd to speak about a feeling of values that is not
felt as emotional experience. Furthermore, and this is the third argument,
both perception and emotion are object-directed acts. This directness explains
how we can speak of the emotions as appropriate or inappropriate reactions
to their objects, just as, in relation to its object, a perception can be either
veridical or illusory. Inspired by the phenomenological tradition, Christine
Tappolet claims that emotions are perceptions of values (Tappolet 2000: 8–9),
while Mark Johnston speaks about an authority of affect, in the sense that
the emotions simultaneously present us with a quality of the world and make
our desires and actions intelligible. In both of these respects, they are loosely
analogous to perception (Johnston 2001: 189).
Despite the intuitive appeal of the thesis that emotions disclose values, this
claim faces important problems.15 I will mention only two of them here, in
order to spell out why some phenomenologists decided to defend an alterna-
tive position, according to which emotion and the feeling of value should be
considered as distinct phenomena. The first problem is that there is no one to
one correspondence between emotion and value. Rather, the nuanced ways
in which the world presents itself to us is richer than the repertoire of emo-
tions that we as human beings can feel. The second difficulty derives from our
everyday experience: we can feel a value without necessarily living through an
emotional episode. We can grasp the melancholy of a picture without becom-
ing melancholic, just as we can see the injustice of a situation without neces-
sarily being outraged. Stein, who defends the claim that the feeling of value
is an emotional response, conceives of these as cases of an “empty grasp”. I
can grasp a value and remain “cold” about it. In these cases, “I’m empty in-
side” (2000, 161). According to Stein, to fully grasp a value requires that we
emotionally respond to it with a vital, psychological, or spiritual feeling. One
group of phenomenologists, however, argued for a clear separation of both
phenomena: the intentional and cognitive feeling of values and the emotional
response to them.

5.3. The Feeling of Values and the Emotional Response

Some of the early phenomenologists sought to differentiate between the
feeling of value and emotional response, regarding them as two distinct classes
of experience. In his Formalism, Scheler establishes a clear distinction between
the act of grasping a value (“Fühlen”) and the emotional reaction to a grasped
value (“Gefühle”). He distinguishes first between “the intentional ‘feeling of

15
For a detailed account on the problems of the theory, see Mulligan 2009.
348 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

something’ and mere feeling states” (Scheler 1973b: 255). Scheler regards in-
tentional feelings as a kind of “organ” for comprehending values (in the same
sense that the eyes are the organ for seeing or the ears the organs for hearing)
and he speaks of an “original emotive intentionality,” underscoring that the
intention “feeling of something” is responsible for grasping values (Scheler
1973b: 256).
In order to elaborate this thesis, Scheler distinguishes three main classes
of feelings: states, functions and acts of feeling. “Feeling-states,” under which
Scheler includes the moods and pleasure and pain, should be distinguished
from “intentional feelings”. This distinction is especially clear in those cases in
which different acts of feeling can be directed towards the same feeling-state
(Scheler 1973b: 256). Once aroused, a feeling of pleasure or pain can be suf-
fered, endured, tolerated or enjoyed. The feeling state then remains the same,
and what changes is only the way in which we feel it. An important trait of
feeling-states concerns the relation towards their objects: this connection is
mediated by experience and thinking. Feeling-states do not grasp the objects
they are directed towards, i.e. they are not intentional.
The second class is that of the intentional feelings, which Scheler describes
as a “goal-determined movement” essentially related to their objects (Scheler
1973b: 257). Intentional feelings can be of three different kinds: 1) The feeling
of feeling-states described above; 2) the feeling of objective emotional characteris-
tics of the atmosphere, as when we feel the restfulness of a river or the sadness of
a landscape16; and 3) the feeling of values such as the agreeable or the beautiful.
For Scheler, only this third class of intentional feelings have a cognitive func-
tion, since in such feelings values are grasped (Scheler 1973b: 257).
The third type of feeling is the emotional act-experiences, which can be
divided into two categories. 1) Preferring and placing after which are respon-
sible for the apprehension of the rank in which values are organised. Prefer-
ring takes place on the basis of the felt value-material. 2) Love and hate, as
the highest level of affective life. According to Scheler, love and hate are not
responses to felt values, but spontaneous acts: “In love and hate our spirit
does much more than ‘respond’ to already felt and perhaps preferred values.
Love and hate are acts in which the value-realm accessible to the feeling of a
being […] is either extended or narrowed” (Scheler 1973b: 261). These higher
emotional acts are responsible for the discovery of values: they designate an
attitude of openness (in love) or closedness (in hatred). In a similar fashion,
Pfänder claims that love and hate are sentiments, and that through them we
are open or closed to the world (Pfänder 1922).
To return to our original question, where should we place the emotions
in this theory? On Scheler’s view, vital, psychological and spiritual feelings

16
This point is also developed by another early phenomenologist: Moritz Geiger (Geiger
1911a).
 The Emotions in Early Phenomenology 349

(“Gefühle”) are responses to values but they have to be separated from the
feeling of value itself (“Fühlen”). As we have seen, for Scheler only the inten-
tional feelings of value and the feeling-acts are intentional and cognitive in
the strong sense of the word, i.e. are responsible for disclosing values and their
hierarchy and for discovering them. Vital, psychological and spiritual feelings,
on the other hand, do not have an intentional and cognitive function of this
kind. They are intentional in the weak sense of being directed towards values
and responding to them, but not in the sense of grasping them! According to
Scheler’s theory, the grasping of value is essentially prior to any emotional re-
sponse. We can lead some support to this claim by noting that we often grasp
a value without emotionally responding to it. One can, for instance, grasp the
unfairness of a situation. Grasping this value, however, does not necessarily
entail that one reacts to it with an emotional response. This account is not,
however, without its problems. In particular, Scheler’s claim that the feelings
of value (“Fühlen”) are not bodily felt is somewhat mysterious, since it is dif-
ficult to make sense of the notion of a feeling that is not in some way given
bodily. An interesting solution to this problem can be found in Dieter von
Hildebrand’s distinction between two forms of the intuitive apprehension of
value (“Werterfassen”): the seeing of value (“Wertsehen”) and the feeling of
value (“Wertfühlen”). In the first case, we are able to grasp a value in a distant
way without necessarily having a feeling; while in the second case, we feel it
and are able to experience it (von Hildebrand 1982: 29).
Other phenomenologists have defended accounts similar to Scheler’s, no-
tably Geiger, who in his analysis of aesthetic pleasure, argued for a separation
of feeling and emotion (Geiger 1974: 8) and Ortega y Gasset, who adopts
a similar mode to Scheler (Ortega y Gasset 1966: 325, 328, 331). More re-
cently, Mulligan has developed Scheler’s theory further, claiming that emo-
tions and desires do not have any cognitive function, that they are not able
to grasp values, and that only the feeling (“Fühlen”) can fulfil this function
(Mulligan 2009).

6. The Moral Dimensions of the Emotions

Values grasped by intentional and cognitive feeling are of a different kind

and reveal a multiplicity of aspects of the world. An important group of
grasped values is that of moral values.. In this section, I will focus on these
and expound upon four considerations that relate to the moral dimensions of
the emotions.
I will begin with what I call the onto-epistemological consideration. There is,
first of all, a connection between the ontology of values and their epistemolog-
ical accessibility through affective acts. In the words of Scheler’s pregnant for-
mulation in “Ordo Amoris”: “The heart is itself a structured counter-image of
the cosmos of all possible things worthy of love; to this extent it is a microcosm
350 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

of the world of values.” (Scheler 1973c: 116). Stein also stresses this correlation
between the hierarchy of the personality and the hierarchy of values: “Person
and world (more exactly, value world) were found to be completely corre-
lated” (Stein 1989: 103 and 108). The ontological claim of value realism has
its epistemological counterpart in the thesis that affective beings are able to
grasp values. Affectivity is seen not as a complex of irrational and blind states
of the soul but as an organized constellation, encompassing, on the one hand,
the function of feeling, which is responsible for grasping values, acts of prefer-
ence, which are responsible for grasping the relations between them, and love,
which is responsible for their discovery; on the other hand, they encompass
vital, psychological, and spiritual emotional responses to those grasped values.
Each affective being is a counter-image and microcosm of the world of values.
Second, to emphasize the moral dimension of the emotions we can also
formulate a motivational consideration. For the early phenomenologists, affec-
tive acts do not only open us up to the value of things, they also provide mo-
tives for action. In some cases, this tendency to action would be prudential,
as in the case of feeling a fear of heights where this fear motivates the agent to
avoid high places. In some other cases, however, the tendency to act is moral,
as when shame motivates the agent to protect her intimate self. Only in this
last case are the emotions morally relevant. This idea contrasts starkly with
the Kantian view, according to which the realm of affectivity can only distort
the morality of our behaviour. For the early phenomenologists, on the other
hand, the emotions provide a valid and important motive for good behaviour.
It is crucial, however, not to misunderstand their position as asserting that
action ought to be guided by the emotions alone. An ethics grounded only in
emotion would be mistaken, and the emotions always need the corrective of
reason (Kolnai 1974).
Third, consider the justification consideration. Affective acts ground and
justify judgements of value. Many of our deeply held beliefs, attitudes, and
judgements are grounded in emotional experience. For example, suppose that
I notice the behaviour of a person and feel insulted by his actions, even if I do
not know exactly what he is doing and why he is doing it. Taking this feeling
as my point of departure, I might then think that the behaviour was offensive,
and on this basis negatively evaluate the person in question. As such cases
show, emotions often play a crucial role in evaluation. They cannot, however,
always justify our evaluative judgements alone, and the mediation of evalua-
tive thinking is often required.
Another point is also relevant here. The phenomenological claim that
emotions may be fitting, i.e. that they present their objects as having cer-
tain evaluative features, does not imply a “moralistic fallacy” (d’Arms and
Jacobson 2000). As stated above, an emotion may be considered a fitting re-
sponse in light of its cognitive basis and the value towards which it is directed.
This, however, should be distinguished from the fact that we can evaluate an
 The Emotions in Early Phenomenology 351

emotion as a prudentially or morally correct response. Take for instance the

case of ressentiment. Ressentiment is a morally wrong response to another
person’s having goods that I also desire. In ressentiment, however, we are in
the first moment very well aware of the value of such goods (thus we have a
fitting response). It is the devaluation of these values that takes place after
realising we cannot achieve them that is morally reprehensible.
Finally, there is the personal identity consideration. Affective phenomena are
morally relevant because they constitute the kernel of our personal identity:
they are responsible for our being open or closed to the world, for having
certain preferences, and for our individual ability to grasp certain nuances
while others remain hidden to us. Affectivity structures our engagement with
the world, and it is in affective acts that one’s personal character comes to the
fore. As Scheler concisely puts it: “Man, before he is an ens cogitans or an ens
volens, is an ens amans” (1973c: 110–111). This thesis is not only an episte-
mological one, but an anthropological claim concerning the primacy of our
affective acts to those of cognition and the will. As we saw earlier, love should
be understood as a movement of the heart towards the world, that is, as some-
thing which fundamentally shapes and structures our inclinations and disin-
clinations, our interests and attitudes. Scheler uses the phrase “Ordo amoris”
to designate the “the basic moral tenor” of human existence. His conviction
that affectivity is at the core of human life, that it serves as a foundation for
many of our theoretical and practical attitudes and acts, was shared by of all
early phenomenologists. Ortega y Gasset, for instance, writes of the primacy
of love as the “ratio essendi” and “ratio cognoscendi” of our existence (Ortega
y Gasset 1963).

7. Concluding Remarks

To conclude, we can note that a new conception of the relation between af-
fectivity and reason emerges from the early phenomenological investigations.
Affectivity and reason are not two separate spheres, but rather interrelate in
multiple and varied ways. The central insight found in the early phenomeno-
logical discussions of the emotions is that the intentional and cognitive feeling
of values and the emotional responses are not a chaotic mixture of blind and
irrational affects but an organized system with a cognitive and a moral func-
tion. These claims are also constitutive of theories of affective intentionality
found the current analytical debate on the emotions. As I have shown in this
paper, there are important parallels between the most relevant theses devel-
oped by the early phenomenologists and some fundamental claims found in
recent analytic discussion of the emotions. These parallels are not only of
historical interest, since they suggest that early phenomenology placed weight
on the development of a new paradigm of affectivity and, for this reason, that
352 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

the contemporary debate might gain significant insights from attending to the
work of the early phenomenologists.

Dr. Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena.
Institut für Philosophie
Zwätzengasse 9. 07743 Jena. Germany
ingridvefe@web.de

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