Affect, Emotion and Feeling

Keywords: embodied spirituality, dance, feelings, altered states, other ways of knowing, direct, immediate and reciprocal experience and expression of spirit, and spirit beings, change and action.

This article describes dance as a moving spirituality through the case study of a specific practice called Movement Medicine. It addresses how a danced spirituality differs from other forms of spirituality, such as meditation and contemplation, and attempts to explore some of the aspects that make dance a unique medium for an embodied, lived and creative spirituality. 'Feel good feelings', as well as emerging from difficult emotions encountered on the dance floor, generate a sense of meaning which is translated to taking sustainable, socially just action. Through dance, different states of consciousness can be experienced through which 'other' knowledge is accessed and subsequently embodied. In these states, people can also meet and relate to spirit beings, and simultaneously express that relationship through the moving body. Finally, three qualities of dance are discussed, which contribute to concrete, lasting changes in existing life structures. My dance became a prayer, a dance with god and my heart expanded so wide. I was swept […] upon a river of love for god and for this life. It became a sacred dance for me […]. To dance is to know, for our body holds all the secrets and when we move […] we allow those secrets to emerge and come to consciousness. Our deep knowing is formed on the breath and freed as we move and breathe, listen and become present

_The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegazza’s selected works. In my extensive introductory essay, Mantegazza’s hybrid contributions from fiction, travel-writing, and ethnography to physiology, medicine, and politics are reevaluated as instances of a proto-cultural-studies approach attuned to the cross-fertilization of disciplines and the circulation of ideas in a period of European intellectual history that defied the notion of specialization.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation

De strekking van de emotie schaamte is bij  Max Scheler positief. Bij Sartre negatief. Waar de relatie met de gemeenschap bij Scheler juist deel uit maakt van het persoon zijn, is deze bij Sartre problematisch. Bij Sartre bedreigt schaamte de individuele vrijheid, bij Scheler beschermt schaamte de persoon tegen het volledig opgeslokt worden door zijn gemeenschap.

My theme is ‘life-writing’, understood as the shaping of one's life through the contemplation of values, although this activity is mostly unreflective. To become an art so that one's life can be shaped in greater accord with clearly held values, this process must become reflective. These values have an inescapably ethical dimension, because as we necessarily poetize our surrounding world, we contribute to our personal and communal ethos the character that arises from the culturally shaping power of guiding ideals. Even the immoralist cultivates life within an ethos where obscure feelings connect with some thing or other, whereby certain aims will then appear more valuable than others.

To understand how we cannot help but shape our lives according to dimly or clearly intuited values, I compare Coleridge’s primary imagination, the ‘shaping spirit’ ‘necessary for all human perception’ with Kant’s ‘blind though indispensible function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, yet of which we are scarcely ever conscious’. With Coleridge, we find in imagination an impulse to connect profound but obscure presentiments and ideas with our surroundings. This impulse propels great art and everyday aesthetics alike. Whether we pursue merely what attracts us, or seek value beyond this, all lives are freely shaped, without excuses, as the existentialists say, but not always in the most pellucid consciousness. Our choices inevitably engage us in the poetic art of life-writing. Cast in medias res, we necessarily improvise. But this is no argument against lives being moral-aesthetic works, spontaneous compositions in value.

Our journey to God really is one of being stripped down and approaching in our vulnerability and weakness, in our disgrace (lack of grace). The important thing to understand is that, when we feel “in control” we are inevitably putting up barriers, making it more difficult for us to be aware of graciousness of God. It is when we are conscious of our own shortcomings and fragility, not a morbid self-pitying way but consciously acknowledging the totality of our personality that we tend to be mostly receptive to the promptings and presence of God’s spirit. This is a personal account of one such journey.

There are certain thoughts - intimations - that will seem corny, or laughable, and therefore dismissed - and only seriously absorbed into the changing mind when felt, in the shelter of the quietly moving music of the soul.
It is the function of art, and of love, to make this music heard . . . 

  It is not the music of depression - it is the way through.

The paper introduces haptic medicine – healthcare based on loving touch for healing and preventing disease. We describe the effects of loving touch (a square inch of our skin has over 1000 nerves) on the body, brain and mind. We describe two web-based health education and media projects. The first, www.21stcenturymed.org is a place for health practitioners to start learning about touch and resources. The second project, Humans Without Borders, is a multi-lingual self help education website for everyday people. Teaching materials for these projects are based on our previous work with a form of haptic medicine known as psychophysiophilosophy with patients at Stanford Hospital, Kaiser Permanente and Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital. We describe psychophysiophilosophy, relate motherly love to recent discoveries in neurosciences and give hints on ways to increase motherly love in each of us. We present a plan for moving into the future by re-introducing haptic medicine into our daily lives through self-help and as an adjunct for current physician practice. There is an exercise in self-help for the reader and an appendix of recent clinical research with profound benefits on the use of human touch for over 40 conditions.

Stories told through different media forms feel very distinctive from each other, to such an extent that there are stories which can only be told through one media form -- at least, if preserving the distinctive affective quality of the experience is a priority. Is this due to something innate to the story which makes it hard to translate outside of its context, or is it the context itself that sets the experience apart? Phenomenology provides a way of understanding how the media-specific structures of textual storytelling can shape the experience of negotiating that text, through altering the affective processes associated with its navigation. This project argues that it is possible to distinguish amongst storytelling in multiple media forms by analysing how differences in textual structure (and the processes required to engage with them) shape the phenomenological experience of those texts. I apply an analytical framework of affective phenomenology to case-study forms of textual storytelling, including videogames, hypertext fiction, webcomics, and Alternate Reality Games. All of these case studies share a new media context, and so their outward similarities will highlight the differences in the experiences they present. I argue that hypertext fictions provide environments for readers to engage with, either as explorers negotiating unfamiliar territory, or detectives seeking connections between disparate material. The webcomic is distinguished from other forms of mediated storytelling by the amount of time spent engaging with characters within the text, which leads to a perception of intimacy as part of the experience. Videogames are set apart by the sense of responsibility felt by the player for events and their consequences within the Heideggerian world-of-concern established with the text and its characters. Alternate Reality Games are texts which function at the level of the community rather than the individual, are experienced as phenomenologically real, and are further distinguished by their textual boundaries functioning at the level of affective investment rather than the specific processes involved in negotiating the text. I argue that the definition of media texts should include how we engage with their textual structures, rather than focus purely on the textual structures themselves. Affective phenomenology and the process of analytical juxtaposition presented in this project provide the beginnings of a map for negotiating this new conceptual territory, and will become particularly relevant as texts and textual forms migrate across platforms.

This paper addresses the phenomenological relationships between affect-regulation and interpersonal experience in psychiatric illness. I argue that a capacity for affect-regulation is inextricable from how one relates to specific individuals and to other people in general. To do so, I focus on a type of experience often associated with depression diagnoses, involving a sense of stasis and inescapability. I show how a feeling of being estranged from other people amounts, at the same time, to a sense of the world as bereft of certain kinds of significant possibility and, by implication, to what we might call an experience of diminished self. This, I suggest, can be interpreted in terms of what I call “existential feeling”. I further consider how one might seek to regulate and change one’s felt relationship with the world and other people, despite feeling cut off from others in general and having a pervasive sense that emotional change is impossible.

In this paper I offer critical attention to the notion of atmosphere in relation to music. By exploring the concept through the case study of the Closed Brethren worship services, I argue that atmosphere may provide analytical tools to explore the ineffable in ecclesial practices. Music, just as atmosphere, commonly occupies a realm of ineffability and undermines notions such as inside and outside, subject and object. For this reason I present music as a means of knowing the atmosphere. The first part of this paper points to the limits of an understanding of atmosphere as a constellation of things, as proposed by Gernot Böhme. In contrast to this, Hermann Schmitz conceptualises atmosphere as half-thing which suggests movement. By expanding on this point, I argue that it is not solely an effect of music to trigger movement but that music itself is movement. Hence I propose to methodologically approach atmospheres as movements. Consequently, in the second part of this paper I closely analyse two motions as they cohere in Closed Brethren worship services: first, becoming (Deleuze and Guattari), a movement on the level of the individual worshiper; secondly, territorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari), a movement of the atmosphere towards its solidification. Here music as atmosphere is not a system of moral signification but a generative power affording intimate processes of divine encounter, whilst producing affective denominational difference.

The full pre-publication text of a 2015 book on feelings. Drawing on the work of Suzanne Langer, amongst other theorists, the book sets out a concept of feeling; explores its relationship with language and social relations; shows how analyses that include feeling can illuminate understandings of key topics related to health and illness (health belief; interactions in chronic fatigue; and madness). The book concludes by positioning feeling in relation to prominent critiques of the 'affective turn' in the social sciences.

Matthew Ratcliffe's model of existential feelings can be seen as a critical engagement with perspectives common to analytic, theory of mind and psychological orientations that view psychological functions such as cognition and affectivity within normative objective propositional frameworks. Ratcliffe takes a step back from and re-situates objective reifications within an interactive subject-object matrix inclusive of the body and the interpersonal world. In doing so, he turns a mono-normative thinking into a poly-normative one, in which determinations of meaning and significance are relative to the changing structural coherence of felt bodily and inter-socially shaped schemes of interaction. And yet, from the phenomenological vantages of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Gendlin and Heidegger, Ratcliffe's approach retains the metaphysical presupposition of subject-object dualism as interacting bodies, with a separate causative glue necessary to provide for the means of their relation. Ratcliffe re-purposed Damasio's concept of background feeling and dressed it up in the garb of phenomenology , but it remains a reciprocal causal model of psychological function. What Heidegger's Being-in-the-World, Merleau-Ponty's figure-background structure of corporeal inter-subjectivity, Gendlin's implicit intricacy and Husserl's reduced transcendental ego have in common is a radicalized notion of temporality that overcomes the split between subject and object informing Ratcliffe's understanding of being 'immersed in' and connected to a world, and thus abandons the need to posit bodily feeling as a 'glue' organizing and maintaining the meaningful structure of consciousness of a world. Temporality , not the empirically causal body, provides the basis of affect, cognition and the organizational glue for structures of meaning.

Comments welcome at joshsoffer1@gmail.com

The main argument of Husserl’s Phenomenology Revisited is developed in three steps: [1] In the first part of the book, I present reconsiderations of certain basic terms that Husserl introduces in his philosophy. I first show that phenomenological activity can be re-interpreted in anthropological terms. What Husserl calls his “phenomenological method,” which includes reflection, eidetic variation, and the performance of the epoche, is, I claim, an abstract development of concrete life-world experiences such as imagining, playing and wondering. By discovering the concrete anthropological horizon of central Husserlian methodological terms (which have confused readers from the beginning on), their foundation in certain experiences, and the way in which they can be regarded as abstractions from those experiences, is shown. [2] In the second part of the book, I show how subjectivity, in the phenomenological sense according to which it is an area of investigation, evolves out of the sensual sphere, and that as such, subjectivity should not be analyzed apart from the lived body or apart from world experience, as some commentators have suggested. As I show, affectivity and the “openness of the subject” towards what is other than itself, is tied to the experience of other subjects, to proto-ethical experiences, as well as to the lived body. [3] In the last part of the book, I turn to the experience of the past and future, in order to establish them as the most important features of the self’s constitution. In sum, by proceeding in these three steps I am able to outline (in a non-abstractive way) three of the most important levels of human experience and its phenomenological investigation, from Husserl’s point of view.

Der Beitrag erläutert und analysiert die Kategorie der existenziellen Gefühle. Im Zentrum steht der Ansatz von Matthew Ratcliffe, der diesen Begriff eingeführt und vor allem im Bereich einer phänomenologischen Philosophie der Psychiatrie fruchtbar gemacht hat. Sodann wird das Konzept auf einen bislang in der Philosophie der Gefühle wenig behandelten Theoriekontext bezogen: auf den „ökosophischen“ Ansatz Félix Guattaris. Eine Synthese der Perspektiven von Ratcliffe, dem Phänomenologen, und Guattari, dem Vordenker einer ökotechnisch dezentrierten Subjektivitätslehre, bietet insbesondere den Kulturwissenschaften vielfältige Anschlussmöglichkeiten. Verdeutlicht wird das für die Bereiche Affect Studies, der Kulturgeographie sowie für die postkoloniale Critical Race Theory.

"'Phil Hutchinson offers an incisive, insightful and deeply humane New Wittgensteinian critique of a number of influential accounts of the emotions, including shame. That too many philosophers have marginalized the 'person' in their accounts – that they have forgotten the place of the emotions in human lives and in the life-world – is the shame of philosophy.'
- Katherine Morris, Oxford University

'A fine work: not only does it provide convincing answers to important questions, it also reveals the limitations - and cures some of the blindspots - of much contemporary research on emotions. The discussion of cognitivism is particularly subtle, while the perspicuous presentation of the lived experience of shame might help to resolve some crucial theoretical aporias about the nature and the significance of being a person.'
- Anthony Hatzimoysis, The University of Manchester
 
'Hutchinson's book is a thoughtful, thorough and interesting work. He offers many striking reflections on emotion, language and, specifically, shame. In showing how different conceptions of emotions are based on problematic conceptions of language, he also goes much deeper than philosophers usually when they write about this subject.'
- Ylva Gustafsson, Philosophical Investigations

'Shame and Philosophy is an engaging philosophical effort to explore reflection about emotion with its relevant connection to personhood. Phil Hutchinson offers a careful reflection that establishes a dialogue among current research both from the analytical and the continental traditions. This novel approach to philosophy of emotions provides, just like Hutchinson wants, a conceptual network for a better understanding of how emotions make up our world.'
- Dina Mendonça, Metapsychology online


Abstract
In an important contribution to the burgeoning area of philosophy of emotions, Phil Hutchinson engages with philosophers of emotion in both the analytic and continental traditions. Shame and Philosophy advances a framework for understanding emotion: world-taking cognitivism. He argues that reductionist accounts of emotion leave us in a state of poverty regarding our understanding of our world and ourselves. The book contains detailed engagements with theorists of emotions such as Peter Goldie, Paul Griffiths, Jesse Prinz and Jenefer Robinson as well as a chapter on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, which also contains a detailed critical engagement with Jacques Derrida's work. The Chapter on Griffiths' work also contains a detailed critique of the program of natural kind semantics. As the book progresses it becomes more and more concerned to meditate on shame as discussed by Primo Levi and other survivors of extreme trauma. The book moves towards conclusion by suggesting further directions for study."

This short discussion piece engages with an influential phenomenological approach to atmospheres, focusing on the work of Hermann Schmitz. Against a background of agreement on the contours of an understanding of atmospheres and their relevance, the text presents a number of critical considerations, in part comparing and contrasting Schmitz's approach with that of cultural theorist and affect studies' pioneer Brian Massumi.

In direct confrontation with the phenomenology of Max Scheler (1874-1928), this paper proposes two theses: a) the emotion (from the Latin word e-movere) is the movement that leads us out of the repetitiveness of existence. Emotion does not represent a subjective or psychological dimension enclosed within the brain, but the anthropogenetic dimension of reality: it allows us to get in touch with the singularity and uniqueness of the others and gives a direction to the formation process of our own singularity; b) in contrast to what Prinz and Tappolet claim in the ‘perceptual theory’, emotion is an intentional movement that refers to the formal object through what Scheler calls valueception (Wert- nehmung).

This paper aims to offer a concise 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, articulating them through the following five topics: 1) the stratification of emotional life; 2) the qualitative and phenomenal aspect of emotional experience; 3) the foundation of the emotions in cognitive acts; 4) the intentionality of the emotions; 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.

This pdf contains Chapter 1 'Introducing' from this book, which posits feeling as the basis of an embodied psychology. The book sets out a concept of feeling, describes its responsivity to social and material influences, briefly considers its implications for notions of experience and subjectivity, and for research, then presents three examples from health and clinical psychology to demonstrate its relevance. The book finishes with a discussion of feeling in relation to the wider 'affective turn' in the humanities, social science and psychology.

Ce livre développe, à partir de Merleau-Ponty, Henry et Sartre, une phénoménologie décrivant la vie perceptive du point de vue du désir d'éprouver qui s'y déploie. L'auteur interroge, selon différents chemins tout à la fois opposés et noués les uns aux autres, le rapport de la vie perceptive à l'imaginaire et à la théâtralité originaire du corps. Il montre comment chaque expérience perceptive est la mise en jeu d'un désir de vivre, comment elle est susceptible d'accroître ou d'affaiblir la capacité des individus à se laisser affecter en profondeur par leur situation, à l'endurer, à y ouvrir du possible.

Contenu : Maurice Merleau-Ponty : La perception comme toucher à distance - La texture imaginaire du réel - Violence et événementialité de la vision - La théâtralité originaire du corps - Michel Henry : La vulnérabilité intrinsèque du pâtir - Affectivité, sensibilité, temporalité - Vie et possibilité - Impression et réalité - La texture imaginaire des impressions - Jean-Paul Sartre : Immanence, affectivité et intentionnalité - L'imaginaire et le retard originaire de la conscience - Émotion et imagination - Liberté et théâtralité.

CONSCIENCIA Y COGNICION
1/4- Una de las mayores ramas de la investigación sobre la consciencia y el inconsciente, lo levantó Benjamín Lisbeth, con sus experimentos entre los años sesenta y ochenta sobre el libre albedrío y la consciencia. Después de medio siglo, despierta debate por nuestro “yo”, pero los resultados siguen consistentes. Adicional a ese se suma el problema duro de la medición, que tiene un siglo de estudios, investigaciones y debates. 
------------
2-4- Las implicaciones del metabolismo, lo anatómico, la comunicación electrodinámica, procesar información, el nivel celular y subniveles, en coloides, microtúbulos, moléculas, membranas, sinapsis, etc., en humanos y animales ha incentivado la investigación. Desde décadas, se han acrecentado los estudios en las pre-sinapsis, la memoria y los fenómenos cuánticos, que han llevado a cooperar a la física cuántica en los niveles neuronales, como antes en la biología molecular.
-----------------   
3/4- Otros problemas básicos en las ciencias psicológicas, sociales, de la salud, se refieren a los fundamentos que guían los actos humanos, la toma de decisiones, la reflexión razonada y el comportamiento. A partir de los años sesenta y setenta, se han incrementado los estudios experimentales sobre la consciencia y las bases que sustentan su funcionamiento. Entre ellos se destacan las teorías de la física cuántica, con éxitos relativos.
---------------
4/4- Los caminos de estos estudios, descienden desde el nivel cerebral clásico, hasta los niveles bio- moleculares, micro-tubular, dendritas, cuántos e incluso lo supra sensibles. Esta labor la han emprendido autores tan dispares como sir John Carew, Eccles, Henry Stapp, sir Roger Penrose, Giuseppe Vitiello, Frolich, Umezawa, Jeffrey Goldstone, David Deutsch, entre muchos como se podrá ver

The television screen, the photograph, the cinematic image
are mirrors of the human self, mirrors that are caught up in
national, global, and corporatised flows of information.
Usually, media flows are theorised in fairly abstract terms
that speak of technologies, audiences, information or communication
environments. This paper attempts to contribute
to these debates through consideration of a much more concrete,
and perhaps unfamiliar, perspective: one that focuses
on the transmission of affect in communication and that provides
a context for thinking about affect in an evolutionary
and biological context. We argue that media communicate
through processes that are more than semiotic and cognitive.
These processes rely on the appropriation of other aspects of
the human organism, such as the face. On one level, they
feed off the capacity of the human for affect (to affect and be
affected); on another, they rely on the ability of technology to
interface with the human through a process of biomediation.
Eugene Thacker writes of biomedia as processes in which
‘biological components and process are informatically recontextualised
for purposes that may be either biological or nonbiological’
(2003, p. 52). For us, all media are biomediations
of the human

The article theorizes nostalgia as a cultural—and philosophical—category by focusing on its transformation through consumer society and its mythology.  It builds on, but also goes beyond, existing critiques of the commodification of the past and of “postmodern nostalgia.”  The distinctions between nostalgia and “the melancholy of history” (Fritzsche), on the one hand, and other historical types of nostalgia, on the other, are illustrated with examples from film, literature, and philosophy.  The remaining part of the article focuses on the production and commercialization of nostalgia, as it relates to cultural and personal memory, material culture, and everyday life.

"The gendered body takes a phenomenological turn in Brower’s cosmopolitan essay on oral sexuality within philosophical, feminist, and lesbian traditions..."
  ("Editorial" by Michelle Iwen)

Abstract:
The 'traditional philosophical prestige' of seeing and touching, as analyzed by Emmanuel Levinas, comes to dominate the qualities of the other three senses. An investigation of the roles of these prestigious senses, along with the resultant privileged sense-organs of the hand and the eye, within phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and gender- or queer-theory suggests that the part of the prestige of touch will have been related to its function in the phenomenality of feeling. Yet the sense of taste seems to be as applicable, if not more so, to the phenomenal experience of selfhood based on feeling as theorized by Edmund Husserl and Jean-Luc Marion. The tongue, rather than the hand, is reconsidered as a sense-organ of touch in order to salvage the all but lost tang of the tangible. As such, the tongue and taste not only illuminate the shortcomings of binary gender theories based on either inner feeling or outer surface anatomy (or, either interior orifices or exterior appendages), but further discover a remarkable phenomenology of the body to be found in the writings of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig that moves beyond certain masculine tendencies lurking about the hand and observation (as described by Freud and Butler). The phenomenal experience of the other that yields either empathy (for Husserl), love/eros (for Marion), or hearing and heeding 'Thou shall not kill' (for Levinas) has much to learn from the orality of women's writing. The third body, as written by Cixous, can experience the self as selftaste (as considered by Derrida) and experiences the other as the taste of the other. It is, thereby, opened to a love or a justice (or an erotic justice) beyond the proclamation of Levinas that 'ethics is an optics' as well as any ethics as a mere haptics to be found in Husserl or Marion, where feeling seems always determined by the hand.