Introduction

Recent philosophical work on emotions has led to a widespread acceptance of the importance and centrality to a human life of affective ways of relating to the world. Human beings are emotional beings. This means that, for healthy adult humans at least, a central way of being in touch with the world and with oneself is affective. Intentionality – the mind’s capacity to be directed at something beyond itself – is in the most central cases not a cold, detached, purely cognitive affair, but rather constitutively feelings-involving. It is affective intentionality.

In this text, I will address one problem which is not sufficiently dealt with in most of the recent literature on the topic. The problem I see is a general underestimation of the extent to which affective intentionality is essentially a bodily affair – the extent to which emotional feelings are essentially bodily feelings. The bodily feelings in question, however, are not the standard non-intentional bodily sensations, but rather crucial carriers of world-directed intentionality. This class of bodily feelings has been completely overlooked in most of non-phenomenological philosophy of mind. Consequently, most theories of human emotions and feelings recently advocated within the philosophy of mind have a crucial deficit in terms of phenomenological adequacy, particularly with regard to the role of the body’s involvement in affective experience.Footnote 1

Even otherwise praiseworthy approaches which see the need for a “unification” of intentionality and phenomenology of emotions have crucial deficits. Peter Goldie’s concept of “feeling towards” is useful in highlighting the fact that certain feelings can be about something in the external world; Sabine Döring’s theory of “affective perceptions” rightly stresses the unity of phenomenal and intentional, as well as motivational aspects; Bennett Helm construes emotions and other kinds of feelings as holistically embedded, intentional and motivational forms of ‘pleasures and pains’. These perceptual or experiential accounts of emotions are a significant advance over earlier cognitivist or component theories.Footnote 2 But just like their cognitivist predecessors, these approaches fail to account in a proper way for the bodily nature of emotional and other intentional affective states. My goal in this text is to show that the intentional feelings that constitute the core process of emotional experience in humans are essentially bodily feelings. Obviously, this is a non-trivial sense of the notions “body”, “bodily” and “bodily feeling” which have to be distinguished from other employments of these terms. While arguing for my main claim, I will inevitably also highlight a series of other central features of affective intentionality. Thereby, I will provide a framework for thinking about human-level affective states that, besides being theoretically sound, is descriptively adequate from a phenomenological standpoint.

A terminological note before I start: I am tempted to use the terms ‘emotion’, ‘intentional feeling’, and ‘affective state’ interchangeably, because I think that the points I make equally apply to all intentional feelings in humans. Thus I think that all affective states in humans are (or essentially involve) intentional feelings. However, I can’t argue for this very general point here. That is why I restrict myself mostly to talk about the least controversial class of intentional affective states: the emotions.Footnote 3

Affective intentionality

It is fortunate that the old dispute between cognitivist theories and feeling theories of emotion is no longer in the centre of the philosophical debate. It is now widely agreed that emotions are experiential states with intentional content. Emotions are about something. Moreover, they are evaluations of events, situations, objects or persons. This basic fact is no longer taken to imply that emotional states are ultimately nothing but cognitive states, as had been suggested by cognitivists such as Martha Nussbaum (2001) and Robert Solomon (1976). Rather, emotions and other intentional affective states are now seen as a type of intentional state sui generis. Besides being intentional, these affective states are phenomenologically salient and motivationally efficacious, and, moreover, hedonically valenced. They are hedonically valenced in that feeling them amounts to feeling good or bad in some specific respect (of course, we experience ambivalent or hedonically “mixed” emotions as well). Through their hedonic quality, these affective states contribute essentially to the dimension of well-being and suffering in human existence.

In contrast to cognitive theories, these recent approaches bring the phenomenology of emotions back to centre stage: Experienced emotions are essentially qualitatively conscious states – they have a “phenomenal character”. Moreover, intentionality and phenomenality of emotions are no longer seen as separate or even potentially separable, but rather as being essentially united in emotional experience. The term “affective intentionality” can, among other things, function to highlight this important fact – the fact that in emotional experience, intentionality and phenomenality stand and fall together. So if a change in the content of an emotion (“what it is about”) occurs, this will inevitably also be a change in the way we feel about the corresponding situation – and if the way an emotion feels (its qualitative character) has changed, you can be sure that its intentional content has also changed.Footnote 4 In the following, I give some considerations in favour of this unification view.

The main argument for the unification view of content and quality is that it offers the best available account of emotional content – i.e. an account of the way emotions and other affective states are forms of awareness of the world. In an emotion, an aspect of the world is experienced as significant in a specific respect: In fear, something is experienced as a threat; in anger, something is experienced as an offence; in shame, something about oneself is experienced as a defect (according to social or moral standards); in grief, something is experienced as an irrevocable loss; and so on. Put thus abstractly, one could be led to think of these significance-attributions as a matter of applying evaluative categories to some neutrally represented state of affairs. On this view, states of affairs would first be neutrally represented and then, in a separate step, evaluated. But such a view would be vulnerable to one of the standard objections against cognitive theories: It seems to be perfectly possible to perform significance-attributions like these without experiencing an emotion, even without feeling anything at all. Bennett Helm has called this, fittingly, the “problem of emotionality”. This problem has formed the basis of one of the decisive arguments against cognitive theories of emotion: Ultimately it accuses cognitivist views of a failure to make clear what is specific about emotions that distinguishes them from non-emotional judgements of significance.

Another consideration in favour of the unification view of affective content and affective quality has been brought forward by Peter Goldie and Sabine Döring. Both of them have repeatedly stressed that cases of clearly unwarranted emotions – i.e. emotions which persist even in the light of openly accessible contrary evidence, like fear of a dog we know to be harmless or anger at someone we know didn’t wrong us – strongly support the claim that affective contents are different in kind from non-affective mental contents. Whereas the contents of beliefs and judgments are in a strong sense sensitive to evidence – in the sense that a person cannot at the same time consciously and explicitly believe p and not-p (otherwise, the laws of belief-attribution as such would be violated) – emotional contents often seem to be inferentially encapsulated in characteristic ways. There is emotional conflict in a way in which there can’t be conflict of judgement or belief. To adequately characterize these conflict cases, we have to assume emotional contents that are such that they can be opposed to beliefs or judgments, without being themselves judgement- or belief-like. Instead, emotional contents seem to display a characteristic phenomenology while at the same time presenting the world as being a certain way. This observation is at least strong prima facie evidence for the unification view of content and quality. Moreover, as soon as the affective content changes in case of an unwarranted emotion, the felt quality changes or ceases as well (i.e. when fear turns into relief or anger into regret). It is quite hard to imagine a case in which this is not so; this would be a case in which a change in intentional content has no effect whatsoever on the felt quality of the emotion in question.Footnote 5

There are many ways to attribute significance to objects, events or situations, but only one of these ways really affects us – namely, the emotional attribution of significance. The phrase “affects us” has to be taken literally here: In emotional experience, we are – sometimes quite physically – moved, even “shaken” by something, which thereby thrusts its specific significance upon us. Of course, we also can execute non-affective evaluations as cold-blooded as we like, but these would not count as emotions. If we would try to construe the “being moved by something” as a purely intellectual operation, we would lose precisely that aspect which makes it a specifically emotional content. Views of emotions that try to loosen the connection between the factual and the evaluative dimension of emotional content constantly run in danger of being vulnerable to a version of the problem of emotionality. This can be called the phenomenological insight (because it was held by the early 20th century phenomenologists Scheler and Heidegger).

Following the path of the phenomenologists, I suggest that we instead should view affective intentionality in the following way: Emotions are experiences of significance (or ‘import’, as Bennett Helm fittingly calls it). In order to adequately construe the evaluational nature of emotional states and processes, I adopt an important part of the view of Bennett Helm. Helm regards emotions as species of pleasures and pains. Pleasures and pains, in turn, are characterized by Helm as intentional feelings of significance, which are, moreover, intrinsically motivational. To view emotions in this way solves the problem of emotionality from the outset: Pleasures and pains are by definition feelings – they are salient conscious states with a qualitative (i.e. hedonic) phenomenal character. Because of this, there is no danger of slipping into an overly intellectualistic view. But, as Helm stresses, pleasures and pains can also be states with rich intentional content; pleasures and pains can be about something in the world:

[E]motions do not merely involve some pleasant or painful sensation among other components, as cognitivist theories require. Rather, they are pleasures and pains and can be redescribed as such: to be afraid is to be pained by danger (and not by one’s stomach); such pain is not a component of, but is rather identical with, one’s fear. This means that emotional pleasures and pains, namely what one feels in having the emotion, are essentially intentional and evaluative, a sense of how things are going – whether well or poorly. (Helm 2002, 16)

Prima facie it might sound counter-intuitive to use the words “pain” and “pleasure” to refer to mental states that are intentionally directed to dangers, threats, or strokes of luck. Rather one might think of them as referring to (non-intentional) bodily sensations. But note that it is also quite idiomatical to say, for instance, that something in the world pleases us or that something pains us.Footnote 6 The ‘something’ in question can be some event or some state of affairs; something that we experience as significant, as affecting our well-being in certain respects, and thereby inclines us to act. Winning a prize pleases us, losing a fortune pains us, etc. It is quite common to characterize emotional experiences like this. This is meant by being quite literally affected, moved or shaken by an event or a situation: The situation or event itself pleases or pains us. The use of the terms “pleasure” and “pain” moreover has the advantage that it conveys a very direct sense of the fact that it is indeed the goodness or badness of something that is apprehended in emotional experiences. What is also easily seen here is a very direct, somatic connection to motivation: By being pleasant or painful in the way just outlined, affective states move us to act in specific ways. In the ideal cases, they go along with intelligent urges or tendencies to do what is called for by the significant situation in which we currently find ourselves.Footnote 7

These views of affective intentionality are a substantial improvement over the older cognitive theories and also over multi-component theories. Nevertheless, they are still not entirely satisfying. Not all of the uneasiness that emotional cognitivism causes in many has been put to rest. What is missing is a satisfying treatment of the bodily nature of emotional experience. There is a persistent intuition that William James was not so wrong after all when he posed the following question: “What would be left of an emotion if all of its felt bodily symptoms were taken away?” and then answered: “Nothing at all!” However, the crucial problem is: How to conceive of the bodily nature of emotional experience without losing the central insight that emotions are intentional feelings of significance – feelings which are intentionally directed not just at one’s body and its physiological changes, but rather at the world beyond the body?

Intentional bodily feelings – five central features

In contrast to the approaches by Helm, Goldie, Döring and other proponents of the recent trend in the philosophy of emotion, I opt for a more thorough inclusion of the ‘feeling body’ in the intentionality of emotions. It is time to accept a class of bodily feelings which cannot be viewed merely as forms of awareness of clearly localized bodily processes, but instead are crucially implicated in the awareness of something outside the body. There are more kinds of bodily feelings than those accepted by analytical philosophers in their standard inventories of the mind. In particular, there is a general bodily sensitivity to the world which is an integral part of ‘outer experience’. This aspect of human experience seems to have gotten lost from attention through an intellectualistic and narrowly mentalistic trend in much of Western thought, which might have been sustained even more by the well-known bias in favour of visual perception as a model case of experience. I will now characterize this much neglected kind of bodily feelings by first describing and discussing five central features (this section). After that I will sketch a more general account of notions such as “body”, “felt body”, “feeling body”, and “lived bodily”, as these are relevant for the issue under discussion (“Felt body, feeling and lived body”).

Diffuse localization

The bodily feelings in question are not clearly localizable but rather “diffusely” spread out through all or most of the perceptual body schema.Footnote 8 In contrast to a tickling on one’s lower back or a throbbing pain in one’s left forehead, these feelings either affect the body as a whole or are felt in a larger, only vaguely circumscribed body region. Often, it is our breast and stomach region were these feelings seem to be most intensively felt. It seems that in a number of cases, breathing functions as a kind of resonance field for the feelings in question. Just observe how breathing feels next time you’re afraid or angry or full of joy – some of the felt quality of these affective states is displayed in the way that your breathing feels in these situations. Other felt states also modify the basic vital dynamics involved in breathing, as is the case, for instance, in ‘existential feelings’ such as feeling strong and capable, feeling in control, or feeling unwelcome or ‘like a stranger’.Footnote 9

According to German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, the feeling body has a diffuse but nevertheless discernible structure, in which one can distinguish different fields or regions (cf. Schmitz 1995, ch. 3). However, our inner experience of our peculiarly structured body landscape is significantly different than, for instance, visual experience of our own body. Schmitz invites his readers to perform a simple phenomenological exercise (cf. p. 119): While we are to a certain degree able to “feel up and down” our own body, as we are certainly able to “look down” our own body, we cannot “feel down” our body in the same continuous, sequential way. Instead, what happens is that we feel certain regions as more sensationally salient, while others recede into the background of awareness, no matter how hard we try to get them into “felt focus”. Overall, the structure of our body as an object of inner awareness is much vaguer than in the case we observe our body visually. This vagueness of one’s experiential grip on one’s own felt and feeling body is what I mean by ‘diffuse localization’.Footnote 10

However, such introspective exercises as the one suggested by Schmitz are quite hard to perform in the midst of emotional experience. Most of the time, in having feelings of the kind I am describing, one’s attention is not directed at the body, but rather at what goes on in the external world beyond the body. This brings us to the second crucial feature of these feelings:

World-directed intentionality

The feelings in question are manifestations of affective intentionality. They are what Goldie calls ‘feeling towards’, i.e., an awareness of significant events, situations or objects in the emoter’s environment. While experiencing events or situations as significant, the felt body is resonating in specific ways that disclose the subjective significance of the event perceived. That is what is meant by the terms “being affected”, “moved” or “shaken” by something that thereby reveals its significance to us. Looked at rightly, this connection turns out to be so close that it makes sense to view bodily feelings of this kind as inseparable aspects of the experiential states in question.Footnote 11 It is not merely a contingent causal connection between perception (or thought) and feeling as separable components, but rather a phenomenal unity: the felt body is itself that through which we grasp what goes on around us.

In fear, for example, we feel as if pushed down by a threatening external force – a bodily tendency that is even more clearly perceivable in states of shock or sudden surprise. The bodily dynamics in these cases can be described as a kind of sudden narrowing; we feel as if the volume of our body is shrinking as effected by the working of an external force. An opposing tendency in the dynamics of intentional bodily feelings is a characteristic widening experience that we have in states of extreme joy, well-being or pride. A good example is the feeling of satisfaction after one’s work is done: Here, we might feel a kind of inner widening, an extension of our body volume, which is felt as something thoroughly positive and lets us feel quite “at home” in our current surroundings. In cases like this, it is our grasp of our current positive situation that consists in part in this widening of the felt body.

This may sound somewhat vague. I have so far used the term “body schema” to characterize the sort of bodily experience that I have in mind. This term is taken from Shaun Gallagher’s recent study How the Body Shapes the Mind (Gallagher 2005). Gallagher’s crucial distinction is the one between body image and body schema. The body image is the conscious image or percept that a person has of her own body – the way the body appears in her perceptual field. The body schema, on the other hand, is the way the body shapes and constraints the perceptual field – this term refers to the structure one’s body imposes upon experience. The crucial point in the way I make use of the term ‘body schema’ is this: The body schema is not something towards which experience is directed, but rather something through which experience is focused on something else, for example on something going on in the outside world. Gallagher calls the body schema “prenoetic” – which I take to mean, somewhat contrary to Gallagher himself, that it is pre-structuring conscious experience while being itself only indirectly accessible to introspection (and most probably not fully). One has to actively focus on one’s bodily dynamics; one has to know that they are there, so to speak, to genuinely realize the schema’s involvement in experience. This potential accessibility (at least of aspects) of the body schema in introspection may be seen as introducing a severe complication into the distinction between body schema and body image – it seems that the body schema, or at least parts of it, can be brought into conscious focus and thereby moves closer to the body image. But they are still not the same: Even while we’re consciously aware of, e.g. the abrupt narrowing of our body volume in fear, we’re still primarily focused on what fears us and not on our body merely as our body. Rather, the now consciously felt bodily tendency is experienced as an integral aspect of our fear: for instance, as a bodily feeling of being threatened (see also point 4. below).

In view of the complication just mentioned it is not surprising that there is some dispute about whether the bodily dimension of emotional experience is a matter of the body image or a matter of the body schema.Footnote 12 With some due reluctance, I opt for the claim that the body schema is what we are looking for. In emotional experience, we are not consciously focusing on our body, but rather have a bodily feeling towards something outside our body – towards a particular threat, an offence, a loss, or whatever else there may be that is or might be significant for our well-being. This is even the case when we experience an emotion that involves great bodily turmoil – even when our heart is racing and our blood seems to boil, we are primarily focused on what angers or what pleases us and not on our bodily state. In these cases, the bodily feeling is part of the structure of the affective experience, and thereby contributes to its content. In a way, the bodily feeling is part of the way the significant event or situation is presented in experience – call it an affective mode of presentation.Footnote 13 Let me illustrate this further.

As Ratcliffe (2005, 47/48) has recently suggested, the sense of touch can function as a model case for illustrating how the ‘felt body’ is involved in emotional experience. In touching an object, we are simultaneously aware of our body and of something outside of it, and we are aware of the object we touch precisely through the way some part of our body is feeling. When we touch a hot stone, “it” feels hot – what does the “it” refer to? Well, simultaneously to the way our hand feels and to the hot stone that we are “in touch” with. Usually, the feeling is a feeling of the object through a certain sensitivity of our body – in the first place, it is a transparent experience of what we are in touch with, with one’s own body only collaterally present in that experience. The bodily feeling discloses the object to us. In this sense, it functions as a vehicle of perception. That is why the role of the body schema in emotional experience can be thought of as an extension or (metaphorical) “generalization” of the sense of touch. It is not just objects, temperature or pressure disclosed through the surfaces of specific body parts (as in touch), but rather significant events or states of affairs disclosed through diffuse, holistic bodily feelings. In this way, emotional feelings are a bodily sensitivity for what is significant in the world. In German, there is a locution that gets at what is meant here: We say “Wir spüren es am eigenen Leib”Footnote 14, and this we say not only when we feel the heat quite literally, when we are getting beaten up or caressed or are involved in other kinds of direct bodily interaction, but also when something happens that “touches us” emotionally.

Hedonic valence

Closely related to the second is a third important feature of these intentional bodily feelings: their hedonic valence, which brings us back to Bennett Helm’s talk of pleasures and pains as the emotional core processes: Most, if not all of these holistic intentional feelings are either positive or negative – experiencing them means feeling either good or bad (which usually has implications for subsequent motivation; quite often, such a feeling already inclines or “poises” us to act in specific ways). However, this does not mean that these feelings open up a primitive pleasure/displeasure valence continuum, as was claimed in some simplistic old-school psychological theories of emotion. Rather, the valence of the feelings in question cannot be properly separated from the significance of what is experienced in emotional states.Footnote 15

Here’s an example: Imagine a colleague offends you; let’s say he drops a remark implicating your alleged lack of effort, while you think and, for that matter, know that you work as hard as anybody in your department. This remark of your colleague may hurt you quite literally. You cannot truly separate the ‘hurtful aspect’ of your emotional experience from the evaluative content of your anger. You feel offended – something that can quite literally feel like a slap in your face, so it is definitely a bodily experience, a bodily feeling in the sense just explained. But feeling offended by a remark is equally and simultaneously an experience of someone having deliberately wronged you, or of someone standing in a certain very negative relationship to you, or of someone taking up a hostile and unjustified stance towards you, etc. The correct way to describe an emotional episode like this is the one used by Bennett Helm: You feel literally pained by the offence – and this pain is inextricably both: felt in the body and intentionally directed at the offence and the offender.

Self-consciousness

The fourth feature of intentional bodily feelings is a kind of combination of the previous two. It is the dimension of emotional self-consciousness. Emotional contents display a peculiar double structure. Emotions reveal to us not only what is significant out in the world, but also what is going on with ourselves – emotional experience reveals to us, to put it in colloquial terms, “how things are going for us”, how things stand with regard to our personal well-being. Emotional intentionality is thus both a matter of outer experience and an important dimension of self-consciousness or even self-knowledge.

Now, it should be obvious from the way I introduced the unificationist approach to emotions that I am committed to the claim that the outward-directed and self-directed aspects of affective intentionality are only intelligible as the two sides of the same coin. They cannot be separated into distinct components. Still, we can describe emotional experience as an interrelation of two (conceptually) distinguishable experiential structures: While afraid, you experience something as dangerous and at the same time ‘you’ feel vulnerable in the relevant respect. But your experience of the danger is not separate from, but rather consists in your feeling thus vulnerable. Each emotional experience has that structure: Something affects you, and thereby you feel affected by it. Your ‘minding’ and something else’s ‘mattering’ are constitutively interrelated – there cannot be the one without the other.

My claim is that this structure is a bodily tendency. Your feeling affected by something is a bodily experience. Your emotional “feeling of yourself” is a bodily feeling of being positively or negatively affected by something out there. The felt body is the “sounding board” (to use William James’ term) of things affecting you adversely or favourably. We can call this the bodily dimension of personal well-being (as well as personal suffering). So feeling bad emotionally (as opposed to feeling bad due to physical illness or injury) is not a disembodied, intellectual appreciation of things going badly – although it surely is some kind of appreciation of things going badly. It is also and essentially a bodily experience. If you are angry and feel offended by your colleague, you have a self-disclosing bodily feeling. It is not easy to describe it exactly, but I think you have the physical impression of being “pushed down”, of being literally “oppressed” by an external force. In this way, emotional pain is essentially bodily. Its bodily nature is not a separable “aspect” that is merely added on to an otherwise purely intellectual appreciation of what’s going on; rather, it is the very core of the painful emotional experience.Footnote 16

Motivational force

The fifth feature concerns the relation to motivation and action. Through their intrinsically evaluative nature, which on my account amounts to their being correctly describable as ‘pleasures’ and ‘pains’ (feature 3 above), affective states are intrinsically motivational. There seem to be some exceptions, but most of the time, experiencing an emotion amounts to at least being inclined to act in some way, where the action one feels drawn to is in most cases intelligibly related to the object of one’s emotion (flight in fear; punishment in anger; hiding in shame, mourning in sorrow, etc.). There is a feature of the bodily feelings under discussion which relates directly to the motivational nature of emotions. In many cases, these feelings have what one could tentatively call a “motor component”. These feelings can be described as impulses or urges towards specific or unspecific movements. Not all of them are full-blown action tendencies. Rather, what is often the case is that these feelings can be accurately described as felt bodily urges to perform movements which, if actually performed, would not amount to actions in the proper sense of the term. We can roughly distinguish three cases:

  1. (a)

    Full-blown action tendencies: e.g. feeling a bodily urge to slap another’s face in anger – feeling a bodily urge to run away from what fears us – feeling a bodily urge to kiss and caress another in love, etc.

  2. (b)

    Tendencies towards expressions of emotions: e.g. feeling a bodily urge to jump up in the air in joy – feeling a bodily urge to shout out in anger, or to cry out in sorrow… (There is a further distinction here between expressive actions – like jumping in joy – and mere expressions, like crying. But although there are some clear-cut cases on both sides, it is certainly not a clear-cut distinction throughout.)

  3. (c)

    “Impossible movement” impulses: e.g. wanting to sink into the ground in shame; wanting to “explode” in anger; wanting to “embrace the world” in intensive joy or euphoria; wanting to literally “melt” in affection, etc.

In general, we can say that intentional feelings are often directly linked to movement impulses of various kinds. In this way, feelings mark the onset of a certain range of bodily activities, some of which qualifying as full-blown actions. As the term ‘emotion’ already indicates: Emotions set us in motion. This point also connects back to Gallagher’s use of the term ‘body schema’: Gallagher employed this term particularly in relation to motor processes, with a strong focus on actions and action schemas. This close connection of goings-on on the level of body schema to actions and activities is a central ingredient of the account that I put forward.

This concludes the catalogue of central features of intentional bodily feelings. The list is not meant to be exhaustive, but it comprises the most important aspects.Footnote 17 With the inclusion of these simultaneously self- and world-disclosing, hedonically valenced, and intrinsically motivational bodily feelings, perceptual or experiential accounts of emotion and other kinds of (intentional) feelings are supported and sustained, however in a modified and phenomenologically enriched way. Döring, Goldie and Helm are right in seeing concretely occurring affective states as evaluative experiences, but it is crucial to add a description of how these affective evaluations are actually performed and how they thereby differ from other kinds of perceptual and experiential states. Only this addition renders accounts of human feelings ultimately adequate. However, what is still missing is a more thorough explication of the notion of “body” and “bodily” which has so far been presupposed in the discussion. To this I now turn.

Felt body, feeling and lived body

In order to generalize the employment of the term ‘body’ in the above descriptions it is useful to distinguish between several ways of referring to bodily involvement in experience. The most common employment in the field of analytical philosophy of mind is what we can call the ‘felt body’ – the body as it is felt in so-called bodily sensations. Bodily sensations in this sense are (bodily) pains, pleasures, itches, tickles as well as states of proprioceptive awareness. In these cases, one’s body figures in experience as an object of awareness. Usually, some more or less clearly circumscribed body part or region is experienced as modified in some specific way. The body here is just an object of sensation. This is the most common and least problematic sense of ‘body’ in relation to experience.Footnote 18

The most important way in which the body is involved in affective experience differs markedly from this. If we are affectively relating to something outside our body, the body is not felt as an object of awareness but rather is itself the vehicle of the intentional feeling. Thus, in this case it is not the felt body but rather the feeling body – the resonance field through which we are affectively aware of something else. Through its specific, often hedonic modification, the feeling body discloses the significance of something and thereby functions as the prime channel of affective experience. It is not an added-on accompaniment of the affective process but rather its very core. In this sense, the feeling body is not an object to which we have some specific way of epistemic access. Instead, it is the very core of our affective being in the world. While it might make sense to say that we ‘have’ our body when we refer to it as the kind of object of awareness which is disclosed in the standard bodily sensations (‘felt body’), we rather have to say that we ‘are’ our body when it comes to the second usage. Insofar as we refer to the body as the feeling body, the body is the basis of our deep existential evaluations, and through this the very core of our being as persons. With it, we reach the dimension in which existential value is truly constituted, since it is here where ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (pleasure and pain in Helm’s extended sense) is ultimately experienced. Omitting this dimension of deep qualitative experience amounts to construing ourselves as evaluative zombies – in effect, as beings to which nothing matters. To recover this basic sense of bodily experience is therefore a central task in the project of constructing a theory of the embodied person or embodied self.

It makes sense to generalize this latter kind of bodily involvement somewhat further so that it extents beyond the realm of affective states and encompasses human experience in general. Not all human experience is clearly marked as hedonic, and so not all human experience is affective. Still, all human experience involves the body in the second of the two senses so far distinguished. In order to demarcate the body’s involvement in affective experience (the ‘feeling body’) from its more general figuring in experience, I suggest for the latter case to speak of the body rather as the ‘lived body’ – a notion that figured crucially in Merleau-Ponty’s strongly embodiment-oriented phenomenology of experience.Footnote 19 The ‘lived body’ is the body insofar as it is the vehicle of experience of the world. It is the structure-giving background of experience, the emphatic standpoint of the subject of experience and the background of all her comportments. It probably makes sense to subsume under this notion also other forms of bodily awareness, as those in which the body or certain body regions themselves figure in experience as objects of awareness (‘bodily sensation’). In this sense, the lived body is the subjectively felt body in a wide sense – a person’s body insofar as it is accessible from within, either as itself standing in the direct focus of awareness, or else as the structure-yielding framework of all other forms of experience.

It is a worthwhile task to further analyse the structure of bodily awareness along the line of the notions here introduced. The work of Merleau-Ponty provides a valuable guide especially to the ‘lived body’ in its various facets. However, all I want in the present context is to stress the importance of these various ways of bodily awareness and put the notions of the feeling body and the lived body back on the agenda of philosophical emotion theory. As the philosophy of emotion stands in need to be contextualized and embedded sufficiently within the philosophy of personhood more generally, the acceptance of the importance of the lived body is an indispensable step on this way. The lived body, and particularly its more specifically hedonic “subregion” which I call the feeling body, forms the basis of a person’s embodied existence in the world. It is that basic resonance field from which all experience and all evaluative awareness originates.

In order to show that the nature of the feeling body as well as the lived body is usually not seen in the analytical and naturalistic philosophy of mind, I want to conclude with a quick discussion of one such approach. Although Jesse Prinz has the praiseworthy goal of re-introducing the body as a central ingredient into philosophical emotion theory, he fails to acknowledge most of what is relevant about this overdue addition. I take his misconstrual of bodily experience to be symptomatic of the impoverished understanding of bodily phenomena in wide parts of the contemporary philosophical landscape.

The failure of Prinz’ embodied appraisal theory

In putting forward his so-called embodied appraisal theory, Prinz follows in the footsteps of William James and Antonio Damasio, two defenders of bodily-feeling-theories of emotion. His strategy is rather simple: Take what’s good in Damasio’s theory, and add to it a philosophically sound account of the intentionality of affective states. In terms of its general tendency, this strategy is certainly praiseworthy. However, Prinz’ account of affective intentionality falls fundamentally short of being adequate.

Just as Damasio does, Prinz places certain hedonic bodily feelings at the centre of his theory of emotion. He shares with Damasio the basic Jamesian intuition that felt bodily changes must be the core of affective experience. Nothing but a “neutral states of intellectual perception” would remain, as William James famously put it, when we “try to abstract from consciousness [of an emotion] all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms” (James 1884, 193). This is of course fully in the spirit of the account offered here. Damasio puts much emphasis on rarely noticed, unremarkable bodily background feelings that tacitly influence experience, thought and decision-making. His somatic marker hypothesis is centred on the claim that certain felt body states ‘mark’ perceptions and thoughts as positive or negative and thereby function as crucial aids in decision-making. However, Damasio stays quite close to James’ original account in conceiving of these somatic markers as inner perceptions of states of the body only; states that are then somehow attached to (non-affective) perceptions or cognitions. So, according to him, these feelings are not directed at the world beyond the body, they lack intentionality. This restricted view of evaluative bodily feelings is of course unsatisfying. Concerning the intentional nature of affective states I am concerned with, Damasio leaves too much of a gap between the hedonic bodily feeling which is crucial for affective evaluations, and what is evaluated through it.

In this respect, Jesse Prinz advances significantly over Damasio. Prinz denies that emotional bodily feelings have the body as their intentional object. Instead, he constructs a representational theory of emotional content which is intended to show that these feelings, although caused by bodily changes and felt “in” the body, are nevertheless primarily about significant events and objects in the world. Prinz puts it such that these feelings register bodily changes – so in a sense, they carry information about one’s bodily state – but they represent things going on outside the body, usually ‘core relational themes’ (cf. Prinz 2004a, 58). According to Prinz, emotional mechanisms have been “set up to be set off” by those existentially significant events and objects. That’s what he means when he says “emotions are like smoke alarms” (cf. Prinz 2004b, 82) – detecting significant objects and events is these feelings’ evolutionary function. The felt body merely is the vehicle through which they fulfil this task (Prinz 2004a, ch. 3).

I agree with the basic idea in its barest outline: The felt body is that through which one affectively apprehends something significant. Only collaterally, these feelings also inform about aspects of one’s current bodily condition. However, my overall conception of affective intentionality differs in fundamental respects from that of Prinz. The main point of divergence concerns the experiential nature of emotions: Smoke alarms are like zombies, they need not and they do not have experiences. In that respect, emotions are exactly not like smoke alarms, since they usually are forms of awareness of the matters of concern to which they are “calibrated”. Emotional experience discloses or makes manifest what is currently of relevance to us. This experiential nature of emotions is entirely missing in Prinz’s account. What emotions do and how they do it is much closer entwined than Prinz’s account allows. Emotions, at least in the standard cases, are transparent, whereas the bodily mechanisms that Prinz has in mind are entirely blind. This is also evidenced by the fact that even creatures incapable of conscious awareness could be equipped with the affective alarm mechanisms that Prinz talks about. Emotional mechanisms that are sufficiently like human emotions certainly have to be experiential states, so they require consciousness – consciousness of significant goings-on in the world, not merely consciousness of bodily changes. Prinz totally neglects the experiential nature of emotional states.

There may be a causal route from external event to bodily changes to emotional bodily feeling. A story about a causal route like this, probably enhanced by some evolutionary considerations, might be a useful analysis of many animal emotions. Something like this story might also be true about affective states in humans. But it cannot be the whole truth about human emotions – not even the most important part of this truth. Describing this causal route does not in any way yield a characterization of human-level emotional content. In the human case, Prinz illegitimately cuts the connection between how an emotion feels and what it is about. His theory thereby fails to respect what Peter Goldie has rightly claimed to be a central adequacy condition for any philosophical account of human feelings: That it respects the personal point of view – the point of view of the subject of emotional experience.Footnote 20 That means: One has to respect and take into account the way a person relates affectively to the world around her – from her own experiential and evaluative perspective.Footnote 21 Losing this perspective amounts to losing our minds. There is nothing distinctively mental or personal left once we leave out the perspective of the experiencing subject.