Abstract
In this paper, I wish to explore whether and how emotions build on a state of being motivated that is linked to character and requires the positive contribution of habit. Drawing on phenomenological accounts of motivation (most notably Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s), I argue that the relation between emotions and character depends on the institution of an emotional space, which is responsible for our sensitivity to the values of the felt situation and yet it is open to changes and revisions.
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Notes
Not by chance, the position-taking at stake in habituality is ultimately rooted in the structure of time consciousness, and more precisely in the net of intentional acts that underlie our memories and expectations (Hua IV, p. 227; 1989, p. 239).
This is an important aspect that characterises Husserl’s account of pre-reflective experience, which is not as unchangeable and stable as it is often supposed (see, for instance, Ratcliffe’s critique of Husserl on the sense of reality: Ratcliffe 2008, pp. 70ff). The notion of affective background in Husserl is also very close to that of mood, as shown by Lee (1998) and Quepons Ramiréz (2015).
As is well known, Ideas II addresses several notions of the I (e.g. the self of the lived body, psyche, spirit), which are not equivalent to each other, although all of them are grounded on the transcendental unity of the ego. For a discussion of this problem, see Ferrarin (2017). In this paper, however, my argument is limited to the notion of personal character.
For Husserl’s notion of style, see Meacham (2013, pp. 16–17): “Because style is instituted, it is constantly in the process of reforming itself by referring-back to its own developmental history in such a manner that its history is continuously acting upon it in new ways. At the same time, its history is retroactively transformed in its own development. And yet, an individual style retains its identity precisely on the basis of this continuous back-referral, because it refers back to an idiosyncratic pathway of development unique to that ego”.
Contrast this with Scheler’s view of the value-laden “shell” carried along by each individual and whose law of formation is prescribed—rather than instituted—by the value structure of the milieu (Scheler 1973, p. 100): “Man is encased, as though in a shell, in the particular ranking of the simplest values and value-qualities which represent the objective side of his ordo amoris, values which have not yet been shaped into things and goods. He carries this shell along with him wherever he goes and cannot escape from it no matter how quickly he runs. He perceives the world and himself through the windows of this shell, and perceives no more of the world, of himself, or of anything else besides what these windows show him, in accordance with their position, size, and colour. The structure and total content of each man’s environment, which is ultimately organised according to its value structure, does not wander or change, even though he himself wanders further and further in space”.
For a discussion of Husserl’s account of emotions with respect to the relation between their presentational and affective dimensions see Drummond (2013).
In his course notes from the College de France (1954–1955) on Institution and Passivity, Merleau-Ponty takes into account the concept of the institution of feelings by referring to Proust. Even though Merleau-Ponty was more interested in spelling out the problem of self-delusion and narcissism in Proust’s description of love, Merleau-Ponty notices that emotions are bound to the felt situation according to a process of sedimentation. In the case of Swann’s falling in love, Merleau-Ponty notices that “love is not created by circumstances, or by decision; it consists in the way questions and answers are linked together—by means of an attraction, something more slips in, we discover not exactly what we were seeking, but something else that is interesting. The initial Sinngebung [is] confirmed, but in a different direction, and yet that is not without a relation with the initial donation of sense” (Merleau-Ponty 2010, p. 39). Merleau-Ponty’s idea is that the relation between character, motives, and emotions is structured along a process of institution, which coincides with “the foundation of a personal history on the basis of contingency” (Merleau-Ponty 2010, p. 36). For a discussion of emotions as institutions in Merleau-Ponty see Maclaren (2017).
As shown by Heinämaa (2008), Merleau-Ponty employs the notion of sedimentation to account for the necessary temporary relations resulting between perceivable objects and the constitutive originarity of the body. Far from outlining a mere accumulation of events and experiences, the process of sedimentation refers to the emergence of spontaneity out of contingency.
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Acknowledgements
I presented shorter versions of this paper on the occasion of the following meetings: the conference Aesthetics of Emotions. Art and the Cognitive Sciences organised by Prof. Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis at the University of Milan in October 2016, the staff work-in-progress meeting of the UCD School of Philosophy in November 2016, and the 48th Meeting of the Husserl Circle in July 2017. I would like to thank all the participants in these events for the opportunity to discuss this paper and for their encouraging feedbacks. I am also grateful to Fabrizio Desideri, Alessandra Fussi, Alfredo Ferrarin, Niall Keane, Alice Pugliese, Jeremy Smith, and Salvatore Tedesco for reading and commenting on previous drafts of this paper. The completion of this article was made possible by research grants funded by the University of Milan in collaboration with ACRI and the Irish Research Council for Social Science and Humanities.
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Magrì, E. Emotions, Motivation, and Character: A Phenomenological Perspective. Husserl Stud 34, 229–245 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-017-9221-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-017-9221-4