Abstracts
In this chapter I discuss Hans Bernhard Schmid’s account of shared feelings which elaborates on the idea that affective intentionality is a matter of world-directed feelings. I reconstruct the philosophical problem Schmid is seeking to solve, which I call The Problem of Shared Feelings. This problem concerns the conflict between two deep-seated intuitions: the intuition that we humans can come to feel together and the intuition that only individuals, and not groups, can be understood as legitimate subjects of feeling. I expose Schmid’s solution to this riddle which attempts to show that feelings can be shared in a non-metaphorical sense of the verb ‘to share’; the point being that collective affective intentionality can be claimed to be a matter of shared feelings. Seeking to motivate a suggestion concerning the terms in which we should conceive of collective affective intentionality, I articulate a question Schmid’s proposal may be argued to leave unanswered: what does it mean for two (or more) qualitatively different feelings to ‘match’ one another? I argue that, in order to offer a qualified answer to this question, we could appeal to a suggestion Schmid may be taken to make in a later version of his analysis of shared feelings: at the heart of a collective affective intentional episode we always find a shared concern. This thought, I propose, indicates a direction we could take in order to spell out a phenomenologically adequate account of collective affective intentionality along the lines of the view proposed at the end of Chap. 3.
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Notes
- 1.
The arguments I am going to discuss in what follows appeared for the first time in English in Schmid’s paper ‘Shared Feelings: Towards a Phenomenology of Collective Affective Intentionality’ (2008). A modified version of this analysis has been published in the fourth chapter of Schmid’s book Plural Action (2009). This latest version contains some additional observations that are fundamental for the view of collective affective intentionality I shall develop in this book. For this reason, I am going to systematically quote from the latest version of Schmid’s analysis, unless the referred to passages have been omitted in this later text. To be sure, there is an earlier German version of this analysis which appeared as part of Schmid’s contribution to the sixth Conference of the German Society of Analytic Philosophy (Berlin, September 2006). The argument developed in the present chapter makes use of a number of ideas and formulations I originally articulated in two papers that began with a review of Schmid’s proposal (cf. Sánchez Guerrero 2011, 2014).
- 2.
My claim that Schmid’s account of shared feelings stands as the unique attempt to elaborate on the idea that the intentionality of an emotion is inextricably intertwined with its phenomenology is restricted to the current (analytic philosophical) debate on collective intentionality. As we shall immediately see, Schmid takes himself to be elaborating on some suggestions made by Max Scheler ([1913] 2008). These are suggestions we briefly discussed above (in Sect. 1.1).
- 3.
Having discussed the neglect of affective phenomena in the context of the debate on collective intentionality, Schmid begins his problematization of the notion of a shared feeling as follows: ‘With this result, let me now turn to a metaphysical question. It is this: in what sense of the word are feelings to be genuinely shared? What does the term sharing really mean in this context?’ (2009, p. 69). Some pages before he tells us that, after having examined the structure of feelings towards, he is going to defend ‘the metaphysical claim that, when people genuinely share a feeling, there is a sort of phenomenological fusion between the consciousness of the participating individuals’ (p. 64; my emphasis).
- 4.
There is a sense of the expression ‘to share a feeling’ which is irrelevant for the present discussion. We often use this expression in order to refer to the act by means of which we communicate or make public our feelings.
- 5.
I have already made thematic this unspecificity of the verb ‘to share’ while discussing the idea of a shared intention above (in Sect. 3.2).
- 6.
There is no clue in the texts I am discussing to an answer to the first question. This, however, has no consequence for our discussion, since the second question assumes that by the term ‘intercognition’ Schmid does understand the mutual conscious awareness of the participants to the effect that they are having the same sort of affective experience.
- 7.
This interpretation is supported by a claim Schmid makes in a different passage in which he considers the fear ‘shared’ by a group of schoolchildren who are playing hooky. He writes: ‘The children might be enjoying their affective attunement in their fear, and even reach some affective agreement [i.e. a generally shared idea about the level of affective attunement expected to be reached in the relevant situation], but there is a sense in which these children’s fear isn’t genuinely shared, because the children’s feelings have different targets: each child is afraid of his or her own parent’s reaction’ (2009, p. 66). However, if this is really what Schmid is trying to suggest, this remark may be taken to contradict a claim he makes in the latest version of his analysis. This claim, which he articulates in analyzing a passage of Homer’s Iliad, concerns the idea that in order to constitute a shared feeling, the feelings of the involved individuals do not have to have the same target (not even the same focus). We shall come back to this point below (in Sect. 4.4).
- 8.
Sugden makes a diagnosis concerning the reason why the notion of a fellow-feeling has been neglected in the contemporary debate that draws on Smith. He contends that the reason is simply that this notion does not fit well into the frame of rational choice theory.
- 9.
This idea of a feeling of sharedness is clearly akin to what I call a sense of togetherness. However, I shall not try to explain this sense of togetherness by invoking a second-order feeling. On the contrary, I am going to appeal to something that is more fundamental than a first-order intentional feeling: a pre-intentional structure of experience (cf. the discussion in Sect. 6.4).
- 10.
The reason for doing so is presumably because calling such a complex state of affairs a (shared) feeling would be unacceptable for some philosophers. We have touched on a similar issue above (in Sect. 3.2) while discussing Michael Bratman’s account of a shared intention. In the next chapter (particularly in Sect. 5.4) I shall use the term ‘affective attunement’ to refer to a completely different phenomenon; a phenomenon that concerns our affective situatedness in a particular world.
- 11.
- 12.
As he tells us, it is precisely the prima facie implausibility of the idea that feelings can be shared in the strong sense of ‘sharing’, which he calls the straightforward sense, that motivates Schmid to examine Scheler’s notion of immediate feeling-together in the context of the debate on collective intentionality (see 2009, p. 70).
- 13.
Mikko Salmela does, in fact, raise an objection along these lines. He writes: ‘The ontological individuality of emotions […] is beyond doubt: only individual subjects feel emotions, as Schmid observes. However, this is not a problem for collective intentionality, for shared beliefs and intentions are also realized in the minds of individuals, and there is a considerable consensus that it is the content or mode of having those mental states that is collective rather than their ontological subject’ (2012, p. 37). As we have seen, even if we can speak of a ‘considerable consensus’, we cannot speak of unanimity in this respect (cf. Gilbert’s [2002] and Huebner’s [2011] view).
- 14.
For a recent defense of the idea that a direct perceptual grasp of other person’s intentions, feelings, etc. plays a role in social cognition, see Gallagher (2008). Already in Max Scheler we find this idea concerning a sort of direct perception of the affectedness of others. Scheler writes: ‘that “experiences” occur there [“in a subject”] is given for us in expressive phenomena—again, not by inference, but directly, as a sort of primary “perception”. It is in the blush that we perceive shame, in the laughter joy’ ([1913] 2008, p. 10). However, Scheler seems to be committed to the view that it is the fact that they occur (that they are being experienced by the relevant other), and not these experiences themselves, that are directly given to us in expressive phenomena.
- 15.
Schmid observes that Scheler, in a way, anticipated the distinction between bodily feelings on the one hand—here we should probably include what Scheler calls ‘sensible feelings’ and what he calls ‘vital feelings’—, and psychic feelings on the other. Scheler limits the phenomenon of immediate feeling-together to psychic feelings (cf. Schmid 2009, pp. 71–72). The reference here is to the taxonomy of feelings offered by Scheler in his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values ([1913–1916] 1973, pp. 328ff.) under the title ‘The Stratification of the Emotional Life’. This remark is crucial, since it makes clear that, in order to follow Scheler, one ‘only’ has to show that feelings towards can be shared in a strong sense of ‘sharing’. This is important given the very limited prospect of success of an endeavor aimed at showing that we can experience the bodily feelings of other persons.
- 16.
Schmid rejects Stan van Hooft’s (1994) interpretation of Scheler’s notion of an immediate feeling-together; an interpretation based on the idea that feeling together is a matter of the numerical identity of the intentional object of the emotions in question. Schmid stresses that Scheler has expressis verbis argued for the idea that the phenomenon of immediate feeling-together is a matter of experiencing together [Miteinandererleben] (cf. Schmid 2009, p. 69); as Schmid puts it, ‘[it is] a matter of the identity of the feeling as an emotional impulse (Gefühlsregung)’ (p. 72).
- 17.
According to Schmid, the solution he is offering to what I have called The Problem of Shared Feelings has already been outlined in the frame of the philosophical debate that followed Scheler’s analysis of the phenomenon of immediate feeling-together.
- 18.
Zahavi writes: ‘An effective way to capture this basic point is to replace the traditional phrase “subject of experience” with the phrase “subjectivity of experience”’ (p. 126). If I understand Zahavi correctly, the proposed term ‘subjectivity of experience’ refers to what Schmid calls the phenomenal subject.
- 19.
In a later paper, Schmid (2014a) coins the expression ‘plural self-awareness’ to refer to what I am calling here a sense of ourness. He is eager to differentiate this pre-reflective form of self-awareness from what is usually called self-reflection, ‘an attitude in which a subject makes itself the object of its cognitive, affective, or practical considerations’ (Schmid 2014a, p. 13). Self-awareness, Schmid writes, ‘is not a proper intentional “act” that is directed towards the subject, but rather a feature, or component, of an intentional act that is directed towards whatever it is the subject happens to have in mind’ (ibid.). Schmid argues that the sort of plural pre-reflective self-awareness that is at issue in a genuinely collective intentional act fulfills at the level of the group mind three roles self-awareness plays in the individual mind in unifying the mind and constituting selfhood. First, ‘[s]elf-awareness is the feature by which any of our occurrent beliefs, desires, feelings, or intentions present themselves to us as ours’ (p. 15). Second, ‘[i]t introduces the distinction between what is “self” and what is not’ (ibid.). Third, ‘self-awareness is the driving force behind the normatively unified mind and thus constitutes proper beliefs and goal-directed attitudes in terms of commitments, and thus our kind of agency’ (p. 16). Schmid summarizes by writing: ‘Self-awareness is being aware of one’s attitudes as one’s own, as attitudes that are one’s own perspective on something, and as one’s own commitments’ (pp. 16–17). The point is that at the level of the group mind plural self-awareness allows for common ownership, shared perspective, and joint commitment. In his book Wir-Intentionalität (2005), Schmid suggests that some ideas articulated in the context of the phenomenological tradition of thought may be read as pointing towards this idea of a plural pre-reflective self-awareness; an idea that, as he argues, may neutralize some of the central problems of plural subject theories (cf. the discussion in Sects. 3.2, 3.3 and 8.2). In Chap. 6 (particularly in Sect. 6.4), I shall tackle the issue of a pre-intentional structure of experience that might serve as a background for a participation in collective intentional episodes in terms of what, elaborating on Matthew Ratcliffe (2005, 2008), I shall call a feeling of being-together.
- 20.
It is by arguing for the possibility of what I am calling here a sense of plural selfhood (or a sense of we-selfhood)—and this is a notion that has to be differentiated from Gilbert’s notion of a plural subject, which refers to the ontic subject of an experience—that Schmid is, in my view, extending the idea of a character of mineness that, according to Zahavi, invariantly accompanies my experiences and pointing to the possibility of a sense of ourness that can structure some of my experiences (and, in veridical cases, does structure our experiences).
- 21.
As far as I can see, Schmid does not spell out this notion of a phenomenological fusion of feelings in later texts, either. In a brief response to a remark along these lines I articulated in a paper (cf. Sánchez Guerrero 2014), Schmid (cf. 2014b, p. 10) states in reference to this notion of a phenomenological fusion of feelings that it simply captures the idea that the participants are pre-reflectively aware of their emotionally expressed concern as theirs.
- 22.
Schmid declares to have taken up these conditions of adequacy from the debate immediately generated by Scheler’s suggestion in the German-speaking philosophical scene.
- 23.
The reason for doing so is not only because Schmid himself explicates this fourth condition in a more detailed way, thereby anticipating some sensible objections to the idea of a phenomenological fusion of feelings. Rather, the reason to focus on the last condition is because in the next section (Sect. 4.4) I shall try to point to a question related to this fourth condition Schmid’s proposal does not answer.
- 24.
This unclarity is presumably at the heart of Salmela’s criticism of Schmid’s argument. Salmela seems to think that one can only in an alternating (and mutually exclusive) way understand an experience either as my experience or as our experience. He writes: ‘The first problem with Schmid’s account concerns the phenomenological fusion of feelings. I believe that it is a contingent rather than a necessary condition of shared emotions. The main reason is phenomenological, namely the elusiveness of this experience. True enough, people may pre-reflectively interpret and experience their feelings as your or our, but such experience vanishes as soon as the ontological individual becomes reflexively aware of the feeling as her or his. This may happen any time during a fused experience, for, however initially interpreted as to its subject, I can always step back from my experience and recognize it as mine’ (2012, p. 38). I cannot see a reason why we should exclude the possibility of having a sense that one’s feeling that some worldly occurrence merits a response of a certain sort is part of our feeling that it does.
- 25.
This interpretation is supported by Schmid’s claim that ‘[s]elf-reflection only serves to make explicit the peculiar pre-reflective awareness characteristic of any kind of consciousness’ (p. 77).
- 26.
Although in the relevant passage Scheler is speaking of love, and more precisely of a particular phase of love ‘as it gradually re-emerges from the state of identification’ ([1913] 2008, p. 71), he claims that ‘there is built in, within the phenomenon itself, a clear-cut consciousness of two distinct persons’ (ibid.).
- 27.
- 28.
In response to a previous formulation of this critical review of his account (cf. Sánchez Guerrero 2011, 2014), Schmid (personal communication) has made me aware that I have erroneously asked for criteria that permit us to determine whether in a concrete case such a sense of ourness is warranted; the point being that we are not required to specify empirical criteria, but only truth conditions.
- 29.
I have been pointing to some unclarity in Schmid’s account. I believe, however, that it is clear enough that Schmid is not after the idea that in a collective affective intentional episode there is some ‘fused’ feeling which is experienced by the relevant group as a supraindividual centre of sentience. As pointed out, the appeal to the idea of a plural self-awareness is intended to resist the pressure to, in order to account for the idea of a genuinely collective affective response, invoke a plural subject of emotion. If there is some sense in which Schmid could take the feelings that are at the heart of a collective affective intentional episode to be experienced by the collective as such, it presumably would amount to a thought along the following lines: an emotion experienced by a collective is an emotion experienced by the participants as a collective.
- 30.
By ‘non-accidentally’ I mean that Adrian and Beatrice do not understand their experiences as experiences that merely happen to converge. We still have to elucidate (in the second part of this book) what characterizes such experiences—experiences structured by what I call a sense of togetherness.
- 31.
Here, I am elaborating on Schmid’s example. Seeking to illustrate the idea of qualitative differences that can be assumed to exist between the feelings of the involved individuals—differences of which the involved individuals are aware—, Schmid writes: ‘If the composer takes the man at the triangle and the member of the audience to share her joy, she will not, in her right mind, take them to experience her exuberant exaltation; rather, she will take the shared feeling to entail her own exuberant elation together with, for example, the audience member’s delight, and the man at the triangle’s silent satisfaction’ (2009, p. 79).
- 32.
Here, I am extending an example offered by Bennett Helm (2001, p. 69).
- 33.
Let me emphasize that an additional condition is met in those situations in which the individuals involved can be taken to be feeling in a genuinely joint manner. For, independently valuing the object in question, Adrian and Beatrice could show the simultaneous affective response just described. This is the reason why I talk here of a possible case of collective affective intentionality. (I shall spell out the condition at issue in the second part of this book.)
- 34.
We are going to come back (in Sect. 5.2) to this important point concerning the role a particular concern plays in relating the target of an emotion to what Helm (2001) calls its focus; a point we already touched on (in Sect. 2.3). Let me recall the main idea by pointing out that what ultimately grounds the intelligibility of a particular emotion is the significance or worthiness the focus of this emotion has for the relevant subject—who has, correspondingly, to be understood as a being able to care about the particular background object that constitutes the focus of this emotion. Schmid makes the point as follows: ‘For a focus-target relation to rationalize the mode of a feeling […] there has to be an additional feature in place: the subject has to have some concern that serves to make the relation between focus and target relevant to the subject. If a person simply doesn’t care about her own well-being, or about the safety of children, the fact that a dog might attack her, or the children, does not rationalize her feeling of fear. Insofar as they involve a concern, [emotional] feelings are an indicator of what matters to us’ (p. 65). As we shall see (in Sect. 5.2), according to Helm, emotional feelings are not merely an indicator of the worthiness certain things have for the subject of emotion. Rather, they co-constitute this significance.
- 35.
At this point of the discussion we cannot agree (yet) that this is a requirement a situation has to fulfill in order to be understandable as a collective affective intentional episode. Schmid explicitly—but, in my view, erroneously—claims that it is not. At any rate, a shared concern about some particular object cannot be what, in this situation, brings the participants’ minds to ‘affectively meet’.
- 36.
It seems to me that those philosophers who, like Huebner and Gilbert, maintain that we can speak of a genuinely collective intentional state just in case the collective itself can be understood as the ontic subject of the intentional state at issue—and these are the philosophers I am alluding to when I talk of someone who is profoundly puzzled by the metaphysical problem posed by the idea of a genuinely collective feeling—would only be satisfied with a proposal that shows that the intuition concerning the profoundly subjective character of feelings is compatible with the idea of a plural subject of emotion (as opposed to merely being compatible with the phenomenological idea of a non-misleading sense of plural selfhood that structures some of our emotional experiences). This is what I mean by ‘finally’ solving the metaphysical problem of collective emotions. One of the reasons why we could feel comfortable with a strategy that ‘continues to suspend’ the mentioned metaphysical issue is because it is an open issue—one which will probably not be settled soon—whether or not we, in general, necessarily have to conceive of a collective intentional state as a collective’s intentional state.
- 37.
Any theory of collective affective intentionality should, for reasons discussed throughout the first part of this book, be able to explain in which sense the involved individuals may be taken to participate in a joint emotional response, in a joint act of felt understanding. To avoid some problematic implications of the idea that the involved individuals participate in one and the same emotional experience—an idea that could be taken to suggest that there is some feeling at the group level, which could be experienced by the group as a supraindividual centre of sentience—it is advisable to talk of one and the same episode of collective affective intentionality. We can, thus, articulate the idea concerning the token-identity of the relevant act of feeling, which is fundamental for us to differentiate situations in which a number of individuals are feeling together from situations in which they are feeling alongside each other, in terms of a participation in one and the same moment of affective intentional community.
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Sánchez Guerrero, H.A. (2016). Shared Feelings and Joint Feeling: The Problem of Collective Affective Intentionality Specified. In: Feeling Together and Caring with One Another. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33735-7_4
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