Emotions are Janus-faced: their focus may switch from how a person is feeling deep inside her, to the busy world of actions, words, or gestures whose perception currently affects her. The intimate relation between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ seems to call for a redrawing of the traditional distinction of mental states between those that can look out to the world, and those that are, supposedly, irredeemably blind.

This paper examines Hannah Arendt's claim from ‘Understanding and Politics’ that we need to determine what ‘makes it bearable for us to live with other people, strangers forever, in the same world and makes it possible for them to bear with us’. From the vantage point of bearing with strangers, it analyses in detail two of Arendt's essays not often treated extensively: ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ and ‘On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing’. Some implications of Arendt's position for (...) current debates about the construction of otherness are identified and assessed. It is argued that bearing with strangers offers unique insights into questions of personal identity and the nature of appropriate political and social bonds. Ultimately, the paper suggests that the idea of bearing with strangers puts Arendt's political thought and her key concepts in a new light and offers elements of a distinctively Arendtian account of politics. (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Arendt's claim from ‘Understanding and Politics’ that we need to determine what ‘makes it bearable for us to live with other people, strangers forever, in the same world and makes it possible for them to bear with us’. From the vantage point of bearing with strangers, it analyses in detail two of Arendt's essays not often treated extensively: ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ and ‘On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing’. Some implications of Arendt's position for (...) current debates about the construction of otherness are identified and assessed. It is argued that bearing with strangers offers unique insights into questions of personal identity and the nature of appropriate political and social bonds. Ultimately, the paper suggests that the idea of bearing with strangers puts Arendt's political thought and her key concepts in a new light and offers elements of a distinctively Arendtian account of politics. (shrink)

The long-standing debate between cognitive and feeling theories of emotion stems, in part, from the assumption that cognition and thought are abstract, intellectual, disembodied processes, and that bodily feelings are non-intentional and have no representational content. Working with this assumption has led many emotions theorists to neglect the way in which emotions are simultaneously bodily and cognitive-evaluative. Even hybrid theories, such as those set forth by Prinz and Barlassina and Newen, fail to account fully for how the cognitive and bodily (...) elements of emotion are integrated. As a result, such accounts are unable to provide an adequate characterization of the intentionality or phenomenology of emotions. I will argue that an enactive account of emotions, one which characterizes them as a way of engaging with and making sense of one’s surroundings, can help us to overcome this false dichotomy between cognitive and body elements. What I call ‘ affective framing’ is at the core of emotional experience. It is the way in which we engage with and appraise our surroundings in and through bodily feelings of caring, so that the bodily and cognitive elements of emotion necessarily are fused. The notion of affective framing not only helps to clarify the relationship between bodily and cognitive elements of emotion, but also offers a useful way to make sense of both the intentional directedness and phenomenal character of emotional experience. (shrink)

The article starts with a brief overview of the kinds of approaches that have been attempted for the presentation of Phenomenology’s view on the emotions. I then pass to Husserl’s unsatisfactory efforts to disclose the intentionality of emotions and their intentional correlation with values. Next, I outline the idea of a new, “normalized phenomenological” approach of emotions and values. Pleasure and pain, then, are first explored as affective feelings . In the cases examined, it is shown that, primordially, pleasure and (...) pain are recordings for our bodily and spiritual states resulting from our confrontation with beings and situations in the world. Delight and distress are, subsequently, approached as the first full-fledged emotive acts that animate or intentionally interpret pleasure and pain in specific ways. The elementary values of agreeableness and disagreeableness appear correspondingly to the latter in relation to the very pleasure or pain and to what has caused them. In other words, agreeable and disagreeable show how what we confront in the world weighs for us, what value it has for the embodied intentional consciousness, for its state and functioning as well as for its existentio-praxial possibilities in the lifeworld. (shrink)

I outline the early Heidegger's views on mood and emotion, and then relate his central claims to some recent finding in neuropsychology. These findings complement Heidegger in a number of important ways. More specifically, I suggest that, in order to make sense of certain neurological conditions that traditional assumptions concerning the mind are constitutionally incapable of accommodating, something very like Heidegger's account of mood and emotion needs to be adopted as an interpretive framework. I conclude by supporting Heidegger's insistence that (...) the sciences constitute a derivative means of disclosing the world and our place within it, as opposed to an ontologically and epistemologically privileged domain of inquiry. (shrink)