waldenfels lived body

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The role of the lived-body in feeling

Bernhard Waldenfels

Published online: 18 July 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract Feelings not only have a place, they also have a time. Today, one can

speak of a multifaceted renaissance of feelings. This concerns philosophy itself,

particularly, ethics. Every law-based morality comes up against its limits when

morals cease to be only a question of legitimation and begin to be a question of

motivation, since motives get no foothold without the feeling of self and feeling of

the alien. As it is treated by various social theories and psychoanalysis, the self is

not formed through the mere acquisition or change of roles, but rather through aprocess that is susceptible to crises, a process shaped by affective bonds and sep-

arations. Learning, which is the theme of pedagogy, loses its hold whenever it is

confronted by disinterest and listlessness. In neurobiology, the increased signifi-

cance of those zones of the brain that are connected with the realization of feelings

makes the brain, accordingly, no mere apparatus that processes data, but a living

organ that selects and evaluates what is important. Finally, cross-cultural

comparison shows the extent to which the one-sided preference for understanding

and willing, which is the mark of Western rationalism, arises from a typical, not to

mention a highly masculine attitude toward the world and life, as many differentstudies on gender difference stress (In reference to this perspective, see Seethaler,

Gefuhle und Urteilskraft. Ein Pladoyer fur die emotionale Vernunft, 1997). The

following reflections provide a historical orientation directed toward a new deter-

mination of feelings. This new determination of feelings is phenomenological and

takes the pathetic character of experience, nourished by the corporeality of expe-

rience as its point of departure.

Translated by Christina M. Gould ( )

Department of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

B. Waldenfels

Department of Philosophy, University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany

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Cont Philos Rev (2008) 41:127142

DOI 10.1007/s11007-008-9077-6


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Keywords Feeling Affectivity Pathos Lived-body Phenomenology

1 Introduction

Feelings not only have a place, they also have a time. Today, one can speak of a

multifaceted renaissance of feelings. This concerns philosophy itself, particularly,

ethics. Every law-based morality comes up against its limits when morals cease to

be only a question of legitimation and begin to be a question of motivation, since

motives get no foothold without the feeling of self and feeling of the alien. As it is

treated by various social theories and psychoanalysis, the self is not formed through

the mere acquisition or change of roles, but rather through a process that is

susceptible to crises, a process shaped by affective bonds and separations. Learning,

which is the theme of pedagogy, loses its hold whenever it is confronted bydisinterest and listlessness. In neurobiology, the increased significance of those

zones of the brain that are connected with the realization of feelings makes the

brain, accordingly, no mere apparatus that processes data, but a living organ that

selects and evaluates what is important. Finally, cross-cultural comparison

shows the extent to which the one-sided preference for understanding and willing,

which is the mark of Western rationalism, arises from a typical, not to mention a

highly masculine attitude toward the world and life, as many different studies on

gender difference stress (In reference to this perspective, see Seethaler,Gefuhle und

Urteilskraft. Ein Pladoyer fur die emotionale Vernunft, 1997). The followingreflections provide a historical orientation directed toward a new determination of

feelings. This new determination of feelings is phenomenological and takes the

pathetic character of experience, nourished by the corporeality of experience as its

point of departure.

2 The repression and the return of feelings

Feelings occupy a precarious position in Modernity. Of course everyone knows that

there are feelings, but how are they given and where? Our valuation of them

fluctuates between disparagement and ardor. Whoever makes an appeal to feeling as

to an oracle within his breast tramples underfoot the roots of humanity1 as

Hegel wrote in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: The anti-human, the

merely animal, consists in staying within feeling and being able to communicate

only at that level.2 Yes, there are feelings, but merely as an undeveloped, dim, and

wordless beginning. At the same time, Faustnot without ulterior motivessings

to Gretchen the high praise of feelings: call it Bliss! Heart! Love! God!/I do not

have a name/For this. Feeling is all;/Names are but sound and smoke befogging

heavens blazes.3 Whenever such conflicting evaluations arise, it is obvious that

1 Hegel (1977, p. 43).2 Hegel (1977, p. 43).3 von Goethe (1961, p. 327).

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there is a secret complicity; one blames or praises beyond all measure what one does

not easily endure. Heinrich Heine pours water into the wine of German feelings. In

one text, which he wrote in 1854 shortly before his death, he explains, It is

characteristic that our German rogues are always affixed to a certain sentimentality.

They are not cold clever rogues, but villains of feeling. They have the temperamentthat takes the warmest interest in the fate of those whose destiny or fate they steal,

and one cannot get rid of them.4

The modern subjectivizing of feeling is reflected in the constant fluctuation

between appreciation and devaluation of feeling. This process correlates precisely

with being disenchanted with the cosmos. As the very quintessence of causally

explainable and controllable mechanisms, nature is henceforth not only free of

sense, but also free of feeling. The eternal silence of infinite space may trigger a

shiver, but this is a mere remnant of feeling that throws the observer back on

himself. As Husserl shows in hisCrisistext, the reduction of the cosmic lifeworld toa physical external world is made up for with the complementary abstraction of a

psychological inner world.5 From now on, everything that cannot be accounted for

cognitively as material properties, or practically as expediency, belongs to the realm

of feelings. In their elementary form, feelings are privatestates of a subject: I have

the feeling that ; how should I know that you feel something similar? Quasi-

physical analysis leads to the acceptance of atomic sense-data, often called

sensation, which wanders around seeking a connection. As Lichtenberg quizzically

noticed, we treat affects like blemish make-up that deceives us about the rawness

of sensations.

6

As long as they are left to themselves, feelings are considered to beirrational, obeying no rules. Descartess separation of soul/spirit and body gives rise

to a dual sphere of feeling in which mental feelings such as pride and grief are taken

to be higher and are set off from base or low animal feelings such as lust or disgust.

Also, the world of feeling has its part maudite. There are indeed social feelings

but they are context-specific and can, if necessary, be set off against ones own

feelings. Possessive individualism extends to feelings. In this way, feelings

gradually lose their worldliness. Initially, feeling begins only with ones self. There

is a truth in this, but only a half-truth. It is just this impoverishment of the affective

world that Hegel campaigns against in his mediations. Of course, there is also the

contrary, as in Sternes Sentimental Journey whereby sensation becomes the

guidebook to an exciting journey. In this respect, literature and art often appear as

agents of something dying away and as harbingers of something to come. Moral

sense, which authors such as Shaftsbury hold in high esteem, is related to aesthetic

taste. Even with Kant, feelings try to find their way in the form of refined taste, but

this stands in the shadows of the laws of nature and law-based morality. This holds

true even more so for the moral feeling of respect that comes into actual practice

from reason itself.7 After all, a novel nobility of feeling grows from this moral

4 Heine (1976, p. 446).5 Husserl (1970, p. 228).6 Lichtenburg (1990, p. 62).7 Kant (2003, A134).

The role of the lived-body in feeling 129

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feeling of respect; it is seldom regarded in the argumentative train of our discourses

and in the patterns of our systems.

There has not always been such a subjective impoverishment of feelings, and it

has not always lasted. What in Greek is called pathosor in Latin, affectus, affectio,

emotio, and passio, is embedded in Classical thought in many different ways: in theperception that commences with sensation; in the striving from which one is

attracted to pleasure and shuns displeasure; in the speech that takes into

consideration the mood and the interests of the listener; in the fervor of passion

in which the world is contracted into a single light or dark point. Eros, which is

praised in Antigone as an unconquerable power that falls on property,8 is far from

an economy of feeling that the individual governs. Even concordia and consensus,

which belong to the basic foundations of political life, contain a lived-bodily

sensuous undertone that is not exhausted in common objectives and rules.

Nevertheless, pathos moves into the shadow of logos in Classical philosophy aswell.Even pathos becomes the adversary of logos in the Stoics, whose influence is

felt in Modernity in a special way. With the exception of Plato, who recognized a

pathosof logos, pathos itself appears as something alogon or irrational, which has

to bend itself to the hegemony of logos.

The outlook already changes in the field of Classical rational philosophy with

Rousseau, or in German Romanticism with Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer,

and Nietzsche as the philosophical rebels of the 19th century, and completely

changes with certain novel epistemic points of departure in the 20th century. Indeed,

even today there is no lack of attempts to create in feeling an esoteric homeland forthe soul far from the strictures of a rationality that has been narrowly restricted in a

mechanistic manner. But those attempts, which are concerned with giving feelings a

new place and in many cases even a new name, are more convincing, and

phenomenology has a special role to play in this.

Husserl frees feelings from their subjective prison by conceptualizing experi-

ences like being happy about something or being annoyed about something as an

intentional feeling that plays a genuine part in sense disclosure and the formation of

the self. We already find this in his Fifth Logical Investigation. To be sure, Husserl

is initially satisfied with being able to dismiss everything that cannot be ordered

among the cognitive and practical spheres as non-intentional feeling-states.

Linguistically, this means that there is something that we encounter as joyful,

sad, pleasant, dangerous, terrible or boring, but that it is pleasure and pain that throw

us back on ourselves. I myself have the pain. The knife with which I cut myself does

not have the pain nor does the dagger with which another confronts me. But as is

often the case a negative definition does not take us very far. Even Husserl does not

stop there when he later confers on sensuous hyle a unique valence, when he

contrasts sensations [Empfindungen] with sensings [Empfindnisse]9, and allows

intentions to arise out of affections. Nevertheless, one can hardly say that the

relation between intentionality and affection in Husserl, and also later in Levinas or

Henry, is clarified in a satisfactory way. Scheler, who develops his theory of feelings

8 Sophocles (1991, p. 227).9 See, e.g., his discussion in (1989, 36).

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in the ethical context of his major workFormalism in Ethics and the Non-Formal

Ethics of Value, leaves the Aristotelian hylomorphism behind from the outset; he

does this by replacing sensations [Empfindungen] that still function as constitutive

elements, with a sensing [Empfinden] that is to be characterized verbally, as a

process that opens and closes. Intentional feeling is founded in an emotional a priorithat is liberated from the dominance of the cognitive and the practical a priori. The

theoretical background of value, nevertheless, remains problematic. Value appears

as something perceptible and values are organized in a hierarchy that subordinates

lived-bodily sensuous feelings to mental and spiritual feelings. The pathetic event of

feeling is tracked according to a pre-given order of feeling.10 In Schelers later

cosmological anthropology, in the essay,The Human Place in the Cosmos, feelings

participate in two movements that run contrary to each other, the movement toward

spiritualization and toward vitalization; as the blind feeling-urge, they reach

down into the deepest depths of life; and as emotional acts like good, love,repentance, or awe they soar to the highest heights of spirit.11 The erroneous self-

deification characteristic of Spinoza and Hegel, a self-deification that has its place

in human beings, eventually transforms all feelings into feelings of self. The

medical anthropologist Erwin Straus has a more modest assessment. He borrows

ideas from Scheler and also from Heidegger, but he works them out in his own way.

He takes sensing as an event, which belongs neither to objectivity nor to

subjectivity, since the process of sensing senses itself in and with the world.12 The

programmatic title Vom Sinn der Sinne points to an internal connection between

intentionality and affectivity, or as it is now calledbetween gnostic directedness-toward and pathetic being-struck-by.13 In Heideggers Being and Time, sensing is

transformed into the attunement of Da-Sein, a finding oneself-in-the-world that

assumes a varying tonality in moods like fear, joy, or boredom. In French

phenomenology the lived-bodily aspect of feelings is reinforced, as when Sartre

emphasizes the magic of the emotions and the emotional enchantment of self, and

when Merleau-Ponty describes sensing as an original, pre-objective and pre-

subjective contact with the world, self, and other. An it feels in such and such a

way or an ittouches me would correspond to the itperceives within me, that

Merleau-Ponty contraposes to subjective perceptual acts. The re-determination of

feelings already announces itself in this, namely, as something that comes to us.

Through this we gain a critical distance from the newer variety of a hyletic

phenomenology insofar as the latter grants self-affection a priority over every alien

affection.14

10 In addition, see my critical position: Wertqualitaten oder Erfahrungsanspruche? in Vom Umsturz

der Werte in der modernen Gesellschaft, ed. G. Pafafferott (Bonn: Bouvier1997).11

Scheler (1976, p. 70); The Human Place in the Cosmos, trans. Manfred Frings (Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 2008, in press).12 Straus (1956, p. 372).13 Straus,Vom Sinn der Sinne, 394.14 See the entirely Francophonic debate that is carried out in the journal: Etudes Phenomenologiques,

Nos. 3940 (2004): Commencer par la phe nomenologie hyle tique?


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3 Feeling as Pathos

Bruchlinen der Erfahrung15 is the title of the book that concerns a radicalization of

experience. Radical experience means that there is nothing and no onean, it, he,

or shethat would precede the event of experience as a finished instance. It alsomeans there are no ideal essences, no universal regulations, and no adequate

grounds by which experience as an event of experience would be made possible or

justified. In the fruitful pathos of experience of which Kant already speaks in the

Prolegomena,16 feelings find their place absolutely released from the province of

the merely subjective. I characterize the foundation and the background against

which all intentional and well-ordered behavior stands out as pathos or af-fection,

literally, as doing.

The Greek word pathos has a three-fold meaning. In the first instance, it means

an experience that befalls us [Widerfahrnis]. This experience that befalls us is anoccurrence of a special kind. It is not a datum, not an objective occurrence, but even

less is it a personal act or a subjective condition, like we still assume today.17 Pathos

is something that happens; it happens by something nudging us, touching us,

striking us, by something exerting an influence on us. It is not that pathos happens

without our effort, but it goes beyond our doing by overcoming us. The grammatical

form of the passive is related topathos, only this must be understood as a primordial

passive, not as a mitigated stage or as a reversal of the active. Furthermore, pathos

means something adverse, something that is allied with suffering, but also

something that admits of the proverbial learning through suffering [pathei mathos].The central theme of the experience of pain belongs here, including the inflicted

pain that reaches its perverse apex in torture.18 Finally, pathos designates the

exuberance ofpassionthat leaves behind the habitual and leaves us like the platonic

Eros that stands outside human concerns and draws close to the divine

(Phaedrus 249 c-d).

The pathos which overcomes us stands out from a pathetic background that

points to a chronic character in relation to an acute occurrence.19 In a certain

respect, we are attuned [eingestimmt] when something surprises us. This already

applies to the bare impression; without even the slightest deviation from what is

expected, without the development of an affective relief,20 we would only resign

ourselves to experiences, but not be complicit in having any new experiences.

15 Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. I articulate there what I can only suggest here.16 Kant (2004, p. 373, n 125).17 See the definition that Hinrich Fink-Eitel suggests: Affects are inner states that are shaped in a

propositional-cognitive manner, that are mediated in a life-historical and psychical manner, and are

founded in a bodily manner; moreover, they are subject to super-individual relations of social and cultural

determinants. See Fink-Eitel and Lohmann (1994, p. 57).18

See more recently: Gruny (2004).19 The polarity of immediate emotion and habitual attitudes of feeling belongs to the basic tenets of the

classical doctrine of affect. Paul Ricur accordingly differentiates between emotion as surprise, emotion

as shock, and emotion as passion in Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans.

Erazim V. Kohak (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007, pp. 250280).20 Husserl (2001, p. 216).

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Affective dissonances arise when deviations from what is familiar get out of hand. It

is these affective dissonances that first give cognitive dissonances their sharp

focusdissonances of which social psychology speaks.

What is decisive for the emergence of pathos is that it is a matter of a genuine

temporal displacement, a jetlag of sorts, a diastasis, that allows the alieninfluence to be separated out from ones own initiative, and that binds them to one

another in and through this rupture. Pathos is surprise par excellence. It always

comestoo early, as that which we could overlook; our answer always comestoo late

in order to be completely at the height of experience. This does not mean that

somethingprecedes ones own experience in the manner that it presents itself for an

outside observer; it does not mean that two events follow each other like stimulus

and response in accordance with the view of behaviorism. Rather, it means that the

one experiencing precedes itself. Experience, which comes from that which befalls

us does not begin with itself, in the self-same, but from elsewhere, in the alien.Every deed and word that arises from a pathosis shaped by the essential feature of

responsivity. It follows from this that I do not have a pathos in the way I have

feelings; I am given over to a pathos. Further, in contrast to feelings peculiar to

Modernity,pathosis no accompanying phenomenon that steps in as third class

in addition to representing and willing, as Heidegger critically remarks.21 It is no

mere component of experience; rather it is situated in the heart of the experience

like the balance spring of a clock. Whoever believes he is the master of his

feelings (an outspoken masculine expression) forgets his own origin.

Finally, the pathetic separates itself from the pathological which can take onvarious and even completely opposite forms. In its being at the mercy ofpathos, the

possibility of ones own response diminishes, while trying to shut oneself off from

pathos, the response solidifies itself to a repertoire of responses. Shock and

stereotypes mark the extremes of an event that finds its last stop neither in an outside

nor an inside. The boundaries between normal and pathological feelings remain

fluid as is shown again and again by the fact that this fluidity is not only accepted by

Freudian psychoanalysis, but also by phenomenologically inspired doctors,

including Ludwig Binswanger, Wolfgang Blankenburg, Henry Ey, Kurt Goldstein,

Eugene Minkowski, Herbert Plugge, or Hubert Tellenbach.

4 Lived corporeality of feelings

The place of the feelings that we think of as pathetic can be found neither in the soul

nor in spirit. The place of feelings presupposes a nature that is neither completely

outside itself, like extended things of nature, nor completely within itself, like pure

spirit. Their place is the lived-body that senses itself in and through sensing

something else and someone else. In the efficacy peculiar to itself, the lived body is

unendingly exposed to foreign influences, and because of this remains vulnerable.

Sensitivity and vulnerability are inseparable. This lived-body is of a lived-bodily-

self; it refers to itself by at the same time withdrawing itself from itself, like seeing

21 Heidegger (1962, p. 178).


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ones own reflection in the mirror or hearing ones own voice.22 The withdrawal of

the self refers not only to the functioning lived-body but also to the materiality of

our physical body, binding us with nature and carrying with it the traces of a natural

history. The enigma of my brain also belongs to this together with the neural

zones of feeling of the limbic system, which functions as a central system ofevaluation.23 My brain is as puzzling as my lived-body which according to

Descartes is only due to a particular privilege that is mine to name.24 Indeed, who

should issue me this special authorization if it is not inscribed with indelible letters

on my body? Even the feeling of the self participates in this material physicality that

belongs to us without our ever being able to appropriate it. The foreignness of ones

own lived-body makes us receptive to the foreignness of others. We are only able to

be approached, touched, affected, insofar as we are never totally with ourselves.

Without this abyss in ourselves whichas Plato assertsborders on madness, there

would only remain a half-hearted contentment.The lived-body that we are and that we do not fully possess circumscribes a

sphere of feeling that is opposed both to a dualistic split as well as to a univocal

hierarchicalization. However, this sphere in no way presents itself as homogenous.

We can differentiate between different ranges and polarities. Thus, there are

peripheralsensations like pain that arise if I cut my finger andcentralcomplexes of

sensation, such as heart trouble, that effect our entire state of health. We experience

recurring feelings of satisfaction and feelings of happiness that radiate through life.

Affects can appear with a greater or lesser intensity, for example, as a calm self-

assurance or as a boundless egoism and as insatiable ambition. Active upsurges offeeling like anger, which erupt when the opportunity arises and again subside when

the situation changes, are opposed to the enduringlust for revenge that poisons life

or to a reconciliation thatas one so beautifully puts itlooks the other way

[funf gerade sein lasst]. This corresponds to the dual character of the active and

habitual lived-body, and it makes possible a culture of feeling that goes beyond the

moment. Related to this dual character is the difference between a focalfeeling that

is affixed to certain events or experiences and atotalfeeling, like the global pain or

the joy of life that spreads out atmospherically, and that for this reason are hard to

produce and just as difficult to overcome. While the lived-bodily self feels

addressed in different ways, it is always only more or less involved. Similar to the

case of intentionality, we are to distinguish different modes and qualities in the

sphere of affects, only that these are by far more difficult to apprehend because they

do not concern the way in which something as somethingis grasped or re-evaluated,

but rather the way in which we are struck by something without replacing this

something with its effect. One can place the affects under the aegis of an

objective correlate, like T.S. Eliot suggested in his poetics; but this does not mean

that our feelings are directed toward objects. The rationality of feelings, which are

in vogue with authors such as Ronald de Sousa or Martha Nussbaum, can always be

22 For more detail see Waldenfels and Giuliani (2000).23 In addition, see Roth (1997, p. 194). However if meanings and evaluative activities are attributed to

the brain directly, we end up with a neurological homunculus.24 Descartes (1951, p. 72).

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an indirect rationality; and this is not, for instance, because feelings are something

especially dark or deep, but rather because they are not something at all that we,

for our part, can comprehend or manage, but something that forestalls our own

efforts.

5 Dimensions of feelings

We encounter basic forms of a corporeal pathos in all aspects of our experience.

Already the simplest sensuous experience goes beyond a mere registration and

coding of data and beyond processing such data. Corresponding to the red or blue

that radiates toward us or surrounds us, is a red or blue behavior that is characterized

by changing forms of turning-toward or avoidance, through flexible or stiff

movements, by faster or slower rhythms. Blue or green favor the muscular activityof flexing (adduction) that is associated with voluntary ego-related performance,

while the color red allows the extension (abduction) and thus involuntary forms of

world-relatedness to emerge. We can see a fundamental relationship with the world

and the self in the behavior of colors, a relationship that precedes the represen-

tational and practical orientation.25 As Kurt Goldstein shows in his

neuropathological studies by appealing at the same time to Goethe and Kandinsky,

the physiology of color coincides with the symbolism of color. If we differentiate

between warm and cold colors, we can see that when someone becomes red with

anger or green with envy, it is no mere metaphor, as it would be if raw data werecovered with an affective lacquer. There is an ethos of the senses that grows out of

pathos before its systematic instructions are put into action. In this sense,

Nietzsches physiology of morality with its sign language of the affects26

contains various antidotes to every kind of superstructure of morality that

embellishes itself with its all too sublime feelings.

Attention, without which there would be literally nothing noteworthy or

desirable, does not begin with acts of observation that illuminate a dark area like

a floodlight; they begin with what attracts our attention or strikes us, with something

that awakens our sympathy and generates excitement. Everything new has an

affective value, and not a mere informational value, and this even applies to neural

processes. Paying attention, in which what is conspicuous takes shape, is already a

kind of response.27 To cite again from LichtenbergsAphorisms: When sometimes

I had drunk a lot of coffee, and was consequently startled by anything, I noticed

quite distinctly that I was startled before I heard the noise: we thus hear as it were

with other organs as well as with our ears.28 The current debates that were kindled

25 See Goldstein (1934, pp. 167170, 307312). Merleau-Ponty resorts back to these studies repeatedly

in his early work, for instance, in particular in his treatment of sensation in the Phenomenology of

Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1962).26 Nietzsche (1989a, p. 100).27 I refer to my recent workPhanomenologie der Aufmerksamkeit(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,2004),

that is based entirely on the resonance between the process of something becoming noticed [Auffallen]

and the process of taking notice of something [Aufmerken].28 Lichtenburg (1990, p. 24).


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by Benjamin Libets experiments and even had the presumption of denying

freedom, suffer from the fact that they subjected the neurologically indicated delay

of consciousness to the conventional linear schema of time; pathetic experience is

thereby reduced to a succession of moments.29

Furthermore, there are world-feelings or fundamental temperaments[Grundbefindlichkeiten] with whose disturbance the order of the world and our

own existence becomes unstable. This holds for wonder and anxiety which have

been counted among the basic motives of philosophy from the time of the Ancients

to our own. Wonder, as it is described in Platos Theatetus, is a pathos that befalls

us, makes our head spin and affects our entire body. Wonder is not a problem to

be solved. It is, moreover, not something to be learned, but at most, something to be

practiced like dealing with death. A situation in which I do not know myself to

use Wittgensteins simple words, is not to be confounded with ignorance or with a

defective knowledge. If it were only that one could confidently allow philosophy toplay the role of a General Problem Solver. There is always something uncanny in

the little something is not right. For philosophy, as well as for art, this means that

they cross a threshold and are efficacious beyond their own field, unlike a trusty

dogmatic philosophy or like merely academic art.

Memory, which enjoys a special reputation as a remembrance of culture, is

certainly dependent on repeatable structures, on the collective remembrance of

places, on figures and rituals of memory. But these sources run dry if something

does not continually awaken our memory. This surplus, which goes beyond the

mere capacities for memory, cannot be thought without something affecting us andmaking a bodily impression on us. Nietzsches remark: If something is to stay in

the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurtstays in the

memory30 evokes a pathetic and deep event that cannot be fully culturalized or

moralized. Not only thoughts, but also memories come whenever they want to and

not whenever we want them to come.

With the expression of feeling we enter an area where the experience of ones

own self and the experience of the alien are interwoven. Moreover, the expression is

to be kept free and clear from a Cartesian split, a split for instance, that makes us

think of anger as something that is already present on the inside and merely steps

outside. When Scheler insists in his work, The Nature of Sympathy, that the red of

anger not only indicates anger, the red of shame not only indicates shame, but that

these feelings are realized in the gesture of expression, this refers to a peculiar body

language which also plays an important role in Freuds symptom-formation.31

Symptoms as they come to light in parapraxis, for example, in a slip of the tongue or

in neurotic compulsions to wash or in the curiosities of a bedtime ritual, do not only

meansomething else, but they substitute for something else. A vicarious satisfaction

is not limited to sending a coded message. Paralinguistic elements like intonation,

tempo, and rhythm, which make up a pre-semantic and pre-pragmatic speech, also

29 Benjamin Libet, a convinced Neocartesian, is decidedly more careful in his conclusions. See his recent

account in (2004).30 Nietzsche (1989b, p. 61).31 Scheler (1979, p. 242).

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belong to body language that is marked in a pathetic manner. In the tone that makes

music, what speaks to us, stimulates us, excites us, comes to expression before it is

put into words or put into practice. In addition, extra-linguistic body language is

articulated in facial expressions, physiognomy, attitude, gait, clothes, and the way

one adorns the body. We can see how someone is situated in self-presentation, in themanner of appearing and in affected behavior. Wittgensteins dismantling of private

language results in a sphere of expression in which there are indeed niches, angles,

folds, and cracks, but which does not exhibit a protected interior or a bodily reserve

that would admit of a pure feeling of self.

Body language is carried forth in abody conversation. It begins with the affective

dialogue between the infant and the maternal parent. Virgils risu cognoscere

matrem, the early childlike smile of the mother that ReneSpitz cited in his study of

infants, opens a sphere of intimacy that develops graduallyor even fails to

develop, as in the case of hospitalism.32

Exploratory, motor, and affective momentsare intertwined in the cultivation of trust and intimacy, but also in the absence of an

enduring relationship of trust that finds its auto-erotic expression in the child who

rocks himself in solitude.33 Becoming intimate, which at first allows a certain binary

sphere of ownness to develop, has as its flipside a becoming alien, which usually

manifests itself in the eighth month as an acute shyness of strangers. One could be

tempted to speak of an original situation of embarrassment.34 In any case, brute or

primitive feelings are out of the question. The early childlike conversation of the

body is carried forward in adult life, a life that is never free from syncretistic

elements of an interpenetration that belongs to the intercorporeality of feelings.

35

All this goes far beyond intro-pathy or an em-pathy that continues to evoke a kind of

Cartesian framework. Whoever is exposed to alien influences and appeals does not

arrive at the other by putting himself in the place of the other and in his situation.

Moreover, the interpenetration of a body-conversation is not to be equated with a

sympathy that is extracted from antipathy. Experiences that befall us do not

converge, and it is precisely for this reason that they surprise us. In his essay, Uber

die allmahliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden, Kleist refers to the look of

a listener that announces to us an incompletely expressed thought as already

32 Translators note: Hospitalism is a pediatric diagnosis that describes infants who wasted away while in

the hospital. It is now thought that this wasting away was due to a lack of social contact since those

infants in poorer hospitals that could not afford incubators did not die as often since they were held by the

staff.33 See Emde (1983). Not only Sigmund Freud, but also the trained author Anna Freud regards the

affective experiences from the early childhood period as a pioneer for the development within all other

ranges.34 I refer here to the remarks of Guy van Kerckhoven, who follows Hans Lipps, in In Verlegenheit

geraten. Die Befangenheit des Menschen als anthropologischer Leitfaden in Hans Lipps Die

menschliche Natur, Revista de filosof a 26 (2001): 5584.35 I am reminded of Merleau-Pontys idea ofintercorpore ite , a chiasmatic network, which is called also

following Husserl interpenetration or intertwining [Ineinander]. This interpenetration would not only be

characterized as intentional interpenetration (see for instance Husserl1970, pp. 255257), but also as a

co-affective interpenetration. [Editors note: See Beata Stawarskas article, Feeling good vibrations in

dialogical relations, in this issue for further elaboration on the affective features of infant bodily

dialogicality and its ties to the structural dynamics of adult conversation.]


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understood.36 With this he recalls the continual birth of sense and of our self out of

pathos. That there are miscarriages with this continual birth, that to this look also

belongs the look of control and persecution, does not change anything about the way

the experience of the alien emerges from experiences that befall us, experiences that

go beyond every unity and discord directed toward sense and rule.

6 Normalization and mechanization of feelings

Among many other questions, there remains the question of the normalization of

feelings and their possible mechanization. Does the world of feelings consist of

nothing but surprises? Presuming this would mean to mistake sensing for sensation.

Normality invariably arises when expressions of feeling are given to iterable forms,

regulated courses of events, and conventional rituals. We learn to clench our teeth inpain, to let sympathy run free, to express condolence or to conceal joy about

anothers pain.

But these modes of expression are distinguished by various degrees of

participation that can be classified according to an affective temperature scale.

When a congregation of mourners comes together for a funeral, one discovers

substantial variations in temperature that do not become fully leveled out through

etiquette and ritual. In the end, the funeral feast provides for a normalization of

feelings that have been all too strained. Here everyone had the feeling of a

mourning that was completely transformed, the feeling of a hearty appetite, and theysat down at the table full of anticipation. The meal was shared and because pain

does not make for less conversation than joy, soon a lively conversation was under

way.37 Uncle Peppi, the protagonist bearing the same name as the story by Ludwig

Thoma who had abandoned himself to grief most vehemently, must then also

unburden his heart more strongly than the others.38

But there are also extremes that cannot be balanced out. We approach the cold

pole if the mastery and control of feelings take the form of a diplomatic sense of tact

or the form of a management of feelings. If we go so far as to operationalize human

behavior and human experience, then the perceptible lack, not to mention the

insatiable desire of others, turns into an objectively ascertainable need, and a need

that can be mechanically regulated, like when a machine needs oil or the body lacks

blood sugar. A feeling-machine like Dieter Dorners computer program EMO

knows eruptions of feeling only as valves that open. Thus, where feelings are

concerned, everything happens in a proper manner.39 Sudden shocks, enduring

traumas, and surprises of every kind, which arise unexpectedly and unprogrammed,

comprise the warm pole of the scale. It is not out of the question, therefore, that one

uses extraordinary events as stimulants to increase functioning. Nothing prevents

36 Kleist (1952, p. 837).37 Thoma (1962, p. 153).38 Thoma (1962, p. 153).39 Let me refer here to my critical remarks in Grenzen der Normalisierung (Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp,1998b), 112 and 247, or to my Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 55, 382.

138 B. Waldenfels

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humanity from becoming confused by its own simulations. Were this not so, there

would be no such thing as a fabricated pathos.

Related to the changing intensity of feelings is the manner of their integration and

disintegration. In his theory of affects, Freud separates the affective behaviors that

are bound from those that are free moving. Similarly we can differentiate between abound pathos that forms the background of our habitual behavior, and thus can

occur inconspicuously like an everyday greeting, and areleased pathosthat pulls us

out of our habitual relations.Pathositself would then only be indirectly graspable as

a deviation from the usual, as a surplus of what is non-learnable in learning, as what

is alien in ones own self. If the pathetic surplus were leveled out by normalization,

we would encounter the normal man of which Nietzsche warns, who is only

acquainted with normal feelings. The human as undetermined animal would

approach the status of an animal that is determined artificially. The anti-human

that comes to expression here is not based on the fact that the human remainsarrested by brute beginnings; rather, it stems from the fact that logos splits itself

from pathos, to which it owes its momentum.

7 Philosophy of feelings

For the philosopher and certainly for the phenomenologist, the question concerns

how feelings can be grasped, how they can be described and conceptualized without

compromising their status as feelings. Husserls well known demand, to bring thepure and so to speak still mute experience to an expression of its own sense40

reaches its limits when we are confronted by experiences that befall us

experiences that rupture the coherence of sense and in this respect have no sense.

Already in the natural-communicative attitude we must distinguish between the

pathicexpression, which comes from a pathos(e.g., the expression of astonishment,

uneasiness, indignation, affection, the cry that erupts in limit-situations), and the

patheticexpression, which endeavors to give pathositself an intensified expression.

A cry is, in this sense, never pathetic. At most, what is pathetic is the cry that the

actor lets out on stage, or the cry that Edvard Munch captures in his painting. In a

diary entry from 1893, which directly refers to the origin of this well-known motif,

the painter describes how while walking along the street with two friends at sunset,

all of a sudden the sky was dyed a bloody red color and in the clouds, blood and

swords flared up: [] I stood there trembling with anxietyand I felt like a long

cry went through nature. The bridge between the pathic eruptive expression and

the intensified pathetic expression forms the uneasiness of the experience that

increases up to the point of horroran experience that finds its place in the painting

and continues as the uneasiness of its gaze.41 To be sure, the artistic design of the

painting leaves the ground of the natural attitude by putting out of play our habits of

expression and our habits of seeing. In this way, the autobiographical note breaks

40 Husserl (1999, pp. 3839); translation modified.41 I refer to my study Der beunruhigte Blick, in Sinnesschwellen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

1998a).


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open the framework of an ordinary autobiography just as in Platos anecdote of the

philosopher who, while stargazing, loses the ground under his feet and falls into a

pit.

We are left here with our original question of how we as philosophers and

phenomenologists can speak of feelings. Two extremes come up empty. The firstextreme would consist of an immediate expression of feelings; here we would not

leave the perspective of direct participation. Whoever speaks anxiously about

anxiety, boringly about boredom, contributes little to the clarification of anxiety or

boredom. Here, the how of pathic experience is not disengaged from the that.

So-called existentialism that promises to merge thinking with life, draws nearer to

such a short-circuiting pathetic experience. We cannot conceive of philosophy

without a certain degagement.

The other extreme would consist of a distancing discourse about feelings which

adopts the perspective of a disinterested observer or disinterested surgeon.Neutrality, as a form of apathy has its own sense, but only as an artificial attitude

that emerges from a process of neutralization. This applies to the impartiality of the

judge or to the impartiality of the historian, just as it does to the calm hand of the

surgeon. If one were to raise neutrality to a standard and then as a philosopher be

content with dryly analyzing experiences of pain, the agony of torture, anxiety of

war, as well as eagerness in research, joy in discovery, delight in love, agony in

love, and outbreaks of despair, as something that does not concern him or herself,

then all we would get with this would be herbaria of feelings.

A third possibility is offered in a speaking that speaks about feelings but at thesame time from them. We encounter such a form of indirect participation at decisive

places. One can think about the witness to whom something happens, and it is this

that makes him a witness; the therapist who resists a direct reflection on feelings, but

in addressing the conflicts, sets free new possibilities of response; the counselors

who help the other person in an adverse situation without being directly affected.

Just as Walter Benjamin demanded from a good translation that it allows the

original text to shine through, one can conceive of an indirect speaking and writing

that allows the experiences that befall us and feelings that deal with them to shine

through. To this corresponds in phenomenology a certain kind of epoche , not the

customary form of intentional and reflective epoche that reduces everything that

shows itself to its sense, that is, toan as whatsomething is meant and given, but an

affectional and responsive epoche that goes beyond the what and the goal of

the intentional act and brings to expression the wherefrom of being affected as

well as the direction of response.42 This epoche would not provide us with an

encompassing view, although it would permit a distancing lateral view, a view that

does not lose sight of what is distanced or unfamiliar. If philosophy is born from

wonder or anxiety then it is also born from pathos. A philosophy that would

completely forget its pathetic origins would be nothing more than a dogmatic

philosophy that becomes entangled in and bound by its own concepts and

arguments, and in the worst case, would serve as an ideological fortress.

42 I count such a responsive epoche among the apparatus of a responsive phenomenology. See my

Antwortregister (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 195197.

140 B. Waldenfels

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Translators Acknowledgements I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Anthony Steinbock for

all of his help in revising this translation. I would also like to thank Dr. Douglas Berger for his comments

on an earlier draft of this translation.

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