Affectively-enabled shared belongingness to the world
pp. 131-168
in: , Feeling together and caring with one another, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
This chapter articulates a proposal concerning what it means for a number of individuals to respond in an authentically affective and properly joint manner. It does so by elaborating on Schmid's insight pertaining to the fundamental role the sharing of a concern plays in situations in which two or more individuals come to jointly actualize their ability to feel-towards together. By discussing Bennett Helm's account of emotions as felt evaluations, I lay down some theoretical foundations needed to develop the following idea: collective affective intentionality could be understood in terms of interdependent acts of feeling that disclose and co-constitute the significance a given occurrence has for the participants qua members of a particular group, i.e. in terms of interdependent acts of feeling that disclose a shared evaluative perspective. Against this background, I begin to anchor the notion of collective affective intentionality in Martin Heidegger's theme of a care-defined human mode of being by arguing that human intentionality may be understood in terms of an essentially shareable (but not necessarily collective) openness to the world. Appealing to another set of Heideggerian themes rearticulated by Matthew Ratcliffe, I discuss the role certain feelings play in setting up this essentially shareable relatedness to the world. This allows me to characterize our human openness to the world as an affectively enabled and essentially shareable world-belongingness. By means of this argument I prepare a claim that is central to the spirit of my proposal: the affective acts that actualize our ability to feel-towards together express in an outstanding manner our human nature.