Feelings of being-together and caring-with

Hector A. Sánchez Guerrero

pp. 177-193

in: Anita Konzelmann-Ziv, Hans B. Schmid (eds), Institutions, emotions, and group agents, Berlin, Springer, 2014

Abstract

In this chapter I address two important roles feelings play in collective affective intentional episodes. I do so by elaborating on the suggestion that our emotions may disclose the significance something has for us as members of a group we care about. Seeking to anchor the notion of collective affective intentionality in the Heideggerian theme of a human care-defined way of being, I first develop the idea of an affectively enabled and essentially shareable "world-belongingness'. I propose the term "caring-with' to refer to a mode of caring about things that may be said to rely on the fact that the involved individuals have come to share a number of concerns. Arguing that the role affective states play in cases of collective affective intentionality is not exhausted by the capacity our emotions have to disclose the mentioned structure of shared concerns, I further introduce the notion of "feelings of being-together' and suggest that certain pre-intentional feelings might serve as "sedimented', dynamic structures of experience that prepare us to understand certain circumstances as situations in which we are pursuing something together in an emotionally motivated way.

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin