FEELINGS, EMOTIONS, AND WERTNEHMUNGEN

What can phenomenology tell us about the feelings and emotions? Many things, apparently, since there are any number of very different views advanced by phenomenologists as diverse as Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Sartre, and so forth. This paper shall sketch a phenomenological view indebted most directly to Husserl. My concern, however, is not to expound Husserl’s views but to supplement and complement them so as to enrich our understanding of the complexity of the emotions. Why turn to phenomenology for this understanding? A helpful clue is provided by the common root of the terms wahrnehmen and wertnehmen, which in their common root offer a valuable starting point for understanding feelings and emotions and the role they play in our experiential lives. Wahrnehmen means to apprehend perceptually, i.e., in a manner that involves a sensorial dimension, and thereby to take and accept something as true. Wertnehmen means to apprehend in a manner involving feelings and thereby to take and accept something as valuable. We “take ” S as p and we take S as p as v in pre-predicative experiences prior to the judgments in which we articulate the claim that S is p or Sp is v (cf. Drummond 2003). This common root reveals that our “takings ” must be understood broadly so as to includ