Matthew Ratcliffe Emotions and The Self

Peter Goldie 15-Peter Goldie-Chapter15 Page Proof page 347 29.5.
2009 9:23pm
part iv
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EMOTIONS AND
THE SELF
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Peter Goldie 15-Peter Goldie-Chapter15 Page Proof page 348 29.5.2009 9:23pm
chapter 15
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THE
P H E N O M E N O LO G Y
OF MOOD AND T HE
M E A N I N G OF L I F E
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matthew ratcliffe
15.1 I N T RO D U C T I O N
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In his book The Passions, Robert Solomon proposed that emotions are the ‘meaning
of life’. By this, he meant that they constitute the meanings in a life, frameworks of
value and significance that are incorporated into the experienced world. I think there
is something importantly right about his claim, and my aim in this chapter is to
defend a somewhat revised version of it. I begin by outlining Solomon’s conception of
emotion, focusing on the phenomenological role assigned to emotion, the distinction
drawn between emotions and feelings, and the claim that moods are generalized
emotions (intentional states that have the whole world or a substantial chunk of it as
their object). I go on to argue that Solomon, like many others who have written on the
emotions, fails to appreciate the phenomenology of mood. It is a background of
feeling more often referred to as a ‘mood’ than an ‘emotion’ that plays the meaning-
I am grateful to Peter Goldie and to an audience at Durham University for helpful comments on an
earlier version of this chapter.
350 matthew ratcliffe
giving role emphasized by Solomon. Not all moods are generalized emotions. Some
may indeed take this form but those that are responsible for the ‘meaning of life’ are
not intentional states at all. Instead, they are part of the background structure of
intentionality and are presupposed by the possibility of intentionally directed emo-
tions. To illustrate this, I turn to Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of
boredom and then to descriptions of altered mood in depression. In so doing, I draw a
distinction between the intensity or strength of an emotional state and its depth. An
emotion can be quite intense but at the same time shallow, whereas a phenomeno-
logically inconspicuous mood can be deep precisely in virtue of its inconspicuous-
ness. This greater depth of a mood, I suggest, consists in its being responsible for a
space of possibilities that object-directed emotions, however intense, presuppose. For
example, to be able to experience fear, one must already find oneself in the world in
such a way that being ‘endangered’ or ‘under threat’ are possibilities.
Having described the phenomenological role of deep moods, I go on to consider
their nature. I argue that we experience the world through our feeling bodies, and that
distinctions between internally directed bodily feelings and externally directed inten-
tional states should be rejected. I distinguish between intentional and pre-intentional
feelings, suggesting that most of those phenomena referred to as ‘emotions’ are
comprised at least partly of the former, whereas those moods that constitute the
experienced meaningfulness of the world consist entirely of pre-intentional feeling.
15.2 S O LO M O N O N E M OT I O N AND
THE MEANING OF LIFE
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In his earlier writings, Solomon insists on a clear distinction between emotions and
feelings. Emotions, he says, are judgements rather than feelings. Although feelings
often or perhaps even always accompany emotions, the relationship is one of associa-
tion rather than constitution. Feelings are mere bodily reactions, whereas emotions
are conceptually sophisticated intentional states that have objects outside of the body.
By claiming that emotions are judgements, Solomon does not mean to suggest that
they are attitudes that we adopt on the basis of our experiences of the world. Instead,
he says that emotional judgements are constitutive of world-experience. The world is
experienced as a practically significant realm of norms, values and enticements to act.
Things appear to us as inviting, valuable, fascinating, threatening, dull, repulsive,
proper, improper, comforting, terrifying, and so on. Emotions are responsible for our
sense that things matter in these various different ways: ‘The passions are judgments,
constitutive judgments according to which our reality is given its shape and structure’
(1993, p.xvii). Solomon also claims that emotions, although constitutive of the
the phenomenology of mood and the meaning of life 351
experienced world rather than explicitly and knowingly adopted by us, are in a sense
chosen. As with beliefs, emotional judgements are often unreflective but we are still
responsible for evaluating and revising them.
According to Solomon, emotions are the ‘meaning of life’, in the sense that they
are a precondition for the intelligibility of all our goal-directed activities. If no
actual or possible states of affairs were ever judged by us to be preferable to any
other, we would have no grounds for action. Without emotions, we could have no
projects, nothing to strive for, no sense of anything as worth doing:
I suggest that emotions are the meaning of life. It is because we are moved, because we feel,
that life has a meaning. The passionate life, not the dispassionate life of pure reason, is the
meaningful life. (1993, p.ix)
So emotions do not give life a meaning relative to some standpoint external to

experience but are experienced as the significance of things in the world; they are
the ‘meanings in life’ (1993, p. 7). As Solomon puts it, we do not experience a
neutral, objective reality but live in a ‘surreality’ of purpose, value and significance
(1993, p. 18). However, he is not very clear on what the relationship is between
objective conceptions of reality and our everyday surreality. One possibility is that
science succeeds in transcending the everyday world and replacing it with a
description of things that is freed of emotional projections. Alternatively, it
might be that the scientifically described world continues to obliviously presup-
pose the context of significance that we take for granted in everyday life. In the next
section, I will suggest that the latter view is more plausible.
In his later writings, Solomon retreats from some of the more extreme claims made in
The Passions and elsewhere. The emphasis on choice is toned down and he also
acknowledges that the body makes an indispensable contribution to emotional experi-
ence. A problem with the early view is that it is not clear how an emotional judgement
is to be distinguished from a non-emotional value judgement with the same content,
without appealing to the fact that the former is felt while the latter is not. Solomon
tries to deal with the problem by insisting that emotions are ‘self-involved and relatively
intense evaluative judgments’ (1993, p.127). But this seems to beg the question, as it is
not clear what, aside from feeling, could make a value judgement intense. For this and
other reasons, Solomon later concedes that our bodily phenomenology makes an
important contribution to emotional experience. However, rather than accepting that
emotions incorporate feelings, he widens the concept of judgement so as to accommo-
date at least some of what others might call feelings. He does this by drawing an analogy
between emotional and kinaesthetic judgements (2003, 2004a, 2004b). When you walk
up the stairs, you ‘judge’ the distance between the steps but this judgement is not
separate from your activity. Such judgements are incorporated into activity; they are
‘judgments of the body’, habitual and often skilful bodily responses to situations (2003,
p.191). Similarly, Solomon suggests, the bodily ‘feelings’ that others take to be partly or
wholly constitutive of emotions can be reconceived as bodily judgements. As with
experiencing the stairs while climbing them, these judgements are not feelings of bodily
states but ways of experiencing things external to our bodies. The stairs appear as ‘steep
but climbable’; the bodily judgement is partly constitutive of how they are perceived.
Despite these concessions, Solomon continues to emphasize the existential role of
emotion, by which I mean its role in constituting an experiential sense of belonging to
a world, of being there, purposively immersed in a realm where things matter. In so
doing, I think he recognizes an important aspect of experience that tends to be
overlooked by philosophers and others. However, I will suggest that his account
needs to be clarified and significantly revised in order to make it plausible. Most
pressing is the need for a clear distinction between those emotions that constitute the
sense of being part of a meaningful world and other emotions that presuppose it. If I
am happy about a specific event, I experience myself as being happy within a pre-
given world. My happiness does not constitute the entire framework of practical
significance that I inhabit at the time of the event. Although Solomon frequently uses
the term ‘emotion’ to refer to occurrent judgements such as being happy or angry
about something, when he claims that emotions are the meaning of life he does also
stress that they are not isolated, specifically focused episodes:1
My emotion is a structure of my world, which may at times manifest itself in certain specific
displays of feeling or behaviour. But my emotion is neither such displays nor the disposition
to such displays. (1993, p.100)
An emotion is thus an enduring aspect of world-experience. Between episodes of

occurrent emotion, it remains in place as a system of meanings that we experience
as integral to the world. Hence emotions ‘set up’ the world that we live in; they
‘constitute the framework within which our knowledge of the facts has some
meaning, some “relevance” to us’ (1993, p.135).
One might object that an emotion such as anger, even if it cannot be reduced to
an occurrence or a disposition, surely does not ‘set up’ a world. Solomon addresses
this concern by maintaining that emotions are holistically linked. Every emotion
‘presupposes the entire body of previous emotional judgments to supply its context
and its history’ (1993, p.137). Although no single emotion is responsible for the
sense that one is part of a significant world, they do so when taken together.
However, it is not clear how a number of interrelated emotions, all of which
individually presuppose experience of a meaningful world, combine so as to
constitute that experience. No doubt it is possible to concoct an account along
such lines but I think this is the wrong way to go. What is needed instead is a
distinction between those emotional states that constitute (or at least partly
1 Consider, for example, Solomon’s example of mistakenly thinking someone has stolen one’s car.
The example is employed to illustrate that emotions are separable from feelings. When one realizes
that the person did not steal one’s car, one is no longer angry with him or her, even though the
associated feelings remain. In this case, it is clear that the anger in question is an occurrent judgement
directed at a particular person (1976, p.123).
constitute) the sense of belonging to a meaningful world and those that we

experience as occurring within the world. In everyday English language, the
contrast between ‘mood’ and ‘emotion’ perhaps best approximates this distinction.
It is certain moods, I want to suggest, that constitute the meaning of life.
Solomon claims that moods are just ‘generalized emotions’ (1993, p. 15), with the
level of generality varying from case to case. Emotion is therefore the primary
phenomenon and moods are a subset of emotions:
To understand the nature of moods, one has to first understand the nature of emotions.
Moods, in their indiscriminate universality, are metaphysical generalizations of the emo-
tions. (1993, p.71)
In taking emotions to be intentional states with specific objects and moods to be

intentional states with generalized objects, Solomon loses sight of the aspect of
experience that he refers to as the meaningfulness of life. A sense of participating in
a realm where some things matter is not an intentional state, a collection of inten-
tional states or a generalized intentional state but a pre-intentional background to
intentional states. I say ‘pre-intentional’ rather than non-intentional because it is not
wholly distinct from intentional states. Rather, it contributes to the structure of
intentionally directed emotion, determining the range of emotions that one is capable
of experiencing. For example, in the extreme case of a mood where the world appears
utterly bereft of practical significance, worrying about whether a project will succeed
and hoping that it will succeed would not be possible. Such emotions would be
unintelligible without a presupposed set of mood-constituted concerns.
A failure to fully appreciate the phenomenology of mood is not specific to Solomon.
Many discussions of emotion take moods either to be generalized emotions or to be
states that add ‘colour’ to experience, analogous to the icing on a cake. For example,
Goldie (2000, p.141) states that the difference between moods and emotions is primarily
down to the ‘degree of specificity of their objects’, and Roberts (2003, p.115) similarly
endorses the view that moods are generalized emotions, adding that mood is analogous
to a colour or tone: ‘depression and elation color the objects of our experience in hues
of value’. This may well apply to some moods but what is needed, I will now suggest, is
an account that also recognizes the greater phenomenological ‘depth’ of other moods.
15.3 T H E P H E N O M E N O LO G Y OF MOOD
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Solomon acknowledges Heidegger as a source of inspiration for his account of
emotion and world-meaning (e.g. Solomon, 1993, p.50), and it is to Heidegger that
I turn in order to draw a distinction between moods and emotions. For Heidegger
(1962, 1995), moods are phenomenologically deeper than emotions, by which

I mean that emotions are only intelligible in the context of a mood. Heidegger
does not actually draw a distinction between moods and emotions. However his
discussion can, I think, be fruitfully couched in these terms, as he does want to
distinguish intentional states (amongst which I include the majority of what we call
‘emotions’) from pre-intentional moods.2 Those emotional states that we refer to
ourselves as being in generally go deeper than those that we have (Cataldi, 1993).
When we have an emotion, we are already in a situation. And, as Heidegger
appreciates, this sense of being there depends upon mood.
Of course, the everyday terms ‘mood’ and ‘emotion’ do not map neatly onto two
distinct phenomenological categories. Not all moods are pre-intentional and, as
I will make clear in the next section, not all pre-intentional backgrounds are moods
either. Nevertheless, ‘mood’ is more often employed than ‘emotion’ to communi-
cate those states that are responsible for giving the experienced world its signifi-
cance. Hence I use the term ‘mood’ for current purposes. However, when referring
to mood, I restrict myself to ‘deep’ moods and thus depart from everyday usage,
which is more wide-ranging. I will suggest towards the end of this chapter that,
when it comes to further studying the relevant phenomenology, a term of art
(‘existential feeling’) might be preferable to the term ‘mood’.
Heidegger’s conception of mood [Stimmung] is premised on the acknowledge-
ment that we do not experience the world as disinterested spectators; we find
ourselves in it. We are not in the world in the way that an object might be in a
container. Experiencing oneself as part of the world is not principally a matter of
registering one’s spatiotemporal location in relation to other entities. Rather, we
are situated in the world in the sense that we are purposively entangled with it. In
any situation, certain things show up as practically significant. This is the case with
items of equipment, for example, which knit together in holistic teleological
frameworks that reflect potential activities (Heidegger, 1962, pp.95–102). Consider
perceiving a coffee cup. It is experienced as functional, as something for drinking
from, and this function is interconnected with the functions of the bottle of milk in
the fridge, the sugar bowl and spoon, the coffee jar, the kettle, the sink, the work
surface, and so on. We do not perceive such objects in a neutral, detached,
2 Throughout this chapter, I adopt a phenomenological conception of intentionality, which takes it

to be the directedness of experience. Intentionality is sometimes conceived of as a non-
phenomenological ‘aboutness’ and there is nothing to stop people from defining it as such. However,
the intentionality of emotion is inextricable from the phenomenology of emotion. As I will argue later
in this chapter, emotional feeling is intentional. See also Goldie (e.g. 2002, p.241) for this view. Hence a
non-phenomenological conception of intentionality would be inappropriate in this context. I also
conceive of emotions (and moods) phenomenologically, unlike some authors who treat them as
physiological changes that may or may not be experienced (e.g. Damasio, 2004; LeDoux, 1999).
Separating emotion from experience is, in my view, counter-intuitive and unwarranted. But, if one
insists on doing so, then we can simply call what I am addressing here ‘feelings of emotions’ rather
than ‘emotions’. The disagreement is merely terminological.
standoffish fashion. More often, our appreciation of them is practical in nature; we

encounter them as tools that are seamlessly integrated into our activities. Thus,
according to Heidegger, the world that we inhabit takes the form of a web of
practical, purposive relations. We experience things in terms of what they offer in
relation to our various projects.
However, it is important to appreciate that there are various different ways in
which things appear to us as practically significant. For example, the potential
activities offered by an object might present themselves as pleasant, unpleasant,
required, pressing, enticing, interesting, boring, only for me, for us, for them but
not for me, difficult, easy or impossible. Objects do not summon us to act in a
single, homogeneous way. Furthermore, potential practical utility is not the only
kind of significance that things have for us. We experience actual and potential
happenings as significant in many different ways too. They might be threatening,
dangerous, exciting, relevant to you, me, us or them, fascinating, boring, expected
or unexpected, comforting, reassuring, safe or unsafe. And then there are other
people too, who we relate to in all sorts of ways and who appear to us as offering a
range of significant activities, happenings, and relations, from sexual gratification
to a boring conversation to a punch in the face.
Hence we experience people, objects, events, and situations in the world in terms
of different kinds of significant possibility, different ways of mattering. The range of
emotions that we experience reflects this possibility space. All emotions presuppose
an appreciation of certain possibilities as somehow significant. This clearly applies
to what Gordon (1987) calls ‘epistemic emotions’, which are directed towards
outcomes that are either non-actual or unknown. One fears, dreads, hopes for,
or is excited by something that may or may not happen or have happened. But it
also applies to many or perhaps even all of what Gordon calls ‘factive emotions’,
emotions that are directed at things one knows to be the case. For example one
might be sad, angry, or happy about an event. Here too there is an experience of
salient possibilities. In disappointment, there is often the sense that the space of
possibilities has narrowed, that certain significant possibilities are irrevocably gone.
Much the same can apply to anger at something someone has done. In mattering to
us, their deed has a significance that reaches out beyond the actual and impacts
upon the likely shape of things to come. Not all of the salient consequences that
provoke the anger are actualized.
Heidegger’s proposal, as I interpret it, is that moods constitute the various
different ways in which we are able to experience things as mattering. Hence they
are presupposed by intentionally directed emotions. Take fear, for example. Hei-
degger claims that the experience of being afraid of something presupposes an
appreciation on our part of distinctive kinds of possibility; ‘different possibilities of
Being emerge in fearing’ (1962, p.181). In order to be afraid, one must already find
oneself in the world in such a way that being in danger or under threat are
possibilities. Some being, perhaps oneself, has to matter in a certain kind of way
for fear to be possible. The point applies more generally: different kinds of emotion
presuppose a range of different ways in which things can matter to us, such as
having practical significance, threatening us or being intriguing. According to
Heidegger, mood determines the space of possible kinds of concern.3
It is surely uncontroversial to maintain that having an emotion with a specific
content requires having a particular set of concerns. For example, the state of being
thrilled at finding a rare stamp presupposes the kinds of value that a stamp
collector might have. However, Heidegger’s claim does not relate merely to the
contents of emotions but also to the kinds of emotion that we are capable of
experiencing, such as fearing, hoping, enthusing, regretting, or rejoicing. Take the
appreciation of practical significance, for example. Some things appear to us as
practically significant and others not, but consider the experiential changes that
might occur if all sense of practical significance were removed from experience, if
one were no longer able to entertain the possibility of anything having any
consequence. Sartre’s (1963) ‘nausea’ is a mood along such lines, where a back-
ground sense of purpose and function that pervades everyday experience is
removed altogether, with the result that everything appears strangely alien and
contingent. Things are experienced as bereft of their usual familiarity, appearing
instead as ‘soft, monstrous masses, in disorder—naked, with a frightening, obscene
nakedness’ (Sartre, 1963, p.183). The world as it is experienced through nausea is
not simply a place without purpose or function but a place where purpose and
function are no longer conceivable.4 A mood like this is, at the same time, a shift in
the range of possible emotions. Sartrean nausea occurs only fleetingly in its full-
blown form. But were such a mood to linger, one could no longer be excited,
delighted, annoyed, or disappointed by worldly events, as one would no longer
experience those events through concerns that such emotions presuppose.
Heidegger warns against philosophical perspectives that construe mood as ‘an
object swimming in the stream of consciousness’ (1995, p.90). A mood is not an
internal mental state that we experience ourselves as having within a world. Neither
is it an intentional state that has a substantial chunk of the world as its object. It is
not ‘an inner condition which then reaches forth in an enigmatical way and puts its
mark on Things and persons’ (Heidegger, 1962, p.176). Rather, a mood is a
background sense of belonging to a meaningful world, a condition of possibility
for having intentional states: ‘The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-
in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards
3 Distinguishing and categorizing all the ways in which things and people are experienced as
mattering to us and exploring how the various emotions depend upon them would be a huge
undertaking. My aim here is to argue for the more general claim that emotion presupposes mattering
and mattering depends upon mood.
4 A strikingly similar experiential transformation is often reported by schizophrenic patients and is
closely associated with changes in feeling (for further discussion, see, for example, Sass, 2003; Ratcliffe,
2008, Chapter 7).
something’ (1992, p.176). Mood constitutes a phenomenological background in the

context of which intentionally directed experience is possible.
A similar account of mood [Stimmung] is offered by Stephan Strasser (1977),
who distinguishes moods from other kinds of emotional state by appealing to
different levels of feeling. Like Heidegger, he claims that intentional states are
structured by moods, which determine the range of ways in which things can be
encountered (as threatening, inviting, etc.). A mood is thus deeper than an
intentional state; it is ‘the primordial phenomenological characteristic of self-
experiencing life’ (1977, p.121), which ‘precedes everything that has the character
of an act’ (1977, p.182). The importance of mood is seldom appreciated and this,
Strasser suggests, is because its depth serves to make it phenomenologically incon-
spicuous. A mood is not an object of experience but a space of possibilities in the
context of which we experience other things. As he puts it:
. . . precisely those attunements [Stimmungen] to which we pay no heed at all, the attune-
ments we least observe, those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as
though there is no attunement there are all, as though we were not attuned in any way at all—
these attunements are the most powerful. (1977, p.68)
So we should not confuse the intensity of an emotional state with its depth.
A phenomenologically inconspicuous mood can be deeper than an intense emo-
tion, as mood constitutes the kinds of concern in relation to which such emotions
are intelligible. Emotions always occur in the context of moods. As Heidegger
observes, we are always in a mood even when we don’t realise it. Even the ‘pallid,
evenly balanced lack of mood [Ungestimmtheit], which is often persistent and
which is not to be mistaken for a bad mood, is far from nothing at all’ (1962, p.173).
The difference between intensity and depth is made clear by Heidegger’s (1995)
lengthy phenomenological analysis of boredom [Langeweile], which distinguishes
three kinds of boredom.5 First of all, there are those occasions when we are ‘bored
by’ something. Heidegger offers the example of waiting at a quiet, rural railway
station for a train that is not due for another few hours. In such circumstances, we
are very much aware of the situation as boring. Our surroundings appear boring;
the station is experienced as something that ‘does not yet offer us what it properly
ought to’ (1995, p.103), as something that puts our projects on hold. We try to
distract ourselves from the situation by walking up and down or drawing pictures
in the sand with our fingers. Every so often, we look up at the clock and will the
time to pass more quickly. In this case, our boredom is intense and, although its
object is not neatly defined, it is still an intentional state directed at a particular
situation.
5 Heidegger’s discussion places particular emphasis on the temporal structure of boredom.

However, I do not discuss this aspect of his analysis, as it is not required in order to draw the
distinction between intensity and depth.
Heidegger contrasts this with a second form of boredom; being ‘bored with’ a
situation. He offers the example of attending a dinner and being struck, upon
leaving, by the realization that one was bored all night. The odd thing though is
that one was not aware of being bored at the time. The situation did not present
itself as an object of experience, as something that was boring. In fact, one quite
happily chatted away all night, expressed oneself with enthusiasm and more generally
immersed oneself in the evening. Yet, Heidegger says, what we have here is actually a
more ‘profound’ form of boredom than being bored by something. During occasions
like the dinner, the boredom is not intense in the way that being bored by something
is. But it is deeper all the same. We are aware of the station as boring because
alternative possibilities present themselves; it stands in the way of projects and
concerns that are not themselves experienced through the boredom. So boredom
is experienced within a space of other possibilities. However, during the dinner, one
experiences one’s whole situation through the boredom. It no longer incorporates
the possibility of one’s not being bored and so there is no vantage point from which
to resist the boredom: ‘any seeking to be satisfied by beings is absent in advance’
(1995, p.117). Hence, in the case of the station, a particular thing fails to satisfy us,
whereas, at the dinner, the possibility of anything satisfying us is absent from the
experience; we are in the boredom. The latter is phenomenologically deeper as it is ‘a
preventing of’ a ‘seeking’ that is still there when we find something intensely boring
(1995, p.117).
However, Heidegger indicates that there is an even deeper form of boredom. At
the dinner, the boredom is my boredom, a realm where only I dwell. I can still
conceive of other perspectives on this and other situations. Thus the space of
possibilities that I currently inhabit does not exhaust my sense of what the world
might have to offer. This is not so in the third form of boredom, being ‘boring for
one’. Here, the boredom is all-encompassing. A sense of there being any alternative
to this way of finding oneself in the world for anyone is absent from experience; ‘we
find ourselves in the midst of beings as a whole, i.e., in the whole of this indiffer-
ence’ (1995, p.138). All experience is structured by a space of possibilities that is
quietly lacking. Things ‘offer us no possibility of acting and no further possibility of
our doing anything. There is a telling refusal on the part of beings as a whole with
respect to these possibilities’ (1995, p.139). Certain possibilities that remain pre-
supposed by the first and second forms are now absent. Hence the third form is the
deepest, as it involves a loss of certain kinds of concern that the shallower forms of
boredom continue to depend upon. While waiting at the station, things are
experienced as ‘refusing’ possibilities (1995, p.140). And, in the second form, not
all situations offer the same possibilities as the dinner. In the third form, however,
there is nothing left to refuse and no alternative on offer.
I suggest that we think of the distinction between emotions and deep moods in
these terms. Emotions are, for the most part, intentional states, such as Heidegger’s
being ‘bored by’. Moods, in contrast, are presupposed possibility spaces that we
find ourselves in. As Heidegger notes, not all moods are equally deep. The second
form of boredom is not as deep as the third. It is not experienced as encompassing
the world for everyone, as a way of being in the world to which there is no
alternative.
The kind of tripartite distinction proposed by Heidegger can be applied to a
range of other emotional states too.6 For example, Garrett (1994, pp.73–4) distin-
guishes three kinds of despair. There is ‘project-specific despair’, which is an
intentional state where one despairs about a specific state of affairs. There is also
‘personal despair’, where one despairs over one’s entire life. And there is ‘philo-
sophical despair’, which is despair over the meaninglessness of all lives.7 Again, we
have a specifically directed intentional state, a mood that shapes one’s intentional
states and a deeper mood that envelops all conceivable predicaments.8
What Garrett calls ‘philosophical despair’ is closely related to the experience of
depression, and deep mood changes are vividly conveyed by numerous autobio-
graphical descriptions of altered experience in depression. It is clear from such
accounts that the experience of depression involves, amongst other things, a shift in
the kinds of significant possibility that shape experience of self, other people, and
the surrounding world. Many authors describe a loss of both practical connected-
ness with things and emotional connectedness with people. What is lost is not just
experience of actual connections. Experience no longer incorporates the sense that
such connections are possible. This is frequently communicated in terms of an
invisible but impenetrable barrier or container that irrevocably separates the
sufferer from things and people. For example, Andrew Solomon reports that
‘I felt as if my head had been encaged in Lucite, like one of those butterflies trapped
forever in the thick transparency of a paperweight’ (2001, p.66).9 A sense of
anything as offering potential pleasure is also gone. As William Styron (2001,
p. 14) remarks, there was ‘a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed
by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living
6 Although I distinguish moods from emotions, I use the term ‘emotional state’ in a more general
way to refer to both.
7 See Steinbock (2007) for a good discussion of the phenomenology of despair, which suggests that
despair involves a loss of possibilities that various other emotional states, such as disappointment and
desperation, continue to presuppose.
8 However, I wonder whether the case of ‘personal despair’ suggests a fourth form of boredom,
located between Heidegger’s forms two and three. I can find myself in a boring situation or
experience boredom as a space of possibilities in which we are all situated. But between the two is
what one might call ‘personal boredom’, where one finds one’s entire life irrevocably boring. This is
more extreme than the case of the dinner, as it encompasses every possible situation one might
find oneself in, rather than just the one situation. Yet it is still only my boredom and thus not as deep
as form three.
9 Solomon also recalls Sylvia Plath’s metaphor of being stuck in the suffocating atmosphere of a
chemical bell jar (Plath, 1966).
world’. And, as Andrew Solomon puts it, ‘the first thing that goes is happiness. You
cannot gain pleasure from anything. That’s famously the cardinal symptom of
major depression. But soon the other emotions follow happiness into oblivion’
(2001, p. 19). It is not just that things no longer make one feel happy; a sense of their
even having the potential to do so is gone. Also gone is the conceivability of any
alternative to the depression. Almost all authors who offer detailed accounts of a
major depressive episode state that, whilst suffering from depression, they could
not contemplate the possibility of any alternative to the world of depression and
therefore could not conceive of the possibility of recovery. For example, Styron
states that ‘all sense of hope had vanished’ (2001, p.58), and Sally Brampton, in a
recent memoir, describes her predicament as follows:
It is the glass wall that separates us from life, from ourselves, that is so truly frightening in
depression. It is a terrible sense of our own overwhelming reality, a reality that we know has
nothing to do with the reality that we once knew. And from which we think we will never
escape. It is like living in a parallel universe but a universe so devoid of familiar signs of life
that we are adrift, lost. (2008, p.171)
As her account illustrates, although we are often oblivious to deep moods, this is
not always so. Changes in mood are phenomenologically conspicuous in depres-
sion partly because of the awareness that something has been lost. The sufferer
knows all too well that the world didn’t used to be like this, that something is
absent from experience. However, to be aware in this way that things were once
different is not to retain the kinds of possibility that previously characterized
experience. The sufferer can remember that things used to be different but
she cannot rekindle the experience of their being different; she can no longer feel
the possibilities that were once there and that might one day return. Although she
knows that something is gone and is able to speak of what has been lost, there
remains something she cannot fully conceive of, an appreciation of things that
none of her thoughts or words are able to evoke. It is the possibility of actually
experiencing things as mattering in the ways that they once did which she cannot
entertain. For example: ‘What time is it? A little after ten in the morning. I try to
remember what ten in the morning means, how it feels. But I cannot. Time means
nothing to me any more’ (Brampton, 2008, p. 29).
Depression thus involves a transformation of deep mood, a shift in the kinds of
concern that structure experience of people, things, and also, of course, oneself. So
there is a big difference between at least some of the emotional changes that occur
in depression and an increase in the intensity of emotions like sadness. The sadness
of severe depression is not adequately characterized as an intensification or gener-
alization of some intentional state. The world is experienced through the sadness. It
is how one finds oneself in the world rather than an emotion that one has within
the world. One cannot see outside it, which is partly why telling people with
depression to ‘snap out of it’ is notoriously ineffective.
The depth of depressed mood will of course vary from case to case. Like
Heidegger’s second form of boredom, it often seems to take the form of my
depression, rather than the world for all of us, but more severe cases involve an
inability to appreciate that there are alternative possibilities available to anyone.
Depression is reality and any activities that seem incongruous with it appear as
absurd rather than as pointing to possibilities beyond depression:
During my long morning walks I watched people hurrying along in suits and trainers.
Where was it they were going, and why were they in such haste? I simply couldn’t imagine
feeling such urgency. I watched others throwing a ball for a dog, picking it up, and throwing
it again. Why? Where was the sense in such repetition? (Brampton, 2008, p. 249)
Deep depression is not a complete absence of all forms of significance though.

Many sufferers report intense feelings of fear, dread, isolation, and loneliness. They
still relate to the world in some way, but in a way that is quite different from what
most of us take for granted most of the time. Everyday world-meaning is replaced
by a radically altered relationship with the world, characterized by irrevocable
alienation, despair, futility, guilt, and the like, with no hope of reprieve. Sufferers
often describe the change as akin to having died. They have lost the feeling of being
alive, a sense of being practically entwined with the world and emotionally related
to others that everyday experience obliviously takes for granted:
People talk about the way disembodied spirits roam the world with no place to park
themselves, but all I can think is that I am a dispirited body, and I’m sure there are plenty
of other human mollusc shells roaming around waiting for some soul to fill them up. [ . . . ]
with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible, getting covered
over more thickly with darkness, coats and coats of darkness that are going to suffocate me
in the sweltering heat of the summer sun that I can’t even see anymore even though I can
feel it burn. Imagine [ . . . ] only knowing that the sun is shining because you feel the ache of
its awful heat and not because you know the joy of its light. Imagine always being in the
dark. (Elizabeth Wurtzel, 1996, pp. 42–54)
It is not that one doesn’t feel joy but that one cannot feel joy. The ‘darkness’ is a
loss of certain possibilities, with the result that everything is experienced through a
sense of insurmountable estrangement.10
Although I have focused on negative moods here, much the same point can be
made, I think, by appealing to more ‘positive’ moods, such as feeling wholly at
peace with the world, at one with things, and at least some instances of being in
love. A love that is ‘blind’ is a love through which one experiences the world, a love
in which one is oblivious to certain possibilities. And an all-encompassing,
unchangeable mood of being completely at peace with the world would be one
in which the possibilities of fear, worry and the like were absent from experience.
Moods thus open up certain kinds of possibility and close down others. This role is
10 See Ratcliffe (2009) for a more detailed discussion of the phenomenology of depression.
not readily apparent unless we reflect upon various kinds of extreme alteration
in mood.
It would therefore be quite wrong to conceive of deep mood as a subjective gloss,
resting on top of a pre-understood objective world. A mood, as Heidegger points
out, has neither an internal nor an external phenomenology: ‘A mood assails us.
It comes neither from “outside” nor from “inside”, but arises out of Being-in-the-
world, as a way of such Being’ (1962, p. 176). When we experience something as a
state of ourselves or as a state of the world, we are already in a mood. Hence it is
a mistake to think that we can contemplate and describe the world in a neutral,
detached fashion by simply discarding a subjective overlay. One’s mood is not
discarded; it is a context of intelligibility that continues to be presupposed by all
experience and thought. In a world devoid of all significance, an objective account
of the structure and origin of the universe could be of no more worth than a
comprehensive account of the precise configurations of all the grains of sand in a
bucket. There could be no motivation for formulating a scientific theory, no sense
of it being of any potential interest or consequence. It is doubtful that scientific
theories would even be intelligible to someone in such a mood. Without relevance,
significance, purpose, without a sense of the world as a place that merits explora-
tion and explanation, the possibility of seeking to understand anything would be
absent. Indeed, it is arguable that a kind of seeking is inextricable from the process
of understanding. Hence a sense of what it is to understand something would be
gone. One would be presented with a series of hollow claims that one might
indifferently assent to or deny but which one could not fully grasp. Just such a
loss of intelligibility is often reported in severe depression. For example, Brampton
remarks that she found herself unable to read: ‘Words are no more than patterns on
a page’ (2008, p. 33). Background mood is not something that any experience,
thought, or conceptualization can simply transcend. However, as the deeper moods
are often phenomenologically inconspicuous, their role tends to be overlooked.
Hence scientific and philosophical accounts of how we experience the world
generally fail to incorporate a sense of being in the world that they obliviously
take for granted. As Heidegger remarks, ‘science becomes blind to what it must
presuppose’ (2001, p.75) and ‘one must see that science as such (i.e., all theoretical-
scientific knowledge) is founded as a way of being-in-the-world—founded in the
bodily having of a world’ (2001, p.94).11
A question still to be addressed is what moods actually consist of. Granted,
we can describe them as playing a distinctive kind of phenomenological role
but what kind of state could play that role? In the remainder of this chapter,
I will suggest that moods are comprised of bodily feeling and that apparent
11 Similar statements can be found in other works by Heidegger (e.g. 1962, 1995).
implausibility of this view is symptomatic of a commonplace misconception of

bodily feeling.12
15.4 E M OT I O N S AND B O D I LY F E E L I N G S
................................................................................................................
The term ‘feeling’ is used in various different ways. We might speak of the feeling of
being in love, the feeling that all is well, the feeling that something is not true, the
feeling of being at the beach on a hot, sunny day or feeling like one is on a
rollercoaster. One could maintain, as Nussbaum (2001, p.60) does, that certain
uses of the term ‘feeling’, including those associated with emotions and moods, are
synonymous with ‘judgement’ or ‘belief ’. Thus, when we refer to a feeling that
relates to states of affairs outside of the body, we are talking about something quite
different from a ‘bodily feeling’. Nussbaum is of course right that not all talk of
feelings refers to bodily feelings. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to think of all bodily
feelings as states that have an exclusively bodily phenomenology. The same feeling
can be referred to as bodily in nature and also as a way of experiencing something
other than the body.13 We can talk about the same feeling in different ways, and
what might appear to be different feelings are often one and the same.
We do not perceive our bodies in complete isolation from how we perceive
everything else, and then link the two kinds of perception together by means of
some subsequent mental process. Consider, for example, the sense of balance.
Losing one’s balance or feeling disorientated is not just a perception of one’s
body or of the world outside the body. It is a perception of the relationship between
one’s body and its surroundings.14 A sense of bodily orientation is integral to
world-experience; the perceived world is organized in terms of ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘left’,
and ‘right’. A feeling such as disorientation is a bodily feeling but it is not just an
experience of the body. In fact, the term ‘bodily feeling’ is ambiguous. It could be
understood as referring exclusively to feelings of the body, experiences where the
body or a part of it is phenomenologically conspicuous in some way. This is
consistent with the pervasive tendency to think of bodily feelings as having an
12 Heidegger’s view on this matter is not at all clear. He does not discuss the phenomenology
of the body at all in Being and Time, but does later acknowledge that it needs to be addressed (e.g.
2001, p.81). Strasser (1977, Chapter 7) is not wholly clear on the relationship between bodily feeling and
mood either, but does seem to acknowledge that the two are intimately related.
13 For other recent approaches which challenge the assumption that bodily feelings have a wholly
‘internal’ phenomenology, see Goldie (2000, 2002, 2009), Stocker (2004), Greenspan (2004) and
Drummond (2004).
14 In Ratcliffe (2008, Chapter 3) I make a similar point by discussing, at length, the phenomenology
of tactile feelings.
exclusively internal phenomenology. However, bodily feelings can also be con-

ceived of as experiences where the body feels something, and here there is no
commitment to the assumption that they are experiences of internal states.
I suggest that what applies to a feeling of disorientation also applies to many if
not all of the bodily feelings that are implicated in emotional states. The feeling
body is an aspect of the experience but it need not be the exclusive object of the
experience. Indeed, it need not be an object of experience at all. A bodily feeling can
be a way in which something other than the body is experienced. It can be that
through which we experience something, an agent of perception rather than an
object of perception.
This conception of bodily feeling follows naturally from the increasingly wide-
spread recognition amongst phenomenologists and others that we do not experi-
ence and understand the world primarily as detached spectators but through our
practical, purposive, bodily involvement with it. A background sense of
interconnected bodily potentialities structures perception of one’s surroundings:
The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to
be intervolved with a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be
continually committed to them. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.82)
The body is not simply an object of experience that one is intimately associated
with or perhaps even identical with. Bodily dispositions to act, recoil, immerse
oneself in activity, or withdraw from it are reflected in what things are perceived as
offering. Hence perception of the body and perception of what is outside it cannot
be disentangled. Much the same point is also made by J. J. Gibson:
Egoreception accompanies exteroception, like the other side of a coin. Perception has two
poles, the subjective and the objective, and information is available to specify both. One
perceives the environment and coperceives oneself. (1979, p.126)
There is considerable current interest in ‘enactive’ approaches to perception, which

develop the ideas of Gibson and others, in order to argue that perception of
the world incorporates proprioception and also bodily activities embedded in
particular kinds of environment. Accounts such as that of Noë (2004) maintain
that salient possibilities for perception and action are reflected in how objects are
experienced. For example, integral to experience of an object is the sense that it
might be perceived from another angle, revealing its hidden aspects.15 Although
I endorse the view that we experience things in terms of significant possibilities
(see, for example, Ratcliffe, 2008, Chapter 4), I also think that enactive approaches
generally fail to appreciate the wide range of different ways in which things and
people are perceived as significant. Consider what Gibson (1979) calls ‘affordances’,
15 So far as I know, the most sophisticated formulation of this kind of position is that of Husserl
(e.g. 1973, 2001). See Ratcliffe (2008, Chapter 4) for a discussion.
opportunities that things are perceived as offering. One can say that a fast-
approaching and unavoidable avalanche affords curling up in a ball and waiting
to die but this is uninformative. It needs to be acknowledged that many different
kinds of significance relation feature in our experience, such as ‘threatening and
impossible to escape from’, ‘desirable but beyond one’s grasp’, ‘interesting’, ‘easy to
obtain’, and so on. Different emotions depend upon different kinds of significance,
different ways in which things matter to us.
Solomon’s claim that some emotions incorporate kinaesthetic judgements is
susceptible to much the same criticism. There is too much emphasis on bodily
activity, on ‘getting engaged in the world ’ (2004a, p.86), and insufficient acknowl-
edgement of the variety of ways in which things are felt to matter. Once it is
appreciated that feelings in general do not have an exclusively bodily phenomenol-
ogy, that we do not experience our bodies as sealed containers with some experi-
ences falling clearly on the inside and others wholly on the outside, it becomes clear
that not all world-directed feelings are akin to the kinaesthetic judgements involved
in catching a ball or running up the stairs. Bodily feelings can involve a sense of
disengagement and passivity as much as they can engagement and activity.
All sorts of different experiences serve to illustrate the double-sidedness of feeling,
how feelings can be both perceptions of self and at the same time perceptions of non-
self.16 Consider Sartre’s description of experiencing eyestrain while reading:
. . . this pain can itself be indicated by objects of the world; i.e., by the book which I read. It is
with more difficulty that the words are detached from the undifferentiated ground which they
constitute; they may tremble, quiver; their meaning can be derived only with effort . . . . (1989,
p.332)
When one is concentrating on the words, the experience of eyestrain, the discom-
fort, is clearly there but it is experienced primarily as a way in which the words on
the page appear. Then, as one attends to the experience, there is a phenomenologi-
cal shift. One becomes aware of a pain around one’s eyes and, in so doing,
disengages from the text. The object of experience shifts but the discomfort,
although not previously an object of experience, was surely not wholly absent
from the experience. Strasser (1977, pp.238–9) makes a complementary point in
relation to the experience of tiredness:
I can simply live ‘in’ my tiredness. I intransitively ‘feel’, then, in the mode of attraction or
mood. But I also transitively ‘feel’ my tiredness; then I examine it on the basis of a
knowledge-intention and possibly identify sensations of pain in this or that group of
muscles, organ-sensations, and so forth.
A feeling of tiredness need not be first and foremost a feeling of the body. We can
inhabit our tiredness, experiencing the world through it rather than scrutinizing
16 For detailed discussion of many such experiences, see Ratcliffe (2008).

the tiredness itself. It can happen that someone who is extremely tired, perhaps for
a prolonged period, remains curiously unaware of it. Even though the tiredness is
not itself conspicuous in a case like this, it might well be phenomenologically deep,
a shape that all experience takes on rather than an inconvenience that one actively
tries to shake off. We can thus distinguish between intentional bodily feelings like
the eyestrain, which present the body or something else in some way, and ‘pre-
intentional’ feelings, such as a background feeling of tiredness that shapes all
experience and thought. As Strasser notes, ‘governance by feeling operates partially
on the preintentional level, partially on the intentional level’ (1977, p.229).
We are often oblivious to the role played by pre-intentional feeling. However, as
Heidegger (1962, pp.226–7) recognizes in his discussion of Angst, its role can
become noticeable during extreme shifts in mood. In some such cases, what one
previously took for granted becomes salient in its absence, as illustrated by
everyday metaphors such as ‘having the rug pulled out from under one’s feet’.
John Hull, in his autobiographical account of becoming blind and living with
blindness, describes what I take to be a shift in pre-intentional feeling, an experi-
ence which he concedes is extremely difficult to express. He refers to the onset of
depression and to a feeling much deeper than mundane feelings, which came to
encompass all experience and thought: ‘the deepest feelings go beyond feeling. One
is numbed by the feeling; one does not experience the feeling’ (1990, p.168). It is not
a localized experience but a way of being that transforms the range of possible
emotional experience: ‘The emotional life is no longer experienced as content (i.e.,
and emotion having the identifiable content of anger, sadness, and so on) but as a
sort of numbness or recoil. I take refuge in sleep, or sleep seeks to inhabit me’ (1990,
p.153). Numerous other reports of painful feeling in depression make clear that
such feelings are neither directed at the body in isolation from the world nor vice
versa. They are bodily feelings and, at the same time, ways of finding oneself in the
world. For example, Tracy Thompson (1995, p.73) describes the transition from
grief to depression as follows: ‘As the months went by, the breathtaking reality of
my father’s death became a physical hurt, a heaviness in my bones, a pervasive
lethargy.’ A world that is all too conspicuously empty of value, practical significance
and potential communion with others is quite literally painful. As William Styron
(2001, p.49) remarks, ‘the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the
quality of physical pain’ (Styron, 2001, p.49).17
17 As several authors have noted, the phenomenology of painful estrangement often reported in
depression is characterized by a kind of unpleasant bodily conspicuousness. The body as a whole feels
different, taking the form of an oddly conspicuous object of experience rather than as a medium
through which other things are experienced (e.g. Fuchs, 2003, p.225). However, a contrast between the
body that invisibly belongs and the body that is unpleasantly salient is, I think, an over-simplification.
There are many different ways in which the body can be phenomenologically conspicuous, not all of
which are unpleasant or alienating (Young, 2005, Chapter 3; Ratcliffe, 2008, Chapter 4).
Deep moods, I suggest, are pre-intentional feelings that remain consistent over
fairly long periods of time. It follows from this that the role of constituting a space
of significant possibilities is not performed solely by these moods. Sometimes,
background feelings shift only momentarily. In other cases, these feelings might be
so consistent and enduring that we refer to them as character or personality traits
rather than moods. Hence the term ‘mood’, even when restricted to deep moods, is
not wholly adequate. For this reason, I have recommended using the term ‘existen-
tial feeling’ instead (Ratcliffe, 2005, 2008). Whether sporadic, longer term or
operative over a whole life, a feeling is ‘existential’ insofar as it constitutes a sense
of belonging to a significant world. Even so, the term ‘mood’ does at least serve to
capture many of the relevant predicaments. Furthermore, the distinction between
having an emotion and being in a mood is a useful one.
It is important to recognize that, even though existential feelings (amongst
which I include deep moods) and intentionally directed emotions play different
phenomenological roles, the two aspects of experience are intimately related.
Existential feelings and emotions are not wholly separate, static ‘states’ but inextri-
cable aspects of experience that shape each other. For example, a sudden change in
deep mood is often brought about by an intense emotion or series of interrelated
emotions. These emotions, although intense, might at first be specifically focused
and thus not very deep. However, such emotions often provoke reorientations of
mood, a process that is referred to in some cases as something’s ‘sinking in’. Sue
Cataldi (1993) describes the process by reflecting upon how she felt when attacked
on the street. To begin with, there is a gradual realization of her situation, involving
a loss of practical, bodily ‘grip’ or ‘hold’ on her surroundings. The initial disor-
ientation gives way to an awareness of danger. As she is assaulted and a knife is
revealed, the experience takes on the form of ‘sheer terror’, which is not a localized
emotion but an all-encompassing way of being. The terror is not felt within a
situation; it is the situation (p. 15). It is, as she says, ‘deep’, a deep emotion being
something one is ‘in’ (p. 2).
When intense emotions culminate in deep mood changes, the process is essen-
tially bodily in nature. For example, here is how the philosopher Havi Carel
describes her experience of receiving a diagnosis of serious illness:
Pain and fear struck like a physical blow. It is difficult to describe the physicality of bad
news. I remember looking at the room and feeling confused: it looked the same, while my
life had been turned upside down. Make it stop, I thought. This is the wrong story.
Someone come and fix it. Someone do something. The realization that everything was
about to change, that a new era was about to begin, seared like burning oil on skin. It
crushed me with invisible force. It is difficult to describe the pain and fear that descended
on me at that moment. Now I cannot imagine my life without this pain and fear. (2008, p.4)
What she conveys here is a way the body feels and, at the same time, a dramatic and
ultimately enduring shift in the space of significant possibilities. How the body feels
cannot be pulled apart from world-experience, and Carel herself explicitly rejects
contrasts such as mental/physical and internal/external, which are engrained in so
much of philosophical discourse (2008, p. 21).
Experiences like these do of course involve more than just alterations in inten-
tional and pre-intentional bodily feelings.18 There is also a conceptual understand-
ing at play, and I think it likely that many of the experiences we refer to as
‘emotions’ are not comprised exclusively of bodily feelings. Emotions can be
complicated, dynamic processes, which have an elaborate conceptual structure
that often takes the form of an unfolding narrative. As Peter Goldie suggests, an
emotion is:
. . . a relatively complex state, involving past and present episodes of thoughts, feelings, and
bodily changes, dynamically related in a narrative of part of a person’s life, together with
dispositions to experience further emotional episodes, and to act out of the emotion and to
express that emotion. (2000, p.144)
However, I suggest that existential feelings, in contrast, are comprised wholly of

pre-intentional, non-conceptual feeling. They can be influenced by emotions and
thus by the conceptual appraisals that are integral to at least some emotions. But
existential feelings are not themselves conceptual. They do not incorporate judge-
ments or appraisals of any kind. By implication, they do not incorporate any
conceptual content. An existential feeling is a space of possibilities within which
we experience, think, and act, as opposed to being an experience or thought
content. As these feelings are presupposed by conceptual judgements rather than
being wholly separate from them, it would be better to call them ‘pre-conceptual’
than ‘non-conceptual’.
It might be objected that non-conceptual feeling cannot amount to a sense of
salient possibilities. Conceptual understanding is required for that. However,
I doubt that this is so. Consider the experience of surprise. In order to be surprised,
one need not have conceptualized expectations about a situation. Rather, the
anticipation of what is likely to happen can take the form of an unthinking,
habitual, bodily engagement with the world (Husserl, 1973, 2001). Expectations
are often only conceptualized after one has met with the unexpected. I see no
reason why the same point cannot be applied more generally—we anticipate salient
possibilities through our feeling bodies.
One might also question the relationship between existential feeling and
thought. I have argued that deep moods and other existential feelings structure
experience by constituting spaces of possibility. But do they similarly structure
18 Again, I should stress that, although I have chosen to focus upon negative emotions here, the
process of reorientation does not always take the form of a negative event provoking intense and
unpleasant emotions, which eventually tear one out of a realm of cosy belonging. For instance, the joy,
delight, relief, gratitude, pride, or elation that follows very good news could equally provoke a change
in mood.
thought? Of course, they have effects upon what we think and upon how well we
think. But the relationship, it might be argued, is causal; background feelings do
not make our thoughts intelligible. Unlike emotion, thought does not have a
phenomenology that presupposes existential feeling, the reason being that thought
does not have a phenomenology at all. However, this kind of view is, I suggest,
mistaken. When a native speaker hears a sentence spoken in his or her own
language, their experience is quite different from that of someone who hears the
same sentence but does not speak the language. Drawing on such examples, Galen
Strawson (e.g. 2004) suggests—quite rightly, in my view—that philosophers need
to acknowledge the category of ‘cognitive experience’. The view that conceptual
understanding and, by implication, the process of thinking have a phenomenology
can be further supported by a consideration of alterations in the experience of
thinking that are reported in various psychiatric illnesses. If there were no phe-
nomenology of thought, there could be no such changes. It also seems that these
changes are, in every case, intimately associated with alterations in feeling. For
example, people with schizophrenia may complain that their thoughts are not only
fragmented but also strangely object-like. Louis Sass (e.g. 2003), amongst others,
has argued at length that these alterations in the phenomenology of thought are
inextricable from anomalous background feeling. Patients suffering from deper-
sonalization likewise complain of changes in how their thoughts are experienced,
which seem to be bound up with anomalous feeling. For example, Simeon and
Abugel quote a patient as saying that ‘thinking just felt different, as if coming from
somewhere else’ (2006, p. 26).
Hence I propose that experience and thought are both structured by a felt sense
of belonging to a meaningful world, a world that matters in various different ways.
This existential background, when it remains consistent over a period of time, is
often referred to as a mood. Such moods, and existential feelings more generally,
are responsible for what Solomon calls the meaning of life. But they are not
judgements and they are not generalized emotions. Instead, they are bodily feelings
and, at the same time, spaces of significant possibility.
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Peter Goldie 15-Peter Goldie-Chapter15 Page Proof page 347 29.5.

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the phenomenology of mood and the meaning of life 351

So emotions do not give life a meaning relative to some standpoint external to

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An emotion is thus an enduring aspect of world-experience. Between episodes of

the phenomenology of mood and the meaning of life 353

constitute) the sense of belonging to a meaningful world and those that we

In taking emotions to be intentional states with specific objects and moods to be

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(1962, 1995), moods are phenomenologically deeper than emotions, by which

2 Throughout this chapter, I adopt a phenomenological conception of intentionality, which takes it

the phenomenology of mood and the meaning of life 355

standoffish fashion. More often, our appreciation of them is practical in nature; we

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the phenomenology of mood and the meaning of life 357

something’ (1992, p.176). Mood constitutes a phenomenological background in the

5 Heidegger’s discussion places particular emphasis on the temporal structure of boredom.

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the phenomenology of mood and the meaning of life 359

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the phenomenology of mood and the meaning of life 361

Deep depression is not a complete absence of all forms of significance though.

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implausibility of this view is symptomatic of a commonplace misconception of

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exclusively internal phenomenology. However, bodily feelings can also be con-

There is considerable current interest in ‘enactive’ approaches to perception, which

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16 For detailed discussion of many such experiences, see Ratcliffe (2008).

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the phenomenology of mood and the meaning of life 367

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However, I suggest that existential feelings, in contrast, are comprised wholly of

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DRUMMOND, J. J. (2004). ‘Cognitive Impenetrability’ and the Complex Intentionality of the

the phenomenology of mood and the meaning of life 371

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