Conference | Paper

Husserl's Phenomenology of Feelings Reconsidered

Thomas Byrne

Wednesday 1st July 2020

The paper accomplishes two goals. First, the essay examines the evolution of Husserl’s philosophy concerning the fulfillment of feeling-intentions. I begin by discussing how Husserl developed his theory of the fulfillment of feeling-intentions in his 1901 Logische Untersuchungen (hereafter LU). I then examine how he revised that account in a 1910 manuscript, entitled, “Erfüllt sich der Wunsch in der Freude?” (hereafter EWF), which can be found in the forthcoming Husserliana Edition, Studien zur Stuktur des Bewusstseins (hereafter Studien). By exploring how Husserl transformed his theory, the essay reveals that Husserl presents a much richer phenomenology of feelings in the manuscripts contained in the Studien texts than has yet been accounted for. In other words, the talk introduces and explores how the publication of Studien can allow for phenomenologists today to rethink their interpretations of Husserl’s philosophy of feelings.

 

The second objective of the paper is to employ Husserl’s previously unpublished insights to critically engage with the phenomenological scholarship on feelings today. Specifically, I demonstrate how Husserl’s conclusion from EWF, that there is a distinction between the satisfaction of the wish-intention and the fulfillment of a value-intention can supplement contemporary conceptions of the appropriateness of feelings.

 

To accomplish these two goals, the paper is divided into three sections. The first two sections examine Husserl’s philosophy of the fulfillment of feeling-intentions in LU and EWF, respectively. The third section cashes out those historical analyses via a critical engagement with the contemporary literature.