Our Ability to Feel-Towards Together: Collective Affective Intentionality Preliminarily Conceived

Abstract

In this chapter I begin to address the issue of collective affective intentionality by discussing some of the considerations that animate the general debate on collective intentionality—a debate that turns on the question of what it is to share an intentional attitude in a sufficiently demanding sense of the verb ‘to share’. I eventually express my preference for a membership account that stresses the relational nature of collective intentionality as well as the normative character of the tie between the participants. In accordance with an objection repeatedly leveled against Margaret Gilbert’s account of so-called collective guilt feelings—which constitutes one of the most prominent exceptions to the tendency to neglect the realm of the affective in the early debate on collective intentionality in analytic philosophy—, I argue that a theory of collective affective intentionality able to capture the affective, the intentional, and the collective nature of the phenomenon at issue has to take as its point of departure the idea that collective affective intentionality is a matter of joint actualizations of our human faculty to feel-towards together. My main goal here is to provide a first glimpse of what has to be done in order to offer a philosophical account of collective affective intentionality which could be considered adequate in light of important insights gained in the course of both the debate on affective intentionality and the general debate on collective intentionality.