The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling: On Affect and Intentionality by Jean Moritz Müller

Abstract

Reviewed by: The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling: On Affect and Intentionality by Jean Moritz Müller Rick Anthony Furtak MÜLLER, Jean Moritz. The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling: On Affect and Intentionality. Cham: Palgrave Pivot, 2019. x + 155 pp. Cloth, $59.99 This concise, systematic monograph is informed above all by ideas from the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand, a phenomenological philosopher of emotion whose work is gradually being made more readily available in English translation. Its central thesis is that emotions in general involve a kind of “position-taking,” the taking of a stand, toward significant features of the world. This is, in other words, a theory that rightly emphasizes the intentionality of affective feeling, while accounting for that type of feeling in a distinctive manner. Müller’s style is lucid and engaging, taking seriously both axiology and phenomenology and focusing on the sense of value in what appears to us. “A view of formal objects as being relative to an individual’s evaluative perspective,” he writes, “is entirely compatible with their recognition as sufficiently objective to provide standards of fittingness.” This leads Müller to defend a form of perspectival realism. “Recognizing emotional feelings as stances informed by our complex background of cares and concerns, this picture recognizes them as one of the most subtle and complex form[s] of position taking we are capable of.” Why does he not refer to them simply as modes of experience, rather than forms of position-taking? Because, he argues, affective feeling “is directed or aimed towards [an] object or event, rather than being a case of receptivity.” It involves, instead, a kind of spontaneity. So a judge or jury can acknowledge guilt, not create it, can falsely ascribe it or fail to see that it exists in a particular case. But why not say that the judge or jury acknowledges this guilt in a responsive manner? After all, the guilt is not its creation but a fact to which the judge or jury reacts. It is important to Müller to reject the “tendency to think of emotional feeling as receptivity to value” for the following reason. “In feeling angry, sad, or disappointed, we do not come to be acquainted with . . . the disvalue of something; rather we take a certain negative position towards it because of its disvalue.” At face value, this claim initially seemed puzzling to me; if I have not been entirely won over, I think I have come to understand better what he means. “Rather than apprehending or ‘taking cognizance’ of aspects of its circumstances, the felt agitation of emotion is a way of taking a stand or position on such aspects,” Müller claims, citing von Hildebrand’s Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung in his support. Emotion is akin to moral action insofar as it involves a disposition of the will—not willing that something or other be axiologically the case, but having one’s volition implicated by its being bad or good in some respect. We might compare Müller’s view to that of Kant, who asserts in Anthropologie §7 that ideas with respect to which the mind is passive, and by which the subject is therefore affected, belong to the sensual cognitive faculty, with emphasis for our current purposes not on sensual but on cognitive. Pure practical reason is not the only kind of practical reason there is. For Müller, the reason why “the feeling does not apprehend or disclose this value” is that “one cannot apprehend what one has already [End Page 391] apprehended,” and “the respective value is apprehended prior to the feeling.” Emotional feeling, that is, ought not to “be conceived as apprehending value since it already presupposes awareness of it.” I can be acquainted with a fact without feeling aware of its meaning for me. As Sartre said at the funeral of Camus, he is dead, and I don’t believe it. Only a particular kind of emotional response registers the loss. Yet I can hold this view without abandoning the kind of value-responsive idea of emotion from which Müller differentiates his own conception. Noting both Goldie and Nussbaum as antecedents, especially the...