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Husserl and the Inner Structure of Feeling-Acts

QUENTIN SMITH

Published In: Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 6, 1976, pp. 84-104.

Edmund Husserl’s theory of feeling has been one of the least known and yet one of the most innovative aspects of his philosophy. Its relative unknownness can be explained by the fact that an extremely small portion of his published writings have been concerned with feelings.[1] But within these fragmentary analyses there can be found a number of new and important distinctions that Husserl made in the nature of feeling. Instead of adopting the traditional tendency of simply describing the different “objects” and “causes” of feeling, Husserl made as his theme the inner structure of feelings themselves. He was thereby able to discover the descriptive differences between feeling-acts and feeling-sensations, and between feeling-emotions and feeling-tonalities. He was also able to bring to a new degree of clarity the substantial difference between feeling objects and the underlying “objects” that the feeling objects are founded upon. In this paper we would like to elucidate these and other distinctions that Husserl made, and to develop or modify some of his conclusions that we believe are in need of further analysis. To this end we shall discuss 1) feelings as act-matters, 2) the proper intentionality of feelings, and the relation of feelings to presentation, 3) feeling-sensations and their intentional interpretation, and 4) feeling-qualities and feeling-flows.

1. Feelings as Act-Matters

Husserl’s first description of feeling-acts can be found in Chapter Two of the Fifth Logical Investigation. Here he describes feelings as qualities of intentional acts, rather than as matters of these acts. An act-quality is the moment of an intentional act which determines the way in which the act intends its object, whereas an act-matter is the moment which determines what object the act intends. With regard to the act-matter, Husserl writes “the matter...must be that element in an act which first gives it reference to an object...The matter --- to carry clearness a little further --- is that peculiar side of an act’s phenomenological content that not only determines that it grasps the object but also as what it grasps it, the properties, relations, categorical forms, that it itself attributes to it. It is the act's matter that makes it count as this object and no other”.[2] For example, it is the act-matter that determines the reference to a green house, a person who is standing before me, or a universal category.

The act-quality, on the other hand, is “the manner of objective reference”.[3] It can be "an act-quality of the objectifying kind",[4] which divides into existentially positing acts and existentially non-positing acts, the latter which “leave the existence of their object unsettled: the object may, objectively considered, exist, but it is not referred to as existent”.[5] Objectifying act-qualities thus are the moments of an act which either posit existence or some modality of existence, or do not posit at all --- and remain neutral to the existential status of their object.

There is also another kind of act-quality. This kind encompasses the sphere of “non-objectifying acts such as joys, wishes, volitions”.[6] Non-objectifying act-qualities are predominantly feeling-acts, and are such that they are always founded on objectifying act-qualities. A feeling-act can never be experienced by itself, but can only be experienced as a way of referring to an object that is posited (or not-posited) as having a certain mode of existence. For example, I cannot experience joy by itself, but must experience joy in a person or event that is posited as existent.

Hence in any complex intentional act it is possible to distinguish three different moments. If we take the joyful perception of a person, it is possible to distinguish the act-matter, which is the reference to the object, a person, the objectifying act-quality, which is the existentially positing way of referring to the person, and the non-objectifying act-quality, which is the joyful way of referring to the existentially posited person.

Despite the subtlety and penetration of this classification of the moments of the intentional act, it contains a certain difficulty which cannot be overlooked. What we have in mind here is the classification of the feeling-acts as non-objectifying act-qualities. In another article, "On Husserl’s Theory of Consciousness in the Fifth Logical Investigation”,[7] we maintained that feeling-acts have their own objects --- enjoyableness, fearfulness, pitifulness --- and hence need their own act-matter in order to achieve a reference to these objects. "Presentations",[8] which is Husserl’s term for the unity of act-matters with objectifying act-qualities, are not the only acts which refer to their own objects. We argued this as follows:

“Joy has enjoyableness as its intentional object, fear has fearfulness as its object, pity has pitifulness as its object, and desire has desirableness as its object. These affective objects appear in and through the acts of feeling, they are objects that appear, as it were, ‘on top of’ the objects of the presentative acts...Husserl stated that the matter of an act is what gives it reference to an object; it determines “what” it is that I am conscious of. Now if affective acts have their own intentional objects, different from that of the presentative acts, then must not they necessarily have a matter which gives them reference to this object? They cannot rely on the matter of the presentative acts, for this matter only constitutes the reference to the object of the presentative act. The affective act itself needs a matter in order to be able to achieve a reference to its own peculiar and separate affective object.”[9]

In terms of the example we gave above, this would mean that the act of joy is not a way of referring to the existentially posited person, but is rather a reference to a new object, the object of enjoyableness.

It is obvious that our argument here is based on the thesis that these affective phenomena are objects. For if they are not objects, they do not need act-matters, and can be adequately accounted for in terms of act qualities. Now it is conceivable that one may object to calling these affective phenomena “objects”. For one may point out that enjoyableness, desirableness, etc., are by no means objects, as are such presented objects as a house, a star or a person. For while a star or a person can subsist by themselves, without the support of anything else, desirableness and enjoyableness cannot. Desirableness and enjoyableness can only make their appearance as founded upon such presented objects as a person or a star. However this objection can be met if we point out that an object, as defined by Husserl, can be a founded object as well as an independent, unfounded object. This becomes apparent in Husserl’s treatment of categorial objects in the Sixth Chapter of the Sixth Logical Investigation. Categorial objects are all founded objects. That is, they can only be constituted on the basis of underlying sensuous objects, and cannot become self-given without these sensuous objects. These categorial “objects are based on the sensuous ones, they are related to what appears in the basic acts. Their manner of appearance is essentially determined by this relation. We are here dealing with a sphere of objects, which can only show themselves ‘in person’ in such founded acts. In such founded acts we have the categorial element in intuition and knowledge, in them assertive thought, functioning expressively, finds fulfillment”.[10] Hence a founded phenomenon can just as much be an object as an unfounded one. If the categorial forms can only appear “in person” as founded on underlying objects, then why should they merit the title of “objects” any more than the affective phenomena, which also can only appear “in person” as founded on underlying objects?

In fact, if we go one step further and examine the relation between the categorial forms and the affective phenomena more closely, we will find that the founded structure of categorial forms is similar to that of the affective phenomena. Categorial forms are of two basic types, relational and universal. Relational forms can be internal, as the relation of a whole to its parts, or they can be “external relations, from which predications such as ‘A is to the right of B’, ‘A is larger, brighter, louder than B etc.’, take their rise.”[11] However it is the other type of categorial forms, the universal forms (Red, Triangle, etc.), that interest us, for it is their founded structure that bears the closest resemblance to that of the affective phenomena. If we take the act moments that constitute these universal forms, and compare them to the act moments that constitute the affective phenomena, we will come to the same conclusion with regard to both of them. We will see that the moments of the feeling-acts can no more be described as ways of referring to a founding object than the moments of the categorial-acts can be. For, in and by themselves, these affective and categorial act moments do not refer to their founding objects. The act moment of “Redness” does not intrinsically refer to the red of this pen, nor does the act moment of “enjoyableness” intrinsically refer to the person who is before me. To experience the act moments of “Redness” or “enjoyableness” is not by that fact to become conscious of the founding object. It is simply to become conscious of the object Redness or the object enjoyableness. The reference of “Redness” and “enjoyableness” to their founding objects is achieved by an additional moment of the intentional act. As Husserl says, Redness is “exemplified”[12] by the founding object. It is the relation of “being exemplified by” that constitutes, in the only sense possible, the way in which “Redness” refers to its founding object. In a similar manner, it is an additional, relational moment of the experience of “enjoyableness” that constitutes the reference of “enjoyableness” to the person. It is the relational moment of “being an affective property of” that constitutes the way in which “enjoyableness” refers to the person. Outside of this relational moment of “being an affective property of” the person, there is no sense in which “enjoyableness” can be said to be a way of referring to the person or even to be a reference to the person at all.

 The consequence of this is that we must recognize that feeling-acts are no more act-qualities than categorial-acts are. If categorial universals are objects, and categorial-acts act-matters, then the phenomena of feeling must also be objects, and the feeling-acts act-matters. The only sense in which either categorial-acts or feeling-acts can be called “ways of reference” to their founding objects is in the sense of their relational moments of “being exemplified by” and “being an affective property of”. However this sense of the phrase “ways of reference” is not the sense that Husserl employs when he defines act-qualities as “ways of reference”. The “ways of reference” in the sense of “being exemplified by” and “being an affective property of” rather fall under Husserl’s definition of act-matter. We quoted this definition on page sixty-nine: “The matter...is that peculiar side of an act’s phenomenological content that not only determines that it grasps the object but also as what it grasps it, the properties, relations, categorial forms, that it itself attributes to it.”[13] Note here that all relations, under which our peculiar types of relations of “being exemplified by” and “being an affective property of” must be subsumed, are here defined as being determined by the matter of the act. The same definition becomes apparent in a negative sense if we recall that qualities were not defined as types of relations, but as existential positings and non-positings, and as feelings. Accordingly, unless we are willing to redefine “act-quality” to refer to the “ways of reference” in our sense as the types of relational moments an act may possess, we must abandon all talk of quality with respect to the intentional nature of feelings. Feeling-acts are exclusively act-matters, and by means of their act-matters, they refer to their own feeling objects.

We cannot leave this topic without noting that in Ideas I Husserl made a significant advance in his conception of the intentional nature of feelings. For in this work Husserl came to realize that feeling-acts do refer to their own objects, rather than to the objects of the presentative acts. Husserl writes that these feeling objects are “objectivities with a new type of content --- values”.[14] “We become aware of the value in valuing, of the pleasant in pleasure, of the joyous in rejoicing”.[15] “It follows from all this that all acts generally --- even the acts of feeling and will --- are ‘objectifying’ acts, original factors in the ‘constituting’ of objects.”[16]

That this new conception of feelings is a significant improvement over Husserl’s conception of feelings in the Logical Investigations has been recognized by Emmanuel Levinas, who writes that the "Ideen mark a progress”[17] in the understanding of the nature of feelings. However this new conception of feelings as acts which refer to their own objects does not resolve all the problems concerning the intentional nature of feelings. For while Husserl now conceives of feelings as referring to their own objects, he still conceives of them as act-qualities rather than as act-matters. Although it must be mentioned that in the Ideas I Husserl no longer used the terms “act-quality” or “act-matter”. For “quality” he substituted “positing” or “thesis”: “ ‘quality’...is nothing other than what we have hitherto treated as ‘positing’ or ‘thetic’ ”;[18] and the act-matter of the Logical Investigations is now discussed in terms of the nucleatic meaning-giving phase of the noesis.[19] Reading the “positing” as the “quality” of an act, we can see that for Husserl feeling-acts are still qualities: “Every feeling-consciousness with its new kind of secondary feeling-noesis comes under the concept of positional consciousness. They are in a wide but unitary sense ‘positings’ “.[20]

Now it seems to us that if Husserl came to recognize that feeling-acts have their own intentional objects, he must by that very fact also recognize that feelings are not positings or qualities, but rather matters. For Husserl defined the matter as “that element in an act which first gives it reference to an object.”[21] Thus to say at the same time that feeling-acts have a reference to their own objects, and yet do not have that very “element” which can give them such a reference, is to maintain a contradiction. If feeling-acts have no matter, it remains inconceivable how they could ever achieve a reference to their own objects. By Husserl’s own definition of matter as the reference to an object, and by his own definition of feelings as references to feeling objects, it is impossible to maintain anything other than that feelings themselves are matters.

2. The Proper Intentionality of Feelings, and the Relation of Feelings to Presentations

In the last section we saw that feelings are act-matters; they are references to feeling objects that are founded on presented objects. We also saw that feeling objects are constituted in relation to the presented objects by way of being their affective properties. These recognitions enable us to solve two further problems in Husserl’s theory of feeling-acts.

The first problem concerns the question of whether feelings are intentional acts in their own right, or are merely non-intentional states which are related to objects only by virtue of “a complication with presentations.”[22] Husserl answers that feelings are intentional in their own right. He says that feelings “are all intentions, genuine acts in our sense. They all ‘owe’ their intentional relation to certain underlying presentations. But it is part of what we mean by such ‘owing’ that they themselves really now have what they owe to something else.”[23] However by describing the intentionality of feelings in this manner, Husserl is negating the very fact he is trying to establish. For by saying that feelings owe their intentionality to presentative acts, Husserl is admitting that feelings do not possess an intentionality in their own right. If feelings are intentional only insofar as they have the presentative intentionality, and not insofar as they are feelings, this means that they are not intentional qua feelings, but only qua presentations. And this is tantamount to saying that feelings as such are non-intentional, and become intentional only by virtue of “a complication with presentations” --- which is precisely the view Husserl is trying to refute.

In the Ideas I Husserl corrected his definition of feelings by allowing them their own proper intentionality. With his recognition that feelings refer to their own objects, Husserl was able to ascribe to them “new noetic phases [and] new noematic phases”[24] which are not borrowed from or owed to the “old” presentative noetic-noematic phases. Nevertheless, as we pointed out above, by calling these noetic phases positings or qualities, Husserl contradicts his own definition of intentional matter, which is that which enables an act to refer to its own object. By considering feeling-acts as matters, as we did in the last section, these problems of the intentionality of feelings can be resolved. Since feelings would then have their own matter, they could have an intentional reference which belongs to them qua feelings, not qua their foundedness on presentations. For with this matter, feelings could refer to their own objects, and would no longer have to ride on the back of the presentative intentions as “ways of referring” to their objects.

The second problem that our reformulation of the nature of feeling-acts solves is the problem of how feelings are related to presentations. In the Logical Investigations Husserl writes that “the specific essence of pleasure demands a relation to something pleasing”.[25] But as to precisely how pleasure is related to the presented object that is pleasing, he does not tell us. Husserl does not go any further in describing this relation than to say that feelings are founded upon their presentations. In Chapter Two of the Third Logical Investigation, Husserl defines the relation of foundation as follows:

“If a law of essence means that an A cannot as such exist except in a more comprehensive unity which associates it with an M, we say that an A as such requires foundation by an M or also that an A as such needs to be supplemented by an M.”[26]

We see that this definition is a very general one, and can tell us no more about the relation of feelings to presentations than that feelings cannot exist unless accompanied by a presentation. Furthermore, this definition of foundation includes a number of other types of relationships of the founded to the founding, besides that of feelings to presentations. For example, it includes the type of relation of categorial forms to sensuous objects, of colors to spatial shapes, and of instants of time to the whole of time. Thus the specific and unique type of relation between feelings and presentations cannot be that of foundation, as this type of relation is also common to a wide variety of other phenomena.

If we turn to the sections in the Ideas I that are devoted to feelings and their relations to presentations, we will find that Husserl again elaborates on the position in the Logical Investigations that feelings are related to presentations by being founded on them. However he also mentions a more definite conception of the relation between feelings and presentations. This is expressed most clearly in a section near the end of the book, which is concerned with the “Delimitation of the Essence ‘Noematic Meaning’ ”.[27] Husserl is explaining how the description of the noematic meanings should be carried out, and writes

“The description of [objectified values] applies to the ‘matter’ intended and, in addition, to the predicates of ‘value,’ as when ‘in the sense’ of that form of our meaning which consists in valuing we say of the tree as it appears that it is covered with ‘gloriously’ scented blossom. Even the predicates of value have then their inverted commas; they are the predicates not of a value simpliciter, but of a value-noema.”[28]

Husserl is here indicating that feeling objects, or “values”, are predicates; that is, they are related to presented objects in a predicative manner. The “gloriousness” of the blossom’s scent is related to the scent by being a predicate of it. Unfortunately, however, Husserl never elaborated upon the nature of these affective predicates. For as such, the relational character of “being a predicate of” cannot be said to be the unique relational character of feeling objects, for the “being a predicate of” is a relational character of presentations as well, e.g. as “whiteness” is a predicate of the object “a star”. In order for the special character of these affective predicates as affective predicates to be uncovered, they must in some way be differentiated from the presented predicates. In the absence of such a differentiation by Husserl, we shall attempt to indicate a few of the salient features of these affective predicates in the following.

It will be recalled that in the last section we attempted to uncover the specific relation of feelings to presentations by contrasting this relation with the relation of universal forms to their founding presentations. We saw that universal forms were related to their founding presentations by “being exemplified by” them, and that feelings were related to their founding presentations by “being an affective property of” them. We may take this phrase, “being an affective property of”, to be equivalent in its meaning to “being an affective predicate of”, although for our purposes “property” is a more suitable term as it does not carry the implication of being a linguistic form. Bearing this equivalence in mind, we can begin to indicate what is meant by these two phrases if we point out that the relationship they refer to can be understood in two different senses. The relationship of “being an affective property of” can be understood either as the relation of feeling matter to the presentative matter, or as the relation of the feeling object to the presented object. In the former sense, the act-matter, “being an affective property of”, would be another moment of the two-layered intentional act itself, the moment that connects the upper layer, the feeling matter, to the lower layer, the presentative matter. In the latter sense, the “being an affective property of” would be an objectively appearing relational meaning that connects the feeling object to the presented object. It is this latter relation, the objectively appearing one, that we are concerned with here.

The objectively appearing relation of “being a affective property of” is normally a preverbal relationship. For example, as 1 walk in fear through the woods at night, I do not verbalize to myself “the woods are fearful”. Rather I am preverbally aware of the property of “fearfulness” as attached to the woods themselves. And by the same stroke this property of the woods appears to me preconceptually; I do not think of the property of “fearfulness” as being a property of the woods, but “intuit” or “perceive” it as belonging to the woods.

But this is not to say that this relation of “being an affective property of” can never be spoken of or thought of. In a conversation I may say: “The woods were a fearful place to be in last night” and emptily refer to the fearful property of the woods. Here the affective relation is being conceived and expressed in language, and being referred to in an unfulfilled intentional act, an act that does not possess the fearfulness of the woods “in person”.

Affective properties can also be imagined; but as we described the nature of these imaginative acts at length in our “Sartre and the Matter of Mental Images”[29] we will not repeat these descriptions here.

However in all this the affective properties show no essential difference from presented properties. Presented properties, such as “brownness” or “leaflessness”, are also perceived or imagined, and can be verbally and conceptually expressed in an empty manner. The factor that is the important and essential difference between the affective and presented properties is that the former are not a part of the presented object they are properties of, while the latter are a part of this object. “Brownness,” “leaflessness,” “wooden,” are presented properties of the trees in the woods; they form part of the presented objects, “trees.” “Fearfulness,” on the other hand, is not a part of the trees. It is an additional, external property, one that is not a constitutive element of the trees qua trees. Its attribution to the trees does not involve the trees qua trees, but the trees qua having a certain affective structure. The affective structure of the trees could change, e.g., from fearfulness to enchantingness, but this would not alter the trees in their treeness. The affective properties are but external layers that are added onto the already constituted “wholes” of the presented objects. They are properties that belong on a different plane of the world than the presented objects and their presented properties.

We must qualify in certain respects our remarks concerning this relation of “being an affective property of”. We mentioned above that affective properties can be emptily referred to, as well as perceived or imagined. If we restrict ourselves to what appears to these empty consciousnesses, we will be able to find certain feeling objects that appear without being properties of presented objects. In the above example, we described an empty consciousness of fearfulness insofar as this appeared as an affective property of the woods. But it is also possible to “have in mind” the feeling object of “fearfulness” without apprehending it as a property of the woods or of any other presented object....In fact, in the very act of writing or reading a sentence about the feeling objects of “fearfulness,” “enjoyableness,” “pitifulness” or any other feeling object, there is an empty consciousness of these feeling objects as appearing independently from any presented object. Thus it is that we cannot say that feeling objects must always and necessarily appear as affective properties of presented objects. But we can say of them what Husserl said of categorial objects in the Sixth Logical Investigation --- that they can only appear “in person” insofar as they are founded on underlying presented objects. In this respect feeling objects bear another resemblance to Husserl’s categorial objects: they can be emptily referred to by themselves, independent of any other object, but they cannot be perceived or imagined unless they are perceived or imagined as founded upon something that is presented. For, as we shall see in the next section, a feeling object can only be perceived or imagined insofar as it appears to be imbuing a sensuous object with a certain tonality, or insofar as it appears to be an emotional property of my empirical ego.

3. Feeling-Sensations and their Intentional Interpretation

In our view Husserl’s most significant and profound discovery in the realm of feelings lies in section 15B of the Fifth Logical Investigation. In this section Husserl makes a distinction between the sensations of feeling and the acts of feeling, a distinction that would be described in the Ideas I in terms of “hyletic data” and “noetic acts”.[30] Husserl points out that the sensations of feeling can be interpreted by the acts of feeling in two different manners. The feeling-acts can interpretatively objectify the feeling-sensations into emotional tonalities or Colourings of sensuous objects, and they can objectify the feeling-sensations into emotional properties of my empirical ego. Because of the complexities involved in these different distinctions, we will quote the entire passage that deals with them. Husserl is here discussing the difference between feeling-sensations and feeling-acts, and writes 

"Our distinction should constantly be kept in mind and fruitfully applied in analysing all complexes of feeling-sensations and feeling-acts. joy, e.g., concerning some happy event, is certainly an act. But this act, which is not merely an intentional character, but a concrete and therefore complex experience, does not merely hold in its unity an idea of the happy event and an act-character of liking which relates to it: a sensation of pleasure attaches to the idea, a sensation at once seen and located as an emotional excitement in the psycho-physical feeling-subject, and also as an objective property --- the event seems as if bathed in a rosy gleam. The event thus pleasingly painted now serves as the first foundation for the joyful approach, the liking for, the being charmed, or however one’s state may be described. A sad event, likewise, is not merely seen in its thinglike content and context, in the respects which make it an event: it seems clothed and coloured with sadness. The same unpleasing sensations which the empirical ego refers to and locates in itself --- the pang in the heart --- are referred in one's emotional conception to the thing itself. These relations are purely presentational: we first have an essentially new type of intention in hostile repugnance, in active dislike etc. Sensations of pleasure and pain may continue, though the act-characters built upon them may lapse. When the facts which provoke pleasure sink into the background, are no longer apperceived as emotionally coloured, and perhaps cease to be intentional objects at all, the pleasurable excitement may linger on for a while: it may itself be felt as agreeable. Instead of representing a pleasant property of the object, it is referred merely to the feeling-subject, or is itself presented and pleases.”[31]

It is to be noted that Husserl conceives of the intentional acts which relate the feeling-sensations to the presented object and to the empirical ego as being presentative-acts, rather than feeling-acts. In this regard one should notice that, in reference to this dual intentional interpretation of the unpleasing sensations of sadness, Husserl writes “These relations are purely presentational”. And after describing the intentional objectification of the pleasing sensations of joy, Husserl says that “the event thus pleasingly painted now serves as the first foundation for the joyful approach”, indicating that the event as “pleasingly painted”, i.e., as having the pleasing sensations intentionally referred to it, serves as the foundation for the feeling-act of joy --- recalling the fact that presentations are the foundations for feelings. Now it would seem very strange that Husserl would maintain that these feeling-sensations are intentionally objectified by presentational-acts, rather than by feeling-acts. But it must be recalled that Husserl is confined in the Logical Investigations by his theoretical stricture that feeling-acts do not have their own objects. The intentional interpretation of these sensations objectifies them as “an objective property” of the event in question, and thus if Husserl allowed their interpretation to be undertaken by feeling-acts, he would have to admit that feeling-acts did have their own objects (remembering that for Husserl an “object” can be anything objective, including an “objective property”). Now once this presupposition concerning feelings is recognized to be false, as Husserl later recognized it to be, one is able to see the phenomenologically self-evident fact that these sensations are interpreted by feeling-acts. To be conscious of a “pleasantness” that is a property of an object is to be conscious of a felt property of an object, not a presented property. If to objectify and intend these felt properties is to be classified as a function of presentative-acts rather than of feeling-acts, there no longer remains any sense in which one can talk about feeling-acts. For feeling-acts are nothing if they are not consciousnesses of felt properties. To use the terms of Husserl’s later philosophy, the feeling act of “being pleased” is nothing if it is not the noetic side of what shows itself noematically as the “pleasantness” of the object. Hence, unless one wishes to use the term “presentation” as a blanket term to cover all acts and noemata whatsoever, one has to recognize that these felt properties and the acts that intend them belong to the domain of feelings, and not to that of presentations. Accordingly, the acts that intentionally objectify the feeling-sensations into felt properties can only be the acts that intend these felt properties, and these acts must by definition be the feeling-acts. If pleasing sensations are intentionally objectified into the noema of “pleasantness”, then this objectification must be undertaken by the only act that intentionally refers to this noema --- the noesis of “being pleased”. In a word, if feeling-acts are to have any being at all, they must be acts that objectify their own feeling-sensations into their own feeling noemata, and they must undertake this function without any surreptitious aid from their underlying presentations.

In the passage we quoted, Husserl aptly described the “pleasant property” as pertaining to the presented object. To this we may add that thc “being an affective property of” is not only the pleasant feeling’s mode of relationship to the presented object; it also is the feeling’s mode of relationship to the presented subject --- my empirical ego. “Feeling pleased” can be reflectively apprehended as the current affective property of my ego: I can be aware that “I am feeling pleased”. But feelings are related as properties to my ego in a different fashion than they are related as properties to a presented object. For feelings are not external, non-constitutive properties of my ego. They are internal, constitutive properties. They are analogous in this respect to the relation of presented properties to their objects, e.g., of redness to this pen, but there are also crucial differences. For instance, feelings are properties that are constantly altering and vanishing and that are ever being replaced by new feelings, and are not in any sense constant and unchanging properties --- as in a certain relative sense “redness” may be said to be a constant and unchanging property of this pen. Sartre has described in an admirable fashion the nature of these affective properties of the ego in Part Two of his work, The Transcendence of the Ego,[32] and we may refer the reader to this work for a fuller development of the present descriptions.

It is of the essence of feeling-sensations to be interpreted as a property of an object and/or as a property of my ego. With respect to this latter interpretation, we may say that it is impossible to feel an emotion without apprehending it as a property of my ego. I cannot under any circumstances have an awareness of the emotion of sadness, pleasure or anxiety without apprehending it as my sadness, my pleasure or my anxiety. Even if I attempt to see my emotion in abstraction from my ego, a dim sense that it is my emotion still hovers in the background. This is because of the psycho-physical location of the emotion “in” my subjectivity; the emotion is by its essence located “in” me and in relation to me, and this “location” forms a part of the internal structure of the emotion. We showed how this was the case in our article “Scheler and the Stratification of the Emotional Life”,[33] and argued that because of this the stratification of the levels of emotional depth can only be understood in terms of the different types of the emotion’s internal relation to my ego. It is also on these grounds that we must modify Husserl’s implied disjunctive proposition in the above passage that when a feeling-sensation is no longer referred to its object, “it is referred merely to the feeling-subject, or is itself presented and pleases.” We would like to modify this by saying that the two alternatives here are not mutually exclusive, but are rather mutually inclusive. To refer pleasure to my ego is to be aware that “I feel pleasure”, and to focally intend this pleasure as such is to be aware that “I feel pleasure”. The difference that Husserl is referring to is really a difference of emphasis. In the first case I am merely reflecting that the current affective property of my ego is the feeling of pleasure, and in the second case I am concentrating on enjoying the pleasantness of the pleasure that my ego is feeling. My ego appears more in the foreground in the first act, and more in the background in the second act.

4. Feeling-Qualities and Feeling-Flows

Despite the fact that Husserl conceived of the objectification of feeling-sensations to be a presentative objectification, his recognition that these sensations are objectified into properties of presented objects and into emotions of the ego remains a decisive one. In this section we would like to develop Husserl’s initial descriptions of this dual objectification of feeling-sensations. To formalize the terms for these two different objectifications, we shall call the feelings that objectively appear as a property of the presented object the feeling-tonalities, and the feelings that appear as an emotion of the ego the feeling-emotions.

Our analysis of these two objectifications of feeling-sensations will take as its point of departure Husserl’s description of the feeling-tonality of joy. In the passage we quoted from section 15B of the Fifth Logical lnvestigation, Husserl described the feeling-tonality of joy in one place as a “rosy gleam”, and in another place as a “pleasant” property, as if to say that the “rosy gleam” and the property of “pleasantness” were one and the same thing. However we believe that a distinction needs to be made here. The “rosy gleam” and the “pleasantness” are both constitutive of the feeling tonality, but they are two different aspects of this tonality. The “rosy gleam” is the feeling-flow of the tonality, and the “pleasantness” is the feeling-quality of the tonality. Every feeling-tonality has these two moments of the flow of the feeling and the quality of the feeling, such that they always appear fused with one another and can only be distinguished in abstraction. The feeling-qualities are the moments of enjoyableness, sadness, fearfulness, pitifulness, desirableness, etc. The feeling-flows have no analogous terms allocated to themselves, and when they are described --- which has been mostly in literature rather than in philosophy or psychology --- they are described metaphorically. For instance, Husserl described the feeling-flow of joy in metaphoric terms as a “rosy gleam”; and thc flows of the other feeling-qualities can also be described in metaphoric terms --- as the flow of sadness can be described as a “cold and empty barrenness”, or that of anger in the phrase “He saw red”. However these different feeling-flows can also be described in literal terms, just as the different characteristics of presented objects can be. But in order to do this, we have to introduce some new categories, of which the first is the category of the “feeling-flow” itself.

What exactly a feeling-flow is can be clarified if we contrast it with a “flow” in the usual sense of the word --- as when we speak of a “flow of water” or a “flow of air”. In this usual sense of the word “flow”, what we have in mind is a presented flow. A presented flow has three characteristics whereby it differs from a feeling-flow. The first characteristic is that the object which is flowing is constantly changing its position in space. Secondly, the flow is not a sensuous property of the object that is flowing, but is rather a synthetic connection of the different spatial positions that the object assumes through time. The consciousness of the object’s present spatial position in connection with the consciousness of its immediately past and immediately expected spatial positions constitutes the awareness of the object’s “flow” through space. Thirdly, the flowing of the object does not involve the whole of the object, but only its boundaries. The object’s flow is nothing other than the steady changing of the boundary relations between the flowing object and the objects it is flowing past.

Now a feeling-flow differs from a presented flow in that it has none of these three characteristics. The feeling that flows does not change its position in space. Rather it is an affective tension that animates and vitalizes the object it is permeating. It "brings the object alive" with feeling, all the while remaining “in” and “throughout” the same object, continually animating the same spatial regions. And unlike the presented flow, this flow of affective tension is not a temporal connection of the different spatial positions of the object. Rather it appears as a sensuous property of the object, and it appears as such to each perception of the object, without needing to be “constructed” out of the succession of the object’s appearances. And moreover, this sensuous property of flowing does not involve simply the boundaries of the object, but the whole object. It is an animating flow of the entirety of the object, the interior of the object as well as its boundaries. And since the objects in the background are animated with the very same affective flow, the foreground object does not appear in its flowing as something that is in contrast with its background.

Now if the feeling-flow could not be described further than this --- as a non-presented flow of affective tension  --- it would be impossible to differentiate the different types of feeling-flows that are intimately fused with the different types of feeling-qualities. However the feeling-flow does admit of a further description, and it is this further description that accounts for the character of the affective tension’s “flow”. What is here being pointed to is the description of the direction of the flow of the affective tension, and the manner in which the affective tension flows in this direction. The direction of the flow can be of several kinds: upwards, downwards, outwards, inwards, forwards or backwards, or a combination of two or three of these directions, such as upwards and outwards. Since all the objects in my sense field are animated with the same flow, the direction of the flow can only be established in relation to the sense organ that is perceiving the flow. And again, the feeling does not flow in a direction by moving through space; for example, it does not flow upwards by traveling upwards through the object, as smoke would travel upwards through a chimney, but rather flows in such a way that it gives a stationary object the impression of having an upward momentum. The direction of the flow is always accompanied by a certain manner in which the feeling flows in this direction. The manner in which the feeling flows in a direction can be one of many types --- radiating, sagging, looming, repelling, etc. Each quality of feeling has its own direction and manner of the flow of its affective tension. We will illustrate the concrete appearances of these feeling-flows by describing the direction and manner of the feeling-flows of joy and sadness.

In a literal sense, the feeling-flow of joy is not a “rosy gleam”. “Rosy” is a certain presented color, and “gleam” is a type of presented lighting. Rather in joy the flow of affective tension flows upwards and outwards, and it flows upwards and outwards in a radiating manner. In a joyful perception of a landscape, the trees and the meadow appear to be radiating upwards and outwards with a joyous energy. This joyful radiation has been portrayed by Van Gogh in a number of his paintings, particularly in “The Orchard”.

The feeling-flow of sadness is in no literal sense a “cold and empty barrenness”, which in reality describes a presented situation. Rather in sadness the affective tension flows downwards, and it flows downwards in a sagging and drooping manner. A sad and gloomy landscape is one where the trees appear to be so laden with sorrow that they are drooping to the ground, and the sky itself seems to be so heavy with grief that it is sagging downwards to the earth. Van Gogh has also captured this melancholy drooping of things in a number of his paintings, such as “The Church at Auvers” and the “Quay at Antwerp”.

Although the feeling-flows of joy and sadness and the other types of feeling are most apparent to visual perceptions, such as in the visual perception of a landscape, this does not mean that they do not appear to the other kinds of perceptual consciousnesses. Feeling-flows appear in auditory, tactile, taste and olfactory forms as well as the more obvious visual forms. For example, if I am depressed, all the sounds I hear appear to be weighted down with sorrow: they sound as if in their inner being they are sagging and drooping downwards. In joy, sounds appear alive and vibrant: they are sounding with the expansive radiation of a joyous vitality. It is of the essence of music to capture these feeling-tonalities. For instance, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony captures the expansively radiating tonality of joy, whereas the slow movement of his Hammerclavier Sonata is thoroughly infected with the sagging and downward sinking feeling-flow of sadness.

Even in touch, taste and smell these feeling-tonalities appear. In tactile perceptions, the feeling-tonality can be distinguished from the presented “touching” of the tactile object. This distinction was made by Husserl, who followed Brentano's lead in differentiating the presented physical phenomenon from the feeling which it arouses. Brentano writes in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint that “in cases where a feeling of pain or pleasure is aroused in us by a cut, a burn, or a tickle, we must distinguish...between a physical phenomenon, which appears as the object of external perception, and the mental phenomenon of feeling, which accompanies its appearance”.[34] However neither Brentano nor Husserl, who repeats Brentano's distinction in section 15B of the Fifth Logical Investigation, describes the exact nature of this “feeling of pain or pleasure”. If we examine such tactile feeling-tonalities, we will be able to see that they appear as muscular movements infused with a certain pleasurable or painful feeling-quality .The feeling-flow is the manner and the direction of thc muscular movement. For example, in a sexual caress we can distinguish several things. There is the pressure of the other’s hand and its friction across my skin --- this is the presented stratum of the touch. The feeling-tonality is the pleasurable tingling sensation that I feel radiating upwards through the region of my body. In contrast to this upward and outward radiation, a painful feeling-flow is a “wincing” back and away from thc presented touch. This tactile feeling-flow is a muscular movement that is a sharp, inner contraction and withdrawal that is fused with the feeling-quality of painfulness. However these pleasurable and painful muscular movements are by no means the only tactile feeling-tonalities --- There are tactile tonalities of fear, pity, anger and many other types of feeling. For instance, the feeling-flow that is fused with the quality of fear is a muscular movement of shrinking back or cringing from the presented touch, as one cringes under the touch of a person whom one fears, or as one’s leg shrinks from the touch of a rattle-snake that is crawling over it.

The feeling-tonalities of taste are similar to that of touch, inasmuch as they involve the muscular movements of the tongue. When I am eating something sweet, there is a radiation of pleasurable sensations upwards through my tongue, and when I taste something that is extremely spicy, there is a painful wincing, a contracting withdrawal away from the spicy food. Pleasure and pain are not the only types of gustatory feeling-qualities, but these qualities are far more predominant in gustatory perceptions than in the perceptions of the other four senses.

The olfactory tonalities are the least noticeable of the five different perceptual tonalities. But they are not non-existent. For example, when I am smelling the rich and fresh scent of a flower, the scent appears to be pleasurably radiating over the surface of the inner membranes of my nose. Or when I smell rotting eggs or feces, the scent appears to repel my nose membranes, to sharply and painfully dig against their surfaces --- and I defensively “scrunch up” my nose and pull it back from the offensive smell.

The feeling-tonalities of touch, taste and smell differ in one respect from those of sight and hearing. They are apprehended as being affective properties of my body as well as being affective properties of the presented object. The pleasurable radiation of a sexual caress is intended as the affective property of the other’s hand, and as the affective property of my body region that is being caressed. In contrast to this, the joyful radiation of a visual landscape is apprehended only as an affective property of the landscape; it is not intended as an affective property of my eyes.

These feeling-tonalities in their five different sensory forms can also be imagined exactly as they appear to perception. In these imaginary acts, the structures we have described are all reproduced on an imaginary plane. We have described the somewhat complicated manner in which this is done in section four of “Sartre and the Matter of Mental Images”, and may refer the interested reader to this article.

There is also the empty or signitive consciousness of these feeling-tonalities, where these tonalities do not appear “in flesh”, but are non-sensuously “had in mind”. These empty consciousnesses do not require any special description; suffice to say that they all embody the essential principle of the empty presentative consciousnesses that Husserl described in the Sixth Logical Investigation.

However we have not as yet mentioned what is in serious need of a phenomenological description: the feeling-flow and the feeling-quality of emotion. We have so far only discussed the feeling-flow and the feeling-quality that appear in tonalities. We must now emphasis that a flow and a quality also appear in every consciousnesses of an emotion. In many cases the flow and quality of the emotion have a parallel structure to the flow and quality of their corresponding tonalities. In joy there is a joyous quality that appears as an emotion of my ego and as a tonality of the presented object, and as the joyous tonality is seen to be radiating upwards and outwards, so the joyous emotion is felt to be radiating upwards and outwards. We recall here the expression that in joy one feels “uplifted” and “expansive”. These expressions refer to the direction of the emotional flow of joy; the manner in which joy is felt to expand is a radiating one. In sadness also there is an exact parallelism between the tonality and the emotion. Just as the presented object sags and droops downwards, so my sad emotion has the flow of sagging and sinking down inside of myself: I feel, and even look, “downcast”. But there are some types of feeling-qualities whose feeling-flows flow in opposite directions. In fear, my emotion shrinks and cringes from the fearful object, whereas the tonality flow of the object is that of a looming and towering over me in a menacing fashion. And in anger, my emotion violently pushes itself outwards towards the hated object, whereas the feeling-flow of this object is that of being overpoweringly pushed back and contracted.

The correspondence between the touch, taste and smell tonalities and their emotions is less obvious than that between the visual and auditory tonalities and their emotions. The sadly drooping tonality of the woods that I am walking through is easily recognized as the tonal parallel to the sadly drooping emotion I am feeling at the same time, but the correspondences between my bodily tonalities and their emotions may not be so easily recognized. Nevertheless there are definite and descriptive correspondences here. There is an emotional “wincing” that corresponds to the painful “wincing” of my leg muscle when it is pinched; there is an enchanted radiation of emotion that corresponds to the pleasurable radiation of a rose fragrance against my nostrils; and there is an emotion of “being repelled” that corresponds to the violent retraction of my tongue from an awful taste. It is these types of emotions that are most often ignored in the classifications of the different types of emotions. For example, alongside of such predominantly visual emotions as love, hate, anger and pity, we do not find distinguished the different tactile emotions that correspond to the bodily tonalities of the painful “itching” of a sore, the “tingling” of a sexual caress, the “seeping warmth” of a hot bath, or the “shivering” from a cold wind.

The outline of the feeling-tonalities and feeling-emotions that we have given in this section points to a larger task in the phenomenology of feeling. This task would be somewhat analogous to the task that Max Scheler undertook in his uncompleted work Die Sinngesetze des emotionalen Lebens,[35] where he attempted to describe all the different species and sub-species of feeling. However, as is apparent from the published portions of this work, particularly from The Nature of Sympathy,[36] Scheler described only the different types of presented objects of the different feelings, ignoring the tonalities and emotions of the feelings. The task we have in mind here is something different. It would aim at describing only the tonalities and emotions of each species and sub-species of feeling, so that the feeling-flow and feeling-quality of the tonality and emotion of each feeling would not only be described as such, but also as it appeared to each of the five different perceptual consciousnesses and their imaginative reproductions. If this task were accomplished, it would represent the first time in philosophical history where attention was systematically turned away from the presented objects of the different types of feeling to the inner structure of the feelings themselves.