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Abstract
This dissertation is a phenomenology of emotion, situated within the school of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As such, it is concerned not only with the philosophy of emotion, but also with continuing the project commenced by Merleau-Ponty, the articulation of our primary and mute bodily contact with the world.
Of the three chapters, the first introduces the theoretical background, describes the methodology used, and examines the existing phenomenological work on emotion. The remaining chapters present the phenomenological research and the theoretical conclusions drawn from it. Chapter two introduces a psychotherapeutic technique called “Focusing” and shows that it can be a useful “tool” to aid us in doing phenomenology. This chapter is concerned largely with attempting to understand the body's role in constructing an emotional situation and applies Merleau-Ponty's concept of habit to emotion. Chapter three is devoted to the phenomenological analyses of four emotions: anger, fear, sadness and happiness. Here both Focusing and emotionally valent artworks are employed as aids in framing the emotions for phenomenological analysis.
On the basis of this research, the dissertation concludes that emotions are best understood as organizational structures that inform our movement, perception, and thought. These structures consist in the adopting of a certain whole-bodily attitude to a situation, which organizes it in terms of a meaning specific to the emotion itself, such as “threat” or “betrayal.” This meaning is not a cognitive or conceptual meaning, however, and need not be present in consciousness in any clear or articulate way. Rather, it consists in a certain “style” informing our gestures and the way we perceive and think of the situation. Emotions are centred in the affective region of the body and possess its “logic,” which consists in a global sense of “how we are doing” with respect to our interests and values. Emotions are distinguished by a mobilization of the body as a whole, and a pressing toward action of a form very loosely specified by the emotion itself (such as “retreat”).
