Feelings of Being Alive HUMANPROJEKT Interdisziplinäre Anthropologie Im Auftrag der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften herausgegeben von Detlev Ganten, Volker Gerhardt, Jan-Christoph Heilinger und Julian Nida-Rümelin De Gruyter Feelings of Being Alive Edited by Joerg Fingerhut and Sabine Marienberg De Gruyter Das dieser Publikation zugrundeliegende Vorhaben wurde mit Mitteln des Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung unter dem Förderkennzeichen 01 GWS 061 gefördert. Die Verantwortung für den Inhalt dieser Veröff entlichung liegt bei den Herausgebern. ISBN 978-3-11-024658-2 e-ISBN 978-3-11-024659-9 ISSN 1868-8144 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Th e Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografi e; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Cover design: Martin Zech, Bremen Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH und Co. KG, Göttingen ∞ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Acknowledgments The present collection of essays approaches the issue of Feelings of Being Alive from a variety of theoretical as well as empirical approaches, rang- ing from philosophy and psychology to psychotherapy and history of art. It is partly based on presentations given at a workshop in 2010 at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The workshop was the closing event of a research project dedicated to the Functions of Consciousness and gathered scholars from Europe and the United States. Additional authors have been asked to participate in the volume in order to broaden the range of perspectives. We would like to thank first and foremost the authors for contribu- ting to this book. We also wish to thank everybody who attended the workshop for the fruitful dialogue and for participating as speakers, commentators, chairs, or organizers. This book owes much to discus- sions that have taken place in our research group, and we also wish to thank those of its members who did not write a paper: Felix Bermpohl, Katja Crone, Jan Kalbitzer and Martin Rechenauer. We thank Isabel Kranz and Jan-Christoph Heilinger, the coordinators of the group, for their advice and their encouragement to carry out this project. Many thanks go to Karsten Schöllner andUlrikaCarlsson for valua- ble help with copy-editing some of the English texts, to Yasmin Mei- nicke, Sonja Thiel and Patrizia Unger for their attentive proofreading, as well as to Christoph Schirmer and Florian Ruppenstein from De Gruyter for their assistance. We are grateful to Regina Reimann and Ute Tintemann for their help with all sorts of formalities. Thanks are also due to the Federal Ministry of Education and Research for gener- ouslyfundingourresearchandtoitsrepresentativeWolframSchüttefor his support. Finally we would like to express our gratitude to Volker Gerhardt who, as the initiator and head of Functions of Consciousness, advocated the progress of our work for many years. Berlin, June 2012 Joerg Fingerhut & Sabine Marienberg Contents Joerg Fingerhut & Sabine Marienberg How it Feels to Be Alive. Moods, Background Orientations, and Existential Feelings ............................... 1 I. Feelings of Being Matthew Ratcliffe The Phenomenology of Existential Feeling ............... 23 Jan Slaby Emotional Rationality and Feelings of Being .............. 55 Riccardo Manzotti An Externalist Approach to Existential Feelings: Different Feelings or Different objects? .......................... 79 Achim Stephan Existentielle Gefühle und Emotionen: Intentionalität und Regulierbarkeit ..................................... 101 Alice Holzhey-Kunz Lebendigsein. Existenzphilosophische Überlegungen zur Zweideutigkeit eines Grundgefühls ...................... 123 II. The Sentient Organism Thomas Fuchs The Feeling of Being Alive. Organic Foundations of Self-Awareness ..................................... 149 Joerg Fingerhut The Body and the Experience of Presence ................ 167 Fiorella Battaglia The Embodied Self and the Feeling of Being Alive ......... 201 VIII Contents Arbogast Schmitt ‘Life Is (not Consciousness, but) an Immediate Act of the Intellect.’ What it Means to Be Alive and How We Feel it According to Aristotle ................................ 223 Eva-Maria Engelen Das Gefühl des Lebendigseins als einfache Form phänomenalen Bewusstseins. Ein aristotelischer Theorieansatz ............. 239 III. Pragmatics and Semiotics Tanja Klemm Corpus animatum – Imago animata. Shared Image Practices in the Florentine Church SS. Annunziata in the Renaissance ....... 259 Matthias Jung Hintergrunderleben und semiotische Generalisierung ........ 293 Sabine Marienberg Bilder des Todes und Formen der Lebendigkeit. Das Gefühl des Lebendigseins zwischen Empfindung und symbolischer Artikulation ........................................ 311 Author Index ...................................... 333 Subject Index ...................................... 339 How it Feels to Be Alive Moods, Background Orientations, and Existential Feelings Joerg Fingerhut & Sabine Marienberg Thatsingularfeeling,wovenofpleasureanddispleasure,stunnedmysenses – overwhelmed me – cannot possibly resist – I ate the herring! (Opinions of Murr the Cat, E.T.A. Hoffmann) 1. Introduction Within the literary tradition the longings of the subject – the move- ments of the soul, the predicaments of the heart, and the joys of the flesh – have long been a topos explored in all its depths and ramifica- tions. This even extends to the ‘sense of sensing’, something that we maybe find ourselves in “before or beyond consciousness”, thus consti- tuting that most fundamental way of experiencing represented by the experience of the cat Murr in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s famous novel (Hel- ler-Roazen 2007, 19). Murr surrenders to all the enticing and thrilling events he encounters on his nightlong strolls along the rooftops and through the back alleys. He is able to do so and to experience life (and the herring) to its fullest. And he can’t help but wonder if his two-legged contemporaries, who are so engaged in higher forms of consciousness and thought, still have the same ability, share the same feelings of existence? Dedicating a book to Feelings of Being Alive,we find ourselves in the position of this existential cat, asking questions about what makes our experience of the world a lively one – or even an experience of life – and what might be the experience of ‘being alive’. It could be that these feelings are something we only experience in passing, as an ability to carry out an ongoing experiential process of registering changes in one’s mind, body or the world we engage in. Kant, in his Anthropol- ogy, famously characterized the experience of life this way, as a move- 2 Joerg Fingerhut & Sabine Marienberg ment of the mind (Bewegungshandlung des Gem(cid:2)ts): “To feel life, to feel pleasure is nothing else than to constantly feel that one is being driven ontoleaveone’scurrentstateforanotherone”.1Likepleasure,thefeel- ing of being alive might be a state that cannot rest in itself, that would cease to be if consciousness just remained focused on one object. On this characterization it might not be a state in the narrow sense at all. 2. The contemporary interest in the phenomenon Whatarefeelingsofbeingalive?Nocurrentphenomenologicaldescrip- tioncomestomind.Thetopicseemstobeonethathastobegrownand developedanew andaddressesaphenomenon thatis notyetcoveredby any standard characterization. This is also why we decided to employ the plural ‘feelings’ in the title of this volume in order to encourage thecontributorstoaddressthepotentialvarietyoffeelingsinsteadoftry- ing to pre-structure the debate by focusing on a purportedly singular feeling under which all kinds of phenomena are to be subsumed. It is also because of this lack of a standard description that interdisciplinarity is especially called for and constitutes a useful heuristic. All the more so since a theory that deals with novel concepts – or at least relatively un- common ones – should draw from the wealth of phenomena provided by the discoveries of different disciplinary approaches in order to grasp its subject matter. We pursue this desideratum by accompanying the main body of the texts in this volume – written by philosophers by training and focusing on the philosophy of mind, emotions and life – with perspectives from psychology, psychotherapy, and art history. To get an initial grasp of our subject: feelings of being alive seem to address something basic in a living being, something that pertains to us asphysical,sentientorganisms.Whetheritisexperiencedbyeveryform of life or whether it is experienceable only by beings that are able to contrast it with other kinds of felt experiences is already an initial ques- tion worth attending to, along with further questions relating to its ob- ject: is it the aliveness of the organism, the different aspects of vividness of its mental states, or rather the experience of changes in the general backgroundstate anorganismfinds itselfin?Asa feelingitdoesnotpri- 1 “SeinLebenfühlen,sichvergnügen,istalsonichtsandersals:sichcontinuirlich getrieben fühlen, aus dem gegenwärtigen Zustand herauszugehen […]” (Kant 1798, 554). Translation into English by the authors.