Feelings: What Kinds are There?

Following a question posed in comments on the post "Schleiermacher on Feeling, Intuition and Religion", here are some thoughts on feeling and the types of feeling we might recognize or talk about. As I like to write and think that feelings are indeed very important in religion as Schleiermacher thought, it is important to be more precise.

"Feeling" is a tricky word. People frequently use it synonymously with "emotion" or even "passion". But it seems that the meaning, even in everyday speech, is not the same. One can feel "tired", or feel "cold", or "one with nature", and neither of these is really what we usually recognize or call "emotions" like fear, hope, sadness, anger, and happiness are. So, although most

English language speakers would say that emotions do involve feelings, there seem to be other kinds of mental states which we also tend to call feelings which are not, or at least not in an obvious way, emotional feelings.

Psychologists and philosophers (analytic philosophy of emotions, or phenomenology are fields of philosophy which deal with emotions, feelings or both) have, as is often the case, developed a bit more strictly defined meanings of these terms, although there is much disagreement about definitions of course, and

then again new confusions unavoidably arise regarding the more technical meanings of these terms. But, I will here start from a simple categorization of feelings which is uncontroversial.

Feelings can be either intentional or nonintentional mental states. Simply put, intentionality of a mental state is a "directedness at something": a belief is an intentional states because it is about something. Emotions are typically also thought of as intentional states - one is angry at John, hoping for a better job, or afraid of the approaching dog. There seem to be exceptions to this; like the emotion of simply "being happy for no reason", or feeling "dread with no particular focus", or similar. But usually, we eventually find out why we were happy, or afraid, or dreaded, even if we do not consciously recognize this sometimes. So, feelings which emotions involve - lets call them emotional feelings - are intentional states.

What is typically thought of as "bodily feelings" are for most experts also intentional states. One feels cold in the body, or is feeling pain in particular part of the body, or sickness in the stomach, or similar. So, bodily feelings, at least in majority of cases also seem to be directed at a particular part of the body or at the body as a whole perhaps.

But some philosophers and psychiatrists have emphasised (and still are emphasising) that there are felt states which are not accounted for by the above two kinds, and which can feature rather importantly in our lives. There are states which do not have an object to which they would be intentionally directed, but can be described as all-encompassing and often form a background for everything else we think or do. Examples would be: Feeling unreal, feeling intensively alive, feeling "not here", feeling complete (or incomplete), feeling connected (or disconnected) with life or with everything, feeing whole, at one with everything, and similar. We experience and describe states which are not focused on particular things or events in the universe, which are felt states, and sometimes consider them as very important features of our lives.

Heidegger has called some of such states "moods" (more about Heidegger's moods in one of the future posts), but recently a British philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe has proposed a category of existential feelings to encompass such states. He defines them in the following way:

“Existential feelings are non-conceptual feelings of the body, which constitute a background sense of belonging to the world and a sense of reality. They are not evaluations of any specific object, they are certainly not propositional attitudes and they are not ‘mere affects’.” (Feelings of Being, 2008, 39)

Actually, he has written a whole book (Feelings of Being) about existential feelings. Importantly, these feelings do not have the body or parts of the body as their intentional object, but are feelings "of the body" (including the brain!) and they typically indicate or arise from a relation of the body (that is, of a human being) to it surroundings. A few more features of existential feelings are especially relevant for a theological reflection on them: Existential feelings transcend subject-object relation (one finds oneself in an EF, does not "have" EF and EF, as mentioned, is not directed at an object); they may be short, medium or long term states of mind; they may be more "normal" or very extreme, like reported by schizophrenics or patients with Capgras delusion, or, for ex. by mystics in a positive way (always positive?); they constitute a background of all other states of mind we have.

Now, although these feelings may be related to and sometimes dependent upon the dynamics in our emotional and intellectual life, they themselves are not the same kind of feelings as emotional feelings.

I should probably stop at this stage, not to leave too long a post. There may be some other kinds of feelings, or categorizations which are better, and I am open for suggestions; this is simply the best way of thinking about feelings I know so far. In the future posts I am going to talk more about existential feelings, and about how this category can be very useful when trying to understand Schleiermacher, and the place of feelings in religions (especially Christianity).