Levels of Feeling in Edmund Husserl

Abstract

 Husserl emphasizes the totalizing function of feeling as an involving horizon that conditions the way in which we are concerned with the alien world. In a grounding level before intentional differentiation, there is a “global feeling” (Gesamtgefühl) or “primal feeling” (Urgefühl) that makes up an undifferentiated realm. On this basis, emotional tendencies contribute to the organization of an affective relief, with a manifold of prominences that awaken the ego and motivate an intentional response with its correlative objects. In this new stage, feeling conditions perceptual interests, exhibits its own type of intentionality, and provides values that outline ends for our volitional acts. In a higher level, the sedimentation of intentional acts of feeling brings forth a background in which all particular feelings have a resonance and contribute to an emotional milieu that amounts to the unity of a universal mood (Stimmung). Thus, after the passage through intentionality, there emerges new totality that establishes a state of affairs analogous to the situation in the level of primal feeling.