Shared Feelings and Joint Feeling: The Problem of Collective Affective Intentionality Specified

Abstract

In this chapter I discuss Hans Bernhard Schmid’s account of shared feelings which elaborates on the idea that affective intentionality is a matter of world-directed feelings. I reconstruct the philosophical problem Schmid is seeking to solve, which I call The Problem of Shared Feelings. This problem concerns the conflict between two deep-seated intuitions: the intuition that we humans can come to feel together and the intuition that only individuals, and not groups, can be understood as legitimate subjects of feeling. I expose Schmid’s solution to this riddle which attempts to show that feelings can be shared in a non-metaphorical sense of the verb ‘to share’; the point being that collective affective intentionality can be claimed to be a matter of shared feelings. Seeking to motivate a suggestion concerning the terms in which we should conceive of collective affective intentionality, I articulate a question Schmid’s proposal may be argued to leave unanswered: what does it mean for two (or more) qualitatively different feelings to ‘match’ one another? I argue that, in order to offer a qualified answer to this question, we could appeal to a suggestion Schmid may be taken to make in a later version of his analysis of shared feelings: at the heart of a collective affective intentional episode we always find a shared concern. This thought, I propose, indicates a direction we could take in order to spell out a phenomenologically adequate account of collective affective intentionality along the lines of the view proposed at the end of Chap. 3.