Table Of ContentFeelings 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
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ISBN 978-3-11-024658-2
e-ISBN 978-3-11-024659-9
ISSN 1868-8144
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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.
