Husserl and Geiger on feelings and intentionality

Michele Averchi

pp. 71-91

in: Marta Ubiali, Maren Wehrle (eds), Feeling and value, willing and action, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

How are we conscious of our feelings? The question was a controversial topic among German psychologists between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1911 Moritz Geiger made his contribution to the debate with a paper titled "Das Bewusstsein von Gefühle". Husserl read Geiger's text and sketched an alternative answer to the question about the manifestation of feelings. Geiger's and Husserl's texts dealt with the problem of intentionality and object orientation of feelings: are feeling object oriented? Geiger's answered that, in feelings, consciousness is sometimes not oriented to representations (and, therefore, that object-intentionality is not an essential property of the mind), while Husserl incorporated object-intentionality in the broader structure of time-consciousness.In my paper I will: (a) sketch in more detail the historical background of the discussion (b) present Geiger's and Husserl's accounts (c) compare the two and draw some conclusions.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Geiger Moritz