Heart and Beyond: Following Emotion Farther Out

Abstract

Urgent times such as ours call for a reexamination of human emotional life, a life we tend to take for granted in calmer times. Philosophy, and phenomenology in particular, should have something to say about our emotional bearings or their lack in this dürftiger Zeit, a time of collective crisis and personal desperation. My hope is that a careful assessment of emotion will be of value to those of us living through what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.” As a phenomenologist, my aim is a mainly descriptive one that seeks to arrive at a more precise sense of the emergence of emotion, not as construed causally but as felt experientially. Accordingly, I shall pursue the paths traced by certain manifestations of emotion: paths that have been largely neglected in recent treatments. Being on this road (and there is no other) amounts to living with the consequences of the manifestation of emotions, what I have come to call them periphaneity.