Embodiment and Emotions in Twentieth-Century German Philosophy (Special issue of "Idealistic Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy")

As noted by Shaun Gallagher, the dimension of affectivity—which clearly includes, among others, aspects such as emotions and feelings—is “closely associated with the body.” A direct connection between the emotional dimension of human life and the dimension of embodiment thus emerges already at this preliminary level, thus showing how, on the one hand, an adequate understanding of the relevance of emotions and feelings in the structure of human experience requires to take into consideration their intrinsic embodied character, while, on the other hand, an adequate understanding of the embodied nature of human experience requires to take into account also affective factors that include emotions and feelings. Of course, much depends on the diverse ways in which the question of human embodiment, and its consequent relation with the emotional dimension of life, can be understood and approached: for example, in purely scientific and sometimes reductionist terms or, vice-versa, in terms that tend to account in a broader phenomenological and socio-cultural way for human embodiment, suggesting the irreducibility of our entire being-in-the-world (including our “[a]ffective and emotional states”) to the sole processes that take place in our brain, and sometimes arriving to blur the rigid separations between the subject and the object, the body and the environment, as happens in some recent theories of the embodied and extended mind, with noteworthy implications also at the level of our understanding of emotions and feelings. On this basis, because of the richness, variety and complexity of our embodied and emotional way of being-in-the-world, it is not surprising that the study of emotions, feelings, moods and also affective atmospheres has recently attracted the attention of a vast number of theorists in diverse fields of research, ranging from biology to psychology, from neuroscience to anthropology and sociology, and obviously including philosophy as well. As the title itself of the present volume clearly explains, the particular approach that we have chosen to adopt in this collection (Embodiment and Emotions in Twentieth-Century German Philosophy) is strictly focused, from a historico-philosophical point of view, on the context of German philosophical traditions and debates in the twentieth century. Of course, the reason for our thematic and methodological choice does not rely on the false idea that, during the twentieth century, only in the German philosophical context valuable and original contributions on embodiment and emotions were offered by various thinkers—which would obviously be historico-philosophically naïve, incorrect and unjust. At the same time, however, it seems to us that some of the most stimulating reflections on embodiment and emotions that have characterized the wide, complex and plural philosophical scenarios of the twentieth century have precisely emerged within the context of German thought and, quite interestingly, in the context of diverse philosophical traditions that, although all belonging to the same geographical and cultural context, were nonetheless rival with each other and sometimes explicitly challenging each other: Neo-Kantianism, Lebensphilosophie, phenomenology, critical theory, hermeneutics, philosophical anthropology, etc.