Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

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187487

Being together and caring-with

Héctor Andrés Sánchez Guerrero

pp. 169-197

Abstract

This chapter spells out what is special about our joint acts of feeling-towards together. It does so by pointing to a distinct felt conviction that phenomenologically defines the experiences that are at the heart of a collective affective intentional episode: the conviction that we (the participants) are jointly caring about something. The chapter elucidates what, in two different respects, grounds this felt conviction: what justifies this conviction and what, from a phenomenological point of view, serves as an experiential foundation for it. This allows me to, first, bring to light a distinctive mode of caring-about disclosed by our joint acts of feeling-towards together, and second, argue that certain pre-intentional feelings prepare us to feelingly understand certain circumstances as situations in which we (the participants) are caring about something as a group. In the course of this discussion, I introduce two notions: the notion of caring-with and the notion of feelings of being-together. I show that, leaving aside the image of some "fused feelings", it is possible to develop an account of the phenomenon of collective affective intentionality that satisfies the two basic conditions of adequacy determined in the first part of this book. That is, an account that, first, makes visible that acts of felt understanding are at the heart of collective affective intentionality, and second, permits us to tell apart in a principled way the situations in which the involved individuals are feeling together from the situations in which they merely are feeling alongside each other.

Publication details

Published in:

Sánchez Guerrero Héctor Andrés (2016) Feeling together and caring with one another: a contribution to the debate on collective affective intentionality. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 169-197

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-33735-7_6

Full citation:

Sánchez Guerrero Héctor Andrés (2016) Being together and caring-with, In: Feeling together and caring with one another, Dordrecht, Springer, 169–197.