Matthew Ratcliffe

The Feeling of Being

There has been much recent philosophical discussion concerning the relation-
ship between emotion and feeling. However, everyday talk of ‘feeling’ is not
restricted to emotional feeling and the current emphasis on emotions has led to a
neglect of other kinds of feeling. These include feelings of homeliness, belong-
ing, separation, unfamiliarity, power, control, being part of something, being at
one with nature and ‘being there’. Such feelings are perhaps not ‘emotional’.
However, I suggest here that they do form a distinctive group; all of them are
ways of ‘finding ourselves in the world’. Indeed, our sense that there is a world
and that we are ‘in it’ is, I suggest, constituted by feeling. I offer an analysis of
what such ‘existential feelings’ consist of, showing how they can be both ‘bodily
feelings’ and, at the same time, part of the structure of intentionality.

Emotions and Feelings

One of the central questions addressed by recent philosophical work on emotion
is that of how emotions can be complicated cognitive states and, at the same
time, incorporate feelings as a major constituent. The problem is exemplified by
the contrasting views of James and Solomon. James claims that emotions are
feelings of certain bodily changes that are reflexively triggered during percep-
tion; ‘the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact,
and […] our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion’ (1884, p.
190). Solomon objects that emotions play a significant role in structuring our
experiences of the world, whereas feelings are just perceptions of internal body
states. Emotions, he argues, are not feelings but constitutive judgements. They
shape the ways in which parts of the world and the world as a whole appear to us.
Mere feelings ‘no more constitute or define the emotion than an army of fleas
constitutes a homeless dog.’ (1976/1993, p. 97). Solomon not only dismisses an
identification of emotion and feeling but goes further to deny even that bodily
feelings play an essential part in emotional experience. Nussbaum offers a simi-
lar view, suggesting that the term ‘feeling’ is ambiguous. It does not always refer
to perception of body state and, in some uses, is interchangeable with terms such
Correspondence:

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 12, No. 8–10, 2005, pp. 45–63

 46 M. RATCLIFFE

as ‘perception’ and ‘judgement’. She suggests that this is the case with emotional
feelings. Bodily feelings are incidental to emotion and the ‘feelings’ that really
matter could just as well be called judgements or beliefs (2001, p. 60).
Most recent philosophical accounts do accept that bodily feelings make an
important contribution to the experience of emotion. Nevertheless, they continue
to assume the distinction made by Solomon and others between bodily feelings
and intentional states. Thus the problem can be construed as that of showing how
something apparently trivial and self-directed is a major constituent of some-
thing important and world-directed. The conception of ‘bodily feeling’ routinely
adopted by philosophers working on emotion is epitomised by the following pas-
sage from Ben-Ze’ev:
….unlike higher levels of awareness, such as those found in perception, memory,
and thinking, the feeling dimension has no significant cognitive content. It
expresses our own state, but is not in itself directed at this state or at any other object.
Since this dimension is a mode of consciousness, one cannot be unconscious of it;
there are no unfelt feelings. (2004, p. 253)
Ben-Ze’ev, like many others, makes three assumptions about bodily feelings,
which I will challenge here:
(1) Bodily feelings do not have intentionality.
(2) Bodily feelings are expressions or perceptions of bodily states. In other
words, when one has a bodily feeling, one has an awareness of one’s body
being a certain way.
(3) One is always conscious of bodily feelings.
In contrast to these assumptions, I will argue that:
(1) Bodily feelings are part of the structure of intentionality. They contribute to
how one’s body and / or aspects of the world are experienced.
(2) There is a distinction between the location of a feeling and what that feeling
is of.1 A feeling can be in the body but of something outside the body. One is
not always aware of the body, even though that is where the feeling occurs.
(3) A bodily feeling need not be an object of consciousness. Feelings are often
that through which one is conscious of something else.
Hence bodily feelings are more complicated than much of the recent work on
emotions might indicate. Indeed, I will suggest that the commonplace assump-
tion that all bodily feelings are perceptions of body states, coupled with a restric-
tion of discussion to the issue of how these states are integrated into emotional
experience, has led to the neglect of a group of philosophically important phe-
nomena, which I will call existential feelings. These are not to be found on a stan-
dard list of ‘emotions’, alongside fear, anger, happiness, disgust, sadness, grief,

[1] By the ‘location’ of a feeling, I mean the phenomenological, rather than physiological, location. That
is, the part of one’s body where one takes the feeling to be occurring. As I hope will become clear,
having a sense of where a feeling is occurring does not require that the feeling itself be an object of
experience.
 THE FEELING OF BEING 47

guilt, jealousy, joy and envy. Nevertheless, they make a considerable contribu-
tion to the structure of experience, thought and action.

Existential Feelings
Everyday use of the term ‘feeling’ is not restricted to talk of emotions. It is also
employed to articulate various ways of experiencing one’s relationship with the
world that would not ordinarily be regarded as ‘emotions’ or ‘emotional’. Con-
sider the following list:
The feeling of being: ‘complete’, ‘flawed and diminished’, ‘unworthy’, ‘hum-
ble’, ‘separate and in limitation’, ‘at home’, ‘a fraud’, ‘slightly lost, ‘over-
whelmed’, ‘abandoned’, ‘stared at’, ‘torn’, ‘disconnected from the world’,
‘invulnerable’, ‘unloved’, ‘watched’, ‘empty’, ‘in control’, ‘powerful’, ‘com-
pletely helpless’, ‘part of the real world again’, ‘trapped and weighed down’,
‘part of a larger machine’, ‘at one with life’, ‘at one with nature’, ‘there’, ‘famil-
iar’, ‘real’.2
What are we to make of these? Most, if not all, do not seem to be descriptions
of one’s inner states or of features of the world but of one’s relationship with the
world. The world can sometimes appear unfamiliar, unreal, distant or close. It
can be something that one feels apart from or at one with. One can feel in control
of one’s situation as a whole or overwhelmed by it. One can feel like a participant
in the world or like a detached, estranged observer, staring at objects that do not
feel quite ‘there’. Such relationships structure all experiences. Whenever one has
a specific experience of oneself, another person or an inanimate object being a
certain way, the experience has, as a background, a more general sense of one’s
relationship with the world. This relationship does not simply consist in an expe-
rience of being an entity that occupies a spatial and temporal location, alongside
a host of other entities. Ways of finding oneself in a world are presupposed
spaces of experiential possibility, which shape the various ways in which things
can be experienced. For example, if one’s sense of the world is tainted by a ‘feel-
ing of unreality’, this will affect how all objects of perception appear. They are
distant, removed, not quite ‘there’.
There are many ways in which one can find oneself in a world and they are
usually described as ‘feelings’, rather than ‘emotions’, ‘moods’ or ‘thoughts’.
The world can feel strange, familiar, unreal, homely, alienating or intangible. Of
course, some of the ‘feelings’ I listed earlier may incorporate various other ingre-
dients and might also be directed towards certain situations in the world, rather
than being general, all-encompassing, world-orientations. For example, the feel-
ing of being a ‘fraud’ perhaps involves an appraisal of one’s status, abilities and
conduct in a specific context of practice. In addition to a ‘feeling’, this appraisal
might consist of intricate, intertwined narratives concerning one’s relationships
with others and one’s abilities. And certain other ‘feelings’ are clearly not just
‘ways of finding oneself in the world’. Take, for example, ‘the feeling of being a

[2] All of these examples were obtained by typing ‘the feeling of being’ into the Internet search engine
Google on 12th February 2005 and selecting from the first fifty hits.
 48 M. RATCLIFFE

true American’, which incorporates interpretations of nationality and nation-

hood, or ‘the feeling of being rejected by God’, which is a specifically theistic
interpretation or expression of one’s predicament. The term ‘feeling’ is also
employed to describe what it is like to be in quite specific situations. Think of
‘the feeling of being on Brighton beach on a hot summer day’.3 So Nussbaum
(2001) is right to note that ‘feeling’ has diverse uses. Even so, I suggest that cer-
tain uses of the term pick out a distinctive category of phenomena, which consist
of ‘ways of finding oneself in the world’. They form a recognisable group in vir-
tue of two shared characteristics. First of all, they are not directed at specific
objects or situations but are background orientations through which experience
as a whole is structured. Second, they are all feelings, in the sense that they are
bodily states which influence one’s awareness. As they constitute the basic struc-
ture of ‘being there’, a ‘hold on things’ that functions as a presupposed context
for all intellectual and practical activity, I refer to them as ‘existential feelings’.
The part played by existential feelings in our experience is different from that
played by most of those states that are commonly referred to as ‘emotions’.
Whereas emotions are usually directed towards specific objects, events or situa-
tions, existential feelings embrace the world as a whole. Furthermore, although
emotions might structure the ways in which objects are experienced, they do not
constitute our sense of the being of those objects. For example, an escaped lion in
one’s garden might appear as a frightening lion but the emotion directed towards
it does not exhaust the sense of its existence, of there being a lion there.4 Existen-
tial feeling, in contrast, is a background which comprises the very sense of ‘be-
ing’ or ‘reality’ that attaches to world experience. Specifically directed emotions
presuppose this background and so, whatever such emotions turn out to consist
of, existential feelings are a more fundamental feature of world-experience. The
distinction between ‘emotions’ and ‘existential feelings’ is, however, likely to be
blurred. Some of those states commonly termed ‘emotions’ perhaps accord with
my description of ‘existential feeling’. For example, extreme grief may well be a
relationship with the world as a whole, a sense of loss that structures all experi-
ence.
Much of the language used to convey existential feeling is metaphorical and
the metaphors employed generally incorporate references to bodily relationships
with things. For example, the world can feel ‘overbearing’, ‘overwhelming’ or
‘suffocating’. One can feel ‘trapped’ in a situation, ‘invulnerable’ or ‘part of
something greater’, and the world as a whole can be ‘distant’ or ‘close’. This
kind of language is, I suggest, no accident. The feelings that such descriptions
express are indeed bodily or at least have bodily feelings at their core. But they
are, at the same time, ways in which the world appears or ways in which one

[3] Again, these three examples were obtained from the first fifty hits I got, having used Google to search
for ‘the feeling of being’.
[4] See, for example, the essays by de Sousa, Solomon and Roberts in Solomon ed. (2004) for the view
that emotions shape experience of objects and situations. Solomon refers to them as constitutive
judgements, Roberts prefers the term ‘construal’ and de Sousa claims that emotions are perceptual
structures.
 THE FEELING OF BEING 49

relates to the world as a whole. In what follows, I will show how, despite the per-
vasive tendency in philosophy to conceive of feelings as reports of internal
states, certain bodily feelings are inextricable from the structure of world experi-
ence.

The Feel of Things

Goldie (2000, 2002) addresses the question of how ‘feeling’ can be integrated
into the world-directedness of emotion and suggests that emotional feelings fall
into two categories. There are ‘bodily feelings’, which lack intentionality or
‘borrow’ it from the intentional states that they arise in conjunction with, and
there are also ‘feelings towards’. These are ways of experiencing things in the
world that cannot be analysed into a feeling component and an intentional com-
ponent, as the ‘feeling towards’ is inextricable from the intentionality of the
emotion. As Goldie puts it, ‘feeling towards is unreflective emotional engage-
ment with the world beyond the body; it is not a consciousness of oneself, either
of one’s bodily condition or of oneself as experiencing an emotion’ (2002,
p.241).
Drawing on this, one might propose that existential feelings are ‘feelings
towards’ the world as a whole, rather than ‘bodily feelings’. However, although I
think Goldie is right to recognise that certain feelings are inextricable from expe-
rience of the world and have a directedness towards things, I suggest that he is
mistaken in claiming that there are two distinct kinds of feeling, one of which is
merely bodily and lacks intentionality. Goldie himself notes that, in some cases,
bodily feelings and feelings towards arise as seemingly inseparable constituents
of experience; ‘the bodily feeling is thoroughly infused with the intentionality of
emotion; and, in turn, the feeling towards is infused with a bodily characteriza-
tion’ (2000, pp. 56-57). However, in maintaining that bodily feelings do not
themselves have intentionality, whereas feelings towards do, he retains a distinc-
tion between kinds of feeling. They may well be blended together in experience
but there are still two different ingredients going into the blender. In what fol-
lows, I will suggest that Goldie’s distinction is a case of double-counting; bodily
feelings just are feelings towards. Some are feelings towards the body or parts of
it and others are feelings towards things outside the body. An account of how this
can be so will serve to clarify the nature of ‘existential feeling’, showing how
‘bodily’ feeling can contribute to experience as a whole.
If one were to model one’s general conception of intentionality on the visual
modality, considered in abstract isolation from proprioception and the other
senses, a distinction between perceiving things in the world and having bodily
feelings might well seem plausible. When one perceives an extremely desirable
object X and has a bodily feeling Y, one has two distinct perceptions, the percep-
tion of X in the world and the perception of Y in the body. However, a different
story is to be told if touch is taken as a starting point for phenomenological
exploration and a more general account of bodily feelings is modelled on this
 50 M. RATCLIFFE

modality. In the case of touch, bodily feeling and experience of the world are
inextricable.
Consider picking up a glass of cold water. It feels cold. But what is the ‘it’?
The glass of water is what feels cold, rather than one’s hand. Awareness is not
directed towards one’s own hand but towards the glass, which is felt to be
smooth, round and cool. Now consider picking up a snowball in one’s bare hand.
Again, the snow feels cold. One’s hand begins as a vehicle of perception,
through which the snow is perceived, rather than as an object of perception. But
when the snowball is held for more than a few seconds, the object of perception
shifts. The feeling of cold, soft, wet snow becomes an unpleasant, dull ache in
one’s hand. It is not the snow but the hand that is felt now. The feeling is not
experienced as changing location; it is and always was in the hand. However, as
it changes in intensity and perhaps quality, there is a shift in what it is a feeling of.
Are there then two feelings, one in the hand and another of the glass, hand or
snowball? There are not. There is just the feeling in one’s hand. Does one need to
interpret that feeling in order to determine whether it is a feeling of a hand or of
an object external to one’s body? It seems not. A sense of the smooth, cool object
as distinct from one’s body is part of the feeling of touch. To touch is to experi-
ence a relation between one’s body and an object it comes into contact with. Yet
which side of the relation, if either, is the object of experience depends on the
quality of the feeling and on what one is attending to at the time. One’s body can
be a conspicuous object of awareness or an invisible context of tactile activity.
For example, compare the activity of typing onto a keyboard, where one’s hands
disappear into the background, to that of trying to assemble a small, delicate
device, such as a watch, with one’s bare hands. In the latter case, the hands are far
more conspicuous and are themselves felt as clumsy and indelicate.
The tactile feel of something is not alone sufficient for experiencing it as an
identifiable kind of object. The feeling of cold, accompanied by a smooth,
curved surface, does not amount to perception of a glass.5 But tactile feeling does
at least incorporate a sense of self and other. As one holds the snowball, the expe-
rience has, as part of its structure, a sense of the hand and not the snowball as
one’s own.
I want to draw two points from the example. First of all, a differentiation
between self and non-self is integrated into the feeling of touch. This may not be
sufficient to determine a specific intentional object but it is part of the structure
of intentionality. Second, the bodily location of a feeling does not determine
what it is a feeling of.6 These related points can be generalised to encompass vari-
ous other, non-tactile bodily feelings. Commonplace philosophical divisions

[5] Tactile feelings should be distinguished from feelings of hot and cold, given that one can lose one’s
sense of touch whilst retaining an ability to detect hot and cold (Gallagher, 2005, Chapter 2). It is pos-
sible that both kinds of feeling incorporate a differentiation between self and non-self. However, it
may be that the differentiation is not intrinsic to a feeling of hot or cold and that touch is required in
order to experientially discriminate between one’s hand feeling cold and an object feeling cold.
[6] There is a great deal more to be said concerning the phenomenology of touch. For example, touching
oneself is different from touching another person and both are very different from picking up a glass
 THE FEELING OF BEING 51

between bodily feelings and intentionality assume that where X is located is also
what X is a feeling of. However, although the body or part of it is sometimes the
object that is felt, one can be aware of a feeling as something occurring in one’s
body or as a way in which the world appears. Feelings of the body and feelings
towards objects in the world are two sides of the same coin, although one or the
other will usually be foregrounded in experience. As Drummond (2004, p.115)
remarks:
..I must emphasize that we must be careful not to distinguish these different kinds
of feelings too sharply; they are intertwined with one another in complex and vari-
ous ways. Indeed, they are the same feelings considered in two different relations,
once in relation to the body and once in relation to the object.
I suggest that existential feelings are feelings in the body, which are experienced
as one’s relationship with the world as a whole. This relationship can be quite
different, depending, in part, on which side of it is foregrounded. When one feels
‘at home’ in the world, ‘absorbed’ in it or ‘at one with life’, the body often drifts
into the background. It is that through which things are experienced. But it can
also enter the foreground in a number of ways. Consider the sudden realisation
that one is being watched by another, an experiential transformation that is viv-
idly conveyed by Sartre’s various descriptions. Before one becomes alert to the
other, one is absorbed in a set of projects and not aware of oneself as an object at
all. There is just a consciousness of the world. However, a rustle in the leaves, a
creak on the stair or a pair of eyes pointing in one’s direction can trigger an affec-
tive transformation that Sartre calls ‘shame’. This is a change in how one’s body
feels; it ceases to be an invisible locus of projects and is suddenly felt as an
object. This feeling, Sartre claims constitutes our most basic sense that there are
others. One can only feel oneself to be an object if one is an object for another. So
to experience oneself as an object is to recognise that there are others. Sartre is
quite explicit in stating that a felt, bodily re-orientation is involved:
….the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of
myself as I appear to the Other. [….] …this comparison is not encountered in us as
the result of a concrete psychic operation. Shame is an immediate shudder which
runs through me from head to foot without any discursive preparation.
[….]…shame is shame of oneself before the Other; these two structures are insepa-
rable. (1989, p. 222)
His account illustrates one kind of shift that can take place between unreflective
absorption in the world and self-objectifying estrangement from one’s projects.7
However, it is important not to over-simplify existential feelings. Experience is
not just a matter of disappearing into one’s projects or becoming aware of one-
self as a thing. As the range of feelings listed earlier serves to illustrate, there are

of water. There are also distinctions to be drawn between active and passive touch and between vari-
ous ways of touching. For further discussion of such issues, see Merleau-Ponty (1962, pp. 315–17).
[7] Although I do not explicitly address the nature of intersubjectivity here, I am assuming throughout
that ways of finding ourselves in a world are also ways of finding ourselves in a social world with oth-
ers. For a complementary discussion of intersubjectivity and feeling, see Ratcliffe (in press).
52 M. RATCLIFFE

many ways in which one can disappear into one’s world or become aware of one-
self as an object. Being at one with nature is not the same as feeling like part of a
greater machine or feeling at home in a familiar environment. And the body as an
object surveyed by another is not the defamiliarised, alienated body that some-
times stares back at one after gazing in the mirror for too long. Neither is it the
injured or debilitated body that becomes an object of experience when it won’t
do what you want it to do. Furthermore, the body, in so far as it feels rather than is
felt, cannot be experienced in its entirety as an object. The feeling body is ‘how
we find ourselves in the world’, a background to all experience of objects, as
opposed to an object of experience. As Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 92) observes:
In so far as it sees or touches the world, my body can […] be neither seen nor
touched. What prevents its ever being an object, ever being ‘completely consti-
tuted’, is that it is that by which there are objects. It is neither tangible nor visible in
so far as it is that which sees and touches.
In tactile sensation, one’s hand can be the object that is felt or it can be a transpar-
ent vehicle through which something in the world is felt. So too, the feeling body
more generally is a framework through which world-experience is structured.
Even when one is not explicitly aware of the body, it still functions as a struc-
ture-giving background to all experience. For example, one can have a sense of
‘up’, ‘down’, ‘left’ and ‘right’ without being explicitly aware of one’s bodily
position.
There is every reason to suspect that the body states involved in what I have
called existential feelings will be many and diverse, able to facilitate a range of
ways in which we find ourselves in the world. Consider proprioception, con-
strued broadly as one’s explicit and implicit sense of body states, unmediated by
other perceptual modalities such as vision and touch. Proprioception has a com-
plicated structure and its role is not restricted to an awareness of body states.
Gallagher (2005) discusses a considerable body of evidence suggesting that
proprioception contributes to the structure of world experience in a variety of
ways. A range of body states comprise the implicit and explicit sense one has of
one’s body and this proprioceptive sense also contributes to the working of the
other perceptual modalities in numerous ways. As Gallagher puts it, ‘perceiving
subjects move through a space that is already pragmatically organized by the
construction, the very shape, of the body’ (2005, p.140).
Gallagher’s account of how the body is integrated into experience is based
around a distinction he draws between ‘body schema’ and ‘body image’, arrived
at by clarifying and distinguishing various historical uses of these terms. He
employs the distinction to make clear the body’s dual role as an object of experi-
ence and a tacit background that shapes experience. Gallagher refers to the body
schema as prenoetic, meaning that it shapes experience without itself being an
object of awareness or part of the structure of awareness. The body image, in
contrast, is an awareness of one’s body, which might not be at the centre of one’s
attention but is still accessible through phenomenological reflection. The ‘exis-
tential feelings’ that I have listed are perhaps best understood at the level of the
 THE FEELING OF BEING 53

body image. They are ordinarily part of the background structure of experience,
constituting ways of finding oneself in a world that shape more specific experi-
ences. Nevertheless, they are phenomenologically available, as is evident from
the various, usually metaphorical descriptions employed to communicate them.
So they are part of the structure of experience, rather than an experientially inac-
cessible contributor to that structure. However, there may be a thin line between
noetic and prenoetic aspects of existential feeling. For example, the role of feel-
ing in constituting our sense of reality, which I will discuss now, is perhaps
something that is hidden beneath everyday experience and can only be made
phenomenologically explicit through reflection upon highly unusual states of
oneself or others.

The Feeling of Reality

So far, I have claimed that certain ‘feelings’ constitute ways of finding ourselves
in the world. In support of this claim, I have appealed to everyday talk of feelings
and also to the fact that bodily feelings need not have the body as their object.
This is perhaps enough to show that ‘existential feelings’ are at least a possible
ingredient of experience. However, further work is needed in order to make a
convincing case for their existence. In this section, I will discuss work in phe-
nomenology, neurophysiology and psychopathology, which supports the case
for existential feelings. This work suggests that feeling is responsible for the
‘sense of reality’ incorporated into experience of the world as a whole, other peo-
ple and even oneself. So, when someone says that things ‘don’t feel real’ or that
she feels ‘part of the real world again’, such talk can be taken literally. The qual-
ity of reality is also something that varies in intensity, allowing objects of experi-
ence, including oneself, to take on an ‘unreal’ aspect.
The feeling of reality is generally ignored by recent work on emotion and feel-
ing. However, it is a theme in the work of certain phenomenologists, such as the
early Heidegger, who claims that experience presupposes an ‘attunement’
[Befindlichkeit] (1962, p.172), a feeling of belonging to a world that is taken for
granted in everyday life.8 According to Heidegger, it is ‘mood’ that attunes one
to the world and gives things their taken for granted meaning. He also claims that
everyday attunement can be disrupted and that it collapses completely in the
mood of ‘anxiety’. Given that attunement underlies the very sense of
Being-in-the-world, anxiety presents ‘the nothing’. Although Heidegger does
not explicitly discuss the role of the body in experience, he does emphasise that
our relationship with the world ordinarily consists of practical dwelling, rather
than detached contemplation. And his description of anxiety appears to incorpo-
rate an implicit sense of its bodily nature, of how one’s sense of reality incorpo-
rates a practical, bodily orientation:

[8] ‘Attunement’ is the term employed by Stambaugh in her 1996 translation of Being and Time.
Macquarrie and Robinson (1962) translate ‘Befindlichkeit’ rather misleadingly as ‘state of mind’. It
is misleading because Befindlichkeit is a way of finding oneself in the world, rather than a perception
of one’s internal mental states.
54 M. RATCLIFFE

The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses

us. We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this ‘no
hold on things’ comes over us and remains. Anxiety reveals the nothing.
(1978, p. 101)
The everyday, taken-for-granted sense that things ‘are’ and that we are ‘in’ the
world is not a matter of perceiving our bodily locatedness amongst things but of a
‘hold on things’. And to lose this hold is to lose the sense of ‘being there’. Expe-
rience is no longer nested in a cosy world of projects, purposes and familiar
activities. All that is left is apprehension of a total loss of relatedness, an absence
of the usual practical orientation through which things are experienced as mean-
ingful.
Heidegger’s conception of ‘mood’ closely approximates what I have called
‘existential feeling’; ‘mood’ for Heidegger is responsible for a sense of
Being-in-the-world. However, Heidegger explicitly focuses on only a few kinds
of ‘mood’. For example, there is fear (1962, p.179), boredom (1978, p.99) and
anxiety (1962, pp. 228-235; 1978, pp. 100-108). But existential feelings are
more varied than this. In everyday life, we might feel close to the world, distant
from it, part of it, estranged from it, helpless before it, in control of ‘things’, at
one with nature, at one with life, part of a greater whole, part of a machine,
slightly lost, overwhelmed, conspicuous or inconspicuous. And the world might
feel familiar, unfamiliar, intangible, unreal, threatening, safe, fascinating,
empty, imbued with significance, dreamlike, surreal, alien or warming. Is every
one of these a mode of everyday attunement? And ‘anxiety’, as described by
Heidegger, is arguably not a single, distinct kind of feeling but something that
accommodates a host of different experiential structures. As Glas (2003, p.238)
notes, one form of anxiety is a feeling of disconnectedness from the world:
What prevails is a tormenting feeling of distance, the awareness of an unbridgeable
gap. This feeling can amount to the awareness that one lives in a vacuum and is
about to suffocate, or that one lives in an unreal world in which things [are not] what
they seem to be and in which attempts to connect fail as if there were a glassy wall
between the person and the surrounding world.
This might look like a fairly accurate description of Heidegger’s ‘anxiety reveal-
ing the nothing’. However, Glas distinguishes this feeling of disconnectedness
from anxiety concerning meaningless, anxiety in the face of death and anxiety
before existence itself, all of which might appear to fit Heidegger’s conception.
Phenomenologists such as Heidegger give rich descriptions of experience that
provide support for a category of ‘existential feelings’. However, it would be a
mistake to understand such accounts as relating exclusively to the familiar
inventory of moods and emotions. To do so would be to pass over the variety of
existential feelings that are incorporated into everyday language but not into lists
of emotional states. There are many ways in which one can find oneself in the
world and a pervasive emphasis on ‘emotions’ and ‘moods’, coupled with the
assumption that feelings are ‘mere’ reports of body states, has led to neglect of
these experiential phenomena.
 THE FEELING OF BEING 55

The claim that feeling constitutes one’s relationship with the world and even
the sense of ‘reality’ itself finds further support from neuroscience. For example,
Damasio (1995) discusses what he calls ‘background feelings’, which are unre-
markable, everyday perceptions of body states that tacitly structure experience.
Damasio claims that they comprise ‘the feeling of life itself, the sense of being’
(1995, p.150) and presents an explicit neurophysiological theory of how a
changing background of body states shapes perception and thought. Damasio
calls this background our ‘image of the body landscape’ (1995, pp. 150-151).
The way he employs the term ‘image’ suggests that, although he recognises the
importance of feelings, he fails to distinguish between a feeling as something
that is perceived and a feeling as something that structures the perception of
something else (Gallagher, 2005, pp.135-137; Sass, 2004, p.134).9 Damasio
christens his more general account of feeling and emotion the ‘somatic marker
hypothesis’. According to this account, certain body states are associated with or
‘mark’ perceptions of particular entities or kinds of entity. Feelings of these
states structure experience, thought and action. Again, Damasio interprets feel-
ing as ‘the perception of a certain state of the body’ (2003, p.86). He thus omits
the possibility that the body need not be the object of perception and that feelings
can manifest themselves through the manner in which another object of percep-
tion, or the world in general, is perceived. However, Damasio still provides a
neurophysiological theory of how certain bodily feelings act as a structuring
background for experience and thought. Hence the claim that feelings do func-
tion in such a way is supplemented by a specific account of how they might do so.
Although Heideggerian phenomenology and Damasio’s account of emotion
both provide some support for my claim that there is a distinctive category of
existential feeling, some of the most compelling evidence, in my view, comes
from work in psychopathology.10 Descriptions of various unusual and pathologi-
cal experiences illustrate how the structure of intentionality can be altered in
many different ways, changing the ways in which objects are experienced. We
may think of intentionality as a space of possibilities for the experience of
objects. Objects are not just experientially presented as ‘there’ or ‘not there’, ‘ex-
istent’ or ‘nonexistent’. They are familiar, unfamiliar, real, surreal, dreamlike,
anticipated, unanticipated, close, distant, estranged, significant, separate from
oneself, experienced in their particularity or as unobtrusive members of a cate-
gory, contextualised relative to one’s purposes, and so forth. This possibility
space is presupposed by the structure of specific experiences and various trans-
formations of it reshape world experience as a whole. It is a ‘way of finding one-
self in the world’, rather than an intentional object or internal state of the person.

[9] Recalling Gallagher’s (2005) distinction between ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’, it should be
noted that Gallagher’s use of the term ‘image’ is more encompassing. A feeling can be a constituent of
the ‘body image’ without being an object of perception, so long as it remains phenomenologically
accessible. Thus feelings could be part of an experiential background, through which experience of
foreground objects is structured.
[10] See Ratcliffe (2002) for a discussion of similarities between Heidegger’s phenomenological descrip-
tions and Damasio’s neurophysiological account, and of how these two very different perspectives
might be brought together.
56 M. RATCLIFFE

Psychopathological case studies not only illustrate how the structure of expe-
rience can be altered but also how that alteration is related to changed bodily
feeling. For example, Sass (1994) attempts to describe the experiential changes
that occur in some cases of schizophrenia, focusing on the well known autobio-
graphical account of Schreber in his Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. Drawing on
Schreber’s elaborate descriptions of his own experiences, Sass argues that
schizophrenic delusions are not a matter of mistaking the unreal for the real.
Such an interpretation presupposes that the usual space of experiential possibili-
ties remains intact. Instead, Sass suggests, it is the whole structure of experience
that is transformed. It is not that schizophrenic persons claim reality for their
delusions but, rather, that their entire experience is structured by a sense of unre-
ality (1994, pp. 32-33). Schizophrenic patients, according to Sass, experience
‘unworlding’; it is the form of the real that is warped, as opposed to the specific
contents of the real (2004, pp. 136-141). The result is a kind of solipsistic experi-
ential realm, where the sense of ‘an object independent of me’ has been removed
from the space of experiential possibilities. He also makes clear the
inextricability of experiential transformation and changes in bodily affect,
observing that schizophrenic subjects manifest significantly altered affect:
…many schizophrenic patients seem neither to feel nor to evoke a natural
sense of emotional rapport. Both the affective response and the affective
expression of these patients frequently seems odd, incongruent, inadequate,
or otherwise off-the-mark. (2004, p.128)
Sass suggests that schizophrenia involves a general diminution of background
bodily feelings, accompanied by exaggeration of certain, more specific affective
responses. So it is not just a loss of the feelings that comprise our hold on things
but also a transformation. Stanghellini (2004) also emphasises the role played by
changes in feeling and observes how a schizophrenic person will sometimes talk
of her ‘deanimated body’ or ‘disembodied spirit’ (p.19). He suggests that distor-
tions of feeling, resulting in a sense of disembodiment, are a source of altered
experience. The background of feeling through which oneself, other people and
the world as a whole are ordinarily experienced breaks down. Stanghellini’s dis-
cussion includes several accounts provided by schizophrenic patients, in which
they report various changes in the ‘feeling’ of things, such as ‘I cannot feel my
being anymore’ and ‘I feel disconnected from myself’ (2004, pp. 123-126). A
further role that changed affect might play in schizophrenia is proposed by
Gallagher (2005, chapter 8). He suggests that the temporal structure of experi-
ence is disturbed by anomalous feelings and that this can lead to a lack of the
usual sense of anticipation and familiarity that precedes one’s own thoughts or
actions. The result is that these thoughts and activities are experienced as alien.
Stanghellini (2004, pp.39-40) appeals to the Heideggerian conception of
mood, in order to convey the kinds of affective states that structure schizo-
phrenic experience, and Sass prefers ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ to ‘feeling’, given
that:
 THE FEELING OF BEING 57

The term ‘feeling’ has a more subjective focus: unlike emotion, it refers not so much
to an attitude toward the world as to a state of or within the self, one that does not
elicit any action tendency or sense of urgency. (2004, p.133)
However, I suspect that the supposed ‘subjective focus’ of ‘feeling’ is a symp-
tom of its philosophical neglect and misinterpretation, rather than of connota-
tions that attach to the term in everyday life, and I suggest that the term ‘feeling’
is preferable to ‘mood’ or ‘affect’, given that we do refer to ways of finding our-
selves in the world as ‘feelings’. The term ‘emotion’ might invoke the usual list
of states, such as anger, fear, happiness, sadness, shame, guilt, regret and so
forth. And ‘mood’ might make one think of misery, elation, boredom or just of
‘good’ and ‘bad’ moods. But ‘belonging’, ‘familiarity’, ‘completeness’, ‘es-
trangement’, ‘distance’, ‘separation’ and ‘homeliness’ are usually referred to as
feelings. One can speak of the ‘feeling of being’ or the ‘feeling of reality’,
whereas the ‘emotion’ of being or reality sounds peculiar at best. And some
‘moods’ seem to be fairly superficial subjective states. For example, one might
say ‘I’m sorry; I’m just in a bit of a bad mood today’, indicating that it is possible
to assign a mood to oneself, without it enveloping one’s whole relationship with
the world. Such moods are states that one experiences when one is already in a
world. Granted, certain other ‘moods’ do seem to be more basic ways of finding
oneself in a world, as suggested by Heidegger. However, the term ‘feeling’ is
less constraining, encompassing these moods plus a host of other ways of relat-
ing to the world. Hence I suggest that it be retained. The everyday phenomena
that relate most clearly to pathological experience are a group of ‘feelings’,
which are inadvertently neglected when characteristically ‘emotional’ feelings
and ‘moods’ are taken as the focus of attention.
Changed existential feeling may underlie a host of other pathological experi-
ences. Consider the Capgras delusion, for example. Sufferers of this condition
maintain that certain familiars, usually spouses or other family members, have
been replaced by impostors, a conviction which is impervious to all contrary evi-
dence. In conjunction with this, they report an absence of the feeling of familiar-
ity normally associated with visual recognition of these people. Many patients
also report a more general sense of unfamiliarity or unreality attached to all their
experience (Ratcliffe, 2004, pp. 31-36). Central to most recent explanations of
this condition is the observation that subjects suffer a diminution of the affective
response that is ordinarily associated with visual perception of close friends and
relatives. This response, it seems, does not just accompany visual recognition
but contributes to it. Without a background feeling of familiarity, family mem-
bers appear strange and ‘not known’. The altered experience, perhaps in con-
junction with a reasoning impairment, is interpreted in terms of an impostor.11
Another delusion, which is often explained in a similar way, is the Cotard
delusion. Sufferers claim that they are dead, damned, disembodied, nonexistent
or that they have been effaced from the universe. Such claims all express a com-
mon experience of self-nihilation, a sense that one has been extricated from
[11] See Stone & Young (1997) for a two factor explanation, incorporating altered experience and a rea-
soning bias. See Maher (1999) for an explanation in terms of altered experience alone.
 58 M. RATCLIFFE

reality or that reality more generally is absent from experience. One proposed
explanation is that global diminution of bodily affect manifests itself
experientially as an absence of the sense of reality. The relationship between self
and world, which ordinarily comprises a taken-for-granted experiential orienta-
tion through which things are encountered as ‘real’, has broken down and the
feeling of being is itself absent from experience (Gerrans, 2000; Ratcliffe,
2004).12
A further question to be addressed is that of which specific affective responses
are involved in various psychopathologies and whether the same kinds of affect
contribute to all ‘existential feelings’. However, the answer will not have a bear-
ing on whether or not ‘existential feelings’ comprise an illuminating category of
phenomena. The category I am attempting to make explicit here is a
phenomenological, rather than a biological, category. If the underlying biology
is diverse, this does not impinge upon the common experiential role that unites
existential feelings. They are bodily feelings that are not felt as the objects of per-
ception but as world-orientations, ways of being integrated into the world as a
whole.

Philosophical Orientations
Although existential feelings seldom feature as objects of philosophical enquiry,
I will conclude by tentatively suggesting that an appreciation of their existence
and role might serve to further our understanding of the nature of philosophical
thought. Sass (1994) compares the experiential predicament of Schreber to the
philosophical stance of Wittgenstein and suggests that philosophy and madness
have much in common. Certain philosophical preoccupations are symptomatic
of the philosopher’s lack of affective rootedness in reality and Wittgenstein’s
work is concerned with the diagnosis and cure of problems that arise from the
philosopher’s artificial detachment from everyday social experience:
Wittgenstein’s characterization [of philosophy as a sickness] can almost be taken
literally: the sicknesses of the understanding he examined in his later work, sick-
nesses bound up with the philosopher’s predilection for abstraction and alienation –
for detachment from body, world, and community – have a great deal in common
with the symptoms displayed by Schreber and many other mental patients with
schizophrenia or related forms of illness. (Sass, 1994, p. x)
Such a diagnosis, though it may be accurate in certain cases, does not apply to all
philosophical thought. Philosophies and philosophers are far too varied to be
guided by the same world-estranging existential feeling. However, different phi-
losophies may well have their source in a range of different existential feelings or
‘ways of finding oneself in the world’. This is a view expressed in several of
[12] Another kind of altered experience that might be explicable in terms of existential feeling is that typi-
cal of autism, which Hobson (2002) explains in terms of the absence of normal affective responsive-
ness to others. This responsiveness is the basis of early infant intersubjectivity and also shapes the
development of intersubjective ability. Autistic experience is perhaps a different way of finding one-
self in the world, bereft of the complex of feelings towards others that structure everyday experience
of oneself and one’s relations with the social world.
 THE FEELING OF BEING 59

William James’s works. Although James never explicitly retracts his 1884 claim
that emotions are bodily feelings, he also indicates in his later works that feelings
or emotions underlie our sense of reality and of the various experiential worlds
that we take for granted13. For example, in The Varieties of Religious Experience,
he suggests that the core of religious and metaphysical dispositions consists in
feeling. His description of the experiential predicament of the ‘sick soul’ prior to
religious conversion is strikingly similar to descriptions of altered experience in
schizophrenia; ‘a thick veil alters the tone and look of everything’ and ‘I weep
false tears. I have unreal hands: the things I see are not real things’ (1902, p.152).
Religious conversion, James suggests, takes the form of an affective reorienta-
tion that alters the structure of one’s relationship with reality. This structure is
not an explicit object of contemplation but that through which experience and
thought are moulded. Similarly, a substantial element of one’s philosophical
position comes ready-made in the way that one finds oneself in a world:
..in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only
when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favour of
the same conclusion. (1902, p.74)
Elsewhere, James suggests that different philosophical outlooks owe much to
bodily, affective dispositions:
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philo-
sophical opinions – Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in
practical affairs… (1956, p.92)
The sense of a coherent philosophical position is, he claims, constituted by a
‘strong feeling of ease, peace, rest’, and a feeling of ‘relief’ structures the transi-
tion from puzzlement to comprehension (1956, p.63). So philosophy is not just a
matter of trading arguments or aligning one’s position with reason and evidence:
…the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is
our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly
got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and
pressure of the cosmos. (1981, p.7)
Philosophies, according to James, are the outcome of various ‘temperaments’.
World-orientations differ from person to person. Some are caught up in the
world, fascinated by it. Others feel distant from it, estranged, lacking in connec-
tion. Philosophers feel at home in the world in different ways and to different
extents. And the way in which a philosopher finds herself in a world is a back-
ground of sense through which her position and her arguments are formed. James
states that rationalism and empiricism have their source in different philosophi-
cal temperaments (1981, p.8) or relationships with the world, which are bodily
and felt, as opposed to abstract products of reason decoupled from one’s sense of

[13] Ratcliffe (2005) suggests that James does indeed maintain that emotions are bodily feelings and that
bodily feelings are central to the structure of world experience.
 60 M. RATCLIFFE

being there.14 He adds that one’s sense of a view’s implausibility or absurdity sel-
dom has its source in a process of rational deliberation.
In contrast to Sass, James does not see philosophy in general as akin to a kind
of madness, a reflection of pathological experiencing, entangled with a desire to
be reintegrated with the world. Indeed, a philosophical view is often not an expli-
cation of one’s existential predicament at all but a retreat from it into a realm of
cosy abstraction that has little bearing on the realities of experience:
…..it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a
classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably
confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our
concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way
of escape. (1981, p.14)
So James suggests that philosophy is sometimes a forgetting of existential feel-
ing, rather than an expression or symptom of it. One hides in a realm of abstrac-
tions, playing with abstract arguments and unreal doubts, divorced from the
world of actual experience. This raises questions concerning what it even means
to think about experience and whether one can lose sight of the very problems
one is claiming to address, by reflecting on frameworks of abstract concepts,
rather than on experience itself. These concerns could perhaps be directed at
philosophical approaches that take experience to be comprised of ‘representa-
tions of objects’, ‘qualitative feels’ and the like, generated in brains that just hap-
pen to reside in bodies. Such approaches pass over structures of world
experience that are presupposed by all experiential objects, abstracting the
objects of experience from the space of possibilities through which they appear.
Questions also arise concerning what it is to hold a philosophical position. Is it
enough to linguistically assent to a set of propositions or must one feel a sense of
conviction with respect to it? And what is it to doubt a claim? As Hookway
(2002, p. 255-6) notes, ‘felt doubt’ has a kind of immediacy that distinguishes it
from various examples of philosophical doubt. Reflecting on the classic example
of Cartesian doubt, can one really doubt the existence of the world or of one’s
body? One can think of one’s body as an object, or of the world as a collection of
objects, and then think ‘it is not the case that X exists’. But can one genuinely
conceive of one’s disembodied existence, as a Cartesian mental substance or a
brain in a vat, when all of one’s experience is structured by a tacit background of
feeling?15 And can the reality of the world be doubted, given that the sense of ‘re-
ality’ does not consist in an object being presented to consciousness but in a pre-
supposed possibility space through which things can appear in certain ways?
Can one, in a detached, indifferent manner, doubt the sense of reality itself or of
one’s bodily being in the world? I suggest not. One can doubt the existence of an
object but the structure of one’s experience of body and world does not just

[14] More recently, van Fraassen (2002) has suggested that empiricism is a stance, rather than a specific
philosophical position or set of beliefs. It is an attitude or presupposed philosophical orientation,
which is sculpted not by reason alone but by one’s emotional attitudes.
[15] Young & Leafhead (1996, p.149) remark that certain delusions ‘are interesting with respect to the
question of what it means to say that one exists’ and relate this to Cartesian doubt.
 THE FEELING OF BEING 61

consist in experiencing objects. It is that through which objects are experienced

as real or unreal. Hence doubting the existence of ‘world as object’ does not add
up to genuine doubt concerning the world’s existence.

Conclusion
To summarise, talk of feelings in philosophy is usually restricted to the role that
they play in emotions. Emotions, for the most part, are ways in which specific
objects, events or situations are perceived, evaluated or felt. But all specific
intentional states presuppose general structures of intentionality, ways of finding
oneself in the world that determine the space of experiential possibilities. These
ways of finding oneself in the world are what I call ‘existential feelings’. A dis-
tinction can be drawn between the location of a feeling and what it is a feeling of.
Thus accounts of bodily feeling which assume that what is felt must be the body
are mistaken. Existential feelings are bodily feelings that constitute the structure
of one’s relationship with the world as a whole. They are thus a
phenomenologically important but neglected category.
I began this paper by contrasting the views of Solomon and James on the rela-
tionship between feeling and emotion. James maintains that emotions are bodily
feelings, whereas Solomon claims that they are judgements. In his more recent
work, Solomon acknowledges that the body plays an important role in emotional
experience:
I am now coming to appreciate that accounting for the feelings (not just sensations)
in emotion is not a secondary concern and not independent of appreciating the
essential role of the body in emotional experience. (2003, p.189)
He attempts to account for the role of body in emotional judgements by invoking
‘judgments of the body’ (2003, p.191). These are integrated into perception and
action, for example in the bodily judgement that a fast approaching ball is
catchable. What people call ‘feeling’, Solomon claims, can be understood as a
kind of bodily judgement. According to Solomon, emotional judgements in gen-
eral are not an outcome of deliberation but are ‘prereflectively constitutive of
experience’ (2003, p.95); they are structures of intelligibility through which the
objects of experience appear. Construed as such, they resemble what I have been
calling existential feelings more so than they do those states that are generally
referred to as emotions. A pre-reflective bodily judgement or set of bodily judge-
ments could just as well be termed an experience-structuring feeling and here we
return to James. James not only states that emotions are bodily feelings. In his
later work, he also suggests that feelings constitute our sense of reality, our pre-
supposed relationship with the world. So it seems as though James and Solomon
have been talking about the Morning Star and the Evening Star; a unitary phe-
nomenon has been miscast as two quite different things16. Furthermore, when

[16] As Greenspan remarks, ‘Affect evaluates! Emotional affect or feeling is itself evaluative – and the
result can be summed up in a proposition. I think we can have it both ways. That is, about emotions as
feelings or judgments’ (2004, p. 132).
 62 M. RATCLIFFE

they refer to those phenomena that structure our relationship with the world as a
whole, they are not identifying specifically directed emotions like fear or anger
but existential feelings, which are presupposed by focused emotions and consti-
tute our sense of being.17

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 THE FEELING OF BEING 63

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