Feeling Value: A Systematic Phenomenological Account of the Original Mode of Presentation of Value

On the basis of a phenomenological reconstruction of the experience of value, I argue for the thesis that the key to understanding the relation between affective experiences and value is to consider intentional lived-experiences of feeling to be the original modes of presentation of value, something that does not rule out value being subsequently presented in other modes of presentation. A careful phenomenological reconstruction of the formation of evaluative meaning can give warrant to this thesis. The aim of the paper is first and foremost systematic, but it draws heavy inspiration from historical phenomenological analyses of value and felt emotions including phenomenological analyses of pre-reflective experience as such, as found mostly in the work of Edmund Husserl. The idea that feeling provides us with the content, or “material”, of any practical reason is emphasized by several phenomenologists, notably Husserl,1 but also Max Scheler.2 The basic phenomenological point, crucial to the following analysis, that complex objects of experience have a history of constitution in experience is vital to the phenomenological account in this chapter and found in Husserl’s Analysen Zur Passiven Synthesis3 and in Erfahrung und Urteil.4 A genetic phenomenology of

the constitution of valuation and value objects reconstructs how higher order attitudes, such as propositional desires and beliefs, have their necessary conditions in simpler experiences and, correspondingly, how complex experienced meaning – notably including the intentional objects of practical reason – is founded on simpler experienced meaning. The point of this chapter is not to discuss the ontological question of what value is. Rather, I present basic claims about evaluative meaning such as the formation of intentional objects of value and their correlating attitudes.