A Phenomenological Critique of Matthew Ratcliffe’s Existential Feeling

Matthew Ratcliffe’s model of existential feelings can be seen as a critical engagement with perspectives common to analytic, theory of mind and psychological orientations that view psychological functions such as cognition and affectivity within normative objective propositional frameworks. Ratcliffe takes a step back from and re-situates objective reifications within an interactive subject-object matrix inclusive of the body and the interpersonal world. In doing so, he turns a mono-normative thinking into a poly-normative one, in which determinations of meaning and significance are relative to the changing structural coherence of felt bodily and inter-socially shaped schemes of interaction. And yet, from the phenomenological vantages of Husserl, Gendlin and Heidegger, Ratcliffe’s approach retains the metaphysical presupposition of subject-object relationality as interacting inherences, with a separate causative glue necessary to provide for the means of their connection. Ratcliffe re-purposed Damasio‘s concept of background feeling and dressed it up in the garb of phenomenology , but as such it remains a reciprocally causal model of psychological function.
What Heidegger’s Being-in-the -World, Merleau-Ponty’s figure-background structure of corporeal inter-subjectivity, Gendlin’s implicit intricacy and Husserl’s reduced transcendental ego have in common is a radicalized notion of temporality that overcomes the split between feeling and thinking informing Ratcliffe’s understanding of being ‘immersed in’ and connected to a world, and thus abandons the need to posit bodily feeling as a ‘glue’ organizing and maintaining the meaningful structure of consciousness of a world. Temporality , not the empirically causal body, provides the basis of affect, cognition and the organizational glue for structures of meaning.

Chapters:

Introduction: 1:39

Existential Feeling as Global Situatedness: 2:58

The Affective ‘glue’ organizing existential feeling: 5:07

Husserl’s Transcendental Affect: 15:37

Heidegger on Feeling, Intentionality and Time: 32:20

Gendlin’s Model of Temporality: Occurring Into Implying: 1:04:27

Conclusion: 1:16:27

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Authors mentioned in this paper:

Thomas Fuchs
Eugene Gendlin
Martin Heidegger
Edmund Husserl
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Matthew Ratcliffe
Jan Slaby

Joshua Soffer is an independent, published writer in philosophy and psychology. Their research focuses on the radically temporal thinking of Derrida, Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin, and their critical relationship to embodied, enactive approaches influenced by Merleau-Ponty, particularly regarding the nature of temporality, affectivity and intersubjectivity.

[joshsoffer]

Matthew Ratcliffe’s phenomenologically influenced intentional model of emotion in particular, and affectivity in general, is among the most promising of contemporary efforts. I believe that Ratcliffe’s model can be further enriched by a deeper engagement with the phenomenologies of writers like Husserl, Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin.