Feeling as the ground of striving? The contribution of Alexander Pfänder

Abstract

The majority of Pfänder scholars (including Husserl himself) have focused their commentary more on Motives and Motivation than on the Phenomenology of Willing. In the former work, there is a clear delimitation of the sphere of voluntary acts as opposed to other acts of striving, such as desiring. The question that I ask in this chapter is both more general and more specific and is one which scholars have not paid sufficient attention to: whether that which makes a striving into a striving is an element that has the nature of a feeling. If it is such an element, one might get the idea that strivings are nothing more than an aggregate of a representative lived-experience and a feeling. Emulating Husserlian terminology, we might say that the “character of striving” of a lived-experience of striving would then have the nature of a feeling. If, however, that is not how things are, then lived-experiences of striving would be a specific type of lived-experience, different from experiences of representation and feeling. The reconstruction of these two positions, defended by Pfänder in the Phenomenology of Willing and Introduction to Psychology, respectively, casts light on a difficult question, i.e., that of the relationship between affective intentionality and the intentionality of the will.