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This essay is the second in a series of works on the phenomenology of emotion. The first1 dealt with the emotion of anger; this time I shall be phenomenologically analyzing the emotion of sadness. Because my analysis is part of an ongoing project on the phenomenology of emotion, it is concerned not only with sadness itself, but also with what a phenomenology of sadness can tell us about emotions in general. I will be utilizing two performances of Shakespeare's play The Tragedy of Hamlet as my research material. The structure of this essay will be as follows: I begin with a brief exposition of my methodology and the theoretical background out of which the project emerges. Then I present my phenomenological descriptions themselves. Interspersed with the phenomenological descriptions will be theoretical reflections about sadness and emotions in general which come out of the descriptions. I conclude with a summary of what we have learned and what work remains to be done. This project is based within the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and can be seen as a continuation of the project he commenced: the re-discovery and articulation of our original, mute, bodily contact with the world. As Merleau-Ponty attempts to show in his seminal work Phenomenologie de la Perception, our body is not a mere mechanism in the service of the mind, but a "body-subject" which inhabits the world and plays a role in constituting it. Through phenomenological examples and analyses of psychological experiments, he reveals beneath the operations of positing thought an intentionality at work in our body's ongoing involvement in the world. This bodily intentionality forms the substratum which underlies all our objectively posited thoughts and acts and makes them possible. It constitutes the background awareness of the world out of which objects emerge through specific acts of cognition. But unlike the non-conscious operations posited by computationalist theories of mind, which merely reproduce a thinking subject beneath the threshold of consciousness (and therefore presuppose what they intend to explain), this bodily intentionality functions in a different way from the "rules and representations" of rational thought. It is vague and inarticulate; objects are not fully grasped or disclosed, but rather admit of degrees of indeterminacy.2 We witness it in the motor intentionality evident in the practice of bodily skills3 and in the spontaneous organization of the perceptual field.4 And we also witness it in the peculiar meaning-making proper to emotion, as we shall see. Before we can proceed to the phenomenological analysis proper, it will be necessary to clarify a bit better our subject material. Unlike anger, which appears comparatively straightforward (at least at first glance) sadness is part of a spectrum of emotion words with associated meanings: unhappiness, grief, gloom, melancholy, sorrow, depression, despair. Are these words synonymous with sadness or do they name states which are only related to sadness? Is sadness an umbrella term and all these others grades or permutations of sadness? There is no definitive answerto these questions because words are defined by usage and our usage of these terms is not consistent. Some of us may use the words "sad" and "melancholy" to refer to the same state, while others may not. Thus the answers that we give are to some extent arbitrary. And yet we must start somewhere. Therefore I shall take sadness in the widest possible sense to refer to any of the states designated by the terms above. By so doing, I hope to avoid excluding any relevant phenomena. Then, should the phenomena suggest that there are in fact different conditions that sometimes go by the name of sadness, I shall attempt to differentiate them and determine which of the above labels is most appropriate to each one. These conceptual distinctions can themselves be used as signposts for subsequent phenomenological analysis. … |
