Self-feeling

can self-consciousness be understood as a feeling?

Gerhard Kreuch

This monograph offers new insights into the connection between self-consciousness and emotion. It focuses on what fundamental "feelings of being" tell us about ourselves. The results enrich the philosophy of human affectivity and help shed new light on some pressing, current problems. The author seeks to understand self-consciousness as an affective phenomenon, namely as self-feeling. He identifies it as a pre-reflective, pre-propositional, bodily feeling that shapes our space of possibilities. It is the affective disclosure of individual existence. His account overcomes the difficulties of infinite regress and vicious circularity that reflective (or higher-order) accounts of self-consciousness struggle with. At the same time, it helps build a bridge between the basic level of self-consciousness and the higher level of more substantial thoughts about oneself. The title explores fundamental affectivity, Matthew Ratcliffe's theory of existential feelings, features of self-feeling, and appropriateness and inappropriateness in self-interpretation. It also considers the contributions of the Heidelberg School of self-consciousness to current debates.