An enactive view on emotions
Paper to be presented at the 9th conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP), June 3-8 2001, Calgary
Cor Baerveldt & Paul Voestermans

The study of human emotions and sentiments belongs to the core business of cultural psychology. In this paper we seek to develop some of the outlines of a cultural psychology that is equal to the task of understanding the social and cultural form of emotions. Our scope will be that of the 'enactive' cultural psychology we have proposed elsewhere (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999a, 1999b; Baerveldt & van Grinsven, 2000; Baerveldt, Voestermans & Verheggen, 1999). Such an enactive cultural psychology is critical with respect to all theories that try to explain the particular form of human emotions by resorting to pre-established cultural models, stories, theories and other 'intentional realities'. After all, intentional realities are real because of the emotions involved, so it makes little sense to use those same intentional realities as an explanation of those emotions. Rather than an explanation, intentional realities - their force and persuasiveness - are the things to be explained. For this we need to understand the phenomenon of emotion much better. From the perspective of an enactive cultural psychology we will discuss three principles that in our view are vital for such an understanding of human emotions.

1. Human emotions are intentional
The notion of intentionality, that derives from phenomenological thinking, has undergone an interesting fate in the history of western thinking. Although the term itself was adopted by cognitive science, its current use has little to do with the original intentions of Brentano, Husserl and other phenomenological thinkers. In an early piece of work Jean Paul Sartre (1939) already criticized the emotion theories of his days for cutting off the meaning of emotions from that what is meant. To experience an emotion is to realize, or to 'enact' a property of the world, not of ourselves. For a psychologist, to distinguish an emotion in a human being is therefore to indicate a domain of relational behaviors, which this person could generate in the particular situation (Maturana, 1995). As such, emotions can be considered as dynamical dispositions for action, rather than some inner state of being.

2. Human emotions are consensual
Although an enactive approach to emotions is tributary to phenomenology, it is also critical with respect to phenomenology's failure to recognize the social dimension of human emotions. By focusing on what it considered to be the 'essential' structure of emotions, most phenomenologists failed to recognize that probably all human action is consensually coordinated. People are involved in an ongoing flow of mutual adaptations. In human beings, the particular course of their 'emotioning' therefore becomes a feature of their consensually coordinated actions with other human beings. Therefore, emotions play a central role in the establishment of the co-operative domains of interaction, or consensual domains, that constitute the unreflected base of culture.

3. Human emotions are recursive
As a consequence of the complexity of human consensual domains, people are not only able to coordinate their actions with respect to their life world, but also to recursively coordinate those consensually coordinated actions. This is typically what happens in language or in other semiotic actions. Therefore, human emotions belong to a domain of second order consensual coordinations of actions, or a semiotic domain. One particular feature of second order consensual coordinations of action concerns the ability of human experiencers to acknowledge or recognize that there are other experiencing persons who have their own, unique experience about 'the same' world. This means that human experience is 'co-intentional' rather than intentional in an isolated fashion. Therefore, human emotions do not only imply the self, as Robert Zajonc already noted, but they also imply the other. To be a self within a semiotic domain is to be able to recognize the experiential autonomy of others. Crucial in this recursive consensual coordination of actions is a process of 'authentification': people need other people in order to make their own experience real, particularly theire emotional experiences.

We intend to demonstrate that the entwining of emotions and consensually coordinated human actions may adopt either a conversational or a ritual form. In our paper we will discuss the particular role of conversation and ritual in the constitution of intentional worlds in more detail.

References
Baerveldt, C., & van Grinsven, H. (2000). Toward a dialogical understanding of cultural patterns. Paper presented at the 1st International Conference on the Dialogical Self, June 23 - 26, 2000, Nijmegen (NL).

Baerveldt, C., & Verheggen, Th. (1999a). Enactivism and the experiential reality of culture: Rethinking the epistemological basis of cultural psychology. Culture & Psychology, 5, 183-206.

Baerveldt, C. & Verheggen, Th. (1999b). Towards a psychological study of culture: Epistemological considerations. In W. Maiers, B. Bayer, B. Duarte Esgalhado, R. Jorna & E. Schraube (Eds.), Challenges to Theoretical Psychology. pp. 296-303. North York, Canada: Captus.

Baerveldt, C., Voestermans, P., & Verheggen, Th. (1999). Human experience and the enigma of culture: Towards an enactive account of cultural practice. Paper presented at the 8th conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP), April 25-28, 2000, Sydney.

Maturana, H. (1988). Reality: The search for objectivity or the quest for a compelling argument. The Irish Journal of Psychology, 9, 25-82.

Sartre, J. P. (1939). Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions [Sketch for a theory of emotions]. Paris: Gallimard.

Last updated: April 2001
Maintained by Cor Baerveldt