Existential Feeling, Touch, and ‘Belonging’

Matthew Ratcliffe’s is a bold and ambitious piece of work that applies current philosophical thinking to an important clinical area. And, in exploring the relationship between feeling and altered world experience, Ratcliffe hits on an issue vital to the concerns of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology. It often seems that, in trying to understand the psychopathology of conditions like schizophrenia, the philosophical approaches from within the Anglophone tradition are somehow inadequate. They lack the resources to do justice to the phenomenological disturbances that are so distressing for patients and so challenging for their doctors. Ratcliffe challenges the traditional dichotomy of the intentional structure of, on the one hand, emotions, supposedly directed toward the external world, and, on the other, that of feelings directed at internal bodily states. He illuminates this field by focusing on what he calls ‘existential feelings.’ These are a group of feelings that are not directed at the body, in isolation from the world, nor are they directed at specific objects within it. Instead, these bodily feelings ‘constitute a variable state of relatedness between self and world which shapes all experience.’ These feelings are analogous to touch and they ‘give us a changeable sense of ‘reality’ and of ‘belonging to the world.’

The phenomenology of existential feelings is evinced in a number of apposite examples, notably Sechehaye’s ‘Renee’ in Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl. Here, the disturbing sense of unreality is recounted in passages where Renee describes herself as ‘rejected by the world, on the outside of life, a spectator of a chaotic film unrolling ceaselessly before my eyes, in which I would never have a part’ (1970).

In another example, he recounts a memorable passage from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1996). The author is in a room with two other people who are dancing the jitterbug and she is left standing alone by the wall while the other protagonists dance with each other: ‘I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine-panelling. I felt like a hole in the ground.’

He points out that lesser changes in such existential shifts are, in fact, quite commonplace. A diverse range of such feelings are reported outside the context of psychiatry and Ratcliffe points to our everyday expressions to illustrate this. We speak of feeling ‘alive, distant, overwhelmed, cut off, lost, disconnected, out of sorts, out of touch with things, out of it . . . belonging, being at home in the world, being at one with things, being not quite with it.’ He suggests that there are a variety of existential predicaments displayed in everyday life and that, once we become clearer about the phenomenology of these, then we can be clearer about these sorts of disturbances in psychiatric patients.

How can existential feelings be bodily feelings and shape our experience, but not have the body as an object? To make good this claim, Ratcliffe calls into question the traditional privilege of vision afforded to philosophical investigation and he develops a fascinating analogy between the everyday role of touch, which reveals our environment in a way that ‘does not respect a sharp body–world divide,’ and the role of existential feelings which ‘constitute a variable sense of belonging.’ It is precisely this sense of belonging that, he argues, cannot be adequately elucidated in terms of the language of experiential content and propositional attitudes. As he points out, experience does not present us with specific contents amenable of judgment; there is always a background sense of belonging to the world that is the ever-present context to such judgments. Our existential feelings are just our awareness of this all-encompassing context, or, as he puts it, they comprise the world as ‘universal horizon.’

This analysis is nuanced and intriguing, but some important issues remain unexplored and unclear. First, I have a worry about Ratcliffe’s methodology. Despite his caveat about how we might distinguish normal from pathological instances of existential feelings, the latter are the focal issue in the paper. The question is, how should our reflection upon the role of existential feelings...