Belonging to the World Through the Feeling Body

I am very grateful to Charles Guignon and Andrew Warsop for their interesting, insightful, and helpful commentaries on my papera “Existential Feeling and Psychopathology” (2009a). In this response, I first address two concerns raised by Warsop, regarding the nature of pathology and the fact that we do not just experience a ‘world’ but a ‘social world.’ Then I respond to the criticism, made by both Guignon and Warsop, that I overemphasize bodily feeling and—in the process—fail to make the most of Heidegger’s work.

Pathological Feelings

In “Existential Feeling and Psychopathology,” I contrast ‘pathological existential feelings’ with more mundane instances of existential feeling. According to Warsop, this is problematic for a number of reasons. First, there is a methodological worry. I say that “to understand cases of pathological existential feeling,” we also need to “reflect upon their role in more commonplace experiences.” The reason I give is that “unless we appreciate something of what the structure of experience is ordinarily like, we will not be in a good position to explain deviations from it” (2009a, 180). Warsop observes that the study of unusual feelings can equally serve to cast light on more familiar forms of experience. I wholly agree, and I did not mean to suggest otherwise. The point I was making is that changes in existential feeling that are reported in psychiatric illness and elsewhere cannot be adequately understood if one presupposes, from the outset, an impoverished conception of experience that fails to accommodate existential feeling. If the interpreter recognizes perceptual contents, qualitative feels, propositional attitudes, and not much else, experiential changes that are largely attributable to other factors will remain elusive. This is not to say that we should first finalize a phenomenological account of everyday experience and only afterward explore deviations from it. Phenomenological interpretation can move in both directions, from a general understanding of the structure of experience to unusual cases and back again. I do want to understand unusual forms of experience in terms of a more generally applicable interpretive framework. However, study of unusual and sometimes pathological experiential shifts can help to bring to light aspects of experience that are ordinarily overlooked or misinterpreted, thus leading to revision of that framework.

What is the relationship between ‘unusual’ and ‘pathological’ changes in experience? As Warsop rightly points out, the difference is something that I should have made clearer in “Existential Feeling and Psychopathology.” An experience can be unusual without being pathological. In addition, some pathological experiences may be quite commonplace, and so the ‘normal’ (as in ‘non-pathological’) should not be confused with the commonplace either. Warsop also raises the difficult question of how pathological and non-pathological existential feelings ought to be distinguished. Again, this is something that I should have been clearer about. A symptom of pathology need not itself be pathological. Hence, a feeling arising in the context of psychopathology need not amount to a pathological feeling. Had I referred to “existential feelings in psychiatric illness” rather than to “pathological existential feelings,” I could have avoided the issue of whether the relevant feelings are themselves pathological. The rest of my discussion would have been none the worse for this.

However, I do address the pathology issue elsewhere (Ratcliffe 2008, Ch. 10). To briefly summarize, I maintain that the sense of reality and belonging varies in a range of ways from person to person and time to time, and that there is not a single, normal, constant way of finding oneself in the world. I accept that even quite pronounced changes in the structure of experience, such as those that occur in certain kinds of ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’ experience, are unusual rather than pathological. However, at least some existential changes do seem to be pathological. I argue that an appeal to biological criteria is ineffective here, but that the distinction can be drawn on pragmatic grounds. What makes an existential change pathological is its substantial detrimental effect on a person’s capacity to act and pursue life goals. To be more specific, all pathologies of existential feeling centrally...