Shapes of joy in Husserl: on the status of feeling as an act and as a state

Abstract

In his manuscripts on feelings, published in 2020, Edmund Husserl offers an original approach to the phenomenon of joy. The founder of phenomenology understands this affective experience as a process or dynamic that unfolds through various shapes. The analysis of this chain of shapes, which combines an original act and successive affective states that we call "trails", identifies the latter, contrary to what has been traditionally established, as intentional experiences. The fact that also in the sphere of understanding Husserl recognises peculiar “intentional states” forces us to reconsider intentionality as the ultimate criterion for distinguishing acts and states, finding in Husserl's texts a more general criterion: the active or passive character of the experience.