The Phenomenology of Shared Feeling (Report‪)‬

On the first pages of his book The Nature of Sympathy from 1913, German phenomenologist Max Scheler introduces a category of feeling, which did not play any special role in the philosophy either before or after him. This is the category of the joint, shared and common feeling or emotional sharing ('Miteinanderfuhlen'). Scheler distinguishes this category from empathy, compassion, emotional contagion and identification. Today philosophy of emotion usually falls short of Scheler's level of differentiation, unless it explicitly follows Scheler as e.g. Peter Goldie does in his book on The Emotions (2000). Scheler is to be sure not the only philosopher interested in the phenomenon of shared feeling. Think of David Hume, Adam Smith, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre or Hermann Schmitz. But Scheler is arguably the philosopher who took this phenomenon the most seriously and who explored it the most deeply. (1) Contemporary philosophy is just rediscovering the phenomenon of shared feeling. This has partly to do with the lively debate on collective action or we-intentionality, which has been going on for years (the main opponents in this debate are Margaret Gilbert 1989 and John Searle 1990 on the one hand and Michael Bratman 1999 and Philip Pettit 2003 on the other). If there is shared action, the obvious question is if there is also shared feeling.