Matthew Ratcliffe

Since Derrida’s introduction of the term _hauntology_, there has been much discussion of ghosts, spectres, and hauntings across several disciplines. This work is not exclusively phenomenological in focus. However, there are frequent indications that talk of haunting relates to distinctive forms of experience, which remain elusive and undertheorized. In this paper, I focus specifically on what it is to _feel haunted_ by something and consider how such experiences might be integrated into a larger phenomenological perspective. I propose that feelings of being haunted are integral to the sense of self and also unavoidable. They are implied by the view that human experience is structured by dynamic, organized arrangements of possibilities, a view that has characterised the phenomenological tradition from the outset.

This paper identifies and characterizes a commonplace but philosophically neglected aspect of human emotional experience, which I call emotional self-dissonance. I start from the position that emotional experiences generally involve taking things to matter in ways that reflect what we already care about. Building on this, I suggest that our various projects, pastimes, commitments, relationships, and habits together comprise an evaluative orientation through which we experience things emotionally. Although this orientation is for the most part cohesively organized, tensions within it are inevitable. I suggest that emotions of familiar kinds often incorporate a sense of these tensions. In addition, emotional self-dissonance can amount to a form of emotional experience in its own right, one that encompasses considerable variety.

Philosophers and cognitive scientists frequently construe emotional experience in terms of discrete episodes or states that can be individuated, enumerated, and assigned to different types. In this paper, I address (a) the source and status of this broad conception of the emotions, and (b) the extent to which it succeeds in accommodating the structure and variety of human emotional experiences. I argue that the emotions are a selective abstraction from the much richer phenomenology of emotional life. This abstraction originates neither in an everyday, commonsense picture of emotion nor in emotion theory. Instead, it is a chimerical hybrid of the two, which risks eclipsing the complexity, diversity, and nuances of human emotional life. I conclude by sketching a philosophical perspective that emphasizes the dynamic, temporally extended structure of emotional experience more so than individuation, enumeration, and classification.

Descriptions of feeling haunted in an emotional way are widespread. It is doubtful that the relevant experiences are reducible to any combination of established emotion categories, such as regret, remorse, or guilt. Nevertheless, what it is to feel haunted has been neglected by philosophers of emotion and by emotion theorists more generally. In this paper, I focus more specifically on what it is to feel haunted by loss. Here, I suggest, talk of haunting spans a range of experiences. However, the majority of these share a common phenomenological structure. Being haunted by loss involves continuing to experience certain possibilities as foreclosed, in a way that is inextricable from how we experience our current situation and orient ourselves towards the future. This unsettles and undermines us.

This paper sets out a phenomenological account of how the autobiographical past can, on occasion, assume certain future-like qualities. I begin by reflecting on the analogy of a bore wave, as employed in a novel by Julian Barnes. Building on this, I turn to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in order to address how our memories are revised in light of our current concerns and vice versa. Then, by adapting Edmund Husserl’s conception of temporal “protention,” I show how acts of remembering are integral to a process of ongoing reconciliation between our current orientation towards the future and the autobiographical past. They sustain, disrupt, and reconsolidate a non-localized, dynamic sense of who we are, in ways that are inseparable from how we experience time.

This paper develops a phenomenological account of what it is to lose a primitive and pervasive sense of certainty. I begin by considering Wolfgang Blankenburg’s descriptions of losing common sense or natural self-evidence. Although Blankenburg focuses primarily on schizophrenia, I note that a wider range of phenomenological disturbances can be understood in similar terms—one loses something that previously operated as a pre-reflective, unquestioned basis for experience, thought, and practice. I refer to this as the loss of certainty. Drawing upon and integrating themes in the work of Wittgenstein and Husserl, I propose that losses of certainty centrally involve the inability to tolerate a certain kind of uncertainty. The contrast between having and lacking certainty is to be construed in terms of differing patterns or styles of nonlocalized, practical, bodily anticipation. I conclude by showing how this conception enables us to better understand various different disturbances to which human experience is susceptible.

This paper sets out a phenomenological account of what it is to feel unable to continue as oneself. I distinguish the feeling that a particular identity has become unsustainable from a sense that the world has ceased to offer the kinds of possibilities required to sustain any such identity. In feeling unable to continue as oneself, possibilities may remain for carrying on in practically meaningful ways but not as who one is or was. I reflect on the kinds of self and feeling involved in such experiences, emphasizing the essential openness of self-experience to transformative possibilities and the dynamic structure of feeling. To illustrate and further develop my approach, I turn to experiences of grief.

This article provides an introduction to the special issue “Emotions of the Pandemic: Phenomenological Perspectives”. We begin by outlining how phenomenological research can illuminate various forms of emotional experience associated with the exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we propose that a consideration of pandemic experience, in all its complexity and diversity, has the potential to yield wider-ranging phenomenological insights. We go on to discuss the thirteen contributions that follow, identifying common themes and points of complementarity.

Grief is often thought of as an emotional response to the death of someone we love. However, the term “grief” is also used when referring to losses of various other kinds, as with grief over illness, injury, unemployment, diminished abilities, relationship breakups, or loss of significant personal possessions. Complementing such uses, we propose that grief over a bereavement and other experiences of loss share a common phenomenological structure: one experiences the loss of certain possibilities that were integral to—and perhaps central to—the unfolding structure of one’s life. Grief can thus be conceived of in a broad but still univocal way. To develop this position, we focus on the example of grief over involuntary childlessness, where lack of a concrete, historical object of emotion serves to make explicit the way in which grief concerns future possibilities. We go on to suggest that the phenomenological complexity, diversity, and prevalence of grief are obscured when approached via an abstract, simplified conception of bereavement.

This paper addresses the relationships between hope and trust. I suggest that different kinds of hope and trust relate to one another in different ways, which I conceive of in dynamic terms. I propose that the movement of hope and trust has a unifying context: the changing structure of a human life and its dependence on other people. I further argue that the most fundamental forms of hope and trust are inextricable. Together, they comprise a diffuse way of anticipating things in general, which could equally be described in terms of “faith.” This sustains a life structure upon which more specific forms of hope and trust depend.

Feeling lonely, being a lonely person, and living through lonely times can all be construed in terms of the emotional experiences of individuals. However, we also speak of lonely places. Sometimes, a place strikes us as lonely even when we do not feel lonely ourselves. On other occasions, finding a place lonely also involves feeling lonely, isolated, and lost. In this paper, I reflect on the phenomenological structure of loneliness by addressing what it is to experience a place as lonely. I suggest that approaching loneliness in this way can help us to see how it involves not merely the lack or absence of something but, more specifically, the sense of being unable to access social and personal possibilities that may still appear accessible to others.

This paper addresses Bas van Fraassen’s claim that empiricism is a ‘stance’. I begin by distinguishing two different kinds of stance: an explicit epistemic policy and an implicit way of ‘finding oneself in a world’. At least some of van Fraassen’s claims, I suggest, refer to the latter. In explicating his ordinarily implicit ‘empirical stance’, he assumes the stance of the phenomenologist, describing the structure of his commitment to empiricism without committing to it in the process. This latter stance does not incorporate the attitude that van Fraassen takes to be characteristic of empiricism. Thus its possibility serves to illustrate that empiricism as an all-encompassing philosophical orientation is untenable. I conclude by discussing the part played by feelings in philosophical stances and propose that they contribute to philosophical conviction, commitment and critique.

Is there a sense in which we can be said to empathize with a philosophical position and, if so, what does empathy consist of here? Drawing on themes in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I sketch an account of the relationship between philosophical language and philosophical thought, according to which the task of understanding, evaluating, and building upon an explicit philosophical position can involve engaging with the experiential world of its author. If accepted, this account has broader implications for how we conceive of both empathy and philosophical thought.

In August 2021, Froese et al. published survey data collected from 2,543 respondents on their subjective experiences living under imposed social distancing measures during COVID-19 (1). The questionnaire was issued to respondents in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. By combining the authors’ expertise in phenomenological philosophy, phenomenological psychopathology, and enactive cognitive science, the questions were carefully phrased to prompt reports that would be useful to phenomenological investigation and theorizing (2–4). These questions reflected the various author’s research interests (e.g., technology, grief, time). Between April 7th and July 31st, 2021, a second questionnaire with the same question set was issued to respondents of the original who had agreed to do a follow-up. This was intended to capture subjective reports of life under social distancing measures a year after the initial survey. By this time–depending on their country of residence and health status–respondents had potentially lived with repeated and prolonged lockdowns and a variety of other restrictions on their social lives. When taken together, Survey I and Survey II provide a cross-cultural and longitudinal dataset that allows for analysis of longer-term impacts of imposed social distancing measures on people’s experiences. For researchers working in diverse disciplines, this dataset offers a rich resource that reflects people’s reactions to the imposition of different social restrictions in different countries and over different time periods.

In reflecting on events of considerable significance, it is commonplace to remark that ‘it hasn’t sunk in yet’ or ‘it’s still sinking in’. Such talk is sometimes associated with things seeming unreal, surreal, unfathomable, or somehow impossible. In this paper, I develop an account of what these experiences consist of. First of all, I suggest that they involve explicitly acknowledging the reality of one’s situation, while at the same time experiencing it as inconsistent with the organization of one’s life. I go on to show how this tension is experienced dynamically, through disturbances of unfolding patterns of anticipation. I suggest that these patterns contribute to our grasp of what is and is not the case, thus accommodating the manner in which things can seem ‘unbelievable’ or ‘unreal’.

In a 2012 article, Peter Goldie describes the experience of having one’s intellectual life ‘go cold’ and asks how, when this happens, we are to distinguish temporary blockage of affective dispositions that partly constitute our values from their loss. This chapter addresses a similar question, but with regard to the more encompassing predicament of ‘existential despair’, a painful sense that no human activity of any kind could ever be of any worth. Focusing on a passage from Tolstoy’s memoir, _A Confession_, the chapter considers whether or not existential despair should be thought of as an accurate appraisal of the human predicament. To do so, it is asked whether it involves blockage of affective dispositions that would otherwise lead one to rightly reject it as an evaluation of human life. Some objections are raised to that view but in conclusion it is shown that it points towards at least a partial solution.

This paper explores similarities and differences between grief over the death of a person and other experiences of loss that are sometimes termed 'grief', focusing on the impact of serious illness and bodily injury. It takes the form of a dialogue between a physician/ neurophysiologist and a philosopher. Adopting a broad conception of grief, we suggest that experiences of lost or unrealized possibilities are central to all forms of grief. However, these unfold in different ways over prolonged periods. Experiences of grief are complex, diverse, difficult to articulate, and frequently under-acknowledged. This diversity, we note, complicates discussions of how to distinguish typical from pathological forms of grief. We raise the concern that thinking of grief through the lens of bereavement eclipses other circumstances in which people are required to comprehend and adapt to loss. With this lack of acknowledgment, the phenomenology of grief is characterized in ways that are overly tidy and people are deprived of important interpretive resources.

This paper addresses how and why social restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic have affected people’s experiences of grief. To do so, I adopt a broadly phenomenological approach, one that emphasizes how our experiences, thoughts, and activities are shaped by relations with other people. Drawing on first-person accounts of grief during the pandemic, I identify two principal (and overlapping) themes: (a) deprivation and disruption of interpersonal processes that play important roles in comprehending and adapting to bereavement; (b) disturbance of an experiential world in the context of which loss is more usually recognized and negotiated. The combination, I suggest, can amount to a sort of “grief within grief”, involving a sense of stasis consistent with clinical descriptions of prolonged grief disorder.