The fundamental capacity of the person to be affectively touched and moved. Affectivity is not a mere accompaniment of rationality, but an autonomous organ for the apprehension of value. It is an essential characteristic of the person and the precondition of the value-response.
In realist phenomenology, affectivity is understood not as a merely subjective life of feeling, but as an intentional faculty capable of apprehending objective values. The person is affectively touched by values — reverence, joy, grief, and indignation are not blind feelings but responses to what is genuinely value-laden. Without affectivity the person could not unlock the world of values (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 150–155).
Affectivity as an Intentional Faculty
The decisive insight of the person-ontological analysis lies in the distinction between mere states and intentional feelings. A toothache is a mere state — it refers to nothing beyond itself. Reverence for a person, by contrast, joy over a work of art, grief over a loss — these are intentional acts. They are directed toward an object and apprehend its value. In this intentionality, affectivity shows itself to be a genuine organ of cognition. It unlocks a dimension of reality that would remain closed to the pure intellect.
Herein also lies the fundamental difference from passion. Passion is a psychic occurrence that the person undergoes. Intentional affectivity, by contrast, is a spiritual response in which the person relates freely to a value. Both belong to the affective sphere of the person. Yet only intentional affectivity is value-apprehension in the proper sense.
Affectivity and Rationality
Western philosophy long neglected affectivity in favor of rationality, or even regarded it as rationality’s adversary. The person-ontological analysis shows, on the contrary, that rationality and affectivity are not opposites but complementary essential characteristics. The person is at once rational and affective. Only in the unity of both does reality disclose itself in its full depth. Rationality apprehends the true, affectivity the value-laden. Both belong to the person’s complete access to the world.
Necessary and Inalienable
As an essential characteristic, affectivity is necessary and inalienable. Even a human being whose affective experience is curtailed by illness ontologically possesses the capacity for affective being-touched. Affectivity belongs to the being of the person, not merely to her present experience.
Ontological classification:
- Superordinate concept: Essential Characteristic, Archphenomenon
Ontological relations:
- is the precondition of the value-response
- is an essential characteristic of the person
- stands in a complementary relation to rationality
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: Personhood
Joy
Joy is a fundamental affective response of the person to that which is experienced as good and valuable. It belongs to the affectivity of the human being and is more than a mere feeling of pleasure: in joy the whole person responds to an encounter with the good — be it joy over the existence of a beloved person, over an insight attained, or over the beauty of the world.
Personalist philosophy distinguishes between sensible pleasure and spiritual joy. Sensible pleasure is bound to the body and passes with the stimulus. Spiritual joy, by contrast, can fill the whole human being and endure beyond the moment. In the third dimension of personhood, joy shows itself especially as the fruit of love: whoever affirms the other as a someone experiences therein a joy that reaches deeper than any satisfaction. It is the affective counterpart to grief, which, as a response to what has been lost, belongs no less to personal life.
Suffering
Suffering is the experience of pain, loss, or evil that concerns the whole person — bodily, psychically, spiritually. Suffering can arise from illness, guilt, injustice, or undeserved evil. It never diminishes the ontological dignity of the person, even when it can impede the actualization of the dimensions of personhood.
The personal experience of suffering reveals the vulnerability and contingency of human existence. Innocent suffering in particular (innocent suffering) constitutes the gravest challenge for any ethics. The fitting response to the suffering of another is personal devotion in medical care, palliative care, and human solidarity.
See also: Value-Response, Reverence, Heart, Individuality, Uniqueness, Person, Cognition, Values, Capacity for Love, Capacity for Truth, Free Will, Consciousness, Intentional Feeling, Passion, Rationality, Essential Characteristic, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Max Scheler
See also: Innocent Suffering, Illness, Person, Dignity, Contingency, Palliative Care, Mood
Passion
An involuntary affective movement that befalls the person. Passions are not morally good or evil in themselves, but become so through the stance taken by the free will. As a personal act they belong to the enactment of personal life, yet they stand in a special relation to freedom: the person first undergoes them, but then can and must take a stance toward them.
Passion differs from the intentional feeling in that it befalls the person, whereas the intentional feeling is a directed response to an apprehended value. Thomas Aquinas treats the passiones animae at length in the Summa Theologiae (ST I-II, qq. 22–48). He distinguishes eleven fundamental passions, ordered according to the concupiscible and irascible appetites. The decisive point is that the passions are not to be suppressed but to be integrated. They are an essential component of the person’s affectivity and — rightly ordered — can even strengthen the moral act.
The Thomistic tradition stresses that the moral quality of a passion depends on the value-response the person gives it. An anger directed against injustice and affirmed by the will can be morally good. The same anger, discharged uncontrollably, fails the integration proper to the person.
Virtue consists not in absence of feeling (apatheia in the Stoic sense), but in the right ordering of the passions by reason and the free will. The person proves herself to be a person precisely in that she takes a stance toward her passions and places them in the service of the good (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 150–160).
Ontological classification:
- Superordinate concept: Personal Act
Ontological relations:
- is qualified by: Free Will
- belongs to: Affectivity
- stands in relation to: Value-Response, Intentional Feeling
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: Personhood
See also: Affectivity, Free Will, Value-Response, Intentional Feeling, Person, Personal Act, Virtue, Thomas Aquinas
Shame
Shame is a deeply personal experience in which the human being protects his own vulnerability and intimacy. It appears wherever something inward — something belonging to the interiority of the person — is exposed unprotected to the gaze of others. It appears likewise wherever the person falls short of her own moral aspiration. Shame is not a merely psychological phenomenon but a personal archphenomenon. It presupposes self-consciousness, a knowledge of one’s own dignity, and the capacity for self-judgment.
Karol Wojtyła interpreted shame as the “protective instinct of the person.” It guards against being regarded as a mere object or reduced to a thing. Bodily shame protects the body–soul unity of the human being against the concupiscent look that reduces the person to her body. Moral shame indicates that the person experiences herself as responsible for her actions. It stands in close connection to repentance and to conscience. Where shame is lacking or systematically suppressed, a dulling of sensibility toward the dignity of the person threatens.
Mood
A mood is a non-intentional affective state that is not directed toward any particular object but colors the entire experience of the person. Examples of moods are cheerfulness, melancholy, or anxiety. Unlike intentional feelings, which are directed toward a particular value or object, a mood pervades the person’s whole relation to the world.
Moods belong to the bodily-psychic constitution of the person and attest to the unity of body and soul. They are part of those somatic and psychic dynamisms that are to be drawn into the free personal act in the integration of the person. A mood is not a state that diminishes personhood, but an expression of the living wholeness of the person.
See also: Person, Body, Soul, Integration of the Person, Affectivity, Suffering
Grief
Grief is the deep affective response of the person to a loss — in particular to the loss of a beloved person. It belongs to the affectivity of the human being and attests to the reality of personal bondedness: only one who has truly loved can truly grieve. Grief is therefore no sign of weakness but an expression of the depth proper to personal life.
From a person-ontological standpoint, grief reveals several things at once: it shows that love is not merely a feeling that vanishes with its occasion, but a personal attitude that outlasts the loss. It shows the body–soul unity of the human being, for grief seizes the whole person — bodily and spiritually at once. And it shows the depth of the interpersonal relation: the other was no interchangeable bearer of a function, but an irreplaceable someone. Grief is the affective counterpart to joy and, like joy, belongs to the fundamental personal experiences possible only to a spiritual being.
Innocent Suffering
Innocent suffering is suffering that befalls the person without her having caused it through any fault of her own. It constitutes the gravest challenge for any ethics and points to the question of the ultimate meaning of suffering. In innocent suffering the radical contingency and vulnerability of human existence shows itself in its sharpest form.
Innocent suffering is a subspecies of suffering and cannot be dissolved by appeal to one’s own fault or to causal connections. The ontological dignity of the suffering person remains undiminished. The personalist norm demands that the innocently suffering be met not with theoretical explanations but with personal devotion and affirmation.
See also: Suffering, Person, Dignity, Contingency, Personalist Norm, Palliative Care
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Hildebrand, Dietrich von (1973): Ethics. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press (on affectivity as an autonomous organ for the apprehension of value).
- Scheler, Max: Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, transl. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973 (on the theory of intentional feeling and the apprehension of value).
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae I-II, qq. 22–48 (on the doctrine of the passiones animae).
- Wojtyła, Karol: The Acting Person, transl. Andrzej Potocki. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979 (on the integration of affectivity into the personal act).
- Wust, Peter (1937): Ungewissheit und Wagnis. Salzburg/Leipzig: Anton Pustet (German) (on innocent suffering and the contingency of existence).