Introduction

It cannot be denied that the value of feelings has been forgotten throughout the history of philosophical thought. This is an oblivion, or a gap, in philosophical memory—as it is not possible to remember that which has never been done—that Contemporary Philosophy tries to mend by taking a step back mostly from Cartesian Reason. For this latter, emotions have just a value as irrational sensations, in such a way that the rationality or intelligibility of emotional life is given from the outside, by the operations of the mind, beyond emotions themselves and their bodily processes (Damasio, 1994: 250). Nevertheless, Modern Moral Philosophy dealt with the problem of emotions as significant ingredients of our behaviours: following the coldness of Kant’s categorical imperative, which denies moral value to feelings, either following the warmth of empiricist Emotivism, which recognizes the value of emotional life in ethics, as well as in its more intellectualistic Utilitarian and Pragmatic forms.

Echoing this Emotivist valuing of feelings, and questioning the Ethical Formalism of Kant’s Reason without feeling, at the beginning of the twentieth century the Material Ethics of ValueFootnote 1 emerged, due to the philosophical and phenomenological genius of Max Scheler (1874–1928). Scheler’s philosophy of feelings and values gives not only value to sentimental aspects of life, as the Romantic view on life would do, but it puts the Feeling [Fühlen] of emotions in value. Borrowing Pascal’s metaphor, Scheler claims that the heart has its own (emotional) logos or reason, which owns its proper (axiological) content: a logos and a content which are different from the ones expressed by theoretical reason, and which involve a non-representative intentionality. That is to say, there are intentional, i.e., rational emotions, as is also pointed out in the current ethical debate—even in line with the Phenomenology of Value (see § 1).

The previous statement is related to the phenomenological recognition of the cognitive value of certain sentimental acts in the context of emotional life (see § 2): emotional intentionality is a particular manner of accessing the world, which presents itself as a world of values, in correspondence to the intentionality of feelings. In accordance with our interpretation and the main idea that is heading this paper, this is a matter of a double emotional and axiological intentionality that Scheler distinguishes from the doxical-estimative double intentionality identified by Brentano and Husserl (see § 3). The latter one is based on theoretical intentional acts, and it does not possess the intentional value of its own that Scheler recognises.

In the double intentionality analysed by Scheler, we finally (see § 4) find the living structure of emotional life, which also owns an ethical character. We make a tentative use of young Heidegger’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology in order to stress the way that the economy of sense of the own existence rules the emotional and axiological double intentionality: the emotions and values are referred to the execution of the factual life, and the ethical life is structured in this manner. From this perspective, emotional and ethical life correspond to the practical dispositions of each person that emerge from a singular understanding of a world felt and perceived in values. Therefore, our research has a double aim: to put the emotional feeling in its own value (feeling in value), as well as stressing the reference of this feeling to the lived, felt and emotionally valued world as a world put in values (feeling in values).

The Intentional Value of Emotions in the Current Ethical Debate

To stress the importance of emotions in the ethical debate and to question the ethics of Rationalism—especially in its formalist versions, from Kant to Rawls—does not necessarily consist of a defence of the view of Emotivism and Intuitionism,Footnote 2 such as Moore’s or Stevenson’s. According to them, estimative judgements would be just emotional expressions (of pleasure or displeasure) and emotional preferences, clearly intuited subjectively. There would be no trace of rationality nor adequacy to reality in emotions. Moral agreement would be only the result of the mutual influence of agents’ irrational behaviours (McIntyre, 2007: 11f.)—or of minimum rationality in the encounter of subjective interests, according to a Utilitarian perspective. So, for the rationalist, as well as for the emotivist, ethical rationality would not come from emotions, but from the external criteria (formal legality or utility) imposed on them, because emotions are either opposed to the logos (as they are irrational) or they lack the logos (as they are arrational and just expressive).

This position contrasts the one defended in Antiquity, first by Aristotle, and secondly by the Stoics: passions [πάθη], coupled with pain or pleasure, are not mere irrational sensations or blind impulses that have nothing to do with the logos, but they are the ground for our modifying [μεταβάλλοντες] of our evaluative judgements [κρίσεις] on reality (Ret. II 1, 1378a: 21f.). That is because passions internally determine the cognitive states or beliefs. Following this classical view, the current and more widespread conception understands emotions as beliefs or evaluative judgements (Deonna & Teroni, 2014: 18); and it stresses their cognitive-intentional and axiological character. As Nussbaum has remarked, emotions are not blind or merely subjective; they are rather similar to beliefs: they have an intentional object—as long as the object “figures in the emotion as it is seen or interpreted by the person whose emotion it is” (Nussbaum, 2001.: 27)—; but, at the same time, on this object lies the value that is given by the person who intends it. Therefore, emotions are rational: they adequate themselves to the world by responding at the same time to the value or importance that the world has for the subject; so, they intend evaluative propositions, but far away from any kind of mere Subjectivism.

For example, it is reasonable to fear a viper as the attitude of fear (i.e., I fear that…) intends the evaluative proposition (“the viper could bite me”). This involves a belief (“I think that the viper could bite me”) followed by a particular affective state (fear): this implies two elements: the representational content and the affective content of the psycho-physic state. These two elements are analytically distinguished, but they are actually linked in their emotional features. The most important aspect of the cognitive-intentional conception is that the affective state is not added from the outside, but “the emotion may be said to have a propositional ‘internal’ object, along with the object given in the proposition” (Greenspan, 1988: 5).

This standard conception—according to how Tappolet (1995: 237) designates it—contrasts with the axiological phenomenalist conception, which maintains that emotions are not cognitive or intentional by themselves. In this line of thought, only beliefs have cognitive value, while emotions add a second element to the belief: a sensation or sensitive and non-intentional state—of pleasure or displeasure. As Damasio (1994: 154) has pointed out, “feelings are just as cognitive as any other perceptual image”, but only because a sensation of pleasure or pain contained in body images juxtaposes itself to the authentically cognitive perceptions or beliefs. Sensations get their cognitive structure from the beliefs they are linked to (Ortony et al., 1988: 4), and beliefs get their axiological value from those sensations of pleasure or displeasure that are bodily felt. Emotions would be just interpretations that are imposed onto reality, instead of referring to it. By separating the cognitive structure and the affective structure of emotions, the Phenomenalist conception can provide a grammar of emotions to the semantics of Cognitive psychology—and in this way it can also be applied, e.g., to AI models. Nevertheless, in so doing a philosophical problem emerges by denying the inherent intentional value of emotions; likewise, the axiological features of reality prove not to be anything more than emanations of subjective feelings (Ortega y Gasset, 1964: 324).

The axiological cognitive-intentional conception asserts the strict rationality of emotions, as has been proven. De Sousa (1987) had previously theorized it, adding an important aspect to the discussion: we perceive reality through our emotions in a similar way that we perceive it through our sensory organs. This analogy between the manner in which we feel emotions and the way we perceive objects suggests that emotions possess a kind of objectivity and adequacy to reality. Emotions are even more objective than mere beliefs, and they actually offer a richer objectivity, as de Sousa claims (1987: 155), in the form of evaluative ontological enrichment. The intentionality of emotions involves an understanding of the world that is not only subjective but objective as well.

In the last decades, this analogy stressed by de Sousa and which determines a new main conception of the rationality of emotions—explicitly defended by Tappolet (Todd, 2014: 704; Deonna & Teroni, 2014: 21)—has been reintroduced into the ethical debate. This very new conception questions the fact that “emotions are entities that necessarily presuppose the possession of axiological concepts” (Tappolet, 1995: 239), as the standard conception assesses. In accord with this last one, emotions (such as fear) are built on previous conceptual and axiological propositions (e.g., “a viper discloses as fearsome because her bite is potentially deadly”), instead of orienting themselves towards the object of the reality in its value (i.e., the fearsome viper).

According to this perceptual conception —as it is generally named— emotions are unique mental states of perceptual character (i.e., I fear the potentially biting viper—the one in front of me, in the forest, right now, or in my imagination, or in my memory): where the cognitive-intentional aspect (i.e., there is a viper in front of me that can bite me) and the affective aspect (i.e., the fear of the viper actually biting me) are coupled, in a manner that the two elements are not linked by a conceptual content (i.e., the viper as a ‘dangerous animal’), but instead they are linked by aiming at the same intentional object (i.e., the fearsome viper), which is given according to a value of this reality (i.e., the frightening quality of the viper). In this sense, emotions do not depend on a previous cognitive-conceptual act, performed by the subject, but on reality itself, which shows itself with a certain value: “an emotion of fear is appropriate if its object is really dangerous” (Tappolet, 1995: 253), and not because the subject has a previous concept (of ‘dangerous animal,' following our example). This particular axiological perceptual conception of emotions is closely linked to Scheler’s Phenomenology of emotions (Tappolet, 2000: 7), and to the particular kind of Sentimental perception [Fühlen] that for Scheler is involved in intentional emotions, whose objects are the world’s values, as we explain in what follows.

Feelings in Intentional and Non-Intentional Emotional Life

After pointing out the actuality of Scheler’s Phenomenology via the perceptual conception of emotions, we are mainly proposing in this paper a double aim study: on the one hand, our proposal tries to widen the ethical debate (see § 4), and, on the other hand, and previously, it tries to deepen the understanding of the intentionality of feelings that Scheler studied, and where we recognize a basic double intentionality (see § 3). To achieve this double purpose, first, we need to present (in § 2) the whole frame of emotional life, as Scheler describes it, where intentional and non-intentional phenomena come forward.

We would all agree with Scheler in that emotional life is made of a very different sort of feelings [Gefühle]: pain, pleasure, fatigue, welfare, sadness, anger, despair, serenity, etc. In fact, Scheler (1966: 331f.) classifies emotional life into different levels, according to the degree of depth in which these feelings affect the person’s Self. There are sensory feelings (pain, pleasure) that affect us as they are located and extended on specific places of our body; there are vital feelings (fatigue, welfare) that affect us in the unitary consciousness of our body; there are pure psychic feelings (sadness, anger) that, by affecting us, fully invade our Self; and for Scheler there would also be spiritual feelings (despair, serenity) that take ownership of the person’s deepest intimacy.

All these feelings of the emotional life are distinguished from other acts and contents of consciousness (such as the act of feeling sensations, representing, imagining, etc., and the corresponding content of sensations, representations, images, etc.), because feelings “besitzen eine erlebte Bezogenheit auf das Ich (bzw. auf die Person)” in such a way that what is intended by the feeling (i.e., the value of things that have the property of having value: the goods) “mit mir, dem Fühlenden, inniger verbunden als da, wo ich etwas vorstelle,” as Scheler explains (1966: 334). This differential feature proves to be essential, as it will be shown (in § 3), to claim that emotional life is held on a particular double intentionality. This cannot be explained as the sum of a representative act (and its representation, more or less conceptual; e.g., the viper as a ‘dangerous animal') and an affective state (i.e., being afraid in front of a viper), caused by the former, and from which it would receive its rationality.

Scheler states that all feelings have a special sort of intentionality; excluding sensory feelings, which, despite having an object (pleasure, e.g., in the sensation of the caress), have no intentionality feature in them, as they are associated and completely identified with their sensorial contents (i.e., the sensation of the caress produces pleasure by itself, without any noematic trace), as well as with other doxical or representative contents (e.g., the memory of the caress can also produce pleasure). A sensory feeling is therefore a mere feeling-state [Gefühlzustand]: a feeling [Gefühl] that is not coupled with the proper intentional act, i.e., the Fühlen. On the contrary, vital and psychic feelings are not mere feeling-states because they comprise a reference to the world—a reference of sense, we would say: one (the one of vital feelings) which targets to the world’s valuable content as the environment [Umwelt] that we inhabit (e.g., the welfare by breathing the freshness of the grass); or another reference of sense (the one of psychic feelings) which targets the world’s goods as set of things, situations and persons endowed with value (e.g., the sadness in the loss of a beloved one).Footnote 3 Vital and psychic feelings are feelings [Gefühle] that are coupled with the sentimental perception of values [Fühlen der Werten]: values that qualify the intentional objects that they are aiming at (i.e., the freshness of the grass, or the disvalue of the death of the beloved one).Footnote 4

For giving account of a double intentionality—sentimental and axiological, as will be developed in the next paragraph—in emotional life, of special interest is the morphic structure of this kind of intentional feelings, as Scheler analyses them (Fernández, 2012: 65). Intentionality of feelings is grounded on fundamental intentionality, an axiological-intuitive one, that Scheler describes as pure feeling [fühlen]—given thereby in the feelings [Gefühle]—whose intentional objects are values. That is to say, a capture or apprehension of values [Wertnehmung], using the new term coined also by Husserl (Fernández, 2012: 44). This is the intentionality described by Scheler as primal or original [ursprünglich], since it points originally at the world, by having as intentional object the values that ontologically qualify worldly realities. According to Scheler’s explanation, this axiological intentionality is followed—by the time of being given the value—by an emotional reaction of response [Antwortsreaktion], which shares the same reference than the intentional function of Fühlen, i.e., the reference of the sense of the world that the values manifest.

In Scheler’s words, the emotional responses to the Fühlen “sind nicht intentional im strenge Sinne, wenn wir hierunter nur Erlebnisse verstehen, die einen Gegenstand meinen können und in deren Vollzug ein Gegenständliches zu erscheinen vermag” (Scheler, 1931: 264): which is only produced strictly speaking in the sentimental perception of Fühlen. In what follows we should wonder what kind of sentimental and reactive intentionality is found in the feelings that intend originally the value of worldly things, and how this primal intentionality modulates feelings in accordance with the morphic structure, which we interpret—following Scheler—as a particular double intentionality as well. Finally, we point out that in emotional life there is another kind of emotional phenomena, which have a single intentionality—and they cannot thereby be considered properly as feelings: love and hate. These phenomena, which fill out the frame of the emotional life that we have exposed, are pure intentional acts because their intentional object is not a specific value, but the valuable character of the values of things instead, which increases when love leads, and decreases when hate is the main act of the person. Love opens and hate closes the world given in values (Scheler, 1931: 178; 1966: 266/7).

Double Intentionality of Emotions: Feeling and Valuing

One of the most questioned aspects of Scheler’s Material Ethics of Value is that it is grounded on the emotional-intuitive apprehension of values (Maliandi, 1992: 73), under the intentionality of perceptual feeling [Fühlen]: an intuitive intentionality that—differently from sensory perception—does not lie in any particular organ for the capture of values, as Hutcheson postulated (Gomá, 1989), but in the structure of the emotive feeling as Wertgefühl. Depending on how this intentionality is understood, particularly as a structural double intentionalityFootnote 5—as we suggest—, we can also find an answer (see Conclusions) to the two questions posed by Ingarden (1969) for any ethical debate in axiological terms: what kind of things are values, and how they exist, if they actually exist.

Reactions of response to the primal axiological intentionality correspond to a kind of intentionality that—inasmuch as the sense of its reference comes from abroad—is given as secondary intentionality or response intentionality, as accurately named by Fernández (2013). This is so because emotional responses share the same direction of sense as the Fühlen, and, besides, they are constituted as feeling by reference to the value givenness (i.e., According to the sense of disvalue given by the viper in front of me I could feel fear, by perceiving its danger; and I could also feel awe according to the value of its power that also qualifies its presence before me: an apparently harmless animal in its size but actually perceived as dangerous and powerful). Scheler recognizes these two intentionalities (primal or axiological, and secondary or emotional, joined by the links of sense that the values provide) in how we express our intentional feelings, as the lexical use of the prepositions for/by [über] and of [an] phenomenologically reveals the intentional doubleness (Scheler, 1966: 264). I am afraid for my life in danger, or I am amazed by the nature of the viper, according to a secondary intentionality as response of being afraid of the dangerous viper (primal axiological intentionality), or by being amazed of the power of this small reptile (primal axiological intentionality as well, but in a different value perception). In these examples, the different way of perceiving the viper is related to the sense of the value of danger or of power in the world that is given to me as I emotionally perceive a viper.

The feeling of fear or of awe is not externally linked to its intentional object by means of a representation associated to the former—neither through a conceptual representation and its logical inferences—as Scheler explains (1966: 363), but it is internally linked by the value-ception or perception of value [Wertnehmung] of the perceptual feeling [Fühlen]. In so thinking, the author clearly distances himself from Brentano, who, being a knowing reader of Aristotle, had recognized the value of emotions, by referring the intentionality of emotional acts (love as pleasure, and hate as displeasure) to the intentionality of the acts of representative consciousness (Brentano, 1889: 15/6; Sánchez-Migallón, 2010: 64f.): “sind hier zwei Intentionen aufeinander gebaut,” the foundational intentionality of the object as represented, and the intentionality—founded on the former—of the object as felt, as Husserl (1913: 389) explains in Logische Untersuchungen. For Husserl, emotions do not take by themselves the objectiveness of their intentional objects (Le Quitte, 2010: 193f.; Venier, 2015: 255); they borrow it. For Husserl in Logische Untersuchungen, emotions are intentional acts, certainly, but non-objectifying acts as well, as they just add a mere affective feature and subjective coloration that wraps [umschliessen] the thetic or objectifying intentionality (presentative, representative, conceptual, etc.) on which feelings are, in this manner, founded. Husserl (1976: 76) refers to it in Ideen I as a double intentionality (Slama, 2017: 343f.; Fernández, 2012: 39). For Scheler, the interpretation of this dual structure of emotional intentionality—which is also the current standard conception (see § 1)—accurately describes the intentional structure of sensory feelings (see § 2), or some other intentional phenomena, but it does not actually describe the kind of double intentionality of emotions that he himself is referring to.

In order to explain the inherent intentionality of emotions, the analogy with the acts of perception or presentification is essential for Scheler—and for current perceptual conception (see § 1; Tappolet, 2000: 175; 2016: 15f.)—, as they are supposed to be acts of original intuition: the sort of acts in which, unlike mere significative acts, “we relate directly to the object, we reach it,” and the object is itself given to us [leibhaftgegeben] (Levinas, 1989: 103f.). “In the living experience [Er-leben], the world is at first given with equal immediacy as ‘bearer of values’ [Wertträger] and as ‘resistance’ [Wider-stand], as it is given as ‘object’ [Gegenstand]. So that involves those essences [Wesensgehalte] that are immediately given and come out as a flash in the acts—and only in them—of the feeling of something [Fühlens von etwas],” as Scheler (1957: 384) explains. The Wertnehmung is for Scheler (1966: 264) the primal intentionality linked [zusammenhängt] with the affective intentionality of feelings—through a bond or linking on which we will reflect on in § 4—and which is a sort of intuition for Scheler and also for Husserl in Ideen (Quepons, 2015: 174).

However, unlike Husserl—for whom values are not categorially intuited in emotions but rather achieved by the synthesis of understanding or judgement (Le Quitte, 2010: 195f.)—Scheler understands emotional intuition as equal to the eidetic intuition described by Husserl’s Phenomenology. The eidetic intuition may be the insight of formal categories or the insight of material essences. This last one takes as a “starting point an individual object, for example, the red of this fabric in front of me. But what I am looking at is not an individual object but red in general, of which the individual red is but an instance” (Levinas, 1989: 155). As well as we sensitively have the immediate insight of the fabric’s colour, we may emotionally intuit its ugliness, for example.

The intuition of essences is not an inductive inference or generalization act, as a kind of synthesis of the transcendental subject, but it refers to the essential or a priori contents of the world (e.g., redness)—without the need for being founded on the individual objects (e.g., the red fabric)—and, whilst it is a theoretical act, it exceeds the sensitive experience (i.e., the gazing at the red fabric), as Scheler (1930: 61) outlines. It is precisely this intention of eidetic essences that Scheler applies to the Fühlen in the Gefühlen: the intentionality of the values that occurs by the time the objects of the feeling are originally felt as goods. Namely, values are given into things, actions, situations…—which are thus felt as goods in the measure that the values are perceived in them. Nevertheless, for Scheler, values in themselves are not real properties of things, events or people, but ideal and essential objects that internally diversify themselves in the estimative qualities of goods (Scheler, 1966: 35f.; Gomá, 1989: 314). In a sense that we estimate close to Scheler’s, Tappolet (2000: 178f.) defined values as the axiological non-conceptual contents of emotions, because they would not be the result of a web of inferences, inductions and generalizations executed by the subject, but the objects of a particular kind of perceiving addressed to the world.

In § 4 we suggest challenging the equivalence between the Fühlen der Werten and the theoretical essence intuition that Scheler presumes, and, consequently, we will also review the analogy between Wertnehmung and Wahrnehemung. With this aim it is convenient to clarify: 1) Following our interpretation of Scheler’s analyses, what are the implications of the presence together of two intentionalities—different from the double intentionality posed by Brentano and Husserl—: the axiological one (i.e., the valuing) and the emotional one (i.e., the feeling); 2) What it means that the axiological intentionality is given in acts of intuition; and 3) Why it is mandatory to refer to a double intentionality.

1) We argue that there are two intentionalities because in the structure of emotive experiences, as it has been described, there are two sorts of intentional acts, even though one of them is original or primal (Fühlen), and the other one is secondary or responsive (the emotional reaction that constitutes the content of Gefühl). The fact that the sentimental or emotional part of the feeling is a reaction of response [Antwortsreaktion] does not deny its intentional constitution, but it does neither imply that emotions are non-objectifying acts,Footnote 6 because they actually aim at the intentional object that has been disclosed in the light of value, i.e., like a good.

2) Our statement in 1) is explained because there is actually an act of intuition that is directed to the essential content of value; and only for this reason—according to Scheler—there is at the same time a sentimental act that aims at the good, i.e., at the object, event or person in the light of its value. We sustain the idea that both intentional acts are co-original: not in a formal sense, on the level of neomatic donation—as we have seen with Scheler under the names of primal and secondary intentionality—, but in the sense of their performance, since Fühlen cannot exist without Gefühl. The last is evident even if, on the contrary, there can be feeling-states that lose their primal intentionality, or where it is reduced to the minimum, as its intentio is no more adequate to the sense of the perceived value: clearly described by Fernández (2013: 16f.) as “mere emotions”.

3) Finally, considerations in 2) explain that the bond between both intentionalities is made through the linking of sense—emotionally perceived in the bearers of value—; a sense that emerges from values (Scheler, 1966: 253) and which grounds the structure of intentional feelings on a double intentio (axiological and emotional noesis)—, rather than on two externally-coupled intentiones. This intentionality is also double at the noematic level, since a duplicity belongs to its intentional object: the good, which is a thing emotionally felt as value bearer, i.e., with a value intuitively perceived.

The Living Structure of Ethical Life in the World, with a tentative Hermeneutical Regard to the Double Intentionality Shown by Scheler

After Scheler’s death, his friend, the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset wrote an obituary under the title “Max Scheler: A man inebriated of essences” (Ortega y Gasset, 1966: 507f.). The phenomenological intuition of essences indeed permeates Scheler’s ontological realism deeply, in such a way that all his analyses tackle this topic. Nevertheless, even though perceiving [Wahrnehmen] a colour (red) in a glance, as an eidetic intuition, has strong resemblance to perceiving values [Wertnehmung] (ugliness, fright, etc.) in the emotions, these phenomena cannot be merely equated—as critics of perceptual conception of emotions have also suggested (Deonna & Teroni, 2014; Todd, 2014). In fact, it is an analogy (Tappolet, 2016: 19) that invites to think, and where what has to be explained by comparison (the ἀνάλογον, i.e., the perception of values) cannot be merely identify with what is already said and known (the λόγον, i.e., the sensory perception). With the purpose of a tentative thinking to which Scheler’s analogy invites—and trying to clear Scheler’s inebriation—we claim that the axiological intuition of value in the double intentionality of emotions can be interpreted—attaining Heidegger’s serenity—as a hermeneutical intuition [hermeneutische Intution], and values as its corresponding formal indications [formale Anzeige]. This is how it is possible to interpret in a more suitable way the “Verständnis- und Sinnzusammenhänge” (Scheler, 1966: 264) between values and sentiments in the double intentionality described by Scheler.

Scheler was himself aware of the fact that Husserl’s Phenomenology had achieved a new sense with Heidegger—transformed into Hermeneutical Phenomenology, as we nowadays say—and that there was no longer in it a knowledge of essences, as Scheler maintained. However, the philosopher of München, as well as the thinker of Messkirch, both defended a Phenomenology that was not reduced to the scope of pure consciousness. For both philosophers consciousness is always referred to the transcendent field of the given—prior to any objectifying acts—according to the ek-static experience of being in the world beyond the transcendental consciousness (Scheler, 1979: 190f.): either the factual world of the Dasein for Heidegger or—apart from the great differences between both metaphysical conceptions—the world of goods and in values for Scheler (1979: 43): a world that is perceived in the axiological-emotional double intentionality, as has been described. We stress indeed that this phenomenological structure refers to a hermeneutical structure.

Firstly, as regards the primal or axiological intentionality, its noesis (the Wertnehmen) neither involves an intuition of essences—that would be given a priori as such—nor it involves a categorial intuition—of pure formal contents—, but instead it consists of a hermeneutical intuition, which “is able to deliver the sense of the immediately lived” (Rodríguez, 1996: 67), without separating life and the content of intuition, understanding the second with the moving and motivations of the former (Heidegger, 1987: 116/7). This is how values are lived according to the sense of reference [Bezugssinn] of the situation where they are given (e.g., as I meet a viper the first time in my life); therefore, values are not idealities. On the side of the noema, values are not essences without temporality or historicity, as Scheler claims, but they can be considered formal indications: they are not static contents, as they catch the sense of the content [Gehaltssinn] of life’s dynamism in a world-in-values (as we might name it): where the values of the world are given as such (e.g., the disvalue of the frightening presence of the first viper in my life, in front of which I do not know how to act), according to the temporality and the historicity of living (Kisiel, 1996: 209).

However, secondly, the response reaction of the second emotional intentionality, which ties its understanding and sense with the hermeneutical value-ception (e.g., the frightening), is from our view not only co-original to the direction and the sense of the content of the axiological intentionality, but it also offers the material, factual and historical structure as well. The secondary intentionality does not merely affectively colour the axiological intentionality, but it modifies it, sets it up, structures it at the level of sense. The emotional intentionality is the sense of execution [Vollzugssinn] (Heidegger, 1992: 261) that modulates the primal noetic-estimative reference and the primal noematic-axiological content. This is the sense that each emotional execution adds, by responding to the sense of the situational motivation of the estimative life (the reference) and the corresponding sense donation of the world-in-values (the content), also providing its factual, historical and actual executive sense.

Intentional emotions catch the value of valuable things, the goods, following the sense of the manifold emotional executions, which mutually interpret themselves according to the sense of the values offered in the world (e.g., the frightening viper that I meet for the first time is understood as frightful following other fearful experiences when having faced the unknown, and in connection with the disvalue perceived in that precise moment). By means of this interpretation of the experience it is clarified what Scheler means when saying that emotions, as response reactions, are particular ways of behaviour, addressed to emotionally lived values: “Diese eigentümlichen ‘Verhaltungsweisen’ (…) haben mit dem intentionalen Fühlen wohl die ‘Richtung’ gemein” (Scheler, 1966: 264).

Our interpretation of the double intentionality presented by Scheler does not match his anthropological conception—of the person as a way of living beyond the facticity, temporality and historicity (Scheler, 1979: 299f.)—, nor to his metaphysics—of axiological realism: where the values are understood as essences of the world, even though this would be reconsidered by the philosopher, mainly in his latest writings (Scheler, 1979). Our view, however, stresses the doubly intentional value that emotions have: not just as means of knowing the world in an estimative way, but also as the modes in which life is disposed in a practical way, so that the double axiological and emotional intentionality consists on the living structure of ethical life.

This double hermeneutical intentionality, by apprehending the world-in-values, offers the basic ethical structure of emotional life: values are not merely intuited, but emotionally felt, as motives for action (Fernández, 2013: 24f.)—and they are therefore interpreted following the sense of emotional execution of each one’s life. In this way, the double intentionality of emotions structures itself as a specific mind disposition [Gesinnung] of each one’s life facing the world-in-values (Scheler, 1966: 184f.). E.g., the fear in front of this dangerous viper, understood following the particular senses of several experiences of fear for the unknown, apart from disclosing a world where there are frightening menaces, prevents me from getting close to the reptile, with terror, or with stealth; it impels me to run away, or to attack the small animal. There is no unique behaviour in the same situation because it depends on the singular way that each individual intentionally understands the world: the same world, however, that is given to all of us according to the same emotionally perceived values; i.e.: an emotionally and axiologically shared world.

Conclusions

As Scheler’s Spanish colleague stated: “valuing does not mean giving value to whom did not have it on its own; it is recognising the value that dwells in the object” (Ortega y Gasset, 1966: 327). This is also the Leitmotiv in Scheler’s Phenomenology of feelings: values are not subjectively produced, as Nietzsche suggested, but they become manifest in emotions: in the ontological character of emotions values are disclosed in their truth—as Heidegger (1967: 135f.) also pointed out. For Scheler, sentiments execute the disclosure or truth of the world in a way that:

  1. 1)

    It does not resemble the objectivation of the thetic-theoretical consciousness (Husserl).

  2. 2)

    It does not refer to the pure factual world either, where values have any ontological sense. (Heidegger, 1967: 99)

Nevertheless, inasmuch as Scheler asserts 1), it is not consistent that he adopts at the same time the theoretical mode of essences intuition [Wesenschau] to explain the particular way of perceiving values [Wertnehmung] of the double intentionality of feelings (see § 3). That is why we find it more accurate to face those problems from a hermeneutic-phenomenological position, as the one developed by Heidegger (see § 4). In this respect, we may address the two questions posed by Ingarden (1969: 200) by asking firstly what kind of things values are.

Following our argument, values are the plexus of sense of the world: a sense that is not added to the world, but which is emotionally felt as we inhabit it. Secondly, as a the second Ingarden’s question poses: how exactly values exist. We attempt to answer by saying that, in the way of our being in the world-in-values (as we have named it), there is no pure intuitive axiological intentionality: it is always followed and modulated by our—factual, temporal and historical—emotional life, as it responds indeed to the intentional and hermeneutical sense that our primal reference to the world already possesses. Living in a shared and singular way at a time—in the world that is disclosed to our feelings-in-values (as we might also name them)—is not just a simple matter of variations of intensity (Tappolet, 2000: 162f.), but it is a matter of the sense (of the lived world) that structures our living. Therefore, whilst philosophical positions—particularly the perceptual conception—, by propounding that emotions contain axiological intentionality, have enriched the current ethical debate with a perspective close to Scheler’s Phenomenology (see § 1), we suggest that a hermeneutical approach could further deepen the philosophical discussion.

If we agree with Scheler’s phenomenology of sentiments and values in general and also with the problematic 2), and instead of turning to the also problematic Scheler’s metaphysics, from our position it would be necessary to resituate the existence of values in an ontology of existence—as Heidegger presents it—, and this involves recognizing the value that emotions have in our life as well as in our understanding of the world. Within this hermeneutic-phenomenological view, some dualistic debates on Subjectivism and Objectivism—of values, and of emotions—could be also resituated. Moreover, this view would also put in question the dualistic manner of confronting ethical matters: either giving—and agreeing—reasons for our actions (Utilitarianism) or letting our emotions run free when acting (Emotivism). Nevertheless, in the field of practical life, reasons are emotional because they are motives, and emotions are rational because they contain a kind of understanding of the world that get us to respond in consequent actions—responding with our lives—with emotional responses. In short, the double axiological and emotional intentionality of our emotional life offers in this manner the hermeneutical structure of sense for our behaviours, i.e., of our fundamental ethical life.

* This work was partially supported by the following grants and researching programmes: Research Grant—Short-Term Grant, 2021 (57552336), from the German Academic Exchange Service, and Programme of Requalification of the Spanish University System for the University of Zaragoza, from the Spanish Ministry of Universities and European Union-NextGenerationEU. The author has not any other financial or non-financial interests to disclose.