From Faint Mood to Strong Emotion: Merging Heidegger and Sartre?

Safety Valves of the Psyche: Reading Freud on Aggression, Morality, and Internal Emotions

“…First, when I speak of aggression, I do not equate it with anger; the latter is a more straightforward emotion for me, whereas aggression I find considerably more complex, or at least more nebulous and subterranean to capture-even more of a "disposition" than a particular episodic emotion of anger, hatred, or something else. Aggression might be more akin to a mood [3], or even have a deeper source, as we shall see Freud maintains. Our angers, by contrast, are usually explicit and episodic, with a particular object at a particular moment, and for a particular (perceived) reason.…”

“…Although the philosophy of emotion has burgeoned in the last few decades, and although it is now clear that many of our emotions automatically engage and interact with the world and its people-in short, it is not all "just in the head", to borrow Noë's [1] well-known phrase-this article will return to "the head" somewhat, i.e., the psyche, and show how some basic internal feelings, affects, and emotions go a long way in formatting some of our rudimentary personal (and interpersonal) structures, which, in turn, format not only our characters and behaviours, but parts of human morality and society more generally. In this manner, although I am returning to studying some internal emotion thanks to Freud viewed as a philosophical anthropologist, this in no way means to discount or detract from more "externalist" or phenomenological accounts of emotion, including my own [2][3][4][5]. The two sides can be seen as interesting and even complementary avenues of study in a colossal and highly complex domain of human behaviour and study.…”