Presentation

This project aims to a new elaboration of the question of emotions and of their bodily basis—the heart—by mobilizing conceptual resources of phenomenological philosophy, phenomenological psychopathology and phenomenological and first-person experiential theology. Joining these three correlative ways of describing the bodily-rooted emotions, our project argues—against the traditional cognitivist view advocating that brain alone materially rules the body and promoting a formal-functionalist approach of cognition—that the heart, understood as a bodily-emotional complex, provides us with a basic and encompassing experience of ourselves as embodied self-present subjects. Thus, the project is based on cardio-phenomenology, a new phenomenological approach to emotions considered in their dynamic relation to the body. By phenomenologically exploring the psychophysiology of the heart, we will offer a contribution to the undoing of the vestiges of the dichotomy between mind and brain. Three topics will articulate our research: the bodily dimension of emotions, the essential role played by emotions in cognition, and the moral e.g. wisdom and spiritual dimension of emotions involved in the intersubjective relations. Following an applied cardio-phenomenological approach, we will explore, on the one hand, liminal experiences of dysfunctional emotions in the field of phenomenological psychopathology and, on the other hand, the prayer of the heart in the realm of experiential theology. Inspired by phenomenological psychiatry and psychoanalysis, we will approach psychopathology with a double objective: to acquire a better understanding of the dynamics of emotions, and to identify the possible therapeutic effects of the cardio-phenomenological method. Applied to the field of experiential theology, we will develop a thorough micro-phenomenological inquiry of the first-person bodily emotional movements of the experiential subject during the prayer of the heart.