ABSTRACT
In her Introduction to Philosophy, Edith Stein claims that “feeling is a multiply differentiated form of consciousness”. This chapter argues that, phenomenologically speaking, emotion, for Stein, must be understood as a capacity for an affective, expressive conscious experience that concomitantly operates within the domains of the lived body, the psyche, and the spirit. An emotion is a type of feeling that is distinguished from feelings that arise from sense perception, sensual feelings like pleasure, moods, and life-feelings like fatigue. All feelings have a noetic and a hyletic component. In her Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, Stein takes up the traditional Husserlian critique against positivism and psychologism by claiming that emotions are not simply reducible to manifest signs of an underlying physical or bodily stimulus. For Stein, emotions are complex and also work at the level of meaning.
