ABSTRACT

This chapter systematically reconstructs Gerda Walther's proposal and discusses how, if at all, Walther’s analysis could benefit from another German early phenomenologist and sociologist Hermann Schmalenbach’s analysis of the basic sociological categories. After some preliminary remarks about Walther’s understanding of the modes of experiential givenness and of the structure of the self, it introduces her analysis of communal emotions. The chapter introduces Schmalenbach’s analysis of the basic sociological categories in order to address the question whether shared emotions are constitutive of a particular form of social structure. There are two aspects of persons that are of great importance to our reconstruction of Walther’s account of communal emotions. First, a person can have lived experiences in three modes of givenness—actual-present, subconscious, and habitual. Second, a person is a unity of two parts—the I-center and the self—both of which are embedded in her intentional background.