Shared Emotions: Re-assessing the Phenomenological Account

How is it possible for two or more individuals to 'literally' share emotions? In this talk I shall address this puzzle by arguing for three, seemingly contradictory, requirements that individuals engaging in emotional sharing must, and indeed can, fulfill: (1) the (mutual) awareness, (2) the plurality or self-/other-differentiation, and (3) the integration requirement. In order to make my case, I will first outline different dimension of the sociality of emotions. I will then critically discuss two prominent contemporary lines of arguments for collective emotions: Margaret Gilbert's joint commitment account (Gilbert 2002; 2014) and two phenomenologically inspired 'token-identity' or 'fusional' accounts of collective emotions (Schmid 2009, 2014; Krueger 2014, 2016). Against this background, in a third step, I will draw on some early phenomenological accounts (esp. Stein 1922 and Walther 1923) and show how they can accommodate the above requirements on emotional sharing.