Abstrakt
I contend that moods and emotions are neither internal mental states, nor hard-wired reactions occurring in our brains. From the phenomenological point of view, they are experientially manifest as wholes that can be only ex post decomposed in what seem to be - once we adopt an objectivizing perspective - their components, such as cognitive appraisals, inner feelings, motor reactions, physiological arousals etc.
Against the strong impulse to decompose moods and emotions into such empirically identifiable components, phenomenology points to the impossible task of reconstructing our affective life in its full sense out of determinate component-entities and provides the means to grasp emotional experience simultaneously in its primary indistinction and implicit articulation. In short, my contribution on the one hand presents the original insights brought by phenomenology into the unified structure of emotional experience and, on the other, deals with the relevance of affective life and its investigation for phenomenology itself.