Stratification of Emotional Life (Scheler) - Scheler's Analysis of The Strata of Emotive Life

Scheler's Analysis of The Strata of Emotive Life

For Scheler, human feelings, feeling states and emotions display a meaningful and progressive pattern of levels from our peripheral to the deeper more stable structures of personality. Scheler identified four distinct but interrelated strata found in human emotional life.

At our most periphery we have sensible feelings (e.g., a tickle, an itch, a fragrance, a taste, pleasure, pain, hunger, thirst, intoxication…), which manifest in relative modes of joy and suffering. These feelings are shortest in duration, extended and localizable with reference to the lived-body, and are the most readily alterable and accessible through external means and stimuli.

Next we have vital feelings or feeling states of the unitary lived-body which are experienced as a unified field or whole (e.g., comfort, health, vigor, strength, tiredness, illness, weakness, advancing age, phantom limb phenomenon…), and which manifest intentionally as fear and hope.

The remaining two strata of the emotive map belongs to the realm of individual personhood because these emotions transcend (or at least exceed) the physical restrictions of lived-body and environment; they are the least subject to arbitrary alteration; and they are also by their very nature communicable and social in character.

These are, first, the purely psychic feeling states or emotions having a characteristically ego-quality (e.g., euphoria, happiness, sympathy, enjoyment, sadness, sorrow, anger, jealousy…), and which manifest intentionally as empathy, preferring, loving, hating and willing. As representing one’s prevalent mental disposition it is important to note that psychic feeling states are alterable though acts of free will, thought and positive social interactions.

Finally, Scheler identifies spiritual feelings which differ sharply from personal psychic feeling states in that “all ego-states seem to be extinguished… take possession of the whole of our being.” (e.g., bliss, awe, wonder, catharsis, despair, shame, remorse, anxiety, pangs of conscience, grief…). These types of emotions overtake and overcome us, usually quite unexpectedly. We can not reason or will to produce such spiritual feelings. As positive experiences, we can only open our hearts and mind and hope that they find us.

The intentional arch of positive feelings and feeling states ultimately spans from the sensible to the spiritual, or from a sort of “hedonistic nihilism” to deeper levels of personal contentment. The opposite is true for negative feeling and feeling states.