Affectivité, sens et affects : les émotions comme articulation de la vie biologique

This article argues that attempts by philosophy to think emotions as embodied is caught between the necessity of thinking them as a subjective first person dimension of experience on the one hand and as an objective biological determination on the other. Philosophy has tended to view these two dimensions, qualitative and quantitative respectively, as in either in a parallelism with each other or alternatively has dispensed with either one or the other. Drawing on Georges Canguilhem ’s biological thinking of “sense” as a mode of functional relationality that constitutes the being of organisms as such, this article argues that emotions are an extension of a more fundamental affectivity proper to biological life in general. This allows for the qualitative dimension of emotions and the objective knowledge of them in biology to be thought in an ontological continuity with each other. It also allows for a renewed thinking of the fundamental continuity of emotional and affective experience in human and non-human animal life.