L'esperienza emotiva tra causalità e motivazione: fenomenologia e neuroscienze sulla capacità di riflessione umana

Abstract

Applying the phenomenological method and drawing on neuroscientific research, I discriminate between the transcendental structures of experience, through which the surrounding world acquires meaning, and unconscious computations made in the psycho-physiological domain. Human emotionality involves neuronal-instinctive mechanisms that precede subjective conscious activity, and these can only be investigated using causal-quantitative methods. Motivation, which can be described using the phenomenological method, speaks to a more complex causality, that allows us to reflect on our emotionality within the temporal flux of consciousness. The distinction between emotion and feeling offers an important clue to understanding the causal dimension of the former and the motivational characteristics of the latter: in this way, we can better understand the role that feeling, which involves constitutive-temporal processes, plays in phenomenology.

Keywords

• phenomenology
• neuroscience
• causality
• emotion
• motivation