The primacy of feeling

Affects are not mere disturbances to be mastered by reason: anguish, nausea, and despair are disclosive moods that reveal the human condition, its freedom and its contingency. Kierkegaard's anxiety before the possible and Sartre's anguish before freedom grant access to a truth that intellectual analysis alone would miss.

Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety · Being and Nothingness

Against reducing affects to merely subjective, irrational states, the phenomenological tradition grants them a cognitive reach: moods open a distinctive access to the world. Heidegger makes attunement (Stimmung) a fundamental mode through which Dasein finds itself always already disclosed to its world, anxiety revealing its very being; Sartre analyzes emotion as a meaningful way of apprehending the world, not a mere disturbance. Affect is thus held to be disclosive, without thereby making feeling the foundation of morality.

Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), §29-30 · Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

His psychology of drives makes affects the real source of thoughts and values: conscious reason is only a late surface of the play of instincts. The position is inferred from this repeated principle rather than from a frontal thesis on the status of emotions.

Beyond Good and Evil, §3 and §187 · The Gay Science, §333

Against Socratic intellectualism, Aristotle grants the passions a properly ethical role: trained to the mean, fear, anger or pity felt when one ought and toward whom one ought belong to virtue, and character is formed by habituation as much as by reason. The leaning toward sentimentalism stays moderate, reason keeping the lead.

Nicomachean Ethics, II.6 (1106b); II.3

Against the Stoic ideal of extinguishing the passions, Thomas grants them a properly moral value: integrated into virtue and ordered by reason, compassion, fear or just anger perfect the good act instead of disturbing it. The virtuous person is not the impassive one but the one whose affects follow right judgment, which leans moderately toward a rehabilitation of the emotions without giving up the primacy of reason.

Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 24 (the goodness of the passions)

Confucian morality does not repress feelings but cultivates and orders them: sincere mourning matters more than strict observance, and it is lived affection, love of one's parents, that grounds xiao (filial piety). The li 禮 (rites) give emotions a fitting form rather than erasing them, hence a moderate sentimentalist leaning, tempered by the demand for discernment.

Analects, III, 4 (in mourning, real grief is better than strict observance) · Analects, XVII, 21 (the three-year mourning and the affection owed to parents)

Montaigne admires Stoic constancy without holding himself bound to it: to claim to root out the passions is, in the ordinary man, a playacting ill-suited to our nature. Better to know one's emotions, to accompany and temper them than to deny them, and he readily portrays himself angry, fearful or troubled, without shame. A supple regulation rather than a mastery, which gives the affects their place as companions of the human condition.

Essays, II, 11, "Of Cruelty" and III, 10, "Of Husbanding Your Will"

His conduct is never governed by rational deliberation but by bodily states: fatigue at the funeral, the sun and heat that overwhelm his conduct on the beach. He reports his affects without mastering or judging them, yet he grants them no moral truth either: a de facto, sensory sentimentalism, never claimed as a doctrine.

Part I, chapter 6: the beach scene, under the sway of the sun · Part I, chapter 1: the vigil and the funeral, dominated by fatigue and heat