Housekeeping of feelings: On Heller’s ethical aesthetics

Feelings: From Kant to Heller

The term ‘feeling’ is extremely complicated. ² It is not only related to human spirit but also to the human body, which involves emotion and sense. For Heller, feelings are often considered difficult to analyse. Since the 20th century, various disciplines have begun to investigate human emotions, such as psychology, anthropology, phenomenology, etc. Emotion research presents a very rich theoretical form. Lutz and White proposed an anthropology of emotion. They turned to study the cultural dimension of emotion, and then examined the social generating factors of emotion. Emotional anthropology, as a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary research, has contributed a new theoretical vision and methodology to contemporary aesthetics. It clearly treats human emotions as a cultural language. In A Theory of Feelings, Heller gave a detailed interpretation and classification of human emotions. She believes that ‘to feel is to involve something’. This is the basic argument of her theory of feelings. This definition focuses on the dynamic exchange between social actors and the objects. ‘To feel it’ means ‘to involve something’, and this is not a tautology. In this assumption, ‘something’ can be ‘anything’, and ‘to feel’ can be positive or negative. This kind of participation is inevitably related to the subject of action, which is an active behaviour and thinking. Heller shows that feelings are not a purely biological or psychological response. Instead, there is a dynamic relationship between the feelings subject and the feelings object.

The ‘aesthetics’ created by Baumgarten has the connotation of perceptual science, which is related with feelings, especially body sense. However, Kant thought ‘the science of taste’ is impossible. In Kant, the perceptual dimension of beauty was evacuated. Heller is deeply influenced by Kant’s view of emotion. She believes that Kant’s discussion of emotion in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is different from his attitude in Critique of Judgment. In Critique of Judgment, Kant excluded human sensibility, especially eliminating sensation from the realm of aesthetics. Kant separated sense from judgment and held that it was madness to regard feelings as judgment. In his moral goal of ‘duty for duty’s sake’, he distinguishes moral respect based on practical reason from moral fanaticism based on sensibility. Therefore, in his transcendental moral law, emotion is first of all qualitative and excluded, and what it seeks is a special moral emotion, some abstract feelings.

However, Kant’s attitude towards sensibility/emotion sometimes changes. Moral emotion is the most frequently discussed in Kant’s practical philosophy. It shows the cooperation between reason and emotion. He found that understanding is highly esteemed by everyone, but sensibility is in bad repute. Kant wrote:

it is necessary that the understanding should rule without weakening sensibility because without sensibility no material would be provided for the use of the law-giving understanding. (Kant, 1996: 29)

Heller avoided the metaphysical discussion of emotions and turned to the theoretical results of psychology. She argues that in the second half of the 19th century, reactions like emotions were downgraded to instincts, which are separated from reason and morality into three separate worlds. Traditional psychology cannot solve the problem of what the emotion is. Heller relied on the phenomenological method and borrowed the theoretical results of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. So, we find in her phenomenology of feelings that the feelings are divided into two modes: figure and background. In different situations, some feelings occupy the foreground, and some feelings are reduced to the background. In the different intensities of emotional investment, foreground and background are constantly changing, which involves the interaction between the subject and the object. In the process of human socialization, different feelings are differentiated on the basis of happiness and pain. Heller refines the driving force, affection, passion, etc. The differentiation of our feelings is at the same time the reintegration of cognition and the accumulation of our wealth of human experience. People gain cognition of themselves in the differentiation of these feelings. For Heller, behaviour, thinking and perception, are inseparable and unified processes. In the process of self-development, behaviour, thinking and perception are functionally differentiated, yet reintegrated. Self-development is carried out with the differentiation and continuous reintegration of sensory functions. Feeling is thinking, and feeling is also action.

Heller also traces the history of the relationship between feelings and ethics. She argues that, since ancient times, feelings were primarily an ethical issue, and the analysis of feelings had always been subordinated to the analysis of virtues. In the dualism of body and soul, only the feelings of the soul (of the spirit) may refer to the good. Feelings pertaining to the body were placed at the negative pole, and they had to be repressed if possible, or at least controlled. Even in the bourgeois era, the reference of feelings to morality does not disappear. Instead, the correlation is usually close. The existence of morality had been taken for granted. But clearly morality is not innate, let alone a sense of morality. Heller believed that this kind of feeling is morally good, which also has an aesthetic component based in sensitivity. When Fu Qilin asked Heller about her thoughts on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, Heller replied:

Moral judgment itself has an aesthetic component, since sensitivity is one of the conditions of a good moral judgment. Our feelings and emotions, which count much for the other person, are also developed aesthetically. Aesthetics cannot replace ethics, but it is the crowning of ethics. (Fu, 2008:103)

Divide and bridge: Two trends in feelings

Heller’s theory of feelings is also coloured by a strong critical Marxism. It can be said that her emotional anthropology is a critical anthropology. The young Marx discussed the problem of sensibility in 1844 Manuscripts when he wrote: ‘All the organs are directly social in their form, their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human world’ (Marx and Engels, 2010: 300). The liberation of humans requires the complete liberation of sensibility, so that sensation returns to the subject. In Marx’s words:

The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. (Marx and Engels, 2010: 300)

Heller believed that it was bourgeois society that created the opportunity to manage feelings. The individual becomes ‘accidental’ and ‘free’ in modern society. It is possible for people to recognize their inner world and express it, so they can shape their own unique emotional structure according to their own nature and choose the task that suits them. However, for most people, this opportunity is presented in a form of alienation. The characteristic of the bourgeoisie is calculation, which also explains the quantifiable characteristics of emotional needs. Emotions become abstract and homogeneous. Whether opposing alienated emotion in the name of rationality, or opposing alienated rationality in the name of emotion, both of these are manifestations of modernity. For Heller, it is necessary to overcome alienated rationality. She recognizes that ‘the homecoming of alienated reason involves the recognition of all human needs in so far as their satisfaction does not presuppose the use of any human person as mere means’ (Heller, 1985: 211). Cultivating emotions is regarded as developing our part of the ability to criticize and distinguish right from wrong.

According to Heller, from the perspective of emotional management, professionalization of work may be regarded as a negative factor. People often have to perform multiple tasks and cannot form a stable emotional structure. The more tasks people adjust to, the more superficial surfaces of feelings evolve. Heller wrote that the task that required considerable investment of feelings was not a goal, but a means: the means to mere survival, to possession, or to the extension of possession. Marx once wrote that when working the worker feels ‘outside of himself’; only outside of her work does the worker feel she is ‘with herself’. We can see that people form different feelings in different work tasks. The degree of stability of sensory structure is related to social status. The choice and re-selection of tasks essentially affects people’s lifestyles and emotional value orientations. In different tasks, the proportion of emotional investment changes. Stable emotional structure depends on a long-term task. Nonetheless, Heller argues that any society that abolished labour would expose people to the barbarism of feelings, so that the absence of social tasks would inevitably lead to another kind of alienation. In modern society, it is the bourgeoisie that has the leisure to carefully cultivate their emotional world. Yet leisure remains alienated for those at the lower end of the social hierarchy. Their emotional life is also constructed by the logic of capital, which moves towards alienation. People cannot secure emotional identification with each other. The emotions between people present a problem of communication.

In addition to the world of individual feelings, the world of communal or social feelings is also worthy of attention. According to Heller, aesthetic taste plays an important role in constructing a community. In the formation of an emotional community, literature, art, etc. have the role of bridging agents. Heller argues that aesthetic taste has a leading guiding function. Heller wrote: the looser the sensus communis, the greater the role played by what we call aesthetic taste, and the more prior education is required (Heller, 1979: 87). Aesthetic taste reflects the commonality of aesthetics and morals, usually referred to as ‘moral feelings’. Moral feelings have a function similar to that of aesthetic taste in its relation to moral value objectifications. From the perspective of anthropology, emotional expression is restricted by local culture, social customs and traditional systems, and is reflected in different ceremonies, celebrations and mourning. Under different social and cultural norms, people have different emotional experiences even in the face of the same event. Local institutional regulations include the intervention of time and space, as well as the limitation of the intensity and depth of emotional expression. Certain emotions can only be expressed in certain ceremonial situations and must be expressed in a way that conforms to local experience or established moral norms. There is no society that does not attempt to regulate the intensity of the expression of feelings, and in the case of certain kinds of feelings, even their content. ‘From the point of view of their moral content, there are mandatory and prohibited feelings, recommended and not recommended feelings in every culture’ (Heller, 1979: 142).

The mutual communication of feelings contributes to the construction of community, and the realization of emotional communication with others is undoubtedly the goal of self-realization, which helps develop personality. Feelings have the function of adjustment and balance. This includes the adjustment of the relationship between the individual and the outside world, as well as the adjustment of the self. Feelings are the maintenance and extension of the self. Without feelings, we cannot maintain and expand ourselves, but not all feelings are suitable for this purpose. There are good feelings and bad feelings. To feel means to be involved in something. We are also involved in the recognition and evaluation of other worlds of feelings. Without this we are unable to preserve ourselves and expand our ego, whether we relate to the world in which we live with particularity or with individual feelings (Heller, 1979: 174). Different feelings are associated with different tasks. As we have seen, work always provides special tasks for the housekeeping of feelings. This can become positive and constitutive of the housekeeping of feelings only if this work allows for the realization of personality. Individuals can regulate their own needs, motives, or desires according to their own needs, can formulate their life plans and choose meaningful lives. Some emotions often help us first recognize our moral responsibilities. Heller bridges the broken emotional structure of the social community by pursuing the ethical path of ‘being for us’. ³ The ‘task’ here refers to the development of interpersonal relationships and emotional tendencies. Another problem related to self-fulfillment goals is common social tasks. It is related to the ‘whole society’ and the ‘cause of mankind’. ‘Being-for-us’ also points to Heller’s ethical aesthetics.

Housekeeping of feelings: A form of caring

The category of ‘housekeeping of feelings’ includes the relationship between emotional management and self-fulfillment, which is mainly concerned with the importance of emotion in the construction of subjectivity. Heller states that in everyday life, all emotions, drives and emotional dispositions are ego-centred (Heller, 2009b: 274) and they orient us in practical situations. Heller draws on the metaphor of housekeeping, and specifically the act of gardening. People cultivate their feelings-world in a way of ‘gardening’ and gain higher moral connotation. In ‘Are We Living in a World of Emotional Impoverishment?’, she acknowledges that we may live in an emotionally impoverished world. She links the issue of poverty and wealth to people’s emotions, arguing that emotional cultivation is the most important part of cultivating wealth, where ‘wealth’ refers to the expansion of all need horizons, especially emotional and cultural ones. For her, though, the most important emotions are moral ones. In Heller’s words: an emotionally rich person can remain morally infantile or irresponsible if she does not cultivate her moral sensibility (Heller, 1989: 50). Heller’s concept of a ‘housekeeping of feelings’ is a method that seeks to link emotion to personality, emphasizing the multiple ways in which emotion and reason are combined in human consciousness, which is related to Heller’s ethics of personality. She writes that the formation of the hierarchy of feeling needs is a condition sine qua non of growing up and of the development of personality (Heller, 1979: 200). In most philosophical discussions, ‘personality’ is not addressed, but Heller talks about the uniqueness of the personality. She endows personality with great aesthetic value and asserts that personality confers beauty. She argues that ‘the lineaments of beauty are devalued where they do not express a personality’ (Heller, 1984: 263). Personality has a fundamental constructive function, and only the brilliance of personality is likely to have a lasting impact. A cornerstone of Heller’s work in this area is that our emotions, in their own way, embody our judgments about ourselves and the world. Heller’s theory of feelings has always been about the self. Heller cites Lukács:

self-identification with the beautiful, the work of art signifies self-identification with the species (what’s more, identification with the species being-for-itself), the feelings that appear during the enjoyment of the work of art are morally good feelings. (Heller, 1979: 146)

Heller regards the emotional function of art as an important index to its definition. Whilst these emotions may not be necessarily strong, they must be profound for the recipient, which is closely related to the person’s self-realization. When people appreciate art or enjoy beauty, emotions are sublimated. The orientational categories of beautiful-ugly ‘guide us’ in the area of aesthetics. Yet Heller notes that the situation can be more nuanced. When we say ‘beauty’ and ‘good’, we have two different value orientations; a ‘beautiful person’ is something quite different from being a ‘good person’. The distinction of beautiful-ugly guides not only in our aesthetic orientation but also our moral orientation. The ‘beautiful’ feeling is mostly synonymous with the ‘good’ feeling, and ‘ugly’ is mostly synonymous with an ‘evil’ feeling. The use of moral and aesthetic value orientational categories may differ only in nuance’ (Heller, 1979: 144). This association not only occurs at the level of feelings, but also in the language expression of feelings. Obviously, the beauty or ugliness of the aesthetic category here is associated with important ethical significance. Art is endowed with moral function and ethical characteristics, which helps with the housekeeping of feelings. In the process of feelings housekeeping, the housekeeping of feelings refers to the conscious self-management of individuals. It is a kind of gardening, a kind of housekeeping. Feelings need to be cultivated. The individual’s world is a world determined by deep emotions. These are the deepest feelings – some constant and steady emotions, which are a decisive shaping force on our habits of mind and action.

The housekeeping of feelings is a form of care. Heller writes: human perfection is the transformation into being free projected by one’s own most essential possibilities accomplished by care. This is the ‘care of oneself’ (Heller, 1979: 65). For Heller, the concept of care is related to responsibility. ‘Care’ is important both ethically and emotionally and is central to Heller’s ethical aesthetic thought. Care concerns self-care and care of others, which is a kind of responsibility to the individual and others. John Grumley notes that contrary to the modern trend of simplifying philosophical ethics to questions of justice, Heller ‘evokes the contemporary significance of the classical pursuit of a “good life” and has formulated general guidelines for modern ethical life and behaviour’ (Grumley, 2005: 3). Grumley compared Heller’s ethical thought with the content of Foucault’s late lectures at the French Academy and suggests that they each made their own theoretical contributions to the ethical issue of self-governance, or ‘care of the self.’ Foucault’s review of the role of the ‘shepherd’ lead to his views on governance. ⁴ He traces the technique of self-governance back to the ancient Greek philosophical tradition and analyses the emergence of ‘caring for oneself’. For Heller the shepherd is not a category of morality but a term of moral aesthetics, of the neglected discipline, which alerts us that our moral acts should also have a ‘style’ (Fehér and Heller, 1994: 56). The care of self means both the care of the soul and the care of body. As Heller puts it, one has to labour upon one’s soul first, by developing oneself by transforming abilities into talents, just as ‘perfectio’ signifies in Heidegger (Heller, 2019: 67). The care is about care of the self, care of others. To care means to love. Caring for others is also a sign of loving yourself. It can be said that ethics itself is a kind of aesthetics in the form of care. Fu Qilin suggests that the particularity of Heller’s emotional definition is that she always interprets it in the sense of caring for human survival (Fu, 2012: 28). Indeed, the housekeeping of feelings is socially necessary, which is completely related to Heller’s humanistic care, that is beyond survival and refers to the possible expansion of human needs and feelings.

The above discussion of the housekeeping of feelings that refer to oneself indicates that it is simultaneously a social practice. Self-relationship is also a relationship with others. When people face themselves, they are also in a process of dialogue with others. Personal artistic practice (formation of an aesthetic subject) is a model form of self-technology (formation of moral subject), a kind of existential aesthetics. How do we directly construct our own identity through certain ethical self-technologies that have been developed since ancient times? This is a question that both Foucault and Heller address. In modern society, we find that certain groups have been accidentally erased. New technological methods continue to add new relationships between political entities and individuals, and rewrite and reshape individual perceptions, emotions, and experiences. Only caring is a responsible intervention. We need to be vigilant that modern governance is disguised as a kind of pastoral care (Foucault). Such governance has always been a matter of political arithmetic. From the perspective of feelings housekeeping, this kind of governance technique also includes a self-governance technique, which is not only the problem of bio-politics but also the key issue of ethical aesthetics. What we have to continue to think about is how should individuals respond to the changes brought about by this governance technology – especially the changes that occur in the dimension of emotional experience, which are related to the relationship between governing the self and governing the others. How to ensure the integrity of oneself when the individual is integrated into the social community is also a question that we need to continue to think about, in the company of both Heller and Foucault.

In the contemporary aesthetic trend towards emotions, Heller’s theory of feelings should have a hearing. Heller uses the ‘housekeeping’ analogy to formulate how people deal with feelings. The category of ‘housekeeping of feelings’ involves the deepening and cultivation of a person’s emotions, which offers the possibility to realize self-understanding and self-talk in emotional life. The ethical dimension of Heller’s feelings theory lies in her emphasis on the realization of individual values. By analysing what emotions are and putting emotions/feelings into consideration in modern life, it analyses the non-negligible role of emotion management in constructing the goal of a better life. In addition, it should also be clear that the classification of emotions cannot accurately describe its complexity. For Heller, only individuals who are morally invested can continue to evaluate their own emotions in a positive and conscious way and seek to achieve the fullest effective management of emotions. Heller’s concept of emotional management highlights the relationship between emotion and personality and emphasizes the ability of individuals to make independent life choices. A person’s feelings or emotions constitute the main manifestation of individual uniqueness. These emotions/feeling experiences are the most private aspects of the human subject and reflect chosen value preferences. Emotion, in turn, also shapes and reflects a person’s thoughts and behaviour patterns. It plays an important in shaping and guiding force in everyday life. At the same time, emotion itself needs to be cultivated to promote the richness of self-development, which is an important link in increasing a person’s emotional wealth.

However, we can see that emotion is no longer the subject’s private content. Emotion has also been included in the norms of social calculation and regulation, which shows the ethical characteristics of bio-politics. In the process of aesthetization of the modern political system, the content related to emotional experience has been reduced to technical means. In modern society, emotion has become an important object of social governance. In the aesthetic turn of modern governance, a series of censorship systems have emerged for people’s emotional activities. Aesthetic governance reshapes people’s sense structure by intervening in people’s perceptual activities. It can strengthen, weaken or suppress a certain kind of perception in order to rewrite the structure of people’s emotional experience. In the housekeeping of feelings, the ethical function of aesthetics is re-recognized. It has become a new strategy of modern political governance. Right now, COVID-19 is rewriting the entire global order, and human emotions have been severely damaged in the process. The epidemic has exposed the emotional absence and moral failings of human beings in a state of emergency. Some voices are marginalized, and some voices are too powerful, and the equal claim of the right to life has been trampled upon. Will the emotional memories of the unseen and the unheard be recorded, and how will they be expressed? If their emotional experience is not represented, in what form will it be repaired? In addition, the emotional ties between people, groups, places, and countries have broken down and will continue to be exposed in the form of traumatic memories. The reconstruction of emotional community is more important than ever before, which has become a great challenge for the housekeeping of feelings in the post-epidemic era.