Abstract

Unlike emotions, existential feelings are not directed towards an object or specific situation, but are the affective background through which experience as a whole is structured. Furthermore, existential feelings are bodily feelings. In that vein, this paper aims to present the theory of existential feelings developed by Matthew Ratcliffe in Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality (2008) and its link to the concept of bodily doubt developed by Havi Carel in Phenomenology of illness (2016) in order to exhibit the importance of bodily feelings in understanding the experience of illness. This paper is divided into three sections: 1) Characterization of the nature of emotions and feelings; 2) Characterization of existential feelings based on the phenomenology of tactile experience, as well as the distinction between existential feeling, emotion and mood; 3) An analysis of the alteration of existential feelings by bodily doubt.