Should we construe the phenomenology of feelings – the presence of a bodily change – as being in the foreground or in the background of consciousness? The article under review briefly discusses this issue (Pliushch this collection, pp. 2-3): A feeling tends to be more explicitly felt as bodily when making a bodily need salient (feeling tired, feeling a pain in the joints), plausibly because its function is to motivate bodily-directed action. Although in so-called "affective feelings" 1 the bodily phenomenology tends to recede to the fringe of consciousness, there are cases, as Iuliia Pliushch notes correctly, where it occupies center stage – think of Proust's report about his chest pain when learning that Madame de Guermantes just died.
It is debatable, however, that in such cases, the formal object of the feeling consists merely in the bodily changes, say, in heartbeat rate. For such states are part of an intensifying negative affordance: the loss of a friend. The notions of "meta-emotion" and "meta-feeling", which are used by Pliushch to discuss the amplification of a feeling might be captured either in purely dynamic terms, or in a conceptual reconstruction of the situation at hand. This interesting issue, discussed in section 2.2 of Iuliia Pliushch's comments, has connections with the notion of how concepts and feelings interact, and will be addressed in section 4.