Status Updates From The Routledge Handbook of P...

It (dialogical love) is not only the most fulfilling type of romantic love; it is also the most demanding. It needs time to develop and mature. This is less the case for curative love and not at all the case for fusion love, which is usually best when it is fresh.

Moreover, it is the presence of a reflection on how what one has or has done is related to what is good and valuable, whereby both are not related to the experience of completeness, but rather to the feeling that one has made the right choices, even if this implies that one had to give up others, including moments of deep joy.

The presence of a happy moment is the presence of a balanced reflection about what one has and what one can still wish. It entails a self-evaluative reference to the past and the still open future possibilities.

Emotional institutions organize our social world and regulate our affective style from the moment we are born.

Asserting the irreducibility of the first-person perspective, which is necessary to preserve this asymmetry, is compatible with the embodied constitution thesis. And the take-away point, then, is that for Merleau-Ponty, minds - including emotions - are hybrid entities.

Merleau-Ponty acknowledges an asymmetry with respect to my emotions and those of others. When I experience an emotion, I feel it immediately "from the inside"; I know it directly as mine. But I lack this sort of first-person access to other's emotions, as they do mine. This asymmetry is phenomenologically constitutional for intersubjectivity.

To be clear, Merleau-Ponty is not endorsing a brand of crude behaviorism according to which mental phenomena like emotions are reducible to their behavioral expressions. Rather, they have a kind of hybrid reality - "significative whole which which properly belongs neither to the external world nor to internal life

Merleau-Ponty argues that emotions are similarly embodied and externalized; they are styles of bodily comportment or "variations of being in the world"... As styles of bodily comportment, emotions are inextricably linked with our agency. They are enacted over time - not things that just passively happen to or in us but rather things that we do.

For Merleau-Ponty, we see mind directly in action. As fundamentally embodied and animate beings, we are open and responsive to our environment; this openness is is constitutive of our bodily being-in-the-world...