Volume 13, Issue 2, 2014
Concrete Abstractions
Ulla Thøgersen
Pages 19-31
The Embodied Emotionality of Everyday Work Life: Merleau-Ponty and the Emotional Atmosphere of Our Existence
The main argument in this paper is that the philosophical tradition of phenomenology can provide a source for reflections on emotionality which points to a primordial emotional atmosphere in everyday work life. Within the phenomenological tradition, the paper mainly turns to the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and his studies of an emotional atmosphere which “is there” as an essential part of our very way of being situated in the world, but Heidegger’s notion of Stimmung is also discussed.