ABSTRACT
The majority of Pfänder scholars (including Husserl himself) have focused their commentary more on Motives and Motivation than on the Phenomenology of Willing. In the former work, there is a clear delimitation of the sphere of voluntary acts as opposed to other acts of striving, such as desiring. The question that I ask in this chapter is both more general and more specific and is one which scholars have not paid sufficient attention to: whether that which makes a striving into a striving is an element that has the nature of a feeling. If it is such an element, one might get the idea that strivings are nothing more than an aggregate of a representative lived-experience and a feeling. Emulating Husserlian terminology, we might say that the “character of striving” of a lived-experience of striving would then have the nature of a feeling. If, however, that is not how things are, then lived-experiences of striving would be a specific type of lived-experience, different from experiences of representation and feeling. The reconstruction of these two positions, defended by Pfänder in the Phenomenology of Willing and Introduction to Psychology, respectively, casts light on a difficult question, i.e., that of the relationship between affective intentionality and the intentionality of the will.
