ABSTRACT
There are different senses in which people might be said to share an emotion. In certain cases, talk of participation in a joint feeling may appear warranted. The minimal phenomenological condition satisfied in these cases might be articulated as follows: If I am to regard myself as someone who is sharing in a joint feeling I have to be able to experience the emotion I am feeling as a constituent of our emotional response. That we can have this sort of affective experiences seems uncontroversial. In which cases exactly they may be said to have a foundation in a state of affairs that deserves to be called a collective emotional response, however, is a matter of debate. Moreover, one could take the very idea of a response that is at the same time affective and collective to involve a metaphysical absurdity. For one thing, properly affective states centrally involve feelings, and there is widespread agreement that groups are not the kind of entities that can experience feelings. This contribution offers a phenomenological account of the core features of those emotional feelings that allow a number of individuals to respond to some event in a manner experienced by them as authentically affective and genuinely collective. In so doing, it shows that a phenomenological characterization of the relevant affective experiences delivers that which skeptics about the possibility of properly collective emotions miss: a description of the ontological requirements of a genuinely joint feeling.
