Emotional Rationality and Feelings of Being Jan Slaby 1 Emotional Rationality and Feelings of Being Jan Slaby To appear in: J. Fingerhut/S. Marienberg (Eds.). Feelings of Being Alive. forthcoming, De Gruyter. Abstract This paper undertakes a comparison and theoretical unification of two recently proposed philosophical accounts of human affectivity: Bennett Helm’s theory of felt evaluations, centered on the idea of a sui generis emotional rationality as the standard of intelligibility of affective evaluation, and Matthew Ratcliffe’s phenomenological account of existential feelings (or ‘feelings of being’), which are encompassing affective background structures that comprise the foundation of all sorts of directed experiences – crucially including emotional and cognitive states. While these two proposals seem – at least on the surface – to focus on radically different aspects of our emotional lives, I will argue that they can (and should) be reconciled. While Helm is right in stressing and elaborating the intricate networks of emotional intelligibility, his approach needs to be supplemented by an understanding of affective background structures which form the indispensable starting conditions of an individual’s evaluative perspective on the world. Only a consideration of these affective backgrounds will give us the information needed to adequately reconstruct and assess an individual’s emotional evaluations as well as the evaluative judgments based upon them. Thus, overall this paper works towards a philosophical synthesis so far rarely achieved. An analytical, rationality-based approach to the normative structure of human forms of life (Helm) is brought into fruitful alignment with the descriptively rich accounts of human experience offered by the phenomenological tradition (Ratcliffe). These two approaches are shown to converge in their underlying aim: To outline the contours of a descriptive metaphysics of personhood and to stress the importance and indispensability of affectivity. 1. Introduction Two of the most intriguing and also most broadly useful theoretical approaches in the philosophy of emotions today are Bennett Helm’s theory of felt evaluations (Helm 1994; 2001; 2002; 2009) and Matthew Ratcliffe’s conception of existential feelings (Ratcliffe 2005; 2008). Helm’s approach is a consistent development of the premise that a person’s feelings, in their entirety, form a complex intra-rational structure – a structure that explains not just the