Eudaemonia: Meaningful Existential Feelings

Abstract

Existential feelings' are the felt sense of connectedness and purpose that shape and build every experience. Though existential feelings are ubiquitous, their malfunction may be experienced under abnormal circumstances. Schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, Capgras and Cotard delusion-through the resulting dysfunction, these each reveal the functional utility and affective possibilities our existential feelings normally bring. Sufferers of these conditions are made to occupy a distinctly disjointed, disconnected, and less meaningful experiential landscape. On the other end, induced alterations of experience through psychedelics have been known to increase the felt connectedness and meaningfulness of the experience-and the experiencer's life, more generally. How and which existential feelings are changing when the sense of meaningfulness and significance is changing? Eudaemonic feelings.

'Eudaemonic feelings' are existential feelings with a felt sense of meaning and significance. They are both attended to and are accompanied by a sense of agency. To have a eudaemonic experience is to have an experience of reality that feels both significant and causal. These experiences can be altered through altering the experiential landscape (the 'horizon'). And all experiences can be made to be eudaemonic.

Eudaemonic feelings of course presuppose the validity of existential feelings. I briefly reestablish the case for these, through positive and negative examples of each, leaning on Matthew Ratcliffe's existential feelings theory.

Later, I explore eudemonic feelings as a special subset of existential feelings which are both attended to and elicit a sense of agency. Such feelings are experienced directly but can be controlled by controlling the horizon. By controlling the horizon, the felt background of possibilities, we can also control the space that eudaemonic feelings occupy. In doing so, these feelings can themselves be controlled.

My overall intention is to introduce a new way of thinking about experiences that feel significant so that these feelings do not continue go underlooked and underappreciated. Experience and consciousness have yet to find a safe and established theoretical home-to get there, we will have to first understand the depth and breadth of experience. Recognizing and exploring eudaemonic feelings could be a small part of achieving this greater ambition.

Full text

1
Eudaemonia: Meaningful Existential Feelings
Abstract
‘Existential feelings’ are the felt sense of connectedness and purpose that shape and build every experience.
Though existential feelings are ubiquitous, their malfunction may be experienced under abnormal
circumstances. Schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, Capgras and Cotard delusion—through the resulting
dysfunction, these each reveal the functional utility and affective possibilities our existential feelings normally
bring. Sufferers of these conditions are made to occupy a distinctly disjointed, disconnected, and less
meaningful
experiential landscape. On the other end, induced alterations of experience through psychedelics
have been known to
increase
the felt connectedness and meaningfulness of the experience—and the
experiencer’s life, more generally. How and which existential feelings are changing when the sense of
meaningfulness and significance is changing? Eudaemonic feelings.
‘Eudaemonic feelings’ are existential feelings with a felt sense of meaning and significance. They are both
attended to and are accompanied by a sense of agency. To have a eudaemonic experience is to have an
experience of reality that feels both significant and causal. These experiences can be altered through altering
the experiential landscape (the ‘horizon’). And all experiences can be made to be eudaemonic.
Eudaemonic feelings of course presuppose the validity of existential feelings. I briefly reestablish the case
for these, through positive and negative examples of each, leaning on Matthew Ratcliffe’s existential feelings
theory.
Later, I explore eudemonic feelings as a special subset of existential feelings which are both attended to
and elicit a sense of agency. Such feelings are experienced directly but can be controlled by controlling the
horizon. By controlling the horizon, the felt background of possibilities, we can also control the space that
eudaemonic feelings occupy. In doing so, these feelings can themselves be controlled.
My overall intention is to introduce a new way of thinking about experiences that feel significant so that
these feelings do not continue go underlooked and underappreciated. Experience and consciousness have yet
to find a safe and established theoretical home—to get there, we will have to first understand the depth and
breadth of experience. Recognizing and exploring eudaemonic feelings could be a small part of achieving this
greater ambition.
Introduction
“For me, madness was definitely not a condition of illness; I did not believe that I was ill. It was rather a country,
opposed to Reality, where reigned an implacable light, blinding, leaving no place for shadow; an immense space
without boundary, limitless, flat; a mineral, lunar country, cold as the wa stes of the North Pole. In this stretching
emptiness, all is unchangeable, immobile, congealed, crystallised. Objects are stage trappings, placed here and
there, geometric cubes without meaning.
People turn weirdly about, they make gestures, movements without sense; they are phantoms whirling on an infinite
plain, crushed by the pitiless electric light. And I—I am lost in it, isolated, cold, stripped purposeless under the light
(Sechehaye 1951).”

2
This haunting account comes from
Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl
. In it, Renee (pseudonym) recounts
her earlier life as a prisoner to schizophrenia. Her language is rich and lurid and laced with metaphor and tracks
nicely with the accounts captured in more formal studies.
The essence of the schizophrenic condition is that it involves a widespread disintegration between a person
and the world they experience. As Renee prosaically reflects, light
becomes
cold and absolute. Concrete objects
become
indeterminate and bland—
meaningless
. She later describes how her loved ones have lost their warmth
and wholeness. Instead of being whole objects of affection, they are less than the sum of their parts, disparate
features on a flat canvas. Describing her beloved therapist—warmly referred to as “Mama”—Renee recounts the
following (emphasis mine):
“I perceived a statue, a figure of ice which smiled at me. And this smile, showing her white teeth, frightened me.
For I saw the individual features of her face, separated from each other: the teeth, then the nose, then the cheeks,
then one eye and the other (Sechehaye 1951).”
The integration of objects with each other and the body is broken down, resulting in a macabre experience.
This altered experience is rarely captured or explained by formal models or diagnostics—instead, it is lumped
in with all the other schizophrenic-type experiences, at which point is becomes a symptom to be eliminated.
The
DSM-5
criteria for schizophrenia is as follows:
“The presence of 2 (or more) of the following, each present for a significant portion of time during a 1-month
period (or less if successfully treated), with at least 1 of them being (1), (2), or (3): (1) delusions, (2) hallucinations,
(3) disorganized speech, (4) grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and (5) negative symptoms (Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR)).”
Classifications such as the DSM-5 may be useless at best, dangerous at worst. After all, most of the listed
symptoms—delusions, hallucinations, etc.—are common both to other classifications and to “normal”, everyday
experience. The purported difference is the depth and breadth of the whole set of symptoms, but none of these
can be measured systematically. Therefore, researchers from a range of fields have gone so far as to question
the existence or at least the utility of the concept ‘schizophrenia’. Poland offers a rebuttal to the classification:
“The research programme spawned by the concept [of schizophrenia] has not proven to be productive, and it is
becoming increasingly clear that diagnostic categories like schizophrenia (and, especially schizophrenia) do not play
a useful role in either clinical assessment or the design and implementation of effective treatment plans for people
with severe and disabling mental illness… (How to Move Beyond the Concept of Schizophrenia 2007)”
It isn’t that schizophrenia cannot be diagnosed with the given parameters—it can be (albeit sloppily). But
before we do this, we ought to first question whether such a diagnosis is or ever could be meaningful. A diagnosis
ought to be bound to an underlying causal mechanism, a model to describe the experience itself, instead of the
observed behavior
1
. Matthew Ratcliffe’s ‘existential feelings’ theory is the beginning of this model.
1
Whatever we want to call their culmination, the horrible symptoms are common. Ignoring qualms with the method
of classification, schizophrenia diagnoses are not rare: 0.3-0.75% worldwide, and that’s just non-institutionalized
cases. This almost certainly vastly underrepresents a much larger cohort with partial or fleeting symptoms that are
not formally diagnosed (Schizophrenia 2018). And, in a sense that ought not to be overlooked, the symptoms of

3
In his ongoing work, Ratcliffe details existential feelings, going as far as to claim that every experience
(including perceptions) is preceded and laced with these feelings. To better define them, Ratcliffe compares
them to other kinds of feelings—noematic and noetic feelings. Noematic feelings are those where the body is
the object of experience—they are bodily feelings. Noetic feelings are bodily feelings about an object in the
world. (The body is still the medium, but the thing causing the feelings is separate from the body itself.) The
third kind
2
of feeling is the star of the show—existential feelings. Ratcliffe claims that feelings of the body and
feelings of the world through the body require an additional feeling of existential orientation:
“I suggest that existential feelings are feelings in the body, which are experienced as one’s relationship with the
world as a whole (Ratcliffe 2005).”
Note that all three kinds of feelings are bodily feelings: feelings of the body itself, feelings of things in relation
to the body, and feelings of the body in relation to the whole. The “world as a whole”, as Ratcliffe calls it, is not
a feeling of the empirical, mathematical, experience-free universe
3
, but of the world as it stands
or could
stand
in relation to the experiencer. Therefore, existential feelings are not just feelings of things as we are currently
experiencing them—they are feelings of things
we could imagine
experiencing. This possibility space is described
by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as a ‘horizon’, a felt range of all meaningful possibilities:
The interplay between actuality and possibility in experience, the phenomenological role played by existential
feeling, and the relationship between possibilities and the sense of reality can all be understood in terms of the
phenomenological concept of ‘horizon’…Both [Husserl and Merleau-Ponty] appeal to the horizontal structure of
experience in order to convey the way in which the body sets up the world and how it is then implicated in the
various experiences that we have within that world (Ratcliffe 2008).
The ‘horizon’ is a felt range of possible worlds in which we could find ourselves. Ratcliffe continues:
Husserl notes that experiencing an object, such as a table, requires more than perceiving what actually appears.
One sees the table from a certain angle, but the experience also includes a sense of other potential perceptions of
the same object (Ratcliffe 2005).
The ability to perceive objects as more than the sum of their parts
4
(the ‘gestalt’) is predicated on our ability
to experience existential feelings. Those afflicted with schizophrenia have such feelings flattened, sharpened,
schizophrenia are quite commonly experienced by completely normal people—just more usefully and in contexts
less likely to elicit negative feedback.
2
Existential feelings ought to be considered both as existing independently of noematic and noetic feelings, and as
being attached to these in every case. It’s possible to have an existential feeling that’s neither a bodily feeling or a
feeling of an object in the world through the body, but it’s not possible to have a bodily feeling of itself or the world
without any existential feeling. Such feelings and their interrelations may be weak and confused in those suffering
from the conditions described here—depression, schizophrenia, and the Cotard and Capgras delusions.
3
In other words, the physical universe as it stands without regard for our experie nce of it. Such a universe is not
something we are capable of perceiving or understanding completely, though we do of course try our best to do so
through math and physics and so on.
4
To my knowledge, no one has tried to marry gestalt theory with existential feelings theory, though they could be a
fit for each other. They may also have the same weakness, as both are more descriptive than explanatory. However,
gestalt theory does have some quantitative measures. Perhaps existential feelings could as well.

4
and/or distorted. While they remain capable of logical and rational thought and while their sensory organs
remain completely functional, their affliction renders them incapable of experiencing being in the same mental,
physical, and social world as everyone else.
Schizophrenia is just one case of dysfunctional existential feelings. Depression can also be similarly
understood and characterized. To the depressed, the world offers a sense of diminished possibilities and
increased rigidity. They cannot imagine the world being any way other than how it is to them, even while they
are aware of their own memories for how things used to be more varied and open. Again, this is not a matter
of rationality or logic. Nor, crucially
5
, is it a matter of belief.
Belief is often taken to be a matter of propositional attitudes. This is not true of existential feelings—they
are not beliefs:
Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, is clear that the sense of reality is not comprised of a
propositional attitude of the form ‘I believe that p’, where p is the proposition ‘some entity called the world’ exists.
Rather, it is a pre-articulate conviction that is already in place before we explicitly assent to anything in the form of
a propositional attitude (Ratcliffe 2005).
The world’s existence is taken for granted in our ‘natural attitude’. Under normal circumstances, we
unaware of this attitude. It is not a proposition and not a belief; it is as real as anything else we experience. In
fact, it is a part of everything we experience, as real as existence—hence the term ‘existential feelings’.
These feelings often go unnoticed because we experience within them, but their distortions
can
be detected.
Schizophrenia leads to dysfunctional natural and social behavior. Depression is detected similarly, though in its
subtlety it is often confused for moodiness or laziness. The same goes for anxiety—we’re prone to judge its
experiencers as having personality flaws like irritability—or being plain irrational. Each of these conditions has
an experienced reality, but it’s difficult to pull these experiences apart from the resulting beliefs and behavior.
Therefore, existential feelings are often best noticed and examined where behavior and/or beliefs are their most
bizarre. Capgras delusion and Cotard delusion furnish this strangeness with laudable aplomb.
Capgras delusion is made known by its sufferer’s apparent belief that his loved ones have been replaced by
imposters. I say “apparent belief” for a reason: existential feelings are not beliefs. Existential feelings are real,
experienced feelings. The man with Capgras delusion is really having an experience in which his loved ones
have been replaced with imposters—body snatchers! Evidence for direct reality includes the recalcitrance of the
feeling. Sufferers can follow logic and reason normally and can be told of and acknowledge the absurdity of
their experience, yet the experience remains. The afflicted cannot be shaken from his uncanny experience.
Further evidence against it being a belief is that even though he may feel his family was replaced with imposters,
this does not motivate him to dash off in search of his real family. He is strangely unmoved by the greater
questions regarding what could have produced his science-fictional reality.
Cotard delusion is thematically similar to Capgras delusion. Instead of declaring his loved ones imposters,
a man afflicted with Cotard delusion declares himself dead, or nonexistent—an imposter to the world of the
5
It is my contention that many theories are gravely mistaken because they lean on propositional attitudes as an
explanatory device. Decisions and feelings may represent themselves to our self as matters of reasoned judgement,
but this perception is almost always an illusion. The inability to deal with the dissonances between accounted-for
thought and underlying experience and behavior—this plagues social sciences.

5
living. He rejects his friends’ protests to the contrary—
no, no, they’re all mistaken
—what they say they see when
they see him is just a corpse or a figment of their collective imaginations.
Taken together and with an ear to existential feelings, both delusions involve an attenuation of sorts. For
Capgras delusion, the afflicted can no longer feel connected to those to whom he ought to feel connected. The
feelings and possibilities he ought to have towards his loved loves are missing, and there is some awareness of
this absence. For Cotard delusion, the afflicted can no longer feel a connection between himself and the rest of
the world. Whatever role his body occupied in the world is impossible to conceive, as that place is now occupied
by absence. Again, note that the
absence
is noted. It’s not that there never was anything there—whatever
was
there is no longer present. The hole is glaring and experienced as a hole.
This absence—this hole—is ‘nothing’:
The mood that ordinarily binds us to the world breaks down and Heidegger refers to the sense of utter unfamiliarity
that arises through this as the ‘nothing’. This ‘nothing’, he explains, is not itself a being. It is a disintegration of
everyday belonging; the apprehension of a total absence of significance. One is no longer there anymore and all
that remains is the feeling of having ‘no hold’ on anything (Ratcliffe 2008).
It is this ‘nothing’ that compels Capgras and Cotard delusion sufferers to fill that void with narrative that
does not map to behavior as it should or would if the lack of existential feelings were instead negative beliefs—
attitudinal propositions. If you really believed you were dead, why would you eat? Why would you still act more
or less the same, most of the time? But, if you instead felt that your body was indeed disconnected with the
world, you would continue to act similarly to before, all while giving an unreliable account of your feelings.
Depression can also be examined under this light. One of the commonest expressions the depressed makes
is that she cannot imagine feeling joyful again, that a happy life just doesn’t occur to her as possible. In this case,
it seems like her imaginative horizon is what’s limited. But it could also be some attenuation of social and bodily
feelings that causes her imagination to shrink. And perhaps the connection between different kinds of existential
feelings—schizophrenia is very commonly precipitated by extended bouts of deep depression. By the time
schizophrenia is in full swing, however, the wider range of existential feelings are in chaotic flux. Depression
may not have a single cause, but existential feelings at least offer a single thread underlying the depressive
experience itself
6
—aberrant existential feelings.
To summarize, Ratcliffe proposes the concept of existential feelings, which he claims underlie all
experiences, perceptual or otherwise. When I see a chair, I experience the chair as a wide but limited range of
possibilities. The way I actually attend to the chair—the way the chair appears to me—is the foreground of
experience. But there is a background to this experience, or there ought to be, under normal circumstances.
When circumstances are abnormal, parts of the background become the foreground and the felt possibilities
for the chair are altered:
6
Again, conditions such depression as are often diagnosed in such a way as to preclude useful work being done to
understand and treat them effectively. Reconceptualizing depression in terms of existential feelings (as opposed to
fitting symptoms or subjective classifications) could lead to progress in the stubborn space. It ought to be eye-
opening and humbling that the most effective treatment by far has been found in research with psychedelic
compounds, which have an extremely strong existential footprint (explored further on).

6
…the structure of thought is like the horizonal structure of world experience. When we look at a chair, its hidden
sides are not part of what is actually perceived. However, the possibility of accessing them is part of the experience
and, as one moves around the chair, experience unfolds in line with tacit, bodily expectations (Ratcliffe 2008).
And this is just for straightforward perceptual experiences. Things get more complicated when we consider
experiences which involve social interactions and the abstract ideas that underlie them. Part of having existential
experience is feeling connected to everything in your world and that everything includes other supposed
worlds—your friends and family, citizens of your experience. When these feelings break down, these citizens,
these other people, are often the ones who notice. Schizophrenia, depression, Capgras and Cotard delusions—
these are all tremendously difficult to detect without outside assistance. And even then, detection and discussion
do nothing to convince the afflicted that their altered feelings are anything but real—after all, the feelings
are
real.
Eudaemonic Feelings
Ratcliffe’s existential feelings theory has myriad implications across disciplines, particularly research
concerned with understanding the aforementioned chronic conditions more holistically. But I think even this
would be limiting its deserved impact. The understanding and framing of existential experience as significant
for understanding a more fundamental and ancient concept—
eudaemonia
—that is, the sense of meaning, of
purpose and significance of our experiences.
There’s something that it’s like to feel connected to your body and world. And there’s something that it’s
like to care about and value things in the world. Moreover, there’s something that it’s like to experience oneself
in relation to anything at all. Lastly, there’s something that it’s like to feel as though things could be different
from how they are as a result of your actions. These kinds of experiences all have existential feelings attached
to them—they only make sense in light of the experienced relationships between entities that seem to matter.
Existential feelings are eudaemonic when they are used to generate meaningful reflections and meaningful
actions
7
. The sense in which these are meaningful is in the sense of feeling like they could lead to the fulfilment
of a greater purpose.
An important note on ‘eudaemonia
8
’: I’m using eudaemonia in a sense that likely does not reflect its
creators’ original intent
9
. Here,
Eudaemonia
is the experiencing of things in such a way that they feel positively
significant and purposeful. It’s not a matter of judgement or belief but comes prior to these. Eudaemonia
7
I’m going to attempt to use meaning in the ‘meaning of life’ sense as sparingly as possible, even though that’s often
the right word for what I mean. Instead, I’ll use eudaemonia where possible. It won’t always be possible, so bear
with me.
8
Another note—eudaemonic feelings are instances of eudaemonia. Eudaemonia is the overall experience of
significance. For something to be eudaemonic means it leads to eudaemonia.
9
The etymology of ‘eudaemonia’ is a real adventure. Literally, the original Greek breaks down to something like
‘feelings of good spirit’, but it has been translated as ‘happiness’ or ‘welfare’. Later scholars have pushed for ‘human
flourishing’ or ‘prosperity’—this based on the context provided by Aristotelian and Hellenistic thinkers.
Unsurprisingly, even the Greeks used the term in various ways—turns out the tradition of confusing and
gerrymandering terms runs deep. In the end, the word will mean whatever we make it mean. Today, it means
feelings of significance.

7
occupies the same space as experience does in Nagel’s
What is it like to be a Bat?
(1974). Our description of
phenomenological events cannot hope to capture the experience itself
10
. Eudaemonia is a smaller part of the
overall experience that it is constructed from the existential horizon, which is itself comprised of felt social ,
conceptual, and sensorial possibilities. Therefore, the landscape of eudaemonia is flexible to change. The
reason I’ve taken to reviving and altering an existing term instead of sticking with calling it a ‘felt sense of purpose
and meaningfulness’ is that doing so is simpler and less fraught than trying to make overloaded terms like
meaning and purpose work even harder than they already do: ergo, eudaemonia.
Definition for eudaemonia and existential feelings in hand, I’ll begin by stating my premises more formally:
Existential feelings have a present, foreground (one’s personal, present reality) and a background (the space of
possible realities). All existential feelings have the capacity to become eudaemonic. Eudaemonic feelings are
existential feelings that feel significant, can be attended to, and are accompanied by a sense of agency. These
are amenable to background changes.
In neat propositional form:
P1 Existential feelings are the felt sense of connectedness and affordance that sculpts and shapes our experiences
P2 Existential feelings are a part of every experience
P3 Existential foreground feelings require a background, an experienced sense of unrealized possibilities
P4 Altering the existential background alters existential feelings
P5 Eudaemonic feelings are existential feelings that contribute to a sense of eudaemonia, of the significance and meaning
of experience
P6 Not every existential feeling is eudaemonic; however, each has the capacity to become eudaemonic
And the conclusions:
C1 Since eudaemonic feelings inherit the properties of existential feelings, they too are dependent on a background, a
sense of unrealized possibilities; therefore, altering one’s possibility horizon can alter one’s sense of eudaemonia
C2 All experiences have the potential to be eudaemonic; that is, to be experienced as meaningful and significant
Existential feelings theory claims that every experience we have is endowed with and informed by an existential
foreground and background. Everything we see, think, or feel is felt both in connection to ourselves and to the
greater sense of ourselves in the universe. Here, we’re going to add one more thing—
some
of these feelings are
more than experiences of existence—they’re direct experiences of significance and meaning.
Before moving on and to hopefully preclude consternation and confusion on behalf of the reader, I’m
going to take some time to more carefully state where the view I’m putting forth stands in relation to the wider
field. For example, it’s implied that eudaemonic feelings play some role in wellbeing, life satisfaction, hedonic
10
Not only is it currently the case that we have no way of modeling experience that’s remotely close to isomorphic
with experience—such a thing might well be impossible. Chalmers’ ‘hard problem’ illustrates this depressingly well
(Chalmers 1995).

8
pleasure, and/or happiness. While this could be true, this is beyond my claims here—I’ll leave it as an exercise
to the reader to connect eudaemonic feelings with any of these other great concepts. I would not blame the
reader for failure to see how eudaemonia is distinct from these concepts, as I did use words such as “purposeful”
and “meaningful” to describe eudaemonia. I blame both myself and language for the confusion. Eudaemonic
feelings are not themselves constitutive of any particular larger concept such as happiness or life satisfaction.
Instead, eudaemonic feelings are the experienced reality of things
feeling
significant—or not. It is not enough to
say that there is such a thing as experience and that it is all equally significant. This is not true of lived experience.
Some things feel more or less significant than others and this is more than just a matter of evolutionary fitness.
And it’s more than raw affect (or
probably
is—the term has many active definitions
11
). Eudaemonia is more than
the foreground of experience—it inherits the possibility horizon of existential feelings, which textures it in a
unique way that defies a flattening process into a mental state. It is not a mental state—instead, it is an
experienced fact of material reality.
Existential feelings theory loosely tracks with interface theories of perception
12
(Hoffman, Singh and Prakash
2015). These posit that we never really experience reality through our senses and instead generate a simulation—
an interface—that is sufficient for our survival and flourishing. Under this view, the assertion that all experience
has existential feelings meddling and mingling with results is unsurprising. The only experiences we have are
those that are already shaped to give us a useful interface. Eudaemonic feelings would also be a natural fit for
interface theories, though they require a slightly different justification for their continued existence (explored
later).
There are some constraints on eudaemonia. For one, it is contingent on attention. Experiences cannot feel
significant unless they can be attended to. Everything that can be attended to is at least potentially meaningful,
but not everything can be attended to. We cannot imagine things that are unimaginable, such as novel colors
(not shades, but entirely new colors), impossible shapes, new sensory modalities, or—crucially—future
experienced reality that stands outside our possibility horizons. Therefore, eudaemonia is indirectly constrained
by material reality
13
. It is not truly possible to imagine myself being anyone other than myself, though it’s possible
to imagine the idea of being a person who could imagine that, which can cause me to have experiences roughly
aligned with those of the object of my imaginings. Eudaemonia is personal and constrained to each of us, a self
or self-like thing in the middle of a much more complex system. It is also necessary to at least generate some
11
Affect
has at least two very different definitions, neither of which captures eudaemonic feelings and neither of
which is quantifiable enough to be more than a placeholder or catchall in published research:
“Hobson takes it to be a feature of interpersonal relatedness. Solomon, in contrast, is dismissive of ‘mere’ affect,
which he construes as an awareness of internal bodily states. Others use it in a physiological rather than
phenomenological sense… Some use ‘affect’ as a very general term to cover all those states we might think of as
emotional… In psychiatric diagnosis, it is often used to refer to a patient’s observable emotional responsiveness to
stimuli” (Ratcliffe 2008).
12
Hoffman et al. get citation credit because they coined the best term, not because they were first or the best theorists
to get around to the idea of simulations and interfaces.
13
Parallel to this idea, our brains are also confronted with and trained according to the physical possibilities presented
to them. Even a complex system such as motion in space and time is therefore greatly simplified by reality itself.
Eudaemonia is just a different kind of natural constraint. Consider it the mental equivalent of the physical constraints
on motion and its technical implementation becomes more approachable.

9
experience through some kind of sensory modality, otherwise the possibility horizon cannot form
14
. The physical
medium for eudaemonia is just that—physical—but there’s nothing in principle that says the medium matters
more than the medium being made of matter. Even this could be untrue (though the only things we
know
to
be capable of experience are beings made of matter).
Eudaemonia sounds strange and somewhat arbitrary—at least it does to me, stepping outside what I think—
but it’s meant to capture something that is both universal and unnoticed under normal circumstances. In other
words, it
ought
to seem at least a bit strange and unintuitive because we were never meant to pull experience
out of the physical universe and into philosophy for an intense
en vivo
analysis. Experience is strange, existential
feelings are stranger, and eudaemonia is stranger still. Eudaemonia is the part of experience that makes the
experience seem like more than
just
a series of events that occur on a limp and lifeless gray canvas—it’s the
existence of the experiential canvas itself. It’s the color to color
15
. And it’s something that can be augmented or
attenuated by experience of the physical world. When I say that I
care
about something happening—something
good or evil or neutral—I am expressing eudaemonia, something I attain by the grace of experience and its
existential feelings.
It should now be clearer why a comparison to happiness or hedonic states of pleasure or wellbeing is outside
the present scope. While intuition screams that all of these have some dependence on eudaemonic feelings,
that intuition ought to be formalized separately
16
. For present purposes, we’ll focus on the embodied nature of
existence and the feelings that accompany those, particularly the feelings that are capable of holding our
attention and affecting our experience and behavior. This brings us back to existential feelings.
Existential feelings are—as explored earlier—the experience of being connected to the ideas and apparent
and potential realities of our personal universes, i.e., our selves
17
. The way things are in actuality, the things we
can directly attend to—these are the foreground of experience. Classically, most views only consider the
foreground, the direct experience (though they acknowledge that we
can
certainly conceive of possible
experiences).
Background feelings are more complex because they are never given first class status as objects of attended-
to experience. Without them, the possibility horizon that Husserl and Merleau-Ponty describe is not coherent—
and neither are Ratcliffe’s existential feelings. A chair would have to seem to be exactly what it appears to be
and no more. There would be no sense of affordance, no conditions or expectations, no felt possibilities beyond
its apparent occupation of our visual space. This sounds wrong. Perception is more than a projection of physical
features. Beyond that function, perception is the introduction of a smaller world of chairlike possibilities to our
larger world of possibilities. There is no such thing as a chair without chairlike possibilities.
With a belief in the potential for the chair to perform some task for me or for something or someone else
that matters to me, I am opened to thoughts and actions that could result in meaningful (eudaemonic)
14
Barring preloaded experience being accessed through some memory process or another science fiction scenario
like wireheading (replacing sensory systems with analogues)
15
Not literally—this is poetic license.
16
But it would be a fascinating project, as we’d be building a bridge between experience and wellbeing et al.
17
This is neutral on the question of the self being an absolute thing or a convenient construction of experience (my
position). Here, I’m using the ‘self’ as an apparently unified experience over space and time.

10
experiences. These imaginings of potentials may not be meaningful in the moment, but they carry the meaning
forward in time to be realized in a foreground. They represent a meaningful future that is made possible through
agents. The backdrop of imagined potential textures the whole of experience. Moreover, the felt sense of our
ability to realize
these imagined realities textures the whole. In other words, what it is like to be us necessarily
includes feeling like the world we experience is bigger than what we directly perceive—it includes a much bigger
possibility space. This larger space carries with it the feeling of being able to choose from among the felt
possibilities. Taken together, these feelings are eudaemonic.
Given this liberal definition of eudaemonic feelings, it might be loudly wondered if other, non-existential
feelings can also be meaningful. Recall Ratcliffe’s noematic and noetic feelings—noematic feelings are bodily
feelings and noetic feelings are feeling of the world, through the body. Are bodily feelings eudaemonic by
themselves? And are all feelings of things in the world eudaemonic? The answer to both questions is that it
depends on how these feelings are interlaced with existential feelings.
Before moving on, I need to make something clear about the distinction between belief and experience.
My arguments do not hinge on any strongly eliminativist conception of beliefs, but Ratcliffe’s existential feelings
work has been critical of their role in phenomenology. Why call a feeling a belief? Beliefs are traditionally held
to be propositional attitude towards something, but such propositions are constructed with language and
memory—they are
not
the experience. What I say I
believe
and what I say I
experience
are in no way describing
the same thing. These do often overlap—words can map to experience through memory. But in this case, the
map is not the territory, no matter how real the map may seem to me. This distinction is critical for
understanding the significance of existential and eudaemonic feelings.
Let’s take a step back and examine what we’ve covered so far. First, we discussed Ratcliffe’s existential
feelings and how they inform and underlie our experiences—every one. Next, we discussed several strange
conditions (and the unfortunately not strange depression) that highlight the importance of existential feelings as
tools for survival and flourishing. Then, we came up with a list of formal propositions. We proposed that some
existential feelings are eudaemonic. This is done through attention and feelings of free agency, which apparently
results in a significant and singular kind of experience.
There were six propositions given, with two main conclusions to be drawn from them, should they hold
true. I’ll now return to each in kind:
P1 Existential feelings are the felt sense of connectedness and affordance that sculpts and shapes our experiences
Ratcliffe’s theory has been covered at length. In interest of building a case for meaningful feelings on top of
existential feelings, I have to rely on this being a strong foundation.
P2 Existential feelings are a part of every experience
This is fundamental to existential feeling theory—every experience is more than some flat, voyeuristically
attended-to sensorial play. Instead, experience is always grounded in the experiencer’s intimate connection to
their world and the objects they experience within it. This normally produces a seamless sensation of being.
However, as explored here, a breakdown between foregrounds and backgrounds or between noematic and
noetic domains results in an attenuation and distortion of existential feeling. This loss manifests itself through
abnormal beliefs and aberrant behavior. The normal state of things is harmonious and seamless—existential
feelings are difficult to recognize because they are directly experienced in a way that does not lend itself to
wasteful attention.
P3 Existential foreground feelings require a background, an experienced sense of unrealized possibilities

11
One of the key ideas behind existential feelings is that they involve not just a sense of how things relate to each
other in the moment, but also a sense of a wide horizon of possible relations that are currently or possibly
available to our experience. This background must be built up through learning and experience, maintained
through some underlying complex system that converges on order and structure.
P4 Altering the existential background alters existential feelings
The background of existential feelings can and will change as a result of environmental changes. Many of these
changes are monitored through our sensory modalities—these modalities are practically necessary for the
construction of our possibility horizons. However, the process of modifying the horizon also includes inner
reflection and modification—alterations sans sensory input.
It should be noted that both the horizon and its contents are part of existential feelings. The dimensions
and qualities of the horizon can change, resulting in changed experience. Additionally, the contents of the
horizon can shift—this alters the resulting experience. Moreover, a
lack of change
to either is itself felt, as is a
possibility of change
. If any of these aspects of background existential feelings fails to perform its function, the
result can be a greatly altered affective and behavioral life on the part of the experiencer.
P5 Eudaemonic feelings are existential feelings that contribute to a sense of eudaemonia, of the significance and
meaning of experience
We’ve introduced eudaemonia already and it clearly fits this premise. However, it is not my intention to wish
it into existence. Eudaemonic feelings really are a part of experience. The way things seem to matter to us is
not exhausted or explained by biological, evolutionary, computational, complex systemic, or functional
accounts—or any account of which I am aware. Other, more distant fields such as ethics take mattering as a
matter of fact. A utilitarian maximizes or minimizes something—hedonic pleasure, wellbeing, suffering,
entropy—but it all presupposes a significance to any action. A deontologist constructs/observes rules and follows
them—according to an underlying supposition that following the rules
results
in something. Eudaemonia is
always present.
Nihilism of course comes to mind as a view in direct opposition to eudaemonic feelings: “Nihilism literally
has only one truth to declare, namely, that ultimately Nothingness prevails and the world is meaningless”
(Thielicke 1969). Dark words, yet we ought to keep in mind that eudaemonic feelings come prior to belief—
which Nihilism is
18
. Still, eudaemonic feelings are at least somewhat influenced by the state of the world:
“If nihilism proves victorious–and it’s well on its way…our world will become ‘a cold, inhuman world’ where
‘nothingness, incoherence, and absurdity’ will triumph (Pratt n.d.).”
According to this prediction, were the world at large to commit to act in accordance with nihilism’s expectations,
eudaemonic feelings would die out in an extinction event of our own making. In 1927, Heidegger gloomily
declared that nihilism was already the “normal state of man” (Being and Time)—yet here we are today, almost
a century older, a near-exponentially growing population of nihilists. It’s possible that nihilism has crept its way
into humanity where it hadn’t been present before, but that’s an empirical question for someone else to answer.
18
At least, nihilism has been expressed and explored in terms of beliefs. I actually think there is such a thing as
experienced
nihilism, which is an inability or loss in eudaemonic feelings, an alienation from meaning.

12
Were it true—that we’ve grown nihilistic in belief—the resulting behavior would probably diminish our
eudaemonic potential. Eudaemonia demands that we prepare a space for it.
P6 Not every existential feeling is eudaemonic; however, each has the capacity to become eudaemonic
What makes an existential feeling eudaemonic or not? It’s a great question and the answer isn’t easy to state.
Let’s start with examining existential feelings. We’ve claimed that existential feelings shape and constitute all
experiences, but
some
experiences have diminished or distorted existential feelings. When these feelings
change, even boring cases of perception can become quite strange. To go back to the chair example, chair
perception without existential feelings would be impossible. Your brain could still receive material information
about the chair through your eyes. Edges, luminosity, color gradients—these do not require any particular
background. However, it’s unclear what else could be gathered without existential feelings. The chair could not
have affordances, as those require a background. Could the chair even be a ‘chair’? No. A chair is what it is in
light of what it is and what it is not, and both of those things are part of the background of experience.
Functionalists could certainly conceive of a functioning system that acts like our own without requiring
existential feelings. In fact, we’ve already built many mechanical functional equivalents, remarkable patterns of
charged silicon and copper that can detect chairs as well as or better than ourselves. Yet these systems are very
brittle and narrow and are (hotly) debatably capable of anything approximating knowledge, let alone experience.
They don’t see ‘chairs’—not yet (and possibly not ever). Instead, they perform the act of capturing some
information that can stand in place of the knowledge and experience of chairs. Chair-detecting systems pass on
potential representations but do not perceive
19
.
Eudaemonic feelings are a special class of existential feelings. In cases of perception, existential feelings
supply the necessary backdrop and context for the complete perception. Eudaemonic feelings supply the
necessary significance of the perceptual experience for the experiencing itself. It is not enough to say that I
perceive a chair, as though that was all there was to the experience—the chair also
feels
more or less significant
to me. This is a matter of experience, not judgement or belief. The experience is constrained and controlled
by the existential background.
Now, what are the conditions for an existential feeling to also be eudaemonic? For one, the existential
feeling must be
attended
to. There are no eudaemonic feelings without attention. The only things that can be
attended to are things that can be perceived. As explored earlier, this excludes things that are impossible to
imagine. Within the range of things that are possible to be imagined, the experiential potential can vary greatly.
We might expect close friends and family to be especially easy to attend to. Then there are threats (snakes,
dogs, sharp rocks) and sources of pleasure (rainbows, sugar, fluffiness). Some of these are learned earlier or
later but we build profiles of sources of eudaemonia. They stop our breath and slow down time. And the weak
ones escape our notice unless pushed to be forefront. Everything in our existential horizon has a profile, but
only some of this acquires felt significance. These are the sources of eudaemonia
20
.
19
These criticisms of functionalism are not central to my main claims here—even if functionalism could make
something else have minds and experience, it’s at least a fact of human minds that we feel a sense of connection
between us and the world around us. Without that connection, our perceptual experiences might (in my view,
almost certainly) no longer function or produce the behavior necessary for survival.
20
The reader may have noted these eudaemonic candidates are affective candidates. This ought not to be surprising.
Eudaemonic feelings are still affects. However, they are unique in that they are attended to, feel agential, and imbue

13
Note again that I’ve mostly avoided using ‘affect’ here, though it seems a healthy candidate for the same
feelings I’ve described. Affect is just not specific enough to fit the role eudaemonia fits. Even taken as how and
how much something feels, affect doesn’t address the question of feeling itself, nor does it have an existential
background, the possibilities of feeling that underlie eudaemonic feelings. The background is a significant part
of what makes experiences feel the way they do. And, given a supportive background, every experience can be
made meaningful.
C1 Since eudaemonic feelings inherit the properties of existential feelings, they too are dependent on a background,
a sense of unrealized possibilities; therefore, altering one’s possibility horizon can alter one’s sense of eudaemonia
Our first conclusion ought to follow straightforwardly from the premises. Existential feelings are real,
eudaemonic feelings are a particular subset of these that are attended to and have a conscious feeling attached
to them, and the thing that determines how and how much they feel is the existential background to each.
Therefore, altering this background will cause the feelings to change.
C2 All experiences have the potential to be eudaemonic; that is, to be experienced as meaningful and significant
The second conclusion ought also to follow straightforwardly. The bridge is as follows. First, we admit that all
experiences bring existential feelings along for the ride—or, rather, that existential feelings give a ride to all
experiences. Next, we posit that some of these feelings are eudaemonic. Then, we take the dependence of
eudaemonic feelings on background and claim that altering this background alters eudaemonic feelings. Done
so with intention and understanding, this ought to mean that every agent with existential feelings can be made
to have an experience of those feelings—an experience that feels both meaningful and significant.
It should be noted, of course, that existential feelings are a requirement for meaningful experience.
Therefore, any agent that does not have these feelings cannot possibly have eudaemonic feelings (though this
does not preclude other feelings). But, according to Ratcliffe, even those with serious conditions ought to have
existential feelings—just existential feelings that are no longer aligned with what living in reality requires. The
man with Capgras delusion still has existential feelings. He functions normally except in cases where he ought
to properly identify persons meaningful to him and does not have the proper experience of them as such. The
lack of experience is still itself a feeling—this is the ‘nothing’ Heidegger and others have described. Thus,
existential feeling is always present, or present in absentia. This therefore implies that eudaemonic feelings may
also be present wherever these are present, though these have additional conditions. As explored, eudaemonic
feelings require attention. That attention is not something that is always possible to grant.
Additional conditions for eudaemonia are difficult to identify. For example, one would expect some sense
of self to be central to the experience. After all, the self is what claims ownership of experience. Everything
appears to happen
to
the self. I say, “Oh how great it feels to have sunlight on my face!”, not “Ah, the sunlight
has made this complex system have a certain significant experience!”. The ability to reflect on and express the
nature of my experience is in no way necessary to have the experience, nor is the ability to put myself in the
middle of it. This is commonly uncovered in documentations of psychedelic experiences, where the
experiencer often expresses a significant, even complete loss in her sense of self. Moreover, there’s
the experience with a sense of overall significance that is wildly tangential to the dimensions of pleasure, pain,
arousal, and calmness.

14
neuroscientific data that support this account. The areas of the brain most commonly associated with selfhood
21
are barely active during psychedelic experiences ((citation needed)).
Another additional candidate condition for curating eudaemonia is the ability to reflect on one’s feelings
(as opposed to having a pure stream of feelings, indefinitely, without reflection). Such reflection could certainly
be necessary to sculpt and shape one’s existential background. If part of the background were building up a
library of possibly significant experiences, then such reflection would be necessary. However, to assert this
condition, I would have to first demonstrate that reflection is necessary for cultivating an existential background.
My love for speculation leads me to want to say this, as it would provide a specific tool for conscious reflection,
even answering in part why we even have consciousness. After all, if it were necessary to reflect in order to
survive and flourish, consciousness would have some great selection pressure that’s often missing from
evolutionary accounts
22
. But this is speculation, no matter how interesting. As it stands, I couldn’t claim that
reflection is necessary for eudaemonic feelings, though it certainly seems useful—perhaps indispensably so.
Perhaps one way to approach the question of reflection and narrative is to examine the way we speak about
things that seem eudaemonic. Indeed, this is at the core of existentialism—therefore, it ought not to be surprising
that existential feelings are found in narrative accounts. Chief among the narrative accounts are those centered
around the ‘meaning of life’. Were you to ask a random stranger what the meaning of life is, you’d get a
staggering variety of responses: “My family”, “My friends”, “God and country”, “LSD”, “Listening to The
Beatles on vinyl”—these accounts vary wildly but they do all share some very broad properties. Notably, they’re
all evocative of
experience
of some sort. None of them would be possible without experience, even the more
abstract among them (e.g., “God and country”). Constructing a narrative account of this meaning is
fundamentally dependent on reflection about direct experiences. But it’s not just any experience that can
contribute to the constructed narrative—just the ones which have strong existential underpinnings. Here are
some experiences without strong existential underpinnings which seem to prove poor fits for constructing
meaning:
Ex (1): The chronic feelings of pain in my hip
Ex (2): My feelings towards an ancient Sumerian woodcarver, long deceased
Ex (3): My feelings towards the star Mirfak, in the Perseus cluster
Ex (4): The feeling of attachment to my spleen
Ex (5): My feelings towards Steve, the stepbrother I didn’t know I had until two weeks ago
These lighthearted examples illustrate that bodily and world feelings are weak and disjointed when the object
of our meaningful feelings is non-salient. At first blush, the examples seem meaningless, even silly. However,
21
The “Default Mode Network” has been identified as a strong candidate for systems which work together to
generate the sense of a self among other selves.
22
Antonio Damasio’s ‘Somatic Markers Hypothesis’ is a sister to this idea. For him, consciousness is where we build
affective markers on concepts so we can harness them later, in order to resolve challenging siutations quickly and
intuitively. The underlying idea is the same. We have consciousness (awareness, not awakeness), so there’s a good
reason to suspect that our genes wanted consciousness, or at least its functions.

15
they are all
conditionally
meaningless. (1) is a part of aging for many, but if I’m 10 years old, chronic hip pain
is concerning and a potential cause for preventative surgery (e.g., to prevent early onset scoliosis). This concern
is unlikely to be directly included in my account of the meaning of my life, but an experience like this could
easily have an outsized influence on my construction of a possibility horizon. (2) might come to mean something
intimate if I happen to be named after this woodcarver and her legacy. (3) could be something I learned while
stargazing with a romantic partner, before being proposed to under the same shimmering sky. The star would
become a shining source of greater meaning. (4) is similar to (1). Normally, we don’t care or mind the spleen
(at least on in the West), but a medical emergency could change this. (5) is meant to include some chronology
as a limitation for feeling, but Steve could come roaring into my life. Or, learning of Steve’s existence and what
led to its obfuscation could rock me to my core.
It’s trivial to conjure a compelling narrative for any feelings we might attach to events
23
. However, the
examples above were actually meant to demonstrate experiences
lacking
a strong existential background. And,
without an unlikely narrative to put them in, they generally would be weakly felt. Our inability to find them
useful, their lack of salience—these are indications that they are weakly existential. As a result, they ought also
to be weakly eudaemonic. In fact, much of what we have experienced falls into this camp. Most experience
fades into the background and is ignored by memory. Even the experience that manages to make it to our
memory stores is mostly left there to deteriorate as newer, stronger feelings are experienced and reinforced.
Let’s return to narrative and its background. How might a sense of eudaemonia be constructed without an
existential background? We could imagine building this exclusively from foreground—direct experience,
straight from the multiverse. What I am currently, actively experiencing could be taken to be constitutive of a
greater whole experience. If I were, say, currently on fire, it could in fact be expected that my experience would
be entirely consumed with my being on fire. The feeling of the first snow of winter, the fleabite on my thigh,
my hopes for my children, the scent of the perfume of a concerned onlooker, my love of pi—these might
normally be candidate backgrounds to be placed in a foreground—but not when I’m literally on fire. The
experience of being on fire is certainly significant and salient, but it’s not a great candidate for a meaningful
experience. Being on fire is definitely
something
, but it’s missing a greater significance—a background to give it
meaning.
In fact, a person’s being on fire has been deeply meaningful to many. On 11 June 1693, Thích Qu󰈖 ng
󰉼 c famously (and heroically, if I may editorialize here) self-immolated as protest against what he considered
to be the tyrannical persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. The act was recorded and
spread throughout the world. Then-US President John F Kennedy remarked “No news picture in history has
generated so much emotion around the world as that one” ((citation needed)). And indeed, the South
Vietnamese Prime Minister Ngô ình Di󰈨m was forced to reform
24
as international and internal pressure
consequently mounted against him. Being on fire can in fact be one of the most meaningful experiences
possible—but it requires background.
It might be noted that in the on-fire example, I’m not just talking about the person being on fire but also
about the people observing the grim event. There is clearly an experiential difference between the observation
of the event and the experience of the event itself. To the direct experiencer, the feeling of being on fire is
23
I suspect that’s due to our continuous, compulsive reflection on our experiences. This process could be how we
take our foreground existential feelings and use them to fill out our background feelings.
24
Outwardly reform, at least. He bravely resisted doing anything moral throughout his tenure.

16
noematic. His nerves are desperately sending signals up to his brain and—taken together—they paint an
unambiguously painful picture for the attending mind. On-fire sensorial input is fast-tracked and highly salient.
To an observer, there are salience hurdles to overcome to have an experience of the monk’s experience.
They have to recognize that he’s a real person, that he has the capacity of being burned and feeling pain, and—
crucially, that his experience means something to them. If this last step is ignored, there is no eudaemonia
generated. (As an extension of this, one way to increase your horizon would then be to care about persons or
beings that could bring their own wider horizons. Eudaemonia can be augmented through connection
25
.)
Before moving on, I think it’s important to raise something that hasn’t yet captured our interests here but
which is a necessary aspect of both existential and eudaemonic feelings: free will, or ‘agency’, as I’ll call it. We
don’t have to espouse any particular view on agency, but we do have to admit that there is such a thing as a
feeling that we could act in such a way as to secure some desired outcome. It’s the
feeling
of agency that matters
most here.
Everything that is meaningful is perceived to be potentially responsive to our volition or to the volition of
something else we find meaningful. It’s the perception of ‘free’ agency that matters, not that free agency is ever
granted. And it’s a matter of experience, not belief. Tying this back to eudaemonic feelings, the feeling of
agency could be a candidate for a necessary condition of eudaemonia. Experiences feel significant, yes, but at
least part of that significance seems to stem from our role or our potential role in relating to them. Such a
relation requires a sense of agency. This sense feels qualitatively different than the sense of mere deterministic
causality that we have with most objects in our horizons. There’s an experienced difference between seeing a
Frisbee moving through the air and seeing a person throwing a Frisbee, causing it to move through the air.
This leaves two constraints on regular existential feelings being classified as eudaemonic feelings—attention
and a sense of agency. We must be able to attend to the feeling and the feeling needs to be accompanied by a
sense in which a perceived agent caused that feeling to occur. Then there’s the more speculative condition—
reflection. Reflecting on the things that cause eudaemonic feelings (often done through a discussion of meaning
and meaningful things) seems to inform the existential background and sculpt our experiences.
Summary so far
Let’s take stock of the ground covered and what’s left to cover. Our first interest was laying down Ratcliffe’s
existential feelings theory. In it, he claims that all experiences have a special class of feelings that help us make
sense of the world around us. Some of these are directly experienced and many are experienced indirectly,
either through feelings of absence or attenuation, or through feelings of possibility. These feelings of course
come with phenomenal qualities—they
feel
like something. My role was to capture a subset of these feelings and
brand them eudaemonic—that is, significant and meaningful. They feel directly so but also seem to have some
connection to at least some of our narrative accounts of meaning and significance. These feelings have to be
attended to and have to feel like they’re supported by agents who can possibly affect them.
In what remains, I will preempt the concerns and questions the reader might have. I can only make guesses at
these, so I apologize if I don’t respond to those concerns:
25
Or so I would predict. The exact kind of experiment you could run to demonstrate this is clearly out of scale to
speculate about, but this and other claims ought to be somewhat testable.

17
What exactly
is
the possibility horizon?
Shouldn’t there be some separation between perceptive and non-perceptive experiences and existential
feelings?
What about unconscious experience?
Aren’t different eudaemonic feelings just experiences with different affects?
What is meant by ‘significant’ or ‘meaningful’ feelings?
How is the term ‘eudaemonia’ useful? Why not just keep existential feelings and tack on some new
optional properties?
Existential/eudaemonic feelings are prior to belief and reason—but how is that possible for complex
objects?
What role does the ‘self’ play in existential/eudaemonic feelings?
How do intentionality and representation play out in existential/eudaemonic feelings?
(Per P2) Are existential feelings really attached to
every
experience?
(Per P6) Can
every
existential feeling really become eudaemonic?
Is eudaemonia really constitutive of a greater sense of the ‘meaning of life’?
What are some possible uses for eudaemonia in further research?
What exactly
is
the possibility horizon?
Ratcliffe describes it as follows:
Experience of something as an object consists of both its actual appearance from a particular perspective and the
co-included space of possible appearances. Thus what is actually given in experience is not all that is given. A sense
of the object as an enduring entity that is independent of oneself is a matter of its not being exhausted by the
actuality that is revealed to one’s current vantage point. The set of interrelated possibilities that surround an object
are referred to by Husserl as its ‘horizon’ […] …a horizon is not constituted by a single sensory modality. When
one perceives something visually, the possibilities that participate in the experience include perception by means
of other senses, such as touch. The horizons of visual experience include salient possibilities for tactile
manipulation, for practical engagement with an entity […] For example, when you look at the blade sitting on a
work surface you see that it is sharp, that it has the potential to cut you. The senses are intermingled in so far as
actualities for one sense are presented alongside possibilities for that sense and for other senses […] Horizons are
not static structures. Rather, they appear as potentialities for future activities and they unfold in organized ways:
Everywhere, apprehension includes in itself, by the mediation of a ‘sense’, empty horizons of ‘possible perceptions’;
thus I can, at any given time, enter into a system of possible and, if I follow them up, actual, perceptual nexuses.
As certain possibilities are taken up by perception and actualized, further possibilities show up and experience of
things takes on a harmonious, organized flow.
Ratcliffe then goes on to explain and explore how we’re not indifferent to this background but indeed the
opposite. The background has an “affective pull”—and this itself is a bodily feeling. (My narrower concept of
eudaemonic feelings leans on these feelings and asserts that they are qualitatively distinct from other feelings
that occupy the possibility horizon.) And there’s a great deal more to them. For the reader who finds themselves
un-swayed and un-swooned by Ratcliffe’s arguments as regurgitated and repackaged here, I highly recommend
his detailed account of theory in
Feelings of Being
(2008). And for the intrepid reader who still wants more, the
works of Stephan and Slaby, especially
Affective Intentionality and Self-consciousness
(wherein they treat
existential feelings as part of a larger affective process) (2008), as well as Kreuch’s
Self-feeling
(wherein he relates
existential feelings theory to the concept of self) (2019).

18
Shouldn’t there be some separation between perceptive and non-perceptive experiences and
existential feelings?
Perhaps. Ratcliffe doesn’t tend to differentiate between the two. This might due to a stronger claim that he’s
smuggling in—that all experience is equal. Or, rather, that all experience is exactly what it is, and the idea that
perceptions are somehow special is undermining our efforts to understand either. Given that I’ve leaned on
Ratcliffe so far, I’m willing follow him down this path. Why consider perceptions as unique among experiences?
They do have the virtue of sensorial input, which tends to lend some constancy to the experience that might
otherwise not be possible, but I don’t see this as sufficient reason to put them in a special box away from all
other kinds of experience.
What about unconscious experience?
Are there unconscious experiences? These could be experiences that aren’t documented by memory, right?
Or, what about experiences that never make it to conscious awareness but which nevertheless seem to be felt
by the body? Such experiences would fall outside the range of experiences that would normally have
existential/eudaemonic feelings attached to them. They wouldn’t be an any particular foreground and they
wouldn’t fit into the background, nor would they feel volitional or attendable.
It’s a bit out of scope to address these cases (and others, such as blindsight), but I believe I stand with
Ratcliffe in saying they’re not experiences if they’re not felt. If it’s just a matter of failed accounting, then they
can still be experiences, existential and (potentially) eudaemonic.
Aren’t different eudaemonic feelings just experiences with different affects?
No, affects aren’t attached to existential feelings. Affect has several candidate definitions (
see 11
) but none of
them would support existential feelings as an experienced, pre-affective process. You could call the experiences
of eudaemonic feelings instances of affect, but you’d be missing a significant part of what makes these feelings
interesting. Eudaemonic feelings are more specific than affect—they are feelings of significance above and
beyond the apparent material reality of the experience, a cosmic magic trick that makes wine from hydrogen
and oxygen and carbon. At any given moment, I am feeling a great deal of things and failing to feel an even
greater deal of things. These feelings are all real, but only some of them are eudaemonic. As explored, being
eudaemonic means being attended to and a feeling the agency to influence them and the world they are
connected to.
What is meant by ‘signicant’ or ‘meaningful’ feelings?
Even explaining these is a bit of its own hard problem, as feelings are (directly) ineffable. That said, they
can
be
reflected on be experienced, but any account we could give of them has to pass through the great filters of
reflection, language, and understanding. Therefore, I have to ask you, the reader, to use your own powers of
experience to open yourself to your feelings. The way the world around you feels more or less significant,
depending on the objects you’re perceiving and depending on how you are attending to them. And the same
can be done by casting your thoughts about. The feelings that are only present some of the time—when attention
and agency (and likely more conditions) are involved—these feeling are significant and meaningful. They are
significant not because of any reasons or beliefs you have but because they
feel
significant—they’re significant as
a matter of existence. These feelings are eudaemonic.

19
How is the term ‘eudaemonia’ useful? Why not just keep existential feelings and tack on some
new optional properties?
I could avoid introducing the concept and stick with existential feelings, of course. That might be a better option,
as it precludes questions like this one being posed. I personally fancy the term, because it emphasizes a part of
existential feelings that isn’t obvious when you consider them all as a monolith—the part that is imbued with a
special kind of magic—a significance that goes beyond affordance, relationships, and raw affect. Eudaemonia
also ties it into larger questions of meaning and significance, which could be dependent on the experience of
these feelings. Existential feelings are still a “newly discovered continent” (Stephan 2012) and it ought to be
expected that new regions of significance, new isthmuses of interest are discovered in the process.
Existential/eudaemonic feelings are prior to belief and reason—but how is that possible for
complex objects?
Unfortunately, the answer to this is extraordinarily challenging to give and would take many researchers much
time to answer (if they ever do). These sorts of
how
questions are fascinating but current scope will have to
focus on the
what
s. Speculatively, I can at least remark that many of the complex artificially intelligent systems
that we have been building have circumvented belief and reasoning in unexpected ways, all whilst providing
output that is in line with what we want. Learning turns out to be far less obviously structured and ordered than
we had expected (circumventing our expectations of knowledge and understanding as fundamental to
intelligence) and experiences might just be similar in this regard. Additionally, the embodied nature of
experience and the constraints of the physical universe seem to serve some role in greatly diminishing the need
for complex beliefs and reasoning skills playing a role in our lives. But again, this is out of scope. If I’m
somewhat right, there’s some process, then there’s some model to describe this. For now, we’ll have to be
content with recognizing the complexity of the problem.
What role does the ‘self’ play in existential/eudaemonic feelings?
Ratcliffe hasn’t committed to any particular model for the self, though he is interested in how it relates to
existential feelings:
“I will not offer a comprehensive account of the phenomenology of ‘self’ here and I do not wish to suggest that the
sense of self is wholly constituted by existential feeling. Nevertheless, I do at least want to maintain that existential
feelings are partly constitutive of selfhood. […] Hence the phenomenology of self, whatever else it might involve, is
not dissociable from existential feeling. It is a matter of relatedness, rather than of something pre-formed that then
enters into a relationship with body and world. Any sense of self that we have is grounded in existential feeling,
even though it might not be exhausted by it (Ratcliffe 2008).”
At least some of the sense of self is dependent on existential feelings. The sense is formed in embodied
systems and is constituted (at least in part) by the active process of experience—the self does not exist outside of
this experience.
Other existential feelings theorists have been more direct in trying to model how the sense of self relates to
these feelings. Stephan and Slaby have argued that existential feelings are both about the world
and
us. The
experience of a lion is both about the lion in the world and about the desires that we might have for the lion
(e.g., that it disappear) (Kreuch 2019). Helm (2001)’s term for this is ‘focus’, and he proposes that every emotion
has a focus—something that we care about. This something you care about is a potential, a possibility, and
therefore fits within the possibility horizon. With this, not only are existential feelings concerned with

20
possibilities of the world and the things in it, but they are also capable of directing a special subset of feelings
towards some central nexus—a self. This creates a unified direction of experience
26
:
“Importantly, our affective self-construals are not static entities of self-knowledge. They are inextricably interrelated
with action, they modify our actions from within. They are not separate representations of our agentive capabilities
but part of our agency itself. They are a felt awareness of what we can do and what we cannot do (Kreuch 2019).”
Tying this to eudaemonic feelings, one of our conditions for the feeling was a sense of agency. While it’s
not clear that a sense of a self is necessary for a sense of agency, the two do appear to be connected. Both
require a nexus of sorts. For agency, the nexus is the feeling that a single strong will is behind an action or
potential action. And for the self, the nexus is the feeling that all feelings are directed towards a single point—a
self. These are not quite the same thing, but their similarities help to explain how the two are lumped together
in both technical and colloquial discussions. So, the sense of self may not be absolutely necessary for
eudaemonic feelings, but it often claims itself present as an observer and accountant of those feelings.
Determining whether this is true or not is worthy of another paper.
How do intentionality and representation play out in existential/eudaemonic feelings?
Unevenly, at best. Confusedly and confusingly, more often. One of the strongest claims that existential feelings
theory makes is that experience is not representational, at least not in the way the term is usually applied.
Intentionality is also distorted so as to be unrecognizable.
Traditionally, a sensory perception such as vision is explained as follows: An object—let’s go back to the
chair—presents a set of properties through the way it interacts with photons bouncing off of it. If my eyes manage
to capture enough of the photons that interacted with the chair, I perceive that chair according to its represented
properties—dimensions, luminosity, gradients, etc. Then, I use my mind to recognize another pile of properties.
These include affordances and feelings (often called emotions for bad reasons). In the end, I am left with a
more or less accurate understanding of the chair, according to its real properties. The difference between this
kind of representation and what existential feelings says of representation is vast. For existential feelings, I (the
experiencer) am never experiencing the physical chair, if there is such a thing. The chair is not representing
itself to anyone. Instead, I am having many experiences and one of them could be an experience of a chair—
which may or may not be reflective of a physical chair. The chair exists as an object within my experience,
subject to my construction of the concept of ‘chair’. The chair experience is real—but so is every other
experience.
So far, this sounds like it could be some version of naïve realism or worse—a solipsistic spinoff. Fortunately, it’s
neither. Naïve realism pushes the idea that we experience things as they
really
are—but existential feelings theory
doesn’t assume our experiences are ever really reflective of some ultimate reality. Existential feelings theory
does at least assume that there’s a universe out there and that we have some connection to its properties. And
it also brings a strong but implicit assumption that experience is useful and even necessary for humans to
perform the tasks they perform. But beyond that, it doesn’t much worry itself with the problems of perception
or representation. Intentionality, however, serves a more central role.
Ratcliffe’s view is that existential feelings are ‘pre-intentional’:
26
And hints at the naturally selected-for origin of the feeling of agency, if I may speculate more wildly.

21
“Intentional states presuppose existential feelings. In order to experience an entity as threatening, enticing,
accessible to others or relevant to a project, one’s world must accommodate possibilities of those kinds. In their
absence, the associated kinds of intentional state could not be adopted. Existential feelings thus shape all
experience, thought and activity, insofar as they determine what kinds of intentional state are amongst one’s
possibilities. Hence we might describe them as ‘pre-intentional’ rather than ‘intentional’ (Ratcliffe 2012).”
Note that existential feelings are
pre-intentional
, not
nonintentional
. They are a necessary component to
building intentionality but are not themselves intentional.
Eudaemonic feelings are therefore the same. They provide pre-intentional context for the construction of
intentionality. As for representation, eudaemonic feelings are even more starkly non-representational. What
would it be to represent significance and meaning? How could objects in and of themselves have those qualities?
If there’s representation occurring down the road, the eudaemonic parts of experience will have to come along
as non-representational stowaways.
Per (P2) Are existential feelings really attached to
every
experience?
Ratcliffe’s response is yes, every experience is
pre-structured
by existential feelings. Some kinds of experience
are more susceptible to existential alterations than others. These are typically experiences involving salient
objects—friends, family, self. Our experiences of things that seem to matter are likely to be shaped by complex
and varied existential feelings.
Mind that I said
pre-structured
, as opposed to
constituted by
or
existential
(as in, ‘the experience is
existential’). Experiences are pre-structured by existential feelings. In its most abstracted form, existential
feelings theory begins with a pre-processing task through which experiences gather and are shaped by their
context. This gathering is a part of experience but is also a part of the construction of concepts and emotions,
made possible through existential feelings.
(Per P6) Can every existential feeling really become eudaemonic?
It’s not that existential feelings become eudaemonic so much as they
are
eudaemonic. Recall that there are (at
least) two conditions for their classification as eudaemonic—attention and a sense of agency, of the possibility of
our effecting a change we care about through action. Earlier, I covered some toy examples of experiences that
were unlikely candidates for eudaemonic feelings and demonstrated how each could be reframed and
contextualized so as to garner both attention and a sense of agency. This is true of
every
experience. While it
could seem surprising, the surprise dissipates when we consider experience as something that only comes about
when both attention and the feeling of agency are possible. It’s not that every experience has attention and
feelings of volition attached to it—but every experience has the
possibility
of this.
Perhaps a more entertaining yet informative example of this is uncovered through studying people under
the influence of psychedelic compounds. It’s quite common to hear Psychonauts strongly express felt
significance to just about everything, real or imagined. They weep at the sight of an ashtray and declare nirvana
as they stroke a spiny caterpillar. And it doesn’t stop at sensory input—they report new conceptions of words,
mathematical insights, and radical political perspectives. Though many of the things they find profound and
real in the moment are later found to be hallucinatory wisdom, the fact is that the eudaemonic feelings they
experience are real, if atypical.

22
Is eudaemonia really constitutive of a greater sense of the ‘meaning of life’?
In earlier iterations of this project, I had hoped to make this connection a centerpiece, but it quickly became
clear that expanding existential feelings was its own project. I don’t have space to make this case fully here, but
I believe that our account of the ‘meaning of life’ is inextricably connected to both our ability to experience
eudaemonic feelings and to the quality and quantity of those experiences. Implicit in this are the ability to attend
and the feeling of agency—both would be necessary conditions to realizing a meaning to life, whatever it is. But
beyond those conditions, there is the feeling—the lived feeling—of caring about things. Taken together and
through social and personal construction, I believe the ‘meaning of life’ could be formalized as an emergent
property of systems involving agents with eudaemonic feelings. I will not be able to establish this claim more
fully or strongly and will instead leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide whether the meaning of life could
be a meaningful concept without eudaemonic feelings.
What are some possible uses for eudaemonia in further research?
I can think of several candidates. We’re just getting started with modelling and theorizing altered states of
consciousness. Now that regulatory agencies are willing to reopen research in the space, I’d expect to see difficult
consciousness questions like those explored here opened before us to analyze and review. Eudaemonic feelings
are a great fit for these studies. So yes, eudaemonia and psychedelics are a fated match.
Relatedly, there’s the ongoing work in providing treatment for people with depression or depression -
proximate conditions
27
. Psychedelics have already proven absurdly proficient at treating these and other hard
cases
28
. Beyond the pharmacological approach, more traditional therapeutical work could try to bring out and
emphasize eudaemonic feelings directly. Ask “How strongly does this make you feel”, as opposed to “What
does this make you feel”? And do the same for questions of agency and attention.
There’s a great, developing parallel path to this approach that already has a library of evidence and support:
Logotherapy, a branch of psychotherapy which employs and emphasizes logic and the felt agency to help
patients through their various complications. Viktor Frankl conceived of the method prior to and during the
horrors of the holocaust he survived, realizing that there were significant differences in experience for men and
women of similarly horrifying material circumstance. In his seminal work,
Man’s Search for Meaning
, much of
it written on scraps of prison contraband, he declares (emphasis mine):
Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has
already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should
become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We
should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that
we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene
to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology "homeostasis", i.e., a
tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a
worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a
potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him (Frankl 1959).
27
Foolishly called ‘mood disorders’, an artifact of the strange psychological past
28
((Citations and explanation forthcoming))

23
The parallels between Frankl’s thinking and those encountered in existential/eudaemonic feelings are
unmistakable. My hope is that at least some of the parallels are a matter of convergence on central truths.
Logotherapy is alive and well, but it hasn’t quite made it out of Austria and its neighboring nations. Cognitive
Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a spiritual successor to logotherapy, however. CBT walks depressed patients
through their conditions and asks them to reframe and reimagine actions and potentials available to them. As
of this moment, it’s the most successful therapeutic treatment for depression ((citation needed)). If existential
and eudaemonic feelings are in fact good models for the early experiential process, this could be factored into
how effective treatment is performed.
The last and most speculative use for eudaemonia is in general AI research—ethics, safety, and alignment.
If experience of the kind that is subjectively significant is in fact contingent on integrated, embodied, enactive,
emergent systems like us, then incidental horrors waged on artificial minds might be less likely than ever. AI
safety is also worried about AI ethics and some of their concerns could be informed by what we learn about
experience, including eudaemonic experience. AI alignment might be the biggest target for this work, as
questions of meaning and significance are disturbingly pressing when one is building a system that can and will
affect billions of lives. Should our creations maximize pleasure? Minimize pain? Or, should they maximize
eudaemonic feelings? Answering questions of experience and consciousness is more pressing than ever.
Concluding Remarks
We’ve covered a lot of ground in a drunkenly winding path, but hopefully the main sites were hit on the way. I
began by exploring schizophrenia, depression, and the Capgras and Cotard delusions. Then, I related those to
existential feelings, a project formalized in earnest by Ratcliffe to capture a fundamental part of experience.
Existential feelings were described as ways of finding ourselves in the world, sculpting and constituting noematic
(bodily) and noetic (worldly) experiences. Next, I explored the background to existential feelings—the possibility
horizon, a felt space that sculpts each experience. This included the sense of absence, of ‘nothing’, that we
rarely attend to. All this was preamble to our discussion of eudaemonia.
We introduced our own useful term,
eudaemonia
, to describe a unique subset of existential feelings that
feel
significant in a way that other existential feelings don’t. These feelings color our overall experiences. They
get at least some of their feeling from the sense of possibility that underlies them. This sense of possibility is
brought out through (at least) two of the conditions I named for eudaemonia: attention and the feeling of agency.
Experiences only feel significant and meaningful when we can attend to them and they feel like they present
some affordance we could imagine acting on.
Next, we formalized the claims being made here. There are existential feelings, they have a background,
changing the background changes the feelings, and eudaemonic feelings—as a subset of existential feelings—can
be created and controlled through manipulating the background. Though attention and feelings of agency are
necessary for eudaemonia, all existential feelings have this potential—and all experiences require existential
feelings.
We stepped through these claims and our conclusions. At this point, we took a step back and posed a series
of questions the reader might have (though we unfortunately were unable to ask the current reader to provide
their own). We attempted to give a good answer to each, keeping the conversation open. After all, existential
feelings theory is still nascent, in need of further scrutiny and development. My contribution to the discussion
was to highlight a corner of these feelings—eudaemonic feelings—and suggest how these might have been lost or
overlooked in broader conversations, because I believe questions of significance and meaning ought to
answered more satisfactorily than before, as scaling and alignment threaten to expose our weaknesses. Now that
we have tools and existential interest in doing so, it’s past time we answer these ancient questions.

24
Bibliography
Association, American Psychiatric. 2000.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-
TR).
Washington DC: American Psychiatric Press.
Chalmers, David. 1995. "Facing up to the problem of consciousness."
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2
(3): 200-219.
Chimero, Anthony. 2009.
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science.
Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Fodor, Jerry. 1984. "Observation reconsidered."
Philosophy of Science
23-43.
Frankl, Viktor. 1959.
Man's Search for Meaning.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1927.
Being and Time.
Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Helm, B.W. 2001. Emotional Reason. Deliberation, Motivation, and the Nature of Value. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hoffman, D., M. Singh, and C. Prakash. 2015. "Interface theory of perception."
Psychonomic Bulletin &
Review
22: 1480-1506.
Korzybski, Alfred. 1933. In
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General
Semantics
, 747-761. The International Non-Aristotelian Library Pub. Co.
Kreuch, Gerhard. 2019.
Self-feeling.
Vienna: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Nagel, Thomas. 1974. "What is it like to be a Bat?"
The Philosophical Review
83 (4): 435–450.
Poland, J. 2007. "How to Move Beyond the Concept of Schizophrenia." In
Reconceiving Schizophrenia
,
edited by M.C. Chung, K.W.M Fulford and G. Graham, 167-191. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pratt, Alan. n.d. "Nihilism."
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Accessed 8 6, 2020.
https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/.
Ratcliffe, M. 2008. Feelings of Being: Phenomenlogy, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality. Oxford: Oxford
University Press Print.
Ratcliffe, M. 2005. "The Feeling of Being."
Journal of Consciousness Studies
12 (8-10): 45-63.
Ratcliffe, M. 2012. "The Phenomenology of Existential Feeling." In
Feelings of Being Alive
, edited by S.
Marienberg and J. Fingerhut, 23-54. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. New York City: Philosophical Library.
2018.
Schizophrenia.
05. Accessed 07 17, 2020.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/schizophrenia.shtml.

25
Sechehaye, M. 1951.
Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl.
Translated by G. Ruben Hanson. Grune &
Stratton.
Slaby, J., and A. Stephan. 2008. "Affective Intentionality and Self-consciousness."
Consciousness and
Cognition
17 (2): 508-513.
Stephan, A. 2012. "Emotions, Existential Feelings, and Their Regulation."
Emotion Review
4 (2): 157-162.
Thielicke, Helmut. 1969. Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature, with a Christian Answer. Praeger.
Webber, J. 2018.
Rethinking Existentialism.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.