Abstract

Objective of this text is to present some descriptive arguments in regard to the assertion that our affectivity constitutes is a socially structured reality. We start with the hypothesis according to which the affective life of the human being reaches its most specific goal through a process of constitution of desire in which my preferences are always defined according to the preferences of others. In order to demonstrate the conditioned character of our preferences, we shall consider ideas derived both from the phenomenology of Michel Henry and Emmanuel Housset, but also from the mimetic anthropology developed by Paul Dumouchel in line with the anthropological thought of René Girard. We show that not only our own, but also the preferences of others are socially conditioned. The language of our affections belongs to the order of conditioned propositional acts, that is, of those who are not carriers of their own conditions of truth. Our emotional life is like an act of language, whose realization presupposes conditions that are no longer in the hands of the subject of the discourse. The text ends with a brief consideration of the ontological sense of the virtue of gratitude.