Law of interest

The Law of interest is a rule named in the book’s index at page 71. Its significance can be situated in the book’s account of affectivity: feelings are not inert contents enclosed within a subject, but intentional ways of relating to objects and of making those objects appear affectively charged. The available discussion does not provide a separate formal statement of the rule, so its connection to that account is best understood through the principles the book does articulate about feeling and its objects.

Affective Intentionality

The book rejects the view that feeling is merely an ineffable inner state, a subjective shiver attached to representations by chance or association. Joy, anguish, and melancholy are themselves consciousnesses, and consciousness is always directed toward something. Hate is directed toward someone; love, toward someone loved. Bodily agitation alone does not establish hatred or indignation: without an object toward which it is oriented, trembling, clenched fists, or blushing remain insufficient to constitute those feelings.

Feeling’s object-directedness does not make it intellectual representation. In unreflective feeling, consciousness is directed toward the object as hateful, attractive, or repulsive, rather than primarily toward its own feeling. Reflection can make the feeling itself an object of awareness, but that reflective awareness is distinct from the original affective consciousness. This distinction places interest not in a sealed interior state, but in the way consciousness is engaged with what it encounters.

How Feeling Gives an Object Its Sense

A feeling can disclose an object through an affective dimension without adding an ordinary, detachable property to it. Love of a person’s hands, for instance, is directed toward their finesse, whiteness, and lively movement; it projects an affective sense onto those features rather than simply registering them as representative qualities. Such affective qualities permeate the perceived object. When they disappear, as in depersonalization, perception may remain intact while the experienced world becomes impoverished.

This account also separates affective constitution from reactions directed toward an already constituted object. In imaging consciousness, bodily phenomena such as nausea, vomiting, pupil dilation, and ocular convergence can participate in forming the image: convergence, for example, mimes the imagined object’s proximity. A later, more independent reaction does not perform that constitutive work. The distinction matters because affective engagement may belong either to the way an object is given or to a response made in relation to it.

Feeling in Relation to the Imagined

The book distinguishes feelings incorporated into the constitution of an irreal object from feelings that develop more freely as reactions to it. A constituting feeling gives the object an affective character, such as repugnance; a more independent response can intensify beyond that function. Thus nausea in response to an imagined repugnant dish is not simply caused by a repugnant object in the way that revulsion toward a real dish may be sharpened by discovering further disagreeable details.

An irreal object can serve as the witness and unifying focus of this development, but it cannot supply the enrichment available from a real object. The feeling may swell through its own activity until it reaches nausea, yet it feeds on its own reflection. The book describes this imagined disgust as autonomous and exhausting: it sustains itself through continual self-creation, without an active object capable of compensating for its emptiness. This contrast clarifies how affective orientation can shape experience while also showing that engagement with an imagined object does not operate like engagement with a perceived one.