Self-Esteem Feelings

In contrast to previous conceptualizations of episodic self-esteem as a cognitive assessment of one’s own self, recent proposals have categorized this phenomenon as an affective state. In this vein, self-esteem has been regarded as a self-conscious emotion (Salice, Self-Esteem, Social Esteem, and Pride. Emotion Review 12(3): 193–205, 2020) and an existential feeling (Bortolan Self-Esteem and Ethics: A Phenomenological View. Hypatia 33(1): 56–72, 2018; Self-esteem, Pride, Embarrassment, Shyness. In The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion, ed. Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer, 358–368, London/New York: Routledge, 2020). While concurring with these recent accounts on the affective nature of self-esteem, this chapter also argues that none of them fully captures its nature. It argues that self-esteem is better understood as an umbrella term for a group of intentional feelings in which the subject valuates herself and senses fluctuations in her own value. The chapter also discusses the place of self-esteem feelings within the affective mind.