Mathematics educators have shown interest in affect and emotion – as expressed, for example, by the 2006 special issue of Educational Studies in Mathematics 26 no. 2 on affect. Despite this apparent interest, the predominant number of studies still focus on intellectual issues at the expense of the inherently affective dimen-sions of life that from a cultural historical position must not be left out of theory unless it is to be fundamentally flawed. "Quantitative" studies inherently miss the phenomenon because each variable is only an external manifestation of some phe-nomenon and, as philosophers from Baruch Spinoza to Georg Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx showed, there cannot be but spurious relationships between such exter-nalizations.