![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
In Being and Time as well as in his later writings, Heidegger comes to distinguish between fundamental moods and everyday or inauthentic moods. He also claims that phenomenology, rather than psychology, is the appropriate method for examining moods. This article employs a schematic approach to investigate a phenomenology of fundamental moods in terms of its possibilities and limits.
Since, in Being and Time, the distinction between fundamental moods and ordinary moods is tied to the division between authenticity and inauthenticity, the latter concepts need to be addressed first. Guided by Klaus Held’s article ‘Fundamental Moods and Heidegger’s Critique of Contemporary Culture’, the second part of the article argues that Heidegger’s phenomenology of moods is indeed one‐sided, favouring anxiety at the expense of awe. Finally, I argue that, contrary to Held’s claims, this one‐sidedness cannot be amended by the means one finds in Heidegger’s analyses. Instead, it is necessary to undertake closer examination of those moods which necessarily involve the other person.
Notes
1 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), p. 35 (Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), henceforth cited as BT). Throughout this article, references are made to the page numbers of the German editions of Heidegger’s texts which are given as marginal numbers in the English translations.
2 ‘Grundstimmung und Zeitkritik bei Heidegger’, in O. Pöggeler and D. Papenfuss (eds) Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, Vol. I (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1992) (‘Fundamental Moods and Heidegger’s Critique of Contemporary Culture’, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock, in J. Sallis (ed.) Commemorations: Reading Heidegger from the Start (Bloomington, Ind. Indiana University Press, 1993), henceforth cited as FM, p. 287).
3 For more detailed investigations, with tasks and goals diverging from the question posed here, see Peter Trawny, Martin Heideggers Phänomenologie der Welt (Freiburg: Alber, 1997), and Boris Ferreira, Stimmung bei Heidegger. Das Phänomen der Stimmung im Kontext von Heideggers Existenzialanalyse des Daseins (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002).
4 Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–8), Gesamtausgabe Vol. 65 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1989) (Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999), henceforth cited as CP).
5 Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit, Gesamtausgabe Vol. 29/30 (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2004) (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World – Finitude – Solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) (henceforth cited as FC)).
6 In his article ‘Heidegger und das Prinzip der Phänomenologie’, in A. Gethmann‐Siefert and O. Pöggeler (eds) Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), Klaus Held shows that the radicalization of the phenomenological method remains the most important goal of Heidegger’s philosophy after Being and Time.
7 Adorno’s prominent criticism of authenticity in his Jargon of Authenticity involves a criticism of (Heideggerian as well as Husserlian) phenomenology as a method, even though Adorno does not provide many arguments for his rejection of phenomenology. Mostly, he dismisses it as a form of idealism, yet without discussing what form of idealism, if any, is meant here.
8 Hence Heidegger’s observations regarding Schein and Erscheinung in BT, §7.
9 Stephen Mulhall, Routledge Guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time (London: Routledge, 1996) (henceforth cited as H & BT).
10 Heidegger mentions the ‘voice of the friend’ in Section 34 (BT, 206). While it might be tempting to refer back to this earlier passage when interpreting the ‘call of conscience’, there are no real indicators in the text that warrant such a connection since the earlier passage is not related to questions of conscience.
11 Mulhall states: ‘This is Heidegger’s basic diagnostic assumption about the errors of his predecessors and his colleagues: their failure to pose the question of Being correctly is caused by and is itself a failure of authenticity’ (H & BT, 33). Yet Section 6, in which Heidegger discusses the need to destruct the history of philosophy, does not mention authenticity, nor does the analysis given here resemble the examination of authenticity in any significant way.
12 Oliver Cosmus discusses several positions regarding the ‘hypothesis of transformation or conversion’ to show how Being and Time is frequently misread as an ‘instruction for being authentic’. See Oliver Cosmus, Anonyme Phänomenologie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), pp. 53ff.
13 The main results about moods gained in Being and Time are confirmed, for example, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, §17.
14 Throughout this article, the term ‘mood’ will be used. This decision makes it impossible to distinguish between Befindlichkeit and Stimmung as Heidegger does when he writes, for example: ‘Was wir ontologisch mit dem Titel Befindlichkeit anzeigen, ist ontisch das Bekannteste und Alltäglichste: die Stimmung, das Gestimmtsein’ (BT, 134). Yet there are a number of good reasons for staying with the concept ‘mood’: ‘state‐of‐mind’ is certainly an awkward translation for Befindlichkeit. What Heidegger calls Grundbefindlichkeit in Being and Time corresponds to the Grundstimmungen in his later philosophy (except for the historical dimension, which is not yet quite obvious in BT), and ‘fundamental moods’ has become established as the standard translation for Grundstimmungen. In order to stress the relation and contrast between ‘fundamental moods’ and everyday moods, it is more helpful to stay with the term ‘moods’ throughout the article rather than using ‘attunement’, which is otherwise a good translation for Stimmung.
15 It seems that Heidegger might be more sympathetic to phenomenological psychology as developed by some psychologists following Husserl’s leads. At the same time, Heidegger would demand a careful examination of the basic presuppositions to make sure that the phenomenological principle – in itself highly difficult and problematic – is indeed being considered. Yet Heidegger never states that psychology should be abandoned; he only points out that Daseinsontology precedes psychology and other sciences, and that the latter remain groundless if they do not consider ontological issues while constantly making implicit claims about Being.
16 A much more detailed and differentiated phenomenological account of the contradictions in certain psychological methods is the one developed by Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, especially in his Phenomenology of Perception.
17 Martin Heidegger, Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte ‘Probleme’ der ‘Logik’ (Winter Semester 1937/8), Gesamtausgabe Vol. 45 (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1984) (Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected ‘Problems’ of ‘Logic’, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Shuwer (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994)).
18 Heidegger states explicitly that startled dismay as a fundamental mood of the other beginning can best be understood in relation to (but also as different from) wonder as mood of the first beginning (see CP, 15).
19 Held points out that there are a few exceptions even within Being and Time (BT, 391, 373f.) and especially in later texts. Cf. FM, n. 53.
20 Without contesting this basic one‐sidedness, I would like to repeat my warning against a straightforward understanding of authenticity and its role within BT, especially if such an understanding involves the search for a ‘transition’ to authenticity as discussed above.
21 I shall not discuss this part of the argument in any more detail here since the relation between first beginning and other beginning as well as the attribution of certain fundamental moods to the Greek world and our world are difficult and controversial topics, requiring a detailed treatment. However, it is worth noting that Heidegger describes startled dismay as the mood we experience as we discover ‘that being is’ (CP, 15).
22 As far as I can tell, Held would like to retain this distinction and its applicability to moods.
23 Levinas hints in several places that he does not wish to abandon phenomenology overall; he writes a ‘Phenomenology of Eros’ (Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), Section IV.B), and a rather striking remark about phenomenology can be found in ‘Diachrony and Representation’: ‘I have attempted a “phenomenology” of sociality starting from the face of the other person – from proximity – by understanding in its rectitude a voice that commands before all mimicry and verbal expression, in the mortality of the face, from the bottom of this weakness’ (‘Diachrony and Representation’, in Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 109).
24 It would be fascinating to investigate certain lines that lead from Heidegger to Levinas, and especially to investigate the sections on the ‘Call of Conscience’ regarding their potential for Levinas’s notion of the ‘Call of the Other’.
25 The discussion regarding Levinas’s ability or inability to think the political, and not just the ethical, persists. See especially Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Third Party: Levinas on the Intersection of the Ethical and the Political’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 30 (1) (1999), pp. 76–87, and Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).