A Discussion of Heidegger's Concept of Mood
Heidegger's Vicious Circle
The politics of mood are irrational and represent the past, because Being-in-the-world is in mood. The phenomenological isolation created by mood initiates a "vicious circle", as we are calling it. In this vicious circle, we are prisoners of mood, unable to break out of our inauthentic world. We do not live for ourselves or for our own potentiality, but for others with whom we share our world of Being-in-the-world. We participate in a swirl of untestable interpretations. Our cognitive processes are locked into a closed, self-referencing cycle of mood formation and self-confirmation, without access to an "objective reality" that could disclose our world as mythical.{1}
In this article, we examine why Heidegger's phenomenological circle is closed. We begin by outlining the vicious circle of Being-in-the-World{2}.
Primordial mood is our basic mood. It is our earliest awareness of ourselves in our world. In Heidegger's view, the primordial mood is not simply the potentiality for mood or a neutral mood. It is anxiety (or angst).{3}
Heidegger described mood as a "structure" (i.e., an existential structure), which sounds static and unchanging; but he intended to convey that mood is dynamic. The dynamic quality of mood is better conveyed in English by the word "condition".
The dynamic quality of a condition is illustrated by analogy to psychological conditions. For instance, we might at some moment be experiencing a condition of agitated annoyance. To someone else, our condition has no identifiable cause; nothing happened to annoy us. We feel, however, that our agitation and annoyance must have been caused by something. We look for a cause of our condition, although the condition already exists (so the cause could not have initiated the condition). Perhaps we seize upon some mannerism of the person near us. We say, "Stop doing that, you're annoying me!" That person would be confused by our outburst, of course. She could not understand why we would be annoyed, since our annoyance preceded her quirky mannerism. Mood is not caused by something in our world, but nevertheless we look for and identify possible causes of our mood in our world.{4}
Condition is always seeking its cause--this is the dynamic quality of the existential structure of mood that initiates the phenomenological vicious circle.
Anxiety generates a secondary mood-state. In Being and Time, Heidegger discussed "everydayness" as the secondary mood-state experienced by persons living in modern, urban, technological, mass society. He characterized everydayness in several ways, one of which is "falling". (In our next article, we shall provide a different label, "suspension", for the mood of everydayness.)
The mood of everydayness is a way (a mode) of Being-in-the-world. Everydayness produces the experiences--who and what are included in our world, what we do, what happens to us--that we experience as our life. Everydayness also organizes and arranges the experiences and assigns values to them. The experiences, their organization and arrangement, and their evaluations are, altogether, the contents of our experience. The contents are not different from the mood of everydayness itself, but for the purpose of explaining them, it helps to think of them as being "produced" by everydayness. Those persistent arrangements of the contents of our experience, that reveal to us who we are, constitute the existential structures of our experience of our own life.
Here are two examples of everydayness. We work at a factory job that we find boring. We stand at a machine. We tend the machine, which stamps out small patterns of metal. The activities we perform in the job are contents of our experience. "Boring" is the value our everydayness imposes on them.
We participate passively in political election campaigns. We are indifferent to their outcome. Our political participation is content of our experience. "Indifference" is how we experience our evaluation of politics.
We also intend to do something with our life. Our experience of yourselves has a time-quality. We did things in our past and things happened to us in our past. We expect more experiences in the future. We might have a life plan. Expectation and planning, like boredom and indifference, are qualities of our understanding and falling. They are produced by mood-state.
For example, we attend engineering college with the expectation of being a professional engineer. In everydayness, we do not experience college as something we choose, however. We experience college and our engineering career as a project for our life chosen by someone else. Perhaps our parents pushed us into engineering. Our project is "not ours", though we are the person living it. The feeling we have, that engineering is not really our project, is produced by the mood-state of everydayness.
In addition to living our life, we understand our life. Our life has meaning for us, in the sense that our life is intelligible to us. Our understanding of our life is not an "objective truth" that we discover. Rather, we disclose the intelligibility of our life in talking with other persons (which Heidegger calls "discourse"). Within our mood, we create ideas, words, concepts, and stories that we tell to others and that others tell back to us. Mood talks to itself through the reflected talking back of other persons. Discourse is a closed circle of words pointing to words: "I say this. You say I said this. I said what you said I said".
Because discourse does not pass through or connect to an "objective, real world", independent of talking, Heidegger calls the ideas, by which we understand our life, a "mythology". Our mythology cannot be proved true or false; it simply is what makes sense to us.
As we live, we occasionally have emotions. Emotions here refer to brief moments of psychomotor activation, in which intense feelings accompany physiological and social acts. For instance, the emotion of anger is the brief activation of hostility toward some threat, usually in an effort to fend off the threat. Fright is a brief eruption of fear in which we mobilize our bodily and mental resources, often to flee a threat.
In Heidegger's Being and Time, emotion is not an existential structure. Emotion is, however, the product of the existential structures of mood, understanding, and falling, and is situated in our world.{5}
Emotions play several roles in our lives. They mobilize our physical and mental resources to deal with, for instance, sudden threat or opportunity. Emotions suspend critical thinking about action. Finally, emotions confirm our sense of the rightness of action we are undertaking.
The role of emotion in self-confirmation is illustrated by an old saying, fear confirms itself. The saying means that, if we are fearful, we will find something to be afraid of--after we are already afraid! After we have found something of which to be afraid, we say we had reason to be afraid. We thereby falsely convince ourselves that what we are afraid of is what caused our fear. What is true of fear is true of all emotions. All emotions confirm themselves.{6}
Emotion is the final step in the vicious circle of Heidegger's Being-in-the-world. Mood generates a mode of being in the world. The mood includes the experience of temporality. We experience our life as acted out across the past, present, and future. Through elaboration of a mythology, we make sense of our experience. We have only the mythology to guide us. Emotions accompany some acts. The emotions confirm the correctness of the original mood that sets up everything.
In our next article, we critique Heidegger's notion of mood by broadening and adding to his analytical categories.
Notes
1. In discussing the existential structure, understanding, Heidegger stated that understanding is involved in a "virtuous circle". He wrote:
"As the disclosedness of the 'there', understanding always pertains to the whole of Being-in-the-world. In every understanding of the world, existence is understood with it, and vice versa. All interpretation, moreover, operates in the fore-structure.... Any interpretation which is to contribute understanding, must already have understood what is to be interpreted." (Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 194{H.152}; Stambaugh, tran., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 142{152}.
See also Heidegger's further discussion of the circularity of understanding in Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 362-364{H. 315-316}.)
The virtuous circle of understanding is not identical to the phenomenological isolation that we describe as Heidegger's "vicious circle". The quotation, however, clearly implies phenomenological isolation.
Regarding the circularity of the vicious circle, Heidegger connected the existential structures throughout Being and Time; for instance, the following passage that opens section 31.
"State-of-mind is one of the existential structures in which the Being of the 'there' maintains itself. Equiprimordial with it in constituting this Being is understanding. A state-of-mind always has its understanding, even if it merely keeps it suppressed. Understanding always has its mood. If we Interpret[sic] understanding as a fundamental existentiale [existential structure], this indicates that this phenomenon is conceived as a basic mode of Dasein's Being." Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 182{H. 142-143}.
In a momentous (and ominous) discussion of "historicality", Heidegger stated that it is virtually impossible for Dasein by herself to extricate herself from mood | Being-in-the-world. She cannot escape the swirl of interpretations in mood.
"The authentic existentiell understanding is so far from extricating itself from the way of interpreting Dasein which has come down to us, that in each case it is in terms of this interpretation, against it, and yet again for it, that any possibility one has chosen is seized upon in one's resolution." Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 435{H. 383}. We can never step outside the mythology!
2. For an introduction to Heidegger's existentialism and the four existential structures, see the previous article in this series.
3. For an introduction to primordial mood, see the previous article in this series.
4. We need to remind ourselves again that Heidegger rejected psychological vocabulary. He was doing philosophy, not psychology. We are not suggesting that the ontological issues raised by Heidegger are simply psychological issues in disguise.
William F. Fischer, a clinical therapist practicing in the phenomenological tradition, describes the dynamic search for causality this way:
"Frequently, one will try to diminish the distressing power of an anxious situation by turning to whatever seems to have led up to it, such as on's own or another's actions. If either of these are then constituted as 'causes', they will tend to elicit vehement expressions of condemnation." Fischer, Theories of Anxiety, p. 170.
5. Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 178{H.138-139}.
6. "Only something which is in the state-of-mind of fearing (or fearlessness) can discover that what is environmentally ready-to-hand is threatening." Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 176{H.137}.
Compare to Stambaugh's translation of this passage:
"Only something which is the attunement of fearing, or fearlessness, can discover things at hand in the surrounding world as being threatening." Stambaugh, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 129{H. 137}.
In his major discussion of fear as a state-of-mind (Being and Time, section 30), Heidegger wrote:
"In fearing as such, what we have thus characterized as threatening is freed and allowed to matter to us. We do not first ascertain a future evil (malum futurum) and then fear it. But neither does fearing first take note of what is drawing close; it discovers it beforehand in its fearsomeness. And in fearing, fear can then look at the fearsome explicitly, and 'make it clear' to itself. Circumspection sees the fearsome because it has fear as its state-of-mind." Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 180{H.141}
References
Fischer, William F. Theories of Anxiety. Second edition. Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology & University Press of America, 1988.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. [Sein und Zeit, 1927; Seventh edition, Neomarius Verlag, Tübingen.] Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962. The original pagination in the German edition is cited in curly braces, e.g., (H. standing for Heidegger) {H. 15}.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. [Sein und Zeit, 1927; originally published by Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen.] Translated by Joan Stambaugh. [Albany, N.Y.] State University of New York, 1996. The original pagination in the German edition is cited in curly braces, e.g., (H. standing for Heidegger) {H. 15}.
Contents
Comments