A Discussion of Heidegger's Concept of Mood
Broadening Heidegger's Notion of Mood
Many readers of Heidegger's Being and Time have found his analyses of existential "anxiety" and "everydayness" compelling. It is not obvious, however, why anxiety should be the primordial mood. It is also not obvious why everydayness should be the only secondary mood-state generated by anxiety. Both claims seem arbitrary and without foundation in Being and Time. In this essay, we tackle the issue whether there could be other secondary mood-states, in addition to everydayness. Modifying Heidegger's schemata is a means of critiquing it and determining its soundness.{1}
The secondary mood-state is the way in which anxiety manifests itself in Being-in-the-world. Heidegger did not use a stimulus-response vocabulary, but it helps to understand typical attitudes of everydayness as responses to our anxiety.{2} Anxiety is not psychological fear, which is fear of a known threat. Existential anxiety is a concern that we are insignificant in our world--that we have no being and that we are not manifested to others beings. To diminish our anxiety (or to cover it up), we take on an attitude of indifference. Indifference reveals itself symptomatically as boredom and drifting from one interest to another.
We give a new label to the mood-state Heidegger calls everydayness. Our new label is "suspension". We believe the term, suspension, conveys in English, better than the term, everydayness, the mode of existence in we hold ourselves apart from the world in which we exist and belong.
The sense we intend the word, suspension, to convey is familiar by analogy to any parent of a teenage child. As a normal part of adolescent development, the child needs to belong to the family, have her life structured by rules and values, and feel secure in her family's protection; at the same time, she needs to separate herself from the family, assume freedom to try new behaviors on her own, and build confidence that she can make herself secure on her own. This contradictory set of needs generates a typical teenage stance. The teenager holds herself apart from the family, withholds participation in some of its activities, and frequently expresses indifference to family group activities, while not being so far from the family as actually to withdraw from its shelter and protection.
We believe other mood-states, besides everydayness, can be generated by different reactions to anxiety, which were not discussed by Heidegger. We identify three other secondary mood-states. These are, in alphabetical order, "dependency", "hysteria", and "submission".
Dependency is the mood-state that results from inability to tolerate any lack of integration with the world, coupled with compulsively repeated efforts to re-engage one's world. The dependent person cannot stand apart in her world, even briefly, to establish her individuality. She strives ceasely to re-engage the world, even when it appears at the moment fruitless to do so.
The dependent mood-state is similar to the feeling we have when urgently need to go somewhere and our car will not start. We experience fear for what will happen if we do not keep our appointment. We try repeatedly to start our automobile when the car battery has too little electricity to crank the engine. We turn the key in the ignition, we hear the starter grind ineffectively, then we hear the starter stop with a clunk. We feel a rising of desperation. We wait for a minute, then again turn the key in the ignition, only to hear the same sequence. We may repeat the action a half dozen times, even though we know the engine will not start.
Hysteria is the mood-state generated when consciousness rejects integration, while at the same time striving for integration on different terms. In hysteria as a mode of Being-in-the-world, a person is unable to focus; that is, attentively to select an object in the field of experience for scrutiny and action.
Both dependency and hysteria are wishful thinking. We refuse to accept reality as it appears to us. We wish the world were different than it is. We behave on our wish.
Submission is the mood-state of resignation. We submit to failure in the sense of accepting our defeat by it. We cannot integrate with the world--so be it! We are largely, perhaps completely, empty of wishful thinking. Few persons experience resignation with no hope of remedy. But their wishes for overcoming failure are postponed for a distant, indeterminant future.
Resignation is, from the point of view of Being and Time, a negation of the temporality of experience of Dasein. In ordinary language, it is shock. Resignation is closer, as a subjectivity, to a coma than to authentic Being.
Each mood-state generates an existential structure, which is a mode of Being-in-the-world. The existential structure includes both our present posture or mode within our world, our expectations for the future, and our plan for our life. We shall refer to our posture toward the world as our strategy. We shall follow Sartre in referring to our plan for our life as our project.
In the table below, we outline the four mood-states and the structures and components of our existence that are generated by them.
Mood-State |
Existential Structure (mode) |
Expectation |
( Strategy ) |
|
Dependency |
Fixation |
Domination |
Combative conqueror | |
Hysteria |
Unfocussed |
Rebellion |
Hostile rebel | |
Submission |
Shock |
Deliverance |
Supplicant | |
Suspension (Heidegger's |
Falling |
Apocalypse |
Follower |
What determines which of the four mood-states shall be a person's Being-in-the-World?
In asking this question, we are again going outside Heidegger's discussion. He did not see alternative mood-states to everydayness (suspension) for the individual in ordinary life. Nonetheless, in several passages in Being and Time, he indicated that the mood-state of the individual could be influenced by the public mood and by heritage.
The public exists as a characteristic of the suspension of Dasein.{3} The public is the anonymous "they" of public social settings. The public itself can as an entity also have its own mood which can affect the Being-in-the-World of the individual member of the public.{4}
Each existential structure includes its temporal resolution--Dasein's expectation of how she shall live in the future and what strategy Dasein should pursue to fulfill this expectation. Dasein is here, to use the inadequate psychological vocabulary, acting out its mood-state.
Public moods can generate heritages, which are historic roles of a culture. Heritages provide roles, so to speak, for the inauthentic person to copy. By adopting a heritage role, a person strives to obtain authenticity. Adopting a heritage role is a way of being resolving--ending--the suspension or everydayness.{5}
Different public moods and different heritages will exist for different persons. They provide different contents for the phenomenological worlds of differently being Being-in-the-world. The route from inauthenticity to authenticity will differ from person to person. Heidegger did not draw this interpretation, but it seems clear that different routes shall involve different mood-states.
In our next article, we will interpret the existential structures of the three new mood-states--dependence, hysteria, and submission--and Heidegger's everydayness (suspension) in terms of expectations and strategies, previewed in the table above.
Notes
1. Heidegger borrows the concept of anxiety from the nineteenth century Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard. We take up the first question, regarding anxiety as the primordial mood in a later article.
2. We must remind ourselves again that Heidegger rejected the psychological vocabulary of cause and effect. He was doing philosophy, not psychology. By using psychological concepts, we are not suggesting that the ontological issues raised by Heidegger are simply psychological issues in disguise.
3. Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 163-168{H. 126-130}.
4. Heidegger states that the public "needs moods and makes them for itself. It is into such a mood and out of such a mood that the orator speaks. He must understand the possibilities of moods in order to rouse them and guide them aright." Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 178{H. 138-139}. Such arousal and guidance of the individual member of a group being addressed by an orator can raise the individual from inauthenticity to authenticity. Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 436{H. 385}.
Hubert Dreyfus presents a more inclusive interpretation of Heidegger's notion of mood. He describes three kinds moods, two public (cultural and social) and one private. A person can only take moods made available by the person's culture. Discussed in this way, Heidegger's philosophy is simply cultural relativism and his existential ontology an explanation of how the phenomenology of cultural relativism works. See Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, A Commentary, pp. 170-172.
5. "The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over." Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 435{H. 383}.
References
Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. Reprint edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991.
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}.
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