A Discussion of Heidegger's Concept of Mood
Mood-States and Political Projects
In Heidegger's theory, Being and Time (1927), the primordial mood is anxiety (or angst). Mood-states emerge out of anxiousness. Each mood-state evokes a typical strategy. A strategy is a person's posture or orientation in the world that inclines her toward a path of action that would resolve the mood-state. As mood-states are ways of Being-in-the-world, they manifest themselves in social behavior, that is, in acts.{1}
Strategies are normally part of a person's primary project. A project is choosing one's self for one's life.{2} Sartre particularly mentioned political choices as life projects. Social scientists in the mid-twentieth century studied the relationship between political choices and psychological anxiety. In previous discussions, we speculatively suggested that other mood-states might exist in addition to everydayness (which we renamed suspension) described by Heidegger. We naturally expect the additional mood-states to generate their own, typical strategies. What strategies and projects might (we suggest) be typically generated by the mood-states of dependency, hysteria, and submission?
In the table below, we outline the four mood-states (Heidegger's suspension, plus three speculative mood-states) and the structures and components of our existence generated by them. Both strategies and projects are conjectural. Empirical research is needed to establish the living content of both strategies and projects.
Mood- State |
Existential Structure (Mode) |
Expectation |
(Strategy) |
(Project ) [example] |
| Dependency | Fixation | Domination | Combative conqueror. | Fascism. Coercive conformism. Revolution. |
| Hysteria | Unfocused | Rebellion | Hostile rebel. | Totalitarianism. Rebellion. Anarchism. |
| Submission | Shock | Deliverance | Servant. Supplicant. | Evangelism. Fanaticism. |
| Suspension (Heidegger’s everydayness) |
Falling | Apocalypse | Follower. | Passive conformism. Consumption. Fascism. |
Dependency engages the world by trying to dominate it. Compulsive grasping at the world by the dependent Being--after it is clear that integration of Being and world cannot occur as the dependent person wishes--is an effort to punish the world. The dependent Being strikes a combative pose toward the world. She will try to coerce compliance by whomever and whatever entities are significant to her. Dependency can be relieved only through domination.
Hysteria engages the world by rejecting it. The mood generates rebellion as a typical strategy. Hostility is the emotion-tone that accompanies world-rejection. The paradox of rebellion is that Being-in-the-world cannot be really be rejected. We have no choice but to be in the world. Rebellion is an ultimately unrealizable strategy. The frustration created by rebellion gives rise to the hostility that accompanies it.
Submission mood-state engages the world by submitting to the situation--accepting the inability to integrate and waiting for eventual integration.
Suspension mood-state engages the world by the several strategies famously and brilliantly described by Heidegger. One strategy is to be indifferent to one's self; another to be indifferent to one's world.
Political Projects
Fascism in the 1930s presented a difficult political phenomenon for European social scientists to understand. Many Italian and German voters turned away from democratic liberalism and liberal socialism to embrace--or at least to accept--authoritarian government with curtailment of political freedom. The Russian people accepted the increasing terror and totalitarianism of Stalin's dictatorship. In the liberal democracies of France and Britain, authoritarian political ideologies drew wide sympathy. Why would Europeans reject liberalism and freedom?
Some European social scientists utilized Heidegger's interpretation of suspended Being-in-the-World [i.e., everydayness] to analyze the mentality of fascists and their followers. Others drew upon the theories of Freud and Marx. For Freud, anxiety was the basic neurotic illness. Social scientists who drew upon Freud (and who might have ignored Heidegger) made psychopathological anxiety the basis for explaining anti-liberal political programs. All these social scientists found the explanation for collective political phenomena in collective irrationality and, whether referring to ontological mood of Heidegger or psychological mood of Freud, in mood.
The most famous school of social scientists to analyze European fascism in terms of anxiety was the Frankfurt school for critical analysis of society in Frankfurt, Germany. Most of the Frankfurt scholars were Marxist. Some members, such as Theodor Adorno, were sharply critical of existentialism generally and the existentialist idea of authenticity particularly. Heidegger's exposé of the human condition did not fit into the framework of dialectical materialism and did not support the thesis that class conflict drove history. Nonetheless, several thinkers associated with the Frankfurt group were attracted to Heidegger's analysis, particularly Herbert Marcuse.{3}
According to the Frankfurt School, political fascism was the product of the psychological pressures on persons in modern, mass societies. Urban society, typified by casual and anonymous association, transformed everyperson's primordial anxiety into pathological anxiety. Everyperson escaped from the overwhelming psychological threat to self by calling for, politically creating, and then submitting to authoritarian powers.{4}
The social-psychological explanation of fascism can be (and was) applied as a model to other forms of political totalism, for instance, Stalinism. Stalinist totalitarianism did not die with Stalin. It did not die with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It replicated in other--non-Western--societies and has become a major problem for our age of terrorism. Journalistic explanation of Kim Chong-il's North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq has centered on the problems of modernization that made totalitarianism possible. Terrorism is explained in terms of religious fascism provoked by globalization and the threat of capitalism to traditional cultures.
Although we tend to think of the submissive mood-state as a religious mode of Being, one of its social projects, evangelism, has a strong political analogue in political fanaticism. In his famous study, The True Believer (1951), Eric Hoffer describes the psychology of the political fanatic, such as the dedicated American communist of his era, in terms of the authoritarian personality. In response to his anxiety, the fanatic becomes a political evangelist, erasing doubt by erasing self by submitting to the total and unquestioned authority of political doctrine.{5}
Heideggerian Misery
Westerners did not abandon liberalism and freedom and commit to fascism and totalitarianism because they read Heidegger's analysis of the human condition. Heidegger's philosophy was not influential because it stimulated mass political change. It became influential, eventually, because left intellectuals found it to be politically useful analysis to support collectivism. It has been influential to the extent ideologies are influential.
The career of Sartre's early existentialism reveals the Stalinist choices made by many left intellectuals.
The existential philosophy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) was based in individualism. The individual made choices and created projects which defined her life. Choices and projects constitute the Being-in-her-world. Life is free; the individual is responsible for her own freedom.
Many persons, including intellectuals, who were morally compromised by the unsavory alternatives of the 1930s and 1940s, found the ethics of individual responsibility too heavy to bear. Tough existential individualism fell aside in favor of structuralism and Stalinism. Sartre himself, sad to say, abandoned his early formulation in favor of Stalinism in the 1950s.{6}
The political philosophies that succeeded Sartre's "bourgeois existentialism" of the 1940s, socialist feminism being the most important, were indebted to Heidegger's heirs, especially Michel Foucault, as well as Heidegger. Socialist feminists were enraptured of Stalinism. In feminist analysis, male existential anxiety leads men to dominate women.{7} Women want to be free. As a practical matter in the United States after 1972, the political solution to "male domination" is class politics (meaning class in the sense of a reserved legal collective category), coercion by statute, and thought control ("political correctness"). It has been an easy step for feminists of the socialist left to embrace gender Stalinism.{8}
If you value individual freedom, the Heideggerian legacy is miserable. His depiction of human existence is miserable. The social consequences of his initial position about human existence are miserable. The consequences are inevitably the politics of misery--fascism and totalitarianism--in one form or another.
Why inevitably? The consequences flow inevitably out of the primordial mood of anxiety. In our next article, we take up the crucial issue of Heidegger's notion of the primordial mood of anxiety.
Notes
1. Recall (article one in this series) that Heidegger was concerned with ontological anxiety, as distinguished from psychological anxiety. Ontological anxiety is (according to his theory) an ultimately irreducible feature of experience; it cannot be explained in terms of anything else. Psychological anxiety, such as anxiety described by psychoanalysts, is explicable in terms of conflicting drives and instincts (for instance). Psychological anxiety is, therefore, not an ultimately foundational psychological state.
2. Heidegger sharply distinguishes between a "project" and "projection". A project is a plan. Heidegger devoted little attention to this component of our existence. Primary and secondary projects received extensive treatment in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943).
Projection, in contrast, according to Heidegger, is a mode of understanding, whereby our understanding "always press[es] forward into possibilities." Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 184{H. 145}. "Projecting has nothing to do with comporting oneself towards a plan that has been thought out, and in accordance with which Dasein arranges its Being. On the contrary, any Dasein has, as Dasein, already projected itself; and as long as it is, it is projecting." Ibid., p. 185{H. 145}.
The notion of a project, involving action, on the other hand, is central to Sartre's analysis of freedom. See part four, chapter one, "Being and Doing: Freedom", Barnes, trans., Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 559-709.
3. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man.
4. This is the thesis of the authoritarian personality. It was presented in Fromm, Escape from Freedom, and Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality.
5. Hoffer, The True Believer.
6. Cohen-Solal, Sartre, A Life.
7. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 53. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, chapter 13, "The Forfeited Self", pp. 311-314.
8. The significance of 1972 is approval of the Equal Rights Amendment by the U.S. Senate and its subsequent submission to the states, and Congressional passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
References
Adorno, Theodor W., with Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper, 1950.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. H. M. Parshley, translator, first edition in two volumes, Le Deuxieme Sexe, 1949, first English edition, 1953, reprint edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre, A Life. Anna Cancogni, trans., Norman Macafee, ed., first French edition, 1985. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. First edition 1963, reprint edition. New York: Laurel (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.), 1983.
Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. First edition 1941, reprint edition. New York: Discus by Avon Books (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.), 1965.
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}.
Held, David. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.
Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. New York: Harper, 1951.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. First edition 1964, Douglas Kellner, Introduction to the Second Edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay On Ontology [L'être et le nêant, 1943]. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes, 1956, reprint edition. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966.
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