Mood and Postmodern Politics, 9

A Discussion of Heidegger's Concept of Mood

So What?

Why should we pay attention to an obscure philosophical issue in a book, Being and Time, that almost no one outside of academia reads, published nearly eighty years ago by a now dead German philosopher who became a Nazi a few years after he published the book? Of what possible relevance could such a book have --or would we want it to have--today?

The main reason we should pay attention is that Heidegger's philosophy is still--yes, today--important in America's colleges and universities. Humanities and social science faculties study and teach ideas and ideologies that rely, directly or indirectly, upon Heidegger's ontological existentialism. Being and Time is the most important work in his literary corpus. His concept of mood is the basis upon which his philosophy rests. We cannot eradicate the disease of postmodernism without understanding the dishonest and corrupt root that gave rise to its poisonous literary garden.

Of the three major ideologies of twentieth century collectivism--Marxism (and communism), fascism, and Heideggerian postmodernism--only Heideggerian philosophy retains intellectual respectability. Marxism and fascism are substantively discredited. They inspire their followers because of what they oppose--free-market capitalism and liberal democracy--and not because major intellectuals think those ideologies represent the future of truth.

Heidegger's work, on the other hand, continues to be studied and taught and to be the basis for innumerable doctoral research projects of future teachers, as if its intellectual foundations are unshakable. It remains the ultimate fountainhead for the collectivist philosophies and ideologies that promulgate under the slogans of radical feminism, gender, diversity, and race. It is the basis for the literary philosophy called deconstruction. As it shapes the world view of its academic believers, it generates their false perception that the liberal political world is organized into irrational and/or pathological collectivities. It thereby sponsors their notion that American law must be reorganized on the basis of compensatory collective justice; thus is the intellectual legitimacy of individualism destroyed. And the struggle between justice based on collective compensation and justice based on individual merit is the great struggle of our time.

Heideggerian postmodernism also is the ultimate source for the toxic ideology of radical cultural relativism that has been used by academics to destroy values and commitment to ideals in two generations of American college students. Academics say, Heidegger was a brilliant philosopher with deplorable politics, then go on to teach his ideas from an appreciative rather than critical point of view. So the postmodern corrosion seeps into the spirit of the university and, through our nation's college trained elites, into the American body politic. This situation will not end until we undertake the hard work of exposing the fallacy and dishonesty of postmodernism's source and take down its advocates.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Heidegger on Mood
3. Heidegger's Vicious Circle
4. Broadening Heidegger's Concept of Mood
5. Mood-States and Political Projects
6. Kierkegaard's Theory of Anxiety
7. The Distinction Between Primordial Mood and Psychological Mood
8. Heidegger's Concept of Authenticity
9. So What?

Comments

[Andrew Glynn]

You can't equate an ontological a priori with a chronological one. The fact that our lower brain developed evolutionarily (or even temporally - as of course it does in the embryo) first, has zero to do with ontological primordiality of mood. Phenomenologically we experience mood as already being there when we think about it, as being there and already colouring every event that happens, every thought we have. Phenomenology looks at things differently than does scientism, and the meaning of the "earlier" is different in each case.

Beyond this specific point, though, I don't follow that Heidegger's work is "based on mood", he uses mood as an example of the way human beings experience themselves, their being, on the way to an explication of how we experience being itself, an explication that does not complete in Being and Time, because far from being the basis of his philosophy, Being and Time was an early work, hurriedly published in order to secure him a job, never completed, and considered a failure by its author. (if there is such a thing as a Heideggerian philosophy at all, which is in doubt - Heidegger's motto in his collected work is "ways not works", because he was not interested in creating philosophical systems).

The underlying issue with your lengthy post, from my perspective, is it's overweening and uncriticized scientism. Which, ironically, is the essence of modernism. Not that I'm criticizing science, or scientific thinking, but its application into areas that are not, at root, scientific is the cause of the backlash against rational thought that you complain so bitterly about. And while you mention Heidegger's short association with the Nazi party, it was the methodical, scientific (in the 19th century sense) way in which it was enacted that made the Holocaust the most disturbing of all the disturbing attempted genocides of our rather bleak history.