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Saturday, January 29, 2011
 
In-der-Blog-sein

Critical Hermeneutics has Richard Kearney on the mood for understanding.
The term ‘understanding’ is not confined by Heidegger to analytic or reflective consciousness. It refers primarily to those pre-reflexive ‘moods’ (Stimmungen) of our lived experience – e.g. anguish, guilt, fear, concern, wonder and so on-which Heidegger identifies not simply as psychological emotions but as ontological acts of pre-understanding (Vor-Verständnis). For instance, Heidegger argues that our common experience of anguish, which frequently goes by the name of ‘depression’, is irreducible to the sum of ostensible causes which might be adduced at the level of an empirical psychology. We are not simply depressed because we failed exams, had influenza or crashed a car. These are no more than occasions which disrupt our normal patterns of behavior, leaving us exposed to a fundamental void or nothingness at the heart of our existence. At its deepest level, Heidegger argues that anguish is an ontological ‘mood’ which expresses being-in-the-world as an experience of non-being. Unlike fear, for instance, anguish lacks any identifiable object; it occurs precisely where ‘nothing’ is the matter.
 
Comments:
With full awareness that MH might feel insulted again to be compared with American thinkers (Pace Baumgarten), I note the accumulating literature on Nietzsche and Emerson and MH's fondness for the former.

Mood is the dominant theme in RWE's essay "Experience." It lacks the depth of philosophical clarity that MH offers, of course. To be outrageous, however, who beside RWE and MH bother with mood as essential for self-understanding?
 
On wikipedia, mood is merely "a relatively long lasting emotional state".
 
A mood-metric of some sort might be of assistance. :]

--- agree tentatively with Jan. re Nietzsche/Heid.--and recall all the Nietzschean rhetoric regarding happiness, joy, feelings etc. He was a mood guy--as were many romantics. Hegel himself often appeals to heroics-- bravery, patriotism, nationalism, etc. So I would say...appeals to moods and emotions as a type of knowledge are not unprecedented. Yet....there are philosophers (Schopenhauer for one) who....would have us move beyond moods and emotions, or at least attempt to do so--the realm of "Pretas" in budd. tradition (then stoics as well...though in similar terms).

not sure of post-Kehre MH. Is he still committed to the SZ program? (.... one at least detects a greater interest in ....polytheistic--pre-socratics--mythological in a sense).
 
"a relatively long lasting emotional state".

Sure, that is mood from the conventional psychological perspective. MH's term is Befindlichkeit, so the choice of "mood" as English translation does not convey the additional connotations auf Deutsch. Kearney's "ontological acts of pre-understanding" takes it beyond psychology.

Since the Beitrage disparages "lived experience," (I expect that is aimed in a specific direction--Husserl? Gestaltists? simplistic existentialists?) I am surprised to see Kearney's reliance on it. But compared to the word weaving auf Deutsch, we are tongue-tied in English.
 
"...post-Kehre MH. Is he still committed to the SZ program?"

I am only about one-fifth of the way through a careful reading of the Beitrage. It was composed in the aftermath of S&Z but not prepared for publication until after the Kehre. I have heard it characterized as evidence that the foundation for the turning can be found in it.

I find it, so far, prophetic and visionary (and less academically meticulous than what I have so far read in Basic Problems). So far in the Beitrage there's more two-fold and one-fold than four-fold. I'd need to refer back to it to see if it is more "forgotteness of" than "abandonment of" beyng. I have no idea yet of any relationship between the Beitrage's "last god" and the later "divinities."

But I got my new clothes dryer installed today.
 
That's good, Jan.

Given a choice between dry clothes...or what Angst reveals most of us would probably choose dry clothes. :]


Your attention to auf Deutsch is important--not just for MH but in regard to any philosophical study... . As with ..."Stimmungen"--according to my Wortbuch, mood is but one of the definitions. "Atmosphere" another. "tune" another.

"Befindlichkeit" --befindlich is translated simply as situated, or ..."being in". MH does at times coin new terms, right --the noun compounding allows for that. MH-Sprache's not merely the Zeitung ...colloquial german . It's a bit daunting. Then Kant or most ger. phil. in the original is as well (and many translation issues). Hans Christian Andersen maybe, eventually.
 
Befindlichkeit" --befindlich is translated simply as situated, or ..."being in."

Emerson's "Experience" opens with asking "Where do we find ourselves?" His image then is on a staircase whose ends we cannot see. In his essay, he tackles that not with MH's abandonment of beyng but with Kant's analysis of the limits of knowledge. Taking a lead from Stanley Cavell, one can grant RWE with a step past the clevage of noumenon and phenomenon, but barely.

MH's assertion that our neglect of the clevage between the ontological and the ontic, which neglect denies us entry to distress, does not attune well to RWE's determination to "raise and cheer." No wonder MH scoffs at American thinkers.
 
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