Being And Time

Moods and understanding are typically seen to be opposed. In standard philosophy and common sense, “objective” understanding is held to be distinct from the former. “Dispassionate” reflective reason and empirical fact, so it goes, are the way to truth, and emotions are only distorting to it. Further, where they do feature, their role is small. It might be granted that emotions give us access to an “inner” domain of the subjective, but this point should remain within strict limits. Indeed, even where more considered accounts of the relation emerge, they remain hostage to this basic concept. That is, they tend to see emotion as a sort of assistant to reason, regarding it either as a useful early warning system, or as a supplementary means of verification.

Heidegger rejects almost all of this, which does not mean, as he says, “attempting to surrender science ontically to ‘feeling’” (177). He is not engaged in a romantic project of valorizing inner, subjective experience and emotion over “reason.” Rather, his goal is to re-orient what we mean by moods in the first place and he aims to dissolve, rather than invert, the reason-emotion dichotomy. A criticism of the subject-object view, and the ontology of presence underlying it, plays a part in how he does this. As such, he begins by outlining more precisely the way moods are standardly conceived, or what can be described as the “colouring” view. According to this view, as Heidegger says, a mood is “an inner condition which then reaches forth in an enigmatical way and puts it marks on Things and persons” (176). The world is then essentially still composed of present-at-hand objects and subjects staring out at them. Emotions and moods, however, may then add a subjective “gloss” to those objects. For example, if we are in a good mood, the garden may impress us as “pleasant,” whereas in a bad mood, it strikes us as dull or lackluster.

There are several problems with this view for Heidegger. Aside from the means by which this “colouring” or “projection” occurs being obscure, it seems to violate the phenomenology in question. That is, this view does not describe our actual experience of moods and the world but is rather a post-hoc way of reconciling emotions with the unshakeable assumption that the world is composed of subjects and objects. Indeed, it is a classic example of how reified theory and ontology can distort interpretation of a phenomenon. On the other hand, holding in check the subject-object prejudice, and the ideal of presence, Heidegger can describe the nature of emotions more faithfully.

When we do this, we discover that moods are not some “internal,” and prior, state to be projected onto things. As Heidegger says, “The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct one-self towards something” (176). What this means is that moods do not exist first in, or emerge from, a domain of the subjective to be later added to the world. They are rather already always co-constituting of it. As the expression of our essential concerns and projects, they are what emerges with and through the world as a complex of equipment, involvements, and situations. They are that which, as an expression of our care, allows any orientation towards the world to take place at all. Conversely, the world and its concerns allow the mood to exist.

In this way, we can see how moods allow for understanding. If our primary relation to the world is in terms of equipment and concerned involvement, rather than detached observation, moods can disclose this in a unique fashion. Further, there is a specific mood that is especially revealing for Heidegger. In the previous discussion on the nature of the “they,” it was said that to simultaneously understand and escape our absorption in the familiar public world, a disruption or interruption of it was needed. A very provisional outline of what this involves was then given. This alluded to the occurrence of something uncanny in the social world. Now, however, Heidegger explains more exactly what this awareness is based on. It is not, as should be obvious, something that one can reason oneself into, nor is it something that one can voluntarily and consciously seek out. Rather it emerges on the basis of a particular mood. It emerges through “anxiety.” This emotion, in which we become aware of the “uncanniness” (234), the unfamiliar, or the “not-at-home” (234) of the they-world, can precipitate the latter’s breakdown. A full analysis of this comes in Heidegger’s discussion of death in Division 2 of the text.