Abstract
We are all familiar with the fact that moods change. But, what is the significance of this familiar fact? Is change merely a factual characteristic of moods or can it also offer us a lens for gaining a deeper understanding of mood’s essence?. The essay’s starting point is Heidegger’s treatment of moods and their manner of changing. Heidegger, I show, is interested in our ordinary shifts in mood as indicators of a fundamental existential structure that underlies the specificity of any particular mood. Yet, is the changing of moods only a means to reveal the inherent depth – the “always already”-- of our givenness to moods, or is it a dimension significant onto itself? Moving beyond Heidegger, I thus explain why change should be understood as the grounding condition of our being-in-a mood, and consequently, what it means to embrace the relationality and intrinsic plurality - the being singular-plural -- of a subjectivity of changing moods. In doing so, I am concerned with the implications that such an analysis carries for the ethical question regarding the freedom and responsibility we have in and over our moods.
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Notes
Consider, in this context, Martha’s Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge, (Oxford University Press, 1990).
Today there are more and more voices that see this as a gradual rather than a categorical distinction. In the context, Peter Goldie holds the interesting position. For his argument, see The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2002), p.17. In this context, see also, Martha Nussbaum, The Upheaval of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 1–19, 129–137.
On the conditions of the blending of emotions into moods see, Hanna Pickard, “Emotions and the Problem of Other Minds” in Philosophy and the Emotions, ed. A. Hatzymoisis, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). p. 96.
On the temporality, duration and change in emotions and, more generally, in affective attitudes, see Aaron Ben-Ze’ev’s (2017) pp 7–9, which appears in the present volume.
The idea that the world opens up to us in ways that are dependent on our moods is a commonplace that is often articulated also in popular culture. Think, for example, of the way this idea is expressed in the beautiful song from the depression era, “When You’re Smiling,” that serves as the motto of the essay (written by L. Shay, M. Fisher and J. Goodwin and popularized in Louis Armstrong’s recording at the end of the 1920s): When you’re smiling, when you’re smiling/The whole world smiles with you/When you’re laughing, when you’re laughing/The sun comes shining through/But when you’re crying, you bring on the rain/So stop that sighing, be happy again.
The popularity of these filters is underscored by those few images that are explicitly tagged “unfiltered”.
In traditional classical music, the prototypical difference between keys is manifest in the difference between a major and a minor structure. Indeed, for an untrained ear, the difference between a C major and a C minor key, for example, would typically seem to be much more evident and pronounced than the difference between a C major and another major key that, by definition, retains the intrinsic (major) relationship between pitches. And yet, while the difference between major and minor keys is often clear and distinct – think of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” played in a minor key – the transposition of a tune from one major key (or from one minor key) to another is not less significant and also brings about, even if in more subtle ways, a significant transformation in a tune’s “being the world.”
I thank Shira Yasur for discussing with me different aspects of musical keys and for suggesting the Mozart example.
I have borrowed here a rhetorical gesture famously used by psychoanalyst W.D. Winnicott who declares that “there is no such thing as a baby.” What Winnicott’s snappy statement conveys is that, for the psychologist, the relevant contours of a baby’s existence cannot be limited to the baby itself but must include a more complex structure: as a psychological entity the baby is what it is only in relation to – as part of -- the mother-child dyad. See, D.W., Winnicott, The Child, The Family and the Outside World (Perseus Books, 1984), p.17.
An alternative way of unpacking this structure would be in temporal terms. The present of being in a mood is never a narrow one, but a present that is on its way to giving way to another mood. The future, in other words, is part of the present of the mood in a very distinct way.
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Kenaan, H. Changing Moods. Philosophia 45, 1469–1479 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9895-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9895-z