Abstract
Moods are usually taken to be pre-intentional affective states that tune our experience and cognition. Moreover, moods are sometimes considered to not only accompany cognitive acts, but to be understanding phenomena themselves. The following paper examines the assumption that moods represent a specific interpretative skill. Based upon that view, the semantic content of moods seems to be self-determining and to elude conceptual articulation. By contrast, I defend the thesis that the alleged inarticulable intelligibility of affective experiences is possible only due to its belonging to a comprehensive theoretical horizon. For that purpose, I first analyze Heidegger’s influential account on moods in Being and Time, in order to clarify his claim that moods have their own understanding. Although Heidegger asserts that attuned understanding becomes itself when it is interpreted, he nevertheless rejects conceptual unfolding as a legitimate disclosure of the intelligible content of moods. I amend Heidegger’s account by engaging Hegel’s approach to this topic in his Philosophy of Mind. In this text, Hegel argues that feelings cannot give an account of their purport by feeling alone. Affective states not only manifest the need and urge to express themselves, but they reach their full extent when their meaning is disclosed within the entirety of the mind. It may be the case that affective states cannot always be fully clarified, but, even within a non-cognitivist account of moods, their intelligibility requires our acquaintance with articulated understanding.
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Notes
We may recall en passant the extensive debate on the translation of Heidegger‘s concepts of Befindlichkeit and Stimmung. The first, which for Heidegger (2006) has an ontological purport, was translated as attunement by Stambaugh, state-of-mind by Macquarrie and Robinson and affectedness by Dreyfus. The second (Stimmung), commonly translated as mood and meant to express the ontic manifestation of the grounding Befindlichkeit, is nevertheless different from the German Laune which renders the actual phenomenon of having a mood. This is why attunement is frequently used for both terms, in order to avoid mood. Beyond this debate, we will use both mood and attunement in the following.
States of mind such as melancholia were for a long time emblematic phenomena for this view (Bell 2014). On that account, the imperative of a certain submission of the affective dimension to autonomous reason seems self-evident in the ancient tradition (Gill 2010). The long history of askesis stands for the rational cultivation of various mental states, such as apatheia (Foucault 2001; Hadot 1995). At the core of this ancient paradigm lies the profound connection between self-sufficiency (autarkeia) and tranquility (ataraxia), between rational response to impressions (prohairesis) and bliss (eudaimonia) (Price 2010).
The idea that affective states can pass beyond the sway of thought is also ancient and could originate in Plato’s dialogues, where he speaks of a certain type of frenzy (mania) which is the result of the immediate intervention of the divine and not of a conceptual process (Plato 2011, Phaedrus, 244a-245c).
This does not mean that cognition and affection are neurologically dependent. Ronald de Sousa (2010) suggests abandoning the doctrine which posits that emotions embody judgments, as well as the opposition between cognitivist and non-cognitivist approaches. He instead proposes a model called “two-track mind”, according to which there are two types of mental processing with different origins in the brain. Emotions could be thus immune to other „channels” of the brain. If so, emotions could not manifest any epistemic claim.
Considerations about the untranslatability of affective states are also a commonplace. Wilson (2002) argues for instance that we cannot fully understand our emotional life, while Pugmire (2010) restates that there are aspects of our experience that evade our best efforts to articulate them. In turn, Ben-Ze’ev (2001) convincingly argues against the normative claim that the description or the knowledge of emotions would reduce their intensity.
“Phenomenally, what mood discloses and how it discloses would be completely misunderstood if what has been disclosed were conflated with that which attuned Da-sein ‘at the same time’ is acquainted with, knows, and believes. Even when Da-sein is ‘sure’ of its ‘wither’ in faith and thinks it knows about its whence in rational enlightenment, all of this makes no difference in the face of the phenomenal fact that moods bring Da-sein before the that of its there, which stares at it with the inexorability of an enigma” (Heidegger 1996, 128).
In the following, I will use either William Wallace’s translation of 1894 or the Wallace & Miller version much revised by Michael Inwood in 2007 depending on their proximity to the original text.
This account is reminiscent of Ratcliffe’s description of mood as, “bodily feeling“ or, “internal state“ (Ratcliffe 2010).
“This sensitive nucleus includes not merely the purely unconscious, congenital disposition and temperament, but within its enveloping simplicity it acquires and retains also […] all further ties and essential relationships, fortunes, principles — everything in short belonging to the character, and in whose elaboration self-conscious activity has most effectively participated” (Hegel 1984 , 29).
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Ionel, L. Moods Between Intelligibility and Articulability. Re-Examining Heidegger’s and Hegel’s Accounts of Affective States. Philosophia 45, 1587–1598 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9813-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9813-4