Abstract
Being-in-the-world is felt as a mood, but it is also perceived in atmospheres. Both forms of emotional state are closely related. As musical instruments can be tuned for a certain tone, so also atmospheres and persons can be attuned for a certain feeling. Not only does colloquial language blur the differences between atmospheres and moods. Also, the scientific terminology lacks clear distinctions. On the one hand, situational feeling is an expression of a personal basic mood, but on the other hand, it is a mirror of changing atmospheres. While basic moods are rooted in a personal situation, the atmospheres often affect the individual from spatial and social environments. However, it is too easy to understand moods as feelings coming from an inside and atmospheres as feelings, which affect from an outside. Both have their own internal and external references, and in both circumstances, a person is confronted with own (current and enduring) emotional states. This chapter deals with points of contact, overlaps and differences. Of central importance are the philosophical reflections of Martin Heidegger, Otto Friedrich Bollnow and Hermann Schmitz. The threshold on which an atmosphere becomes a mood corresponds to the power of a feeling that generates subjective involvement. This is what constitutes the difference between the two: there are distinct forms of subjective “being-with”, one with emotional distance and one without.
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Notes
- 1.
However, in recent years, an “emotional turn” can be ascertained, particularly in the empirical cultural sciences (Beitel and Schneider 2016).
- 2.
Steffen Kluck describes the Zeitgeist as an overarching, collective situation in the sense of Hermann Schmitz’neo-phenomenology (Kluck 2008) andMarion Heinz emphasizes the emotive character of world views (Heinz 2001). Zeitgeist and world views are not purely cognitive orientations, but are supported by certain emotional attitudes to life, which bear resemblance to moods.
- 3.
The concept of “situation” in neo-phenomenology denotes a specific structure of relating to self and world. Situations are characterized by an internally diffuse meaningfulness, of which singular states of affair, programmes and problems can be explicated. Situations exist as personal, collectively shared, current or enduring situations. For an introduction to the concept of situation in neo-phenomenology, see Schmitz 2009, 47–55.
- 4.
Nina Trcka, for example, does not understand moods as “inner” mental states, but it is understood as “felt-bodily palpable ways of being involved, the bodily-felt, subjective engagement and bodily-felt affective involvement. They are ways, in which something affects our experience and touches us deeply” (2016, 4).
- 5.
If the what and the how of feeling is induced by the environment, as Slaby remarks, then this holds equally true for moods: “Not only what we feel, also how we feel is strongly determined by the environment, if not downright shaped and directed” (2010, 37). In this process, suggestions of movements and figures [Gestaltverläufe] play an eminent role for the constitution of moods, because as expressive gestures, they synesthetically transmit feelings.
- 6.
Rainer Wimmer describes moods with Heidegger and Bollnow not as a mirror of exceptional situations, but as a lifelong expression of existence. Yet, this does not mean that moods are not embedded within situations (Wimmer 1997, 143–162).
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Hasse, J. (2019). Atmospheres and Moods: Two Modes of Being-with. In: Griffero, T., Tedeschini, M. (eds) Atmosphere and Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24942-7_4
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