Ferber Ilit - Philosophys moods : the affective grounds of thinking

Hagi Kenaan 1

(1)

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartres novel Nausea , presented as the journal of Antoine Roquentin, opens with the narrators statement of an unexplained change that has pervaded his world. Roquentins need to examine this disturbing sense of change is the explicit reason why he begins writing.

Jean-Paul Sartres novel Nausea , presented as the journal of Antoine Roquentin, opens with the narrators statement of an unexplained change that has pervaded his world. Roquentins need to examine this disturbing sense of change is the explicit reason why he begins writing.

Roquentin searches for an understanding by attending to the manifestations of the ordinary. Through close attention to the ordinary, he seeks to articulate the manner in which his whole being-in-the-world has changed.

Roquentin is unaware of the phenomenological resonance and philosophical potential of his detailed daily descriptions. He is thus somewhat surprised when, his inspection of experience reveals to him the world itself, the world of which he is part, rather than a private mental domain. The unmistakable presence of a new quality acquired by the world or, perhaps, the new absence of a dimension that has unexpectedly vanished from the world makes it difficult for Roquentin to find the terms to pinpoint the change he has experienced.

Yet, despite his intentions, Roquentin is ultimately unable to choose between the internal and external, since the very opposition between the two realms cannot do justice to his experience. Roquentins world has changed in a manner that does not lend itself to an understanding in terms of a mere subjective occurrence. At the same time, however, Roquentin is unable to frame the change in terms of the objective state of things, e.g., in terms of objects and their properties. It is an abstract change without object, one that cannot register within the objective order of facts. Roquentins difficulty is, in itself, revealing.

Roquentin is ultimately concerned only with the specificity of his own situation, i.e., with a mood that reveals the bare such-ness of the world and bears a distinctive affect of nausea. Yet, despite his focus on a specific mood, Roquentins explorations inadvertently provide a few important insights into the more general structure of moods. His ability to identify a transformation in the quality and form of his experience of the world, together with the inability to explain this transformation in terms of the common opposition between the subjective and the objective, is indeed indicative of the unique manner in which moods are present in our lives.

As a corollary we may say, with Heidegger, that moods are world revealing. For Heidegger, a central figure in this collection and clearly the most important twentieth-century advocate for moods, Dasein always belongs to a world; but this world is neither the totality of objective facts nor a merely subjective experience. World is rather the human realm of meaningfulness that precedes the distinction between the subjective and the objective. Our embeddedness in the world, our basic attachment to meaning, finds its primary expression in the experience of the world as that which matters to us: in moods.

With a new friend around, the city that seemed so gloomy now appears joyful and vibrant. Indeed, the world matters to us in different ways, at different times revealed through the changes of moods that are, concomitantly, a disclosure of moods dynamic infrastructure. Like Roquentin, we know that moods change, but their constant flux indicates more than their plurality and transitional nature. Change is the primary manner in which moods or the spectrum of moods is revealed to us. What their constant movement signifies is that moods are always already there, operative in this form or another in structuring our encounter with the world. As Heidegger puts it, We are never free of moods . A state-of-mind always has its understanding understanding always has its mood (Heidegger : 182 [143]).

According to Heidegger, moods precede any form of cognition and, moreover, they condition it. Mood is a primordial kind of Being for Dasein, in which Dasein is disclosed to itself prior to all cognition and volition, and beyond their range of disclosure (Heidegger : 232, H187).

Moods are crucial for an understanding of our being-in-the-world; however, are moods also pertinent to an understanding of the distinctly philosophical openness to the world? What is it about moods that makes them specifically important to phenomenology?

Since Husserl, phenomenology has consistently singled itself out by making a point of its point of entry into reflection. Phenomenological reflection is dependent on, and cannot begin without, an essential transformation of our ordinary gaze. This transformation or alteration of the natural attitude is not a trivial aspect but constitutes a moment wherein resides much of the difficulty of practicing the phenomenological method . For Husserl, The phenomenological epoch lays open an infinite realm of being of a new kind , as the sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience (Husserl : 20).

What the phenomenologist acquires by this universal depriving of acceptance, inhibiting or putting out of play of all positions taken toward the already given objective world is the universe of phenomena in the phenomenological sense (Husserl : 2021). Phenomenology, in other words, not only begins with a crucial shift away from our ordinary immersion in the world; it is, moreover, dependent on the possibility we have as humans of dodging or disconnecting ourselves from the claims of the ordinary world to which we are typically riveted. The epoch is a constitutive moment in the phenomenological response to the world, one that opens up the world as a phenomenological field by finding a new distance within our ordinary proximity to things. This distancing is of course different in many ways from the new experience, the transformation, that Sartres Roquentin seeks to account for. But, at the same time, the epoch , read against the background of Roquentins insights, raises the question whether the possibility of the epoch and thus of phenomenology in general is not couched in the very structure of mood.