Haar (1999:) – Stimmung

A existência nunca é neutra. Nenhum momento é insignificante ou desprovido de tonalidade. Cada um deles pode brilhar com uma luz singular, vibrar intensamente e, de repente, parecer desvendar a profundidade última das coisas. O cinzento chumbo é, afinal, uma cor do céu, tanto quanto o turquesa — e, no entanto, quantos momentos monótonos e atonais, com a sua singularidade esvaída, são reduzidos a nada! Quantos momentos se tornam incolores, a sua música silenciosa! Ter-nos-á então abandonado o apelo do Ser? De que esfera é que esta estranha indiferença desce sobre nós com todo o seu peso? De onde vem essa estranheza?

A tonalidade de cada momento, essa ressonância que nunca é duas vezes a mesma, a que Heidegger chama Stimmung  , nem revela — preciso mesmo repetir — um "estado de espírito" puramente interior, nem uma questão de facto, mas antes um modo como o mundo se dá a si próprio. A Stimmung informa-nos sobre o ar das coisas, o seu tom, o seu estilo, a sua modulação. Descobrimo-la juntamente com as próprias coisas ou seres: uma rua triste, um rosto simpático, uma paisagem tranquila ou inquietante, uma sala alegre ou severa… . As emoções estão inscritas na textura do mundo. Não se trata de uma projeção do sujeito nos objectos, nem de uma determinação do interior pelo exterior, mas de uma correspondência bidirecional, que pode ser sentida como "acordo" ou "discórdia". Para verificar esta verdade fenomenológica, basta notar que, felizmente para nós, nem o céu cinzento nem o céu azul nos mergulham invariavelmente na depressão ou na exaltação. A mesma cor atmosférica "objetiva" dá a Hölderlin   o êxtase do "azul adorável", e desperta em Mallarmé o terror do obsessivo "azul eterno".

“If only we could: get along without being.”

Existence is never neutral. No moment is insignificant or lacking in tonality. Each one can shine with a singular light, vibrate intensely, and suddenly can seem to unveil the ultimate depth of things. Leaden grey is, after all, a color of the sky just as much as turquoise — and yet, how many monotonous, atonal moments, their singularity flown, are reduced to nothing! How many moments become colorless, their music silent! Has the call of Being deserted us then? From what sphere does this uncanny indifference descend upon us with all its weight? Where does this uncanniness itself come from?

The tonality of each moment, that resonance which is never twice the same, which Heidegger calls Stimmung, reveals — need I even repeat — neither a purely interior “state of mind,” nor a matter of fact, but rather a manner in which the world gives itself. Stimmung informs us of the air of things, their tone, their style, their modulation. We discover it along with things or beings themselves: a sad street, a likeable face, a peaceful or disquieting countryside, a happy or severe room… . Emotions are inscribed in the texture of the world. It is not   a matter of the subject’s projection onto objects, nor of a determination of interior by exterior, but of a bidirectional correspondence, which can be felt as “accord” or “discord.” To verify this phenomenological truth, it is sufficient to [296] note that, luckily for us, neither grey nor blue skies invariably plunge us into depression or exaltation. The same “objective” atmospheric color gives Hölderlin the ecstasy of “adorable blue,” and awakens in Mallarmé the terror of the obsessional “eternal azure.”

Apparently Stimmungen never leave us. They are as old, stubborn, vivid and continuous throughout their temporal   fluctuations as the presence of the world: “From the ontological point of view we must as a general principle [grudsätzlich] leave the primary discovery of the world to ‘bare mood’ [Stimmung].” “The fact that moods [Stimmungen] can deteriorate [verdorben werden  ] and change over means simply that in every case Dasein   always has some mood [gestimmt ist].” To be rid of a tonality, whether it be passing whim or something more lasting, is possible only by passing to another one: “When we master a mood, we do so by way of a counter-mood; we are never free of moods.”

If this is the case, how can we ever become indifferent? Why are there indifferent, flavorless moments? When we feel what is called “dead time” or “vagueness of the soul” — a lessened interest in what normally fascinates or occupies us — could this be something like an absence of Stimmung? Is indifference a Stimmung, or is it the absence of all tonality? Is it so shot through with disinterest that we suspend our relation with time and, consequently, with being? When “nothing interests us any more,” at the height of boredom and melancholy, are we situated outside of being? Boredom, by making us deaf to solicitation, insensible to attachment, and strangers to the world, is not like anxiety, a call and revelation of being, but “suspends claims, especially that of being,” Jean-Luc Marion   writes in a brilliant analysis. “Nothing makes any difference any more, not even the ontological difference.”? “Boredom, by disengaging itself from the ontological difference, detaches beings from their beingness, abolishes the very name of beings.” Can this interpretation   be defended? Can man be indifferent to being?

It would be necessary to show that boredom (ennui) — why do we insist on that word, so overdetermined with Pascalian, and then Romantic, Symbolist, and pessimist resonances, why not simply say ‘indifference’?… . It would be necessary to show that boredom, if you will, excludes us from every situation  , destroys and decomposes us absolutely, and — even more than mystical ecstasy — depersonalizes us, delivers us from our identity, throws us into nothing and nowhere. In boredom there is undoubtedly something like an inverted ecstasy (think of Sartre   who spoke of Nausea as a “horrible ecstasy”); but is this not an ecstasy of time, rather than a passage to some neutral dimension, neither temporal nor eternal? [297] The fact that time begins to weigh horribly on us and slows to almost nothing, does not authorize the supposition of the annulement of time and, consequently, the suspension of our understanding of being.

Besides, if we could close ourselves off from being-in-the-world, get out of the clearing, how could we return to it again? We are held   (tenus) in being, and, no matter how tenuous tenu) the thread attaching us to presence — for example, in fainting or dreamless sleep — we are never, as long as we are, released into pure nothingness, nihil   negativum. When somebody says he is “bored to death,” he is not thinking of a factual disappearance, but rather of the despairing feeling, so perfectly described by Kierkegaard  , of “being unable to die.” The frightening monotony of a time that irregularly drags out its own old age, the impression of stagnation and regression (temporal succession inverted and opened onto a monstrously enlarged past) can certainly swell to the point of being close to nothing, like Baudelaire’s spleen:

Nothing equals the length of limping days

When, under the heavy flakes of snowy years,

Boredom, fruit of drab incuriousity,

Takes the proportions of immortality.

But that gigantic inversion of the eternal does not disinterest us from being, does not subtract us from time. Once again, as long as we are, our interest — our “inter-esse  ,” as Levinas says — may well fade out, our Care diminish radically; but we can never reduce it to nothing. Mailarme is saddened as not being able to attain “the insensibility of the azure and of stones,” and in the poem L’Azur, he despairs of finding in nature the adequate symbolization of his “dear Boredom.” The appearance of the Azure, breaking through the clouds, always turns sadness, once again, into bitter derision. The Stimmung of insensibility never rises to pure detachment, to the serenity of the eternal Azure, but suffers from being mocked, by what — outside, in the world — is in disharmony with it. Boredom is never without fault, never perfectly satisfied with itself, and that is undoubtedly why it does not fall   out of being. It is all too obsessed and overcome by its situation in the world to truly distance it or to be held by it at a distance from all. Is it possible to imagine an indifference lacking all disquietude, even if merely latent? Is there a happy boredom? Isn’t “deafness” to being secretly worked over by it sown negativity? Doesn’t boredom communicate with anxiety?