According to Heidegger, “mood” (Stimmung) makes a substantial contribution to the sense that we have of belonging to a world.1 Our moods may change, but we are always in some kind of mood, and what might seem like the absence of mood is actually the presence of an inconspicuousness mood. Being in some mood or other is, according to Heidegger, a fundamental existentiale of Dasein. In other words, it is essential to the distinctively human way of having a world (134). In the absence of mood, we would not find ourselves in a world at all and would therefore cease to be Dasein. Heidegger refers to the characteristic of finding oneself in a world through a mood as “Befindlichkeit,” a notoriously difficult term to translate. Macquarrie and Robinson, in their 1962 translation of Being and Time, opt for “state of mind,” but this is inappropriate. Heidegger stresses that moods are not experienced as states of mind possessed by psychological subjects, and that we do not experience moods as “out there” in the world either. Moods constitute a sense of being part of a world that is pre-subjective and pre-objective. All “states of mind” and all perceptions and cognitions of “external” things presuppose this background sense of belonging to a world. Other (158) translations include “affectedness,”2 “attunement,”3 “disposedness,”4 and “sofindingness.”5 In what follows, I will replace the term “state of mind” with “attunement” when quoting from Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation of Sein und Zeit.6 Elsewhere, I will refer more often to the having of a mood and to how we find ourselves in the world or belong to a world through a mood.
In maintaining that moods constitute a sense of belonging to the world, Heidegger does not mean that one has a subjective state called a mood and that this somehow contributes to perception of one’s spa-tiotemporal location in relation to other entities. To find oneself in a world is not, first and foremost, to occupy the perspective of an impartial spectator, neutrally gazing upon things from a particular spacetime location. Rather, the world that we belong to is a significant realm, where things can have a host of different practical meanings. An appreciation of these meanings is inextricable from our actual and potential activities. Finding oneself in the world is thus a matter of being practically immersed in it rather than looking out upon it. Consider how I currently experience my office. As I type these words, the computer keyboard does not appear to me as a conspicuous object of experience. Rather, it is seamlessly integrated into my activity, and my appreciation of its utility is inseparable from what I am doing. However, I do not take all my surroundings to be significant in quite the same way. Numerous other things that appear to me as practically significant do not solicit activities in the way that the keyboard does. For instance, the shoes sitting on the floor by my chair appear to me as functional but do not currently summon me to do anything. So we need to distinguish between having practical significance and being both significant and enticing. The pile of student essays on the table matters to me in a different way from the keyboard and shoes; they present themselves as an impediment to my current project. They still have a kind of practical significance though, which takes the form of “something I ought to or need to do, which is unappealing and requires effort.” Other aspects of my situation might appear to me as urgent or pressing, safe or threatening, interesting or boring, easy, difficult or impossible, predictable or unpredictable, achievable without effort, beyond my control, and so on. Practical significance thus divides up into a range of subcategories. If another person enters the room, she or he may matter to me in yet further ways. None of the impersonal things in my room appear to me as offering up possibilities such as conversation, companionship, consolation, love, humiliation, pride, and shame. Hence, there are many different kinds of significance. (p. 133-134)
- The German term “Stimmung” does not have quite the same connotations as “mood.” In any case, Heidegger’s analysis certainly does not encompass all of the phenomena associated with everyday uses of the term “mood,” and so it is important not to place too much weight upon choice of this particular term.[↩]
- Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time Division 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).[↩]
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996).[↩]
- William Blattner, Heidegger’s Being and Time (London: Continuum, 2006).[↩]
- John Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus: Volume 1, eds. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 43-77.[↩]
- This choice is to some extent arbitrary and other terms, such as “disposedness,” would serve equally well. However, no English term has quite the same connotations as Befindlichkeit.[↩]