Heidegger

>”Verstehen is immer gestimmtes,” translated by M. as “Understanding
>always has its mood.” But some moods are clearer than others. I can
>be in a particular neurotic mood, that is, a mood pecularly and
>uniquely my own. I have come to understand that mood, even though
>I’m not always able to control it. But I can remember, re-imagine a
>moment just past when my neurotic mood changed suddenly and left me
>relatively “clear.” With the two moods side by side, I could
>recapture the mood of relative clarity and think from there. My
>question is, is it possible to think a kind of objectivity, that is
>autonomously, that is independent of one’s neuroses? It would seem
>so.

Hi Allen,

The translation of Heidegger’s “Verstehen is immer gestimmtes.”
[SuZ:142] as “Understanding always has its mood.” is problematic,
because it now seems as if Heidegger is saying that “understanding”
has some kind of (additional) property viz. a “mood”. I don’t think
that that is correct. What Heidegger imo wants to convey here is that
understanding *is* of itself a kind of mood. (btw. the word “mood”
as translation of “gestimmtes, Stimmung etc.” is not helpfull either,
it’s leaning to much on the side of psychological categories; better
would be imo “attuned, attunement”.)

The way i understand Heidegger here is that “thinking, remembering,
(re)imagining, recapturing, questioning etc” are all ‘moods’ by and in
itself. And the most basic or ‘objective’ mood in Heidegger’s SuZ is
being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein). Have to run now, MichaelE
can certainly enlighten us more on these tricky translations.

yours,
Jan

Posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
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