In the Mood
April 15th, 2008, search relatedRelated posts :: In the Mood :: in the mood :: In the Mood :: In the Mood
> >”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
>
Jan,
I see the other possibilities, but I have found that teaching the
verse as “Understanding always has a mood” is an enabling pedagogical
tool. It get us into an important discussion of the “hermeneutics of
emotion” which Heidegger reads out of Book II of Aristotle’s
RHETORIC. It’s an occupational hazard for me that if I teach a
passage in a particular way, it (the passage so understood, or
thought) can become a part of my thinking.
As to the translational issues you raise, let’s just talk about them
as if we know what we’re talking about and if Michael would like to
intervene, “Welcome!” The reason I like “mood” is that it is mood
that represents the “note” that is attuned. So I have made up the
word “be-mooded” for the sake of wording the translation as
“Understanding is always be-mooded” which it is. An explanatory
corollary would be “One is never not in a mood.” Which gets back to
the problem I raised. If we see “mood” my way, the problem remains.
How does one find oneself in an objective/basic mood for thinking?
Regards,
Allen
