From Emotion to Mood: Attunement and Disclosure
[Interrogations]
There is no doubt: The Russian attack on Ukraine is a moral outrage. In September, the UN reported that almost six thousand Ukrainian civilians have lost their lives in a fight they have nothing to do with. Upon hearing this, what do you feel? Angry? Enraged? Frustrated? Hopeless? Towards what? And from what position?
What does it mean to “feel” these emotions, anyway? Let’s start with this: An emotion is how we situate ourselves in relation to an event. That is, we feel enraged towards Putin for violating the autonomy of Ukraine, disrupting modern national boundaries, pursuing quasi-imperialist agenda, all the while murdering civilians. This is in violation of many values we hold in the Western world. By being enraged towards them, we position ourselves in a stance of defense and/or retaliation, and this opens up new ways to intervene in the world. On the other hand, by adopting a hopeless frustration, we may resent Putin, but we are not in a position to do anything about our situation — hence, cynicism or apathy. Both of these emotions — rage and hopelessness — each have their own structuring element on how we experience the world and condition how we might respond.
Attunement
We are “always already” in a certain position towards our surroundings. That is, we are always engaged in personal ways with the things, events, and people around us. We are not, strictly speaking, detached from our environment. It is, in fact, precisely this attunement that is the stuff of human experience; but we need to think of this attunement in existential terms. In other words, we are not attuned to our existence as a tree is attuned to the forest, or the cloud to the wind patterns. We are not thrust around, and the relationship is not merely symbiotic. But I don’t want to get too bogged down on the differences between human beings and other beings. Nonetheless, the following quote from Richard Polt’s introduction to Heidegger will elucidate the distinctly “human” flavor of attunement:
One’s attunement discloses one’s thrownness: attunement is our way of finding ourselves thrust into the world. Having an attunement thus involves having a past, for I always find myself already attuned to the world in a certain way. (Polt, 1999, p. 65).
Our world and our internal states are in constant communication in a dance rooted in what Heidegger calls attunement. We are not separate observers of our reality and ourselves; we are always “tied up” in our observations. You can’t take the scientist out of the experiment any more than you can take biography from the philosophy. There are many ways in which we are engaged in the world and our attunement is revealed to us. Decisions we make, self-reflection, and philosophy and science are all ways we are actively engaging with our own existence, in which our unique position and experience of the world is disclosed to us. Moods and emotions are other moments wherein our personal “stake” in our own life is made clear.
The important point of attunement for understanding the rest of my argument is coming to terms with the fact that we are always already tied to our environment, and are existence is in dialogue with it.
Disclosure
Mood is one of the ways in which our engagement with the world reveals what we are tuned in to — or attuned with. Just like behavior, it can reveal certain aspects of our subjective experience and engagement. Here, I may ruffle some feathers: Mood does not distract us from reality but is fundamental in our understanding of it. The implication: we should let go of the distinctions “fact/logic” over and against “mood/emotion” for this very reason. Indeed, mood is essential for us to understand how we are engaging with our own reality and that of others. By “being objective” and/or logical, we are not getting rid of mood; we are replacing other moods with apathy, scientific wonder, or in some cases, nihilism. This is an exercise of exchange. Reality is ‘still there’; our mood only informs which facets and aspects of it we are “attuned to”, which elements we pick up on.
For example, some research has found that individuals with social anxiety and paranoia disorders are more likely to see negative intentions in facial expressions. They are, in an existential sense, attuned to the less pro-social motivations guiding our actions that may be ever so slightly revealed on our faces. Most of us don’t pick up on these slight nuances of character because we are typically more attuned to other things in faces (e.g., friendliness, discomfort, and so on). But our attunement to these other motivations do not mean the socially anxious or paranoiac is wrong in their attunement: it is just that another aspect of motivation is disclosed to them more readily than the rest of us. To use a less dramatic example: when I am happy, the world is cheerful. Birds sing gingerly, food tastes wonderful, and conversations are pleasurable. But you are angry. Your world is filled with irritation: conversations are difficult to maintain at best, and bird songs are either a nuisance or not relevant at all. The world as-it-is is full of nuance and complexity with various elements and aspects occurring simultaneously. No one person can partake in an all-encompassing perspective. We are attuned to one or a few of these elements of the world, and that is the world we are engaged in; the world, for all practical purposes, we are dwelling in and living life in. This is the disclosive structure of mood.
Robert C. Solomon, in his book on The Passions (1993), deconstructs the typical reason-passion distinction which has been a part of our cultural lineage in the West for the past few hundred years. In his turn to what he calls a “New Romanticism”, he seeks to understand the relationship between rationality and the passions, and finds that passion (emotions, moods, etc.) contain within them their own internal logic, particularly he argues that “emotions are judgements” (p. 15). From this he develops the theory of the meaning of life based in the reason of emotions — the “Why?” of passion.
To understand the structure of mood and the role of emotion in our life, Solomon argues that the passions have a phenomenological structure wherein they always have an intentional object they are referencing. But is the object of mood always in our head, intimating a kind of solipsism? No. Nor is it some “true” object in the “real world” that our mood is misapprehending. To bypass the paradoxes opened up by these conclusions (either the object of an emotion, e.g., an event, is entirely in my head or it is always a ‘real’ object), Solomon develops the concept of surreality. Surreality is his way of saying that the world is always for us — it is always presented to us in some capacity or another: “there are ultimately no intelligible distinctions between the emotion and its object” (p. 117):
To say that emotions are intentional is to say that they essentially have logical connections with the objects of our world … An emotion is a structure linking ourselves and the objects of our world which provides the structures of our world (p. 119).
Read in this way, emotions are interpretations of reality, not meaningless and distracting reactions to our world. As judgements, our mood reveals something about our interpretation of our experience. The interpretation of our experience is the intentional object of our emotions, what our mood attunes us to. Thus, mood is an act of judgement wherein our attunement to our world is disclosed to us.
From Emotion to Mood
I tend to dismiss my mood as something random and meaningless, and thus I make the mood even less disclosive (Polt, p. 67).
What does Polt mean by this? Well, when we “wake up on the wrong side of the bed”, we tend to dismiss the existential structure of mood: It must have been poor sleep; maybe I ate too much before bed; it’s just one of those days; and so on. While these interpretations may be true, there is always a deeper understanding of mood that is available to us, one that can reveal how the world is disclosed to us at the time.
My grumpiness today is the result of a certain disposition I have toward the world, not merely some random neurochemical event or behavioral tendency (though these are undoubtedly physical manifestations of mood). There is something life-affirming in this shift in how we view our mood. Grumpiness is now not just random, an off-day, to be dismissed. It is revealing what I am attuned to that day: the indignity of the 40-hour work week; the dissatisfaction with my life; something amiss but unspoken occurring with my partner; etc. There is life in our moods, and we would do well to not dismiss them altogether. If we do so, we will be looking for the meaning in our lives in the wrong places.
What Polt is getting at is a common tendency we have in our culture today. Each and every emotion or mood is ignored as distractions, imaginary, or unhelpful to living a happy and productive life (the only two moods which haven’t yet been medicated, lobotomized, or therapeutized away). Indeed, our situation is slightly reminiscent of Huxley’s Brave New World, where even the passions of sex are smoothed over. What do we lose when we engage in this interpretation of mood? For one thing, a closer and more disclosive interrogation of how we uniquely exist and move throughout the world. By treating anxiety as a symptom to be cured without understanding its existential context, we are denying ourselves the full extent of our subjectivity. This is the shift I would like to claim we should make: instead of thinking about emotions, which imply a-historical, biochemically grounded feelings, we should think of moods, with all their existential attunement and disclosive structures.
Stripped of their randomness, mood takes on an ethical character. Rather than the common “That’s just how I feel”, which allows one to avoid responsibility for their subjective position in the world, mood requires that we take up our attunement to the world in a self-critical manner. By assuming responsibility for our moods, we assume an ethical stance towards them. We will take up this claim in the next article.
References
Green, M. J., & Phillips, M. L. (2004). Social threat perception and the evolution of paranoia. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 28(3), 333–342.
Polt, R. (1999). Heidegger: An Introduction. Cornell, NY: Ithaca University Press.
Solomon, R. C. (1993). The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.
