From Emotion to Mood: The Ethics of Mood
[Interrogations]
Our Axiom: Subjectivity as Task
I want to pick up from where we left off last week with an axiom: “[O]ur humanity is not an inner state or a secure possession but a task” (Davis, p. 156). This is the grounding of an existentialist ethics. We are attuned to and thrown into the world, and we are always over-determined by our environment, surroundings, biology, parents, and so on — nonetheless, mature subjectivity is marked by how it subjectivizes these external/objective factors. This is epitomized by decision and reflection. By deciding, we are asserting our subjective experience over and against the world. In reflection, we critique our very Being. This is what Walter A. Davis means when he says that our humanity is not something we are born with or given; it is earned and gained through living, committing, deciding, and reflecting. This is the existentialist theory of subject.
Okay, so what does this have to do with mood?
The Ethics of Mood
Our experience is always already situated, and it is disclosed via mood. This was our argument from last week. This is the basis of mood; and it is, in part, the structure of experience, particularly of our affective experience. If it is the case that a mature individual takes up their own experience as its task, its project, then mood is a fundamental element of our experience that requires our interrogating efforts. Through reflection on mood, we shift how we act in the world. Of course, this disrupts the separation of emotion, reason, and action. These become, as in the work of Robert C. Solomon, all tied together within the broader picture of mood.
So mood is not a detached, objective thing that “happens” to us, oftentimes getting in the way of our rational decision-making. This kind of thinking reifies the naive subject of the Enlightenment: self-contained, distinct from the world, and so on. It is precisely this subject that Heidegger is a trenchant critic of. An existentialist theory of mood, then, assumes that it (mood and its consequences, emotion, judgement, feelings, etc.) arises from concrete and material situatedness in the world, our thrownness:
[E]motions aren’t private dilemmas, but stances we adopt the problems and contexts of existence (Davis, p. 163).
It is, then, through the development of our moods that we can take our being to task; or, put differently, in reflecting on the constitutive element of mood, our existence becomes its own problem. This how the existential ethics is always self-referential (not in some capricious subjective anti-objectivism), but in the sense that our engagement in the world and with others becomes the ethical task.
So, ethics is not rooted in abstract propositions that we cognize our way to; rather, it is a ‘lived philosophy’ (to revisit to a concept of ancient Greece). When asked what the meaning of life is, Frankl responded with a metaphor: Asking for the meaning of life is comparable to asking a chess master what the best move in chess is. Yes, Camus was right about this: it’s absurd to ask the universe for universals. It is in our rooted situatnedness that the ethical dimension of subjectivity is revealed; and it is through mood that our sitautedness can be interrogated and made known to us.
Thinking, as a way of being in the world, is a discipline of passion. Intelligence is not a logical power measured by one’s ability to perform abstract calculations, but a question of courage determined by one’s ability to sustain fundamental questions by deepening one’s engagement in their existential roots. The primary act and proof of intelligence is not reflection on abstract logical dilemmas and relations but reflection on existence. (Davis, p. 163).
This is made clear in Robert C. Solomon’s subtitle of his The Passions, “Emotions and the meaning of life.”
What can we take from Evard Munch’s 1896 “Evening. Melancholy I”? It was carved and painted on wood, a semblance of his friend who was in the throes of jealousy during a three-way romance. According to the MoMA inscription of the piece, Munch deliberately chose to carve his painting lines against the lines of the wood, creating a structural tension in the painting, building strife into the frame underneath the already-disturbed image and color palette.
Is the figure depicted pathological? Should he not be “happy” in his romance? If not, shouldn’t he simply leave? The painting goes deeper than the division implied in these questions: event versus emotion tied to it. The world itself, both the structure and color, are jealous, confused, tense, and cumbersome. The painting feels heavy to illustrate the mood of its subject. Something about the world is disclosed to us in this work about the instability and tension of love, and particularly of non-culturally-dominant forms of love. Following Nietzsche, Munch aestheticized experience in order to interrogate at a deeper, more engaged level. This is our task as subjects imbibed with mood. It is my personal contention that literature and art does this better than other modes of production. For instance, one enters into the world of bleak absurdity of Camus or humorous absurdity in Kafka.
An ethic of relativism?
I want to clarify one final aspect of this reading of mood before closing out. It might strike the reader that I am advocating for a kind of “Well, this is my mood, and it structures my world, so leave off.” This would be a kind of shameless relativism. But this is not the case. By grounding ethics in mood, I am not saying that ethical decisions are simply based on what we are feeling at the moment. Rather, it is a broader claim: that the existentialist basis of ethics, that of the self-referential subjectivity, is based in mood. I live ethically when I take my mood to be problematic to myself, not when I assume it is some a priori event that justifies any action.
What happens when we think mood via attunement and disclosure is that we are now responsible, as individuals, to respond to our situatedness. The first gesture is existential reflection on mood and how it positions us in relation to the world; the second gesture is to respond to this task that is opened up to us.
Yes, mood reveals how my world is for me. But this is precisely what makes it an ethical category. Certain ways of being and acting in the world are opened up only when I confront and interrogate my mood. In fact, existentialists would claim that the default setting of being a person is precisely to avoid taking one’s being to task. I certainly don’t have to confront my mood, i.e., take up my own being as a task. But this is what makes subject existential. It is a rather different way of reading the Delphic maxim, “Know thyself.”
References
Davis, W. A. (1989). Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity In/And Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Solomon, R. C. (1993). The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.
