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  • The Body, Bodily Feelings, and Existential Feelings: A Heideggerian Perspective
  • Charles Guignon (bio)
Keywords

body, bodily feelings, Heidegger, phenomenology, existential

Feelings in general tune us into the world and give us a sense of where we stand (Taylor 1985, 47). Some rather subtle feelings present us with an all-pervasive sense of our existential predicament in the world. These include, for example, feeling “disconnected,” “not all there,” “out of it,” or, more commonly perhaps, feeling “on top of things,” “in charge,” or “with it.” In “Existential Feeling and Psychopathology,” Matthew Ratcliffe (2009) develops a detailed and insightful phenomenology of these sorts of “existential feeling,” as he calls them, illuminating them by contrasting them with pathological feelings as they are described in both literary works and in psychologists’ writings on schizophrenia and other disorders. He also develops a phenomenology of the experience of touch to show how feelings of touch provide us with a better understanding of existential feelings than do the examples most commonly considered in writings on perception, namely, visual perception and proprioception. Ratcliffe’s essay is a sample of the rare breed of genuinely original and consistently insightful papers written from the standpoint of both phenomenology and psychology. He has a fine grasp of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and he knows how to reap the most from telling quotations from their writings. He also expresses a debt to Heidegger, although I believe that Heidegger has more to offer than Ratcliffe realizes.

On Terminology and Heidegger’s Concept of “Mood”

Because I am generally in full agreement with Ratcliffe’s views, I limit my comments to a few observations that may help to extend or enrich his main theses. Following his lead, I begin with some considerations about terminology. Ratcliffe notes that there are quite a few words related to “feelings” that might be used in its place. He suggests that “emotion” seems to convey something more complex than “feelings,” and that “affect” has a technical ring to it that can disconnect our phenomenological descriptions from actual lived experience. I agree that “feelings” is the best choice of words to get at the phenomena that interest [End Page 195] Ratcliffe, although I think that the choice of words here is somewhat arbitrary.

Nevertheless, I think Ratcliffe would do well to give further consideration to Heidegger’s account of “moods” as a way of getting at what he wants to describe. Certainly the word “mood” seems to have a restricted sense, being tied to such expressions as “being moody” or “being in a bad mood.” But it is important to see that the German word translated (quite correctly) as “mood” in the standard translations, Stimmung, has resonances of meaning that go far beyond our English word “mood.” The word Stimmung is derived from the verb stimmen, which means “to tune,” as in tuning a piano, and it is clearly related to bestimmen, meaning “to determine.” To capture these connotations, it might be most aptly translated as “attunement.” What it refers to is our way of being “tuned in” to the current situation, and Heidegger suggests that we are always tuned in to the world in some way or other, even if this be the “privative mode” of everyday “pallid, evenly balanced lack of mood” (1962, 173).

In Being and Time, the notion of moods is introduced in the context of a discussion of certain “essential structures” (1962, 38) of humans that, Heidegger says, make it possible for us to exist in a familiar everyday world that is “always already” intelligible to us. The first constituent of everydayness he identifies by using a neologism that is nearly untranslatable, the word Befindlichkeit. This neologism is derived from ordinary ways of speaking in which a German might say, on a chance encounter with an acquaintance, “Wie befinden Sie sich?” which means literally, “How do you find yourself?” The expression is therefore similar to our English expressions, “What’s up?” or “Where are you at?” or “How’s it going?” It asks not just how a person is feeling (and certainly not about someone’s “state of mind,” as the misleading English translation suggests). Instead, it asks about how you are situated or disposed...

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