Affect, Rhetoric, & The Body | Prof. Bay | Paper #1 | September 20, 2019
Before this seminar, I thought of mood as a kind of personal temperament, the kind of thing that fluctuates or can be stabilized. While that might be part of it, understanding mood as a condition for disclosure, especially as it relates to states of mind as well as the internal and external features of experience opens new doors for conceptualizing emotional embodiment in society.
Heidegger believes a state of mind is very different from immaterial kinds of thinking that “first turns round then back again;” rather, the “there” has already been disclosed and “bare mood” discloses the “there” primordially in a way that closes perceptive reflection more than “not-perceiving” in the first place (175). As I read this, I think Heidegger is saying that state of mind is not the same as logical mental calculation and that when it is really attending to an atmosphere in the way it is supposed to, the need (and perhaps even possibility) for lots of cognitive rationalization and judgment dissipate. In this light, moods are more than the internal psychological tones that we each experience in solitude, attempting to express in words, emoji, or memes. Here, mood dwells in or perhaps arises from the shared social space those communicative acts take place in.
I’d like to draw our attention to our reading of Aristotle which includes a remark by translator Kennedy drawing attention to symposium attendee Aubenque (115) who draws attention to Heidegger who ultimately draws attention to Aristotle as “the first systematic hermeneutic of everydayness of Being with one another,” a kind of theory of “publicness,” which “needs moods and ‘makes’ them for itself,” because “it is into such a mood and out of such a mood that the orator speaks,” and the mark of a good person is being able to “understand the possibilities of moods in order to rouse them and guide them aright” (178). My long route into this commonly cited passage in Being and Time, by way of drawing attention to those who draw attention, is intended to acknowledge the extended chain of thinkers whose pointing does more than just make a trail leading back to Aristotle, rather they help ‘make’ the mood out of which Aristotle is able to speak to us as [again], in yet another voice.
Aristotle’s taxonomy of the “Emotions Useful to a Speaker in All Species of Rhetoric” is an impressive work of psychology which is written essentially as a technical description for the rhetorical toolkit of the human psyche, but is laden with metaphysical and ethical assumptions. It is from this space that I think Heidegger fleshes out his ontology of moods. On my most recent reading of this chapter, I started taking note of the structural moves Aristotle makes for each emotion. He usually starts with a definition, moves on to articulating its state of mind, and then points to its causes or the kind of people of have or inspire the emotion. The specific category of “state of mind” interested me because some are written as the “state of mind of those who are…” [Calm, Indignant], while others are translated as the “state of mind of those who feel…” [Confident, Shame, Pity]. Other formulations situate the emotion as a verb “state of mind of those who envy” or as an emergent quality, “state of mind of those who become angry.” While the term “state of mind” is used consistently across most emotions, these variations in how it relates to the emotion itself might tell us something about the emotion and perhaps to the mood in which it is disclosed. Are feeling, being, and doing functionally the same here, or might Aristotle have been giving us deeper clues about mood?
The relation of mood to emotion took on an a deeper comparative hue as I considered Heidegger’s “bad mood” in light of this renewed perspective of Aristotle’s calmness (or being calm). If a bad mood is one in which “Dasein becomes blind to itself” and “the environment with which it is concerned veils itself” (175), one experiencing such a mood is likely to go spouting off in anger or dissolve in envy or shame because of this momentary blindness. Calmness, on the other hand is a state of mind that Aristotle mostly describes as the quality of not easily falling into anger, envy, or disrespect (122). I’m seeing this as a kind of profound attunement to being with whatever mood has come over us. Certain notions of emptiness carry a similar connotation—and it is from this space that I wonder how my words have been empty so far. What have they missed or where might they indicate misunderstanding? Is this reflection part of mood, or is this reflective ‘overthinking’ a detachment from it? The important place to connect or re-attach mood, for me at least, is in its shared social features and the bodily ways it moves us.
That mood is essentially social, or at least includes externality beyond the individual, opens up what appears to be an ongoing question in the field: at what point does mood enter human experience and how does it function socially? Heidegger says “It comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside,’ but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being,” moreover, “a mood assails us” (176). Rickert posits that “A mood befalls us,” and that is an “a priori possibility emerging from the situation as an attuning within that situation, not an emotional charge leaping from one person to the next within the situation” (449). Others seem to approach this question of form by reverting to priority of pathos or logos and the implications this might have for mood. Nussbaum, speaking of Aristotelian emotions, says that they have a “rich cognitive structure” and that they are not mindless surges of affect, but discerning ways of viewing objects” (309), while Gross interprets Heidegger as holding that “Pathos…is the ground of logos, providing the mood and motivation necessary for the speaking animal to emerge and find its place in the world” (37). Whether emotions are based on logic and discernment or vice versa, it seems that the order of priority has implications for how we might view interacting with our emotions and cognitions, and I think this question can be engaged meaningfully by applying it to the experience of observing something cute.
Cuteness is a quality that has interested me from a philosophical point of view for a long time and it seems that theory about moods and states of mind might provide another lens through with to conceptualize what it means for something to be cute. What I’ve always found puzzling is this: whenever someone encounters something they think is cute, the way they usually describe the situation is to say “that thing is cute!” Imagine seeing a cute puppy—we’d say something like “the puppy is cute!” but I think more is going on here because cuteness seems to be a primarily affective quality experienced by people who observe something they think is cute rather than some real property of the cute thing itself. So instead of saying “The puppy is cute,” we might be better off saying “the puppy makes me feel cute.” Mood in the Heideggerian sense might suggest that cuteness is the phenomenological possibility that arises or is disclosed by the right beings Being (and perceiving) in relation to one another. In Aristotelian terms, it might be that the state of mind of one who feels cute is sensitive (or perhaps attunes to) situational features that are the opposite of disgust. Mood also helps explain how cuteness is contextual. To have an emotion or state of mind associated with cuteness depends on mood. Things change. For those of us who have or have had pets, perhaps you’ve had the experience of lots of people telling you how cute your critter was when it was a puppy or kitten, but as it’s grown up maybe you hear this less often? Your furry friend might still be very cute to you, but others don’t perceive them in the same way you do. You’ve been with them all the way along; you see them regularly and they make you feel cute regularly, but others see them at intermittent moments; perhaps the mood is different?
Beyond speech, what do people do when encountering something they think is cute? Often they smile, and perhaps become a bit giddy. They might change the tone or inflection of speech (an embodiment of words). It’s also common for people to put one or two hand up to their chest, right over their heart. Meanwhile, the little cutie is just looking at you like “what’s the big deal?” I think that this imbalance in outwardly manifested physical responses on the part of observers of cuteness is suggestive of an observer’s state of mind coming into contact with the mood that permits their dispositions toward feeling cute to emerge. Studies and theory about cuteness cover an interesting range, mostly in psychology, all of which I’ve encountered seem to search for the causes and traits of things we think are cute. One theory says cuteness is linked to juvenile features (large eyes, bulging heads, and tiny chins). Another one found that dogs are rated as being more cute if their head is tilted to the side rather than staring straight on. An evolutionary theory suggests that putting on displays of cuteness is a defense mechanism (‘please don’t hurt me, I’m cute!’). Cute aggression is the bizarre, yet common, response of some people to encountering a cute thing and wanting to superficially hurt it (‘he’s so cute I want to squish is little cheeks and toe beans’). All this is to say, there’s much interest in the experiential properties associated with cuteness, but not much theory about the ontological relations between being cute and perceiving (or feeling) cuteness.
Theorizing cuteness in light of mood and states of mind might shift metaphysical points of view, but I also think it could be valuable to rhetorical theory in understanding cuteness as it relates to persuasion and identification. Cuteness is disarming in a way that makes is easier to like and feel like someone or something else. It might explain why offering assistance or charity can be motivated more by affinity and pathos rather than actual need. But these are questions for another space, and perhaps another mood.