The emergence of mood in Heidegger’s phenomenology

This thesis offers a genealogical-exegetical account of Heidegger’s phenomenology of mood (Stimmung), focusing on his Freiburg and Marburg lectures from 1919 to 1925. In Being and Time, moods manifest the transcendental factical ground of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) in which an understanding of Being is constituted. However, throughout Heidegger’s work, moods have operated as the ground for disclosure, the origin of authentic ontological understanding, the defining character of each historical epoch and as the enactmental urgency that will bring about an ‘other’ beginning. This thesis contextualizes Heidegger’s accounts of mood within the broader phenomenological project concerning the constitution and grounding of meaning. The first part of the thesis examines the neo-Kantian challenges to philosophy as well as Husserl’s response. It further explores the problems Heidegger identifies in Husserl’s phenomenology and shows how Heidegger offers a grounding of phenomenological understanding in lived experience, in order to provide a concrete account of a phenomenological “beginning” (Anfang). Heidegger’s turn to affects constitutes a radicalization, rather than a repudiation, of Husserlian insights. The second part of the thesis explores Heidegger’s earliest accounts of affective phenomena in his interpretations of St. Augustine and Aristotle, where the terminology of Being and Time is developed for the first time. This involves an analysis of Heidegger’s accounts of love (Liebe) and joy (Freude) as they figure in the 1920 lecture course Phenomenology of Religious Experience, and analyses the emergence of Angst and other grounding moods (Grundstimmungen). The thesis then looks at Heidegger’s early interpretation of Plato and Aristotle in the lecture courses immediately prior to Being and Time, where the technical notion of disposition (Befindlichkeit) emerges, as well as his first analysis of fear (Furcht)