Attunement and Disorientation: The Moods of Philosophy in Heidegger and Sartre

Abstract

This essay employs Heidegger’s philosophical analysis of the moodedness of human understanding of the world in order to evaluate the significance of the moods in and through which specifically philosophical understanding is achieved in the phenomenological tradition. First, Heidegger’s Being and Time is shown to be critically informed by the moods of anxiety and perplexity; then boredom is shown to be the determining mood of his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics; and finally, the significance of shame as a topic within, and a mode of attunement of, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is assessed.