This is just a question, one that I hope someone smarter and more learned than me can answer: what is it about the 19th and 20th centuries that made philosophers (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas, etc.) during those periods so interested in mood (irony, fear, anxiety, shame, pleasure, etc.) as the lens by which to understand ourselves and the world around us? Is it something that can be explained by some sort of historical, philosophical progression, or am I wrong in thinking that this seems to be, primarily, a relatively recent philosophical approach?
It seems that more recently we have thinkers with a broader appreciation of the dynamics of mood (Zizek on the one hand, Deleuze on the other - at least as exemplars), but that these appreciations aren't fixated on particular moods as means by which to understand subjectivity or the social. So if it was a particular historical moment, tied to particular conditions of emergence, where did those conditions go? Or are they still around and I'm missing the evidence? Thoughts, anyone?
Comments (6)
This is not so much an answer as it is an additional dimension to your question, and that's that I was always struck by Lyotard's definition of postmodernism as a mood...
Posted by collin | September 19, 2005 4:17 PM
Posted on September 19, 2005 16:17
enormous question, but the french revolution and kant might serve as two markers to begin the addressing it.
to further complicate matters neither of these two markers are easily delimited as a 'particular historical moment' as they are both -- or at least think themselves as such -- properly inaugural, thereby inaugurating another ( thinking of ) history.
Posted by Amie | September 20, 2005 12:03 PM
Posted on September 20, 2005 12:03
Yes, I agree with the question.
Suppose that Lyotard and the dissolution (somewhat contested) of grand narratives might as useful a place to begin an answer as any. Or with Blanchot and the "civilization of the book," which is a useful place to file every question.
Posted by Matt | September 20, 2005 6:38 PM
Posted on September 20, 2005 18:38
I'm speculating, but I suspect it might have something to do with "the (re-)turn" to the Greeks that was so prevalent among German thinkers that emerged in the mid-18th c. and is still in "play" today. More specifically, one might call it a (re-)turn to a tragic sense of doing philosophy, which focused on finitude and the limits of reason/the concept/the proposition and began to think more about the "aesthetic/affective" dimensions of thought and existence. ~ DS
Posted by Dan Smith | September 24, 2005 8:39 AM
Posted on September 24, 2005 08:39
Oooh, that's an interesting thought - a bit of play on the tragic, both as drama and as finitude, in which the mask that dominates our performances in life matters, in a most serious and material way. Something to definitely contemplate.
Posted by Kenneth Rufo | September 24, 2005 10:38 AM
Posted on September 24, 2005 10:38
Check out Dennis Schmidt's On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life.
Posted by Dan Smith | September 24, 2005 11:48 AM
Posted on September 24, 2005 11:48