Abstract
This contribution starts from Max Scheler’s claim that modern philosophy holds two differing views on feelings. The first view, which Scheler attributes to René Descartes, presents them in their intentional role but rejects their independence; the other view, which Scheler attributes to Immanuel Kant, holds that they cannot be reduced to the rational part of the soul and thus affirms their independence, but deprives them of all cognitive powers. After considering both views, I discuss the views of Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl. Husserl takes an ambivalent approach to attunement, which opens the possibility of understanding Martin Heidegger’s thought of fundamental attunement.
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Notes
The basic problem with providing a unified expression for feeling is that the very search for a unified term is itself misleading. The reason for this is that every thinker uses their expressions within their own mental framework. I can thus find already in Aristotle expressions such as pathos (Gr. pathos), attunement (Gr. diathesis). In the Middle Ages two terms emerge, affections (affectiones) and passions (passiones), which are taken over by Descartes (1951, 1989). According to Heidegger, the latter two bring before us a fundamentally different truth of what it is to be human. Later, Kant distinguished affects from passions and feeling. Feeling and disposition (Ger. Gefühl und Gemüt) are German words, which prevailed in the 17th and 18th centuries (Kaufmann 1992). In Heidegger, the expressions for affectivity are mood and attunement (Ger. Stimmung und Befindlichkeit). This is why I have decided to use the term attunement as a unifying expression in the title of my contribution, and in individual paragraphs the terms related to individual thinkers, indicating the basic thread of my thought, seeking to meet the demand for “Begriffsgeschichtlichkeit”.
In this aspect of the later Descartes, Michael Allen Gillespie (1996) recognizes the basic trait of thinking which was of decisive importance for later philosophy, placing more and more importance on the primacy of willing, all the way to Nietzsche and his will to power.
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Lozar, J.M. Attunement in the Modern Age. Hum Stud 32, 19–31 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-009-9107-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-009-9107-3