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understood in a biological manner as failing functions of serotonin reuptake.
But a biological approach does not exclude a phenomenological model of
understanding. It should be stressed that even if we did know that lack of
serotonin is the cause of depression and anxiety disorders in a way similar
to the lack of insulin being responsible for diabetes (most neurobiologists
and psychiatrists would not support such a conclusion today), this model of
understanding would not make a phenomenological approach irrelevant. To
know the cause of a phenomenon is one thing, to understand its meaning
and phenomenal structure is something different.
One promising place to start looking for a phenomenology of feelings
is the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In his fi rst major work
Being and
Time
, originally published in 1927 (1986), and in the lecture course
The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
, given in 1929-30 (1983), Heidegger
offers extensive and in-depth analysis of the feelings of anxiety and boredom,
respectively. In the two topics the two phenomena - anxiety and boredom
- are assigned central, and in many way parallel, places and functions. In
later works Heidegger also pays deep attention to grief (Haar 1992), and I
will return to this aspect of depression below. In what way can we benefi t
from Heidegger's phenomenological analyses in this context?
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The fi rst point I would like to bring forward is the way in which Heidegger
makes lucid that certain feelings - moods - are world-constitutive phenomena.
Moods open up a world to human beings in which things
matter
to them
in different ways. It is common in the contemporary philosophy of feelings
to distinguish between sensations, emotions and moods. Sensations have a
distinct place in the body (pain, tickling), emotions have an object and are
based upon beliefs (love, hate), whereas moods do not have a place in the
body and also lack a distinct object, they rather color the way everything
appears to the subject (anxiety, boredom and sadness, or joy, curiosity and
awe). This schematization has its roots in Aristotle and has been further
developed in slightly different ways in the tradition of analytical philosophy
(Solomon 1993). What is central to the distinctions is that feelings in the
form of emotions get a cognitive content; that is, feelings are not merely
passions, which lead the rational agent astray in his search for knowledge,
feelings are indeed forms of knowledge in themselves.
Note, however, that this merely holds for emotions - in which an object
of the feeling is involved - when it comes to sensations and moods the
cognitive content is much harder to pin-point and therefore tends to fall out
of the analysis. This might appear rather adequate in the case of sensations,
in which the possible cognitive content is so crude in contrast to the content
of emotions - for example that my fi nger hurts in contrast to the emotion
of envy towards a certain person, which includes quite elaborate beliefs
about the state of the world and the way I would like it to be. When it
comes to moods, however, the lack of a distinct object of the mood seems
to have forced the classic analysis in the wrong direction. Moods, for sure,
do not contain thoughts in the same way that emotions might do, but they
