Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
nevertheless determine which kinds of thoughts I will be able to develop.
Moods are not added on top of thoughts, which I have already formed and
which will thus make the thoughts seem happy or sad because I am tuned in
different ways. The moods I live in underlie my thought formation rather
than being added on top of it; joyfulness and sadness will lead to development
of very different kinds of thoughts with different content. This is of course
the reason why thoughts of death, guilt and hopelessness typically occur in
the life of a depressed person.
To understand the constitutive role of moods more thoroughly we will
introduce some basic notions from Heidegger's phenomenology such as
they are developed in
Being and Time
and
The Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics
, notably the concept of being-in-the-world (
in-der-Welt-sein
).
The world, for Heidegger, is not a collection of objects in the midst of which
we human beings are placed in the same way as a table is placed in a room,
which is placed in a building, which is placed in the city of Stockholm, etc.
The world is not basically a geographical phenomenon. Nor is it a physical
phenomenon, in the sense that we would come to know the most basic
structure of the world through doing quantum mechanics or something
similar. The world is not the
res
extensa
in contrast to the
res
cogitans
of the
subject. The Descartian, dualistic split is where things started to go wrong
in the understanding of the world phenomenon, according to Heidegger
(1986: 89ff.).
Instead the phenomenological world concept is to be understood as a
web of meaning where every object (or tool as Heidegger calls it) has its
place and appears for a human being on the basis of its signifi cance for doing
different things. I intend the word “doing” to have a very wide application
here; the Heideggerian concept is rather understanding (
Verstehen
). You can
do things with words and thoughts, just as you can do things with your
hands. The important thing is that in all these cases you handle different
things to bring about something, on your own or - most often - with other
people. Thus to understand what a hammer is, to use the most well-known
example from
Being and Time
, is, on the everyday level, to be able to use it
in building something, and, on the phenomenologically refl ected level, to see
how it relates to other phenomena in the world (nails, boards), from which
it attains its special place in a web of meaning (1986: 69ff.). Humans in their
being-in-the-world are thus standing in a meaningful relation to the things
they are approaching, they are
with
the things and not just beside them and
in this being-with-the-things they also assign them meaning in different ways
by doing things.
Feelings, especially in the form of moods, in Heidegger's phenomenology,
are basic to our being-in-the-world, since they open up the world as meaning-
ful, as having signifi cance. They are the basic strata of what Heidegger refers
to as
facticity
, our being thrown into the world prior to having made any
thoughts or choices about it. We fi nd ourselves
there
, always busy with
different things that matter to us, together with other people, and this
