Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Since the world is always a “world with others” (
Mitwelt
) (1986: 118), the
pathological forms of anxiety and boredom (as well as the authentic forms
in Heidegger's interpretation) are characterized by loneliness. The others,
along with the world, become foreign and strange in anxiety and boredom,
they do not move and touch us anymore. If some fellow human being still
engages me, if I still feel some urge to meet the address of the world in
engaging in different projects, I am not totally locked in, and thus I am
still somewhat at home. This is not to say that all forms of shared activities
would be pleasant or joyful, it is just to underline that the basic problem with
anxiety and boredom is that they tend to block our possibilities of being with
others, since they fail to connect us to spheres of shared meaningfulness.
And there is indeed no private world to be in without the others. All things
around us in the world point towards shared practices and projects. You
could choose to live as a hermit, but you could not choose to live in your
own world (or if you do, you would, indeed, go psychotic).
Moods make what Heidegger calls
transcendence
(stepping out, being in,
taking part) to the world of others possible, by opening up a horizon of
meaningfulness to live in. Consequently moods are not qualities of a subject
in contrast to the qualities of objects belonging to the world surrounding
the subject, but rather phenomena which
connect
the subject to the world,
making a being-
in
-the-world possible. I have stressed that moods are not
chosen freely, but rather come to us as a basic predicament of existence and
transcendence. This being the case, however, we seem to be presented with a
basic problem in characterizing depression and anxiety as
mood
disorders
, as
pathologic phenomena, in contrast to the boredom and anxieties of everyday
life. If moods are not qualities which essentially belong to the subject - to
the self, i.e. person - but rather a structure of transcendence, a way of being-
in-the-world, how are we to understand the essential difference between
bored and depressed people and between anxious and “overanxious” (that
is, disordered, abnormal, unhealthy) people? Why do some people “get
stuck” in boredom and anxiety in a way that transforms their being-in-the-
world into a pathologic condition of overwhelming unhomelikeness and
“locked-inness”, whereas others pass through the experiences of boredom
and anxiety and are yet able to maintain a homelike being-in-the-world?
I would like to start answering this question by making use of some
concepts and distinctions developed by Thomas Fuchs in his study
Psychopathologie von Leib und Raum
(2000). Fuchs introduces the notion
of
leibliche Resonanz
- bodily resonance - in explaining how the body “picks
up” moods in its transcendence to the world of human projects. The lived
body is the central vehicle of our transcendence to the world as a kinesthetic
scheme of intentionality, which underlies our doings and understandings on
higher cognitive levels (Merleau-Ponty 1945), but it is so by its capability
of being affected by the world in getting tuned. The lived body opens up a
“mood-space” - a
Stimmungsraum
- in which our being-in-the-world can
envelop, and it does so by acting as a kind of physical resonance box for
