Heidegger, Mood and the Lived Body: The Ontical and

the Ontological
Robert D. Stolorow

Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles

It is sometimes said that Heidegger neglected the ontological significance of the lived
body until the Zollikon Seminars, where he elaborates on the bodily aspect of Being-inthe-world as a bodying forth. Against such a contention, in this article I argue that,
because of the central role that Heidegger grants to mood (disclosive affectivity) as a
primordial way of disclosing Being-in-the-world, and because it is impossible to think
mood without also thinking the lived body, Heidegger has actually placed the latter at
the very center of Daseins disclosedness. Heideggers account of mood thus entails and
highlights, rather than neglects, the ontological significance of the body.
Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is
the most stiff-necked adversary of thought.

Martin Heidegger (1977/1952, p. 112)

The lucid courage for essential anxiety assures us the

enigmatic possibility of experiencing Being. For close
by essential anxiety as horror of the abyss dwells awe.
Martin Heidegger (1998/1943, p. 234)
Every feeling is an embodiment attuned in this or
that way, a mood that embodies in this or that way.
Martin Heidegger (1979/1961, p. 100)

How does Heidegger view the role of ontical phenomena in the

illumination of ontological or existential structures? The answer to this
question, I believe, can be found in the central role that Heidegger
(1962/1927) gives to moods (Stimmungen) in the disclosure of our Beingin-the-world:
[O]tologically mood is a primordial kind of Being for Dasein, in
which Dasein is disclosed to itself prior to all cognition and volition,
and beyond their range of disclosure. (p. 175)
In Heideggers conception, mood is disclosive in three ways: (1) it discloses
Daseins thrownness into its there (p. 174), into its situatedness;

(2) it discloses Being-in-the-world as a whole (p. 176); and (3) it discloses

how what [Dasein] encounters within-the-world can matter to it (p.
176) in a particular way.
Elkholy (2008) makes the case for the centrality of mood in Heideggers
view of Daseins disclosedness aptly and persuasively:
Arguably, Heideggers most important contribution to the history of
philosophy, in addition to entrenching the subject in its world and
thereby overcoming the subject/object dualism, is the primacy that
he accords to mood in his analysis of human existence. Through
mood humans gain access to their world, to themselves and to their
relations with others in the world in a manner that is prereflectiveand
unthematic. [M]ood, especially the mood of Angst, has the power
to reveal the whole: the whole of how one is in the world and the
whole of the world at large. (p. 4)
Thus for Heidegger, ontical experiences of mood, or of certain moods, are
ontologically revelatory. According to Elkholy, Heidegger thereby displaces
the traditional, excessively cognitivist metaphysics of reason with a
metaphysics of feeling (p. 6).1 I take Elkholy to mean that, for Heidegger,
affectivity rather than reason constitutes the ground of philosophizing.
Anxiety, in particular, is grasped as a bridge to the truth of Being, a bridge
from the ontical or psychological to the ontological.
In his 1929-1930 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics, Heidegger (1995/1983) gives a particularly powerful
statement of his view of the philosophical significance of mood. Referring
to ontologically revelatory moods as fundamental attunements or
ground moods (Grundstimmungen), he makes a truly remarkable claim:
Philosophy in each case happens in a fundamental attunement
[ground mood]. Conceptual philosophical comprehension is
grounded in our being gripped, and this is grounded in a
fundamental attunement. (p. 7)
In the lecture course, Heidegger discusses a number of such ground moods

that make philosophizing possible. For example, in addition to anxiety,

there is homesickness, turbulence, boredom, and melancholy.
Capobianco (2010) traces how Heideggers privileging of anxiety in Being
and Time gives way in his later work to an emphasis on other ontologically
revelatory ground moods, such as awe, wonder, and astonishment.
In certain contexts, Heidegger (1962/1927) alludes to the role of
mood in the disclosedness of the they [das Man] (p. 210). The mood
of curiosity, for example, can, along with idle talk and ambiguity,
disclose Daseins falling into the they [and] fleeing in the face of itself
(p. 230). Fear, too, can accompany a defensive evading of the existential
anxiety of authentic Being-toward-death, replacing the latter with some
concrete entity or event threatening to life and limb. Such fear is anxiety,
fallen into the world, inauthentic (p. 234).
I cannot recall ever encountering a reference to the mood of shame in
Being and Time. It is my view that, just as existential anxiety is disclosive
of authentic existing, it is shame that most clearly discloses inauthentic or
unowned existing. In feeling ashamed, we feel exposed as deficient or
defective before the gaze of the other (Sartre, 2001/1943). In shame, we
are held hostage by the eyes of others; we belong, not to ourselves, but to
them. Thus, a move toward greater authenticity, toward a taking ownership
of ones existing, is often accompanied by an emotional shift from being
dominated by shame to an embracing of existential guilt, anxiety, and
anticipatory grief.2 This is a shift from a preoccupation with how one is
seen by others to a pursuit of what really matters to one as an individual
from how one appears to others to the quality of ones own living, including
especially the quality of ones relatedness to others.
Moods, Emotions, Feelings
A number of authors (e.g., Freeman, 2011; Ratcliffe, 2008) have
criticized Heidegger for failing to distinguish clearly among mood,
emotion, and feeling, a failure that Freeman characterizes as sloppiness.
In my reading, Heidegger is rarely, if ever, sloppy. He often does, however,
appropriate familiar words and use them as terms of art, giving them
meanings that are very different from those found in common everyday
usage. Examples abound: Being (Sein), existence (Existenz), care
(Sorge), understanding (Verstehen), death (Tod), anxiety (Angst),
conscience (Gewissen), and so on. I want to claim that mood (Stimmung)

is another such term of art for Heidegger, a term that plays a special role in
Heideggers ontological language-game which terms such as emotion and
feeling do not. Let me try to explain.
Heidegger (1962/1927) claims that in being our there, our
disclosedness, we are three constitutive ways of disclosing our Being-inthe-world: discourse (Rede), understanding (Verstehen), and Befindlichkeit.
To me, the best translation of the latter is the literal one: how-one-findsoneself-ness. How-one-finds-oneself-ness shows up ontically as mood,
through which we are attuned to ourselves and to our situatedness in the
world.3 I believe Heidegger, in this context, is using the term mood to
refer to the whole range of disclosive affectivity. If I am right, mood as a
Heideggerian term of art can encompass all of what is ordinarily meant by
moods, emotions, and feelings, but, and this is crucial, only insofar as
these affective phenomena are disclosing our ways of Being-in-the-world,4
as Heidegger variously claims can be the case for anxiety, homesickness,
turbulence, boredom, melancholy, awe, wonder, and astonishment, and,
in the mode of falling or inauthenticity, curiosity and fearfulness, to which
I have added shame.5
Mood and the Body
It is sometimes said that Heidegger neglected the ontological
significance of the lived body until the Zollikon Seminars (Heidegger,
2001/1987), where he elaborates on the bodily aspect of Being-in-theworld as a bodying forth (p. 196), a term he had introduced earlier
in his Nietzsche lectures (Heidegger, 1987/1961, p. 218). According to
Aho (2009), Heideggers concept of bodying forth, like Merleau-Pontys
(1962/1945) earlier account of embodied perception, belatedly addresses
the previously neglected fundamental role that the lived body plays in
spatially orienting our practical comportments in the world.
Heideggers (1962/1927) claim that Befindlichkeit is equiprimordial
with understanding (Verstehen) and discourse (Rede) as a way of disclosing
Being-in-the-world is, in my view, a definitive answer to criticisms of his
alleged neglect of the body in Being and Time (Stolorow, 2011, chapter 3).
This is so because Befindlichkeit always shows up in lived experience in the
form of a mood (Stimmung), and disclosive affectivity always includes an
experienced bodily component, a bodily attunement, as Levin (1999,
p. 135) aptly puts it. Against those who fault Heidegger for omitting the
lived body from his account of mood (Freeman, 2011; Ratcliffe, 2008), I
am contending to the contrary that it is impossible to think mood, and

thus to think the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world, without thinking

the lived body. Thus, without explicitly naming the lived body, Heidegger
has placed it, along with affectivity, at the heart of Daseins disclosedness.
A skeletal account of the ontogeny of affective experience can
help support my claim. One can distinguish two closely interrelated
developmental lines for affectivity: (1) affect differentiation: the gradual
development of an array of distinctive emotions from the infants diffuse
ur-affect states of pleasure and unpleasure, and (2) the symbolic integration
of affect: the gradual evolution of affect states from their earliest form as
exclusively bodily states into emotional experiences that can be verbally
articulated. Symbolic processes play a pivotal role in both of these
developmental progressions. The capacity for symbolic thought comes on
line maturationally at the age of 10-12 months, eventually making language
possible for the child. At that point, the earlier, exclusively bodily forms
of emotional experience can begin to become articulated in symbols
at first in imagistic symbols and then in words. Consequently, the childs
emotional experiences increasingly can be characterized as somatic-symbolic
or, eventually, somatic-linguistic unities.
I have long contended (e.g., Stolorow, 2007) that these developmental
progressions always take place within a relational medium or context. It
is the caregivers attuned responsiveness, phase-appropriately conveyed
through words, that facilitates the gradual integration of the childs bodily
emotional experience with symbolic thought, leading to the crystallization
of distinctive emotions that can be named. In the absence of such verbally
expressed attunement, or in the face of grossly malattuned responses,
derailments of this developmental process can occur, whereby emotional
experience remains inchoate, diffuse, and largely bodily. The persistence
of psychosomatic states and disorders in adults may be understood as
remnants of such developmental derailments. Most important for my
purposes here, however, is the grasp of even the most evolved affective
phenomena as somatic-linguistic unities in which the experienced body is
never absent. From the standpoint of a developmental phenomenology of
affectivity, it is impossible to think mood without also thinking the lived
body.
Summary of My Claims
(1) One of the most important relationships between the ontical
and the ontological in Heideggers thought is the central, ontologically
revelatory role that he gives to moods. (2) Heidegger uses the word mood

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as a term of art to refer to the whole range of disclosive affectivity. (3)

Because of the role that Heidegger grants to mood as a primordial way of
disclosing Being-in-the-world, and because it is impossible to think mood
without also thinking the lived body, Heidegger has placed the latter at
the center of Daseins disclosedness. (4) Heideggers account of mood thus
entails and highlights, rather than neglects, the ontological significance of
the body.
References
Aho, Kevin. 2009. Heideggers Neglect of the Body. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Capobianco, Richard. 2010. Engaging Heidegger. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Elkholy, Sharin. 2008. Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Feeling: Angst and the
Finitude of Being. London: Continuum Press.
Freeman, Lauren. 2011. Phenomenology of Mood. In Proceedings of the
Forty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Heidgger Circle, edited by Daniel Dahlstrom,
Lawrence Hatab, William McNeill, David Pettigrew, and Richard Polt, 133-154.
Furtak, Rick. 2005. Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for
Emotional Integrity. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie
and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Original work published 1927.
-------. 1977. The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead. In The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, 53-112.
New York: Harper & Row. Original work published 1952.
-------. 1979. Nietzsche, Volume I: The Will to Power as Art, edited by David
Krell. New York: Harper & Row. Original work published 1961
-------. 1982. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by Albert
Hofstadter. Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Original
work published 1975.
-------. 1987. Nietzsche, Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as
Metaphysics, edited by David Krell. New York: Harper & Row. Original work
published in 1961.
-------. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press. Original work published 1983.
-------. 1998. Postscript to What is Metaphysics? In Pathmarks, edited
by William McNeill, 231-238. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Original
work published 1943.
-------. 2001. Zollikon Seminars. Edited by Medard Boss. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press. Original work published 1987.

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Levin, David. 1999. The Ontological Dimension of Embodiment:
Heideggers Thinking of Being. In The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings,
edited by Donn Welton, 122-149. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by
Colin Smith. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Original work published 1945.
Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2008. Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the
Sense of Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2001. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological
Ontology. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Citadel Press. Original work
published 1943.
Stolorow, R. D. (2007). Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical,
Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. New York: Routledge.
Stolorow, R. D. (2011). World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and PostCartesian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

Notes
Furtak (2005) has shown that a similar characterization can be given of Kierkegaard.
I have contended (Stolorow, 2011, chapter 7) that authentic Being-toward-death
always includes Being-toward-loss of loved others, that death and loss are existentially
equiprimordial, and that existential anxiety anticipates both death and loss.
3
Macquarrie and Robinson, translators of Being and Time, tell us, Stimmung
originally means the tuning of a musical instrument (p. 172, fn. 3).
4
Artificially or endogenously induced affect states, for example, are not ontologically
revelatory in this way.
5
A passage in Heideggers 1927 lecture course, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology,
lends support to my claim: To be affectively self-finding [Befindlichkeit] is the formal
structure of what we call mood, passion, affect, and the like, which are constitutive for
all comportment toward beings. (Heidegger, 1982/1975, p. 281, emphasis added).
1
2