Wednesday's Child

From Heidegger to Affective Neuroscience, a Field Theory of Angst

Gregory P. Schulz

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608996841
  9781498257350
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498274067
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Philosophy of emotion is a vital topic within contemporary philosophy of mind. Beginning from insights latent in Heidegger's early philosophy, Wednesday's Child is an argument that, with the recognition of a suitable field of consciousness, it ought to be possible to speak scientifically about our non-cognitional and non-volitional but nevertheless rational moods, in particular "that most celebrated mood," namely, Angst. With the emergence of twentieth-century existentialism and its attention to human experience, and with Heidegger's revolutionary insight that an emotional mood such as Angst (long-term anxiety or anguish) has intentionality, the time was ripe for serious phenomenological work on the emotional aspect of our human being. Much more recently, advances in neurological imaging have enabled us to contemplate the phenomenon of human emotion scientifically. At present, the new discipline of social neuroscience affords us a philosophical and scientific opportunity to attend to the emotional aspect of our being, a long-neglected aspect of our humanity. Proceeding from Heidegger's insight regarding the intentionality of moods, this book adumbrates a type of social neuroscience capable of validating Heidegger's understanding of the centrality of Angst for human being. Wednesday's Child concludes with an Afterthought pointing to the religious and non-religious uses of Angst, which the author depicts as a "prime datum" of our human being and includes a glossary, and an appended outline of the book's argument.

one

From a Feeling of Angst to a Field Theory of Consciousness

Clearly the anguish [running through the writings of the mystics] is that of separation and incompleteness at the level of existence. One can experience one’s incompleteness emotionally or economically or culturally or sexually, and all this is painful. But how terrible to experience it at the deepest level of all, that of existence! For all these other sorrows are partial experiences of one root experience of existential contingency. And this, I believe, is the sorrow of the man who knows not only what he is but that he is. All this is not far removed from the anguish of the existentialist philosophers about which we at one time heard so much. Their agony was not necessarily theistic. Rather did it come from a radical sense of man’s insufficiency, contingency, incompleteness, mortality, summed up in Heidegger’s terrible definition of man as “being-to-death.”

—William Johnston, Introduction to The Cloud of Unknowing1

Let us undertake a philosophical and scientific study of human anguish. Where shall we begin in order to find the phenomenon of Angst itself? The essence of anguish is disclosed, I submit to you, in Heidegger’s existential analysis of conscience. For Heidegger, the mood of Angst is integral to our experience of conscience. Heidegger’s existential analysis of conscience shows, in his characteristic vocabulary, that authentic Dasein (the interpreting human being, capable of deliberation) summons inauthentic Dasein to recognize in the very dissonance of the experience of Angst the potential to be a responsible self. Angst is thus itself a continual call to validate this dissonant feeling of insufficiency, contingency, incompleteness, and mortality—that is, to ask whether our feeling points to anything real and objective or whether it is merely subjective. Can one be authentic and ignore this question? Heidegger points out how easy we find it to be to escape into “everydayness” (Alltäglichkeit) rather than deal with this question. It is easier to fall into the distraction of everyday living than face this call.

Introduction

The present study of Angst is not meant to serve as an historical rehearsal of an existentialist concept of which we used to hear a great deal. Nor is it meant to unpack Heidegger’s “terrible definition” of man as being-to-death. Instead, I shall simply be arguing that, beginning from insights latent in Heidegger’s phenomenological approach to human anguish, we today are in a position to verify our feeling of Angst in line with currently emerging neuroscience on the basis of the intentionality of this feeling, much as we are accustomed to verify the items of study in other scientific fields on the basis of the objectivity of those items. By “verify” I mean the understanding of empirical investigation such as we practice in the natural sciences. A related term, “validate,” seems more appropriate for the way we used to speak in continental philosophy or phenomenology. Intentionality is objective in both manners of speaking. That is to say, moods have an object that is validated conceptually. In addition, moods have intentionality and that their intentionality is an irreducible feature of moods is a feature that can be verified objectively in terms of an appropriate contemporary neuroscience. First, though, we need to identify the phenomenon of our study, namely, anguish or Angst.

To the Phenomenon Itself2

Somewhere between 1940 and 1943, at the monastery of Ettal and Kieckow, Martin Heidegger’s countryman Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this about shame and conscience: “In shame man is reminded of his disunion with God and with other men: conscience is a sign of man’s disunion with himself. Conscience is . . . the voice of apostate life which desires at least to remain one with self. It is the call to the unity of man with himself.”3 This is a remarkable understanding of conscience, philosophically speaking. It is not Aquinas’s understanding of conscience, nor is it Kant’s. It is, however, a theological analog to the early Heidegger’s philosophical presentation of conscience.

Philosophically, we are familiar with the notion that conscience is determined by its practical activity or content, as is the case with Aquinas and Kant, taking conscience to be a shared knowledge within human beings that establishes our moral obligations to God or to one another. But this is not at all what Bonhoeffer describes. He describes conscience as an indication of our essential disunity with ourselves and others in our world. This is the very same view of conscience elaborated by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time: “A more penetrating analysis of conscience reveals it as a call (Ruf). Calling is a mode of discourse. The call of conscience has the character of a summoning Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-of-being-a-self . . .”4 What does this mean?

If conscience is such a call or summoning, this invites us to seek the answers to three basic questions. In the discourse of conscience:

1. Who is calling?

2. Who is being called?

3. To what is the listener being called?

In the course of answering these questions, we can conclude that Heidegger’s understanding of conscience in Being and Time is unlike Aquinas’s understanding of conscience as practical reason. It is furthermore unlike Kant’s understanding of conscience as an internal courtroom. Both of these philosophical views of conscience exhibit a traditional way of considering conscience that Heidegger deliberately rejects or supersedes. Rather, for Heidegger, conscience constitutes a disclosure of Dasein’s existential anguish or Angst while being in the world. In this, conscience is a disclosure of the here-and-now, the Da of Dasein.

To put it another way, conscience discloses that, though the human being or Dasein is in the world, the human being is unheimlich, not at home with herself as being-in-the-world. One objection may be that conscience, inasmuch as it is a call involving oneself, presents a problem for the early Heidegger’s phenomenological method (i.e., the method of Being and Time), namely, how to ground the existential presupposition that there exists, as a given, an ideal self to be appealed to. My argument, however, is to accept Heidegger’s existential interpretation of conscience, entailing as it does our feeling of Angst, not as a way in itself for the human being to conduct herself ideally, but rather as the ground for the possibility of being a self or responsible human agent in the first place. An outcome of my argument is the recognition that, in terms of Heidegger’s understanding of conscience, we can begin to see the phenomenon of our feeling of Angst for human being. A secondary outcome is the realization that Angst, when studied as the phenomenon it is, rather than as a notion conveniently downsized to fit a place in our theoretical commitments, exhibits an intentionality that makes it not only reportable but also capable of validation.

Who is calling? Authentic Dasein is calling. According to Heidegger, a human being is authentic insofar as she relates freely to the world in which she lives as herself. This is what is meant by Dasein’s “ownmost potentiality-of-being-a-self.” Before explaining this more fully, it may help to set Heidegger’s view of the caller against the understanding of two earlier philosophers as to who is calling via conscience. His philosophical precursors in this matter of “conscience” are Aquinas and Kant.

Heidegger differs from Aquinas in viewing conscience as a dialogue of self with self while being in the world contingently; Aquinas views conscience as the application of knowledge to a particular action. Aquinas sees conscience as moral activity resulting from the rational deliberation of practical reason. In the Summa Theologiae, he treats conscience under the heading of “Human Abilities—Bodily and Spiritual” in this way: “Conscience . . . is neither ability nor disposition, strictly speaking, but the activity of consciously applying our knowledge to what we do: witnessing to what we do and don’t do, legislating about what we should and shouldn’t do, and defending or accusing us when we have or haven’t done well.”5 In Thomas’ view, then, conscience is practical reasoning about moral matters.

For Heidegger, this traditional philosophical definition of conscience, which he call...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: From a Feeling of Angst to a Field Theory of Consciousness
• Chapter 2: Toward an Affective Neuroscience of Mood
• Chapter 3: How the Mood of Angst Might Be Verified Empirically
• Appendix: The Argument
• Glossary
• Bibliography