In the mood for philosophy: on the importance of setting the mood for philosophical thinking

I've been learning how to write fiction. It's been a slow process, going on for about three years now, and after many rejections and writing about 15 stories (far more if you count all the unfinished ones) I got my first short story published published in a magazine here.

It has been an interesting learning experience so far, and I'm still learning.

One thing I've learned is the importance of mood. Mood is very important for fiction writing, and also perhaps for philosophy. It's an under-appreciated aspect of why we love some philosophical works and keep on turning back to it. 

The YA novelist Maggie Stiefvater says in her online course  that mood is more foundational to a story than the idea or the plot. The reader engages with the novel because she wants to feel something. When people go to the movie theater (ah remember!) they don't go to see e.g., two friends having a drunken weekend in Las Vegas, or about an asteroid about to hit the Earth and a team of scientists trying to stop it. No, we go into a movie wanting to feel a certain way. Do we want to feel excitement, are we in for some goofy fun, do we want to feel sad? That's what we're looking for in fiction.

Psychologists commonly make a distinction between emotions, which are directed and more transient (e.g., anger, disgust) and moods, which are less directed, more enduring, such as nostalgia or playfulness. I need to look more into this distinction as I'm not sure how well it holds up, but a fine-grained distinction isn't really needed for this post, I could grant that emotions also have their role, but they need to be more enduring/less directed than a momentary emotion that quickly fades. Moods are semi-persistent mental states and are influenced by many different factors. Stiefvater argues that though we write for ourselves, we also write for others, and our writing only really works if we can move our audience. Eliciting mood is an effective way to do this. We want to listen to sad music because it evokes a sense of nostalgia, wonder and peacefulness. Sometimes, we are in the mood for such things.

By allowing works of art to elicit moods in us, particularly music, we engage in a kind of cognitive scaffolding, as Joel Krueger points out. Art is experiential.

But philosophy is also experiential. Pragmatist authors such as William James, John Dewey and others have discussed the importance of mood and temperament in philosophizing. So, for example, William James discusses what makes life worthwhile is not the drive for survival, as evolutionary ethicists hold, but "the social affections, all the various forms of play, the thrilling intimations of art, the delights of philosophic contemplation...the rest of religious emotion, the joy of moral self-approbation, the charm of fancy and of wit--some or all of these are absolutely required to make the notion of mere existence tolerable" . 

Some philosophical works have a very distinct mood. I will be teaching Zhuangzi next term (together with my colleague Pauline Lee) and one thing I find is that, at least in the inner chapters, there is a consistent mood of playfulness and profundity, Zhuangzi (though highly likely extensively edited and not by one author) the mystic, the sage who doesn't take himself too seriously. I think the mood is an important contributor to the work.

The same might be said of, for example, Nietzsche's work. The mood evoked in Nietzsche's writing doesn't come out of nowhere, digital humanities can help us clarify (see work by Mark Alfano, here) how Nietzsche discusses as well as evokes certain moods and emotions, such as the pathos of distance, which allows us to achieve a certain cognitive distance from, for example, Christian ideals and beliefs through a feeling of contempt; it allows us to aspire to a better self, as illustrated in this moving passage (also cited in Alfano, here): 

what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self. Compare these objects one with another, see how one completes, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you that the true, original meaning and basic stuff of your nature is something completely incapable of being educated or formed (from Schopenhauer as Educator).

Other examples abound of philosophical mood: would Augustine's Confessions be such a classic if it didn't evoke the mood of inner struggle? Or Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks? Or even Descartes' Meditations. As Christia Mercer pointed out, Descartes' work is indebted to the work by the mystic Theresa of Ávila, who in a clear-eyed way led her readers through the interior castles of the soul, toward greater self-knowledge and greater knowledge of God. Similarly, the meditative tone of the narrator, the close point of view we are afforded of him, helps us to self-identify with him, and to recognize his epistemic struggles as our very own, such as  “My habitual opinions keep coming back, and, despite my wishes, they capture my belief, which is as it were bound over to them as a result of long occupation and the law of custom.”

A Kant scholar once told me how she was totally disgusted by Kant as an undergrad, when she took a course on the Critiques, and could not make head or tail of it, but then she read the conclusion of the Second Critique (about how the starry skies above him and the moral law within him fill Kant's mind with admiration and awe). She said to herself "Someone who can write something so moving must have interesting things to say. I must try again". This is how her journey with Kant's work began. 

The moods and emotions evoked by these and many other philosophical writings are essential to their enduring appeal and also play a role in how we appraise them. They are what makes reading philosophy a delight. But they might also introduce an improper source of bias. After all, we have significant evidence that philosophical thought experiments are subject to framing effects, and other forms of bias, even in the face of training, reflection and expertise (see these experiments by Schwitzgebel and Cushman). Perhaps moods are an irrelevant influence in our philosophical judgments.

Alternatively, moods might be part of the philosopher toolkit. They contribute to creative imaginings, and emotions and moods have an important role to play in this. Such imaginings are epistemically helpful (as authors such as Tamar Gendler have pointed out). I am inclined to agree with this.

I have argued (in earlier work such as here  and in current work in development) that philosophical expertise is a peculiar form of expertise that consists of rich imaginings, of finding that peculiar balance between evocative mood, storytelling, and dispassionate analysis. We achieve a certain cognitive distance by focus on argument, on analysis, on looking at concepts in great detail and at taking them apart, but we also stir the mind with rich, evocative, emotionally and personally relevant ideas. That, at any rate, is the philosophy I enjoy best. I find that when we train philosophers to write, not enough attention is given to this second aspect, the aspect of finding philosophical mood, which is ultimately conducive to finding one's philosophical voice. And yet, it does constitute as James would have it, an important part of the delights of philosophical contemplation. 

 

Comments

[Eric Linus Kaplan]

our life is permeated by mood, so if we are going to create an artifact of language that vibes with our life it should also be permeated with mood.

[Martin Lenz]

Thanks for a wonderful post! Hoping to write later with additional examples or ideas in response, but now I'd just like to wave agreement.

[Matthew Duncombe]

Excellent point Helen! I though also of Plato, who is the master of different moods: slapstick comedy in the Protagoras, broad bawdy humour in the Charmides, to pathos in the Apology, tragedy in the Phaedo, awe in the Timaeus.