Heidegger y Neurociencia

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1: 287–312, 2002.
© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.AND THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTION
HEIDEGGER’S ATTUNEMENT Printed in the Netherlands.

287

Heidegger’s attunement and the neuropsychology of emotion
MATTHEW RATCLIFFE
Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, Durham, UK
(E-mail: mratcliffe@philosophy.ucc.ie)

Received 29 May 2001;received in revised version 13 January 2002

Abstract. I outline the early Heidegger’s views on mood and emotion, and then relate his
central claims to some recent finding in neuropsychology. These findings complement
Heidegger in a number of important ways. More specifically, I suggest that, in order to make
sense of certain neurological conditions that traditional assumptions concerning the mindare
constitutionally incapable of accommodating, something very like Heidegger’s account of
mood and emotion needs to be adopted as an interpretive framework. I conclude by supporting Heidegger’s insistence that the sciences constitute a derivative means of disclosing the
world and our place within it, as opposed to an ontologically and epistemologically privileged domain of inquiry.Heidegger and attunement
In Being and Time, Heidegger is highly critical of the traditional philosophical neglect of emotion. He remarks how, according to the “traditional view”,
“affects and feelings come under the theme of psychical phenomena, functioning as a third class of these, usually along with ideation [Vorstellen] and
volition. They sink to the level of accompanying phenomena” (1962, p.178).1
In other words, emotions and moods are construed as a superficial subjective
gloss that taints our cognition of the objective world and are considered peripheral to an understanding of how we represent and engage with the world.
Heidegger’s account is, to put it simply, a complete reversal of this sort of
view.2 Emotions, and more specifically moods, are philosophically central forHeidegger.3 They are not merely “subjective” or “psychic” phenomena but an
irreducible pre-theoretical background, relative to which the world and the
manner in which we are situated within it is disclosed or rendered intelligible.
To appreciate Heidegger’s account of mood and the manner of its departure from traditional accounts, it is important to grasp the way in which it is
situated in thecontext of Heidegger’s broader project in Being and Time.

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MATTHEW RATCLIFFE

Heidegger’s primary concern in Being and Time is the question of the “meaning of Being”. “The Being of beings ‘is’ not itself a being” (1962, pp. 25–26)
but a meaning-giving background, an understanding of which is presupposed
by the intelligibility of worldly beings. Heidegger claims that our understanding ofBeing has historically been hidden and obfuscated by our explicit concerns with specific beings, and proposes to uncover this implicit understanding.
To do so, he selects a specific being as his theme, as a “clue” from which to
start an inquiry into Being. Heidegger chooses ourselves as his focus; we are
the beings that have an implicit understanding of Being, an understanding that
philosophycan attempt to make explicit. He christens the subject of his investigation “Dasein”, in order to distance himself from traditional philosophical construals of the self as a theoretical, internal subjectivity that relates
intentionally to entities in an objective, external world. Heidegger contends
that, in construing the self as such, philosophers have obscured the way in
which we relate to theworld and have thus also obscured the nature of our
understanding of Being:
In this characterization of intentionality as an extant relation between two things extant,
a psychical subject and a physical object, the nature as well as the mode of being of intentionality is completely missed. (1982, p. 60)

Heidegger claims that this mischaracterization is evident in the emphasis that...