Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 17:10:33 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Mind & Body, One More Time


On Wed, 1 Jul 1998, henry sholar wrote:

> i don't disagree; i can't tell if you are mistaken because there is some
> misplaced concreteness involved here around colors and "living."  i did
> like your pun.  i usually don't understand and stop reading your
> lengthier posts. 

Mood as "color", in quotation marks, is good enough for the point I was
making, I think. I was not falling into concreteness. Moods aren't
*really* colors, though it would of course be very naive to think there is
no relation between innumerable metaphorical, poetic, artistic, cinematic
expressions and devices, and certainly figures of speech, etc.  and moods
or states of mind. I simply meant that a mood is not exactly a
*situation*, and to take it as such is really to misunderstand both
Heidegger and the phenomenon of moods in this regard. I suggested,
however, that states of mind *can* become *situations in themselves*
precisely when they are somehow out of control, problematic, etc. Now,
this may be wrong. This is different from the mood becoming a situation
through the misunderstanding of mood; i.e., moods becoming a situation as
such simply because we are equating it with situation, not because it has
*become a situation* in the rarer sense of a kind of distension or
distortion of Dasein. This would be, instead, a distortion on the order of
ontological misunderstanding: mood is mistakenly taken to be a situation. 
I must reaffirm that mood is more like the "color" of any given situation
and should not be overextended to be identical to a situation itself. I
may be wrong, but would you please consider not attributing difficulty of
understanding between us to my being deliberately obscure?

> 
> i expect the same treatment when i fade into or persist in obscurity,
> or if readers of this list find me simply stupid.  (No, not you.)

What I was saying was not at all obscure. Excuse me for "living"! ;)


Regards,

TMB



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