2023-04-26 08:38:54
How to define mood? Transparent, imperceptible, it is the innocuous garment that envelops and reveals a relationship to the world sometimes distorted by its turbulence.
What might be more elusive and fortuitous than mood? Transparent, mood is neither a thing, nor a sensation, nor even an idea. It might be compared to the quantum vacuum whose energy level is so low that the particles struggle to emerge. Without consistency, mood nevertheless envelops our states of consciousness in a way that is all the more influential because it is invisible and projects its color, tone or temperature onto the things themselves. Projection which, in different forms, can modify, even distort our relationship to reality. How to understand this emptiness that influences everything?
Definitions
To distinguish between the different senses of mood, one must first carry out a “cleaning up of the verbal situation” (1). Its primary meaning, trivial, designates a spontaneous state of mind. Thus, to be in a “good” or “bad” mood is to approach things in a favorable or unfavorable way. “General tone of emotional experiences” (2), mood is often linked to the quality of the awakening or the event of which it is the shadow, to the point of disappearing behind the logic of reality, who speaks louder.
In this first meaning, mood is a sort of minimal orientation of the mind, which would distort its objectivity. A melancholic mood would make our thought stream pessimistic, anticipating failure and ways to counter it rather than the strengths of a situation. Conversely, a euphoric mood might encourage a damaging presumption. Also the perfect mood would be “neutral”, not only invisible but inoperative. This is why we value this “equality of soul” which is called equanimity or serenity and which, far from being given, may require a physical condition (health), a social level (wealth) or even a philosophical effort (stoicism).
can be touched
But mood is not only this parasitic epiphenomenon, it is rooted in our affectivity, that is to say our ability to be affected by phenomena that are neither strictly physical (sensations) or psychic (ideas). but sentimental, through which the world is revealed as such. Moreover, Antiquity represented “humors” as bodily fluids transmitting emotions. What is love, anguish or admiration but the deepening of a favorable, anxious or grateful mood? Mood would be like the “smell” of feeling, its vaporous manifestation, a kind of undulating hollow prefiguring the form of possible feelings, confirmed on occasion by the filling of such and such a feeling, an affect which might itself be thicken, even become rigid in trauma, depression or mania.
In fact, mood disorders have sometimes been called “affective disorders” (3). Depression, for example, distorts our relationship to reality, in particular by influencing cognitive faculties through outrageous generalizations, false inferences or concentration on details. Depressed people would thus have a negative and rigid cognitive schema, inherited from childhood or from specific experiences, leading them to interpret their experiences in a systematically devalued way (4).
Mood would thus be the visible part of an affect, the hidden part of which would be passion, that of suffering and of pathology – all three of which share the same etymology. It can be described as the inertia of a state of consciousness which lasts beyond its own logic, thus the alcoholic who drinks-without-thirst, the depressive who is saddened endlessly, the traumatized who relives the same situation indefinitely, the person who accumulates objects beyond their use, the erotomaniac whose love crystallizes in the certainty of reciprocity… Mood, an imperceptible inclination of the mind, thus testifies in silence to the power of being affected and, consequently, potentially driven by affects with unhealthy autonomy, whether it be mania or depression, but also obsessive disorders, even delusions that can be analyzed as the secondary interpretation of unjustified feelings ( 5).
The depth of transparency
Humor is therefore the prow of a ship which is anchored in serenity but can drift in feeling, be capsized by troubles, run aground on passion, or even sink in the delirium of interpretation. It is the harmless garment that envelops and reveals our relationship to the world. Neither sensation nor thought, she is like a “feeling of nothing, the first opening that commands all the others. » (6). It is moreover in this pure capacity to be affected that Bergson saw the origin of art, below the rational turning point where intelligence cuts up the world according to its needs (7). Also this “depth of transparency (8)” can lead us to creation as well as to illness, depending on whether we open it up to the world or close it on ourselves. Because a tonality is less determining than the music that is composed in it. It is up to the will, the therapy or the pharmacopoeia to encourage this self-writing.
Guillaume Von Der Weid
philosophy teacher
1– Valéry, P.: “Poetry and abstract thought”, Variété V, Folio Essai, 2002, p. 661. 2– Pichot, P.: “Personality and reaction”, Bulletin of psychology, t. 15, 1962. 3– Faure, H.: “The disorders of affectivity”, Bulletin of psychology, t. 21, 1967, p. 83-97. 4– Beck, AT: Depression, clinical, experimental and theoretical aspects, Harper and Row, 1967. 5– Serious, P., Capgras, J.: Les folies raisonnantes. The delirium of interpretation, Alcan, 1909. 6– Barbaras, R.: Metaphysics of feeling, Cerf, 2016, p. 188. 7– Bergson, H.: Thought and movement, PUF, Quadrige, 1990, p. 149-151. 8– Barbaras, R., op. cit., p. 37.
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#mood #smell #feeling
