Thanks to Michael Eldred for picking up on the possible relationship
between Seinkoennen, Dasein's potentiality/ capability for being, and the
dynamis( capability) of rhetoric as one " existential possibility that
Dasein can throw itself into." I'm wondering though about the way in which
Heidegger features rhetoric so prominently in his early, agenda-setting
discussion of the dynamic ( set in motion by our interlocking capabilties)
inter-relationship between Seinkoennen,Geworfenheit
Befindlichkeit,Gestimmtheit in SZ #29. The problem might be posed as
follows:
On the one hand, as Michael says,
Prior to rhetorical skill of course, there is the
>understanding of mood as mood which has to be given before Dasein can learn or
>think about ways of influencing it by what and how it speaks.
The precision of your formulation here enables further thinking "inside"
the process you are describing. Heidgegger does speak of mood as "already
disclosed" as "equi-primordial with being-in-the-world",, but also as
"making it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something."
This "directing oneself toward something," enables one to be affected by
events in ways that matter and so is essential to the phenomenal structure
of care. My question concerns this moment in H's formulation where mood "
makes it possible to direct oneself toward something." The description of
mood as "making possible" conflicts ever so delicately with its character
as "already disclosed," which I would like to gloss as "already
interpreted."
One would suppose, especially in view of Heidegger's implied affinity for
Aristotle's Rhetoric, that he understands mood as a predisposition to act.
If so, how is that predisposition "disclosed"? How( In what form) is it
"found" as part of our Befindlichkeit? At this point in the text Heidegger
points to Aristotle's Rhetoric as "the first systematic hermeneutic of
everyday life. . ." He then goes on to say that the work on Moods that
Aristotle so prodigiously began has hardly advanced at all and has
especially been held back by the recent tendency to treat moods as a "
third class of psychical Phenomena" by which they "sink to the level of
accompanying phenomena."
I wonder if the proper phenomenological placement of moods might not have
to do with the mediative role played by rhetoric between the already( but
not fully) interpreted character of moods and their fuller
realization/interpretation as a mode of action in a particular case. It
would seem to follow that the "form" of one's already disclosed/interpreted
mood would be as a persuasive possibility in some sort of public,
shared-with-the-other discourse of the Mitsein. This would suggest that
rhetoric, defined by Aristotle as "the capacity for discovering in the
particular case what are the available means of persuasion" as part and
parcel of the phenomenal structure of Gestimmtheit as a predisposition to
action.
I believe that rhetoric plays a similar mediating role in Aristotle's
notion of Phronesis, which leads me to finally conclude with a very
suggestive reminiscence by Gadamer of an epiphany Heidegger had in an early
lecture when he said/saw that Verstehen was what Aristotle meant by
Phronesis.
Regards,
Allen
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