One of the interesting aspects of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy is his analysis of bad moods. For Heidegger, bad moods cause a form of blindness wherein a failure to reflect upon our states-of-mind is coupled with being disabled from proper circumspection and encounter with our environment and ourselves.1 A bad mood is the mind assailed due to an “unreflecting devotion to the ‘world’ with which it is concerned and on which it expends itself.”2
As bad moods are the mind assailed by an “unreflecting devotion to the world,” we have a sense about the genesis of bad moods: as mind feeds upon world, the mind is left more and more empty, and from this emptiness a condition, a bad mood, arises which further alienates the mind from recognition of God, self, and other. Bad moods, then, are a punishment upon the weakening of mental being caused by a persistent preoccupation with worldly abyss and an expectation that this abyss can nourish when it cannot. The pathologos—viz., the embedded irrational belief—of all this is a belief that one’s source of life depends ultimately upon an uptick in changing realities instead of on God, and this disease only continues the cycle of despondency and blindness. Sadly, one of the curatives for this pathologos—i.e., discourse—seems to be in short supply in today’s realpolitik. Still, to be freed from an attachment to radical contingency, which suppresses the mind and instills bad moods, requires the liberating discourse of another. But when self and others are bowed down to moodiness, the required exigency is difficult to access. However, one must take such exigency because trusting political gods for the succor and sweetness of life is as silly as a plebeian appealing to the whims of capricious gods to explain the regularity of nature. So then, how shall one escape the political cycles of bad moods?
The state of bad moods is borne from a failure to guard humility, peace, devotion, and the divine voice and from a willingness to make what is essentially hollow (i.e., the world) into something it is not (i.e., substantial in its very origin). Thus, the truth about how we ought to be and live resides in a resolute humility that safeguards interior peace and devotion and remains attentive to divine exhortations: I am substantial food; come to me and I will give you rest (cf. Ex 3:14; Acts 17:28; Jn 6:53-58; Matt 11:28-30). Without the divine protectants, the soul is tossed from one end of the world to the other—and this despite
the warranted anger at worldly injustice felt initially. Without protection, the anger felt at injustices wrought by machinations of weakness and false bravado can still hurl us into some parasitic, unreflecting devotion to the world, which saps the vigor of our lifeblood and turns our gaze away from the divine. And yet, what does this mean for those affected by political injustice? Can interior sanctity be restored without that restoration meaning placating those affected by political injustice? The question is mostly irrelevant on the supposition that the restoration of interior sanctity is the justice necessary for rectifying the individual soul.
Judah Stampfer coined the term “metaphysical shudder” to describe an “assertion of reality in the teeth of bewilderment…a grasp at complex truth in a universe crumbling to bewilderment and triviality.”3 Those grappling with dismay at the world’s injustices are grappling with bewilderment and triviality: bewilderment at the onslaught of the grotesque aberrations of cruelty and inequity, and triviality in the lack of attention given to these grotesque aberrations. The ensuing attitude is one of helplessness, despair, or the like. One’s attachment to the world of injustice forms quickly from there, and bad moods are symptoms of the attachment. But piercing through all this is the assertion of reality, like a spear rammed into the mouth
1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 175.
2Ibid., loc. cit.
3Judah Stampfer, John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1970), 6.
of a beast. For a soul disposed to knowing and sensing well, such an assertion rectifies their weakened state by conveying the understanding of a complex truth, which is of both fear and love. It asserts, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Prospero, “Abjure the rough magic of the world.”4 The nature of these truthful assertions, as God made known to his prophets, is far more fearsome than the spectacles of the world, and yet so unlike all of it, surpassing all in love and mercy and kindness. Hence, the “metaphysical shudder” is an apprehension of what should have always been but was neglected. As St. Bonaventure says of St. Francis, the metaphysical shudder is found in that truth which makes a good man seem foolish to the world, for this is a standard for judging the world as vain and stupid.5 The “metaphysical shudder” should be able to halt our vicious cycles of worldly attachments long enough to return to God.
Happiness lies in wisdom. Wisdom is not a bad mood. It is something followed in the assertions of the wise, for they have conquered the world with its vanities. Most of all, however, happiness lies in the endurance of divine love: In the world you face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world! (Jn 16:33) May we be courageous and longsuffering as we guard ourselves from the world.
4 Cf. The Tempest, V.i.50-57.
5 Francis of Assisi, True and Perfect Joy, 1-15. Cf. Bonaventure, Hex., 9.27-29.
