10/07/2008
Sepp Gumbrecht on the philosophy of moods
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature, of French & Italian, of Spanish & Portuguese (by courtesy), and is affiliated with German Studies, and the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. He is also Professeur Associé au Département de Littérature comparée at the Université […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Western civilization hasn't come this far.
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All the way to the western edge of California.
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Just to dry up in the sun, has it?
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I thought the sun died here.
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This blazing venerated overwhelming God.
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We forget that Earth's atmosphere forms a membrane that protects us from its ravages.
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We live under layers of discretion.
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The ozone layer, a veil of modesty worn by the planet,
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toward off the excessive order and seduce the star into generosity and gentility.
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The sun has its glory.
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I don't deny it, but it's from clouds, vapors, mist,
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and other aerial phenomena that Earth derives its tones and tempers.
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Thanks to the spirit of its atmosphere, we live on a planet of moods.
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Silence must be filled.
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Unless you listen to entitled opinions, the one thing you'll never hear mentioned in the endless public drone about global warming
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is what warming trends are doing to alter the mood of the Earth.
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Yes, the mood of the planet.
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And that means our human mood as well, because mood is a form of attunement between nature and spirit, between habitat, and inhabitant.
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Desertification of the soil is the objective correlative of desertification of the soil and vice versa.
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In fact, the very first harbinger of global warming were the early modernists,
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who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries spoke of the age as a growing wasteland.
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The wasteland grows warm, Nietzsche, woe to him, who harbors wastelands within.
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Global warming begins in the human soul and then pushes outward into the world, into its objective correlatives, such are the ways of attunement.
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I'm not in a particularly giddy mood today, friends, as you can tell, and no doubt it has something to do with the season.
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This is the time of year, mid-October, when the soul craves the moods of autumn, craves precipitation, craves cloud cover and changing colors.
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But you don't get much of that here in California, at least not where I am.
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Nevertheless, every year around this time, a rumor starts circulating about the start of the so-called rainy season.
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It's more of a hoax than a rumor.
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The weather-fed forecasters say showers by dawn and by ten in the morning a handful of clouds drift across the sky like dirty rags hung up to dry.
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And even when it does rain, there's no real mood to it.
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No real change in the atmospherics.
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The dogs don't get nervous.
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The cats lounge at their leisure.
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No tremor of doubt.
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Disquites the soul.
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The sky merely turns from a uniform blue to a uniform grey without any rhetoric of passion, like a grown of thunder or flash of insight.
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When it rains in California, it means that a storm system with remote Pacific origins has reached the coast riding the jet stream east.
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It's front passes over the area and moves on.
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The rain falls for an hour or two or a day or two and then back to normal.
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This way, California has a raining is, to say the least, uninspired.
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I spent some time in Rome this summer and that's a place where it rains very differently.
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In Rome, it's not a question of fronts passing by, dumping their load and vanishing into the dawn with no sure return.
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There, the rain has a wide variety of accents and moods.
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At times you'll hear a thunder roll faintly in the distance, an endless rumble spreading in a circle from hill to hill.
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And just when you think it's over, the sky will break open like a cataclysm and mystify the city in a downpour of biblically.
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The kind of storms Rome can summon beneath her municipal dome.
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I don't know where else they happen like that.
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At other times it showers gently, a faint hiss on the rooftops, and then there are the contrasts.
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Dark, sinister clouds becoming luminous at their edges, bulging like sails against recesses of blue.
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In Rome it doesn't mean the end when sunlight streams through corridors in between the clouds flooding the streets.
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The solar blaze blinding against the wet pavement comes and goes, just as the rain stops and starts again for days on end.
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In Rome it's not a matter of fronts on their way elsewhere.
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The rain stays, lingers, lageriates, renewing its energy in ways that suggest that the city actually generates its own precipitation.
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Now this is bound to sound impressionistic even though I don't intend it impressionistically, but it seems to me that at the most fundamental level where everything becomes fluid.
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Water is thought's most proper element.
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There's a kind of thinking which does not think about this or that, but about the source of the relation between this and that.
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For some reason rainfall reminds me of this source.
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Sometimes I even take it for the source itself.
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When thought becomes truly thoughtful it becomes a kind of listening, and when it listens intently enough,
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it hears the sound of water falling, or something that sounds like the sound of water falling.
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Am I in the mood for some rain or what?
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I have the next best thing to a good downpour right here in the studio though, and that's my good friend and Stanford call "Exep Gumbrecht."
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Professor Zep Gumbrecht is no stranger to entitled opinions.
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The two previous shows I did with him, one on sports, and the other on Robert Moozels, the man without qualities, were smash hits with our listeners, and it's a pleasure to welcome him back today to discuss, you guessed it, the topic of moods.
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What is a mood? Do we have adequate words, talk about moods?
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How is it that moods arise from and reach into the deepest layers of our being in the world?
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How is it that certain works of literature not only convey but are suffused by moods?
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It's a lot to talk about and it gets underway right now.
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Zep, welcome back to entitled opinions.
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I'm happy I'm back and I'm in the mood.
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I am too.
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So, do you want me to get an answer to your question?
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Yeah, there were a number of questions here.
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I would never want you to start with, it's good with me.
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Yeah, I wanted to start with mood and I mean with the basic question, what is a mood really?
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And I wanted to suggest that we maybe start with the German word for mood and the German word for mood.
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It's "Chtimung."
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Now, "Chtimung" the root is "Chtimung" is "voice."
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And that different from mood, which as a word is kind of flat, is not very complex.
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I mean, they're the phenomena in this complex, but the word...
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But "Chtimung" suggests that what we call a mood is always something that is not only in your spirit,
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not only on your mind, but very much the way it is described with thinking.
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It is as if you hear something physical outside of your mind that gets your mind into a third and into a certain mood, into a certain rhythm.
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And, you know, when you listen to somebody in a conversation like we do,
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we all know that we do not only hear with our ears, but the voice of the other wraps your body.
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It's the lightest physical touch on your body.
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And this is what I saw like about this concept of "Chtimung."
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And in this sense, I think you're definition early on in your introduction to say,
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it's an attunement between nature and spirit.
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It's precisely right. This is not just a metaphor.
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I mean, there is nature. There is something physical that surrounds us, that is in contact with the spirit that sets the spirit.
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That facilitates a certain type of thought, certain type of inspiration.
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We all know that the way you think, the way you feel, the way you could play music, sing, write on a rainy day, like the days you described at Rome, is different from an Indian summer day.
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In California, I actually do like the October days. I mean, there's nothing.
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One of the reasons I could never leave this region is football games in a Saturday afternoon, October.
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I think only here, I mean, yes, the rain is missing, but there's something about it that I wouldn't want to miss.
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I didn't suggest that there are no moods in the Indian summers in October.
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It's just not the kind of mood that when fall comes around.
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I mean, I'm in the mood for, if you want to put it in that term.
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Now, "Chtimung" is "Chtimung" is voice, but also it's a musical metaphor.
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I don't know if you even want to call it a metaphor because I think the way you were describing it.
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Now, that's my whole thing. I don't think it's a metaphor.
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I don't either.
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It is interesting when philosophers literally authors write about "Chtimung" almost invariably the two dimensions that they used to exemplify it is voice or music on the one side and whether on the other side.
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So, and this makes me think that although people would first say, "Oh, we had a metaphor," no, it's not a metaphor.
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It is actually the lightest physical touch on your body.
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It is a physical touch on your body like my voice as we are speaking, wraps your body or your voice, wraps mine and we do that with people listening to us.
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And that is the same with weather.
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I mean, it surrounds you. It has an impact on your body and at the same time we tend to not think about it this way because it is so light and so permanent that we don't feel it like pain or we don't feel it like like in a caress.
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We don't feel it like sexual excitement. It is permanent and therefore we don't think much about it but it is definitely not a metaphor.
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Right. And in fact, that makes me think that when I said it's an attunement between nature and spirit that it was maybe even too dichotomous because spirit is for me completely isomorphic with what you were saying about the lightest touch of the material world in the voice because spirit is the most dematerialized form of math.
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That exists and it is precisely because it is that dematerialized it can traffic in between, let's say body and emotions and mind and it has this ability to go back and forth between the two and maybe moods are spiritual.
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No precisely, I think this is important and it is from time to time that that words like spirit or soul it's old fashioned for some people a little bit embarrassing because it sounds so theological are not completely synonymous with consciousness.
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You know, when I think consciousness I think they card nothing only the mind but spirit or soul mood are always already in this attunement and it is interesting that they were cultivated and used more naturally more frequently with more differentiation and historical knowledge.
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And in cultures where this was more natural, I mean it is interesting that in the middle ages the word consciousness basically did not exist or it was an extreme word.
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You talk about soul and soul was part of this inseparable being part being not necessarily in the middle but being part of the world of objects and that is what interests me in our present cultural situation about the whole topic of mood.
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And I mean mood in steaming I see anonymous but wanted to bring steaming in because it makes this point so very nice very nice.
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It makes me think that the challenge that neuro-nuro-science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, all these things where consciousness now is the new frontier that everyone is trying to conquer in order to relate consciousness either reduce it to a genetic determination.
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The one thing that is left out of the whole philosophical conceptual horizon is the idea that there is much more to the human and animal phenomenon than a mind and a body.
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There is something that is unreifiable if you like and it is precisely the attunement or are being somehow in spirit with the world that is pre-cognitive and that no amount of cognitive science no matter how successful it is in its venture to find a biological basis for cognitive abilities can really reproduce.
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I mean the funny thing is that we all know it. I mean you only have to say an example so you and I were both pretty picky about the seminar rooms.
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We get the certain seminar rooms, you know if you get the seminar room seminar we not be good.
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There are certain days when you wake up if you're in the teaching profession you know it's not going to be good.
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I mean you walk to the class and you do your best but you know it will not work.
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You know this is very politically incorrect but also the way the people who are interested around you don't have to look necessarily good but the physical surrounding we are not going to be good.
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We all know nobody would ever deny that this is a big condition for our intellectual performance to say it in the neuroscientific way for the performance of a consciousness but as we seem to be unable to grasp it conceptually quote unquote scientifically we act as if it didn't exist but it is intuitively the most obvious thing everybody knows it.
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In fact science has no choice but to deal with objects or things that can be ratified as objects but let me read you a quote from Schiller.
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Very interesting quote where he talked about how before the act of creation of poetry that he was taken over by a musical mood the way that you say he's surrounded by it touches him and he says I'm quoting.
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With me the perception has at first no clear and definite object that is formed later a certain musical mood comes first and the political idea only follows later.
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I would be lighted because this prejudice with Sheila that is always too brainy this is very beautiful.
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Well this idea that the musical mood comes first means that it's prior it's even logically it's wrong word logically a prior I but the fact that you first have to have the mood and then the object will come later it's almost its moods are
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a positive of the world in which objects can appear and science can deal only at the second order or you know that the second stage of the appearance of objects but poet if you want to say poets are in touch with this primary prior thing which is the musical mood which allows for the appearance of objects that would be doing justice.
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I would like to rephrase what you're saying in a sense that if the phenomenon that's what it is etymologically in this word history is what that which shows itself it always already shows itself in a mood in an environment in this very physical sense we have been saying.
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And in that sense you know I really like this this medieval this old fashioned idea that we are always already surrounded by the sound of the spheres but as we are so used to it we don't perceive it.
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So music of the spheres.
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Yes I mean the music of the spheres and it I mean maybe it is not so wrong even scientifically that we always already surrounded by this light is touch of sound of light of voices of weather.
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But as it is inevitable I mean as we are born with it literally I mean that is part of being born you're born in too light I mean this is you know.
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Content this idea this is why the baby shout because I mean he didn't understand the physiological thing about it nobody asked them whether they wanted to be born and all of a sudden there's light but but we until our death this never stops it changes so we are so used to it that we never thematize it but this being in a mood at each given moment I think is the condition out of which the object.
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I mean what then becomes the object of experience what the scientist to math upon it we have to talk about math.
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This is the condition for it to appear so I think there's never any.
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Object phenomenon showing itself without this already happening in a certain mood in a certain student right.
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And that's as moved my to find our relation are that we have primordially with it so what other.
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Aspects of mood would you like to emphasize before we go on to ask questions like for example why not only do.
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Places and voices come with moods but that there's also in in artworks and especially in the history of literature we can be that's very distinctive moods when it comes to poems you know there's so many things have been I don't even know it to start I mean for me.
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Like what we were saying about it I mean this is something that everybody has been living with all the time and people like ourselves you know working with literature or art music more.
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And yet I mean there is not much interesting stuff written about it so that's interesting so ever since I realized this would be something to think about for for some time to concentrate upon I have too many things but let me start with one thing.
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I care a lot about I mean you know that that as a historian we are all apart from historians I have bad enough taste to believe that we don't learn all that much from history I mean I I basically about drives me to to to to concentrate on the past and to work on the past is really this desire to kind of.
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insert myself if it was possible physically in historical situations. And then I feel something
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amazing can happen about mood that texts from the past, artwork is true but it's
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concentrated on texts, especially their products and their rhythm, their rhymes and so forth.
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Sometimes seem to have absorbed a mood of a remote past that they can irradiate again,
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they can wrap you into that. I give you one example that I find absolutely amazing, and
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this is the most important troubadour of medieval German language. His name is Valte von
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de Fergolade, I mean to be correct it was probably what I would have to say today it was
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Austrian, doesn't matter. Now he was politically if one can use that word changing between
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different emperors and kings. And he was basically participating in this pro-de-political
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situation, the term of the inter-regnum, and it was not clear who would be the emperor.
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Now clearly and we know that biographically he was hesitant, he was nervous, he was under
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pressure. And there's a certain moment when this happens when the prosody of his poems is changing.
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Now you can of course not ultimately prove that but I have the very strong impression if
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I recite this poems. I've done experiments with that. If you read them in class even
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to people who would not understand the content of the poem, they feel that something is
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just changing. And that for me is a complete, the amazing thing, very precious to me that
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you feel you can expose yourself, you can wrap yourself physically because literature has
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conserved that into a mood that is no longer capable, able to happen in your time. This
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type of nervousness will not happen in the 21st century.
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Well I have two examples I'd like to bring from the Middle Ages you remind me of and
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it's not the same thing where we could not ever put ourselves back into that mood but
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maybe on the contrary we can put ourselves back in that mood but there are two of the major
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poets of the medieval, lyric poets of medieval Italian literature, Petroc and Guido
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Calacanti who was a friend of Dante's. Now I think it's fascinating that when you read Petroc,
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so many of his poems are talking thematically about sorrow, about depression, about
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sullenness and the fact that his woman is far away and that he, and even after her death,
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that he always seems to be longing and grieving and in a state of constant frustration.
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But there's something about the mood of a Petroc poem which is completely unconvincing
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with regard to this theme whereas you read someone like Guido Calacanti and although he never
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thematizes a Petroc and sort of grief. In the poetry, in described within the body of the
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poems themselves and the rhythms and the rhymes, there's a melancholy which is so palpable
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that it's a--
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Absolutely, I mean I did not know we were so agreeing on Petroc. It's almost, I mean, it's
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almost embarrassing for two Romanists because this medieval trouble that I was talking about,
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he would never talk about his nervousness. That would have been a question of embarrassment.
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It would not talk about you, but when you recite it, I'm saying it cannot ultimately prove
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it, you feel something is happening to them. I would actually say to theorize and philosophize
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a little bit what you're saying, the problem with Petroc is, Petroc is already-- I mean
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everybody knows he's on the historical threshold, this is only modern subjectivity. There's
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already a subject, there's lots of consciousness, there's lots of capacity, fantastic capacity
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to transform it into a content, into concepts and you could say to the extent that you have
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concepts for it, you perhaps don't feel it that much anymore. To give you my favorite
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example is this late 12th century promos al-Trombo-ventadoran who instead of having concepts
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for erotic fascination, has this one poem that we both love, it talks about the lark,
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is rising high in the air and then lets itself fall. This feeling that I think you can identify
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with, let yourself fall down without fear, I think that has a power of irradiating, of wrapping
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you into something, into an erotic situation, 800 years back, that no concept, however perfect
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they are and they are beautiful and perfect in Petroc, could ever match. I think that's what we're
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talking about. Let me raise the question here of the concept of the latent which you've been working
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on recently, because if moods are so palpable that you can feel them when you read the poem or
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you feel them when you go into the seminar room and all of a sudden you realize that something is
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not going to happen in this space just because the mood is wrong or the attune, it's a
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disattune, something that can be that pressing, although with a light touch, can we still say that
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it moods are always somehow latent in the world or in ourselves, in our relation to the world.
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They actually like you as a situation that this comes after Petroc, because it could of course say,
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I mean to turn your argument around, if we are right in saying that Petroc is weaker on moods,
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on streamung, because he has the concepts. Of course whenever you have a concept, the thing is no
|
| 00:25:17.020 |
longer latent, you can articulate it, you can talk about it, you can discuss it. And that would mean
|
| 00:25:21.500 |
that the streamung remains strong as long as you don't have this capacity. So that means that
|
| 00:25:27.020 |
there is clearly an association, or that's what I think there's an association between mood,
|
| 00:25:31.900 |
between streamung, and something that remains latent. And sometimes I think there are situations,
|
| 00:25:37.660 |
historical situations, personal situations where that never becomes obvious. And we all know,
|
| 00:25:41.900 |
we have all had in our lives, I mean attractions, erotic attractions, love attractions,
|
| 00:25:48.540 |
romantic attractions, that have never articulated themselves. It has always remained latent,
|
| 00:25:53.260 |
we have never found the words, we are not even aware of it. Sometimes late in life you come aware of it.
|
| 00:25:57.900 |
And I think these situations are interesting, if you're not too low questions,
|
| 00:26:01.980 |
you can give me one example of my life. Today I mean it's standard in history books to talk about
|
| 00:26:08.460 |
the years following 1945, especially in Europe, but also in the US, as this years of quiet,
|
| 00:26:15.740 |
something was under the lid. So I was born in 48 as you know. Of course you wouldn't feel that as a
|
| 00:26:21.420 |
child, you wouldn't notice that. But the famous day, the German July 4th, 1954, so this is not the
|
| 00:26:27.900 |
American July 4th, this was when Germany won the soccer ball championship for the first time.
|
| 00:26:31.740 |
So my parents had a new radio and lots of friends were in our apartment. And the moment that the team won,
|
| 00:26:37.420 |
I realized, I mean I can have concepts for it today, but I realized that age six, that I was then,
|
| 00:26:44.380 |
that something had changed. I mean something this kind of depression that it was absolutely
|
| 00:26:49.980 |
impossible to have anything close to national pride was exploding. I think it then went back,
|
| 00:26:55.180 |
it continued to be this quiet, but there was this short moment, this outburst of something
|
| 00:27:01.100 |
where what created a steaming because it was there physically there, we were wrapped into it.
|
| 00:27:08.140 |
Physically there, but we had no concepts for it, especially as a zero child,
|
| 00:27:12.220 |
bursts out and then went back into a mood, went back into a steaming.
|
| 00:27:17.740 |
And I'm asking myself sometimes whether there's something in the decades following 1945 that
|
| 00:27:23.820 |
until today has not really articulated itself, that maybe that would be a hide-a-garean thought
|
| 00:27:29.740 |
will never articulate itself in concepts.
|
| 00:27:31.820 |
Heidegger is an important figure in this discourse because he's the one
|
| 00:27:37.020 |
soul philosophers, as far as I know, except for Jean Paul Satt, who's derivative of Heidegger in
|
| 00:27:44.940 |
this regard, who turn moods into one of the most fundamental phenomena of his philosophical,
|
| 00:27:53.900 |
ontological analysis. And in being in time famously when he, which is a kind of massive existential
|
| 00:28:02.300 |
analysis of this being called design, which is human existence, moods for him are the fundamental
|
| 00:28:10.140 |
way of disclosing the world that design lives in and belongs to. And he says that design is never
|
| 00:28:17.020 |
without a mood and the famous moods that he discusses there are angst or dread and anxiety and so
|
| 00:28:24.460 |
forth, hope as well. But then later Heidegger takes this idea of mood and he historicizes in ways
|
| 00:28:35.180 |
reminiscent of what you were just saying that there are epics that are dominated by what he called
|
| 00:28:42.620 |
the "groomed stimu," these basic moods, these ground moods, fundamental moods, and he identifies them
|
| 00:28:50.460 |
according to his history of being. So for example, the Greeks in the Greek civilization had a
|
| 00:28:57.980 |
"groomed stimu" of "wonder" or "estonishment." That was the mood. That changed with Christianity.
|
| 00:29:08.620 |
And the early modern period, the mood was one of certainty combined with doubt, Cartesian doubt,
|
| 00:29:15.180 |
but there's also this security. And then he speaks about the modern era as
|
| 00:29:22.380 |
the era of technology as being conflicted by moods of distress, terror, and confidence, or a kind
|
| 00:29:31.180 |
of false confidence. And I think it's interesting that he says that the modern era, post-neature,
|
| 00:29:38.780 |
after the so-called death of God, when now the foundations are now suspended in the nothing or the
|
| 00:29:44.380 |
abyss, that this provokes terror in all of us. But the terror is something that as far as he goes,
|
| 00:29:53.900 |
we've never really embraced, made our own or acknowledged, confronted, and therefore the mood of
|
| 00:30:02.380 |
terror, which determines the age, is also pervaded by a denial or refusal to acknowledge terror
|
| 00:30:10.300 |
as the basic mood. And therefore we live in this strange paradoxical moods of on the one hand
|
| 00:30:17.660 |
fearing what's coming on the other hand having a kind of false confidence in the future.
|
| 00:30:24.460 |
And it just goes to show that not only do individuals have their moods, but the historical age
|
| 00:30:34.300 |
has its mood the way 1954 or '56 was it? No, '54 or '54 when they beat Hungary, yeah.
|
| 00:30:41.420 |
Right, '32. Look, I mean the one thing we agree upon, there's no denial, sometimes I think
|
| 00:30:48.220 |
unfortunately, is that Heidegger is the great philosopher of mood and of STEM. I mean nobody has
|
| 00:30:54.060 |
contributed so much to this topic and it's a lifelong thing. I mean, there's one of the few topics that
|
| 00:30:59.260 |
are articulated about 30 pages and being in time in 1927 until the end, you pursue it. And yet this
|
| 00:31:05.980 |
may be my one-time opportunity in in time, the opinions to say something critical about Heidegger.
|
| 00:31:11.180 |
In the sense that what I think is the beauty of his substitution of the concept of existence,
|
| 00:31:19.020 |
subjectivity by Dazin, is the date, the spatial particle dah. So that makes it clear in German,
|
| 00:31:26.380 |
if you say Dazin for existence, that it is always already in a space. It always, I mean, you are
|
| 00:31:32.860 |
in a physical environment, as we're talking about the beginning. If you take that into account,
|
| 00:31:37.740 |
I feel that the historical examples she's using that you are quoting, they miss a certain
|
| 00:31:45.500 |
primary level. I actually, I pretty much agree with his diagnostics about the present day,
|
| 00:31:50.860 |
I think yes, he's right. I mean, as far as I can tell, about ancient Greece. But like in them,
|
| 00:31:56.780 |
like what we're talking about, Patrick and the earlier Tripadors, I think there is a primordial level,
|
| 00:32:02.940 |
where it is not yet what we call fear or curiosity or doubt, where it is much closer once again to
|
| 00:32:09.660 |
your skin in the quite literal sense. And the sad thing is the interesting thing is that Heidegger
|
| 00:32:16.620 |
would have had the systematic possibility to talk about that because of Dazin being spatial, right?
|
| 00:32:22.700 |
In that sense, actually, I think the philosopher, if any, that he considers his predecessor Nietzsche
|
| 00:32:28.780 |
is much stronger. I mean, Nietzsche gets this primordial level and then goes on to this descriptions
|
| 00:32:35.020 |
of moods in the historical sense as Heidegger. Well, speaking of Nietzsche, I know that you've done
|
| 00:32:44.140 |
some work on steemung and Venice, no? I've been writing some pieces for the German newspaper,
|
| 00:32:49.580 |
Frankfurt al-Germain, and can you tell our listeners why Venice is such an obvious city of moods?
|
| 00:33:02.700 |
And everyone who's been to Venice knows what that means, but what do you do with that?
|
| 00:33:08.620 |
Look, in the first place, I mean, when people are asking him when I'm using the rich steemung and
|
| 00:33:13.180 |
and I say, "Yeah, it is mood, but it is more physical than your first thing." I mean, if I'm talking to
|
| 00:33:18.620 |
people who want to be cultivated and I want to use a text that pretty much everybody has read,
|
| 00:33:23.020 |
I'm always using the the novella by Thomas Monde d'Echen van Nes. Because that is very clear
|
| 00:33:29.580 |
that what this novella is all about, this is not really about a love story, but it is about
|
| 00:33:34.780 |
a mood, a mood of decadence, a mood of falling in love and not being able to control that,
|
| 00:33:42.620 |
that's being a love towards death, how he very strongly relates that with the specific weather conditions
|
| 00:33:49.980 |
that literally smells, physical environment in Venice. And I think, you know, unless there are
|
| 00:33:58.300 |
some days where this doesn't exist in Venice, I've never been to Venice, without feeling when I
|
| 00:34:03.180 |
enter the city, I mean, it's not only the beautiful architecture and on you can talk about,
|
| 00:34:07.820 |
you're always, you feel it very strong, I think Venice is a place where this lightest touch
|
| 00:34:12.300 |
becomes lightly heavier and you feel it on your skin, your sweat. And finally, the interesting
|
| 00:34:16.700 |
that one of my four children I've all taken them to Venice very young, my daughter Sarah, she was
|
| 00:34:21.420 |
so impressed, she was like five or six years old, they're on the way home, she painted a map how to
|
| 00:34:27.340 |
not go back to Venice. Because it was so heavy on her, it was a very hot day in Venice,
|
| 00:34:32.140 |
that she felt it was too much, you know, she felt suffocated, she never wanted to return, but that's
|
| 00:34:36.220 |
precisely for most of us in a positive way why Venice is such an example for what we're talking about.
|
| 00:34:41.900 |
Certainly the presence of water has a lot to do with the generation of mood there now.
|
| 00:34:47.180 |
Absolutely, I mean, it is water, I mean, you know, if you do the gondola thing, I mean,
|
| 00:34:53.980 |
this is something how to get talks about skin skiing, right? I mean, he says, I mean,
|
| 00:34:57.980 |
has this fascination with skin, that while you're skiing, you feel the earth, I mean, you can,
|
| 00:35:01.740 |
I mean, you feel it, you feel it rolling, and this is how you get into Venice. And then in Venice
|
| 00:35:08.220 |
also this water smells badly, but nevertheless it surrounds you. So I think that what Artisto
|
| 00:35:14.380 |
and his talk about, what were tourist guides talk about, the architecture and all the beauty,
|
| 00:35:17.820 |
is inseparable from an exceptionally direct and in that sense,
|
| 00:35:24.220 |
perceptible being touched, I mean, being physically wrapped into this world. And I think this is
|
| 00:35:31.420 |
why not only for me, but you know, from many artists, from any philosophers, Venice and Western culture
|
| 00:35:38.540 |
has become the very symbol of that. It is actually interesting. I mean, every reason
|
| 00:35:43.260 |
you had the opinion to do a little bit more about Russian culture, Russians normally talk about Siberia
|
| 00:35:47.900 |
or about the North and Britain. I mean, that's very cold, which could be the equivalent,
|
| 00:35:52.380 |
doesn't have to be warm, but you know, I'm a friend, I mean, a friend of ours, Irina,
|
| 00:35:56.220 |
she always talks about Norilsk, and Norilsk, it is so cold that it is precious, it hurts,
|
| 00:36:01.820 |
but you feel you are in the physical world.
|
| 00:36:03.980 |
Yeah. I have a feeling that something in Venice has to do with the flowing of water,
|
| 00:36:11.900 |
which in itself cannot help but provoke a notion of passage. And the constant reflection of solid
|
| 00:36:22.220 |
buildings in the water reminds one of the insubstantiality of even the most solid of solids,
|
| 00:36:28.940 |
and therefore it evokes the passage of time and death, this constant association
|
| 00:36:33.660 |
that Venice has with death in the Western imagination is much better than what I wrote about this
|
| 00:36:42.140 |
and then there's this in H.A.L.M.O. Nietzsche, that autobiography where that kind of mad autobiography,
|
| 00:36:50.540 |
madly fascinating, and he's speaking about music there, and he says at a certain point he says,
|
| 00:36:57.820 |
"Whenever I think of another word for music, the only word that comes to mind is Venice."
|
| 00:37:07.020 |
And then he adds, "I do not know how to distinguish between tears and music."
|
| 00:37:16.620 |
And then he includes this little poem which I brought along both in English and German,
|
| 00:37:21.020 |
hoping that you will read the German of it, called Venice, and it takes up this association
|
| 00:37:32.460 |
of Venice with tears as well as music, and would you like to read the German first or should I read
|
| 00:37:39.420 |
the English first? I think it's more interesting to do the German first not in order for me to be
|
| 00:37:44.460 |
the first, but to get the mood that the mood is in there without it, for people who don't know German,
|
| 00:37:50.700 |
just one word, I mean there's this inseparability that Nietzsche talks about of tears and music,
|
| 00:37:56.380 |
that is precisely once again our opening topic, the attunement of nature and soul of nature and spirit,
|
| 00:38:02.940 |
and of course we don't have concepts that unified, but the whole thing is that they're not separate,
|
| 00:38:10.060 |
they're the same, okay? And I will not, I mean it will be hard for a full little
|
| 00:38:14.700 |
re-quiddic to resist the temptation to comment it, I will just read it as best I can.
|
| 00:38:18.140 |
Venetic. "The bököstän tjungstäk in brown and art.
|
| 00:38:24.540 |
Fern here come gizung. Golder-tropfung-kwaltz, but it's set in the flejhewek.
|
| 00:38:33.340 |
Gondeln Lechter-Müzig. "Tökungkungstämz in the demerunghenaus.
|
| 00:38:40.060 |
Manazile, Anzaitenchpiel, Zangzi. "Wundzig probably Rüwert, Heimlich and Gondel-Lietzer-zuh.
|
| 00:38:49.100 |
Sitem for Bünters-Lietzkeit. Hötter-Yemand-Yetsuh.
|
| 00:38:58.220 |
Oh, I Venice. At the bridge of late I stood in the brown night. From afar came a song
|
| 00:39:05.420 |
as a golden drop it welled over the quivering surface. Gondeln's, lights, and music.
|
| 00:39:13.740 |
Drunken, it swam out into the twilight. My soul, a stringed instrument sang to itself
|
| 00:39:22.140 |
invisibly touched a secret gondel song, quivering with iridescent happiness. Did anyone listen to it?"
|
| 00:39:30.700 |
You know, the amazing thing about this poem just circumstantially is that when
|
| 00:39:37.260 |
when Nietzsche went mad and Turin, who was it that came to get him?
|
| 00:39:43.660 |
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's friend from Heidelberg.
|
| 00:39:47.580 |
His friend from Heidelberg and the name will come to me now. But anyway, he was taking him back to
|
| 00:39:53.420 |
Germany and in the train at around three in the morning the train stopped in a train station.
|
| 00:40:02.620 |
And this was a weird moment because Nietzsche actually refused to get on the train unless he could wear
|
| 00:40:08.860 |
his night cap. And so he must have been quite a sight. But he actually sang this song from his
|
| 00:40:17.100 |
bunk. I mean, he thought he was asleep, but he actually sang it aloud. And
|
| 00:40:24.620 |
overbeck is it overbeck? Overbeck is sad because overbeck is overbeck.
|
| 00:40:31.820 |
Back back for as he was neither for us nor is no. And it's overbeck.
|
| 00:40:34.140 |
It's overbeck. And he said it had such an eerie effect on him to hear him sing this poem.
|
| 00:40:41.020 |
You know, I mean, the poem we both read, I mean, as two things, I hope it comes across it that
|
| 00:40:47.580 |
is my feeling when I listen to you reading it even in the English translation, even more so in the
|
| 00:40:51.900 |
I mean, when I embody the poem so to speak in German, it has this effect. I do think there's
|
| 00:40:58.780 |
something absorbed there. This is the amazing effect when you read it. You can be wrapped into this
|
| 00:41:04.700 |
physical world almost in the same image it was. But at the same time, you know, in the description,
|
| 00:41:11.500 |
especially I would say in the second stanza, it is exactly what we try to describe. Look, I mean,
|
| 00:41:17.180 |
my soul, a stringed instrument sang to itself in visibly touched a secret gondola song.
|
| 00:41:22.220 |
So the first place, it's soul. It's not consciousness. It's soul. Not a word he uses very much
|
| 00:41:28.700 |
soul, but he it has to be soul or could be spirit, but it could not be something like consciousness.
|
| 00:41:33.980 |
And it is an instrument and it's a string instrument. I think the important thing of a string instrument
|
| 00:41:37.980 |
a string instrument resonates. Yeah. I mean, a string instrument receives something. So what your
|
| 00:41:42.620 |
soul really does, it resonates to this environment and by resonating to this environment, a,
|
| 00:41:49.580 |
it becomes one with the environment. So it becomes music in this environment. And b, it absorbs
|
| 00:41:58.460 |
something from this environment that then is in this music. And the is is saying this in a very
|
| 00:42:03.420 |
high to game in way. I think it's absorbed that's physically absorbed. You know, my obsession with this
|
| 00:42:07.820 |
French 17th century meter with the Alexandre, which is basically very strange meter, but clearly,
|
| 00:42:14.620 |
I mean, everybody in Paris in the 17th century, all of theater was absorbed with this meter. So
|
| 00:42:20.700 |
for me, it's late and I don't know what it is, but something is in there. And once again, I'm saying
|
| 00:42:26.220 |
there in this ontological in this physical sense that it keeps and that makes it
|
| 00:42:33.260 |
possible for us to a certain extent to be back into this world. And I think in this sense,
|
| 00:42:40.300 |
this is very much historically chronologically the same Venice, you know, for rich people,
|
| 00:42:48.380 |
intellectual people in the late 19th century, the Thomas Man went to. I mean, Thomas Man actually
|
| 00:42:52.860 |
writes the Nevada in reaction to a stay in Venice. We don't know whether he also had an
|
| 00:42:58.300 |
erotic adventure, but there is something absorbed register, but register is not strong enough,
|
| 00:43:07.500 |
like this like this string instrument here that he can resonate with.
|
| 00:43:11.580 |
The stringed instrument is in the second stanza that is singing this song and it's quivering,
|
| 00:43:19.820 |
or as you were saying, trembling with iridescent happiness, it's strange because
|
| 00:43:25.820 |
the first stanza he describes standing on the bridge, the brown night, I love that brown night.
|
| 00:43:32.780 |
It's so indeterminate because what is a brown night? And this, so from a far comes a song,
|
| 00:43:40.300 |
and it's like a golden drop, it comes over the quivering surface. So the quivering surface of
|
| 00:43:45.820 |
the sea is the same as the quivering with iridescent happiness. It's the same word even in German,
|
| 00:43:54.220 |
that this song comes towards him, gondels like this, and then it says if what you were talking about
|
| 00:43:59.660 |
absorption, it says if this drop has grown and it actually overcomes him and then swims out
|
| 00:44:07.580 |
against the twilight, having inspired him, it leaves him there, able to sing a song.
|
| 00:44:13.020 |
And we were speaking about how sometimes you can have this melancholy without it being at all
|
| 00:44:21.900 |
theoatic and bicevursa. The year he says it's all about happiness, but do you not sense a deep
|
| 00:44:28.940 |
latent melancholy actually in the poem? Yeah, no, the man sees as happiness, but the word is
|
| 00:44:35.260 |
zalich kind, and zalich kind is actually something that's very beautiful with very precious word.
|
| 00:44:41.740 |
It's the German word actually for bianthus, so before you become a saint, you are zalich.
|
| 00:44:47.020 |
So this word is much less intense, much more indeterminate, as you said, than happiness. I mean,
|
| 00:44:53.100 |
I'm not blaming the translator, there's probably no equivalent, but it also has something of
|
| 00:44:58.460 |
serenity. So it is not as clearly positive as happiness. Another thing that is why, and forgive me
|
| 00:45:05.580 |
for that, I want to interrupt you, but it is so beautiful, is that the word quivering appears twice
|
| 00:45:10.860 |
in the poem. The first and the second stands. I actually don't know why he didn't just say trembling
|
| 00:45:15.340 |
because sit on this exactly trembling, I mean quivering is more poetic, you know, as, so
|
| 00:45:20.060 |
trembling. And the interesting thing is that in the first stand, what is trembling is the surface
|
| 00:45:25.980 |
of the water. In the second stand, so what is trembling is the sound of the song that he produces,
|
| 00:45:31.900 |
and it's the same trembling, and in that sense, then the repetition of the word trembling shows
|
| 00:45:37.740 |
that the environment into which his soul, his soul, his wrapped, and how the soul resonates with it,
|
| 00:45:46.060 |
it isn't separately. It's one thing. And once again, I would say, I mean, you know, we're using so
|
| 00:45:49.820 |
many words, it's so difficult to articulate. I bet in a hope that all we're talking about who is
|
| 00:45:55.660 |
listening to us, people know that. I mean, everybody knows they don't have to be an intellectual.
|
| 00:45:59.180 |
Maybe, maybe, actually, it's not so good to be an intellectual. Well, if there's ever a poem about
|
| 00:46:05.100 |
steamoon in the sense of attunement, this is a poem of being totally attuned, the inner and the
|
| 00:46:09.980 |
outer are the soul and the place, the da. It's just the da's Venice, yeah. Are there other works of
|
| 00:46:17.580 |
literature zep that maybe some of our would be familiar to some of our listeners where there's a
|
| 00:46:23.580 |
very distinctive mood that comes over them? You know, let's try something completely different,
|
| 00:46:29.020 |
because we have done medieval poetry, we have done petro-ing. It's an interesting topic, the
|
| 00:46:34.380 |
absence of mood. Of course, hide it would say, I mean, there's always in a mood and I agree with that
|
| 00:46:38.140 |
philosophically. But sometimes it's less central, like in this trouble, the poems is as much as we
|
| 00:46:43.660 |
were saying much more substantial. I dare to use that word, that in petro-ing. So let's do something
|
| 00:46:48.940 |
completely different and let's do existentialism. And I mean, existentialism as a type of literature,
|
| 00:46:55.580 |
but also, I mean, existentialism as an intellectual movement, because not unlike what you were
|
| 00:47:00.860 |
saying about hiding a historicizing schtimmel, I think at least many of the great
|
| 00:47:06.860 |
intellectual movements we can refer to with a name have a certain mood. Now, in every
|
| 00:47:14.380 |
type of thing, existentialism, anything not poetry, but there's not much good existentialist
|
| 00:47:18.300 |
poetry, I would say. But anyway, so the one novel you think about is La Nozi,
|
| 00:47:23.020 |
by Jean-Paul Sartre, which I think is completely about a mood and as an interesting mood,
|
| 00:47:29.180 |
because to give an example, I'm in a contemporary poet, Godfrey Ben, who wasn't the German
|
| 00:47:34.860 |
military and had a diary and just in early 1945 in March, April, no-so-so-so-so-so-so-so,
|
| 00:47:43.660 |
under the impression of the coming German defeat, that this moment, our present moment, is the
|
| 00:47:50.380 |
end of schtimmel. And after that, there will be no schtimmel and then he scratches it and say,
|
| 00:47:54.140 |
"This is precisely our existential schtimmel." And that's very interesting. So,
|
| 00:48:00.140 |
I think although, of course, I mean, terminologically existentialism starts much early, but there's
|
| 00:48:05.420 |
something very specific to the schtimmel of this post-World War II, above all French, but also
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| 00:48:11.020 |
German, Argentinian, American existentialism. And it is precisely, you could formulate a paradoxically,
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| 00:48:17.180 |
it's the absence of the beautiful schtimmel. And for me, the literary passage that is the most
|
| 00:48:23.340 |
impressive is actually the very final page of Santus, N
|
| 00:48:34.500 |
Nano, Zain, where the main protagonist is this kind of very autobiographical protagonist, I think the
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| 00:48:35.340 |
town is supposed to be Lou Avel, could be Cherbu, it's North and France, walks along the sea,
|
| 00:48:40.620 |
the water again, that's something you discovered. It's raining, like you're opening. And then,
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| 00:48:47.500 |
and that is very specific for me, he says, and it was passing by, I think, a construction,
|
| 00:48:51.660 |
I mean, a house construction. And he says, he smelled the very specific smell of the wood,
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| 00:48:58.300 |
construction wood, under the rain. And we all know that smell. I mean, we don't have good words for
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| 00:49:04.220 |
it, I think, in any language, but that's a very, very specific schtimmel. Now, I'm not saying
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| 00:49:08.700 |
all of existentialism is that, but it is a schtimmel that is very, very different from the one
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| 00:49:13.900 |
we're talking about in Venice, which is much richer. It is a schtimmel again paradoxically that one
|
| 00:49:20.380 |
could almost correct rise by the absence of the otherwise exuberant component of schtimmel. And very
|
| 00:49:28.380 |
often when we talk to him, when something really wraps, you can almost feed it Venice.
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| 00:49:31.420 |
It's the emblem of that. Whereas this Lou Avel, Cherbu, like this movie that I like a lot from the
|
| 00:49:38.060 |
50s, the Paris-Prites Cherbu, where you also feel this rain, this absence of anything exuberant is
|
| 00:49:48.460 |
precisely that moment. And I think this is this post-war existentialism, where all of you
|
| 00:49:54.300 |
said in this cover, you have any freedom you have ever wanted, but you don't really know what you
|
| 00:49:59.260 |
want to do with it. So the world is completely open to you, but there is no drama in that world. And
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| 00:50:05.580 |
that seems to be, I mean, philosophically speaking, the schtimmel that is materialized and is very,
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| 00:50:11.020 |
very beautiful scene at the end of La Noussène. Well, we know that Saat had gone to Marburg, I think,
|
| 00:50:18.060 |
study with Heidegger and Husserl, and he was there right at the time when Heidegger was giving his
|
| 00:50:24.060 |
inaugural address, what is metaphysics, which is a whole treatise, if you like, on angst, which is
|
| 00:50:33.340 |
also in being in time. And I think it's clear that Saat took the nausea. He's just translated
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| 00:50:41.500 |
angst into this phenomenon of nausea, which really we should understand as a mood rather than
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| 00:50:47.100 |
some kind of, you know, merely physiological disorder. So that was, but as you said, that's pre-war,
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| 00:50:54.460 |
because that was written in the 30s. And I'm curious about this suggestion you're making, if I
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| 00:51:00.860 |
understand you correctly, that at least God freed Ben, and I know that you say the spitzer as well,
|
| 00:51:06.300 |
that do you suspect that post-war in the broader sense, that we start entering into an age,
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| 00:51:15.340 |
which is in at least in danger of becoming an age without mood? Well, I mean, the first place
|
| 00:51:22.860 |
does not critical to us, but you know, I think the, I mean, we can have moods as individuals
|
| 00:51:28.460 |
as well by moods, but just the age. By a graphical remark, I mean, as you know, I have a reason to
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| 00:51:33.580 |
work a little bit on the history of Marburg and stuff. And the more I'm doing that, the more I know
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| 00:51:37.900 |
about it, the less certain it becomes that Saat was ever really there. I mean, we're in or
|
| 00:51:43.900 |
ever, but clearly, I mean, in terms of intellectual influence, it is of course, who's
|
| 00:51:48.060 |
so and hiding it. I think probably the who's all component is more stronger than we tend to
|
| 00:51:53.100 |
think, think, but I completely agree with you that this whole concern about about moods, about
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| 00:51:58.220 |
land of a zebich, I think also in being in nothingness. And the first chapters that we discussed
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| 00:52:02.620 |
two years ago in a philosophical reading group are beautiful in that sense, you know,
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| 00:52:06.380 |
this description of the restaurant that is, that is a shrimun already.
|
| 00:52:11.020 |
Now, here's what I think, I mean, Spitzer actually wrote in 1945 as a German Jewish
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| 00:52:17.820 |
Austrian Jewish immigrant and Johns Hopkins University, this beautiful two-part essay on world harmony.
|
| 00:52:25.500 |
And it is it is a conceptual history. It's very erudite. And all of a sudden, surprisingly, at the end,
|
| 00:52:31.500 |
this is as well. The reason I was writing this as in doing this work was to say that we are
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| 00:52:36.620 |
at the end of the age of world harmony. I mean, thank goodness the Western Allies are going to win
|
| 00:52:40.620 |
the war, but this world harmony will never come back. So for Spitzer, this is an end, but I think because
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| 00:52:47.500 |
he associates shrimun and mood unilaterally with harmony. And this is precisely the one step that
|
| 00:52:55.340 |
Ben goes further. He says the exact same thing. And then he understands no precisely this absence
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| 00:53:04.300 |
of the mood that is the type of death in Venice mood. That is our new shrimun. And that's the
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| 00:53:11.740 |
stream of existentialism. And I think that is beautifully not described really, but beautifully
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| 00:53:17.260 |
evoked conjured up in the final, in the final chapter. I mean, throughout La Nose, but especially
|
| 00:53:22.860 |
on that final page. As of today, I mean, if there's something to what we're saying at the very beginning
|
| 00:53:30.780 |
about this attunement, about this being physical, if it is true as we both are thinking that our
|
| 00:53:37.420 |
professional life is more and more life that consists in a fusion of consciousness, not
|
| 00:53:43.900 |
soul and software, then of course at a certain point you're asking where would be, you know, as
|
| 00:53:49.820 |
you would say, in French, the point of attack for a steamer. I mean, there is nothing. I mean, if you
|
| 00:53:54.620 |
if you spend your days in front of a computer screen where your body is the most superfluous thing,
|
| 00:54:01.660 |
it is difficult to get into initiative. And in that sense, this is not identical with
|
| 00:54:09.660 |
watch bits and Ben were saying. And this is, I mean, this kind of thing out of the possibility of
|
| 00:54:14.860 |
steamer getting one level further. Yeah, it's a different thing. I've often, when I'm watching
|
| 00:54:20.860 |
science fiction, either movies or television series with this fantasy of the Androids, which has taken over
|
| 00:54:28.140 |
the Androids, when they are humanized enough, the fiction is not just that they're intelligent
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| 00:54:35.980 |
and even sentient. It's fine. We can imagine creating Androids who were sentient and intelligent.
|
| 00:54:42.860 |
But where is this attunement that gives them a world where there is a surrounding, there's a
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| 00:54:49.500 |
dot around them that they are taking cognizance of, which makes them responsive to little gestures,
|
| 00:54:56.700 |
to little inflections and a voice, sad eyes and the interlocutor. These are the kinds of
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| 00:55:05.340 |
things that go completely under the radar that where our humanity really resides most
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| 00:55:13.100 |
essentially in my view. And if we had more time, we could maybe contemplate the possibility,
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| 00:55:18.940 |
not only the possibility, but I'm sure a number of writers in the post-war period, and perhaps even
|
| 00:55:25.260 |
before have had as one of their very explicit ambitions to try to write either a poetry or a
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| 00:55:33.020 |
work of literature that is moodless. I wonder if even Camus tried to do that in the stranger.
|
| 00:55:39.900 |
Of course, the more successful they are, the more there's the latency of mood, always in it.
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| 00:55:44.860 |
Now, but this is the, I think that's a nice hypothesis about the stranger, but that, of course,
|
| 00:55:50.860 |
would be precisely that mood that then to my, I mean, I don't care about him being the first,
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| 00:55:57.260 |
but it's very early describes. I think the absence of mood is precisely the mood. I mean, I think that
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| 00:56:03.020 |
is one interesting reading of the stranger. The entire attitude of Camus, right? Now,
|
| 00:56:09.340 |
I think that is different because, you know, the everyday life conditions are very different. I think
|
| 00:56:14.700 |
the way our above-on communication technology has evolved and transformed above all our
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| 00:56:22.380 |
profession every day since the mid-20s century until now, early 21st century is very, very radical.
|
| 00:56:29.100 |
I mean, you know, my youngest daughter did not learn how to write with a pencil, but with a keyboard,
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| 00:56:34.140 |
I think that is, I mean, with a keyboard in front of a computer screen, but even saying it's bad,
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| 00:56:39.740 |
but this is very different. I think this is a very, this is a special not to be underestimated.
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| 00:56:44.140 |
Definitely. Well, Zep, we've come to the end of our hour. Thank you to B again. We're going to do it
|
| 00:56:50.380 |
again for sure because we have an interminable conversation going on. We've been speaking with
|
| 00:56:55.740 |
Professor Zep Gumbrecht here on entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison, and we're going to be
|
| 00:57:01.260 |
with you for this whole fall quarter on Tuesdays from five to six. Thanks again to Harris,
|
| 00:57:07.660 |
find out our assistant who does all the hard work for us. All we do is talk. So next time Zep.
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| 00:57:17.660 |
Next time, Robert, thank you.
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