Páthos and fundamental dispositions

Affective tonalities in Heidegger’s Phenomenology

Abstract

The present article proposes a phenomenological analysis of the affective tonalities in Martin Heidegger's thought. In contrast to the traditional approach of ontic sciences, Heideggerian phenomenology investigates the relationship between affects and Dasein as an essential condition for world experience, exploring how Dasein reveals itself in its immediate manifestation, ontologically available to being-affected. To access the meaning of Stimmung in Heidegger, the study traces the origin of the Greek term páthos in Aristotle and its appropriation by Heidegger in his lectures of 1924, culminating in the existential analytics developed in Being and Time. The article then explores how the theme of affects was reoriented in Heidegger's turning, particularly in his radicalization of the history of being, as presented in the 1929 lectures and in Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning. It concludes that Heidegger, drawing on his reading of Aristotle, recognized páthos as the foundation of his hermeneutics, seeing it as the original ground of logos, which dynamizes Daseinin its historical and worldly existence. In his later phase, Heidegger reoriented the analytics of affects, understanding that being open to affects is a fundamental encounter with beyng, alternating between withdrawal and giving. Within the framework of onto-historical thought, Heidegger brought the discussion of being-affected into a more original field, analyzing the structure of the existential atmosphere in which beyng is historically attuned to a fundamental affective tonality (such as the profound boredom characterizing the age of machination) and open as a horizon of manifestability of beings in totality.