ABSTRACT
Within the broader attempt at a description of the phenomenon called the “coloring of life”, this chapter explores the notions of affective or emotional “coloration”, “splendor”, “light”, or “shine”, as well as the notion of Stimmung (mood, temper), as both of them are expounded in Husserl’s project Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins and in two other texts considered as precedents of the Studien: the “Notes on the doctrine of attention and interest” of 1893 or 1894 (in Husserliana XXXVIII) and a passage in § 15 b) of the Fifth of the Logical Investigations. The review of the Studien highlights a first notion of coloration as “emotional sensation” (Gefühlsempfindung), then a second notion as a transcending (or transcendent) affective or emotive coloration. After the exposition of the emotive “expansions” or “transferences”, it reaches the notion of a mood (Stimmung), situates it within the schema of affective experiences, and describes their unitary character, their motivation, and their peculiar intentionality, pointing to their relation with background consciousness and with the so-called (by Husserl) “stream of sentiment”. At this point, the essay is in position to develop a revision of the notion of a mood by way of stripping it from abstractions. The result is the non-affective notion of the “coloring of life”, as the “imprint” that each lived experience (understood as the unitary composition of a “total state of consciousness”) makes in time-consciousness, and asks for a more developed phenomenology of this coloring and its relationship with moods.
