ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger and Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s essential contribution to the phenomenology of emotions is their discovery of the primordial role of Stimmung (attunement) for human intentionality and the intelligibility of the world. This chapter begins by introducing Heidegger’s account of Befindlichkeit and attunement in Being and Time. It discusses Heidegger’s seminal work Das Wesen der Stimmungen (The Nature of Attunements). The chapter discuss Heidegger's idiosyncratic understanding of fundamental attunements, which shows the close link between Befindlichkeit and the core of his overall philosophical project. One of the ground-breaking insights of Being and Time is that our most primordial mode of being is constituted by the way in which we find ourselves in the world. Heidegger introduces Befindlichkeit as a general condition of an entity existing in the mode of being-in-the-world. In Das Wesen der Stimmungen, Bollnow builds on Heidegger’s discussion of Befindlichkeit while adopting a critical stance toward Heidegger’s overall project.
