On the whole
A sketch of habitual mood, or how things come home to us
Footnotes is a series of essays that build on each other. This one is the second installment in a chapter on the The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James’ book.
⩩ 25
In German, “Mut” means courage. Our English word “mood” not only looks and sounds like it but is in fact cognate with it, and, like it, sits at the center of a vast, sprawling constellation of derivative words and compounds. Or, it used to. It did in old English, but the thick, rich garden of offshoots and descendants that once surrounded it was slowly overcome through the centuries and reduced until only this single giant stump remains. Name a living derivative of “mood”!
This makes it easy to neglect the concept, as many philosophers have, though not Ralph Waldo Emerson, nor William James. What especially interests me here is the way James’ understanding of mood lends itself to a conception of habitual mood: not changing mood, mood as it rises and falls and flows with the passing circumstances, but default, resting mood. Each person has a characteristic mood which expresses their fundamental experience of the world on the whole, the world as home.
The main reason mood is overlooked is that we can’t see it. We see and know a thing, we fear an object, we are angry about a fact. Perception, desire and emotion are thing-oriented, but mood is not. It is more basic than things. It is an atmosphere, a lens. We see things through it. We don’t mood a thing or about a thing, we simple have a mood. Mood is not in the world but makes the world, coloring our perception of things and facts and appreciation of everything in it. It is nowhere and everywhere.
Mood is a variety of total reaction, and we react totally on all sorts of things. Think of a movie. You can evaluate it along specific dimensions, for instance its acting, its music, its narrative, but in the end you step back from these specifications and roughly form a judgment of it as a whole. After becoming as familiar as you can with each of its parts and dimensions, some force comes in to reduce the unwieldy complexity to a simple, concise evaluation, a verdict. Engagement with the thing is tied up in a bow, yielding an appraisal to take on the road. The movie is summed up as interesting or boring, helpful or harmful, good or bad.
I see three moments in a total reaction: collection, collation and compression. We gather up all of the knowledge we have of it, bringing together all of the various situations and environments we have seen it in. Then collation. We compare and organize the variety. Like so many pictures in an album, we flip through the scenes, considering the way it appears in each. Like so many cards in a hand, we fan them out and arrange them and set them in order and make a series. Then compression. Having finished with comparison and manipulation, standing back and taking it in, we combine it with what we know on the whole and form a judgment of it.
We react totally on paintings, books, careers, cities, movements. We also react totally on life, — we react totally on life first and foremost. Not to this or that place or action or work or person or people but to the totality of them, to experience in the largest sense. This is a judgment of experience as a unit, as one thing, the output of the great breathtaking summarizing act of the mind. The amount, the complexity of data, of experience, that must be “crunched” into a neat verdict! The result is a running summary of experience which is expressed in a person's habitual mood.
This is how James describes the moment of judgment, the act of synthesis: “When the labor is accomplished, the mind always performs its big summarizing act, and the system forthwith stands over against one like a living thing.” James pictures it as a transfiguring act, an act of animation, because in judging something we see it as our counterpart, as it answers to our own living needs. This is no less true for a total reaction on the world.
Here we see the connection between habitual mood and the idea of home. Using a formulation suggested by Jozef Majernik, we can say that the fundamental question is whether we are at home in the world. We have not choice but to answer this question, to judge. The result of this judgment is our habitual mood, a practicable consolidation of experience on the whole, an evaluation of the world from the most intimate and comprehensive place available to us. It says how life comes home to us. We sum the world up as hostile or friendly, as good or bad, ourselves as at home or homeless in it. And, whenever we react to a thing on the whole, say a movie, we implicitly invoke this reaction to the whole of life.
But who is “us”? Or more generally, when we say, “On the whole,” — whose whole? Everyone has a different whole. It is always his or hers or theirs, yours or mine. When a person reacts totally to a thing, the totality they react to is theirs.
This is why “on the whole” is often suppressed. James writes, ““On the whole,” — I fear we shall never escape complicity with that qualification, so dear to your practical man, so repugnant to your systematizer!” It is complicity because it introduces or acknowledges the distances between ourselves and others and as social animals we all hate and fear that distance. It tears us from each other. It separates us, makes us different, distinct. Individuals.
Others can differ from a judgment “on the whole,” but they cannot properly speaking disagree with it. This “on the whole” points to and protects the space between us, and it issues from what is unknown to others and even to ourselves. We have to admit that the sources of our judgment are hidden from us, and that the act of judgment is itself mysterious, childlike and definitely creative.
We study our shared objects and compare with each other and finally go home to form a judgment and — oops! a little vagueness, a little unpredictability, a little subjectivity slips in. This “on the whole” is just another name for “solitude.”
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 25, the second installment in a chapter on William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. Here are some highlights from what came before.
Retreat
⩩ 21 Review
⩩ 19 Storytelling
⩩ 17 Retreat
Firsthand
⩩ 16 Revelation
⩩ 14 Yourself
⩩ 12 Learning
⩩10 Habit
⩩ 9 Firsthand
Stagestranger
⩩ 7 Mistake
⩩ 6 Whim
⩩ 3 Speechless
⩩ 1 Headsup
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A shoutout as usual to Danny at breakfastswerved for his ink. See his drawings for the series here.
If you’ve come this far: thank you for reading my work and spending time with me. I would love to hear from you.
In Russian, “mood” can be translated as «настроение» or «наклонение», which can have different meanings depending on context (point of view, perspective, etc.). The prefix, «на», implies “on,” as in “atop.” The «строение» part can be translated as “structure,” or “erection” (as of a building). For the other, «клонение» implies “leaning.” There’s a resonance, not?