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§17 [100-101]

manner in which infectious germs wander back and forth from one organism to another? We do indeed say that attunement or mood is infectious. Or another human being is with us, someone who through their manner of being makes everything depressing and puts a damper on everything; nobody steps out of their shell. What does this tell us? Attunements are not side-effects, but are something which in advance determine our being with one another. It seems as though an attunement is in each case already there, so to speak, like an atmosphere in which we first immerse ourselves in each case and which then attunes us through and through. It does not merely seem so, it is so; and, faced with this fact, we must dismiss the psychology of feelings, experiences, and consciousness. It is a matter of seeing and saying what is happening here. It is clear that attunements are not something merely at hand. They themselves are precisely a fundamental manner and fundamental way of being, indeed of being-there [Da-sein], and this always directly includes being with one another. Attunements are ways of the being-there of Da-sein, and thus ways of being-away. An attunement is a way, not merely a form or a mode, but a way [Weise]—in the sense of a melody that does not merely hover over the so-called proper being at hand of man, but that sets the tone for such being, i.e., attunes and determines the manner and way [Art und Wie] of his being.1

Thus we have the positive correlate of our first negative thesis, namely that attunement is not a particular being. In positive terms, attunement is a fundamental manner, the fundamental way in which Dasein is as Dasein. We now also have the counterthesis to our second negative thesis that attunement is not something inconstant, fleeting, merely subjective. Rather because attunement is the originary way in which every Dasein is as it is, it is not what is most inconstant, but that which gives Dasein subsistence and possibility in its very foundations.

We must learn to understand from all this what it means to take so-called 'attunements' in the correct way. It is not a matter of taking up an opposite stance to psychology and delimiting more correctly a kind of emotional experience, thus improving psychology, but rather a matter of first opening up a general perspective upon the Dasein of man. Attunements are the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Attunements are the 'how' [Wie] according to which one is in such and such a way. Certainly we often take this 'one is in such and such a way'—for reasons we shall not go into now-as something indifferent, in contrast to what we intend to do, what we are occupied with, or what will happen to us. And yet this 'one is in such and such a way' is not—is never—simply a consequence or side-effect of our thinking, doing, and acting. It is—to put it crudely—the presupposition


1. [Tr: In addition to its common meaning of 'way' or 'manner' of doing something, the German Word Weise has the more literary meaning of a 'tune' or 'melody'.]


Martin Heidegger (GA 29/30) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics