The Present Age: A Case Study
This chapter deals with the question of historical mood: how to diagnose a mood, how to avoid obvious simplifications or idealizations, how to think through the relationships between a mood and its underlying conditions, what possibilities for transformation there are, and how moods affect agency. Trawling the media for comments about the present age it is hard to escape the language of passion and mood. Notable among these moral emotions are anger and ressentiment. Heidegger’s extended treatment of boredom opens up a deeper look at the significance of mood. Todays “mood” (anxiety, anger, ressentiment…) is tied both to short-term frustration (which may be cultural as well as economic), long term anxiety (what are our prospects?), and ultimate unsustainability (perhaps only dimly glimpsed). It is too easy to say that these are all problems of calculative time. But security, predictability (up to a point), and confidence in our ability to plan ahead enable a range of virtues. Finally, the relation between mood and agency—my frustration being tied to knowing that I alone cannot make much difference (though perhaps together we can)—is linked to the multiplicities of “we” in play, not only of agency, but also of constituency and impact.