Book Notes: All Things Shining - Moods

Homer invokes the gods in order to account for the observation that a central form of human excellence must be drawn from without. A god, in Homer's terminology, is a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking.

Dreyfus and Kelly argue that a "polytheistic" way of framing our existence was present during Homeric Greece and was lost for a couple of thousand years. Melville, writing in the early 1850s, begins to revive this mindset in Moby Dick.

In a disenchanted, secular world, how do we build a foundation for leading our lives? I am not sure how satisfied I am with a paradigm that establishes moods as a foundation for determining the best course of action. I suppose Heidegger might argue that I am approaching this too deliberatively, rather than letting the appropriateness of the moment dictate the "determination". This does seem so slippery that a wide range of actions can be explained and justified as appropriate to a certain mood that prevailed at a particular time with a particular actor (or set of actors). The idea of being prepared and then receptive to the demands of a given situation does strike me as a reasonable aspiration. But receptivity does imply a passivity that is quite counter to the culture that dominates today. Don't we value action, decisions, progress toward a goal? To what extent do we drive our environment in a direction and to what extent are we driven?