Moods and Emotions: Some Philosophical Reflections on the ‘Affective Turn’

Chapter 2 shows how affects, moods, and emotions are treated by Spinoza and philosophers of existence, and how existential philosophy is a source of inspiration for empirically oriented social and cultural research. According to Spinoza, human consciousness can never be analysed independently of the body and its affects: joy implies an increase in the power of acting and sadness a decrease. By leaving the philosophy of the mind and concentrating on the philosophy of the body he has become a constant point of reference for scholars promoting the ‘affective turn’. For Kierkegaard and Heidegger our primary access to the world is also affective: the perceiver is always in some kind of mood – distracted, indifferent, anxious, or bored. Although fundamental to an understanding of how the world is constantly ‘attuned’ through affects and emotions, they both leave out what ethnologists and anthropologists have taken as their main focus – practice.