RESEARCH PAPER Attunement in the Modern Age Janko M. Lozar Published online: 7 April 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract This contribution starts from Max Scheler’s claim that modern philos- ophy holds two differing views on feelings. The first view, which Scheler attributes to Rene ´ Descartes, presents them in their intentional role but rejects their inde- pendence; the other view, which Scheler attributes to Immanuel Kant, holds that they cannot be reduced to the rational part of the soul and thus affirms their inde- pendence, but deprives them of all cognitive powers. After considering both views, I discuss the views of Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl. Husserl takes an ambivalent approach to attunement, which opens the possibility of understanding Martin Heidegger’s thought of fundamental attunement. Keywords Attunement Á Feeling Á Modern age Á Objectifying act Á Passive synthesis Á Phenomenology Á Representation From Rene ´ Descartes to Immanuel Kant According to Scheler (1916/1973), modern philosophy holds two differing views on feelings. 1 The first view presents them in their intentional-noetic role but rejects the J. M. Lozar (&) Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, As ˇkerc ˇeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia e-mail: janko.lozar@guest.arnes.si 1 The basic problem with providing a unified expression for feeling is that the very search for a unified term is itself misleading. The reason for this is that every thinker uses their expressions within their own mental framework. I can thus find already in Aristotle expressions such as pathos (Gr. pathos), attunement (Gr. diathesis). In the Middle Ages two terms emerge, affections (affectiones) and passions (passiones), which are taken over by Descartes (1951, 1989). According to Heidegger, the latter two bring before us a fundamentally different truth of what it is to be human. Later, Kant distinguished affects from passions and feeling. Feeling and disposition (Ger. Gefu¨hl und Gemu¨t) are German words, which prevailed in the 17th and 18th centuries (Kaufmann 1992). In Heidegger, the expressions for affectivity are mood and attunement (Ger. Stimmung und Befindlichkeit). This is why I have decided to use the term attunement as 123 Hum Stud (2009) 32:19–31 DOI 10.1007/s10746-009-9107-3