MA Defence: Matthew Raymond, Philosophy

Attunement and Individuation: Existential Tonality in Being and Time

ABSTRACT: In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in attempting to provide a thinking of individuation within the bounds of Heidegger’s early thought. Common to such attempts is the key insight that Dasein’s individuality is not simply given, and thus requires an existentially-validated account which determines how individuality is essentially constituted as a component of being-in-the-world. The question of individuation, taken in this light, analyzes the nexus which links the manifestation of Dasein’s ontic individuality to the unfolding of a field of articulated relationality, in which Dasein is constitutively embedded. It is the sketches of this primary field, as they determine the process of individuation, that this essay intends through an analysis of the existential role of attunement (Befindlichkeit) in Being and Time. As such, we will demonstrate how attunement, as the primary layer of Dasein’s being-in, constitutes the field of articulation which individuates Dasein through a dynamic process of relational differentiation. Thus, attunement prior to both understanding and discourse, denotes the aspect of being-in-the-world through which Dasein’s individuality is primarily articulated. In addition, by proposing a more general reading of the relationship between individuation and attunement, we supplement the existing scholarship which (following Heidegger’s lead) privileges the Grundstimmung of anxiety in the question of Dasein’s individuality.