Atmospheres and Understanding: Time and Inclusion

• In Event: Bearing Witness and the Ethics of Care

Abstract

This paper develops Heidegger’s notion of "Stimmung," of attunement or atmosphere, specifically as it is interpreted by one of his students, O.F. Bollnow. It reconstructs how Bollnow regards understanding itself as emerging through a range of possible atmospheres, each implying different dynamics of time and of inclusion and exclusion. The paper then focuses on an example of a happy or felicitous classroom Stimmung, and with the way that it includes and excludes others and connects present and future. It concludes by illustrating the connection of such Stimmungen specifically with the purposes and priorities of pedagogy, understanding pedagogy above all as a way of being with children and the young that is oriented to the future.

Author

• Norm Friesen, Boise State University