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Just read this wonderful paper by Rebecca Bamford which indicates Nietzsche anticipating mood psychology by over a century! Psy-ops ... 1/ https://philpapers.org/rec/BAMMAA
Just read this wonderful paper by Rebecca Bamford which indicates Nietzsche anticipating mood psychology by over a century! Psy-ops ... 1/ https://philpapers.org/rec/BAMMAA
So in Daybreak, Nietzsche considers that it's hard to tear oneself away from the morality of customs because of a sense of fear and dread. "Every individual action, every individual mode of thought arouses dread" (D9) 2/
So it's really hard to formulate alternative moral systems in that climate of dread and fear. Nietzsche anticipated, correctly, that a negative mood generally serves as a "stop" to action, and a positive mood serves as a "go" to action. 3/
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-17748-014
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-17748-014
Nietzsche argued that the mood of fear acts stultifies our appetite for action, and that a joyous mood (see D 28) encourages it. In D 28, (entitled "Mood as argument") he writes, "The good mood was placed on the scales as an argument and outweighed rationality" 4/
He concludes D28 with "'Create a mood!' One will then require no reasons and conquer all objections!"--this seems to me a lot of what psyops is all about. You don't need to convince people Brexit is a good idea. Just make them feel good: sticking it up to the elites, yeah! /5
It seems to me (if I read @RebeccaBamford correctly) that Nietzsche proposes countering mood with mood, given that people are so influenced by mood. Not sure what I think about that? /6
In political discourse, it becomes attractive to indeed just focus on the mood rather than the content. But I think that people do have independent epistemic aims: we really also want to have true beliefs, we value thinking for ourselves, we want to think and consider /7
If one focuses too much on mood at the expense of content, you get into a worse epistemic situation. Also, there's a sense in which intellectual clarity and being dispassionate is also a mood and one that is good to cultivate. If you go for gut-first messaging you miss that /8
Here's a nice demonstration of clear, dispassionate mood of Carnap, a wonderful reading by @lastpositivist - the fragment he reads is also relevant to Nietzsche's point and provides a useful counterpoint I think /end https://twitter.com/lastpositivist/status/1305092683833249793
