Notions of stimmung (mood) in a historical series: between disposition and atmosphere

Abstract

The relationship between art and philosophy is examined based on the notion of Stimmung (mood), which appears in eighteenth-century music theory as a proportional relationship between tones or instruments

it was then incorporated into aesthetics at the end of the century in the works of Kant and Fichte. In Kant's works, Stimmung refers to the capacity of the faculties of knowledge for knowledge in general, that is, as a presupposition of aesthetic presentation through which the notion of proportion between the faculties is preserved. In his On the Spirit and the Letter in Philosophy, Fichte points out that the aesthetic disposition is the mode by which the aesthetic impulse acts out, connected freely and directly to the faculty of imagination and to the activity of creation. This aesthetic tradition is revisited by the historian Alois Riegl in 1899 in the essay Die Stimmung als Inhalt der moderne Kunst (Mood as the Subject Matter of Modern Art), where the concept of Stimmung is first presented from historical perspective as content of modern art in the sense of atmosphere, i.e., the experience of a relationship by which awareness, in accordance with immanent law, acquires certainty. A similar review was done by the young philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs in 1910 in Soul and Form, where the author conceptualizes the differences in meaning between the notions of Stimmung and Atmosphere (atmosphere).