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The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something else.
With the strong exception of Heidegger, there is not much classical philosophical work on moods — yet anecdotally, we all know (I assume), instinctually, how important our moods are; they dictate, to a major degree, our behavior, our thoughts; generally, how we see and are seen. Perhaps philosophers have had very little relative interest in moods because, simply, they’re an insoluble problem — or not a problem at all: just a stark fact, like having a body, or breathing.
When I get on the subway, however, in a bad mood — a palpably bad mood rather than say, a vaguely anxious or unhappy mood; a pointedly bad mood — I can’t help but think that there is some purpose to it, some meaning that I have to infer. The bad mood is some kind of spiritual and biological (or biological and spiritual) radar dish: it is picking up something that could immanently hurt me or damage me. The mood tells me that something is wrong; that the architecture of my life isn’t letting in enough natural light.
The dominance of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already been decisive even for the possibilities of having a mood — that is, for the basic way in which Dasein lets the world matter‘ to it.
The hardest way to write is without illusion, which is to say, without a pseudo-mystical sense of one’s importance.
