Evaluating Heidegger’s Fundamental Mood of Dread: Intentionality and Revealing

In this paper, I explore two different interpretations of Martin Heidegger’s concept of the “fundamental mood of dread [anxiety].” I focus on the intentional structure of the fundamental mood of dread, and how it can still be considered intentional despite its ‘object’ being ‘the nothing;’ I also explore the idea that this fundamental mood reveals ‘the nothing.’ I compare and contrast S.J. Paluch’s claims that Heidegger both confirms and denies the intentional structure of the fundamental mood of dread, and Paluch’s claim that the revealing action of fundamental moods can ‘fail to reveal.” Furthermore, I explicate Ronald Grimsley’s account that the fundamental mood of dread does reveal, and despite its inability to take the nothing as an object, still has an intentional structure.