On Mood

"There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so"
- Hamlet

A wise man once said that to have a good life did not mean being always happy. That would be impossible, not only because joy loses its meaning without the chiaroscuro of bla bla bla (zing! take that Aquinas), or because evolution would not work if we were all chuffed all the time. No, it would be impossible because true joy is by its nature transient, caused by necessarily ephemeral, temporal, and thus mutable phenomena like a glorious day, a sudden success, the presence of a loved one. But no sun shines forever, no life is without slings and arrows, and no beloved is everpresent, or stays for good. Even life itself is transient. Ergo joy of this kind, joy with a cause, cannot be permanent. This kind of happiness is not a way of life, it is a mood.

Mood is mysterious, and yet it dominates our lives. It is the tinted prism through which we experience everything that happens to us. The light is brighter when you're happy (although vice versa, the impact of light and atmospheric conditions on mood is I believe beyond dispute). Your body aches when you're bored, you feel physically sick with anger or disgust. Mood posesses us, our bodies and minds, without warning. We are the puppets of our emotions, using our reason to justify the way we feel, or talk ourselves into the courses of action our passions have already decided for us. Hume toyed with this model of the mind, seeing morality (and thus action) as fundamentally ruled and determined by the passions rather than reason or Revelation, which were merely used to validate or justify what we have already (in our hearts) decided.

Mood is mysterious. Sure, we know some of the things that cause various moods, like food or lack of, sleep or lack of, sex or lack of. Scientists using big machines and unexamined assumptions can tell us which regions of our brains light up when we are feeling (laboratory-induced versions of) certain emotional states. But to say that we understand mood, the flux of affect and the irrational ways it makes us act and react, would be to lie brazenly. A scientist with a big machine may feel a certain mood of pride and overconfidence when interpreting these results, and a reader skimming a newspaper story about neuroscience may be too distracted or preoccupied to notice.

Mood is a property of the body, but not the body as mechanism. It is the example par excellence of why attempts to isolate the mind or 'Reason' from the flesh and the world is doomed. Merleau-Ponty said the body is not something we have, but something we are. And the moods that rise through it are part of the fabric of our experience. In the same way that we never see or experience anything but through our own embodied consciousness (try imagining a disembodied consciousness...) so we can never see or think except through the dark glass of a mood. Nothing is emotionally neutral. Even the attempt to attain neutrality or rationality is a function of a certain set of emotions attached to the idea of irrationality. The attempt to exclude the passions is precisely an admission that we are at their mercy.

And yet, and yet. The brain is not just a kind of pancreas for information, breaking down the world and digesting it. It is a repository, a radar, an almost mystical field of potentially infinite connections, not even half-understood by those mapping electrical fields. And the fact that, even more than colours (a whole can of worms) it is moods which are universal to humanity. Experiments have taken place (haven't they always) to show that the facial expressions for certain emotions and moods are recognisable across cultures to a very high degree of accuracy. Does this indicate that the moods themselves have the same kinds of meaning, charge, colour, if you will, for all of us. Is boredom a universal experience? Is joy?