Heidegger first articulates this notion of thrownness in his interpretation of the phenomenon of mood. Dasein is always already attuned to the world in one way or another, and this mood
colours its encounters with things in the world.
Heidegger gives the example of fear:
Dasein can only encounter something as fearful insofar as it is already afraid. It is my
fear that reveals something to me as fearful. One might ‘fear’ death, but this would seem
to be a category mistake; fear is always of some determinate thing, and death is, by its nature indeterminate—it is no-thing. But there is a mood, anxiety, in which nothing is made manifest to us. Anxiety is such that its object is indeterminate, nothing.
Anxious Dasein "finds itself face to face with the "nothing" of the possible impossibility of its existence."
