A mood like sadness is a conduct one perpetually recreates, never an achieved state

Evidence

But take a mode of being which concerns only myself: I am sad. One might think that surely I am the sadness in the mode of being what I am. What is the sadness, however, if not the intentional unity which comes to reassemble and animate the totality of my conduct? … Let a stranger suddenly appear and I will lift up my head, I will assume a lively cheerfulness. What will remain of my sadness except that I obligingly promise it an appointment for later after the departure of the visitor? … If I make myself sad, it is because I am not sad—the being of the sadness escapes me by and in the very act by which I affect myself with it. The being-in-itself of sadness perpetually haunts my consciousness (of) being sad, but it is as a value which I can not realize; it stands as a regulative meaning of my sadness, not as its constitutive modality. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 301

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the core distinction between the being-in-itself of a state (regulative meaning, unattainable) and consciousness’s constitutive activity — foundational to the for-itself/in-itself ontology.
• XREF: Directly sets up Beauvoir’s account of emotion and of women’s lived sadness; also echoes Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit as background. — connects to: Grief leaves no permanent internal traces because feelings never set — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1367

Broader Connections

• Grief leaves no permanent internal traces because feelings never set #corroborates (0.95) — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1367