Physiology of a Heartbreak

"We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed"- Martin Heidegger

While the previous anatomy looked at a cross-sectional analysis of heartbreak, the mere structure and foundation of its phenomena as a manifestation of care in the world from which the heartbreak is derived from is lacking the "skin and blood" that flows through the ruins of the metaphorical heart. The sadness, anger, anxiety that comes from heartbreak conceived as a kind of being-towards-death of Dasein in relation to the heartbreak can be imagined as physiologically. 

The body which perceives heartbreak is a body through which heartbreak is perceived. The will to resist is akin to choosing fight in the fight or flight response as adrenaline pumps throughout the blood. And as this phenomena of heartbreak is encountered, it is initially repressed in a superficial way. Wanting for heartbreak to stop because it's not how things used to be isn't a convincing way of engaging with the world from which this heartbreak has arrived. Similar to an immune response, after the initial shock is dealt with, the way heartbreak lingers becomes more a psychologico-phenomenology rather than an ontologico-phenomenology. The true kind of care and concern that is brought about in this dwelling shift is important because of its acknowledgment as living in the world in an unhomelike way. 

Much like feeling not at home in your house without your family there, the body recognizes an unhomelike-being-in-the-world. The world, rest assured, is always there and dasein will always be a part of it (this contingency is standard in Heideggerian circles but an important point for those not too familiar with the concept). The world is normally engaged through disclosure of specific features in the world. The rest of it fades into the background. But as the anatomy identified in heartbreak's structure, the structure of dasein's world all radically come to the foreground of dasein's regular engagement and disrupts regular functioning. 

All one can think about initially is uncontrolled and enveloping angst but with ignorance. After this "immune-like" response, dasein's care and concern is better understood in context with the world (dasein's world). 

Heartbreak can be thought of as a private moment. It can also be thought of as a mood, a filter that turns ordinary engagement with the world into white noise. Initially it is distracting and paralyzing but then it peaks and returns to the background (ontology to psychology concerns). This brings about a feeling of numbness and many different people will respond in different ways (hence why the shift is to psychology rather than the more universal ontology). One may try to chase the white noise's deafening stimulus but realize he can't hear. Another may try to ignore the hollowness and live an ignorant strawman. Either way, "you will regret both" (Kierkegaard reference).

And so the ambivalent inner conflict of being-in-the-world as heartbreak circulates dasein's supply of concern. Physiologically, this system of heartbreak is stepwise yet flexible and methodical. And with all this complexity, dasein is authentic. While being authentic in a Heideggerian sense is in our judgment a good thing. However, phenomenologically, it does nothing for dasein. Our sense of space and time while going through heartbreak becomes rigid and tends to lean towards ontic perception such as that seen in Cartesian spatiality. While every comparison is compared arbitrarily, dasein sees this activity with much doubt. A rigid analysis of heartbreak as being ___ units to dasein is indeed rigid but also arbitrary. Heideggerian spatiality, however, which focuses on a somewhat more relativistic comparisons, gives dasein time to reflect, dwell and respond to how close/far something is to dasein. But this is exactly what dasein or human existence is all about (this comment probably functions better as a description probably more relevant with the anatomy). 

So heartbreak is through and through one to be lived through and shouldn't be lived with. Although our personality and psychological tendencies respond differently to heartbreak, it nonetheless discloses itself as an account for dasein. The road here matters less than the goal through which one paves their way forward. Signs of heartbreak doing away should come from both a healthy checkup with people who love you and then for them to observe how the anatomy and physiology of heartbreak is in its repairing stage. A broken house-like anatomy and the way in which dasein dwells in the world is not only necessary, but contingent to understand the disclosure of the world. 

Ambiguity's Ambiguous Ethics

"You can't offer ethics to a God" – Simone De Beauvoir (Ethics of ambiguity)

Simone de Beauvoir says this in her more important work of existentialist ethics but I often wonder can you offer an ethics to a person you treat like a god? What about a king or a queen? If we cut the bullshit, ethics is simply an opinion with very good reasoning. The Ethics of Ambiguity Simone De Beauvoir argues is one that has very good reasoning but with an irrational premise– that we can't stick with defining one another as only a subject or an object, one must deal with the ambiguity that lies in the heart of human existence. So reasoning isn't simply a rational, logical ruleset, at least for human beings. We are an irrational man, "condemned to be free" as Sartre put it. 

Before jumping ship onto the freedom train that awaits us in the end of the Ethics of Ambiguity, we must consider the structure and phenomena that Simone De Beauvoir shapes her ethics. She has put herself the daunting task of taking what she admits to be ambiguous beings and offer them an ethics. It's like trying to fit a shapeless material into a square hole– it doesn't really matter to the former, but how the latter structures the experiment to identify it. Sure the flowy matter may conform to fitting through the square hole or act like a circle peg and not fit. Whether or not we act upon that abstract entity, it is entirely free from our influence but yet we are the ones who structure their approach. This approach seems wishy washy and some may jump ship and focus on more concretely defined principles of what human beings are in order to structure the ethics to have a sound foundation (i.e. man is a rational animal). 

But that kind of approach is too cookie cutter, and would cause no qualm among the beings who decide to adhere to the ethics given unless they are human beings. There's a reason why we constantly argue about ethics and it's not just because it's an opinion on how one should live. Rather, it's an opinion on how we live already and from there, give the most logical suggestion as to maximize the ultimate goal/telos from what was principally established. But what if the premises are off track? That's particularly why Simone De Beauvoir gives human beings this amount of leeway. She acknowledges the polarizing effect of providing an ethics to an individual engaged in a sort of reflective discourse on what or who he/she is– any attempt at defining them would force an ultimatum to some form of "love it or hate it" dichotomy. 

She forms her structure of the kinds of people who would respond to the realization of one's ambiguity. Before that she even lays out the development of a human being born into the world, unaware of the ambiguity of his/her existence up until the point where they start to tackle it. This almost developmental psychologist-esque account of human beings is ultimately necessary for De Beauvoir's point. Those that come across the problem of one's ambiguity and ignore it are rightfully typecast as the "subman" and then the other dialectical side– the ones who acknowledge the ambiguity and throws themselves onto a cause/project– the "serious man". Overcoming these extremities, realizing that the answers to one's ambiguity cannot be given unto him/her then relegating him/herself to a numb apathetic approach to life is categorized as the "nihilistic man". 

These three categories are all cloaked with problems of dealing with ambiguity that Sartre would call being in "bad faith" or Heidegger would consider "inauthentic" behavior. De Beauvoir doesn't just leave us with inauthentic bad faith however. She provides the ethics she wanted framed into this structure of the looseness of human's ambiguous existence, the "free man". The one who realizes the ambiguity of one's existence and the potential meaningless of it all and supplies the meaning herself. She doesn't stop there, she provides the responsibility of the free man to realize that he/she is not completely free if others are not free as well and calls upon the emancipation of all man to dwell on the ambiguity of their individual existences freely. 

Just like those that offered ethics before her, Simone De Beauvoir has described her freeman as the ideal for which one should do when faced with the ambiguity of their existence. And yet, isn't the structure almost too identical to those that offered ethics before her? It appears that the process of unfolding an ethics comes from the similar framework of structuring the view of how people are in reality. Is Simone De Beauvoir simply another iteration of this?

Perhaps, but De Beauvoir has taken the right step in tackling the question of the human being with ambiguity rather than rationalism. The field of economics itself has also learned from their mistakes of equating human beings with being ultra-rationalist creatures who would definitely act in their best interest if they had known better by establishing the field of behavioral economics. What Simone De Beauvoir provides the ethics enthusiast is the realization that the field of ethics itself is an ambiguous field, unable to define itself as a subject or an object of inquiry. Should we discuss ethics for the sake of attaining the maximum field of ethics or should it be an object from which we project our opinionated explanations upon? 

Because De Beauvoir structures her approach to ambiguity by going through the stages of development where one begins without an understanding of human's ambiguity up until their realization of it. This kind of reasoning ultimately provides a foundation for why human beings are ambiguous in the first place. One man may at one day be a sub-man then tomorrow be a free man but was a nihilist last week. We as human beings are in constant inquiry as to what is the best way to live life and it does not take a philosopher's well-polished ethics to do the trick, it's to build up one's own framework on how to structure their goal.

Simone De Beauvoir's goal was to tackle the problem of the ambiguity of human existence and does so in a quasi-ethics standard structure. What makes her redefine the standard system of structure is to import irrationalism qua ambiguity. And so this kind of import should be done as an ethics in itself (I'd call it a metaethics but that would be imprecise), what should we do to live life to the fullest as human beings and what is our condition? 

Our condition is defined by awareness of our existence (Heidegger's "Dasein") and how we project care onto the world through it. The way we project it is in our practical engagement with the world. Why am I reflecting on how I should live my life? The clues lie in what we do, and why we do it. 

We don't just simply do things for one reason, claiming so would be incomplete. We are ultimately striving for something, and that's defined by what we do. We hammer nails into wood for the sake of putting two pieces of wood together (quintessential Heideggerian example). Not only for this do we hammer nails into wood, we do so in order to build a house. Not only this but we hammer nails into wood to build a shelter for Dasein (Heidegger). This is a teleological engagement– an approach to understanding our actions based on for what goals we do so.

The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe coined the term consequentialist ethics to define ethical systems that look at the consequences of the action– the "effects" on whoever is concerned as being significantly effected either badly or goodly. One may confuse this approach with teleology but would be mistaken fundamentally unless one looks at the consequences of the action in relation to the goal of what one had in mind when performing the action in question. Anscombe also wrote about intention and how a person intends to do an action has multiple layers. Think "I put 10 bottles of hot sauce on the pasta with the intention of making it spicy" as one example of an inadequate explanation of teleological engagement. 

All of these approaches come back to the same foundation of ethics– having its own goals the main influencer on the way they give solutions to their definitions of the regular behavior of human being engagement with the world. I can't stress this enough, it was a brilliant step in the right direction for De Beauvoir to follow this tradition by importing the notion of human's ambiguous existence. 

Only with this premise set can we move along the proper kind of ethics offered to human beings and not to a god, queen or rational animal. Ultimately it is us, the shapeless beings we are, fitting ourselves on different polygons that we commit ourselves to with a train of intentions driven by our practical everyday actions. 

Anatomy of a Heartbreak

"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of"- Blaise Pascal

A heartbreak is often described as a melodramatic feeling when faced with a parting with someone you love and care for but then must abruptly stop doing so. And yet, the cliché "you are what you do" is right on point. But as this essay's title suggests, the premise of an anatomical observation and demonstration of heartbreak cannot simply be described and defined. We must dig deeper. 

The kind of relationship that one cherishes, is one wherein the answers to the question "why one does something" extends to the person they chose to love. The reasons line up perfectly like train carts connected together on the telos (goal) track. One could argue that where in the line the person they love comes up in the telos track is proportional to how much they love. But of course that doesn't make any sense. 

We can't quantify the human being yet we are qualified to be a human being by virtue of our actions as human beings. It is in the everydayness of how we conduct ourselves where we can view the microscopic cracks that we macroscopically enlarge in our melancholy. And it is quite an absurd reaction to wallow over our love for doing so does not get the conscience caboose any closer to restoring the practical everydayness for which we engage with the world through our concern, especially the one we have chosen to fuel our steampunk engine. It feels contradictory for one of your train carts to be let go off your track and feel like an extra load has been put on that slows the train.

Maybe it's just the conductor in me, or the heartbroken, that cannot see the horizon of the world that I have disclosed by doing these practical everyday actions for the sake of achieving something, with the common denominator manifested as doing so towards being a better person for the one we choose to love. 

When they say that love is complex, they only do so from the perspective of a computer. They try to compute and conduct experiments on what love is under these conditions and try to replicate the findings over and over and leave with no findings. Instead, they are just infected with the emotions that reasons can't explain. 

But we are not computers. Computers don't have what we call a heart, yet they can imagine the organ, they cannot feel the blood and its reasons for pumping. We are burdened by the things we choose to give ourselves meaning to our lives. And the closer that burden is, the more we reflect our identity through our practical everydayness interacting with a world for it. The world thus becomes disclosed and brings about a mood, coating the way we perceive things. 

Heartbreak doesn't add anything to the way we perceive things, it only uncovers this mooded veil. But just like untangling a mosaic thread, one only sees thread (cue "one only sees the trees but not the forest" cliché). And with an attempt at practically engaging with the thread, tries to sow one's own wounds for the sake of repairing and restoring his care, having been denied the chance to sow the wounds of the one who hurt him. 

What does one make of the heartbreak? One surely doesn't practically manifest pain from heartbreak with the goal of making things better. But as much as one tries to rationalize and fit in explanations for how heartbreak has something to do with an ultimate goal, one mustn't forget that practical readiness-to-hand isn't the only mode of being. The heartbroken Dasein shifts from readiness-to-hand to unreadiness-to-hand to presence at hand (theoretical understanding).

The heartbroken return to theoretical engagement. It first comes from the realization that one is stopped from their practical everydayness from engaging the world. Like the quintessential hammer example Heidegger explains in Being and Time suddenly stopped working for some reason. The mode of being shifts to unreadiness to hand and is split into three different types but for the sake of this discourse, isn't as important. What matters is that this unreadiness to hand prompts an authentic engagement with what used to be an extension of one's being (hammering as an extension of carrying out the goal of driving a nail in the wood in order to build a house for the sake of sheltering the human being). In this case, the practical schema of doing something with ultimately for the sake of the loved one is somehow blocked from happening. Does it come from the lack of foresight in seeing how one does something for the sake of the loved one or does it come from the way in which the action presents itself as unreadiness to hand. 

The world that is disclosed from unreadiness-to-hand is somewhat derivative of the readiness-to-hand. For if one wasn't even aware of the hammer being an extension of Human being's care for the world with its goals as defining him/herself, there wouldn't be an unreadiness-to-hand. 

In other words, without a heart familiar and one of the main structures of the world in which the heartbroken used to disclose, there wouldn't be an unreadiness-to-hand eventually leads to heartache. But first, the first response is panic and anxiety. This is an extreme form of care for the world the heartbroken was previously in and disclosed. Either trying to use the metaphorical hammer again or find another hammer or realize the hammer is missing all to a failure to achieve this readiness-to-hand, the anxiety builds. Perhaps this would be the moment of trying to salvage the heart from completely breaking. 

When that ultimately fails, Dasein (human being) ultimately tries to come towards a theoretical understanding via presence-at-hand mode of being. To continue the metaphor, one would examine the hammer and its properties to try to understand why it doesn't work or if the hammer is lost, would begin visualizing what it is and try to understand where it might be. But by doing so, the heartbroken-to-be leaves the world that included his love as a goal that he disclosed behind, causing more anxiety.

The peak of the heartbreak comes about when Dasein realizes that he cannot disclose the world that included his love as a goal. And he cannot understand whether or not it's the unreadiness-to-hand or presence-at-hand's fault. And this can go on for a really long time. But as being is intrinsically related to time, the fear that comes from being aware of one's death (being-towards-death), Dasein's dwelling cannot go for so long without any consequence. Since every world Dasein tries to begin structuring and hopefully disclosing, Dasein feels not at home, the issue comes to the forefront of experience and distracts his practical engagement with the world. The world that keeps changing with no constant telos. 

This unhomelike being-in-the-world is akin to sickness. Because one cannot separate the being from the world, the anxiety from feeling unhomelike in the world only produces confusion. Dasein is aware of death and its relation to time but does not feel at home in the world as a being. This is the very essence of the long drawn out heartbreak, where irrational behavior manifests itself the most. And not only the irrational behavior like one does when engaging in the prisoners dilemma, but rather the unpredictable kind; the undefinable, indescribable feeling even to Dasein himself. 

Dasein continues to try coping and its only until Dasein restructures his engagement with the world with a reformulated telos that the heartbreak can be contained. The cliché "time heals all wounds" is half-true in the sense that time's pressure on being to engage with the world while being aware of death brings Dasein to confront the very way one structures his modes of being (readiness-to-hand, unreadiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand). 

The way one does so splits into two– authentic or inauthentic engagement. The former is more difficult for Dasein as Dasein will have to constantly reevaluate his structure of world while the latter simply finds a telos that he is okay with coming back towards a readiness-to-hand mode of being. Inauthentic engagement may be a quick fix but Dasein will limit his engagement to a sort of pseudo-readiness-to-hand because the unreadiness-to-hand is either misunderstood or ignored and the presence-at-hand is superficially just an exterior (it is what it is). Can one arguably state that heartbreak is a mode of being? Perhaps and perhaps not. I would tend towards the latter as it is highly impractical to do so. 

Heartbreak is a kind of phenomena that brings about this chain of being that either authentically brings about a better understanding and concern for the world or leave an inauthentic, lackluster existence glazed with superficial goals with broken glass from the previous world that Dasein doesn't bother cleaning up.

Interpreting "living in my own world"

Over time, the people I get close to tend to remark that I am "living in my own world" either as a backhanded complement or as a straight out insult when an argument occurs. And upon reflection weeks after the last had occurred, I thought it be a good exercise in dwelling. Not only has this remark passed its regular cycle of concern, I have come back to it to give an interpretation of it through dwelling.

The concept of "living in my own world", if we are to interpret it phenomenologically, does not support a Cartesian "duality". I take it that what he/she meant is that I am a subject engaging with objects in reference to me as a subject rather than taking everything into consideration (if we talk in Cartesian tradition). If anything, the remark calls me egotistic, focusing so much on the "I" and forgetting that there is a world to consider outside the "I".

If we allow a longer period of time to dwell on it, where emotions ad hominem are filtered out in favor of this exercise in phenomenological ontology. And I don't mean to interpret the expression as a kind of apology (defense). Instead, this interpretation acts as both an exercise and a way to understand the kind of criticism levied against me so I may understand and acknowledge it more deeply.

This blog's foundation is grounded on trying to reconstruct this notion of being through dwelling and what's part of that is to make clear that Cartesian duality (mind and body) isn't the ultimate interpretation. Frankly I'm guessing Elijah would outright go and say it's wrong. However, it doesn't do much to simply cast it aside.

The word "egotistic" or "pretentious" can be levied around either implicitly through expressions such as "you're stuck in your own head" or by straight up saying one is "egotistic". These expressions are value-judgments and implicitly support the Cartesian subject-object distinction– it's in the language. But this may simply be Descartes and his followers bandwagoning the structure of language. Extremist Heideggerians may go as far as saying there is no consciousness. This is polarizing.

Frankly, I don't doubt that there is consciousness, and I think Heidegger doesn't either. However, I think that when saying I "[live] in my own world", the notion of world may be somewhat distorted when taking a person's "world" to be an expression of a person's mind and its projection into the world. And this kind of interpretation may lead to thinking of Heidegger as a structuralist, that our experiences in the world are simply a result of the structure we are born in.

Although there may be small hints of truth in this interpretation, it is dismissive of the kind of point Heidegger is trying to make. Heidegger is "pre-structuralist" in a sense but doesn't focus on the structure. Instead, Heidegger is more interested in the notion of being-in-the-world. That being is intrinsically a part of and in the world. Perhaps what my dear friend meant wasn't a Cartesian notion, or at least I hope so. Instead, the critique levied against me is how I am engaging in the world as not having a proper structure of world hood in his/her eyes.

And the frustration that comes from the "in your own world" is dependent on the possessive "your own'. Within language, which is the "dwelling place of being" that Elijah quoted Heidegger in his essay, we can infer the kind of frustration it is from being a Dasein. 

Dasein cannot truly understand the condition of another Dasein. Each person is stuck within the hermeneutic circle– the circle of interpretation. And the frustration comes from never being able to understand another. However, the approach in trying to understand someone based on one's view of another's engagement with world, is not a helpful approach because it tempts the presence-at-hand mode of being– that is, looking at a being in terms of a kind of theoretical understanding qua Descartes, Kant and Hegel.

But if the Dasein is approaching another Dasein as ready-to-hand– the kind of being that a person normally engages in, that is a practical engagement with the world. The critique levied is the world hood structure Elijah was talking about in the previous essay– the "towards which", "for the sake of which", etc.

That is in colloquial terms– the inferred final cause of my action that my friend takes as being fundamentally flawed as a kind of inauthenticity. However, engagement with Das man or the "crowd" exposes a kind of inauthenticity. Authenticity is an engagement of Dasein with his own existence. When Dasein is not doing that, it becomes inauthenticity.

However, one may notice that in questions of authenticity, there is rarely any value judgments. The only suggestion Heidegger gives in response to living a more authentic time was a scoff "spend more time in graveyards", alluding to his notion of being authentic through realizing that Dasein is being-towards-death.

So turning to Heidegger doesn't give any suggestion of morality or ethics, how we should behave. We don't have to spend all our time in graveyards. That would be missing the point. Instead, I think we have to think for ourselves and our own final causes. Why do we do any actions? For the sake of what? What is our goal?

And particularly, my friend's criticism is right. if my goal was to engage in a moment of friendship by listening to what he/she is sharing, then I should be engaged in that.

What I think she/he means when she/he says that I'm living in my own world, I now interpret as a criticism of me not expressing concern/care for the world wherein my identity is to be a friend for him/her.

Touché

Music, a language qua dwelling

"Language is the dwelling place of the truth of being"- Martin Heidegger

The kind of phenomenology, if one could call it as such, that Martin Heidegger employs to give an "analytic of Dasein" (lit. there-being), the kind of being that human beings have qua taking issue with one's own existence. Early Heidegger systematically employs an understanding of being that traditional western philosophy had previously ignored, instead focusing on what he called "logocentrism". For me, Heidegger acts as a kind of prophetic interpreter of the crazy genius of Kierkegaard and Nietszche. The later works of Heidegger shows a kind of turn away from his attack on logocentrism and instead attempts to embrace the disclosure of being that Kierkegaard and Nietszche had focused most of their lives and work on. With thoughts on poetry and other aesthetic artforms encompassing most of his later lectures, I found it surprising that he has little to say about music (and if he did, it's ambiguous as to his actual stance in relation to his philosophy).

My sister's an aspiring composer in high school. She recently told me she has writer's block on writing more compositions. When I left for the states to go to uni back in 2015, my sister was a rising freshman in high school with my other sister, a rising junior. Now fast forward three years this academic year, she finds herself relatively alone in terms of sibling company as my other sister is in New York now studying humanities (the vagueness is intentional, she keeps changing her major). My little sister's development as far as I can discern from my other sister's long phone call catchups, is that as a person engaged in music, my little sister has shifted from being less a musician that performs and more a musician that composes. This leads to her leaning towards music theory rather than music performance. My other sister and I, somewhat more on the musician/performing side have stopped at ABRSM's grade 5 (out of 8) music theory while my sister is gunning for the top level. 

When she told me she recently got a writer's block in composing, I had Kierkegaard's either/or (which I'm currently reading) in my mind (specifically his writings on Mozart in the volume 1's "either"). So I thought that instead of giving her some kind of stimulus/inspiration to write from, I suggested she read specifically Kierkegaard's essay (via pseudonym "A"'s essay in either/or called the musical erotic/immediate stages of the erotic) on Mozart's Don Giovanni. I then also gave her links to different writings by Adorno, Morricone, etc. on the topic of philosophy of music, with the intention of giving her some source material to have an inspiration on why one does music instead of what to write about. 

Whether or not she does read it, I realized that my advice comes implicitly from my reflections on Heidegger. I'm no Heideggerian scholar, but I do appreciate his philosophy and am very happy to study Heidegger's work in my free time. And when I interact with my sister, I'm reminded of my pre-Heideggerian days in high school where I would spout out "cogito ergo sum" in my social media bio descriptions. I remember myself trying to compose music and always thinking about different techniques and music theory ideas. I thought about motifs, inversions and whatever else I learned from (I)GCSE music and studying for the ABRSM grade 5 music theory exam. I don't remember any of those compositions. The ones I do remember are when I approached music as an outlet for the feelings that I went through, I even lamented the kind of sick joke it is for musicians to go through so much pain to write music so replayable and memorable. Granted, I don't mean to say that my music that I'm proud of is actually good. Quite the opposite actually. Because of the fact that the music I wrote that I find meaningful are the purest reflection of the situation I was in. 

It's almost as if music is a medium through which the world as I knew it looked like. Heidegger said that we are "disclosers of worlds", and this realization I had only cemented a deeper understanding of what he meant. Heidegger described the structure of worldhood in Being and Time with the systematic rigor of phenomenological analysis that Husserl had imparted on him but that Heidegger made his own. Without getting too much into the actual specifics, Heidegger seems to bring about a notion of focusing on the telos of an action, or what Aristotle called the final cause. Whenever we engage in meaningful activity, we engage with the world for the sake of the action. Our actions don't end with that simple final cause. We also engage in activity in order to define the purpose of the action. We then come back to another for the sake of which something that defines our identity as being-in-the-world. 

And Heidegger acknowledges that without language, this structure of worldhood couldn't be defined. It now comes to my attention to reflect on whether music is such a kind of discloser. The easiest initial defense to come to music's aid is most likely Heidegger's inspirations. Kierkegaard championed truth as subjectivity and dedicated a whole essay to music in Either/Or. Nietszche said that "without music, life would be a mistake". But even so, if Heidegger were to simply join the underdogs of philosophy, who worked tirelessly and with a almost schizophrenic writing rigor, Heidegger wouldn't be able to come close to his ultimate goal– to dismantle philosophy from within the tradition, like a secret spy planting explosives at the very core of western philosophy– the logos. 

So taking Kierkegaard and Nietszche's advice won't do for Heidegger. Music must be held accountable to the same standards. What comes immediately when one encounters music depends on whether or not one is listening, performing or composing. What's the same in all of them is that the Dasein in music is always engaged with the world, in the world. 

To narrow this rough analysis' scope further, we must eliminate the encounter of music in which music is not the focus and is merely in the background. Kierkegaard and Nietszche would agree as the former's writing on Mozart's Don Giovanni was an almost obsessive argument for the aesthetic and the latter was a musician in his own right with some of his music even on spotify. 

As soon as the music is intelligible, attentive listening becomes an active engagement. It may be tempting to go through the Cartesian tradition and think of music becoming a reflection of consciousness but that would simply be an analysis of music as pseudo presence at hand or, if done right, presence at hand. One may look at the structure of the music, analyze all the chords and keys and instrumentation but miss the entire experience that music is as part of the world to be engaged with. Dasein instead would normally be concerned with the practical aspect of music in its immediacy. Dasein listens to music for the sake of hearing a song, in order that the song may be made intelligible and finally, for the sake of ultimately defining Dasein's worldhood identity. And the way that music, when engaged with, makes sense comes from Dasein's understanding of music's equipment. Be it headphones, speakers or a live outdoor concert, these equipment are part of what make music itself intelligible. Otherwise, the primordial Dasein unfamiliar with this kind of music would not treat it as music and maybe treat the phenomena as something else (a warning signal or a battle cry, for example). 

So if we speak of music that is familiar to Dasein, the clues that give context to acknowledging and engaging with music qua music is particularly intelligible to Dasein when he/she engages in music by disclosing a world. A good example of this concept is a familiar genre of music. When listening to say for example "pop music", Dasein would understand music and engage with it in a matter that relates itself to music and the rest of the environment around him/her. In a club, for example, music can be listened to for the sake of being happy, in order for a birthday is celebrated and finally for the sake of which defines Dasein as a person, at the club, celebrating a birthday celebration. Music thus discloses Dasein's engagement with music at a club, if Dasein is particularly actively engaging with it. 

The analysis of trying to sort out music as a language in the same manner that our language as we speak it ultimately ties the similarity of Dasein's engagement in terms of its concern with the world. Dasein is particularly concerned with its being-towards-death, an example of awareness of one's existence and its inherent finitude. Temporality, which unites being, inherently points at music, whose finitude is enough to be a kind of mirror of Dasein's own finitude. Heidegger brings about concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity to describe Dasein's focus or lack thereof in engaging with one's awareness of one's existence. Inauthenticity is tempted by Das man (the they) that drown out Dasein's focus and forcing it to the background. The inauthenticity may simply be a symptom manifested by the angst/anxiety that comes from the awareness of one's being-towards-death or more colloquially– the "existential crisis" that ensues. 

Music is the kind of language that potentially establishes a line that may draw Dasein's engagement with the world towards either authenticity or inauthenticity. And through either path chosen, being dwells. That which being dwells is reflected by concern with the world that affects one's ability to tune into the engagement with the world that affects the way one engages with the world– what is termed "mood". Music is particularly a language that Dasein is fluent in, one does not need to think about breaking down music and build up an understanding from it, Dasein's engagement is the understanding of music and its bearing in the world that Dasein discloses. 

Music's idiosyncrasy is mood. Dasein tunes in to music and instantly understands it, and if payed attention to, is concerned with it. Is music a purer form of language than our systems (english, german, chinese, etc.) because of its immediacy manifested as mood? In some ways it may be so. Dasein is a skillful coper in the world. And when one engages with music, be it the budding bassoonist tirelessly practicing her scales and timbre through each breath or the dedicated listener lying in bed and immerses himself in it. And each time, gets better at disclosing the world of Dasein through its engagement with music. Music expresses being so well because it does not tempt expression of beings inherently. And yet, music is an activity, an activity that when Dasein engages with it, is able to cope more skillfully with the world that at the same time Dasein is actively disclosing. 

Music is indeed a language, but not the kind that can be captured structurally by the worldhood of Dasein. Instead, music is that which utters being through dwelling. It is the pure language by beings that when made, somehow stops becoming an expression about beings and instead simply a disclosure of being. This distinction is important– beings are entities (the many) while being refers to that which is made intelligible. And so music may elicits a language through Dasein. As one is skillfully coping music, it is already an elicitation of being. Music is a language in so far that it requires the language of Dasein in order to utter a single note. In this sense, music does not exist neither "externally" nor "internally", it is the medium of communication/expression that Dasein discloses as a world when one is actively engaging with it.