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.