We aren't wading in life's kiddie pool when we're born. We're thrown into it with a blinding light in our eyes. We cry, we hear our crying and respond to it by crying some more. There's so much information coming in, it's overwhelming. We decide to make choices on what to prioritize. We begin attuning to the sound of our mother, the only familiar frequency we've ever known. There's a varying frequency of sounds initially unintelligible but we get so used to the reaches of the range of the human voice that we point this out when we hear things over other noises.
Attunement is a wonderful amalgamation of the concepts of attention and presence.
As temporal beings, our engagement with the world has been highly refined, even the scientist herd would agree. Our own quirks can be observed by understanding what stands out to us when we are engaged with the world while present. Maybe a painting at a friend's house lights up to you. It may be an objectively crappy rendition of starry, starry night but it reminds you of art class at the local mall with your older sister where you tried painting your tigger backpack on a sheet of construction paper while your sister had tried to recreate starry, starry night for the purpose of learning Van Gogh's techniques.
A musician is highly attuned to the intricacies of his instrument. Perhaps so much so that other non-musicians couldn't quite point it out. Not only is this shown in his commitment and care for his craft but also in the way he expresses it. And we as casual listeners have the ability to attune to that after being exposed to so much music growing up. We have to experience the world and recognize its continual unity through time as our marked relationship with being.
Things out there in the world mean something to us, somehow. We care about it over other worries in the world. We take this care with us as we traverse through time, albeit stubbornly. But why care about anything? Frankly, that question is misleading for we already express our care in the question, which shows concern of what we're already doing.
Perhaps we're attuned to care, that's a plausible reason. But attunement cannot become a theory of everything, for it will simply amount to nothing if so. Rather, attunement is built into our care as being-in-the-world that can be seen through our continuous engagement with something we care about. Things about this care are revealed to us unlike any other. Features, details and even just hunches about our intended care that was not apparent to us before. I use "we" a lot to point out to a common ground of experience but really, that ground is just ground; your experience is just as unique as mine.
Not to sound existentialist or anything...
Nevertheless, like a radio tuned to a station, our attunement is selective but not like that of the psychologist's notion of attention. For even if we found out which specific areas of the brain light up when we pay attention to a chair, the qualia of our experience remains at large, and all the built-in contexts behind this chair. We are built into attunement is what I'm trying to say. We can read the mood of the room at a party or feel our own emotions while being at said party. Perhaps being "in-tune" with one's emotion may take the spotlight for an example of attunement but being "in-tune" with your significant other holds just as much ground.
Understanding your significant other "better than they can" is a well-repeated adage and has some truth to it. However the comparative is obviously relative. "Better than they can understand themselves" can amount to understanding someone better in terms of how they are revealed to them. The rug under the carpet feeling gets released when one realizes the other person is "not who they thought they were" because of this fixation with attunement as it is only one kind of attunement.
Attuning to something discloses a kind of being of a person but also necessarily covers it up. Maybe it will cover up other aspects that become mere background noise in terms of priority or simply cover up the potential for understanding someone in terms of the goal they set out for in the first place.
This skill itself is a particular attunement. And so my awe with attunement perhaps isn't that it is a particular unique notion not recognized by previous philosophers before Heidegger. Rather, it is my amazement at how people have taken many lengths to deny it.
Attunement isn't the groundbreaking concept to tell you the underlying message about what it means to be a human being, rather it is the ground from which you can explore your presence and engagement with the world. It is the fundamental mood, an attitude you've felt like you've always known and take pride in knowing. The world that you disclose and cover-up, that you bring to stand out and leave behind the curtain. This is simply a structural demonstration, one can only find out if this is truth by engaging with this everydayness and give time to notice that there are many things in the everyday that become a world to be disclosed, integrated and most importantly lived-in.
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