Being as horizon in relation to thought, nihilism and atemporality

We inherit the thought we choose to adopt. We are the vessels of the structure of this thought; thought that drives our regular engagement with the world is necessarily self-sufficient. Yet this thought entertains a multitude of possibilities.

This thought hides in the laying out of hypotheticals, oscillating through the basic three tenses. It is fundamentally our thinking that affects this tension of time. The subjunctive, pluperfect, conditional are call called “moods” of time. They open up the possibilities of different worlds. We attune to these worlds through our practical engagement with the world. This everydayness is in fact a thought. Our being, though not actively “thinking” is in fact a thought. It is through this unrestricted engagement that being manifests pure thought.

Being is immeasurable, for when one tries to, being is necessarily hidden/concealed. This is what I believe/think Heidegger means when he calls for the destruction of Western philosophical tradition, those slaves of reason. For this kind of philosophy corrupts being. It is through our own tendency to want to improve the already established thought that we hide the truth that lies in being. For being is a horizon that this philosophy looks at through a telescope, fixated only on the vanishing point instead of this unrestricted, infinite, endless horizon of being.

And we grow up to inherit this thought and express the being of this collective telescope, the lens of which clearly enhances the tunnel vision from which we suffer. It is paradoxical that philosophy (through Heidegger) realized its own necessary self-destruction but only through it, can we free thought to freely speak being.

“Language is the house of the truth of being” - Martin Heidegger

Freedom in the sense of freedom of discourse and not the radical freedom that existentialism cried for. Rather, it is the being, situated in the world that is all being thinks. For even attempts to go beyond the world necessarily discloses a world. 

And because we inherit thought we choose to adopt, we structure ourselves in one world. And it is through this misunderstanding that we eventually find in trying to unite ourselves into the “one”, “they”, “herd” or “crowd” that we forget that we’ve lost ourselves in our little telescope. Yet with infinite possibilities of other worlds we may disclose, being may lose itself to the nihilistic attitude. We don't realize we have imported skepticism from the myopic "one" world into being the beings that we are, in the horizon of being-there.

For beings experience the world necessarily (as being-in-the-world) but being doesn't. Being is the hidden door not through which experience passes through. The significance of being is simply its separation from beings.

We see being everyday, through our everydayness, because of our everydayness. For thought is being's spirit, language its furniture, rooted in being-in-the-world.

The nihilistic attitude's attempted coup stems from this misinterpretation from the "one". The nihilist doesn't realize that before coming to this conclusion, Dasein/being-in-the-world/human-being fundamentally cares. For if Dasein does not care, how would it come to contemplate its world? And because of nihilism's identity as the skeptic who gave up, it is evidence of the skeptic's circular thinking.

Nihilism is this anxiety turned apathy from going around in circles. This is the condition "myopia"/"myopic thinking" suffers from. Not only has it realized its great distance but zero displacement, it stubbornly marches on, expecting something to be the same and being upset about its restricted certainty. And this kind of judgment is simply the means of escape from this myopia from disclosing it.

This does not mean that Dasein should not be anxious. It is only in understanding this anxiety from this engagement with the world that we can examine as an existential analytic that we can recover our engagement with being. For the hidden history of the west, the history of being before plato established "being as entity" as dogma, is evidence of human engagement with its roots.

Being as "phronesis" (coming to be then coming not to be), as "power"; even the overrated western being as "entity" as well as "creation" in the christian interpretation is the original philosophy, the roots of the question of who we are. In this modern age, the millenial will come to realize that information isn't simply a value of knowledge about being, but by its too quick availability, brings about an awareness that the kind of being "the one" is heading towards is atemporality.

But "being is time", said Heidegger. However, the "one" will not heed Heidegger's warning regarding technology. As we attempt to become atemporality through becoming this thought, we will find that the project of being as entity- essentially all disciplines ending with "ology", worshiping only one sense of the "logos", we only continue to suffer from this mute logos, unable to utter thought as discourse (legein, greek, another sense of the word logos).

Artificial intelligence, the brainchild of "being as entity" party will only reach the limit of the resolution its telescope can resolve. The "limit" akin to the mathematical "limit" is the horizon's vanishing point discovered and developed to be an artificial being. And out of frustration, "being as entity" will walk towards the horizon, hoping to find its end, unaware that they are missing the point. And it will continue to walk on "in circles" or towards the vanishing point and see the same thing, and will feel secure with the collective myopia. They will stumble together, trip together, and push the boulder like sisyphus up a hill together or even turn to nihilism-- unfounded and unfortunate.

For in all these attempts, being is concealed, continuously buried through every wrong step we take.

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.

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.