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.