Reflections on Attunement

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.

Pros and Cons of being Heideggerian

1. Having a more enriched notion of Being (pro)
2. Know the difference between "being" and "beings" (pro)
3. Saying you’re Heideggarian is uncool (con)
4. Having to use a new form of vocabulary/language to speak about things which regular language tends to misrepresent (con)
5. Having to defend the relevance of Heideggerian thought despite Heidegger being a Nazi (con)
6. Having a good argument against Descartes (pro)
7. Being able to say the metaphysics project failed and know what you’re talking about (pro)– get effectively get that two-way nod with those Wittgensteinians.
8. Have a stronger notion of theology than most religious people if desired (pro)
9. Heideggerians may not know formal logic/ the continental problem (con)
10. Have a better grasp of the history of philosophy than most Analytic philosophers (pro)
11. Knowing pre-Greek terms that you can show off to Greek students (pro)
12. Automatically become an etymologist (pro)
13. Your dogma is to doubt the dogma (pro)
14. Being dogmatic is hard when other philosophers don’t grasp Heidegger well (con, arguably pro because humbling)
15. Not having a philosophy for ethics, having to outsource, and not really find anything (con)
16. Having to explain to people you’re not an existentialist (con)
17. Have most of your ideas be associated with existentialism (con)
18. Most of the time the only thing people know about Heidegger are Authenticity/inauthenticity and know the word Dasein but not what it becomes to mean over time (con)
19. Be confused when people say Heidegger doesn’t make any sense (con)
20. Have your philosophy accept science (pro)
21. Having to work on philosophy without using the word consciousness (con)
22. Having to read Merleau-Ponty if wanting to extend ideas about being to perception and corporeality (con)
23. Having to study Husserl in order to truly grasp Heidegger (con)
24. Other Heideggarians shit on you if you don’t know German (con)
25. Typing Greek is as difficult as it sounds (con)
26. Be able to interact your philosophy with many different departments from different countries (other than USA) (pro)
27. Potentially fall into postmodernism (con)

Phenomenology of death: intending loved ones

While the existentialists made radical strides on the topic of death as a personal possession of every human’s, the phenomenology of death need not only dwell on one’s own end. Most of the time, one stumbles on dwelling the topic of “death” in general after hearing about the death of a loved one or variable levels of acquaintance with someone who had passed. While philosophy from the Greeks to the existentialists prepare for death, what remains hushed is those who used to possess the verb to be. The phenomenological method that Husserl revolutionized allowed for a more ‘scientific’ understanding of the categories of our intention- the ‘logic’ of our consciousness. One may confuse this logic with the logic of Descartes, Kant, Hegel. But phenomenology is supposed to return us to the things themselves. When we engage in perceiving the object, consciousness intends the object, tries to grasp it. But in our natural attitude, in the hum bum of everydayness, our perception maintains the wholeness of an object despite only seeing one of them. The part is intended, the unity is what consciousness is intending.

But what of intending the departed? Whatever euphemism we use, language can only try to describe the phenomena, the kind one would know when one actually engages in phenomenology. And so this investigation will attempt to do just that. But this will not solely follow the Husserlian telos, other variations of the modern dogma will manifest themselves in thought as it helps the process. For philosophers, even if their backgrounds were in mathematics, theology, anthropology, etc. all studies are just studies of humans situated and narrowed into a subject of interest about the human. And so we must inquire whether or not intending the dead is akin to intending an ideal structure such as mathematics. For what characterizes human beings is that they are always unfulfilled, always a potentiality until death. Heidegger calls this notion being-towards-death. To begin to try answering this, one must ask what does one think of when one intends the phenomenon of a loved one and is that different from intending the dead in general? Phenomenology is always a first person investigation, and so others dwelling on this should think of this themselves. For when I intend the dead in general, all I’m dealing with the facticity that they used to be, always thought of in one tense– the past. And so I find it strange when other people say something along the lines of “she would have wanted it like this” or “she doesn’t like it to be this way”, turning whoever into a mouthpiece for one’s own interpretation. And these people aren’t mystical prophets or completely self centered manipulator, at least that’s not how I intend them ;). Jokes aside, any tense a person uses referring to the departed other than past is inaccurate but not entirely false. Language is just a tool for us to aim our intentions at what we’re intending.

With a specific person in mind, when we intend them, our act of intention puts them in our consciousness. Is the act of intention a fulfilled intention? For our interests, the logic behind consciousness, where supposed transcended ideas arise from, is that where our intended loved one resides? Mathematics is a fulfilled intention as it does not require us to rediscover 1+1=2 over and over again. But death doesn’t appear to us as a fulfilled idea, at least not intuitively. In our everydayness, thinking about a dead loved one is normally associated with emotions, which trigger memories that grasp the past intentions. And the constant grasping by consciousness for a person who at the time before her death was being with possibilities, provided us with an insight into the structure of our intentions. Most people are on the fence on whether death is a certainty. But phenomenology takes the things themselves, and the very notion of death gained from seeing the corpse itself or reading about it in the obituaries affects the structure of the life world of the phenomenologist. Regardless of the source, the notion of death of an other remains a factually true statement but also an ontologically debatable discourse. For to describe death itself, one may turn to the Kantian cop out and claim one cannot know the thing in itself but that only promotes skepticism.

Death is first person for me but always third person for any one else. And so Phenomenology’s first person technique grasps for the kind of being that used to be continuous beings that are always a “yet to be” but always is. And so even the most sophisticated and considered of phenomenological analysis has to deal with this intending in time. “Being is time” Heidegger ironically answers about the relationship of being and time in his large magnum opus.

One thing that can’t be denied as mentioned previously is the fact that one cannot help think of one’s own death when dealing with the thought of a dead person. Death is a looming certainty in our being. And so arguably in trying to grasp or intend the death o ta loved one, the ego is also trying to grasp the fulfilled intention of one’s own death. For all of this activity of intending is going on within consciousness. Noth the consciousness of the subject and the pure consciousness for which all consciousness operates under.

The notion of death when dealt with and put in the forefront of one’s life world, can lead towards either authenticity or inauthenticity. Authenticity occurs only when one is dealing with one’s own death. Projecting it unto another and denying one’s own certain, impending death leads to inauthentic behavior, one may tend to go with the “crowd”, “herd”, “they”, “one”, etc.

Underlying all this activity in the forefront is the background being-in-the-world, our everydayness still dominates even if one falls into lapses of coping with the idea of death. And so when speaking/intending of a loved one , it appears that the phenomena will try to grasp the person who has deparrted and realize that he/she is actually intending one’s own death. Either way, the investigation remains a looming uncertainty, like an unsolved mathematical problem. And from one’s own attitude towards death (inauthentic or authentic behavior) leads to the fundamental underlying ethics that stems into our everyday ethics. So this kind of pre-ethics, appears to be fundamentally irrational for grasping something that is unfulfilled does not leave comfort into certainty. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why ethics ends up with relativism. Because each person’s death is their own. no one can take hold of it. But death isn’t unique in that sense, each person’s own unique experience with death itself is unique. But also everyone’s own experience with the phenomena. There’s no way one can experience the same as another, only a notion that some things remain certain while other aspects of a thing remains a practical endeavor.

This analysis is leaning towards the Sartrean notion of nothingness, and will likely end up in that train of thought as the notion of the nothing, when truly considered is a complex endeavor and may arguably the same as mathematics.

Nonetheless, thinking of a dead person, especially one that I know makes me think about myself because that death is his/her’s. My death is mine. We may be caught in existential crises and melodramatics death as if it were unnatural but death is really an integral part of a person’s life. The choice to anguish over our death is authentic behavior but not practical. Because alongside our being-toward-death are the goals we set to ourselves as we engage within the world, necessarily as part of the world. To disclose being through activities such as ontological phenomenology, history and even science. The problem of death is the problem of life so long as we make a part of us a problem.

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.

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.