Tag: Hiedegger

Existential Ramblings and Conclusions

On By Chris ShuttleworthLeave a comment
Originally Written: July 20th 2020

The problem is that we have an experience, and that experience can be better or worse. Not to mention, that experience and its contents, which are ranging, are wholly contingent upon this world in which we find ourselves thrown into.

The question no longer becomes whether anything matters or doesn’t, as it surely does, to us, it becomes – how do we best navigate this existence we find ourselves thrown into? The social milieu, the time, the space, the experience, the present moments causal tethers, and the anticipation of the future, how do we navigate with the givens?

Do we stop trying, and produce an intolerable suffering that we subjectively experience? Do we struggle to pursue what we individually uncover as valuing, despite the universes judgment upon the futility of meaning? We ought to. We ought to rebel against the universes condemnation, and bring to the forefront that meaning which we find gives sense to our experience, that which relates to our conscious awareness the beneficiality of pursuing, not because it means something to the world, but because it means something to us. Is this real? Does it exist? It exists as sure as our experience of existence exists, and to optimize this experience is to pursue what we value, which, if we’re smart, we would look to discovering what is the most optimal pursuits to value themselves.

We don’t forget our thrownness into a world unasked for, we don’t ignore the universal insignificance of our existence, rather, we value the content of our own experience, we see the sense that is made behind every moment, as our embodied perceptive ability discerns which content to manifest in conscious experience, and in so inviting, we discern modes of being, we experience life, we live and we learn, we strive for optimal states, and we ought not feel guilty, nor forget the framework from which we work in.

Our natural orientation toward the world will inform us of our values, whether they be pre-conscious in perception, or consciously directed. Our genetic encoding for how to perceive, and the way in which we orient ourselves towards our environment is done so by a certain signification that objects in our environment give as mediated by the perceptive system (itself genetically and environmentally informed). This is base level sense, meaning, and signification. It also just so happens to be the case that we are located in a social milieu, a familial and culturally influenced system, which is formulated into our perceptive orientation system since birth. These systems all seek to orient us in a way that has value, from the basis of survival, propagation, and other evolutionary factors. This basis, provided with a social milieu, entails action and Being that works in a way towards properly being in the world. This “proper” is somewhat anthropomorphized, but it is a natural process that is underlined by a certain sense.

There is sufficient reason why we pay attention to certain things, why certain content has the effect it does upon us, why we reciprocally act in a way that is “intuited” as optimal for us. It is a production of a value system, that is part in parcel of our Being, that which we are, and our place in the world we find ourselves in.

We can extrapolate, as the desires and goals become enriched by the societal norms, become more complex as the means to survival and satisfaction become more entwined and enriched with a causally determined value. We pursue things, we say things, we do things, we think things, and we reflect on our own experience, not for no reason at all, but for good reason, it is all bursting with meaning, we ought to attempt to uncover such things, which we can (Value System Uncovering). Proper Vipassana meditation, analyzed with a phenomenological method, can disclose the intentionality behind conscious experience, can disclose the modes of being which we embody, and their characteristics (Phenomenology of Vipassana Mode of Being). One of which, as Hiedegger pointed out, is our natural care or concern system, which courses through every present moment.

Everything we do is fundamentally informed by our care and concern, our want, our deficiency and its alleviation. We care about things, we value things, because they mean something to us, there is no escaping this, whether we consciously attribute our belief structure to being nihilist, or absurdist, etc., the orientation towards a belief structure, and mediated by the belief structure, itself is rooted upon a type of meaning, albeit the selection of negation over affirmation (in these cases).

Why do you think you better yourself? We should answer these questions for ourselves, look to who we want to be, what we want to do, and strive to go there, for good reasons and intentions. Making this goal, these intentions, and the path there explicit provides a benefit towards achieving that goal of becoming who we want to become, of getting “better” in a subjective sense – made objective only in its relation to our subjective experience of being better or worse.

Why do we continue living? Why do I do the things I do? I do it because it fills me with meaning, provides positive states of being, it will make me a better husband, father, citizen, which themselves are sources of meaning, they provide a framework from which to act under that improves my psychological state, it fills my life with potentialities that have a significance to me, and for me, that is enough to continue living.

The better we are, in ways which we value, hypothetically (if our goals, intentions, practice, and definition of “better” is actually conducive to a better experience of life) the better we can navigate existence, the better we can cope with hardship, the better subjective experience we have, and the better we can aide others. By bettering ourselves, we become more equipped to handle life itself, optimally, that produces wellbeing for ourselves and those we care about.

The more virtuous we are, the better we can act, the more knowledgeable we become, the better we are able to understand reality, and the better equipped we become to live in an optimal manner.

While this is itself subjective, I think we ought to pursue what we value regardless, at the least on a “whim” as Camus said, but we can go past that, because this “whim” can be properly informed and backed by empirical evidence of improving psychological wellbeing, which ought to matter to us, seeing as our experience does matter to us. We can instantiate a path towards a consciously formulated goal, mode of being, character trait, personal accomplishment, creative act, etc. that is the result of a pursuance in accordance with what we find meaningful in the present moment, or what we value.

Now why ought we to pursue what we value, what we consciously formulate as being valuable? This is generally a tautology, we pursue what is valuable because it is valuable, it provides us with wellbeing, reduces suffering, creates a life that is meaningful, to us, by definition, because it’s based on our values.

This would be, if you could grant me, a subjective pursual that is objectively verified as a real present moment decision, act, understanding. The phenomena of such conscious decisions, the awareness necessary to realize, is all subjective, but we can say, from our experience, if is an objective fact about our existence that it is occurring.

I would never make a claim that pursuits and values are universally shared to the same degree, just that they objectively exist and can be discovered subjectively. Any further extrapolation would require quite a detailed phenomenological explanation as well as a philosophically vigorous explanation of what “truth” here entails. (On Truth Claims) I hope you see where I’m coming from regardless.

One more point on the is ought problem, as far as morality is concerned, I’m coming from a meta ethical perspective of moral realism, tempered by individually acquired wisdom in actuality, so there’s that.

In regards to extrapolating these musing beyond the life of a human, to other sentient life, the natural orientation we have towards the world we’re in, this goes for Dasein, and dog, and buffalo, is naturally oriented towards the content within its environment, pre-consciously. This orientation is grounded upon the biological structure of our system, formed through DNA, developed through our historical development by environmental factors. The dog isn’t aware of the being of the object which imposes a reaction, the dog is merely orienting himself to the environment he perceives in embodied pre conscious adjustments. The perception of the hot ground in Arizona, and the subsequent movement of the lizard in response, isn’t merely an empirical sensory intake and thus movement, neither is it the intellectual comprehension and directedness of the mind imposing direction and movement, it is the embodied perceptibility of his being which is seeking to reorient that being based on the conditions of the world in which he finds himself, the milieu which surrounds him.

I would say the orientation of the being of the organism to color and heat is intuited by its perceptive abilities prior to cognize, that being said, where anthropomorphized cognition and intellect must be suspended, such as in another organism such as a lizard, we cannot claim that it recognizes the being of such phenomena as such. We only claim the being of the object being perceived in consciousnesses as being a possibility due to our own recognition of our being, I think it would be fallacious to attribute the same power, to the same degree, to other beings – but this also holds true to members of the same species.

That being said, from our perspective, using our language, we can say that the organism does intuit heat and color, that they recognize the fluctuation, variance, and thus orient themselves accordingly, but this content is never made explicit to itself in a way which humans are capable of doing so.

So the organism does have a comprehension of the color and heat of the sand which it darts across, and thus is impelled to action through movement, but that comprehension which we say is the comprehension of the being of externalities, isn’t the same comprehension which we are used to. Our comprehension is mediated and filtered through our perceptive abilities, and the mode of comprehension which is enacted upon by the lizard isn’t making the content of his environment explicit, or attributing it to the being of externalities, he is merely reorienting in much the same way we do with a hot stove, or when someone walks into the room.

Every being, in relationship to any other being which enters into our perceptual or even conceptual horizon, modifies the being which is present in response to its recognition (not conscious recognition, merely perceptive.) The manner in which we do so, the characteristics of such modes of being, how phenomena influence us, and how we come to perceive, comprehend, and are modified by such phenomena, is the role of the phenomenologist to attempt to uncover.

The manner in which organisms which are farther away from us do so, i.e. not Dasien, becomes less clear and more difficult their degree of removal of sameness they are from us, as we all know, even denoting our own fundamental characteristics in regards to any given phenomena, noema, and the underlying noesis, is difficult enough.

What stands, regardless of the being which is in question, is that if it is life, it has a set of values, instantiated at birth towards certain aims. These aims, whether conscious, unconscious, or merely perceptual and reactionary, inform the being of the organism in question as to how to orient itself in life. Whether to produce locomotion, cognition, action, or inaction. This evaluation of our environment, our modification in response to the gulf between ourselves and the environment, urges us in directions, towards objects of intentionality. This all is presupposed by a significance, a meaning, an evaluation, which, if uncovered, can provide insight into why we do the things we do. This system isn’t merely bottom-up, but can be effected significantly in a top-down manner as well, which is where the absurdist or existentialist conceptions come in play. As long as our subjective experience matters to us, we ought to pursue that which we value, re-examine our value system, and direct ourselves towards actualization of that content – that is – if we want a meaningful life, if we want to have a positive psychological experience. While none of this matters sub species aeternitus, from the universes perspective, or from any perspective outside our own, the fact remains that it matters to us, and that is more than enough to pursue what we value.

On the Phenomenology of Desire and the Necessity of Suffering

On By Chris Shuttleworth1 Comment
Originally Written: February 28th 2020

In reference to our subjective experience of the content of the present moment perception available to us through mindfulness, we can discover that the content presented to us is of an essential axiomatic character (Mindfulness and Phenomenology). The axioms which we predominately wish to analyze here are those in which the Buddha claimed as fundamental and all applicable, in which we will alter slightly in their defining and expounding. The essences in question are those of desire and dissatisfaction with the present.

We find in our subjective experience our consciousness is directed towards objects of desire, whether these be in the form of mental or material content or physical acquisition or pursuit is indifferent to us here (abstract connections and the broad use of desire will be used throughout). Our consciousness is meaningfully directed towards the acquisition of its object of representation, one discoverable essence of this intentionality itself (not of the object of intention, but towards the very phenomena which is represented by the concept of intentionality or directedness) is its characteristic of desire. This desire is attempting to acquire something, which we experience as the object of attention. The essential nature of conscious direction with its foundation in desire necessarily implies that we do not currently posses the object of attention, placing us in a mode of deficiency. Coupled with the admission that we are in a constant state of directedness, which of course is transiently altered moment to moment, yet is founded upon an inherent desire which implies deficiency or lack, places a descriptive state of suffering, or unsatisfactoriness, as part of the normal state of being.

This all-experientially-pervasive aspect of Being in its totality, of unsatisfactoriness, drives our conscious experience both mentally and physically through life, and I believe is the natural product of evolutionary biology which truly seeks to work within the framework produced by evolution, towards the beneficiality of the genome (its survival, replication, copying fidelity). In recognizing dhukkha as being the first noble truth of life, in its essential nature being desire (contains desire to avoid, desire for change, desire for stability, in short, craving as well as clinging as well as aversion), the Buddha made the logical conclusion that if we wish to escape the dissatisfaction or suffering which characterizes our experience, which is discoverable by inflection and phenomenological analysis, we would have to eradicate desire. His conclusion on how to attain this is through following the noble eightfold path, which if carried out conclusively in perfect accordance with “the truth”, would lead to the dissolution of desire, which as being a fundamental underlying axiom supporting intentionality, would in turn eradicate suffering from our experience.

The problem is that in actuality, being biological beings, these terms are concrete and inherent in the very Being in which we are. Fortunately, we can recognize this nature, and find ways to realize the actuality of the first and second noble truths as being applicable as modes of the description of our Being, and based off the realization of such truths, work to navigate and become comfortable within the framework which we discovered to be underlying our existence. The framework of areas in which we could direct our intention to defining, and thus pursuing and through pursuit improving, is provided by the Buddha in his eightfold path… what each fold means, and the values inherent in them, are characterized through conceptualizations produced by us (or found in the conceptualization of values such as given by the Buddha, or philosophers, or other religions, etc. ) which in their defining and actualizing in a practical sense in our own experience can serve to a better or worse degree in improving our conscious apprehension of reality, as well as improving our wellbeing, and the wellbeing of those around us, in ways that are in alignment with our aforementioned value structure (Value Structure Instantiation). This understanding, pursuing and actualizing necessarily must include interactions with other Beings, as we discover them in our experience and thus they become part of the world which we wish to contend with, in recognizing the experientiality inherent in other beings, and possibility of better and worse states of being in in their experience, we are better enticed to follow better and worse moral structures in which to interact with the world, and thus to affect others.

In describing the framework of desire, if we wish to eradicate desire this itself becomes a second level of desire, if viewed from a phenomenological lens. E.g. in experience we may find ourselves contemplating the future, and our desire to have our present be in accordance with such imaginings. This produces an unsatisfactoriness experienced in the present, the result of desire. Thus we can hypothetically choose to follow the Buddha and seek to eradicate the desire, and thus we enter into the second dimension of desire in relation to the original object of desire (the actualization of a certain perception of the future.) In reference to this object we originally desired for its actualization in the first dimension, in the second dimension we desire to not desire this actualization or perhaps we simply desire to not attain that future perception. In any case, we are left wanting. The common Buddhist retort to the “problem of desiring to not desire” is that once we attain the object of our desire the desiring itself ceases. If we desire to go to the park, once we get to the park we no longer will desire to go to the park. If we desire to no longer desire, once we no longer desire, we will no longer desire. The only recognition that such a state of non-desire exists is a faith based claim upon the supernatural claim of Buddha’s attainment to it, which, if we analyze our experience, or anyone else that has ever lived, we can surely recognize the fallibility of such a claim. While it may be useful and beneficial to hold such a faith based belief structure, that path is wholly not the topic of our inquiry, as we seek to discover means of coping with our own experience, based on a phenomenologically sound base (as we so find in our experience, which is the limit to what we have to work with).The problem is that we cannot ever reach that place of nonexistent desire, and that desire itself is essential to the structure of our biological being and constitutes the very essence of our conscious experience, whether we like it, or believe it, or realize it, or not. I understand my own belief, finding, and perspective being here interjected, and wish to state that I believe my own belief itself to be fallible, and alterable, upon further evidence, which hitherto hasn’t presented itself to me, but altogether is unimportant to our pursuit of how to cope with the situations of a world we are currently “thrown” (Hiedeggerian) into.

By adding layers of desire in our quest to eradicate desire, we unknowingly are following the desire structure inherent in us. By seeking abstinence in response to overindulgence, we are merely trading one mode of Being for another, one set of actions for another, albeit perhaps with good intentions and good results, yet we are not escaping the desire structure. This isn’t a hopeless situation we find ourselves in, it isn’t good or bad, it merely is, and recognition of it can aide us in our conscious formulations of how to navigate through it.

Better or worse solutions are discoverable in response to navigating through the strata of suffering, intentionality, and desire. These can be improved by analyzing and expounding the eightfold path, or for better or worse through any other structuring of our Being we wish to view through. All methods of dealing with our current state of Being within the present moment are predicated on our acquired wisdom. The wiser we are, the better we handle the slings and arrows of misfortune, wisdom is the essential characteristic which represents our ability to traverse the landscape of life, and the noble eightfold path, as a method, is something we can utilize in the developing and implementing of wisdom. (Wisdom Ethics)

Heideggerian Overview, Personal Interpretation, and Terminology

On By Chris Shuttleworth2 Comments
Originally Written: May 18th 2019

Heidegger set out to question what it means to “be”, what it means to be a Being, and what constitutes such a phenomenon. He took his approach phenomenologically, meaning from the approach of analyzing one’s own being, in what is commonly referred to as a subjective approach, analyzing phenomena as they appear within one’s own experience. He took this method and applied it in a broad ontological manner to the question of what is Being. Heidegger stated that we must develop a deep understanding of what it means to Be, what our Being is, prior to any objective pursuit, such as science or other intellectual activities. This phenomenological analysis, which seeks to give description and insight into the nature of our experience, and how it comes to fruition, what characterizes it, is necessary something which is presupposed in any scientific endeavor, without being explicitly stated. By continuing to ask scientific questions, in pursuing technological advancement, without clarifying the subjective mode, and the perspective and characteristics of it, we necessarily are engaging with material from a foundation that is unexplored. Heidegger sought out to explore this foundation, that which is the essential characteristics of our Being, in order to shed light upon anything which proceeds from it, which is all of our subjective experience, which, in reality, is all that truly matters to us. Heidegger discovered that our Being, the one we have access too, the one closest to us – so to say, itself is best understood through the many modes which are available to it, in general, the Being that we are, is a Being for whom his own Being is a problem for it, which is, what he termed “Dasein” or in general, the human condition, a Human Being.

The modes of being can be characterized as having distinct characteristics, arising, and being modified, by situations, environment, history, the present. In short, our experience is tempered by temporality itself, by time. Building off of Heidegger insight, Merleau-Ponty pointed out that this very being is deeply entwined with our perspective, which is primordially grasped and develops the contents of experience as an aggregation through time. The perspective which directly intuits and filters content of sensory input, through a signification structure, or a value structure, necessarily determines which information is manifest in consciousness. The development of datum in accordance with our inbuilt value structure, and modifications to the value structure, both from intuited pre-conscious perspective data collection, and conscious direction, mutually influence each other and reinforce the content which is manifest in our actions and conscious experience in the present moment. Heidegger makes reference to the nature of our being that of contained the threefold tenses of time, bundled up in the present. The present experience is tempered by historicity, the past, and is an intuition, and potentiality, of the future, both past and future, showing their modifications and effect within the manifestation of the present moment’s contents, in short, our being is modified by the unity of time, containing within it the past, present, and future.

The past isn’t following behind us, or a property making up who we were. It isn’t behind us, it is with us, it necessarily is us. This is so due to the past actively manifesting the future through our Being which is located in the present. Our past is characterized by humans thrownness, by us being here, in those times and places, in which we were thrown into, in which we existed without placing ourselves there. We relate to our present by being in a mode where we attempt to make sense of the world, where we try to feel comfortable, in satisfying desires, in short, we wish to be “at home in the world” in the present. Towards the future we are living as a projection of ourselves, we relate to the future by imagining the goals and aims wish we wish to accomplish. Now necessarily our present moment relation to each of these is contained in the present. This threefold nature of temporality is bundled in the present, and while there is a unity of the three, in the present, we, in our directedness, relate to each one differently. It is part of a humans very Being not in the conventional sense that we are using lessons learned through retrospective analysis or acting on  habits formed in the past, but it is itself part of the becoming future, it is a functional perspective of making sense out of our being in describing our history as being us as we are, and even being within the present, as it not only causally produced this moment, but continues acting within every moment of being, in an abstract sense it is moved from implicit to Being to its truthful place implicitly located within the definition that we give Being.

Our fundamental mode of being, in general, is characterized by intentionality. This intentionality implies that consciousness is always directed towards something, or with an object, an idea, a thought, a Kantian “Idea”. In other words, our being is always in relation towards a content. Our conscious gaze is directed towards something, and that intentional directedness of consciousness, and the contents it points at, necessarily is predetermined by our value structure, or what Heidegger refers to as the nature of care. That which fills out conscious experience, is the product of inherited, nurtured, developed, perspectively tempered, systematically built up, content. This content which is the production of the filtration of the perspective system, based upon the significance, or sense of which we are in relation to content, and the hierarchy of importance discerned by our embodied Being, makes up that which influences our Being. Our conscious gaze, marked by the modification of temporality, directed by intentionality towards a content, is deciphered as containing content which we care about. In other words, we only pay attention to that which has been developed, systematically, by the entirety of our Being, as something that is important, as something significant, that has a sense, in which we “care” about. Our consciousness cannot be directed upon phenomena in experience that doesn’t matter to us. If we are conscious of it, it has presented itself as something with meaning which, in the present moment, is manifesting itself in certain significance, which is intuited an ingested by the perceptive system, displayed in conscious experience, and further modified by our conceptual linguistic system to be represented symbolically using language. Granted, this description isn’t necessarily all Heidegger, there is a lot of my personal connection between different phenomenological discoveries and their entwinement into a complete picture, but the discover of intentionality, and care, are fundamental to Heidegger, and displayed in this way, gives us an abstract description which is objectively true of our subjective experience, which, in short, is what phenomenology seeks to uncover to us.

Spatiality for a being such as we are, Dasien, is experienced not in the distantially of phenomena, but rather what is most proximally subject of our conscious awareness within the present moment. What is closest is not felt or seen or experienced as what is physically closest, but as that which is most ready to consciousness, as that which is occupying our present conscious state, or has the ability to be so. In this way London might be closer to the man who is contemplating England, than the shoes on his feet, phenomenologically speaking. We see our contact lenses before objects objectively speaking, but in analyzing our being and its relation to spatiality, we always see and experience entities farther away, and feel them as closer to our experience, than the glasses which we see, and objectively are much closer. This is what Heidegger means by the concept “closeness”.

Apart from the general characteristics which make up our Being, there are different modes of being, that are distinct and contain their own significations, apart from the generalized universal attributes described above. These different mode of beings are reflective of the way in which we inhabit the word, several of which, as described by Heidegger, I will out outline.

One such mode is what Heidegger refers to as ready-to-hand, indicating that being which we embody in relation to tools, or something which becomes an extension of our self, without much thought about it, the mode of being which pertains to me typing, is that the device I am using is ready to hand for me, I am not analyzing it’s being, nor questioning its composition, I am using it as equipment for a certain end, as an extension of myself. Its meaning as ready-to-hand is intrinsic in my relation to it as it fits into the broader structure of the purpose I have for it, for which I am directed. The object that is ready-to-hand is not a content which we are subjectively conscious of, or focused upon, it is like our shoes, we do not think about them while walking, yet they are ready at hand to us in relation to the action new have in “walking”. It is the primordial sense of the term, existing prior to any theorizing, and the object is seen in its significance towards us as something to achieve a theorized end.

The theorized end, or contemplated phenomena for which the ready-to-hand is applied, towards which the gaze of consciousness is intentionally directed upon, is the present-at-hand. The being of the object is in relation to us, and our perception of it is modified by the state it is in. When the state is something to be utilized, it is present at hand to us. When the state of the object is perceived in a fashion that it itself is the object of conscious intentionality, then it becomes present-at-hand, or that which is the intentional object of phenomenological experience. The ready-to-hand object itself goes relatively unnoticed, until it breaks, or becomes un-ready-to-hand, and it is recognized from the perspective of another type of being, where it presents itself as present-at-hand. Meaning, it no longer is a working tool for an end, but it itself has been made into an end, that must be fixed to continue what is meaningful work for me (which writing happens to be). This present-at-hand device now becomes analyzed and inspected as a problem, and the mode of being which grasps and experiences such a phenomenon is another state which us humans, Dasein, encounter. The intentionality of our being, that of the which we are directed towards, becomes the content which is present-at-hand within the moment, to us, subjectively. The “object” or Kantian “idea” is that towards which we are directed at, and is denoted by the term present-at-hand.

Present-at-hand and Ready-to-hand are what objects are in relation to our conscious perception of them, and are altered as the contents of consciousness are altered. An object that is, at one subject moment, being used towards an end, if phenomenologically analyzed (retrospectively) it would be admitted as being ready-to-hand for us in that moment. If the next moment, our conscious gaze becomes directed upon the object, and thus it becomes the direct object of our intentionality, it moves from ready-to-hand to present-at-hand, for us, in that moment.

The modes of being which are possible for us are large and range in uniqueness to a scale which is hardly possible to be enumerated, at least presently, but what we can realize is that a range of experiences, of modes of being, are available to us, and they change situationally, I believe, due to determinate causes, which we can also work to uncover, as well as work to develop the characteristics which enable certain modes of being which we care more about, to be more prevalent in our lives. Say the mode of being which strives to overcome something challenging to the entity, becomes appealing to Dasien due to its rewarding nature in overcoming. One can learn the prerequisites and the modes of being which lead to such further entailed modes, and by a greater understanding and ability to recognizing circumstances and situations as having a potential value of initiating said desirable mode of being, better produce them in their own experience.

Heidegger’s had a conception of Dasein being in a natural state of “guilt”. We are guilty due to our thrown projection into our existence. We exist due to our thrownness, we are thrown into the world, into our present moment. We didn’t choose existence, choose this moment, we didn’t create ourselves, but we find ourselves here. Thus, we are indebted, naturally, to existence itself, to the universe, for an existence unasked for, undeserved, unwarranted. Someone who is in debt is naturally guilty. Thus, we are always guilty. Not only are we guilty of contained something which we did not ask for, namely, our existence, our very Being, but we are guilty in not living up to the call of our conscience in acting authentically,we are always guilty due to not being what we have the potential for being. Heidegger notes in his Being and Time that, “when the call of conscience is understood, lostness in the “they” is revealed. Resoluteness brings Dasein back to its own most potentiality for being its Self. When one has an understanding Being-towards-death – towards death as one’s own most possibility – one’s potentiality-for-Being becomes authentic and wholly transparent.” As our nature has us constantly living in front of ourselves, striving to future possibilities, we never are what we are, we always are living in and for the future, projecting ourselves into it, and we are at fault for not Being this authenticity which we should be, ourselves. Most of the time we are consumed by the they-self, a product of being part of society, of the mass, of the crowd, which shapes us. We are guilty of not being our true selves, as that which stems from the inclination of our own individualized Being, but instead, is modified in accordance with the masses, and seeks to project a false version of ourselves, and thus is inauthentic, and thus guilty of deception. This guilt, coupled with a realization of our finitude, an “expecting” or anticipation of our own annihilation, death, can produce a somewhat original conception of morality, grounded from this guilt. This is comparable to the Buddhist notion of morality being founded upon moral guilt, and moral dread. Thus, we are punished for what our conscience shows us to be bad and are forewarned and enticed not to commit it again, in dread, out of fear for the same suffering we produced before. In this way, guilt, time, conscience, death, and our specific type of Being, Dasien, all are tied together to produce morality. This springs from a resoluteness, or steadfastness, not to act contrary to our authentic selves (uninfluenced by society / norms) (which itself must be influenced and dependent upon such prior influences) but nonetheless is ourselves, not our immersion in a hive mentality, but producing activity that is in reaction to our own developed conscience. This resoluteness, or the ability to heed the call of conscious, to recognize our temporality, both in time and the eventual end of our individual time, and act in a way that accords with our own conscience, is what produces morality. This is all possible due to Dasein’s essential foundational nature as “care”, or the ability to attach importance to phenomena, in the sense of concernful solicitude – valuing / judging.

The idea of being-with-others in the Hiedeggerian sense is a distinctively different state of Being than that of Being-alone, in a sense of your state of Being when other humans or even life forms enter your conscious experience through their being environmentally close (perceived in consciousness physically) as well as mentally close (perceived in consciousness as a mental manifestation). The radical change is immediately recognizable, and I will not go into the details or characteristics of such a change, just that it is manifest in a way many people don’t naturally recognize as a distinct state of Being, which we most of the time, every day, are in. Those who say they do not like being around other people, or don’t like being around a lot of people, really mean to say, they do not like their state of Being-with which is only manifest among others. It is not the others, but it is your own state of being-with which you may find to become uncomfortable if you have aggregated a personality trait of unsociability. It is a mode of yourself which you are not content with, not the imposition of outside forces upon you. The mode of Being-with-others is modified according to the environment, our developed perceptual response, and the individuals to whom are in our company. Only those that are consciously or perceptively intuited as being in our presence are included as causal factors towards the modification of our being, those that go unperceived, or those not in our immediate vicinity, are not causally related to our mode of being-with-others. The unperceived, or unintuited physical presence of another Being, if consciously gazed upon cognitively, in thought or in recollection, modified our being additionally, but is not included in the sense of this term as Heidegger poses it.