UNDERGRADUATE

experience of the transcendence of its thingly character
one is no longer capable (or as least easily so) of working
around that painting. 2 This example in Heidegger is
comparable with the rule that doctors are not allowed to
treat their loved ones. A doctor, to an extent, must reduce
the person they are treating down to solely a thingly being.
They are treating flesh and bone, not the patient’s Dasein.
A doctor cannot treat their loved ones because they are
not capable of experiencing solely the thingly character of
their beloved’s Dasein. They cannot work around it, much
like the person who boxes the paintings cannot work
around the painting that moves them. There then must
be something in the experience of the Dasein of one’s
beloved that thrusts one into the disclosedness of beings
as such insofar as one cannot work around the Dasein
of one’s beloved. This is how one can understand love
insofar as it is a fundamental mood through Heidegger’s
discussion of the aesthetic experience of an artwork that
moves oneself.
Let’s recall Heidegger’s exact language “Another
possibility of such revelation is concealed in our joy in the
presence of the Dasein—and not simply of the person—of
a human being whom we love” (Basic Writings 99). In the
presence of the Dasein of the person whom we love, the
beloved is no longer simply a thing, but rather something
more much like in the experience of the transcendence of
the thingly character of a piece of art that moves us. The
transformation of the beloved’s Dasein occurs in the act
of falling in love, when the equipment-like character of
the fellow human falls away, when the meaning normally
attached to fellow humans is traded for something more
than equipment. In love, the beloved’s Dasein accrues
a new meaning, the equipment like quality of Others
falls away, changed to something fundamental. In love,
the beloved’s thing-ly body can be transcended, and yet
the Dasein remains irreducibly present. The beloved is
fundamental.
To conclude, in this analysis I examined three of
Heidegger’s works: What is Metaphysics, Being and Time,
and The Origin of the Work of Art. I argued that we cannot
conceptualize the fundamental mood of love in concert
with the fundamental moods of anxiety or boredom but
we can conceptualize and fit in the fundamental mood
of love, or the experience of the beloved’s Dasein, with
Heidegger’s discussion of both the conspicuousness of
broken equipment and the transcendence of the thing-ly
character of a work of art.
2 On a personal note, as someone employed as an art handler, this is
absolutely true. One time, after two straight days of examining and
cleaning framed works of art, someone asked me which one of the pieces
I was working with was my favorite. I had to take a step back and actually
examine them as art, I had only been considering their thingly nature.
WORKS CITED
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings: From Being and Time and The Task
of Thinking. Ed. David Farrell. Krell. New York: Harper Perennial Modern
Thought, 2008. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie. Ed. Edward S.
Robinson. New
York: HarperPerennial/Modern Thought, 2008. Print.
116 CREATING KNOWLEDGE