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Great things have been said about love, but how many pages have been dedicated to reflecting on the inevitable lack of love? Phenomenology has addressed the experiences of anguish or nausea as moments of enormous existential and theoretical insight. But, do not fundamental revelations of the being of things also occur in this experience of lack of love? Heartbreak is not only expressed on a discursive level as loss as a social failure, but rather it presents a physical pain that connects us with our corporality, with our particularity of being a body. Findings from neuroscience and experimental psychology evidence that heartbreak causes a decrease in dopamine levels, a short circuit in the biochemical reward system. The chemical imbalance of heartbreak would initiate a withdrawal syndrome that, to a certain extent, explains some irrationalities.
Contrary to the instinct of survival, or pride and reason, abstinence would encourage a pursuit of contact with the loved one to recover the well-being that was previously felt. A supposed chemical imbalance would make us place the person who has failed us as the custodian of our well-being. Natural “rationality” moves us to demand relief from the person who caused the wound, who remains absent in the face of the difficulty. However, this heartbreaking pain cannot be captured solely by scientific theory, in this case. By leading us to a purely descriptive dimension of the experience of heartbreak, we can try to unravel what it reveals to us from the method of phenomenology.
Phenomenology is a philosophical tool developed by the philosopher Edmund Husserl with the purpose of achieving a pure description of the phenomena given to consciousness without the excesses of theory. Using the maxim of “to the things themselves,” phenomenology proceeds through the pure description of what is given to consciousness in an immanent manner and not from the position of an external subject that judges things from previous preconceptions as would happen in the case of scientific explanations or some philosophical theories. With this, it is intended to achieve a field of its own for philosophizing, or in the words of Husserl’s disciple Adolf Reinach, “a method of philosophizing that is demanded by the problems of philosophy.”[1] What happens if we apply this method of philosophizing to an experience like heartbreak? Can pure description, if it is possible, light on shades about an experience that is highly charged and narrated at a social level?
Sometimes it seems that love is an empty concept, something like an indiscriminate receptacle for multiple social conventions or a simple excuse for the most thoughtless and malicious acts. In Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse,[2] the philosopher and writer Roland Barthes speaks about the particularity of the language of the lover, which sometimes occurs in a rigid and stereotypical way. According to this, it is the originality of the relationship that must be conquered because most of the wounds come from the stereotype; I am forced to pretend to be in love, like everyone else: to be jealous, abandoned, frustrated, like everyone else. But when the relationship is original, the stereotype is shaken, surpassed, eliminated, and jealousy, for example, no longer has a place in this relationship without place, without locus, without “plans,” without discourse.[3]
We understand that the “hyper-theoretical” and “overcharged” treatment of love would cause many of its disagreements. Therefore, it could be argued that a phenomenological analysis, or at least a minimal one of the process, could light up this thing that sometimes shows itself as a mere feeling, but that seems to support a set of obligations and automatic action schemes. Nonetheless, do we really understand heartbreak if we simply think of it as the end or loss of love? Is heartbreak a mere reverse or an antonym of the love we once had? Perhaps with these assumptions, we are denying heartbreak its nature as a genuine experience. Moving away—even willingly—from all that stereotypical burden linked to heartbreak, what does the purely particular description of the phenomenon reveal to us?
One way to capture the singularity of the phenomenon can occur in the field of literature. For philosophers such as Sartre, the scope of phenomenological description does not have to be restricted to philosophy, but if it is attached to experience, it can occur equally in a work of fiction or literature.[4] Our proposal is to consider the value that the pure description of a complex and socially regulated experience such as heartbreak can have. To do so, we can first consider its painful character, which manifests itself in a bodily dimension. This experience, in turn, allows for shelter in a phenomenological-literary description such as the following:
It is easier to wake up when the broken heart does not yet hurt.
The agony subsides and returns with sharp pangs. The tears fall without restraint.
A rejection that is metaphysical, that denies the possibility of being in the life of another.
Pain sharpens consciousness.
Pain opens as a path to consciousness, Unamuno would say.
It is a gaze, an understanding so strong that it stings.
The pain takes root in the body and from the realization that one is not loved by someone comes the doubt of whether the love belongs to one at all.
The heart remains open, but for other reasons.
It is not open to experience, but rather it has been left open to the elements.
“There is no possible place”—says the broken heart—that abstract from the fixed point the condition of all experience. Concreteness, as in melancholy, becomes the universe.[5]
From the physical pain caused by heartbreak, we are led back to feelings of uprooting, social failure, and rejection, and to specific thought patterns. Heartbreak, in a similar way to depression, works with universals. Barthes warns about the dual discourse of loving processes: “either all or nothing,” I am loved or I am not, the (dis)loved person is not dialectical;[6] in any case, heartbreak presents itself as a crisis of meaning. If Augustine of Hippo said that “love is the weight of the soul,” we can understand that heartbreak is the weight of the soul that falls apart.[7] A common experience is this crisis, this process of estrangement from all those symbols that in our daily lives refer us to the loved person.
In heartbreak, the world is emptied of consistency and of that hallucinated plenitude characteristic of loving thinking; the world had previously been overloaded with meaning, with countless references, with impulses to be happy or “crazy projections of a full future”; now all these references go to a process of loving nihilism or into the idea that “everything was for nothing.”[8] On the positive side, however, we can note that the breaking of the love spell gives us a particular vision of things. Everything that has been lost is now revealed; loss is a particular kind of illumination. In this experience, the absence of an “object” or entity—whose contours I can now draw—is manifested. The possibility of thinking about what has happened is revealed, and an opening to thought is offered. That is a particular feature of every crisis of meaning.
[1] Reinach, A. (1986). Introduction to Phenomenology: Presentation, translation and notes by Rogelio Rovira (Vol. 33). Encuentro.
[2] Barthes, R. (2014). Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse. Siglo XXI.
[3] Barthes, R. (2014). Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse. Siglo XXI.
[4] Macías, A. (2017). The experience of nausea and the work of art as evasion: Lévinas and Sartre. Open Insight Journal of Philosophy, 8(14), 69-89.
[5] Introspective phenomenological exercise carried out by the writer in an episode of heartbreak.
[6] Barthes, R. (2014). Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse. Siglo XXI. p. 105.
[7] “My weight is my love: it carries me wherever I go” (Confessions, 13, 9, 10). Augustine of Hippo (2010). Confessions. Gredos, 639.
[8] Barthes, R. (2014). Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse. Siglo XXI, 105.
Literature
Aparicio-Marcos, A. (2020). Keys to recognize a true friendship. A reflection from the thought of Miguel de Unamuno thought. Journal of Philosophical Research and Information, 76(291 Extra), 1263-1272.
Kross, E., Berman, M., Mischel, W., Smith, E. & Wager, T. (2011). Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(15), 6270-6275.
Tamam, S. & Ahmad, A. (2017). Love as a Modulator of Pain. The Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences, 24(3), 5.
Translated by Lina Salazar
Aurora García Carreras
Aurora García Carreras is a professor and researcher in Philosophy. She is currently writing her doctoral thesis in Philosophy and Language Sciences at the Autonomous University of Madrid and her areas of interest include Metaphysics, Philosophy of Logic, History of Philosophy and Philosophy of Science.
