A Short, mostly superficial, Meditation on Thinking

A thinker is not Sergei Diaghilev, because a thinker must read the thought of the great thinkers, and not assign them a place in a big tent. There are the great thinkers and those who would say something about the great thinkers. While the latter can never philosophize, they can bring us to the point where we can enter into the thought of the great thinkers. To enter into the thought of the Great thinkers is to see what they see, rather than the phrase which operates in the classificatory system of the university. The phrase: speach speaks, or ‘Who tells us?: ‘It is language.’, for example, remain a kind of magic curiosity to the serious student who does not reach the point of entering the thought of the great thinker Heidegger. Likewise, whoever speaks of the phenomenology of the great thinker Husserl does not enter into this thinking by possessing the advertisement, ‘to the things themselves’ or, the absurd classificatory sticker: “the science of subjectivity”.

The Historial as Political Religion 

 

The sense that senses the philosophical is not known. The philosophically unmusical, to adapt a phrase of Max Weber, know nothing of it. When someone has a sense that something stupid has been said, or that something tasteless has happened, or that an offense to public decency has occurred, this is not one of the five senses that control observation according to the notion of sense data. Such distinctions belong to the mysterious sway of common prejudice, in so far as the fact is determined out of the holding sway of history. When the fact means the thing under the authority of the scientific expert it is defined de facto. Whatever is left over is the subjective. This distinction has no security, it only holds because it does. The ‘philosophic zombie’ is supposed to belong to the expert, and the man in the street, to defend against the expert, must appeal to the notion of competence, an extra-scientific confidence. The political nature of the British discussion of consciousness arises from this difficulty. Someone who is obviously conscious, awake, not unconscious or knocked out, still might not be conscious. This artificiality, the question, is the one who is conscious ‘there’, means the same thing as, is there something that survives the ‘philosophical zombie’ that belongs to the scientific expert, does something go beyond the objective and get a say in the evaluating of things, even without being an expert?  These problems have no philosophic content, but if we notice the way they work, we can lead ourselves to the essence of the historial, because the basis of this movement, the de facto movement, is the demand of reason to bring the things, the facts, over to this objectivity. The objectivity means, the range of possible opinions that obtains at LSE, Harvard, Yale and a few other institutions, becomes, the range of non-subjective possibility. The rest is illusion, subjectivity. The subjectivity can not defend itself infinitely under the principle of liberality established by J.S.Mill, that it doesn't matter what they say, since it has no effect. Rather, whatever goes beyond the objective normative, beyond what is rendered to science and technocracy, becomes organic illness, disease. The well-known sayings of Nietzsche have seen this, the voluntary surrender of man as man to the ‘philisophic zombie’ that must be rendered to the expert. The aristos, the best, who were supposed to be those who learned, due to the possibility of all citizens in modern times to learn, never available in the past, becomes democracy, not as universal aristocracy, as the plenum of the best, or well educated, but as those who have been sold the franchise of the range of the objectively normal.

The universities replace the ecclesiastical rule, but only the peak universities determine the possibility of the objective which emanates from their power to sell the franchise of their curriculum to all institutions. The situation is not one of exploitation, because the ocean river of the historial is not asking these beings whether or not they wish to be used as agents, it is not Faustian, it is not bargain. 

What does Thinking Aim at? 

First to see, by looking at the thought, what it means to say that language speaks. Nietzsche says, when he thinks the ‘life-giving lie’, language is the tool of the animal that can blush, ‘the clever beast that invented knowing’. He doesn't want to say that is true, but only that when one wants to be that animal one thinks oneself in charge of the language. Aristotle already knew that some language pleases, thus the tragedy is not some kind of story, but it is a kind of language. Language can bring memorably-magic thought to das Man, and to ourselves. Certain language, viewed only from outside, is more efficacious, and from within, more beguiling. Language moves inside the beings, but those who speak of ‘torturing language’ are children. And understand nothing of what is shown in Heidegger. That slogan, concerning torture, is one species of the art of sophistry, which rises up at the sight of the specious movement of the cleverness. Heidegger says, language is the house of Being. But to see this means, that we understand that we have understood something that we think through as we think it. We look at the word see, and we look at what it is supposed to see. Not the rain, not the greenery that passes over a winding path, not the concept of virtue which Socrates denies to know in the Platonic dialogue called the Meno. What is the region where language talks to us, the question is not an enigma, it wants to direct the thinker to see the language as it speaks. The thought mentioned is literal, but the literality is odd and weird to ordinary Dasein. Because we are used to looking outside for the pressure that forces us to move, for the concern that compels us because we are exposed to it. Namely to the objects, the things that either readily come to help us, as we grasp them, or oppose us as we trouble ourselves, perched amidst a difficulty, caused by the outside. This is not to determine the language as inside, unlike the things, but somehow our cognition gets run down by the demands of the language. 

In the book on the principle of reason we see the demand of reason, what it compels from thought, we don’t know what it means for reason to compel thought, but we try to see. But language, what the situation of this house of Being is, that is something that is greater, and what it actually means remains an unknown country that puzzles. The constant lack of force in thought flees in the face of the possibility to see what is yet unseen. It wants to be rescued by the scientific religion, the objectivity, which is the province of the expert or technocrat. It does not want to force thought to think, but it wants to hand over to reason and to language what these alien things demand. 

I say, in the title, above, “mostly superficial” and mean: Here we seldom direct thought with sufficient force to show the way to think through what is given in the labels and slogans. What would puzzle in the groundless movement of the grounding, of thought as thought, is constantly diverted by the sinister movement of the nonsense of the religion, that emanates not from thought but from the demands of reason as the reason that now holds sway.  The ocean river, the historial, the pan-oceanic, when it is seen, is like the unknown country that wants to hide from thought. So long as thought is under the spell of this unconscious, it is the slave of these forces.

Thought in contradistinction to reason according to Dostoevsky and Heidegger 

 

What is placed under the questioning: 

1.Thought is not reason. 

2.Philosophy is not Science.

Are these supposed to be wishes? One asks: Are these presuppositions? Are these theses? 

The presupposition unlike the wish does not claim to want the thing to be so, but it acts as though it were so. It reminds us more of the wager. But, our initial guidance, by way of clarifying several distinctions, suggests the difficult and more-or-less cavalier way of thought when it wants to be, not normative, not communicative in order to say, but when it wants to take up what is. The presupposition is organized by the influence of a comprehensive or circumlocutory look, an attempt to overcome all errors of a naive kind through seeing what is, and an invigilating which tries to bring out what is worthy by seeing it. 

The presupposition in this case. That of the historial. Presents itself as a destiny, not in the ways of thinking, in the Weltanschauung, but in Being. Strauss grants this as sufficient, i.e., as not falling prey to a simple error. 

The thesis, if we parse, if we make a determination for thought, is an orientation according to reason as rational distinction, it does not simply look at thought, it uses thought as the means for its work. The binding character of such abstractions appeal directly to Geist or the rational spirit, and not to the “simple inspiration” of psyche. Abstraction in the sense of Geist is intelligible only when thought philosophically, only when thought in the Western fashion, as over and against the prosthesis, i.e., the concretion of the individual ergon (the perfect work, i.e., and thing as common sense thinks it). Freud speaks of the prosthetic, because when he unconsciously tries to harmonious the “black tide of mud” and the concrete historial world of the individual things, he involuntarily grows along with Plato. Those who know of this must be familiar with the mention of the Republic (by Freud), where Plato assumes the search into ideology, that which is behind the appearances as psuke, is a senseless procedure leading to confusion.        

If thought were qualified by common sense it would be determined by common sense, but thought according to the phenomena would be the historial. This thought would be brought about by a “radically mysterious dispensation of fate”. If it were brought about by the nature of someone who, was not merely erudite, but gifted by nature, this “nature” would have to be reinterpreted outside the canons of Western thought or reason. We have already said more than what an unconstrained willingness to learn could make clear to itself without great preparatory work. The question in regard to what is “clear” means: Is it clearer to reach a scientific understanding, i.e., that colour is spectrum, that thought is the activity of neurons and so on, than it would be to think over what the thing is in some other way? Classically put: Is the grand view from the high place, that of the Emperor in the box overlooking the action in the theatre, on the floor and behind the proscenium, more clear than that of the small detail afforded to the private sight of the actor or common theater goer? Is the ‘ideal type’ and the law progressively clarifying and strengthening? Does it abandon common sense entirely and leap into the spectrum and the neurons? Does it find scrupulous and continuous clarity when it plunges into the exterior object, taken as reason for the folk experience, as seen by the grand synthesizing intellect? 

Kant and Hegel understand this intellect as the intensification of the abstract, as the concentrated limit state of the human ratio. If it is a limit state, standing still is the limit state of movement, it is thought logically, according to the principle of excluded middle. The implication is that mathematics, the physics of Newton, is related to the common sense. Locke says first that the solid things are primary qualities, but later he sees this was a bias of the common sense, with its congenital respect for pain. Dostoevsky’s Shatov, form the novel ‘Demons’:

“Shatov had radically changed some of his former socialistic convictions abroad and had rushed to the opposite extreme. He was one of those idealistic beings common in Russia, who are suddenly struck by some overmastering idea which seems, as it were, to crush them at once, and sometimes forever. They are never equal to coping with it, but put passionate faith in it, and their whole life passes afterwards, as it were, in the last agonies under the weight of the stone that has fallen on them and has already crushed them half to death.”

Again, later in the novel: 

“But are there really no ways of dying without pain?” 

“"Imagine"—he stopped before me—"imagine a stone as big as a large house; it’s hanging and you’re under it; if it falls on you, on your head, would it be painful?"

"A stone as big as a house? Of course it would be frightening."

"I’m not talking about fear. Would it be painful?"

"A stone as big as a mountain, weighing millions of pounds? Of course it wouldn't be painful."

"But really stand there and while it hangs you will fear very much that it will be painful. The most learned man, the greatest doctor, all, all will be very much frightened. Every one will know that it won't hurt, and every one will be afraid of the pain."”

Attempting to attach human sentiment to what happens seems a servile glance at the irrational world of the past. Even Locke, we see, must exclude, only in afterthought, his own conscience trust of his own nature, but if he thinks it as the enemy of truth, as the bringer of defect, at least some basic features of the so-called blank slate must remain? How could they?

Heidegger disentangles the teaching of the West from those of the human being or what he calls Da-sein. At the same time he understands this thinking, his own, as that history, the current worlding. When thinking is reason it is emphatically political in its activity, its chief suppressed presupposition is that the individual thing, what can not be reduced and is perfect, is the same as the particular, the part of the whole. That the concretion, is thought in the same thought as the abstraction. Leo Strauss says, in our opinion it sounds strange that Comte speaks of science as chiefly flourishing among the white race, that “our opinion”, i.e., the modern or contemporary opinion, that of circa 1960, is already too distant to accept the thinking of Comte as plainly the case. But, he says, when we look we see without any ‘racism’, that it was simply so in Comte’s time. Even more difficult is it to accept that philosophy belongs to a specific movement, of the thinking of the abstraction over and against the concrete. Strauss says “we must not be squeamish”. We must act in an Enlightened manner, and not narrowly in the manner of the newspapers, i.e., in the way that even the “meanest intellects” can see. Something more is needed.

Dostoevsky understands the thinker in the light both of the psychologist, i.e., the psychologist in the sense of whoever asks about what is behind human motivation but not evident to the positive spirit as the searcher after reasons, ultimately as the searcher according to the principle of sufficient reason. And, in the light of the emotional thinking that befalls the thinker as thinker, that shows in the “deep lying glint of the eye”, not as an idea or opinion, but as something that if it were to become an idea simpliciter, and not a felt-idea, would be at once made banal.

Heidegger shows the thinker as the one who thinks grounds simpliciter. He goes then, deeper than the principles of logic, and joins Husserl, with the logos simpliciter. The principle of identity does not control the thought that a book is. What he says is that if we ask why, as the genera out of which reason as cause and effect, and reason as the common sense or folk answer arises, the why leads only to the being of the being, the child's question about the why, insisting on more reasons ad infinitum, to the fatality in the bizarre and wild grounds of philosophy as questioner after final causes, we must stop this regression in the alleged sobriety of the being as first answer to the why. It seems that the separation of the basic cognition, form what is thought, is still active in the thinker who questions.

The thinker who questions is not the poet since the poet is supposed to not ask why, even in the sense that the thinker's why does not seek here and there for reasons, but only answers the why at once, saying, it is by way of Being, but the poet is supposed to be like the crape myrtle and the animal and the keyboard one types with, in so far as what is represented in the logos is not the product of the questioning but of the mere saying. The poet as poet merely says, but the thinker questions after the why, without going into the abstraction of the reasons.

Thought is not reason. Philosophy is not science. What needs to be thought is the sense in which thought is not reason according to the why of thought. It could be a normative distinction that is laid down in a thesis, but unsupported by the existence of beings on the earth. The approach which says “Philosophy is not science” abstracts something it calls philosophy from the reasoning that becomes cause and effect in its essence. Out of all uses of the logos, science becomes one, not because someone said it was in order to lay down a rule for thought, but because it did in history, because this became completely victorious in the being of man as man.

When the movement of thought is phenomenological in the extreme, as in Husserl, it is very like the poetic, if the poetic asks no why. The presence of the why indicates a knowing. As a ground to place the because, to hand over to the question what it wants. The thought of the questioning in Heidegger admits the hermeneutic interpretive method as a provisional activity, as skill in knowing how to deal with whatever the phenomenological seeing sees. When Dostoevsky feels the idea he too moves over the poetic in that he wants the gathered idea to move and overtake the being, under the tendency of the being to nurse the idea, and to be lived by the idea, in a kind of keeping that guards. The keeping can not be a psychology of hidden motivations, such as we see in Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, e.g., in the so-called pale criminal. It is not operative as a prosthetic apart from the human being, like something we can consult, like a table of causes for whatever happens. This too is meant in the sense that Heidegger says, if we want to know what Husserl's phenomenology is, we can not, as with Hegel, learn the matter apart from reading Husserl. Normally it is supposed to be proper to read Hegel to understand Hegel since knowledge of the primary material is by general fiat promulgated as the method of scholarship, but the thought of Hegel is conveyable by secondary sources, this is what Heidegger implies. It is essentially possible to learn many things, even philosophy, through byways. But the thinking that is at the same time, like a paideia, like something that shows one how to lead oneself in thought, according to a knowledge about how to move in thought, is not generic in principle.

By comparing this notion of thought to paideia we say that just as the Greek axiom, as finding, existentially, something worthy in thought, can be compared to the principle, as the thing of first importance for thought, and to the ground as a reason for something, the basis of a way of thinking, if we are to be enabled to think about, without striking out into the absence of thought, as a loosing of the way in the anything goes, as a kind of suicide rather like 'returning' to brute being, the being of the animal that does not question according to reason, one must have some means to lead the thinkers in the peculiar movement of thinking that is by and for the thinking in the movement of the thought through its history to its own being in the light of itself. In the Greek thinking this movement implies the archaic return to music, in the current age it implies the mathematical: hence the unbearable lightness is set off against the heaviest stone—where is it set off? In the way the wave makes its journey into the annihilation at the shore, the “where” of what is located amid the knowledge of the questioning seeks some stronger determinant for its ecology, shunting immediate glances at its predicament, seeking rest in the consolation of a congealed solid certitude. In practice, in the repetition of formulaic answers, and sneering unwillingness to face the difficulty. Abandonment to the relative becomes seeing what is in the positive phenomenon as it gains and crests and passes and breaks.  

A Superficial Consideration of the Birth of Thought and, on the other hand, the Perennial Philosophy

 

If one sees a chair, then the sense is that one has knowledge of an actual chair. The split between the knowledge and the actual is due to the possibility of mistakes. The break without parallel as we call it, the start of the problem of the field of thought as perception that changes to the problem of the subjective and then to the epistemological and then to the British notion of consciousness. Someone who has an inkling of this development might become conscious of it properly. Thus, the levity of language loves to use the same words to say different things. All the more this is true when we use technical terms. They exist to make precision in thought, but often degenerate into confusion and formula. 

The intuition of a chair, that one sees a blue chair, that has been maliciously laid in one’s way, by a malignant person, in order to make one’s way more difficult, is intuited as it is thought. In other words it is not considered as something actual and something known, but the thing is disclosed only in the narration of what is intuited. So language speaks the knowing, but the knowing is of the intuition and not of the supposed actual thing. The subsistence of the intuitional subject matter grows in the same sense that the voluntary movement of the hand is a thought and an actuality at the same time. The intuition is the intentionality when it comes into being alongside the narration. The chair intends to be an impediment, strewn along the way, bothersome to remove and set aside. 

The perennial philosophy thinks the question: What is the reality? The reality is something behind the common opinion. The opinion is not supposed to be the reality. The reality is supposed to be the nature, i.e., the subject of empirical experience, that we see a chair, i.e., a certain species of thing, is the idealist thesis. Idealism means speciesism. The belief in speciation (in the peculiarity of each thing as its kind). Whereas the rationalist materialism claims that there are no ideas or species, but rather, in reality, there is relation [cause and effect], homogenous and expressible as law of the hidden nature tout court. 

One must understand this thinking is not that of the “Two Tables”, the so called scientific and folk table. That concerns things, really viable, atoms, and so forth, which could as easily be, in reality, species or ideas. When Kant sees this dispute he is driven to push aside reality as such. He finds the claim of the thing behind the opinion unintelligible. Yet, hinc illae lacrimae? Not from here do all these tears come, but from the so-called “parasite” as one critic called the god of Kant. Kant wants to show that the opinion can come to justify itself, that it is not arbitrary. I.e., that the social ideas and morals, and prevailing laws are not arbitrary, that the are not irrational, that they are not based on human society but on this now vestigial philosophic problem of a reality. 

In this sense Heidegger finds the talk of epistemology ridiculous. Because Kant does not set the dianoetic against the intuition of the species, but he says, rather, these both are irreducible and it is unintelligible to set one off against the other. For instance in the eminent remarks about the cinnabar. In the thought that has the name Kant the problem about the philosophic reality is not a question of speciesism or materialism (‘one stuff’ism as Dennett names it), but only about the Utopia or the Real. One can see it in Marx’s adaption of Feuerbach. The Real, as material, is not materialism (of a physics), it is rather, the suspended possibility of morality, of the so-called society without contradiction. It refers to the human social conditions (as the flip-side of the material reality), not to calculation or rationality in the terms of so-called scientific facts. It thinks dreamily, for it thinks, nature loves me, the human being. It does not think, this nature is mysterious, it does not think this is neutral matter.

Since a long series of reflections lead to the prowess which is made from the paidia (how is this concept to be thought, at this point in the thinking?) of the historical development, the thinker according to historial thought is better able to see the appropriate way to handle thought in any situation. The weird and ephemeral character of the thinking can only be justified by the End of Metaphysics, because the thinking of a reality is no longer tenable. If the thinking of reality, not opinion, is not tenable, then who to establish thought outside meaningless and fruitless drifting? If one, I speak superficially, thinks over what takes place in Deleuze and Guattari, one sees a kind of explosion of the final speculation about the reality, which is supposed to coincide with a kind of physical materialism, and not the philisophic materialism. So it is as though the human idea of morality, still in Feuerbach, which is not the philisophic rationalism, becomes physics. This thinking alongside the development of the psychologizing psychoanalytic, i.e., the ideology or search for what is under the appearances, presents itself as sturdier, whereas it has no serious consciousness of its own vapid movement. Thus one says, nothing can be done, just hanging on in the social-aesthetic realm, where thought is called subjective. It is thought subjective because science is the tacit authority. So this thought is through, without power, it is as defective as the British thought of the problem of consciousness over and against all things.

Historia Disputes Modern Logistics as the Problem of Consciousness 

Thesis: Whereas primordial language is prior to the question of perception and thought so first by Husserl. Heidegger knitted the spell over the “Greek Beginning”, i.e., the “First Beginning”.

We ask about primordiality by thinking through the genesis and history of the problem of consciousness, which we presuppose to have its essence from within the ecology of the primordial. Such that the primordial is that region out of which the latter artificial difficulty is located in its peculiarity. 

History of the Western concept of consciousness:

1. Seeing and knowing
2. The individual as knower
3. Metaphysics as knower
4. Cognition as consciousness of all things
   
   

1.Someone who sees a birch in winter light as cold, slow wind breaks over them would be considerably surprised if, on another occasion, they saw a birch and found the white branches were those, on a change of look, of a quaking aspen. Socrates wonders how something that one knows can lead to a mistake (One can refer to the book “Strange Wonder” to be pointed towards the passages in Plato and Heidegger respectively that treat of this issue). This is awareness of the problem of perception -- not of, 2., this or that individual's account when compared to that of someone else. This latter problem must be distinguished from the former adequately in our thought. Socrates finds that in the sphere of reliance, of daily life, there is a break that is without parallel in human existence.

3. When this filigree or matrix reaches the Enlightenment it becomes the issue of the way anthropos in its naive analogising wants to subordinate the universe to an image found within its own body. The problem of modern epistemology, as in Kant, as the conditions of experience, as the rational conditions of a being that is rational or sapient and so has the human essence, in order to become ‘positive’ Auguste Comte attempts to bring everything into the sphere of pistis thus reinterpreted as the Galilean image of a place of pure relations observed (after his abstraction concerned with idealized unfettered motion). 4.As a political movment, driven to attack this relgious authority, that of “3.”, i.e., the overpowering authority of science as modern science, the concept of consciousness, as the cogito over and against the sum reimagined (e.g., as property of the biological in Searle), raises its head out of arguments uncompelling to thought, generated by largely British ‘thinkers’. (One should remember that Darawinianism was received at the end of the 19th century as a neutral religion (a guiding view acceptable to the society in a bound region, or the Nation). And that, likewise, earlier, Comte had understood Positivism as a religion.)

Poetry is the realm of what can not be refuted, as it speaks no thesis and posits no knowing. Thusly in the ‘first beginning’ Plato’s withering appraisal of its instrumental value as servant of truth (as what is made into the lie in the service of truth, as the demotion which destroys the essence of what it discredits) challenges the sense of the ‘same’ as the principle of identity it itself erects under the new grasp of hen or world as against all things, ta panta. Poetry understood under the growing consciousness of the ‘First Beginning’ could not be what is the ‘same’ as what came before if for not better reason than the change in its ranking or authority. This way of putting both (the Pre-Platonic and Platonic poem) shows the critique on the universal, as the identity that remains in history, is not wholly unfounded, and also it inadequately appraised the transformation by reaching back into what is before thoughtlessly, under logical attacks on logic.  

The logos as what is irrefutable, according to Husserl is the noetic or the thinking logos as over and prior to the dianoetic. Cf. Alecsander Dugin, who gives Da-Sein as a basic under a thinking through of the concept of the ethnos (loosely transcribed):

“The duality between society and nature, in the simple .. there is no such difference, ethnic living-world, Husserl , understood by living-world the process of special human thinking that had not underwent critical rational analysis, a kind of primitive thinking that wasn’t revised by scientific rationality, thinking is different than the law of Aristotle and Plato and scientific rationality, no subject and object, all the clearly defined forgotten or unknown at this level of living world,..[etc.]”  

“Lifeworld (German: Lebenswelt) may be conceived as a universe of what is self-evident or given,[1] a world that subjects may experience together.[2] For Husserl, the lifeworld is the fundament for all epistemological enquiries. The concept has its origin in biology and cultural Protestantism.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeworld

Now we consider a byway, which is worth taking seriously: Husserl's concept grows out of a new thinking of reality, which he found in Dilthey. In Dilthey the thinking is utterly free of deception. Like the earliest Chinese poems, it thinks the new possibility for existence in an unalloyed mysterious given. So there is the suggestion of the Genetic Circle, in so far as the idea does not come from anywhere but then, when it comes to power in the consciousness that gains an inkling of it, is the storm from which it itself is the calm that holds sway upon its center.

A squirrel running in the clumped leaves at the edge of scraggly branches could mistake a healthy piece of the plant for an unhealthy one. The squirrel might experience confusion and hesitate, examining, suggesting its knowledge of the awareness of relations, between its stomach and the leaves. But it never experiences thaumazein in the sense of this wonder of Socrates, the theoretical man. Most of all Heidegger has shown this profound despising of Socrates [which however admits Socrates in the historial as something great], as we have before mentioned, not for the reason of the theory, as in Nietzsche, but for the reason that Socrates never understands how to question man as man (for he asks of the essence of man, finding it in investigation of the hen or world as against all passing things), as the question of Being. Only someone who questioned the thing that can not be disproved, can come into the primordial questioning. The analysis of the squirrel here is ontic. It is not sufficient to move into the ‘captivation’, Dasein, Element thought as opened by Husserl in the way the obeisance of thought before the thing in abeyance holds back from the prethinking alive in the problem of perception and knowing. The not knowing of the thing is confusing without itself being confused. Meaning, the way towards the thing in abeyance is not confused, though it leads one into a confusion. 

Heidegger (as though) over and against Husserl 

 

Considerations on the course of future investigations are developed in the light of the question: Which thinking is more cogent, Husserl or Heidegger?

The student has an advantage over the teacher since the teacher is directed by their masterly skill par excellence, while the pupil has not yet any more than an inkling of their path, and is not wholly forced into compromises at once, more so if the student is Heidegger and the teacher the extraordinary master Husserl. We must ask, according to the essential possibilities of thought, and according to the direct path of the thought, if Heidegger can lay claim to more cogency for thought than Husserl in his fundamental directive thought, that of the End of Metaphysics. For Husserl no such end is expected, nor has it arrived, nor would it be beautiful if it did. Investigation wants to stay at the starting point, and look at what is moving under the glance of thought. But in Heidegger, it is as though those plunged into the action of thought, dealing with the activity of looking, break off and spectate, isolated from their action as thinkers, and recoil into the sphere of the interpretation or the hermeneutic peculiarity.

In Heidegger the grip on the movement of thought across the centuries is the most important exigency which everywhere quickens the pulse. If the rise of the principle of reason, out of the enigma of the unthought which is intimately operative in the non-presence of the West, of the history of metaphysics, if this is so broad and comes forth and holds sway infinitely over man as man, demanding what must be from what it renders to cognition as fundamental resource, as the cause and effect towards the perfection of fashioning or fulfilling unconstrained logistical power, if this is according to thought cogent, the spectation has grasped what the action of seeing alone, phenomenological looking, could not know. 

Thus if we awaken to the strength of the thesis, as guiding strand, we can not treat it as mere arbitrary projection. Yet, Nietzsche speaks all the time of Ariadne and the maze. As soon as one allows that the concern of Strauss can be put aside, that the primary evidence is the guidance of all research, proper to philosophy, and that Nietzsche brings a defective hearsay in his premise, i.e., that one can throw thought open to the abyss, to the constant glance into the fertility of thought, to that that is between spirit and life, namely the abyss, this masterly and commanding thinker then glances into the return to the logical grasp of the emergence of the End of Metaphysics so scornfully as to wither philosophy. Philosophy becomes thinking, it can no longer be philosophy, but thinking is completion, it finds itself, it is not arbitrary, for it is the completion of that metaphysics as the end in the “steadfast resolution” towards the leap. 

If one thinks of the discovery of, e.g., the axioms of Euclid, which the human race opened and discovered, this glittering activity, that of the inner vision over and against the brute nature, supplies the urspring of the historial movement in its root as a prime mover or God. If the God is cast down in the establishment of an ultimate refusal of gods, in the disbanding of the skeptical division between logos and physis, in the final contest, still alive amongst us, of nature naturing (natura naturans) and nature natured (natura naturata), the indication is the destiny in its ultimate movement of itself draws thought to think what is to be thought in the “end” of this metaphysics.

Some thoughts can not be solved by philosophy, since it is guided by the god or first cause of reason. And not the sight of thought simpliciter. Drawn directly and without fanciful impediments from the various schools of thought now prevalent one would bring thought to establish its path to the question of this “drawing forth” as possibility or weird fancy. Such is the thing legislated by historial thinking.

Considerations Pertaining to the Determination of The Element

We aim to distinguish the Element and show the ecology from which its peculiarity is to be located. We distinguish it from Buddhist Enlightenment, we show it in the light of the animal, thought as captivation. Its ecology is that of the worlds, the historial worlds of Da-Sein or Dasein. Dasein as an ordinary term becomes Da-Sein, the claim about the unthought region of experince, the ground between intelligibility and all beings or things. Da-Sein is thought as Element and becomes Dasein. This movement is homologous to that of captivation, the human being, and the Element.

Captivation, the poor in world, means that something is not seen as something. Traditionally this could be explicated by saying that the human is always either higher or lower than the animal, for the reason that the depths, say cannibalism, and the heights, say the thrones as sung by Hölderlin, evade and deflect captivation. The human emotions were supposed to be more diverse. Here I use another example, that of laughter and tears. Laughter breaks the concentration, we cry in so far as we can laugh, and to cry is also to loose one’s attention. The human being, also, knows periods of captivation, of nervous sleepwalking, but they are comparatively few and far between. The lack of being, say that a chair is pressing against the body, but unthought, is not the same matter as the captivation. The animal too, has the absence of their poor world.

If the example of the Bowerbird is offered we can also see it. Since the art is not there as art, but it is only for the human, that the art of the captivated bird is there as something. It is there, and not absent, but it is there in captivation. The Buddhist experience of Enlightenment absolutises the something as something. The something, is now Nirvana. The something is, just as much, in Kierkegaard, the Knight of Faith. Sometimes people, form outside, say, this state is that of the human become dialectically animal. This gives one an idea of what Heidegger means when he says Kierkegaard is ontic. Ontologically, captivation, Da-Sein, and the Element are in play. What is decisive is that experience is in play in the Buddhist Enlightenment. What is burned away is the being as being.

We see the Element, that which Heidegger wants to express in the walking about the old city, where everything is closed, in the time before the secular, on a Sunday. That text wants to show the mood of Boredom ontologically, elementally. But, unlike in the captivation, there is no captive, but an uncanny opening. The world is so uncanny in this Element that it wants to suggest Being. The opening of the Element, wants to draw towards the unthought movement of the worlds. This is why, in his book Sojourns, Heidegger wonders if he will find the Greek world in the ruins, not in the ontic, or the things, but in the opening of the Greek element.

We see the anticipation of the larger thinking through of the worlds in various reflections on the way Greek, Christian and Modern Da-Sein think concepts, such as that of the principles of logic. But the thought of Heidegger tries to raise itself to the thinking of the worlds historialy. Only if the opening of Being is thought through historialy can it be thought at all. Because without the contrast it is unthinkable.     

This account is technically inaccurate in certain points, but one is meant to see through the pedagogical shabbiness, a kind of path.  

The Element thought as a basic constituent of the Historial, and Da-Sein as Dasein

 

If philosophy and revelation are exhausted then the motivation of the choice seems desperation. And the views put forward as matters of investigation can be understood as artificial and deceptive. It is a kind of despair when the conglomerate of the former possibilities taken in massive generalities are thrown aside by the Western thought of destiny as history. But if the questions asked seriously propound sufficient answers to these and other objections a manner of investigation promotes itself to any who find in the low pursuits of life, gain, pleasure, etc., pleasantness and joy but insufficient ultimacy. Then when the childish things force it, one has to admit the possibility of various obscure passages which propound the risk obscured by Socrates, who held the path too susceptible of the invitation of the ridiculous. Such reflections abandon the highest things altogether, and so too conscience. Yet, in nobility there is a rigour which attaches itself like a kind of peculiar morality, of the hermeneutic or historial judgment of the higher and lower in regard to what is unconstrained in its power to draw forth thought. This eros of Heidegger is unmistakably accompanied by the judgment of the master of craft, of the musician in regard to the musical things, or the shoemaker. Many paths are then judged according to the daemon who guards against paths that don't lead to the condescension of the specific eros.    

Is the human the only repository of nature natured, of the things that could happen again? Such a contrast does not reach historial time. When the outer, the irreal, is called the destiny, the eternal gathers in the human soul. And beside it sits the nature that has become natured. And whether the knowledge is to be used to make more destiny, for mastery, or whether the recluse will absolutise the soul, separates Utopia from Nirvana. 

The obscurity of the concept of experience, that which knows and the outside, is sometimes grasped as the Element. The world being, i.e., consciousness without the ‘I’, is called Dasein, when it is understood to give no ground between the two. Husserl shows the movement of the body in this light, when the inner thinker is the outer action at the same time. Dilthey shows the irreducibility of the tropes of a world, a stone, a smile, hunger, wisdom, shoes, the sky, an alleyway.

The Element is not a thing, or a part, but it takes the definite article. Boredom in the example about the old Sunday wants to express the Element. The Element wants to signal Being, by drawing the thought towards Being. To think through the matter of the Element seems to have, as it were, called the thinker into being. Because when the thinker was still a philosopher, the concrete experience of the Element could not raise itself at the gate of thought. The philosopher has the identity of the knower and the thing known firmly in mind, and can not shake it off. The philosopher is not drawn to ask “Why does Being happen?”. The philosopher is the knower who wants knowledge to act on destiny. 

Throughout the history of philosophy nobody despised Socrates so seriously as Heidegger. The “embarrassment” of dialectic, the “philosophical embarrassment” as Heidegger called it, was not due to the Nietzschean thesis, though this too has a role to play for Heidegger, about the theoretical man. But it is because every reflection in Socrates is about the destiny of man as man. But it never can dislodge man, anthropos is never cast into its own abyss. Everything in Socratic discussion moves away from the eros of Heidegger. This eros is neither Freudian nor that of Socrates and Plato. But what role does it play in the motivation of the leading question “Why does Being happen?”. We might suspect that it is homologous or at least that it belongs with this question. Is this eros, that which condescends to call forth, the same as this Being? This seems untenable, as it would promote the notion of an Ontotheology, of a first cause. This eros can not be thought under that approach, but it remains a difficulty of the enigma of historial thinking.

Generally speaking there is an arbitrariness in Heidegger’s insistence on the “point” of it all, i.e., the eros that gives the direction of the drawing forth, as if in the direction of the crown of a tree to the sun, and not in some other direction. Husserl’s agnosticism seems sounder, but this seeming is in the light or guidance of philosophy—recalling knowing from the regions of thought. It’s utterly obscure what the purpose of such a work is, if it can move as suggested not by what is prior or by the eros, the eros would have to fall aside as an ontotheology.