As a generic close to a principle: What is Nihilism? 

 

In our last post we brought out something of this weatherworn question, but did not show where it brandishes itself. At first we mentioned the “unconstrained indifference” of nature. But in order see how nihilism first showed itself out of its essence in the 19th century we should mention how it first commands out of the rough facts of life. Because everything that gives us an opening to theorize, must have a place in the phenomena. Everyone has an inkling of nihilism, but no one thinks it properly. Just as everyone thinks of justice, but no one thinks justice in its essence. However unlike justice, nihilism is only recently come to raise its body amidst the histrorial world.

Someone who had the feeling that nature and trees were hiding something, a fundamental level of being, that is first given manifestation in physics, and is expressed in quantifiable systems that bridge billions of years, must have an inkling of the unconstrained indifference. But, yet, they are no nihilists. It is not as though nihilism were a matter of nature. If someone understood that there was no true or proper course in things, even though, they did not dwell on the thought, but allowed themselves to turn to the comforting notion of altruism, natural sacrifice, they would have yet not even had an inkling of nihilism through that thinking. But yet everyone knows something of nihilism! Just as we all know what the modern sciences are even if we can say little about them, even the blindest amongst us.

Nihilism at first dawns on someone who when they are distressed, notice that while they are in distress over some matter, involved in this distress, they see that it really is all about nothing. But they do not by that virtue become like the unconstrained indifference of the quantitative fact. Rather, this is something that first dawns on them, and only them, who see that thought is thinking a fact. That the fact, the rough fact, that as yet remains without explanation, the stone is warm, we do not yet know of thermodynamics, we do not even ask, why is it warm, nobody tells us even about the sun light. Does the sun light upon the stone, and so warm it? We do not know, does the heat come into that body, and excite the system? We do not ask. The rough facts as they first appear have come unbound from their hiddenness, and fall into the abyss of the thinking. Only one who begins to see this can take up or reject this abyss. Yet, everyone knows, that is, has some inkling of nihilism. They will have heard names such as Nietzsche, nihilism, what is it? Some idea, something not worth thinking about, some piece of literature. A thing that belongs in the department of literary studies, of critical theory. Nihilism? What is it, the illusion behind the Nazi hoard, the idea that some idiots thought? Nihilism.

When the inkling of the way the prowess of nihilism shines through the alleyway and the street light comes to be represented to thought, when the thought comes to be stated and conceptualized, the essence as a god begins to lead the world so far as its far-seeing look can hold the mortals. But the gods war. And each is against each one, or, at least, they do not all agree.

It is clear that the unconstrained indifference does not speak of the nature of the natural sciences, the prosthetic world gives voice to the essence of reason which demands the use of the prosthetic world. But nihilism undercuts reason, and if it thinks reason it thinks of something that is part of what it is supposed to be working on. Reason wants to be that lever that gets hold of the earth and moves it. Nihilism laughs. It laughs, but this mock can not claim victory. Nihilism is another reason, another leverage over things. Thus the abyss as a god. All this can’t easily be entered into, and when one is supposed to see the way being is thought, through another thinking that knows of the abyss and nihilism, one is very close to a war.

In Strauss, as we mentioned before, “good sense” stands over and against the “will” of this abyss, but we neglected to say that good sense is not common sense. In the same way, Heidegger too, wants to make thinking grow out of a special holding about what the inexact rough fact can say. These are attempts to distinguish the principle of reason as a place for the experimentum of being. Cf. Dostoevsky (this note refers to the whole topic)

reflection and thought on methodus contra system and sense and will

Even though in our last post we expose ourself to the criticism that we exaggerated in every direction, even granting this exaggeration must point back to something substantive where it has its proper ground from which it gets all puffed up. Bellow I will give some fragments that consist of an archipelago, almost as though one had gone after philosophy in some sense linked to the phrase “Pre-Socratics or Pre-Platonics” or “Early Greek Thinkers”, which tries to bring being into sight out of the involution of reason, which abandons itself in the thought of rendering causes for the objectified object. And there resting, as though waiting to be executed, and to sink into the fire, allows a moment when being comes visible.

Here we move on a ground that must be picked up through thinking, and holding in thought, and thinking. For example, if one says to someone who has been sick, thinking of exaggeration, “Compared to the last time I saw you you look infinitely better.” How do I know that the “better” does not name a vast gulf? The accomplished bridging of an abyss. It would be justified if someone accused us of a kind of insanity if we seriously wanted to speak of a “vast gulf”. Or, more likely, ridicule would be the natural response in the thoughtless, who are most of each society, who speak all the time of subjectivity and the ego. Or, again, we should be accused of insincerity. But where do we find the court of appeal where we can ask about the misuse of this thinking? Where is the yardstick here? When Strauss speaks of “good sense”, Nietzsche speaks of “will”. Strauss names philosophy, not naively, but in the storm of the polemic of the crisis. 

“For each man regards all times as fulfilled in his own, and cannot see his own as one of many passing waves. Just as if the world and its history had existed merely for our sakes!” 

Jacob Burckhardt

Compared to Nietzsche, Burckhardt appears a stupid animal. His culture falls into the realm of the comment of Adolf Loos, who deprecates ornamentation. Nietzsche with his unconstrained indifference to history and the human being understands nihilism and the abyss. The abyss had already been raised, what is that abyss? In order to reach the thinking that must be supposed to lie beyond Nietzsche, we are supposed to think through some of his methodus, assuming this word names a middle path in thought. A path is not a system, but only a lane in thought. Here, there, not as a highway. Many alleys. 

The unconstrained indifference is, itself, that which grounds. It grounds, it holds that there is no abyss. It plays the role of a court of appeal. It is located exactly in that German Idealism, so called, that posits representation and legislation. The sciences, everyone knows what the modern sciences are, take the thought of Kant as he handed it to them, and change nothing. They find the object as the unconstrained indifference, i.e., the objectified being. Its ground is the unconstrained indifference of causality. The objectified being, thought under the categories of space and time, soon come to be understood as unspotted causality as the mathematical corpuscular conception of nature, under the activity of the experimentum as the experiment.  

Nietzsche then thinks without the objectification of the object. Because he sees that this is an addition that posits a hypothetical imperative. This object is insufficiently unconstrained in it indifference, it is useful. The unconstrained indifference does not even grant that. If change is no longer restrained, under the demand of causal objectification, reason would cease to exist, and thinking would be thought as existential. Heidegger refers to this thought as understanding of the vague fact of existence.  

Reason and the logos have to go passed the most inexact saying that is still what we live in. But thinking does not. Presuming that change names something more simple than movement would expose us to difficulties. But one can say that change is more basic, more thought-like, than causality. Causality, in the sciences, always rests on the grounds of German Idealism, on the representation that crashes into another representation. It forces the mirror of this thought: the legislated or rendered thing, as the created thing, rather than the represented thing. It is not as though it were simple to step into the vortex of the abyss without leaping from a suitable path, because the schemea of thought can always be words as a parroting. And not a holding or confirmation of thought in its experimentum, its discovering experience which amasses along the path. 

So far, in these thoughts, we think along the paths already thought and do not bring ourselves to the point of thinking into other leaps as prepared in the exercise. But the exercise exercises without following the causal determination, and without detemintion except by the thought of the methodus. There are worthwhile thoughts in the path that were not already thought.


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methodus, middle path, short foot path

experimentum, experience, to come across what is unusual in experience, and to tell about to one self and each other

abyss: reason understood as being, reason understood as indistinguishable from being, the overcoming of the determination of nature as the eidos and the dunamis

nihilism: reason understanding the abyss as abyss, the elegant understanding of the abyss by the will

A Note on the “Self Reserved and Egotistical” 

 

Assuming what leads, we wonder what is. Whereas what is wonders to choose us.  dixi

'Sometimes I wonder which is more difficult: to instill an awareness of Politics in the Germans or to convey to Americans even the slightest inkling of what philosophy is all about.' Hannah Ardent 

According to the British attitude Heidegger is egotistical, and wonders about what things are for him. And not for the rubric, the impersonal, the work. This isn’t an attitude, but a thinking of the world. According to German thought, the work called Heidegger demands to be placed above the other texts, and is not the work of some man with a biography. This seems strange, can one really believe it? The reason is that the manifestation of reason’s experience is not some idiosyncratic matter, but all that differs in this one philosophy is the force in which the work is constituted. It was in the air anyway, but here it is caught in a way that demands we look at it and most of all, hear it. It was there, it is part of what is, it is now handed over to all in the work. But, for the British, everything has to do with the ego. Why? Because philosophy does not exist for British, only politics does. Philosophy is something that, if one hadn’t had it, one would get on with life in the same way. It is an activity for reflective people, and perhaps good for exercising the mind. To English thought, philosophy is something alien.

True enough, amongst German professors, one too, finds parochial pettiness. But here German does not name some people, but a fundamental experience of thought. One that understands what is higher as higher. In fact, the current situation we call the American thinking. The British no longer has a proper existence. The British thinking is that thinking that always wants to get on with it, and which always wants to pass over whatever is roughly working. It is an ancestral thinking, a traditional thought that looks at life without demanding much. If it sees someone who is drawn to something more, it perceives the egotist. Everything that seriously wants to learn is despised by such thinking, since such thinking is fiddling about with something that is already pleasant enough, and might be worse.

How does Heidegger appear to German thought? As something that one can see demands the right respect, because the quality of it can be seen. One need only listen to Leo Strauss speak of Heidegger, because he sees the value of the work. It is not objective, as the thing Americans like. It is not subjective, as the thing one might or might not prefer. But whoever sees the work knows what is demanded by such work. Therefor the care for the work called Heidegger, by Heidegger, is the care of what belongs to the work. And the work is in the hands of the one who might always fail to give what is proper to the work, and so this one is bound to that work. What appears as egotism is what is most unknown in our time, duty. Duty is alien and, if one thinks of it, repelent.

The Forgetting of the Alien, in the Withdrawal of the Moment of Thought    

The Prussian born, Pole, Friedrich Nietzsche. But what difference do these changes of inflection make? They bring us into a second kind of psychology. What does it actually mean that reason hears in different ways? That, as the text of Heidegger says, as part of its work, the metaphor is no longer a metaphor. But when metaphysics ends it becomes risky, and can’t hold out a railing for the consulter of dictionaries and reference books. Psychology is separated by a twig from origin. Origin is not important to philosophy, but the words are. The words are meant to speak on their own. The normative reason is that in asking about origin we disregard the thing said, and make it stand on a foundation which at any time could be snatched away. History as the thought of the normative locations and the ethnic sensibilities constitutes another air, which the thinker does not want to see, on order to raise the question of what it stands on, in other words to ask if it is a prejudice, but rather the thinker is the one who deals with what is said in the work.

What is said in the work is not a human matter in the biographical sense. Rather, even if someone hears what the logos says, when they speak it to themselves, this is only a concession to a lack of skill on the part of the listener who still interferes with their own listening by listening as someone. 

Historial phenomenology takes whatever it thinks in the experience of thought as roughly what it is, without going in for asking more about a dialectical or discursive relation to the other things. But if each word were taken up singularly nothing would happen. It rather takes in sentences in what they say, but not in relation to other works, but it wants to leap into the whole work. Into what is alien in the work.

This thinking can no longer be understood as a method that establishes something. It is not something aimed at establishing something. Its orientation is the very experience of thought that experiences the worlds. For example in what was thought in the book where Heidegger is in discussion with a Japanese and questions the concept of Iki, of elegance as a force. A vital force is a force that gives life, the animus is such a thinking of a force. But the thinking of the West scarcely knows how to think in the regions of Iki. No longer does the modern East. The East no longer exists nor do the Germans of the day of Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein. Strauss himself showed a certain lack of awareness concerning what was left uncommunicated in his fundamental stance. The more he understood himself as living outside his own world, the more he thought of seceding. This has its parallel in Heidegger, when he speaks of daring or risking becoming unintelligible. The difference lies in the fact of the awareness in Heidegger of the thought of this change in ground was more direct. It would be naive to think this as a change in generations, because the specific change in thought was a matter of thousands of years, of the collapse of the normative moral discourse, which became analytic ethics for instance.

If one thinks of the absurdity of, e.g., critical theory, as the thinking of normatives, one sees something of the vast gulf. The critical itself is what makes morals impossible. The fact that one still speaks of morals means only that something that is thought differently has the same name. Metaphysics is not metaphysics when Da-Sein is thought. Because metaphysics means the same thing as dissention or the determination of the historical and the true. When this division becomes part of the fundamental thinking of the critical metaphysics it is never again thinkable. Except for the thinkers this goes by in a impossible naivete. Everything is superficial that does not think these kinds of changes in a way that closely sees them move. For example in the book on the history of reason, about the principle of reason in the way it moves from what various circles thought of what became reason.     

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Theme: Language Speaks 

Logos is not glossa, where glossa stands in for the English word language. The “stands in” means that we suppose that glossa is thought in the same way. This is not really possible. Because the sense of life was surely different. And the thinking of anything is a part of that circle. Logos is supposed to say speaking, but so far as someone speaks in order to give manifestation to themselves they simply prattle. What does language speaks mean? Someone is standing back, in the darkness, and language speaks? What “someone”? Does language speak to “someone” in the way that one says something to someone? Not at all. It speaks, but not to someone. 

What does the knowledge, the ordinary sense, of what is strange for them mean? For “them” that language speaks is strange, or something less than strange. It is far less than strange, it is simply nothing, blather. Is the sense of language, when it speaks, at all to do with the speaking? Glossa doesn't say here, what it said then. But even the phrase “language speaks” does not say for “them” in their country, what it says for the thinkers. If this thought of the thinkers in their alien world, which is also nothing mystical or outlandish, but very ordinary, for them, something higher? Is the “for them” some kind of subjectivity or a personal issue? Certainly not. Is it a matter of saying something of one’s own rather than what the others say? Absurd. 

It is none of the things that is usually said. It is the question of the other worlds. But how do they stand there? What do they stand on, or why are they separate? On what grounds do the worlds find their separateness?

According to the work on the nature of reason: The things when they stand, stand, without reason. A body is a body, before we ask what it is. Before we ask what it is contrasted from. The body is a body without reason, and before it is explained by the asking. But is this supposed to mean that language says something prior to reason? Certainly. But on the other hand, what is reason, hadn’t it need of being spoken? This must be the case. Nothing is without reason, but yet everything has a stand in language. But language itself is a reason. Is handed over. The worlds have to rest somewhere near where this reflection is now brining us. How do the worlds move over, and become alien to each other? The other beings, who don’t think language as speaking, in their foreign world, remain concerned with their alien world. 

And yet, just as when we encounter anything, a keyboard, a stone, light in a room, human beings and animals, it is all simple. It is not as though having another language is the kind of thing, like a wall, that makes it hard to see and walk alongside everything there is. Then we think of the standing against, of the object, as it seems to have no world? How does the being unable to think the object tear us away from language? Because at once we, as someone, are brought into the concerns of pushing about this way or that. Then language is not speaking, but someone is doing something, and some thing is there, and the someone is like one of these things. 

Perhaps, by exaggerating we go astray. If we limit ourselves to saying, the concept of language, as speaking, can grow into a experience of reason, we can say more. 

A Short Word about the Logos

(and why it speaks) 

We mortals don’t have a great deal of time, but the logos has time. They are thought to give an account, but do they do that? Not at all. Giving an account means that someone says something to someone. That would be a discussion, and it would imply a fundamental diversion by which things might come to be doubted. When logos has this sense it points to the limit state of logos, in what does not address another, but is spoken by someone. That is the mathematical. When Euclid set out his elements, he starts from the start. When one starts from the start, everything is very clear in one’s mind. It is objective, because it is secured against discussion, some one says something, but not to someone else. But this logos that has time, lots of time, it is not like that. It is not spoken by someone, as if to give manifestation to themselves. Does it describe some animal, a lion? Not at all. This remains the logos that says what there is to be said, as the first inkling of the saying of what is there to be said. It is there only by this logos, and it is this logos that says it, not someone.

This is the logos that was first explicitly dealt with in Hericlitus. But was Hericilitus the first man? Certainly not. Was he the first to raise his head, to be human? Not at all. Yet, when man becomes man for the Greeks, he is indicated by the saying: man is the animal that speaks, the rational animal. Only by looking at the interior court, where one argues with oneself, as opposed to the law courts or the counsel of those who convene to make decisions about what is right, does one approach this inner tribunal. But whereas every human being knows of the tribunal of argument with oneself and with each other, not everyone knows of rationality. Rationality is the decision between principles as what is general and foundational. Hericlitus was not rational, he was still imperfect and did not know of doubt. Of opinion as fundamental opinion. He knew of opinion, but not of opinion as fundamental opinion.  

One could say, he had such fundemental opinions, or one such opinion, but they were part of him, and not somtihing else, like the eidos of the rational.

What follows from the break with the logos, and the availability of the logos as logos, and the thought of the rational, is manifest in history. How does what comes available think back into its own origin, as the “first beginning”? Such is the subject matter of thinking, where thinking is the coming to question, in thinking, the logos as what holds itself over and against what burns like wildfire across history. The logos wants to hold the causes over and outside the fire of history as the change of the particular things that themselves are thought by the logos as the particulars.

This problem raises its head at the gate of the experience of thought for the first time when Kant begins to search reason as what is all the cases of things thought not as principal or particular, not as envisioned or stated, but as the reasoning over the cases of the things that are under the thought of cause, fate, and the gods. Therefore we must begin to pay attention to this state of affairs, wholly unimagined, lurking unthought, but now spoken by the seemingly-abstruse logos. 

A short note on the British problem of language:

If there is a question over the possibility to maintain what is, because the things there is thought under subjective eyes, it is suggested that language, taught in youth, brings the subjectivity to the things, and thus the abolition of language in the universal language would bring about a fix. But the universal language could only be a enlargement of the problem. When British thinking takes these steps, it thinks according to the culmination of its belief in the objective, exasperated by its naive confusion over whether what is thought in common sense is objective, or only what is thought theoretically achieves this.  

The British problem rejects the sense of qualia, yet maintains it. It rejects what it means, but maintains it as the subjective. It brings itself to the point of stirring a cauldron of confusion whereby nothing creative can result. It fights with itself, and produces rubbish. It never takes the matter on squarely. It can not establish, but only attacks itself from within.

It attempts to think language as what separates man from the neutral. This is one way to explain the German thought of Wittgenstein, which never says that at all, but by British, how else could it be thought?