An attempt to make the Methodos Think Magic and Ethnos, using comparandum to go to Element (Initial preparatory work)

In order to locate the kind of thinking that is involved when one speaks of magic, we want to locate the Spielraum in thought. In a certain sense we will use the Spielraum as a comparandum. But in that sense we are moving schematically, and what is said is plainly visible in the text. But in so far as we actually think through the matter, if we lead ourselves to this as thinking, we do not say something that is strictly speaking in the text. We do not let the words become vacant signs, that are simply vague and open to being filled up with any content, it is not a matter of the arbitrary, but of the “house of Being”. The leading sentence “Seriousness imitates play.” will now be put to work as a universal. If I have a formula, a circle is a closed curved line where at every point of its surface it is equidistant from the center, I have a universal. In thinking this sentence, in what it brings forth, one prepares the way to any number of circles. They can be made or drawn or imagined, dreamed or represented by metaphors, ideogram or metonymy, &c. 

Sometimes magic means divination practices, or the work of astronomy when the exter step of meaning is added, and it becomes astrology. Magic can mean the work of the so-called alchemist, who thinks of the work of alchemy as the attempt to discover the principle of nature in the Philosopher’s Stone, or, as it were, the universal medication. Magic can name something illicit and “black”, as with witch's magic and love potions. It can name a approach to the divine, as with the gleaming light of the Kabbalists. Yet, because all these forms of magic are partially rational, a sign of this is negative, they look like false forms of modern science, they do not speak to something so wide in its presence as the Spielraum, and they do not therefore meet the criteria of the formal comparandum we seek. The Spielraum is what the serious imitates, where the seriousness is the essence of the human being. The essence of the human being, not of Da-sein, is reason. This means knowledge as gathering the efficient causes of all things, as the project that stands outside the modern science as explicit manners of methods of seeking scientific knowledge, as its grounding impetus upon which everything else depends. This is the seriousness, the natural knowledge, as the summum and the great authority. When it becomes economics, it already dissipates, when it becomes politics it already lacks power. But when it begins to lack power, it is represented as a Utilitarian project, aimed at raising the lot of the human being in every domain. 

When we think of the Spielraum as magic it is what has the authority of knowledge as natural knowledge, by the formal comparandum we represent it this way. Here we think of the Shaman, but that is only a site of the magic. The magic is what fulfills the space between the sky and the surface of all things when it is open to vouchsafe to the human beings their lives and themselves. When the magic is what the seriousness imitates, at first it might be thought as what was already, or what lurches out form before, a priori. But only in reflection does this feature suggest itself so formally. In thought, in the life of someone moved by the power of knowledge, of the essence of modern man, does the possibility of knowing come from something latent in objects, as though it was from an earlier time? Does it hatch out, now, when one has been enlightened on so many points by the historical process? Thought rightly, such knowledge does not make us think of the Owl of Hegel, or of a unseen hand that brings order to the rumble-tumble mismatch of experienced eons. The method, of Lord Bacon, of taking the things as solid basis for induction, or of Galileo, of starting first with the theory or hypothesis may, one will grant at once, come about as part of the development. But the knowledge? In it basic readiness to be found in nature? Surely not. Likewise the magic is not from before in the case of the time when it grants to human beings their essence. 

So far we are only attempting to prepare thought, almost by drawing a picture of the terrain, hoping the methodos will vouchsafe to the thinker some traction. We are preparing to bring in the thinking of Mircea Eliade, and to some extent of the concept of the ethnos as it is thought in the work of Alecsander Dugin. Dugin says the ethnos, the magical being, is the being for which there is “only nothing” outside itself. The others are those who come into the magical, they enter into the meaning of the ethnos so far as the Shaman throws the door open. In considering magic we already want to make the methodos carry us to aletheia, but when we consider magic we must not already be busied with another thinking that is not yet arrived. But it could always be that something decisive is to be found in the thinking of what is only supposed to be a bridge. Prejudice is a powerful factor in all thinking, and everything depends on bringing out the prejudice as prejudice in order to ask if it is something to continue to include and keep, or something to be left out. Prejudice is not seen chiefly in examples, or in conceptual statements, but it is what comes out in the actual thinking. It is not the most difficult thing to show, for example, formally, the fatal flaws in the scientific dream. Through analysis of the thinking of the Enlightenment, of the thoughts of David Hume for instance, or the wild abstraction of Galileo's method, or the failure of Bacon to account for transformations in common sense. But in doing so one only suggests to thinking, but does not show it what is going on with its canonical power, that of natural knowledge. How much less would one do so by looking at examples of actually-working science? It is only by thinking that enters into the authority of the essence of technicity that Da-sein first shows itself as the staunch demand of the question about what the human being is, first in Husserl and then in Heidegger. (This happens too in Nietzsche, not as the unconcealment of Da-sein, but as questioning of man's essence, but in Nietzsche technicity is suspiciously dismissed without ceremony. The "why science" is almost a prop for the myriad euphoria over the n number of "lies". So that one might wonder if it were used as a means to the greater and more of the "life-giving lie". Nietzsche accuses Heidegger of his own sin with considerable plausibility, while Heidegger thinks Nietzsche as someone who took the wrong path towards a kind of Will to Life or Historicism.) So far we are only preparing to think about magic through using our leading statement, Seriousness imitates play, as a mobile and protean universal.    

Collection of ascriptions for the establishment of the tonality of the word Imitation in our leading sentence 

 

Our understanding of our leading sentence, our leading thought, “Seriousness imitates play.”, while it has included some tones or notes worth keeping, remains confused. So far we haven't said much about what “imitates” says. We mentioned that according to the concept of Johan Huizinga, the puppy and the young animal imitates the seriousness of real hostility playfully, in its play. We considered the notion that the seriousness referred, ultimately, to death. This is not wholly clear from what Schmitt’s Concept of the Political brings to us, where in his explicating essay Strauss brings out the polemic with entertainment and diversion, Schmitt does not cite the German General who said “peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream", with the explicit sense of bringing sacrifice to the forefront, as that which bestows communal moral sense on the population. One discovers a region of thought, near the "serious", which includes also Nietzsche’s polemic with the “laisse aller”, thus his insistence on the constraining factors in life. When the concept of a sovereign, of sovereignty, speaks to the doctrine of Kings, it speaks not to life and death, but to the final right in the interpretation of the laws. And to the constraining. To the prerogative of ultimacy in the issue of something that reminds us of the Spielraum, the interpretation. The interpretation becomes the ex cathedra from which the "life-giving lie" rules the whole cosmos. The "nomos of earth" with its basic sense of commanding. Likewise we see the thought of Wagner, of the communal work of art, as representative of the first sentence of his essay called The Artwork of the Future “As Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man.”  This art or Kunst is in the place of sovereignty. As it traveled from the king to the people, now it is induced to move swiftly to the realm of Kunst, and so to soar in the Gesamnstkunst work, the communal gathering. One thusly thinks of the panhellenism which sees the moral, intelectul and bodily compulsion of the civic life of the Greeks where the artwork was a compulsory just as schooling in this age is. But Nietzsche says Wagner doesn't see it but he has no leg to stand on, because the Kunst as seriousness merely imitates the "Will to Power" as a god, less forcible than the Christian God that laid down the proper logos, but died.

It is worth the diversion we right now consider, in rallying all this material, because in doing so we remind ourselves that we too are part of the Spielraum, that there is no exemption for the one who follows the methodos, however well prepared by the experimentum. We too slip into the vulgar vagueness of thought "which is still a fact". Nietzsche says of Wagner's efforts that they played right into what he overtly purposed to escape, the entertainment of the masses. The subtlety of this lies in the fact that Utilitarianism, at its peak, is very difficult to distinguish from sacrifice to the god, conceived of as the  “Kunst” in the sentence “As Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man.” Because the highest pleasures, the delight in the wondrous, the delight only to the most cultivated and most serious, is conceived according to the Western tradition as what is furthest from sensual life, from animal life, primarily this means eating and less firmly, of sex, for sex and love are merged and bring out a subject fit for poetry, and fitness for the poem is the classical standard for the kalon or the noble, and even above the emotional and the imaginative pleasure, and perhaps above the pleasure in unselfish moral sense. 

The seriousness might speak of death, thus of all things as a "natural world" (and not as the world of "Nature's God", as the 18th-century document still thinks), but it could also describe a larger circle of ascriptions, including dedication to the god as “Kunst”. What imitates says in the thought “Seriousness imitates play.” is not a sort of mimicking, as in the example of the puppy and the imitation of hostility, nor is it the kind of thing that is supposed to be perfected in the photograph, when art as copying nature reaches the supposed perfectio of the photographic representation. Let us say something about the well-know beginnings of the problems of "nonobjective art" to make this more clear. Everyone knows that Picasso copied or “stole” the works of his fellow Cubists and of Matisse, &c. But did he imitate them? Certainly not. Because to imitate is to lack the originality of the thing that is copied. To be an imitator means to be an epigone, to backslide into degeneration. When Max Nordau speaks of degeneration, he is already thinking of the cheap existentialist, who when he sets himself up as a personal nation, which has equaled in himself the various manifestation of a people, and answered the question of how to rationalize existence, got their own manifesto raised over the earth so to speak, they actually only achieve a decedent entertainment and a caricature of human life. So degeneration means the same thing as the accusation of Nietzsche against Wagner. The reference to Nordau should make us think of the lecture Why We Remain Jews, by Leo Strauss. It links one also to the questions of Shatov in Dostoevsky's work, called in Russian Besy or Demons. If the God is dead, only a concept in the service of the Utilitarianism, the people looses its raison d'etre, or, better, its soul. It becomes a nomos, a de facto situation of calculating or political necessity, or "programmed survival" as a mere biological evolution which is a kind of buffoonery if taken as the sufficient reason for a people to be a people in the light of human, "all too human", choice.

“Imitation” now sounds out in this tonality: A deficit of Macht, a privative state of the power of the creative. The apple is the perfectio of the apple tree, when it is ripe. The former life of the apple tree has led to the production of the apple, it is the summa of the teleology. But is the photograph, in its attempt to perfect the representation of the object, a summa or highest point? Bergson strangely does not address the photograph as what is historial. The photograph, like all beings, can be looked at, lived with, experience, in the Spielraum of the movement of reason. How is it supposed to stand outside all being? Supposedly it is a slice of the “band time” that is “one movement”. When would that happen? The idea of “clock time” is the technological as the episteme, as a thinking that reflects and juxtaposes this to that. But reflection is not possible unless it would have an object, or better, a being upon which to reflect. Taken from life, one sees the photograph, from this or that angle, in this or that year, under this or that sky, beside a shooting star or under a dark cloud. But in reflection, when we abstract, the photograph is supposed to be a piece of a moment of time, taken according to an abstract notion of a single moment of time which might be universally documented. There is no “moment” (neither as "one" stretch, or as infinitely many) separate from another, except through an abstraction from the Spielraum. So, if Picasso, supposedly seeking greater freedom, moves into the nonobjective, he supposes thereby an objective representation which does not exist. If he prefers the nonobjective to the photograph it is more likely, whether he knew it explicitly is not important, because the photograph was an imitation, in the new tonality, it lacked power or originality. (This was shown to be false, de facto, in the later development of the photographic artfrom. Thus suggesting a fashionable dogmatism, and not only an artistic creativity, in the approach of non-objective art.)

Seriousness imitates play, has now the sense: Seriousness lacks the power or originality of play. A avocation, when it is a mere hobby, is not so serious as the work of someone who pursues something where real learning about the whole is possible. Yet, the ability to rank the “real learning” as “better” than the “hobby” stems itself from the “play”. Something which is everywhere commanding is more powerful than the work of the taxis or classification that tries to establish a ranking of the dignity of activities. Which means that, it is not that arbitrarily, through attribution by human beings, this or that activity rises in rank, but that essentially the ranking is in the Spielraum, and only in weaker form does the rhetoric about it follow, as the expression of a geometrical hierarchy. 

The point to be taken here is only that the imitation is weaker than what it imitates. The rest is commentary and perhaps not quite worthy of thought. But certain concerns are established, which might be worth keeping in the ongoing circle of the methodos, such as the vagueness of the seriousness in the historical rise of Utilitarianism as the explanation for the activity of human beings, when they suppress the difficulty. Because such explanation if it were taken seriously would be an idealism, a concealed view about the perfectio of nature that allows the human beings to seek pleasures. Parenthetically, the classical philosophers of history are still believed in (e.g., Vico, Hegel, in every way Marx), since through them we are supposed to have historically achieved the fulfilling of the full essence of man in the knowledge that there is no teleology. Which is itself the perfectio of the teleology actually manifested in the English thought, that thought of world which evades the confrontation with Being as Geschick and seems to sink below the level it could not keep to as shown in the work of the thinkers.        

Attempt to make the Spielraum more explicit in connection to the problem of the Destiny of Being

In the movement of the methodos we hope to deepen our thinking of what “Seriousness imitates play.” says. We continue to say more about play, and to move away from "seriousness", but we wonder if the "seriousness" is also standing before us in the notion of the Geschick or fate of Being which we shall attempt to say something about in what follows. The methodos attracted us to a notion that in what science promises, rationality as a specific interpretation of the Good, reason, or the Spielraum, that which in the sentence “Seriousness imitates play.” is called “play”, would be lost, in order to allow for pure rationality, or the vision of all things and all possibilities within the system of nature to become clear and unpolluted by what becomes the subjectivity, or the illusion of the human being with its irrationality or arbitrariness. What this means is that in a prescient imagining of the rationality, we are able to clarify to ourselves something about reason, or the human being as it has been classically understood by the Western thought or world. But at the same time, in our circle, we are able to bring another view in, from the thinking of the Japanese world, which lets us wonder if the essence of man, might be something other than reason. So that the result is that reason must be compared, if not at once to Iki, thought as the lost essence of a world, at least to magic and aletheia. Because these two are more available to the Western thinking, and to the English thinking that has now come to power everywhere. But keeping this in mind we still follow the methodos that wants to catch a more candid view of reason.

A kind of snapshot of the moment when technicity, as the possibility of the suicide of reason, will become clearer when we have compared a comment by the originator of the Quantum Theory, Heisenberg, to what we have already brought into view. We are looking at a specific text in order to increase the legibility of what Spielraum or "play" says. Heisenberg remarks: 

Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language. It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes occurring within the atoms, for, as has been remarked, it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life, and these consist only of processes involving exceedingly large numbers of atoms. Furthermore, it is very difficult to modify our language so that it will be able to describe these atomic processes, for words can only describe things of which we can form mental pictures, and this ability, too, is a result of daily experience. Fortunately, mathematics is not subject to this limitation, and it has been possible to invent a mathematical scheme — the quantum theory — which seems entirely adequate for the treatment of atomic processes; for visualisation, however, we must content ourselves with two incomplete analogies — the wave picture and the corpuscular picture.

The talk of the “limitations of our language” refers us to human beings, and not to this or that language. Parenthetically, the global English, which is spoken by the elites of every country, brings a certain concreteness to the English thinking, which is also called the Problem of a Global State when it is interpreted according to a political philosophy. The “limitations”, are commonly thought to refer to some features of the discoveries of physics, in its deepening, and becoming more fundamental. What is left unnoticed is that this same “limitation” is visible in what we came across in our last post when we mentioned the claims of David Hume. Kant tells us that if Hume is right, the concept of causality can not be what it is meant to be. Thus he allows that it can be retained if it becomes an internal feature of the transcendental philosophy, but not simply. If we think the same matter without the transcendental philosophy, we come to the word causality, not to a lack in the language, but rather to the clarity of the phenomena in the way it floats apart, allows the space of Da-sein, to let in the creativity of the various manifestation of Being. The thing causality was supposed to mean, that we have been accepting, we humans, turns out not to be what it was casually. The causality is just like the features of the fundamental science of physics, in that it too can not get used to what it is supposed to say. Nothing can say what it was supposed to anymore. That is the light of the discovery of Being. So the various manifestation does not refer to things, entities, but to the protean arrogation of Being as History of Being. 

If the Spielraum has to be seen by whoever looks, whereas before it couldn’t be, the suggestion of a ineluctable movement can't help but be noticed, though it need not be taken to be the case. The claim of the calling to Being has the look now of seeing what is there to see, for whoever thinks through what is already the case. But the sense in which it is “better” is lost, except that through a life-giving lie it be purposively accepted as a destiney. Strauss understood this tendency in Heidegger as the threat of Historicism. Where he has explicated this threat as a matter of blind acceptance of what comes. Yet, if the position of staunch acceptance of the destiny is rejected, the sight of Being is still forcible. Here is where Husserl ostensibly stands within pan-historial and versicolour phenomena as though he had relinquished all banners, and announced no secret manifesto. The position seems to be the limit state of reason, only looking. Whereas in Heidegger the position is like the full-throttle suicide as a overcoming of the human. 

Parenthetically,  if Humanism means anything like the view that pleasure and the good life should replace the subjugation of human beings to a god, the view popular among the philosophic rabble, of the English Professors, that there is a human being being “emphasised” in the text called Heidegger, loses its basis. Rather the human is supposed to be what is made impossible when the Spielraum comes into view in the light of the Rationality. The ongoing sociology, which everywhere brings forth a confused and sometimes unthought Utilitarianism as a Humanism, is the furthest thing from this thinking. It is then as though the Spielraum showed itself in its afterlife, in numerous thoughts. But here we are viewing, as we go on, mostly Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche with respect to this future of Reason which is also called the human being. Their position is marked mainly by the decisive fact that they can no longer understand what the human being is, nor explain its situation. But they begin to be taken along on the terms of someone hostage to the History of Being which in some glances is a glittering Geschick.   

To reiterate the decisive point, when the common language, in the sphere of reliance, the lower part of the Analogy of the Divided Line of Plato, which is called both pistis and described in tandem by Plato under the title αἴσθησις (‎aísthēsis), a word related to the word aesthetic, seeing or perceiving through the senses is signified, becomes like an accordion which can be opened up, to put the one hand on language [this current expression, our methodos as represented by this text, allows for greater difficulties, in the sense of the meaning of the word language, which is neither speech nor writing (considering that logos is not glossa for instance)] and the other on the senses as they see the things. If the simple word causality, which is actually the answer to the questioning, why?, is shown to be reason, and this is not really what it was said to be, but the view of what it supposedly said is no longer assured, but only assures the same life of natural tradition, as a surriety like that of the master’s footfall for the dog, who expects to soon be fed, and so salivates, this regime of coordinated reliance opens up a kettle of fish that is necessary to thought. And so what can’t be struggled out of seems to announce something that must be faced. But, it is always possible to suppress such a view, amidst the general English thought. But for whoever has seen the difficulty does it not become something that if abandoned, one would need to say, they could not keep to the high level of that which was looked at in the thinking? A removal to an innocence appears as a kind of suicide (this is, of course, augmented by the more sophisticate innocence, which exists in institutional form within a community which continues the questioning, as of particular clusters of students in elite schools of art). And then in speaking of the high level we again must speak of the “better”? For now one finds this all unanswerable.  

The Continued Thought of Play 



 

At first glance “reason” is the answer to the question: What is philosophy? If reason means making arguments, and not only describing things, then modern science is the termination of reason. Anyone who only describes things, in the way they move, doesn't use reason. They are more like a parrot. Parrots seem to speak, but they actually only make noise. If reason were to cease to exist that would be a kind of death, a removal of a part of the human being. But has that actually happened? Not at all. Up until now the modern sciences have been frustrated in their supposed ambition to become rational. Rationality would be a specific interpretation of the concept of the good, the collection of descriptions without reason would be the rational. According to David Hume one can not describe causality. One must argue for it. This, beside myriad other pollutions of pure rationality, is the decisive life of reason. Reason still continues in the End of Philosophy so called. But how is this supposed to help us when we try to hear what “Seriousness imitates play." says?

We need to know if we are making some mistake before we can answer that, by way of a sideline we continue to add to the circle of the ongoing inquiry being carried out in the last several posts.   According to one tradition, we deserve to be scolded, because we artificially work with the constituents of a so-called binary opposition. But if we are allowed to think, can we not avoid the logical difficulty, and escape this presumption of an educational admission? What attests to the link at all, in the case of an opposition? It is the principle of thought called the Law of Excluded Middle, that which affirms reciprocity of oppositions. Isn’t it a part of philosophy? But can we keep to philosophy if we want to think Being? Not at all. Yet, we are still thinking, and giving reasons, for what we take Being to say. That is quite unavoidable, or at least so far. Yet, we are not attempting to give reasons or to do philosophy, but to set up a path, that will carry us in thought. Contrary to our intention we may yet do philosophy, since we are, according to a pronouncement found in the work called Heidegger, still in the gathered End of Metaphysics. Perhaps this saying is in error? We can ask about that by looking at an oft-cited word of Hericlitus:

Ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει, ἀλλὰ σημαίνει.

The God whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks plainly nor conceals, but indicates by signs.

The phrase “indicates by signs” (the translation is indifferent, we have made no special exacting translation, we aren't explicating the line, but only using it according to what it brings to intelligibility in connection to our theme, with the sense of not saying what is arbitrary, not just anything, but we are not attempting to accurately construe the notional being of the fragment as a historical fact. Parenthetically, that is not possible, the work of classists is not what it is presented to be, but an interpretation of something ungraspable, and we presuppose its impossibility here as a fact without going into it) is supposed to be a reference, not to the pythia, or to the God Apollo, but rather to the rising possibility to gather the significance of the signs, and it is this that became the possibility of argument. The argument is not simply a saying of what is, as though now, just now we had become able to see what is now, but something more has a life in the argument. It is a beyond, a perversion. But as a perversion, is it itself the Spielraum? That which allows for the interpretation of death as the seriousness, as the thing explicated by Tolstoy as the final day of his hero? Supposedly, one lives as many, but dies as one. According to the significance produced by the look of the talk about death, assuming that what is gathered in a theme, and kept in the inclusion of that theme, tells us something that we grasp at a glance. 

Reason, logon, ratio in Latin, is classically the given specific differentia of man as man. It is identified with speach and thus with knowing. It is made distinct from the sensible through the tradition laid down by Plato, as a Gogolian overcoat. (An extrinsic comment is warranted: Whoever makes use of some limited literary allusion will be, these days, suspected of being literary. The strange imputation of the literary. Is it an evil? Subjective and aesthetic. Thought has a wider sphere, since it thinks beings in toto. It is not something essentially pretty, or like art when it loses itself in the standardless measure of the art world, it is still like a voice in the wilderness, that would only whisper to itself.) It is what tells us what man is, when we suppose that man is not only different from the other things by degree, but essentially. Socrates explicates this thesis when he says that “The life that does not demand questioning investigation, is no human life.” (The famous and beloved translation, from Plato’s Apology of Socrates, by the English Classicist Jowett reads: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”)   

“Seriousness imitates play.” remains an opaque saying, but if play is something from which the rest finds its ground, or house, that it housed within, it is strange to ask about a dyadic relation. But do we really know what that significance of the sighn “play” is simply because we have made a theme out of it? The theme itself is a part of reason, but in the whole, or, better, not in the whole, but in what Being wants to say, is there the possibility of a break where reason stands to one side, apart from the stock of all things? It’s not that we want to find a place to sit reason at the table, because reason is the Spielraum itself. But at the same time it seems to one that the seriousness is the thing that imitates and stands in opposition to this elbowroom. For the reason that what is signified seems to be the things, and not the Spielraum itself. But the Spielraum, or reason, is there along with all things, as what is fielding almost raising into the Element where they are the same. 

Said flatly, in order to escape the vagueness of an exposure to pure flight into talk, we can channel the strain of historical thought called the Fact/Value distinction. This distinction is explicated by Strauss who calls it the “sanitization of Nietzsche”. Instead of an interpretation, Simmel hands us a pair, the fact on the one side, and the value on the other. The value reminds us of the arbitrary, of reason as the Spielraum, and the fact is like all things. Yet Nietzsche never tries to think Being. Let us look at a word of Strauss’s in order to see how one might attack the position of the work with the name Heidegger, and to become its enemy. Remembering that for the most part all criticism is something less than an enemy, has no traction, and does not confront the thought of a great thinker. Strauss says:

Yet how can finiteness be seen as finiteness if it is not seen in the light of the infinité? Thèse and similar difficulties seem to hâve led Heidegger to a very thorough revision of his doctrine. One may doubt whether through that revision the fundamental relativism was overcome. I can allude hère only to one point, to Heidegger's teaching regarding historical truth. The interpreter's understanding of Relativism and the Study of Man understanding of a thinker is true if it understands his thought as he understood it. According to Heidegger this is altogether impossible; it is not even a reasonable goal of understanding Nor is it possible, in his opinion, to understand a thinker better than he understood himself; true understanding of a thinker is understanding him creatively. i.e.. understanding him differently from the way in which he understood himself. This understanding necessarily implies a criticism, a fundamental criticism of the thinker in question. According to Heidegger, all thinkers prior to him hâve been oblivious of Sein, i.e.. of the ground of grounds. This assertion implies, in fact. the claim that Heidegger understands the great thinkers of the past in the décisive respect better than they understood themselves.

We must strain to understand how Strauss thinks this “better”, in the final sentence. At first glance it can not make sense, because Heidegger makes the decisive break from transcendence in order to deny the moral conscience any umbilical access to the bestowal of the moral. Heidegger understands the moral as memory, as practical memory, phronesis (Judith Butler is an example of a contemporary proponent of such a "rather prefer[red]" "memory"). In this he stays, more or less with Nietzsche, I don’t purpose to argue that point, but only to say that Heidegger does not admit morality in the sense of the moral conscience that is granted through a relation with a Summum Bonum. The “better” might refer to the hermeneutic claim, that is mentioned, about the famous business of understanding the thinkers of the past better than they understood themselves. Yet, that is not what Strauss has in mind, rather he wants to pose an objection to the Historicist supposition, to the possibility of Historicism. Strauss grants, elsewhere, that if the objection to Historicism is a question of its privileged insight, that is adequately dismissed on the basis that there are ages when the insight is possible, but not every age. This implies neither a teleology of stages nor a End. It is the claim of the End that comes into sight here, in the “better”. We have mentioned this before, as the point where Husserl sees the “own” “naivetes” of the work that is titled Heidegger. 

But is this a naivete? It is not a nescience in the manifest sense that something that might have been cognized was not. Here we think of the “resolute steadfastness”. This is self understood as a attempt to answer a calling, it is what calls to mind the charge of the hidden sorcerer who does not reason nor give us the signification. The thought of Being, still a thought of something, is always insufficient in a way that can’t be made right in the Spielraum. This is why Nietzsche keeps struggling with Heidegger by suggesting that the inescapable difficulty to which the thinking of Being willingly brings the thinker is the blinding attempt to commit suicide within the sight of the Summum Bonum. Where the Summum Bonum is a life-giving lie. This presentation of the possibility of attacking this discovery of Being is worth keeping within our circle, but it is not decisive, and not powerful enough to put a stop to the thinking.