A Short Reflection Pertaining to the Question of Whether Strauss Philosophized

At this point I would like to bring forward some clumsy remarks about a specific problem which Strauss often mentioned which has ceased to make sense to me. And so has become a bother, and a fishwife of thought, and a predicament for thinkers with the sensitivity to think it. I do not know whether it ceases to make sense because it was always wrongly thought, or because we are moving further from the epoch in which Strauss philosophized. One can not necessarily take Strauss at his word when he announces himself as a Historian of philosophy, chiefly working out the details of the disagreements of the Great philosophers. Viewed not as reactionary, but as a thought that faced the movement of the epochs, Strauss must be understood as philosophizing. The fact that the nature of seeking principles through reasoned discussion becomes enigmatic, which is to say one no longer quite knows what such a work is about, does not set aside the possibility of the work. Which is to say, one can accept the primacy of being, as the essence of man, which comes in and replaces the view of Reason as the essence, and yet continue to Reason, though Reason has now become enigmatic. In a certain sense, the pursuit of Reason becomes greater, at the moment it can no longer exist.  

In his works and lectures Strauss often fell to the consideration of the matter of this excerption: 

“I dimly remember the time when people argued as follows: to deny the possibility of science or rational value judgments means to admit that all values are of equal rank; and this means that respect for all values, universal tolerance, is the dictate of scientific reason. But this time has gone.

Today we hear that no conclusion whatever can be drawn from the equality of ail values; that science does not legitimate nor indeed forbid that we should draw rational conclusions from scientific findings.”

This point, so to speak, is on the cusp of Strauss’s concerns. It is beyond the chief part of his work. Since his work was concerned precisely with ranking (human) facts. He devoted all his powers to the task of rescuing the highest things, at least in the possibility of thinking them and distinguishing them from the trivial things. There is no high or low so far as there is no ranking. 

On the crude view in thought what happens is that certain matters simply appear or disappear. They seem important, or they cease to seem important. But Strauss always distinguished between the practical situation, the ideas that controlled the field for the day, and the theoretical situation, the deeper consideration of the most sober minds. It becomes difficult to see how the phrase “the equality of all value”, which was still accepted by Weber, makes any sense. Because equality implies a measure taking, a reckoning. If there were no possibility of measuring the height of two human beings, in what sense could they be said to be of equal height? The question itself makes no sense because one who had no possibility to measure height, in any way, would not even know of the feature of beings called height. Something like this darts into each thought in this epoch. One speaks of values, but one means “ideology” or some such thing. But, spoken more seriously, didn’t one mean to say, simply nothing? Value is a nonce word, concealing the difficulty, that there is nothing. 

In other words the ability to distinguish between unconstitutional states, and despotic or tyrannical states, can only make sense if there is a will that can be controlled by reason--if there is a will, and reason. On the other hand, one is compelled to go on calling that thing a constitution, and distinguishing between a state run not by some human beings personal discretion, and a state run sheerly by discretion of some untrammeled leader. There is a hard factual distinction, a matter of empirical record, but it flies away in its content. Everything empirical begins to fly in this epoch, but so does everything that has to do with reason. For now I can not ponder this matter more, but leave it to others to show what errors are made in what is said here. 

It is really of no help that for those who know nothing of thought, with no sense of these matters, it is possible to go on as though nothing had happened. And make bemused remarks about those usless and unseriousness fellows who pretend to by nihilists, or to uphold nihilism. Surely, anyone who speaks so has no sense of the air in which they move. Nihilism is a fact, and not mainly an argument made in remote and private chambers with low voices, or by boasters and fools in the public square. Philosophy has perished, to be replaced by analysis and intellectual biography, sham arts from a stringent view, mere collections of unessential matters for the generous observer. But since dust is holy, can what is dust come into a new exercise?

Determination and resolution of the inquiry: Is the god motion?

Paragraph 12

“Understanding of being means that according to their essential nature humans stand [steht] in the openness of the the projection of the being and suffer [aussteht] this understanding [Verstehen] so understood. When understanding of being is experienced in this way, the representation of humans as subjects is, to speak in line with Hegel, put aside. According to their essential nature, humans are thinking beings only insofar as they stand in a clearing and lighting of being. For, in our history of thinking this has meant to respond to the bidding of being, and on the basis of this response to have a dialogue about beings in their being. In the history of Western thinking this “having a dialogue” (διαλέγεσθαι) develops into dialectics.”

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Philosophy must always commence uncabined by ordinary considerations. Therefore what is lambent trickles out over everything, solitary, quiet, so full and in all haziness concerning its definition. There are no leading questions to agitate thought in the Ultimate, what is sheltering there has passed beyond the chamber of the god. Heraclitus saw both fire and lightening. The “essential nature” of man is fire and lightning. Ratio itself proves to be fire, and lightning. When one thinks of reason, someone, instead of uncontrollably willing, gives a reason, I write this now in order to shelter what is in openness, but the reason is simply what one calls reason, and it ceases to be that reason that makes the will something other than despotic. 

Why is the god motion? Does motion remain motion? What does one call motion? Reason is a knowing, it is language. No one knows where it is, or has its place, it is there and not there. Now we should go back and look at an account of what is more plain. But, on the other hand, such an account will be senseless to someone reading it in thirty thousand years. Just as everyone knows what it means to walk down a sidewalk, no one knows what it means to walk alongside a fire pit in the area that is called China, one million years ago, to be a hominid of some other kind. This is not so clear because it brings the biological, and the physical, over and against the mere reason, the what is there, the look of the essence. The ratio, of course, is also the giving reasons, that becomes the manner of showing what has become the condition for the possibility as the necessary manner of contingent being. If there were nothing necessary, amidst the contingency, possibilities would never be founded in the conditions for the possibility. If possibilities had not become natured, and begun to stand in the possibility of a Sky beyond what natures, no one should have thought to seek what is Free. 

There is thus, what is Free. What is possible. What is necessary, and what is contingent. Everyone knows of all these beings of a philosophy. If language, as Reason, evolves, as though from one language to another, English to Global English, has ratio itself Evolved? What does evolution mean biologically? Does it mean that genetic mutations alter the passing contingency, or does it mean that behavior is passed through the small materials, proteins, and that they command the new organism, on the basis of the way they have been altered by the movements of the being? Or does it rather mean that a young animal imitates the motions of the group, and receives to itself what stands in the clearing according to the movement? But only from what is received is the rest read out, so to say. 

According to what is said above, the dialog comes in after the bidding to respond has already commenced. Yet, this means: the dialogue is the “Zwiesel”, the forked growth. Or, it is one branch of that growth. It is the something of the philosophical work of Socratic or Platonic dialectic, the genus. But is it the fork, or is it part of the fork, this seems to say that the something and the something don’t come forth in the bidding. The bidding is still ratio, since it is the understanding, but it is not ratio as the account about something under the amassing guidance of the dialogue about being. 

In passing one can say that when in Heidegger we get a formulation, like in one of the poems, about what Being is, “without man”, it means that pushing back from the fork, we come to the lightening and the fire, to the flash of the knowing of what stands beyond in what holds by one, that they are the same. What is asked about is to Hericlitus, what Hericlitus is to Socrates and Plato. But, in the work called Heidegger the first one to “raise their head” is not Heraclitus, but Anximander. It must be that what comes from behind one, like an incubus, and wants to rest in the presence, is yet not disturbed in Anaximander. The movement of the god has not yet commenced in Anaximander, the lightening not yet been hurled. The fire not yet consumed and let its smoke touch the glass with scumbled deflection, so that what hides behind one is not yet coming to rest before the newly raised eyes. This is not a myth, since it concerns us now, in our consideration of time.   

Some deficient or expressionistic propaedeutic Remarks on thinking what a God is, according to the leading phrase: “Only a God can save us”

 

“Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten.”

The appetites and the choice-worthy aims, if they belong to the same agency, offer an enigmatic difficulty to thought. Sometimes they are conflictual, this can be called an addiction, a pull in two directions by one entity. The ancient view implies that the rational faculty can teach the body to come into harmony with the proper principle of movement, so that the body on earth becomes like the stars above. The gods move according to the stars above, and sometimes they exercise the bodies of those with deficient principles of motion, absorbing their very being, becoming them, stretching into the appearance of the Element. The destruction of the literal sky, and stars, when telescopes come in, and the other things, is not the destruction of what is thought through them, as though by a metaphor, the way of thinking according to the stars and the Sky has a continued meaning to the human being as an aid to its pondering on what is. 

The Merkmale, attributes or marks of Iki are attributed by Count Kuki to plant life, as well as humans. There is a parallel with the Greek Dike, in so far as in accord with a general principle, a plant is Just in so far as it reaches its perfectio. Perhaps the closest word in present English to perfectio is completion. Since completion is a very ordinary word; the completion of a process is Just. Someone builds a house, and they finish the work. Or, a bear grows to maturity and the peak of its strength. The second example strains the word completion, in the present language. Possibly there is no word that so cannily speaks of artificiality, and growth, in the present language. Spinoza, in his remarks on Human Bondage, draws a distinction between cause and design. One can say that purpose, in biological teleology, that a wing has a function, serves a purpose, does not say that an awareness accompanies the matter. Spinoza does not say, we do not make the decisions in the cases of the designed things. But if making a decision means that one resolves to do a thing, picturing its perfectio, and then does it, it only means that the purpose is somehow announced. But it is no different than the blind instinct in its origin. It differs because it might be rejected, contravened. The instinct and the agreement with the instinct, as though a consent, posit a ground and a reason. The absurdity of an order given to oneself, the commander, and obeyed by oneself, the subsidiary agent, in a certain sense, corresponds to Nietzsche's reflections on the Dionysian and the Apollonian. 

How can someone, who is walking up a step path, where the body demands much, doesn't wish to go on and registers this attitude through pain, contravene the body, as though the body were something else, and not the same as the one who began to command in another way? The body obeyed! I forced it! In fact this is totally natural to our thinking. Whereas what Nietzsche says is strange, that “I” command and “he” obeys, makes us think that the self is in question. The body can be treated as a prosthetic, much like any thing. The split can be thought as of the presence of the willer, and the being-at-hand of the prosthesis. The presence of the body, however, is not the willer. The willer is neither the presence, as the known thing, or the body, as the prosthetic. The willer is the principle of motion, the Aristotelian power or virtus. In this sense the distinction between purpose and  design is taken away. Even a molecule has a form, or principle of motion. The right, or Just way of moving, of guiding, has nothing to do with the distinctions between stone, living thing, animal or designing creature. The principle of movement, in its specificity is the kind of subject matter the Greeks called a god. For example, the deamon of Socrates, which helped him to avoid the wrong path or evil.  

If someone follows a rule, or takes an oath, or sets a goal, they speak to something more and beyond, under which they hope to lever themselves, and propel their will towards an end. In contradistinction to this when the will is willed by the principle of motion it is noticed as something that can be contravened by the Apollonian. Steadfast resolution is supposed to gather without involving anything far off. This discussion leads us to a general orientation concerning the subject matter of Aristotle’s work of the ergon, and dunamis. In a certain sense the ergon is a god. It is a kind of principle of movement, but not in the sense of Galileo's notion of entropy, which itself rests on a thought-experiment which posits a false space, where a thing can move in a pure way. Movement is never movement as such, but always a kind of movement. Presence is a specific kind of movement that makes the world seeable according to the god. Likewise what is opened in phusis, as things thrown into the sides of things, is according to the god. The Element of motion is more like time than is anything else, if time is understood as something that is not obvious so long as the character of presence, and the character of the-ready-to-hand are chiefly holding sway.

Some musing over the question: What is Being and Time?

The Text on Leibnitz' discovery of Reason, as the combination of phusis and ousia, recommences with these words pertaining to what we are calling the German thought, by which we mean the period roughly from Brentano to Strauss, and should be understood as an epoch distinguished from the Kantian and the World-British epochs:

In the still cruder and more awkward language of the treatise Being and Time (1927) this means that the basic trait of Dasein, which is human being, is determined by the understanding of being. Here understanding of being never means that humans as subjects possess a subjective representation and that being is a mere representation. Nicolai Hartmann and many contemporaries understood, in their own way, the point of departure of Being and Time in this sense.

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Basically, the separation between the empiric and the scientist, someone who sees a chair, and someone who makes laws about homogeneous matter which has no essence, i.e., which is not a chair, is a double movement which brings the objective and subjective to its sharpest opposition without destroying the one or the other. At this point Being and Time comes in to take up the position without the ‘legal’ split. Kant speaks of ‘legislating’ to oneself the laws of nature. Nature is understood by the science of the essential one, of the human being as the source of freedom, or spontaneity of will. This freedom, however, in Kant, becomes nugatory since it is supposed to be identical to God as the source of the Moral Law. Thus it is free only in its necessity to be what it is, essentially, i.e., the Good. All the essentialness is for the being of the human being, and nature is all the un-essentialness. Man becomes “Nature’s God” (which is still the concealed view behind scientism, and such movements as ‘The Brights’). Following Leibniz Heidegger takes the view, not of the essential or the anti-essential, but of what understands both and is prior to the split. 

Olive trees and Redwoods are dissimilar in appearance, the former has a pale blue leaf which is rather rounded, and it sits close to the ground and clumps itself up into a canopy. According to the Greek thinking, which one has inherited, this is the given fact of the data. It is what phusis brings forth, to the eyes of those beings who have raised their heads to see what is present in their world. The Redwood, unlike the olive tree, has a furry bark and green leaves made of small fingers or bristles. They are very dissimilar to the eye, especially since the redwood towers, whilst the olive sticks close to the earth. Nous is conceived as the ability to bring, in a concrete way, real things before ourselves so that they are there, or present, as the same thing. Nous is not a matter of convention, or subjective. But, in Kant nous becomes the legislator of the looks of things. Due to the topsy turvy happenings of modernity, where subjectivity, as substance, changes place with the object, as what appears to us, and becomes only what is made by us, wherase the appearance becomes the substance but is renamed the object. Amidst this confusing congeries of concomitant madness, there came this understanding to its upmost telos. It is the Fate that throughout the Western Historial World, ascends to the ‘legislation’ of laws, through the presentation, Vorstellung, as what conforms to the empiric and the scientific. It “conforms” because it becomes a rule or law that can be applied, a general science, that is applicable in empiric detail. So that science ceases to concern, and come from man, in the science of raising opinion to Truth, and becomes wholly outside man in the objectified object which leaves over the essential being of man as the spontaneity of the subject in its authenticity or autonomy. The fact of the concrete thinking of the general idea or of the look of a specific thing, as being indifferently, to use the medieval term for the presence of the universal, in this one and that one still obtains to experience of daily life is passed off as an illusion or state of the folk mind by the devotees of the objectified object. Whilst, contrary to this, the civil law tradition, the Roman Law, still struggling by statute to say out of the essence of the things what the meaning in the highest sense, of human life, is.

Just as the Roman law can go on making forever adjustments to its discovery of principles adequate to the law, the science of the objectified object can forever discover new laws of nature. For no Truth is ever arrived at, neither in the one nor the other. When it was shown that the air could be removed to form a vacuum, gravity as understood by Aristotle, gave way to new laws. But remained essentially correct. Any additional discovery will leave the current laws unseated and no longer a limit on what is physically the case. Reasoning too undergoes its rough vicissitudes, such that the principle of one epoch, can not hold in another. Since even what is dearest to Law would be overthrown if Law itself were obviated or cast into opprobrious scorn. Both Theoria and theory as what can be applied point to different notions of Truth. Truth must have a ground in a split between what is temporizing, and what always is. What is most true in Being and Time is the transcendental, as the “understanding of being”. This understanding does not ascend towards anything but the infinite, under the thinking called Heidegger. It ascends towards the infinite, but can never arrive, or, as Cassier put it “break the sphere”. This thinking is then in a chamber where it can concentrate its efforts on a pursuit which is not like the older pursuits of theoria and theory as what can be applied. From within the lebens-raum, the lived-space, as what is a world spielraum or gestalt formation. The subject matter of the world is the same as what is understood as being, by Reason. But this Reason is no longer a grund for the theoria, or a ratio for the applied science. Those become the seriousness of going forever into the infinite, but never sensing the play of the ground from which those pursuits stem. 

What is given itself, as what comes of itself, does not come to some being, but is already as much in that being. When something stands before one it is already understood as what it is, but only in the vague sense of being what it looks like, and not an illusion, a dream, or a reflection in a mirror. Language is what speaks of its own, but not to one, but in one as one. Whatever comes forward to the understanding, a doorway that is left open, is cognized according to this speaking forth of what is to be reckoned with. Presence in the state of captivation comes into being when spoken in the state understanding. This is all meant to be prior to reflection, what Heisenberg says elucidates what “reflection” means:

In the more precise terms of our own day, we might even say that the word “rest” is defined by the statement that the earth is at rest, and that we call every body at rest that no longer moves relative to the earth. If the word “rest” is understood in this fashion—and it generally is so understood—then Ptolemy was right and Copernicus was wrong. Only if we reflect upon the concepts of “motion” and “rest,” and realize that motion implies a statement about the relationship between at least two bodies, can we reverse the relationship, making the sun the still center of the planetary system, and thereby obtaining a far simpler and more unified picture of the solar system, whose explanatory power was later fully recognized by Newton.  

The archaic language that speaks itself stretches out of shape as it becomes intellectualized in the reflection. Archaic Language should be able to speak the Element, in its presence. Then presence would not mean ousia, as the ontic, over and against physis as the wild and uncultivated. It would be World itself as a basic spielraum. World is more basic than any category, since it is like the container or receptacle concept in Plato, a Elemental consideration. It would be wrong not to think world as concrete, since the gestalt is the same as wherever one is now. In a room of  a particular building, or on a lawn beside trees of various dull and withered colours suffering from drought. One understands all this, without ascending to theoria or theory as what can be applied. The order is not comprehended, but one stands exposed to it not wholly without resource, and manages to spirit away a bit of elbow room from the forces which hang over one, impendingly. 


Q: Is ideology, the arbitrary sortie into reasoned instructions overcome even in phenomenology? Even in Existential Questioning? In Phenomenology there must be a series of instructions about how to get to an arena where arguments are obviated by the pure exposition of observations. Much is presupposed, above all, the way in which it all remains the same, and so comparable as a science. In Existential Questioning, too, there is the presupposition of the Historial Thesis, of the existence of the Historial. The evolution of what can not be grasped, but is to be sensed, of what is forever an anomaly, offers the path to a new science, more basic, but does it escape the Thought of Nietzsche?

Comments Interregnum, (or reflections along the way) 

 

The joke that is found in Moliere, if we give it in translation, updating it, ceases to bring us amusement. It would read something like: How does that sleeping pill work? It has an active ingredient. Everyone knows, at least vaguely, what an “active ingredient” says. Though, in itself, it is empty to speak of one, tautology is all that results. It points to some chemical substance. This manner of study, however, was not known in Moliere’s time. The activity of the ingredient in Aristotelian terms is the ‘virtu’ or ‘power’, it is the form of the matter called, in this case, diphenhydramine, a simple molecular compound. It is the specific and unique motion of that compound. This historiological transformation, in a certain sense, explicates the work of Spinoza. For, the reliability of causal explanations dispels meaning. Which is to say that in Spinoza, the work called ethics, is no matter of exhortation to right behavior. Rather it is a matter of demonstration of causal structures. A doctor shows that the lungs turns black and rot when one smokes, rather than, a morning prayer that inculcates the abstinence from the vices. After this there is no essentially compelling sense to any dogma. 

This is the sense in which being “withdraws”. In its withdrawal it nonetheless comes to no solicitous resolution or perfectio. A pomegranate tree moves towards the perfectio, the ripeness of the savoury seeds of the fruit. Each stage in its growth is towards the telos. Thus its nature is discovered or invented, and its essence brought to thought. This is torn apart, by the presence of the causal explanation for growth. The whole world, the natural order or cosmos, if it is thought to have a telos, tends towards the Utopia, or Salvation under the medieval thinking, and the Enlightened principle of labour. To be sure, in Marx, labour never means physics. And it thus, retains its dogmatic possibility, in the anomaly of its priests' correct consciousness as set off against the base masses with their religious atheism, always tied to the wicked substance of Capital and the Devil’s lucre, the surplus. Yet, in the withdrawal proper nothing like that that the messianic Truths hold comes forth at all. The Truth turns out to be terrible. The creativity is the renaissance of the telos as the relativistic God, i.e., it is what Nietzsche finds in the overthrow of the causality. It is a unique opening, and it is a rebirth. It is an end to what was, and it is the same as what is more of the same. Because the causality is a tide that comes forth, destroys, e.g., the notion of witches, in the light of the understanding of chemical efficacy, but rolls back from its own annihilation in the sand of the shore, back into the great sea which has become the abyss of the will. In Schopenhauer the will speaks to itself, through language, trying to show that it has built a hell. In Nietzsche, contrary to this, or, at least something closer to contrariness is there, the will stretches back into the will to will. 

Angelus Silesius ended his life as a “fiend”. He converted to Catholicism and wrote anti-Protestant tracts in a cell. So writes Carl Jung. For a moment he discovered the “because”, the frontier of poiesis, which is what comes to, and stands in man, when he moves beyond the Protestant freedoms, the irrationality. Marxist thought can never abandon its sentimental religion, its dogma, its conservatism, its Catholicity. This is the safe house of all fiends. The ritual signs and the ordo with its deathless goals. The “because” was more than Silesius could withstand, when he glimpsed it, he was suddenly lightened, and everything unconformable in his being drew forth into the concept, into the openest concept. Spoken from a million miles above, formalistically, a absorption occurs where 1. The captivation of the animal, 2. The presencing of the world with the human, comes to 3. Poiesis, where the concept is standing in being and as what is soaked in the richest illumination. 

One should sense, which means something much like what Dostoevsky struck upon in his notion of the felt thought, the world-laden texture of the human being as beside the captivation and the concept as letting be alone. The being of being here shows the Fate in its manifestations, and thus points to being with no rubric, i.e., that which is represented as Being. In Poieses, that is, "the because", we let be: 

Nothing is without reason. Given in the first voice: Which is a rather British tonality, a world-British thinking: Whenever something is there, one can find a reason for it. One's shoes are missing from the door-well, an empty spot is there, and we can go on to search out the reason. In the secound voice: that which was Heidegger's distinct and high discovery: Everything is, so far as it has a reason. What it is to be for Da-sein, is to have a reason. But, in the "because" one "lets be". 

There is another tonality which is not explicated in the Leibniz text, but is, nonetheless implied: THE Nothing is Without reason. Nothing, nicht nichtet, is without reason. Nothing, as nothing, is not a condition for the possibility. In fact, in Kant it is the thing by itself (in itself). This means that in the play of what withdraws, what comes forth in the seriousness has Reason. In what withdraws, according to language itself, according to the work of Hussrel, in the text most praised by Heidegger, the way language speaks world itself brings the nothing to the threshold as inability to hold to what is speaking in and to the essence of world as truth.

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These passages in the so-called Monadology, should be given in French:

29. But it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from mere animals and gives us reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God. And it is this in us that is called the rational soul or mind.

30. It is also through the knowledge of necessary truths and their abstractions that we rise to reflective acts, which make us think of what is called I, and consider that this or that is within us: and thus, thinking of ourselves, we think of being, of substance, of the simple and the composite, of the immaterial, and of God himself, conceiving that what is limited in us is in God without limits. And these reflective acts furnish the chief objects of our reasonings.

31. Our reasonings are founded on two great principles: that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge that which involves a contradiction false, and that which is opposed or contradictory to the false true.

32. And that of sufficient reason, in virtue of which we hold that there can be no real or existing fact, no true statement, unless there is a sufficient reason, why it should be so and not otherwise, although these reasons usually cannot be known by us.

Heidegger even fell to admiring Matisse because these lines were written in French.

Comment Concerning the Status of Theoria in Heidegger as Concrete Sensing of the Speculative

The work on Leibniz’ uncovery of the Principle of Reason continues:

We would be thinking neither highly nor concretely enough if we were to understand these words as a pretension of the thinking person vis-a-vis the absolute. It is precisely the opposite: the preparedness to respond to the claim as that which being qua the absolute concept proffers to thinking and which in a decisive way molds in advance the epoch of the completion of Western metaphysics. Since the being of beings makes itself absolutely known to metaphysical-ontological thinking in the shape of the absolute concept, the most radical withdrawal conceals itself in this proffering of being. It will become clear how this is pertinent when, in what follows, we make a concluding characterization of an epoch of the history of being, the epoch of Kantian philosophy. 

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In a certain sense the absolute is identical to the rational. In the political sense rationality means that reasons can be given in such a way as to give an orientation. An argument can be made in such a way as to demonstrate, not the right way to live, but rather what the world wants of man as man. How it claims the human being from the essence of that being. If one thinks of the motto of the Royal Society, Nullius in verba, one has a statement of the repudiation of the logos. Science can no longer be a matter of the logos. This means nothing other than that theoria becomes the general rule which can be applied, rather than the orientation which itself is insight into what the world wants of man as man. In this sense we must inquire how it stands with the Geschick, specificly, when illumined by Ratio. Ratio is the absolute, and, therefore “the most radical withdrawal“. 

The repudiation of the logos means nothing other than the repudiation of thought, as Denken. Denken, in Kant, is transcendental. It is erkennen, or cognition, in so far as cognition is thought as a kind of ratio, i.e., a kind of cause, specificly, the condition of the possibility of experience. Nullius in verba, under the spell of Newton (as lived by Kant, and the so-called Kantian epoch), means that reason must “remain silent”, but what is crucial is, only because it is the condition for the possibility. This means that when space and time are thought as objectified objects, as the irreducible axioms of a non-metaphysical physics, non-metaphysical if the axiom is thought as what corresponds to “the most radical withdrawal”. In other words, the thinking called Heidegger wants to make an end of the Geschik, in such a way that the “withdrawal” can never be outstripped. In such a way that the utmost radicality is understood to rest in the End of Metaphysics, which is not a terminus, but a pooling up or gathering of what is utterly imminent. 

Husserl is the site of the first “overcoming” of this ratio. Thought phenomenologically space can not adduce a proof of its objectified perfectibility. For instance in the example Kant gives about a man who sleeps while traveling, but can be sure of having passed through n leagues of country. The enigmatic character of space is evident to the phenomenological science. Dostoevsky often speaks of a man taking quick steps on a crowded way, abstractedly. So much so abstractedly walking as not to be present. Yet, thought rightly what comes forward in the world as one is thrown upon it, is never without the play of what is present and what is concealed in openness of what in presence lies before one. Rousseau gives the wonderful example, which is more to the point, of a man watching, in a state of abstracted remove, the flowing of his own blood pouring from a wound. In such states space is not the mathematical-practical space of Kant. And therefore it is no condition for the possibility. If it is not the condition for the possibility, neither can the Nullius in verba hold. Therefore, we cite once more, the late Wittgenstein, who had come to this same point via another way: If I say something without a wholly definite sense of what I am saying, do I thereby say nothing? 

It is now: “being qua the absolute concept” which “proffers to thinking” the call. That is, not the world, but, rather being as the absolute. Which means the same thing as the “radically mysterious dispensation of Fate.” Because of the repudiation of the teleology, through the reception of this Fate. The “steadfast resolution” is the imminent theoria, i.e., it is the orientation that is not from ratio, but rather from the reception of what is brought forth in the Fate. Again, this is the site where Nietzsche is able to shake the resolution and wield the thunderbolt precisely as a denial of the bestowal. The thunderbolt and the aegis of Zeus are interpreted as the flash of the Opening and the Lighting of World. See the sayings of Hericlitus as read in Heidegger. If the so-called Kantian-epoch includes Hegel, one can not ask how it stands aside Husserl without knowing what manner of science Husserl believes his “flooring” to be concerned with. Is it theoria? Is it that which one can collect up and then apply? What is it in the light of that this “flooring” is supposed to be a knowledge? In fact nothing. In this sense Husserl is the most strange of all thinkers, he only says, one might go on looking at the “flooring” and wait to see what “the point of it” all is. Here one might ask how is it with Strauss? Strauss moves towards Husserl and Heidegger, but he is dissatisfied with the proof that theoria has been refuted. This means that in Strauss, one sees the path of the logos, but not necessarily the logos of Aristotle, in fact surely not!, rather a logos prior to the Laws of Thought, are still obliging human beings, i.e., they are drawing those with the gift of speach to speak about the highest things. 

In Heidegger, the contrast could not be more sharp, overcoming the rubric is what is everywhere dominating the path of the thinking. How is the logos to be overcome? is almost identical to the question: What is the meaning of Being?. The logos is always forcing, through its despotic and undemocratic rule, the life of man to rush forward in this and that manner. But the overthrow of logos leads to the dissolve of everything certain into the liquid which is without orientation, special meaning, or even self. Many arts require no logos, beekeeping for instance. That one makes a science of beekeeping doesn't mean that it needs a logos, or to become a beekeeping-ogy. But Socrates always wants to make this lower knowledge, of the nonverbal, into the higher knowledge, or truth, which is concerned with the ranking of things according to the world, and what it asks of man as man, its deepest demand. Therefore, in Heidegger, there is a demand to sense, rather than know what one is called to. The sense of what sense means is not to be mixed up with this or that concept of heteronomy, pathos, or affect. All that is inchoate and bizarre in thought must come to this sensing, this means exactly the thinking “highly” and “concretely enough”.