Some theoretical remarks on the Path of the Thinking, as the Thinking of the Ergon of the Work of a text 

 

#31

So that we do not stray from the path with these discussions, we should recall what it is we want to achieve. It is an insight into the fact that and how “being” and “ground/reason” “are” the same. In other words, we want to hear what the principle of reason says in the second tonality as an utterance of being. Such a hearing does not simply bear something in mind. Rather, if it occurs correctly, a hearing [Hören] that thinks experiences that to which we always already, that is genuinely, belong [ge-hören].

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In all philosophizing the peculiar genius of philisophic talent native to the thought of the philosopher who philosophized demonstrates itself in the commonly available output of the philosophizing, which is to say, that which is said in the text of the work present to hand. The work itself, when read adequately to its essential inner activity, is what is ready-to-hand, as the text which speaks with the philisophic researcher who listens attentively to the work. Insofar as in the universities make a textbook, for instance that which speaks of the “epistemology” and the specific notion of the “a priori”, which, though it is a term used by Kant, is in the textbook explicated extrinsically, or, e.g., the notion of the “indifferent” character of the aesthetic, in all these cases, as with the “deontological” morality, we find something which floats apart from the work, and has no essential connection to it. So that just as textbook stands to reality, so does the common, or universal English-speaking University version, stand to the actual reading of Kant. So too with any great work, and, with a work of thought which comes to speak to what is peculiar in the work.

How far does one “stray from the path” who does not respond to the essence of the work? The work can’t be taken up sophistically according to the average way of constructing the sense of things if it is to amount to anything for the philosophic researcher. Here we Seek "to achieve" an insight into the fact that and how “being” and “ground/reason” “are” the same.” This seeking guides the research. All seeking is already a sensitivity to what resounds according to the seeking. So, if we read the text without the peculiar engine of this seeking, already active in our thinking, we putter out into a meaningless region of the discussion about discussion, and about the relative frames in which, having taken the frames, such as the tag “epistemology” or “deontology” one can fit this and that into a masterwork of reference, like a table to be consulted on any occasion and for whatever generic propose. Such a procedure is impossible for genuine philosophizing. Therefore we must understand what is this “seeking”? What is it to find the quite distinct pattern of its inner means of coming to decision which comes to be demonstrated through the work of the thinking? 

“So that we do not stray from the path with these discussions, we should recall what it is we want to achieve. It is an insight into the fact that and how “being” and “ground/reason” “are” the same. In other words, we want to hear what the principle of reason says in the second tonality as an utterance of being. Such a hearing does not simply bear something in mind. Rather, if it occurs correctly, a hearing [Hören] that thinks experiences that to which we always already, that is genuinely, belong [ge-hören].” 

Gratefully the line given in bold text is given again “In other words,” we want to hear what the principle of reason says in the second tonality as an utterance of being.

What follows: Such a hearing does not simply bear something in mind. Rather, if it occurs correctly, a hearing [Hören] that thinks experiences that to which we always already, that is genuinely, belong [ge-hören].” 

We aren't yet ready to explicate without first saying what the doubled text in bold letters is saying. This was the subject of the whole lecture series. At the same time it tells us about what we have been meant to “seek”, in the “same”. The more we come to enter this thought, the more the work ceases to be something we need in order o carry on the seeking. In any learning one can gather to oneself the essential dynamo of the teaching as what is learned. But, in thinking this is not demonstrable to anyone, at least not without a large measure of uncertainty. Yet, whoever reads a text of Heidegger sees something of this work, even if in seeing it they regard it as mere idiosyncratic trash, which is a literature or a mystical jargon. Even they participate, however dimly, in the work which is this or that text. With those who have eyes of more-than-ordinary attunement to the work, whether from nature or through the reading of the text, which is the introduction to the work as the essence of the text, it is obvious, just as with the sense of colour in the world, that whatever the ultimate status of a work is, there is independent existence in the realm of such works. The things that are subject to the sensorium may not exist ultimately, yet, nonetheless they are independent of the ego understood as the one who reads, looks, or smells.  

We have been looking for an “utterance of being”. What is first helpful in this is the word of Leibnitz. It tells us that wherever human beings come across something, not this or that human being, but man as such, not the faulty one, or the one distracted with some other matter, but man as man, there is a look which seeks reasons. Even when, in the extreme, reasons come in the form of the “because”, the empty and lethargic poetic “because” which returns nothing, like an erosive abyss into which everything pours. Like a beggar or a child. Everyone has heard the empty “why” of the child who only asks in order to ask again ad infinitum. 

At first what we hear in the statement of reason, about how everything has a reason, is a trivial observation about the objectivity of the object. Each object, by virtue of it existence, is related to the conditions for the possibility, as to a proximate cause. The proximate cause is time and space, as of the non-metaphysical physics, which, when coming to hear itself, hears the obscure decisional property of its own demonstrations, by listening back into the ground of its seeking, in the reasoning which wants to know about the only perfect reason, reason as such, reason as a basic being. When reason is viewed as a being, since man as man is not a creature living in the sky, but amidst everything, since its essence, that of reason, too, is exposed to the abyss, reason can not be said to be something perfect. Insofar as man is guided by seeking, this seeking was the history of reason, which, being one being alongside others, is one being that is amidst the Geschick of being as such. Therefore, reason must come into our seeking as what is said in “the second tonality”.  Which is to say, as what in a World, i.e., in that specific modification of the thinking of Sky, the eternal, when we see that it is nowhere grounded, but melting into thin air all the time, in a world, or as a world, there is here, as this world, reason. The change in tonality means: at first the objectified object has a reason, namely: what caused it. The row of dominoes. But, in the change, we don’t let anything hang alongside the object like an ideal or a value, like a being, instead we say, being as such always has a reason. It always calls out with the “why”, even as the cause, the power thinking, the storing up of possibilities for the empty and the listless matter. 

Of those who today would still hold with Ulysses, against the slumber of the blessed Lotus Eaters, “who mean no harm”, only a small number would think to turn their consideration to Thought. Departing with those political spectres which haunt the better impulses of good nature, of the good nature of the human being. When nature, when the moral senses, in their scope and sagacity stun out in other directions, denying the principle of the “marketplace of ideas” will lead to the Common Weal, seeing no Progress and no Development , but that peculiar to some power mass, passed off as a Country come Nation State, instead the Political Waxes in the existential eye. That eye of unusual sagacity which evades the Political, is thereby exposed to Nihilism in its tangible sense, as what is self-independant. Letting this parenthesis pass, let us go, or pass, back into the statement of the text. How much can be passed off as mere text?

What does the second tonality say: The world as such is one world. Literally, the current world, is technicity, as for its essene technicity. But the current world is the dispensation of being as such, the Fate as this seeking of what is the same: reason. Reason being undermined was what was performed in the work called Kant. But at the same time, so long as the common presentations in the universities go, there is constantly a variegated terrace of yet unextinguished manner of presenting the why which have not yet come to cause. For instance the class thinking, and the race idea, the morality of the race idea, and the economic prefabrications and predictions of the class thinking and its every-more predictive demographic analyses. Yet, they remain essentially defective when compared to the basic causal thinking which is Power itself, as the storing up of undefective knowledge as such. But the more the ideological, and the economic melt into the peculiarity of the Sky, into the causal as what is always the same in all thinking, in being as this world, the reasons as arguments cease to speak, and the reasons as sheer pictures, of logographic keys to the storehouse of possibilities which is Power as the future stored up as causality. The more the being of human beings fusses with Power as such, the more the confusion of being hides, and withdraws, in the melting away. The more the melting away comes to conceal the human being, in its annihilation, such that the human no longer even celebrates its destruction, but goes on living through the activity which is now the inner peculiarity of the Power, the more then the bodies function as the act of this power, as the letting be of its thought. 

Then the consternation of the one who hears is the consideration of this moment when the general being is sinking away, it wants to catch the look of the same. It wants to, in its seeking, in its hearing, to see the path of the Geschick. So that the turn, the leap of the world, comes into sight. That is what the thinking called Heidegger then purposes, or, in fact, actually works out in its essence, according to its thinking which is not a why asking. In fact, far from what is mostly said, in Husserl, all this would be flat. It’s not that in Heidegger the thought rejects basic Phenomenology, in order to speak of death and of the ready-to-hand as the Nicht nichtet, or nothing that nothings as the energia and the fundamental activity of the unalloyed action, but rather that the resolute steadfastness is supposed to be able to guide towards the leap without asking why or being part of the reasoning of being. In Nietzsche: the dispensation of the basic ground or nature is no longer Sky. It becomes World. But World is aware of Worlds. When one thinks of  a “common weal” as what the moral sensibility seeks, in its independent sphere of activity, like the sensorium with its things, it seeks the one Good, like the target, like the tracing of the cursive line that the hand of student follows in their learning. When one speaks then of 1. the common good, one says one thing, a sentence. When one speaks of Lyotard and the postmodern one objects that the postmodern (as of course with the earlier such views since Hegel), the multiplicity of the Pagan is, 2. Multiplicity of the Worlds, broken apart by the differend. 

So: statement one and statement two. Each a all-speaking statement about all that is, about a world. One saying many lines to trace out, another saying one line. Many scripts one script. We remember all these objections formally in each discourse of the past, but we have to now remind ourselves that what is said formally is not quite the same in the world. For instance, if one says, there is one light. And then in looking one sees some light fountaining down through a window in brilliant rays. All of a piece, all brilliant light. One can say again, there are many lights. 1. One light. 2. Many lights. As statements they are on par, but in looking we see pale violets, and the dusky afterglow of the horizon with orange hues and yellow, and above the clouds the wan blue of the evening sky. Yet, what the formal statement, the reason, the rule, says about its Grund, out of which its meaning emerges, is not something aside from being. Both are being. In Nietzsche the work of decision grasps this. And comes to think of all leaps from within the World that is now given and exposited in the rule-like thinking of the statements. This presentation is no history, and no experience, it is the wellspring of the thinking as the growing energia of the work one calls Nietzsche. But in Heidegger this thinking wants to take the changing of the World, moving in the regions where the Laws of thought, the contradictions of formal thought, doesn't hold what Language says in its spell, just as what is contradictory in a Penrose triangle is not too great to overcome the mind of Thought as such, just as Bayesian thought eliminates biases in the realm of a idealized perfect causality, just as Galileo dreams in the region of his thought experiment which draws motion into the perfection of inertial frames, to the turn and the leap, to let Thought think into what is Same un-housed, uncabined. Thinking to this region.