Rehearsal of some Basic Questions in the Human Self Narration or Existence  

 

 

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The programmatic assertion of the fourfold folding of beings (E 2) is especially important in that it adds a more precise determination to the ὄν here being articulated: τὸ ὄν—τὸ απλώς λεγομενον, the being, that is, that which is addressed purely and simply in itself: that is to say, the being taken purely as itself, precisely as being; the ὄν ή ὄν, the being inasmuch as it is a being.

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The saying of being as being, or existence as existence, is the essence of ousia, of Aristotelian beings. The ὄν ή ὄν is the prototype of the “something as something”. More decisively, it is the human gathering, as the being of what becomes, becomes what it is. The stars are prototypes of what need not become what they are, but already are what they were to be by nature. Whereas the form of a square is the equal sides and equal angles, in the intellect, the vault of the heavens shows the rational in the Apollonian style, visually. The Dionysian, what is only in the night of the intellect, and the Apollonian, the radiant sparkle of the stars, are the same. However, even with the stars, which properly and truly realize the natures, the intellect grasps in one way, and the eyes in another. The Dionysian is the resolute “yes” only because of: the truth is lacking. Yet, it lacks? The system of thinking remains in the vortex, which survives only by the fitness of the life-giving lie. We must remember, music is the teaching of the youngest, the humanizing, as it were. Music is music insofar as it belongs to the night world, and when it becomes the mathematical, it is already not Dionysian, thus, the intellect itself is tamed in Nietzsche's account. 

It is said that the mystery of the animal is due to its lack of intellect. It is too unlike man, to be other than enigmatic. The cunning of the animal is strictly unable to intuit the forms. For this reason the scale that moves upward, towards the gods, seems more like man as man, i.e., man as rational animal, the intelecting animal. From the oyster, on through all the animals, there is not intellect, and man is the first to possess this trait, when we draw a hierarchy. Montesquieu, in his day, simply adapted this schema to the notion of the transformation of all things. Positing that something more intelligent than man was sure to existence in the system of physical nature, which is to say, not that it did, but that it must be able to. By the time of Leopardi, such things were taken as a matter of course. Thereby, the knowledge, of the animal inventive of that knowing out of the night of the intellect, of the nature of the stars, suggested to the human mind, the sense: there is no truth. Which is to say, the realization of the true motion of the circular, so unlike the linear motion of the terrestrial heap, with it petty dependence on change, τῠ́χη, that which absolute dedication to the good of the whole is meant to find a saving art which can relieve the difficulty of exposure to the god or the fates. The totalizing of nature, of the form, into the homogeneous system of all the physical things, is only what brings the intellect to the crescendo of its expansiveness, without ever overcoming the “something as something” characteristic of the First Beginning with its juxtaposition of the eternal and the changing. All things are brought into the changing, but “all things” as the whole, is the perpetual and the always as the transforming. 

The something as something implies: the form is fundamentally susceptible of a true and proper manifestation in the phenomena. In this sense that in which something can be, what it is, is washed away. The model, what makes all species, all patterns, everything which the human gathers, is washed clean and finds no place to hold. The conception of phusis, which holds the physical system, up to be as it is, as all things, no longer can be kept from swaying. The things hold sway insomuch as they cease to be. The beings, a being, as what is, is what has become. The becoming is the what it is to be of the inalterable. According to the Will to Will, the being still holds as the unalterable. As the past. When the being is seen as what is “already”, as what is unalterable, the “already” is what stands as the now here, only if time is washed clean, and finds no mooring, is the ‘something as something’ learned to be over much the determination of the human. Human in what sense, in the same sense as the over much, which is to say, in the sense derived form the accomplished gathering of the resolute sense of the pitiful holding sway, which has no ground, of the human. 

The inquiry into dunamis and energeia is meant to go “inside” the being that is already resolutely learned to be not what it claims to be. It is questionable what Strauss maintains, that here we are to know Aristotle better than he himself. Such a knowing implies objectification. If one takes, let us say a culture, as an object, and, for instance, regards the Japanese spirit as a kind of mental illness, something gone crazy, as imposition from outside, that doesn't belong, the psychiatric view in some crude sense, is brought in illicitly. It claims to know better, to understand better, by means of a violent incursion which, if successful, comes away with the prize of the new man, formed by the superior critical interject. Whereas, on the other hand, whoever ‘enters in’ to the other world, takes the subjective attitude, allowing the self understanding of the, e.g., the overcoming of the Western materialism in the stringency of the spiritual devotion to cause, the investigator is, at best, subsumed in the ownmost of the other. Here, in speaking to Aristotle, the measure of higher and lower is lacking. And the possibility of plunging into the world is set aside. The decisive issue is the presupposition of the having learned holding sway. The consideration of the Thinker, vis-a-vis the End of Metaphysics, is not a matter of knowing, and so not of “knowing better”. However, this remains a feature of the basic sense of the “resolute steadfastness” of the ergon of the text with the name Heidegger. Only the learning of the sense of that ergon would be sufficient “refutation” of the “knowing better”. This is certainly admitted by Strauss himself. Some pursuits require gifts, which is not to say that the boon does not come to the general awareness when sufficiently set into the open.