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On Sameness

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[The Paragraph starting with]

Accordingly, Aristotle explicitly states: Being is said with an eye to something that is 
somehow common to all the various ways, and which cultivates a community with 
these so that these many are all of the same root and origin.  …

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Here we are directed to ask about sameness. “Indeed, ὅν and ἐν are different conceptually, but in 
their essence they are the same, that is they belong together.”

Here ἐν speaks of what is ready or available, the thing that exists. Whereas ὅν speaks of 

the one that is as it is, as “this one”. This one means the primary ousia, or substance, 
for Aristotle, but this is a qualification on ὅν, as what upon reflection is what is “before” us, or, 
alongside us. A hand that claps is some what that is cast into the predicament of clapping. 
It is this some-what as a thing “standing under” which is ‘symbolized’ in the predicament of 
clapping. The saying of ὅν, as such, is prior to the “something as something” in precisely the 
sense that Kant says being is not a predicament. The primordiality of language increases 
the concealment in ὅν, forbidding with greater force than with the “something as something” 
(its own order of thinking being present in its grammar), such that concealment and oblivion 
most viably hold their breath like the faint light in the crevice of a closed door before the thinker. 
On the one hand it is what is long the most cogent to vague sense of everyday Da-sein, that this 
that is here, the oozing torso of an octopus on the deck of a small vessel going at sea, has a 
content that does not refer back to any concept. For the reason that it evades the general 
sense of being, e.g., an octopus, so far as it is ‘just once, just this time’, here, and not in another 
place, and ‘so on’ (in a vague sense). Whether all this is “available” to man as man, as what is 
 “present” or ἐν, in the sense of what is effective or real (real for technical logistics, and power 
[not in the Nietzschean sense, but)  in the sense of the standing-reserve or stock of knowledge 

at the ready to be deployed, of “Science” as such), remains a dark question. It seems to be the 

region of the contestation of “Da” and “Sein” over the fate of Being (in the sense of the  ‘presupposition’, that is, of what a rubric may not be able to say but is supposed to draw forth  
according to the ergon of the work called Heidegger).  

 

While two clapping hands come together in the same act, that of clapping, they are not identical 
nor do they belong together in the sense of “Indeed, ὅν and ἐν are different conceptually, but in 
their essence they are the same, that is they belong together.” This belonging, as being the same, 
is different from being equal. Equality in the abstract sense of Greek science, of mathimatikos, 
means, e.g., that the mathamatical unit, which exists as a perfect whole number, e.g., 1, is = to 1, 
in and only in the region that is available to the essence of man as man, to ratio, as what is destined 
to last forever. Nothing like such a thing, according to the Greek science, exists as what is available 
amidst the beings that change and come to be.  

There is a sameness in what Socrates sees beyond the walls of Athens, along the banks of the  
Ilisus, under the shade of a planetree, and that that Phaedrus sees. However, we do not here think 
of questions of perspectivalism (though, we do think of the just mentioned sameness). There is a difficulty in the construction of the classicists' notional 
view which removes all that we know from the “sameness” that is to be rescued. In Strauss we 
have the claim that the social scientist refuses the notional view for the sake of historical context 
(and often for the children's tale of Progress, of the past as the road to this), thereby we are meant to take up a notional view, 
not for the sake of taking proper care of the understanding of the text through preservation of the 
translation, and most of all through keeping the way to explore the text open in the passing down of 
scholars betwixt themselves, but, rather, for Strauss the assumption that we know no more, are not in a sphere of greater sophistication than, 
the writers we speak to, and listen to, aims at sailing amidst the high winds of modernity as though 
the absolute clear sky of antiquity was in itself sufficient to keep afloat in the winds. Strauss 
is an historicist in this respect, he knows that in entering the water, as one who does not follow the 
vulgar style of historical contextualization, the more subtle difficulties of the high winds can not be 
kept wholly out. This makes all the difference in his work. His road, when judged against the claim 
of “knowing better” of the historial view (not the contextualising historicist view) is actively struggled 
with. So that in Strauss there is a limit state of historial thinkng (of thinking the history of Being), 
where the dangerous gust that winds men about is suppressed, a standing still, as opposed to throwing the doors open to the storm 
wind. Just as motion, in modernity, that the earth still stands still, as it were, even when one 
knows motion is no longer what it was, but relative, and therefore, not motion at all. This limit state 
of historial thinking, is perhaps the opposite of the confrontation with historial thinking. It must be noted, that, 
generally speaking, though historial thought is everywhere the case, the experience, and holds sway, taking a stand 
on it that is raised to discourse is in the hands of most theorists, not to speak of the immense 
masses of those who never think of their destiny, a dry etching without the power to make its 
stamp a passion for thought. The question of what one has long called sameness moves in 
this region, and comes to comforntation here. This region menaces with its threat to be swallowed 
up by oblivion.  

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Being, Beings, Wholeness

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Thus he says on one occasion (Met. K [XI] 3, 1060b32f.): τὸ δ᾿ ὂν πολλαχῶς καὶ οὐ καθ᾿ 
ἕνα λέγεται τρόπον. "Beings are manifold and so not articulated according to one way." 
But he also sees immediately and clearly the result that this view, when taken out of

context, could generate, namely the dispersion of ὂν into many τρόπονὶ, a dissolution 

of the ἕν. In contrast, Aristotle states: παντὸς τοῦ ὄντος πρὸς ἕν τι καὶ κοινὸν ἡ ἀναγωγὴ γίγνεται  
(1061a10f). "For each being, for all beings in whatever sense, there is a leading

up and back to a certain one and common"; and at 1060b35: κατά τι κοινόν:  
"to some sort of common." We are always encountering this cautious and (as to what 

the encompassing one may be) openended τι (of some sort). Aristotle speaks of the 
final and highest unity of being in this fashion; see 1003a27 in Met. r (IV) 1, l003a27

(and many other passages): τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν, τό ειναι as φύσις τις a sort of governing from 
out of and in itself.

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From the same being the manifold of beings, gignomena, those that are and are not, dissolve 
the whole or one. The sentence speaks in two ways, first of being out of which comes the things 
that are and their potential to be, and then it speaks of the whole which are all of the things that are 
and the things that can be. Heidegger leads us to this reflection: “Taken out of context” one 
forgets being, and comes to dwell, as one has long done, with beings and their potential for being. 
Phusis and what it brings forth, eidos, conceal being. 

All the same one can’t leave it at that because here “conceal” is not understood properly. 
One must raise the question how this concealment is said. This word here means something 
is kept secret according to a deprivation of what is. What is is the truth of being. The body is 
concealed from the attention which is plunged into other things, for instance when one does 
not think of the place of the tongue in the mouth or the beating of the heart, the movement of 
the feet in walking as one checks the street lights at a crossing, and the unconsciousness of 
the heart, when it seems to hear the distant peal of thunder, resounding, can be caused by the 
association of some thing or smell, or sight, that has not come into explicit knowing. 
The growing awareness of love or hate, corresponding to the transformation of the habitual 
way of being of this or that one, is the unconcealment what resounds in the core of mortals. 
What makes the world huge is the unconcealment of the foundations of being, when the 
human essence becomes thought in the First Beginning, for example, it means the region 
that is perpetual is set off against the appearances. Number, for instance, ceases to be 
concrete and a matter of counting, but becomes what is set off from all time and place, 
such that what is perpetual and indestructible is revealed.

Being is not concealed. It is forgotten. First of all this speaks negatively, telling us that to 
forget is not to conceal. What is concealed, oblivion, is always ready to flow forth. At the 
extremes all can be thought as within consciousness, or, on the other hand, whatever 
stands about can be thought as amidst the rest of what stands about. The inner world 
can be set off against what stand before one.  This “a sort of governing from out of and 
in itself” brings about a vague saying of the region of being that when it draws forth fills 
Da-sein with strange passions. The object in letting what pertains to being, beings and 
the whole become the subject matter for our investigations is never disputation, nor 
setting a problem with a concealed answer, even less is it wresting free through struggle 
the human answer to the plight of the forsaken human being, nor does it require one 
shatter oneself against the contradictions in order to let “fire burn fire” or “water wash water”, 
to come to one’s own ground or to destroy the self, instead in this thinking, which is a 
making available for experience, one is attempting to spark the passion for thinking 
in such a way as in forming the hexis of thought an attempt to draw back from our 
commitment to what is and can be in the whole will have first been initiated. What 
this has to do with “genuine philosophizing” we shall not know at first.

Review of the Fourfold, πολλαχώς

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Yet, did we not assert, during the first enumeration of the four

meanings of being in the Aristotelian sense, that the unity of these
four meanings remains obscure in Aristotle? We did. However, this
does not rule out but, for a philosopher of Aristotle's stature, precisely
entails that this unity be troubling in view of its multiplicity. We need
only observe how Aristotle explains the πολλαχώς.

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The fourfold of Aristotle, polyaxhus [pollakhos, πολλαχώς], might be written somewhere, shut in a shoebox, 
and thereby placed in a closet, on a dark shelf, far behind many old articles of clothing 
that will never be worn. Substance, true or untrue, dunamis and energia, and the categories. 
Insofar as we grant Aristotle had the hexis of this thinking, such that his “equiprimordial” 
care was exposed to the task of thinking what he was exposed to, this list speaks of the Greek World. 
Yet so far as we master the subject matter of Aristotle, under the specific thinking of the 
ergon of the text with the name Heidegger, we only set a vagueness of thinking (like a questioning) 
alongside a mastery of a formal subject matter. And then attempt to transform the basic and habitual 
of experience as questioning into the track in order to let what is strange show forth as deviant and 
so to call thinking forth.

Let us review these subject matters in no particular order.

The true and the untrue: What is true could never hold if it allowed the world totality to 
include non-being, as what was available alongside being. Ergo, for Aristotle, what is true 
is said about what is available as what is gathered in its availability, thus, whereas for Plato 
non-being remains a problem, for Aristotle dunamis has the gathered privation, stands as 
what is a limit state out of which what is to be spun is spun. Nous, for Aristotle, is as much 
one of the beings as is a stone. The problem of what is ‘real’, and what is ‘intellectual’, never 
shows itself. The stone is governed because it has form, just as is plant, animal, and intellectual 
being. The chariot, just as the charioteer, has form. Hyle does not name, as in Plato, the 
appearance of the bodies, but rather the differentiation of form. This way of thinking still 
persists and holds sway amidst the forgetfulness. Yet, superficiality is so great that one 
never thinks to see the foundations of one’s habitual understanding. The ‘ethical’ sense 
of the true is forced into all things, even beyond the reticence of the immature Socrates 
of the Parmenides who does not wish to become ridiculous.

Of dunamis and energia:

We beg off this, the chief topic of the current study, with the comment that Wilhelminian 
collapse of the Prussian saw the beginning of the belief in the fact. It is curious that just as 
Nietzsche, moved to admiration by Polish thinkers understood himself as Polish, not fictively, 
but as a biographical matter, so too did Kant falsely ascribe a Scottish ancestry to himself. 
The fact always is unavailable to such cryptomnesia of the universe, so to say, such slips, 
and yet the fluidity of essences allows for it, because in Nietzsche the totality is essentiazable, 
the Kantian thing-izing of the being of beings, as the ‘thing-in-itself’, consummates Aristotelian 
thinking in the self destructive act of an animal feeding on itself, since the true becomes the correct. 
This feeding on its own flesh is the Pessimism of Optimism itself. The Utopia proves to be the place 
that casts off its own knowledge of what it means arrive at its proper consummation. In this sense, 
the vague saying, “merley ontic”, with respect to Nietzsche, comes in. We must move in a 
questioning which we may not be able to reach, but, nonetheless, it draws all human experience, 
and that says thinking, to it.

The “catagories” as what is accidental in being as such:

“Whan the breed is conuerted into the precious body of our lord the accidentes abyden..whytnesse, 
roundenesse and sauoure.” a text of 1483  

Color, contour, savour, where the latter means the peculiar sensation that strikes one. 
In this sense it is clear that the accidents, σῠμβεβηκός, have already been taken to mean 
what moves the sensorium, by exciting the animal spirits, or what corresponds generally to  
pathe, the thing acted upon, rather than the actor. When we take up the issue like this, accidentally, 
as it were, rather than seeing the development of the West properly, we miss what is proper to the 
accident. Why is what is, as such, ‘collateral’, accidence, also the property, or what is “proper” 
to a thing, and thus the a priori? Massiveness is a priori an accident of granite outbreaks in a 
landscape. And, yet, asks Kant, is it not necessary? The nature of granite demands no concrete 
instantiation in the sense that the form and the matter are dunamis, virtus or power.  

Substance

For Aristotle substance is form. From being the principle of motion. What is said in Augustine, 
is also so of space. Since, if there is a place we don’t now see, we know perfectly well how to 
set ourself to get there, and we will arrive. Yet, if asked, how can we answer how it is done? 
This sinks into the unfailing forgetfulness of cybernetics and is like boundless oblivion.

Examination of the moment of lost surroundings, as the "Crystal Palace" of correct thinking fails to look at what is, and therefore must turn away from all that

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Since the basic relationship between Plato and Aristotle is undecidable,

every popular pseudophilology that believes that for every

thought of Aristotle's a prototype, no matter how sketchy or farfetched.

can be found in Plato must be rejected. When someone asks

the inane question, From whom did he get what he says here? believing

himself thereby to be investigating the philosophy of philosophers,

that person has already cut himself off from the possibility of ever

being affected by a philosophy. Every genuine philosopher stands

anew and alone in the midst of the same few questions, and in such

a way that neither god nor devil can help if he has not begun to buckle

down to the work of questioning. Only when this has happened can

he learn from others like himself and thus truly learn, in a way that

the most zealous apprentices and transcribers never can.

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Da-sein itself refers back to this break. Therefore is it quite empty when Dugin takes up the 
position that the other worlds have Da-sein. Since, then, it is an admission of universal Western 
worlding. In Descartes there is a Westerning thinking that is decisive, the one is thought as thinking, 
as the intelligibility of whatever is. This is at once abandoned, not even abandoned, but, it was 
only set up, as it were, in the course of preparing the interpretation of science now in power, that 
of the objectified object, that it was proposed as the foundation. Husserl takes it up as the doubtful 
framing. This that is there is this doing. The somewhat, as what is doing, as the doing of the verb 
of the predicate, as what is said of the predicament, is most of all meant. No human being at all 
comes in, yet, according to the ergon (or inner hexis) of (the text with the name) Heidegger, 
the “human being” has always been this something as something 
which opens like the invisibility between earth and blue heavens. The biological interpretation of 
man is set aside along with the moral interpretation. 

Strauss speaks of the “cowardly vagueness” of Heidegger. Yet, when one thinks through Kant, 
as the Western world has, in what it de facto is, all Westerns are de facto nihilist. And that 
means all beings on the earth touched by what is planetary, as much the Chinese as the Russian. 
The burning passion for more lessons on what “living well” means, for the political “ethnos”, are 
confusinons, driven by a sincerity of intention which misunderstands what is endangered. 
Lyotard, Dugin, Deleuze, never see the range in which the discussion which aims not a 
overcoming the planetary, not at all, but at overcoming the obdurate refusal of all genuine 
questioning, race through the range of cosmic nihilistic worldings. In this, such thinking is 
more aware than is the ordinariness which claims to uphold values, and purpose, while 
all the time moving silently in the gigantic statue of nihilism, and yet, at once it is weaker 
and less capable to question what is. Strauss speaks of the “cowardly vagueness”, 
and this is correct. Yet, it is what is correct that is most necessarily the place of the battle 
implied by the thinking of Da-sein. For Strauss sees correctly that if all is clouded by the 
encroachment of unintelligibility, of the radical interpretation stemming from Kant, that is 
still the current notion of the sciences, that causality must be a kind of arrangement out of 
a basic chaos which is itself quite drawn into the vortex of the logos, which none can follow, 
one must gaze steadily into the phenomena as they would stand if no longer reflectively deemed 
“appearances” and, most of all, no longer grasped under the ancient reflective determination of 
the “available”.  

Here one must press the point that being is not a conception necessary to man as man, 
as Strauss puts it. However, it can not be set aside. Now our efforts must become more 
serious, and therefore abandon a “speaking back” to the thoughtless. The methodos, 
up to now, has not challenged the basic element of the “Western philosophy”, of this 
“genuine philosophizing”.