Questions III

Is Mood ever to be brought to Being in the sense that Phenomenology lets it be utterly doubted? An expressionistic look.

 

The “mood” in Heidegger is the “mores” at its primordial font. It lacks “morality”. Morality is a word we have from

Cicero, by way of a translation of ethikos, and from there it flows into the tradition and returns with Hobbes
(“Aristotle controls the university”). Ethikos was meant to be a scientific, thus not an emotional derivation of
character such that this science rises to sophos, to wisdom (the round circle). Quite unlike the blind groping of 
Euthyphro, he who followed the conscience, or his gods, in order to avoid becoming polluted (miasma) by faul
acts. Wisdom and science are approached by Aristotle, yet it is Hobbes who brings them to the ground of nature, as
a rational natural law (Here we don’t go into the “square circle” of the binding of nature and convention or law into
a confused thinking which almost lets man become indistinguishable from animal, and so almost comes to
nihilism proper. A small comment. Summa ratio itself is the termination of nature into divine “convention” or
positive law in the Catholic thinking. The entire natural law hangs on holding back the coming of the “positive”, by
observing in the ontological, in the series of cases observed, the “pattern” of Justice. Such that one is moved to the
genuine character, of hexis, of this “right reason”. So far as a potentia ordinata is sustaining as what doesn’t give
way to a potentia absoluta = “the gods philosophize” = Dionysies. The play of the absolute and the seriousness of 

the ordinata are but a “mood” in its horizon, in its determination or bounding.). The “Justice is giving each one

what is their own” is the apex of this morality when it becomes English. What is most one’s “own”, says Hobbes, is

dear life. Ergo the formula, each one has the right to preserve their life against society, against those who “assault”

that one, for instance in leading them to prison or to death. Ergo, a right that outstrippes society, that vouchsafes the

so-called contract. The mood then stand in the place of the question: “What regime of contract law did hold sway

at the time of the contracting?”. Such a contract, is taken as a “legal fiction”, and yet it is determinative of a thousand 
times said “rights”, of what is said in law or constitution. The mood that upholds a right most of all brings

the modern “Ich” to hold sway over the “Du”, and whatever advantages “life” is felt as a sort of Rausch like the

sudden wind which brings out all things at the horizon, the sound of the wind is the promise of power. Because 
power alone will be sufficient to keep life secured against the ones who would “assault” it. But, In this, Heidegger 
asks, what is this mood? What is it we have long called the character? The character of the “it works”, of the

technological “all of us”, as man or what “one” does, bubbles over what is a'brew in the “if it were only a matter 
of life and death it would not be serious”. Ergo, the “Ich” steps out over what is a'brewing in the world 
as it does not only concern the mortal, but as with Berkeley, “the horse is in the barn”, the world, thus, is 
supposed to go on beyond the mortal in its character.

 

The “it works” in the undecided (befallen without being noticed as decision) essence that gives the peculiar mood

or character of the Technological Dasein says that kinship is an “inclusive fitness” and is advantageous. All human

selflessness becomes the “it is to their advantage”, the overcoming of doing good for near and dear in the “it

works” as what explains the why of this kin behavior, which extends to the “friends and family” which one, by

sacrificing oneself to, advantages oneself. Ergo, the anti-social forces of family and friends, or “tribalism”, as

against the society on the whole, are saved for the “it works” as valid. In this we have the sense that Strauss

observes a “human nature” which in the Hegelian manner cynically refuses the true morality of Kant. Kant’s

morality requires the complete extinction of empirical human nature, of what has been, merely, until now. Of the

scandalous and defective rumer of mere empirical knowing. While these forces, the positive power of society, and

the old habits of “human nature”, socialization and the murky resonance of the remaining forces, the basic force of

nihilism lets its turbulent cyclone boom clearly over all the beings. Here, Heidegger sees the failure to overcome

the absorption in being as the flight from the attempt to overcome nihilism in the denial of nihilism (or, better, 
in the not seeing of nihilism in the extended region of brilliant light). Thus, the decision to

the decision, to take the fundamental decision, is missed. Even Nietzsche was still absorbed in the war to let something

artificially dominate the future as a mood.

Questions II

Q.

Does “Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht” mean that the ontological difference can not stand? 
(Or, that it might but as a "life-giving lie".) The ontological difference means that Historicism 
is stood alongside Phenomenology. Common sense, as the common sense of a people, 
local in time and geography, is set off against “the eyes of the soul” as what can merely “look”.

No attempt will be made to justify this understanding against the various confused interpretations of the

ontological difference. Phenomonolgy is the ultimate science-wisdom (the round circle par excellence), 
rather than mere Greek-Sceince become "science". In this sense, in Heidegger, the question about 
the European Science is indefatigably spelled out (which, for us, going on in the investigation as we 
are, is not clear), it is thought as not great and fatiguing amidst the End of Metaphysics.

What Phenomenology is is a matter of a building up from common sense towards wisdom when it is

regarded not as itself, but as something to be interpreted. So, for instance, Husserl says, this doubt of

Descartes can not be wrong, this doubt as, I, Husserl, grasp it, as what is doubt and only doubt, the

so-called “bracketing”. The bracketing aims at thinking the Element. The Element is the overcoming of

the “in between”, when seen from a Platonic perspective. One is no longer between the eidos and

wisdom, or, the same thing, doxa and the summa ratio. The Element is the flash that withdraws man

from his “place”. The, organic, or sense-direct, the I see and hear but do not know. Presumably the “I

do not know it”, which when interpreted is the method of saying, “Maybe it was not like that at all”, a self

doubting, is the Time as genuine. Rather than as overlaid with the obstruction of the “cause” and the

“reason”. Of the something as something as the order of intelligibility and the order of existence, the

there and the showing as the what. So the question is not how Phenomenology is explained by a given

phenomenologist, a Descartes, who builds up at once, or, a Husserl, who doubts even the question of

the philisophic Optimism, the “best world”, or, an Aristotle, nor a Heidegger. Instead, it is said as a

basic, or inexplicable, condition.

Common sense does not know that “where” it happens is in question. The “where” is the where of the

anxiety of one who has a plight to deal with. Of anxiety as mortal. But, there are always mortals. To say,

“as mortal” already says, ontic-ontological. So where does the pure anxiety, that is not concerned with

the tiger’s shoulders raised above the jungle grass at the foot of the path, happen? Only in the ontic-

ontological, whereby the ontic pleny is Element. Phenomenology is always already chosen and drawn

far-off, its concern is not built up out of experience, yet it is not concerned with the childish things,

mathamatics, political science, nor even science as wisdom, rather, it is in the essence of science, in

what is interpreted as the always-living in the simplict science, in geometry, that it shows its Element.

Even if in Aristotle it never reaches beyond phusis, and always lets ousia become shut in by the

thinking of phusis as against wisdom, Phenomenology sees the Element, but interprets it this way or

that way according to common sense. 

The Element is never Being, since it is Open ontic look. Impossible, so it seems, to endure.

A Phenomenology, a thing learned, is never Element, but a way of coming towards the Element full of

what is never Open to Time or Being proper. 

It is clear that Nietzsche thinks all this under the aspect of Lessing, as the chess player who enjoys the

game, and puts the outcome aside as what is of less value.

The Spirit of Anatole France, and the Spirit of Lenin, or, a Hamlet in the Material Order

--------

A prospectus in Mini of the notion of Seriousness, taken from the ground of Fire. Fire means in 
the Heideggerian thinking, the End, and is set off against the Beginning in the pre-philosophers. 
At the same time the pre-philosophers, Hericlitus, are sought in the End, which is the only place, 
so far as one is aware, they might be sought.

---

The Spirit of Anatole France, and the Spirit of Lenin, or, a Hamlet in the Material Order

La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, 
de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, 
beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

The Spirit of Lenin (in our own words): There is a real value in labour, each one should have 
it according to the days they work. This rule is the essence of Government, ergo, it is summa ratio.

Insofar as we deny the thinking of Descartes, as it is brought out in Husserl and Heidegger, 
as the mirror of πῦρ ἀείζωον, of everliving fire, as kosmos which is there and shows itself, as a 
Da-sein or a cogito esse, a knowing (which is called a thinking because it is dubitative) 
that has what is not-known or concealed there as the divined or barely intuited empirical 
accidental things, as the panta, or many accidents which fall to questioning as to their origin 
and meaning, we speak from the Essence of Technology. 

The Essence of Technology names the knowledge of how to move forward in any situation, 
such that whatever someone does during any moment, for instance the time it takes to cross 
the street, a moment, is according to the knowledge. Interpreted into the Nietzschean thinking 
this would read: the world, embodied knowing. Will as Kantian Zweck, becomes Weg or path. 
Someone knows how to tie a shoe, the knowledge is never available, and even when they don’t 
consciously think through it, they do it according to the knowing. But technological knowing is 
not a partial knowing, but knowing of the world. 

The Hamlet in the material means that the “intelectual” which Bertrand Russell names, we paraphrase

as follows: “The world problem consists of doubt in the wise and confidence among the insane.” In the

material means that the issue is not here or there that there is a diffident Hamlet, but rather that the

question of the Sovereign who controls the interpretation of the armed laws or rules has fallen prey to

the abyssus in a peculiar manner. Not at all in the sense of a “Is there truth in interpretation”, or not

mainly, but in the sense of a nightmare-like terribleness whereby reason becomes available to the

human being. Which means the ability to manipulate the essence of the human being becomes a

problem like the phase change: carburetor to fuel injection system.

The Liberal Order wants a rule of law. The order of a Utopian Conscience wants Equality. The rule of 

law means that the law about sleeping under bridges will be applied equally, without consideration to

the result. The result is a reaction norm, more-or-less calculable in advance, between circumstance 

and law. The poor will be more guilty of violations than the rich. The Utopian Conscience, in the strict 

sense, is not present in Lenin. Lenin however leads into the abyssus, or bottomless pit, which we here

call the Hamlet in the Material. For the well-known reason that there is no natural value, and therefore a

law that wants to apply equally to each labourer, so that a days work leads to the same enjoyment of 

the fruits of that work in each one, falls prey, not to an interpretation of the laws, in the sense that the 

Sovereign is the interpreter, but to the Essence of Being in its failure to know in such a way as to allow 

for a law that can treat equally. Rightly speaking we derive the sense of a rule of law only from the

sequence which brings about the American and French Revolutions, although with some spuriousness

the Republic of Geneva is also mentioned in this connection, and, at length, the ancient citizen-states

and the world of Cicero. However, it is only the collapse of the Estates-General which makes the claim obvious.

Each one has the same right to fall prey to the law about sleeping under bridges as each other with no

exception for the high clergy or the nobles. 

The order of Lenin (for this is the clearest case of the demand for a nation of laws, or “equality of 
opportunity, not outcome”, whereas the Capitalist allows for inheritance and the rule of families which 
is the problem of Socrates, the inordinate claim to the need of power to protect one’s own follows, and 
reaches Hobbes), the Liberal or Libertarian order, falls prey to the commercial order, and no longer to 
the magisterial sovereign. The question of “government capture” is not the main issue here, 
Government capture, that would mean that business would become sovereign, as is often claimed 
already to be the case. This Takeover, as such, is not a violation of rule of Law. Any interpretation 
can be meted out to each one and each other in the Liberal fashion. It is only when it is supposed 
to happen through “cheating” or corruption that it can be, mostly on the part of negative and 
vindictive persons, and also on the part of Utopians who would have utter equality even prior to rule of 
law, claimed to be. 

The system of knowing, which has a underlying basis in the theory of “Labour before Philosophy”, 
the Lockean and Hobbesian school, at bottom refers back to the Galilean break with Aristotle’s 
physics, the teaching which accords with the Scholastic Aristotle, the “square circle” as Heidegger 
names it, that is the Christian Philosophy. This is said in order that anyone who would take their 
bearing in German thinking may have an entry into the seriousness of the study, and not be 
out at sea with the Anglo-American teaching that thinking hangs apart from the world and the 
world situation. 

----

Expressionistic investigation:  

What and There
Essence, Existence
Doubt as Existence
Subject, Object 
Music as exsistence
Da-Sein
Knowing as Solipsism

An abyssus-voro, hungry abyss, and an abyssus in which one finds oneself, as in Nietzsche, 
a starring back of the abyss, stand linked at the point of the eidos. The eidos is a particular 
showing of the god in the sense Berkeley says "the horse is in the barn", which means that a 
tree that falls in the forest, with no one there, makes a sound for common sense. Or, for God. 
The reality of common sense, in Kant and Berkely, remains secure in the human beings all are 
set off against what remains. In Berkley the sense of idealism is said against Leibniz and those 
who think reality as Aristotelian "philosophic material" where a "extension" unseen to the eye, 
can be grasped by the intelligence. In Kant it is the moral sphere. Reason and cause are 
thought into the third abyss in Husserl and so in his student. One can say, to the students 
of Dreyfus, that it is obvious that the talk of an "understanding of being" implies the structure 
of subject and object in the sense still retained by Heidegger, but, of course, not in the 
sense of Locke of what is now the remaining part of philosophy, that is, so called science. 
The distinction between the place of the thinking in Husserl and Heidegger is touched 
on in the book about the Four Seminars. But it is said absurdly in Dreyfus because it is 
not thought genuinely. 

 

An abyss: the eidos as common sense, the modern conception of natural law as what is 
essential to an age. The voracious abyss: The cosmos as the lighting flash that changes 
the place of what is serious. The place of the serious and the place of the play: The 
fantastically serious movement of a wildebeest forging a river swarming with crocodile. 
Although there is something genuinely called play in animal life, animals never pretend. 
 To be animal is to never wish. There is no 'I would like to, aber perhaps can not." for the animal. 
There is no "Reality is better than dreams." Philosophy is serious only because it is not merely 
a matter of life and death. Ergo, the realism in Berkeley and Kant. "The horse is in the barn," 
the cosmos remains apart from the mortals. Kant is no solipsisist. Neither Husserl. Da-sein 
is not the human, but is the human. It is the seriousness as the human. The play is then 
abyss as apeiron, which means, as availability and knowing as origin.

QUESTIONS 

Presupposition: Thinking (*) that starts from a natural science (i.e., a science that rests on the paradoxical,
not to say fundamentally incoherent and therefore empty, Greek conception of nomos or law of phusis, or,
what is determined in contradistinction to nomos and techne or the making of things) forces the humanities
(everything else) to justify themselves and their continuation is alien to us, to this investigation. 

Phusis is an historical concept of the Greek Beginning which presents an impediment to the inquiry into 
the character of being so-far as it is a prefigured future. At the same time, to what extent, in actual 
thinking, and that means being, more will follow on this, the impediment still is our most ready possibility, 
constantly employed, is not clearly evident.   

Q1

Can one speak of a quarrel between Leo Strauss and Heidegger? The question does not ask if the 
quarrel as political contest and ideology (namely, that one solicitous to adduce evidence for a cause 
should gather up scientifically verifiable results and call them an argument due to the implications or 
their suggestive force on the naive or natural consciousness) exists, it does. But, rather, whether the 
question can be asked for a thinking devoted to the highest intellectual rigour -- and that means, 
not in the style of ‘a mother solicitous of her children’, or of a champion of a people and their 
accomplishments, but without condemnation and praise with respect to the implications of what 
follows from the investigation, and not even that what is implied by the implications can be regarded 
as a sign which would point to what is to be done, but always without trust of the implication. 



The issue of the question is the rank and stature of the thinkers. The piercing power of the respective 
thinkings. How so far Strauss can at all survive the onslaught of nihilism (i.e., of the thinking that 
superimposes existentialism over all beings, the ‘each one is free to their own opinion about everything’ 
as abandonment of the fundamental striving to know and learn of the character of being in the strain of 
beings called humans to haphazardness, and science of fact-value (where vert-frei, worthlessness or  
blind emperia of thoughtless expeditiousness, = fact) methodology, as the ‘It is tested and it works’. 
Ergo, factual (according to the theory of facts worked out between Hobbes and the Royal Society on 
the one hand, and Nietzsche's early readers Simmel and Weber, thusly the American elite understanding 
[through the takeover by Weber] the other.)    

The conflict between some attempt to salvage truth as a way to live of “man as man”, which, however, is 
never mere reactionary motion, and the forgetfulness of being as the extension of a region of resolute 
spontaneous questioning. 

On the general situation in which the question is asked: 

Insofar as Natural Right is read as whatever is necessary to an age, rather than a moment, the most 
conservative institutions tacitly seed nihilism and the link between democracy and nihilism. Though, 
without insight into themselves or what they are doing. Underlying this is the de facto formula, 
manipulation based on scientific power which achieves control of the common attitude prepares the 
“age” with a sense of its “necessity” which is then the standard of the laws. The contest to control 
the human being rages at the level of technological research into means of changing human necessity 
and thus one can speak of cybernetic guidance of the beings (with a certain emphasis of the 
unawareness implied by the word manipulation, e.g., in the ”nudge” based on psychological bias so-called), 
which, however, never means simply of ‘leaders’ who manipulate the masses, but of a contest between 
conflicting factions over the power to control those masses and themselves, for no human being is free of 
the sense of its necessity of usefulness, entertainment, and search far-off for knowing. 

Presupposition: The quarrel between Nietzsche and Heidegger exists, is still thinking, and thinkers 
possessed of an anxiously-guarded intellectual probity can take it seriously. 

Q2

Does a region exist apart from manipulation (unconscious guidance, ‘it works’, ideological propaganda) 
once identified with the conception of rationality as the essence of man as man, such that even though 
reasoning in no longer a true essence, ‘man is rational animal’, which points to a possible answer to 
the question How to live?, or, Kantian autonomy as the sound of a stream from the Godhead, and the 
ideas in the mind of a perfect and unchangeable world order, still be generally spoke of? What, when 
interest, the solicitous mother, and lack of mental acuity, are taken out, and we deal amidst the lack of 
complete information only, the “bounding” of rationality, of do we speak if anything? 

Q3

Does Heidegger take a backward step or a forward step? The question is not to be asked in the 
stale tones of a logical sequencing, neither in terms of historical chronology. Rather out of piercing 
reflection over questions that circle in the realm of basic questioning into the world situation -- the 
world where being is again put into question.

Was being in the sense of a stepping back before the First Beginning (or into primordial indiscion), thus 
before the interpretation of being as availability, or ousia, of phusis (thus a phusis-parousia), with the natural naive corollary of phusis and techne (making things) and phusis and 
nomos (primarily modification of laws)  only reached by the historical process? Though, to be sure, 
not in the sense of a rational process as with Hegel, nor even as with Nietzsche in the sense of a 
willing (in a spectrum of senses) of ‘life giving lies’, that reveal, at length, that ‘truth is deadly’, but in 
a sense that prefigures a (proscribed) genetic circle with the thinking of being in Heidegger? 
A moving away from everything theoretical, but not a sliding into art as ‘what is art?’, as a striving for 
unboundedly free research which has the passion to make art into reality as its justification. 

In quarrel one who is to think -- (*) that means ‘to be’ in the sense of the cogito-esse of Descartes as 
thought by Husserl’s peculiar choice of explication (though, then, not arbitrarily or out of tune with what 
Descartes made available) -- being in the sense of the ergon ( the hexis exposed to the possibility of 
abortion or creative growth) Heidegger is not first in one’s being prior to explicite training, schooling, 
and so on, in possession of this thinking (or being this thinking). For instance if one is to think through 
the characteristically Western “Something as something”, in καθόλου  or universal and 
the kath hekaston or particular back to mere expeditious jumble of the whole thing at immediate life, 
will one have been product of a sequencing? 

Heidegger thinks from being, and not from the sequence, the sequence has the status of a ‘logic’, 
which is to be subsumed by the unsequenced. This is susceptible of being grasped in thought in greater 
coherent detail and not merely vague talk. 

Q4

The question whether the genetic circle is itself Hermeneutic Circle. Ergo, “interpretation” rather than 
“text”, itself moves in the thinking in the cogito esse in the sense that the cogito is never a, I undergo 
an experience and then, afterwards, ‘think it over’, as though the experience were something factual, 
physical, tangible, a bleeding wound, and then the interpretation comes in and puts a ‘slant’ on it in the 
style of a saying that realities are more pleasant than dreams or daydreams. The dream and daydream 
here are cogito esse as much as the living thing, they are beings. The logos is, however, in question in 
its separability from immediate cogito-esse, so far as a question remains as to whether it is or is not 
wholly included in the phenomena. Husserl himself raised this question in a sense, though, strictly, 
and at bottom, we must regard the logos as part of the cogito-esse. At the same time, distinguishing 
the sense in which a mere look, a seeing, can be distinguished in some sense from the adding on of 
the constant talking over found in the strain of human beings, but both are cogito esse (which never 
means cogito ergo esse, but, rather, ‘think-am’, as it were.) 

Q5

Is the European science (the now planetary science, through its general, not to say universal, rise of 
power and intellectual dominance) great? Ergo, that all arguments must ground themselves in what 
belongs to the European science in order to take on the character of cogency to natural Dasein (this 
is comparable, at least at first, to the situation, e.g., where all arguments must be read out of the 
Confucian classics by the Literati officials in the period prior to the Nationalization of China). Judged 
from a historical criteria of importance, out of the current cultural-institutional situation, the answer is 
a straightforward yes. From the thinking of being and intellectual good faith through it require thinking. 
For, at first blush, this European science is not a science, it offers nothing that ‘does not aim at utility’ in the 
sense of Aristotle in the sense of an understanding that goes outside the immediate stock of readily 
exercisiable arts (or potentials to make things). 

However, here, what matters most is not at all a question of a “Santa Claus nailed to a Cross, 
in a Japanese department store”, as reported to a cultural anthropologist, that is to the issue of the 
cultures as the interpretaters of the symbols, but it asks, to what extent does the 
European Science outstrip any theory of cultures whatsoever? Here, to be sure, 
Dugin has proceeded very far. Though, genuine closure of this question is not in sight.