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

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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.

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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. 

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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.