A Review of the Difficulties out of the Ground of Common Sense 

The question about how to represent history, so called history, is superficial when compared to the question of how we are to grasp time in its essence. History means primarily the history of the nation, its battles and the transformation of economic arrangements, its conception of rights, of the meaning of the legal person, of citizens and subjects, duties, self-sacrifice, the place of liberty, and various other metaphysical issues of knowledge which always become stale when divorced from the living interest of the people. The history of a country, in our own time, is at war with the history of the world. The consideration, known for 24 centuries, thought through constantly by a few, of the distinction between the country and the world, between the interests of the country and the universal law of reason, of nature’s logos, raged for the longest time within hidden minds, hovering at the cusp of public attention. Often men were suppressed or burned from speaking too nosily on this score, or ,too rashly. Considering that even Millennia ago a hundred years was felt as a long time (as still now despite all the clamor about the transformation of the mental effects of our lived time experiences among those who regard themselves a mental aristocracy), it has been a ponderously huge span of time since these things have been present to the most thoughtful. And yet, since the dawning of cosmic nihilism, since the beginning of the scientific age, where science means not the product of reason, but rather technique, external experiment, the region that excludes moral investigation, such discussions can only be considered from a sub-rational, and, increasingly, an irrational vantage (which was to some extent always true in the political sphere, but not in the University. Not in the highest intellectual authority; however little its force was felt in actual affairs). That which was to be universal, the reason in nature, faded out.    

Husserl who was a mathematician of the first rank, and schooled in physics, diagnosed the difficulty under the word, natural science has become a science of nature. The science of nature is one meaning of the sense in which, after the longest spell of propagandizing, the Enlightenment was compelled to admit that its premises were not self evident. The question went away, because it was impossible to turn back to reason, to philosophy and rational religion, and de facto it was settled that no moral standards were possible (said in the sense of the theoretical discussions which much later on became the Hart Fuller debates and such-like, ergo the turn to the so-called Positive law [which, true, had always been the great power in practice, but in the minds of human being's was constantly weighed against a rigorously developed, and not merely anarchical and insane, conception of Justice). The most intelligent people grasped this in Germany, the full force of the crises, already around the year 1900. Thus WWI was followed by the greatest period of freedom ever known to human beings during the Weimar, the doctrines of Hegel, still rational, were replaced with those of von Gierke and the like, a theory of the people and their "natural law" was adduced, since sheer desperate moral chaos was only confounded by a strange sense of teetering on the creative zenith the collapse of 29' was all the more a shock. (After the Second War, as with the question of cancer caused by tobacco, long raised in Germany, the issue was suppressed by the non-rational, non-deliberative, non-Liberal in any serious sense, American political-corporate forces (as described in Schmitt), and partly by American stupidity and unconsciousness, partly because the war was understood sensibly as an economic catastrophe. Yet, conscious understanding of a matter never destroys its essence or reality which remains no matter what view is taken of it, as with the cancer question. [This implies that the datum of the intellect have a real status in a new and as yet at the time unthought way, this was thought through by Nietzsche, but long partly hidden behind the works of Weber, the great Simmel, and the like.]) The so called axioms of the Science of Nature were at least two-fold. On the one side, the ultimate theory of inertia. Stemming from Galileo, and still in control of the field of physics, places an imaginary vacuum, something that one has never encountered, at the center of a theoretical grasping of the universe. Because this requires many breaks with reasonableness, for instance the claim that “nothing is faster than the speed of light,” which plays on the distinction between the inertial frame of reference, the calculable field of matter which resists or moves freely, and a conceptual nothing, which nonetheless seems necessary in the light of the theory of the "heat event’s" ("Big Bang") expansion. Necessary not to the science of physics, because there whatever can not be measured does not exist, but to human reason. Because there, with reason, it is inconceivable that the universe could have expanded to the size it has, within the limits of the speed of energy moving through the vacuum. All this posits a fictionalism. 

On the other hand, there is a deeper objection, which is not everywhere understood. It stems from Kant’s synthesis of the problems raised by Hume concerning causality and the traditional view of the intellect. This view was taken up by Schopenhauer, who replaced causality with his famous world “Will”. For 22 centuries the discussion of the human soul, with its senses (actions/capacities of the eyes, ears, etc.), its urges, and its intellect, with all the happenings which go under the name “anthropology,” which meant the logos, the reason, or the serious discussion of Anthropos, the human being, and psychology, the careful study of the soul, with words or with reason, reason being a specific feature of speech, that which grasps ideas or kinds of things, trees, iron ore, wolves, thoughts, continues unabated. Sometime after the year 1800, as the technological “science,” tecnhe, in contradistinction to the “queen of the sciences,” Philosophy, and to Theology, the science from which the moral law must ultimately be derived, there arises an empty concept (when understood in its technical meaning, which, is never for the most part grasped in any precision, such that Chalmers often gives some older, say Descartes, thinker, utterly absurdly, as its origin.), consciousness. One can speak about all manner of problems with respect to the soul, but with respect to consciousness nothing can be said with respect to its content. Theoretically it is the sin qua non of experience. There can be an experience without push carts, without clouds, without the sea, without vision, without any thing which might follow the definite article, and so forth. There can be no experience that doesn't also have consciousness. [What is "also" supposed to mean here?]

Because Kant works from what is reasonable, from reason, he never posits this empty so-called epistemological condition. He speaks of space, and he speaks of time. He says, also, though in theory the question of causality is difficult to maintain, it is unreasonable to give the issue a great weight. Since, though, there is the bare logical consistency of the denial of causality, an event need not have a cause, nothing is inconsistent in an event, which would otherwise by an effect, which were spontaneous and came out of nothing. In creativity properly so-being. So far as consciousness is taken in the experimental sense of techne, of what everyone calls science, it names something that exists so far as it is effective. Therefore it is worth observing that such a concept excludes the grasping of creativity. Creativity is not a matter of the law of reactions, of things that either exert force, or move in the vacuum according to the ideal thinking of the concept of inertia. Talk of consciousness, as an abiotic being, remains within the region of Techne. It has no moral content. Which means, at the same time, no human content. So far as the human is not understood as measurable quantity of mass or a system of entropic energy. If the human is supposed to mean an animal with speech, reason/logic, it is excluded from the region in which the consciousness concept moves. Therefore, the discussion of the analytical philosophers, Chalmers on the one side, Dennnett on the other, remains sterile with respect to philosophy in any serious sense. On the other hand, if philosophy is genuinely over, and has become “science,” e.g., the unhuman, techne, the alien, it is worth noting that the doctrine of creativity must be regarded as a subjective fiction. So far as the human being is subjective, all its experiences are fictions. Or, merely subjective. It might be asked, how can such a being have a science at all? It is because, of the one hand, logic in the sense of Frege and Russel, where it means not reason, but mathematical logic, is simply taken on faith. Thus, again, the problem of authority of the so-called axioms. 

Mathematical perfection is no different at all in the most complex mathematical effort, in that which only through the most lengthy and superhuman study one might grasp, than in the simplest. So far as bare arithmetic, the number one, is grasped as perfectly equal to another one, in the intellect, we have the basis of all mathematical thinking. The perfection of the objects of the intellect. A triangle, in this sense, is never perfectly manifest. This means that the human intellect is made the standard of the science. Thus, human subjectivity is made the standard. The inner human workings. Once the doctrine of the soul is knocked down, the justification for holding this region, where imagination, envisaging a triangle, and conception, thinking of the three sided object as such, must come from its efficacy in estimation of happenings. Estimation means prediction in the modern sense. So far as the intellect, a subjective field, generates efficacious imaginings and concepts, it is deemed useful. It is useful, though merely subjective. What counts as objective is the sense data. Howsofar is a conception of sense data theoretically valid once there is no contrast with urges and intellect? A bare empiricism differs from Philosophic empiricism, as was know to the tradition for 22 centuries. A bare empiricism has no logical meaning (logical, that is, for reason which has layed down to itself certain limiting determinations as rules). Because each object is unique as given in experience. No oak is exactly as an other oak. Nothing can be “built up” scientifically. The meaning of the logical induction from the tradition was that the thing pointed to, the “singular” being, was the object of the intellect which discovered in the singular patterns. That I find that of all the Redwoods I see, they each grow toward die Himmel, towards the sky or heavens. The crowns of the trees become, then, part of a structure of “particulars,” that is, particulars under universals. The tree I can point to is the thing of the senses only, but it is subsumed under the scientific datum of the intellect in its pattern finding capacity. Thus something that is true in the past, now, and in the future is rescued from the destructive decay of time. The river of time soaks into its body and melts all the Redwoods, all the stuff of the senses, but the intellect has saved something for its Metaphysics. It’s as simple as that. 

When Russel says, Heidegger has confused his logical “nothing,” with a psychological “nothing.” He makes one of his typical thoughtless remarks. Russel, who was an intelligent man and thought through many problems with quite exemplary clarity, never thought through the basic foundation of the modern technical scientific development. He rejected Kant already before the turn of the century just when the Marburg school had raised him to his new glory! Russel simply ignores the difficulties in the English style, as denoted by Macaulay, who, in another connection says that the English always ignore “asymmetries” when it is covenant so to do. This attitude, it must be said, for good or ill, is impossible for the German. One may think, true, of Pushkin's Hermann, and pity the German his agitation over mere trifles, which, from the perspective of daily life have little meaning, or, seemingly little meaning. Yet, is nihilism a trifle? Is the inability, self confessed, by all quarters, of the leading power in the whole of human life, namely science to distinguish good from evil, a trifle? It is, rather, a crisis unparalleled in the human development. It is nearly impossible to credit Dugin with such foolish utopianism with respect to the overcoming of the spirit of cosmic nihilism. Yet, on the other hand, a choice had to be taken to enter the contest. 

Heidegger says that what is lacking is the spirit that can see the crisis for crisis, that is, can even admit the existence of a crisis. It is true that Heidegger himself, his teacher Husserl, Leo Strauss, and quite a few others did admit this crisis, but who today does? One might suppose Dugin himself. However, his powers of philosophy are less than his powers of faith, if one might say so, if this is so. Here we must again attempt the path that was taken by Husserl. The crucial decay in the time of Husserl is that of psychology. Psychology becomes, at length, after passing through the stage of Associationalism, into mere experimental, thus, “scientific,” what, study of the soul? A ridiculous absurdity. A study of the rational animal carried out without rationality. Or, as it is said, with the so-called notorious “instrumental rationality.” Instrumental might as well read nihilistic. 

From the point of view of Nietsche where does the doctrine of the overcoming of nihilism come in? For Nietzsche Nihilism is said in another manner. His sense is that though man’s essence, his reason, is still intact, its datum is arising out of the abyss of the will. And this abyss of the will is but one logos among 1001. There is no so-called subjectivity, because Nietzsche begins with the critique of causality. With the ground of rejection of the specific ordering of the causal things, for instance that one can not merely say because day follows night that night caused day, an investigation of causality, confusing to common sense, opens up. It is solved by the standard of predictability (estimation of the changing things, in a non-theoretical sense, ergo not under the strict "science"). This standard, while powerful, is never satisfying to the most intelligent investigators, most of all to Schopenhauer who demolishes it as if in his sleep. So far as what counts is prediction, prediction of the repeatable “fact,” the factical means that the will to repeat a given experiment is the “cause” of the so-called fact. Since whatever is not yet a fact of technological art is merely a historical “singular.” Whatever is singular can not be the feature of a science. Because it is unfolded in past, in the present, in future. It is what according to Thomas, and, to Agathon before him, what marks the limits of God’s power. Even God can not make something once produced, produced in the past, unproduced. This doctrine, in accord with reason, nonetheless, from the point of view of bare intelligibility is imperfect. It is intelligible, as many common entertainments demonstrate hourly, to consider the erasure of some person born in the past through making them not born. The so-called “Mandela effect” conceptualizes an intermediary case, of something partially or imperfectly unproduced. 

The region of intelligibility is more comprehensive than the region of what is reasonable. One can think the reproduction of a past being being caused by the omnipotent God, but the God limited by rationality, can not accomplish this. The Catholic God (ratio ordinata), thus, is the same as the Secular God, so far as the Secular God is said in the phrase “the regularity of nature.” It is a God that is limited by the reasonable. Thus reality and the thinkable differ. However, the analytic philosophical tradition, which is the water bearer of the nihilistic science, in positing such conditions does not speak from reason but from subjectivity. This is so so far as we think theoretically. On the other hand, it is not so that in our ordinary thinking, someone who announces themselves to be an Orthodox Jew, or a holder on the Progressive faith of an inchoate and unthought through Enlightenment “Humanism,” somehow avoided the authority of the sciences. Here, the second meaning of authority is invoked. It is what draws the being of the human being to it of the human’s own accord. It is authority because it makes sense, because it is trusted, because it accords with the human soul. In this sense we come towards the region of Technological Essence. Of what fires within the human, and, is the human. Thus, Dasein is alien to itself, and dismisses itself in its core. What brews in the soul of Dasein is self alienation, in the repudiation of its own essence. Of reason. However, since reason is long forgotten, what thinks? 

In this connection, in connection to the “soul of Dasein,” which can not be said in the manner of a Platonic psychology, or, indeed, of the tradition as the tradition understood itself, must be said in the manner of the Historical Consciousness. Consciousness means awareness. But, there is bare awareness which merely repeats certain catch phrases, and there is again and again approaching the essence of the manner of being in which this awareness comes to hold sway. Even the sense in which everyone knows that certain matters become moss grown, and merely are said, and no longer grasped, is itself a trope that may be in error.

We must then approach the question of what is to be understood by the soul after Phenomenology is born out of the repudiation of any possible psychology. We must regain the possibility to follow the footsteps of Husserl and his student from the exact historical motivation. To again see in Plato Phenomenology, which is an overlay on recollected memory as a speaking to the ancients. 

The questions to be raised are: What is “Intentionality” properly? 

How does the issue of the sequence of approach in the grasp of being, allegedly grasped on an “analogy” with the senses, come to the thinking of the “Truth of Being?”

Howsofar does the Technological Essence hold sway in the Sophia of the soul of Dasein? 

  

Where there can be no soul of Dasein in the sense of a thing apart from beings, of the bodily being, the bodily being is no longer thought as “accident” over and against essence. Since the “eyes of the soul” of Dasein do not snatch things up from the region of the accidents. Therefore, what is induction become in this region of being? Is Being a region, or are regions only said in connection to Metaphysics of availability?