Some Impressionistic Comments on the History of the Atmosphere of Thought Leading to Historial Being
Said in the second, unusual tonality, the principle of reason sounds like this: ”Nothing is without reason.” The emphasized words “is” and “reason” now allow a unison between being and reason to resound. The principle now says what it says through this unison. What does the principle say? It says: being and ground/reason belong together. This means that being and ground/reason “are” in essence the same. When we think the same—more precisely, sameness—as a belonging together in essence, then we keep in mind one of the earliest thoughts of Western thinking. Accordingly, ”the same” does not mean the empty oneness of the one and the other, nor does it mean the oneness of something with itself. “The same” in the sense of this oneness is the indifference of an empty, endlessly repeatable identity: A as A, B as B. thought in the sense of what in essence belongs together, the same indeed bursts the indifference of what belongs together, even more it holds them apart in the most radical dissimilarity; it holds them apart and yet does not allow them to fall away from each other and hence disintegrate. This holding-together in keeping-apart is a trait of what we call the same and its sameness. This holding [Halten] pertains to a “relation” [Verhältnis] that still stands before thinking as what is to be thought. But through metaphysical thinking it does come to light in particular shape; it does so most purely in Hegel’s Logic.
Similarity and sameness, which is to say “difference and repetition”, is the mystical reading of materialism (I call this "mystical", because from the core of man, comes the ability to make similarity, from which all that, out there, the real exterior things, get their founding), where the problem of the universal is subsumed under the ability to see one thing as like another. Insofar as similarity is a basic feature of intelligibility, it has to be raised to a material absolute. Since it is what allows one things to be, because if there were not many, as a kind, that fell together as similar, there would be simple unintelligibility. The similarity would have to stand with the principle of identity, constantly asserting that there was not the similar, but the same. But this materialism is cast off utterly in Husserl, since it is a rationalisation moving towards a tendentious and overweening project of process and relation of similarities, that of a materialist realism. Said more appropriately, from the Phenomenology of Husserl, there is the abeyance. In the abeyance there is no rationalisation. But putting aside all these muddle-headed English projects, why in Heidegger does one still speak of sameness? Because the sameness is not an identity according to a law, but according to the abeyance of the reception of the “everyday” reception, that itself points, or radiates, towards the scientific and towards the primordial. Thus, schematically thought, the text called Heidegger thinks neither the function of the process as the samneses, nor the property of the substance as the thingley object. It thinks on the beings, in terms of the ready-to-hand, which is the substance cast into Nothing, and a presence-to-hand as a look which asks for no rationalisation to account for its genus.
If the Nothing were thought according to the biological thinking, the hand, which is the first and obvious example of the ready-to-hand, would be held to be a great adaption, a prized trait, which made, with its opposable thumb, the rise of the human being and the master of technology possible. But, in the abeyance no such evolution is thought, as an explanation. Neither is a field of drives to be found in the Nothing (which is always: Nothing-ing, Nicht nichtet), which leads one to a mantic Dionysian region, from which the world of presence could be measured as lacking. There is a night world, and a day world, but everything hangs on the possibility of holding the phenomenological observation of the two beyond all projects. In abeyance according to the Historial grasp of being as such. Only if the glance at being as such is no project is the abeyance still at work in the Historial “interpretation”.
"Said in the second, unusual tonality, the principle of reason sounds like this: ”Nothing is without reason.”" Insofar as this nothing, the region of the Ready-to-Hand, has no reason, it was observed by Hume in his simple claim concerning the psychology of association. But the cause rests in the Geschick itself as the Principle which is mighty. The Nothing is thought and not thought. In Kant the Nothing is ruled out of bounds, since Kant holds one can be sure that one has gone a certain span, even if lost in thought. And all the way one’s hands may have been grasping a wallet or a cellphone, and one was abstractedly walking about, engaged in locomotion, preceding to travel from this place to that one. But, according to the thinking of the look, the eidos, in Kant, the thing as a species must have an independent region of subsistence, beyond the presence of what comes forth according to what one calls sensorium. The Geschick comes to the horizon of the Nothing, and looking into it, as though at what is roughly like the present world, but not quite, supposes what can not be deduced but which shadows the edges of the topographical presence. The Nothing is only the Nothing in so far as it regions beside presence in what shines forth in its own shadowy fashion. One leaves it apart from the projects, not knowing why or blaming it for making some aim untenable.
“The emphasized words “is” and “reason” now allow a unison between being and reason to resound.”
Thusly we are lead to show Reason, once again, as the “-” which is the region of the Open, whereby the Geschick makes Da-sein come into its regard. Cause is not found in the region of vision, no more than is identity, a being that saw but knew nothing of identity would act only according to the Readiness of the Nothing. If world is not thought as Nous, the god of Reason, the Olympian and the Cosmic gods hold no sway. The Olympians are the law givers, which speak over presence, and the Kosmic gods are the ones who come forth in the Nothing, as of their own. But Nous is the sight of the bifurcation. However, when Nous thinks ontically, for the first time, in Parmenides, noticing that there are always more things, but each must be thought according to the whole of a world, already the bare level of what is thinkable has flown. The coming forth of the orientation is scrambling out of the dimension of the Geschick.
This talk of “the same” is thought according to manner of one who looks towards the ‘memorey’ to find the source of the higher motion, as with Socrates and the notion of the wise. The remembering, would be what brings into the beings what guides them. But according to the Medieval thought, the things are the makings of that transcendent God, having become Christian, they sought the inspiration from above. Only by the inspiration might they put down the law, as what the higher faculties could read out, though not follow with felicitous readiness in the case of the interpretation of the law into the case at hand. In his most human man was reaching for the God. With Hegel, following Descartes and the rest, the god was found to rest in the surface of the presencing sensorium. It was as thought remembered in the flesh, from outside, and not from the chthonic abyss of Socrates. Then, with the coming of the cause, and the putting away of the telos, in the modern moment, which in fact is layered over the final teleology, as we still find it so in the Marxist teleology and the Neo-positivist technicity, the possibility of effects becomes the essence of future as Power. What can we expect? Only in the abeyance does philosophy look upon itself as something ended, as something entirely different giving way to dissolution. This is the atmosphere in which “the same” comes to speak of the beings. In Kant already this same is basically known, as the realm of the Critical, the critique of insight becomes another name for metaphysics. There is an insight in the sight of equality, that man knows one thing to be of equal length to another, for instance. Insights come to rest in the basic stratum of what is learned. As what is learned but not given from the outset as are fingernails, for example. Always, language, is not given, but it is only there afterwards.
One can see that the four movements all are, according to being as the concealing. And being as the concealing is the history of the Geschick as the thinking of this epoch. What is concealed is being as such. It seems useless to think such things at time, though having moved through them we often loose sight of their concreteness, until at length one again glimpses the reception in such thinking of what is calling out to be thought. Everything leads to this thinking, in so far as one thinks what is worthy of thought. Therefore why? But the why is perhaps also what is given up in the Historial more than anything else that is the last leaving off, when the why is set beside the mere cause or span between cause-effect and telos as the opening of the “sameness’ of the leaping region which is being.