Politics

have just begun to interest me. Not current affairs or foreign policy but the radical questions concerning how it is that we can get along. There are many questions that hence arise: what is the essence of to be human? Does self-preservation always come before self-sacrifice? How did civilization begin? That is, why did we begin to work together in the first place? Can we ever attain altruism? Or is everything we do, for some reason or another, self-interested?

Perhaps it is sharing that enables the possibility of our getting along, and giving that enables the possibility for love, dedication in trust. Sharing, to not selfishly take someone else's portion even though you can, first begins the reciprocity in every relationship: you give and hence expect to receive, and if you don't receive, the trust is broken. So there is always an initial giving by the more trusting one, even in trades or exchanges. This is why shops have security; they enforce a fair exchange by/through exciting a fear of punishment in the shopper. When the shop has little security it is being more trusting, showing more trust in its clients. This is due to the shopowner having less fear that s/he will be robbed. This "less fear" is the shopowner's, despite the area or the people in it. Yet this "more trusting" directly relates to the area, its economic status (which can be assumed reflects the moral/ethical education of the area's inhabitants in that the wealthy are typically more educated and hence because they are wealthy and because they are more educated they are less likely to try to steal a pack of chewing gum), and, as was just shown, the people in the area.

So, as we have seen, every exchange is a giving, in that one must first give expecting the other to give in return: even sharing rests on a giving. Despite the fact that when we give we typically expect something in return, if we were only to not mind if nothing was given in return, and hence to take pleasure in generous giving, expecting but forgiving the failure to satisfy the expectation, we would, with this forgiving and giving, perhaps even refusing the return giving, come to be altruistic beings.

Yet one can say that the wanting to be altruistic degrades all "altruistic" actions to the status of reciprocally altruistic, as the "altruistic" doer is getting something out of his/her action, for him/herself, namely what they want, which is to be altruistic. So altruism is impossible. Yet ever so necessary.

This topic deserves more than a short blog.

Oblivion of moon (in physis)

As the earth rotates around the sun, the fire that sustains all beings - that has brought them into their being - shines forth the appearance of Being: the sun is what opens a space for a clearing to have occurred, to have arisen. The undifferenciated differenciating cannot have preceeded its ground, the earth, or the ground's source, the sun, for although the two must be distinguished by physis, man is needed not only to recognize but also to enact the very appearing of that which appears, for without someone for appearing to appear to, there is never any thing so called (appearing).

Physis is not only this distinguishing but also the sun, part of the distinguished, for the sun enables man to see the distinguishing (it appears as such only to him).

Physis is this enabling of man to see physis!

Fire is the ever moving heart of the revealing, ever distinguishing its essence into two aspects:

Physis reveals itself: it reveals revealing! It appears as the appearing of the appearance! Showing itself is the enabling of man to see showing itself itself.

Despite the above we can never forget the concealment in the heart of physis as that which cannot be seen inside that which is revealed, inside the revealing itself.
(Not) Showing itself is the enabling of man to see (or not see) not showing itself.

Physis enables man to see revealing and concealing. It is "what gives". As such it is also the sun.

The sun is what enables beings to be: it brings forth their being and the appearance of their being. The sun provides the light that shines into the clearing, enabling us to see the clearing; without it, the clearing would be concealed. In the sun's shining light the sun is the shining, the sun is the light. Physis is not only the growth but that which enables the growth and that which grows: not only the shining but that which enables the shining and that which shines, the light. The sun reveals the earth as earth, concealed as concealed, and is this revealing. Beings wander in the light of the sun, yet only for half of the day.

The other half of the day would be black were it not for our nightlight, the tide changer, the moon. In the dark the concealed comes to the fore. Yet is only seen as concealed due to the m

The Dog

Is unleashed to run free in the park
yet fences restrain it, as it wishes
to chase the cars on the street.
The chase: a subservient following
that actually believes it can get ahead!
Getting ahead is in fact remaining behind.
Remaining behind is where the love is found.
The love of the chase, of the trying
to get ahead, where you lose the love,
the passion, the desire that we crave.
And we love our craving. And we love
our love, the love that loves the
want to have, and the want to have more.
Yet our having more only leads to the
want to have even more! Satisfaction?
Can we ever attain it? Only within
the freedom within the fences: with
a dissatisfaction, no longer wanting
to chase but enjoying the freedom within
the fences. To keep it unconcealed, the job
we have to do for the truth. Concealed is
the truth, and to bring it out is the truth.
But it was always already out, and all I do
is ensure that what keeps us happy remains
unconcealed.

Seek Love

To think, a challenge,
a destruction of love,
of indifference,
in its determining:
a gathering that segregates.
Physis began, and the mystery
of nature emerged
from a forgetting.
Creation became discovery
and the beginning became
a conception found
in possibility never
actuality.

We must refind love, lost
on the battlefields
of thinking to a strife
that seems impossible
to conquer. Perhaps only
seek to refind a love
that once weakened will
fall again, and we can
do nothing but seek.

"Allowing in" as key to creation

I haven't written in forever and I need to write just to remind myself how. But each day I don't write I seem to lose myself more and more: I have convinced myself that one must forfeit being a writer to be a reader, and vice-versa. To read: to lose oneself to the other, to place oneself in the mind of the other, or rather to place the other's mind in the place of ones own. One questions the thought of the other, but only to ones own dismay, as the writer is right, if you properly choose who to allow in, that is. Yet we can only argue against one writer with another, until you yourself become a writer and can argue against the others. Nevertheless writing is also an allowing in. If you are never yourself but always your influences, if you are teaching and hence allowing a bringing-forth of the new into your learning. We learn as we write even if we only reiterate what we have already learned: perhaps the ability to discover the new does end at twenty-four, yet perhaps the new really is in the rephrasing of the old. Perhaps all that can be discovered has already been discovered and we re-discover what others and ourselves have already discovered. This is why the how of discovery is so important right now: perhaps we each have a different method of discovery or perhaps we all align when we try to discover, in the trying itself, as if we must all recognize, in order to properly discover, the coveredness of the covered as covered, and then to see in this coveredness the unconcealment of the concealed, the moment of revelation: having stretched to the limits of the understanding what is within these limits begins to reveal itself in the being of its appearance. The being of the appearance is allowed into unconcealment against its will to remain concealed. The appearance of a being is the way it is. The appearance of the concealed is the way (how) it is, concealed, yet as appearance thus unconcealed.

But what about acting? The appearance is unconcealed, and the concealed does not appear. But as concealed it appears: we know the actor is an actor and we can, from this, infer certain characteristics of the actor that correspond to actors as actors. Yet there is still more that is concealed than we can see in the concealment: it seems that the dialectic of concealment-unconcealment mimics that of the concept of stochasm: from the concealed comes unconcealed and concealed, from that concealed comes unconcealed and concealed, the unconcealed being held as unconcealed, in an infinite progression. Then we must look into the concealed to reveal to us the truth, and not into what we have already unconcealed. The concealed's concealedness is what unconceals the concealed.

But back to the allowing in of reading and writing. It is a possesion of a revelation, a revelation by language to the author in the reading, a possesion by language of the writer in the revelation that wants to be written. To read or write one must be possessed, possessed by revelation, what grants inspiration to simply do, and not not do. The allowing in is the allowing in of inspiration, the allowing in of a revelation to grant inspiration, the allowing in of the other through which one sees oneself, and from this seeing oneself the world is opened, truth becomes, and Being becomes what it is, the way we see it. Allowing in is the key to discovery, and hence to its brother, that is its identical twin, creation.

There is more I can write about this.

How I understand "horizon"

horizon is a boundary throughout the history of philosophy. But I see not a simple boundary but a confined area, not an empty mediating concept, the concept of the mediation itself, but the area between the abyss and the sky. We mortals have built the sky, that is, we dwell in it, and preserve in it the fourfold. The sky is the realm of "truth", of belief, of "fact", of knowledge. In the sky lies all those things we hold, things that seem to stand fast. But what do they stand on that enables us to hold them and not let them slip through our hands like butter? Reality, some say. The correspondance of assertion to reality, perhaps. But what is reality but another empty concept, an "error" or "vapor" that evaporates with the emergence of the sun. A concept simply created to ground our beliefs, to enable "truth", to allow the arrogant and condescending who cannot bear to lose to be "right". Everything stands on a leap, a leap from the ground over the abyss (where reality disappears as a mirage), to the horizon that grounds the world in identity and non-contradiction; in other words, the horizon is the not-ground grounding the possiblity of holding, creating the ability to stand. The horizon is tautology, as if the "is" were always an equal sign (=) and the "is not" its negation, nevertheless in tautology. Synthetic statements are grounded in analytic statements, if such a difference hasn't collapsed. The horizon, for me, is not only a boundary but the ground of the sky, that grounds as a not-ground the (not-ground of) standing/holding after/above the leap over the abyss from an endless nowhere, from a veritable, beautiful, eternal nothing.

Culture

Nietzsche describes a "genuine culture", in "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks", as a "unity of style". This unity of style enables the activity and force of philosophy to take effect, for philosophy to free itself from "exile among barbarians", to begin the do-ing of philosophy; that is, only in a culture can philosophy work its magic, a magic that is inherently doing, to reality, and no longer confined to the play of the mind or idea with itself. But what is a "unity of style"?

The many ways of saying being

Being: the way in which being(s) is(are).
being: the totality
Essence: the whatness of (a) being.
Existence: the thatness of (a) being. Sometimes the totality, in contrast to not-being.
Perhaps both essence and existence are really the how it came to be of (a) being.

What about the not-Being that is not the way in which (a) being is?

I will have to continually alter this blog until I can get it right.

In-difference

In-difference. A hyphen stands within indifference as the most significant signifier to have ever been. The ground of all being is a relation, is a relation, is a relation… A relation always expresses the in-difference of subject and predicate: an affirmative relation expressing indifference, even if to highlight a difference; the negative relation expressing the in difference of the subject and predicate, even if to outline similarities. In-difference is both indifference and in difference, both indifferent and in difference to/with itself. Being contains nothing and their sublation within itself: phusis is what gives beings over to being in an unfolding that it itself is. As all beings need an opposite or simply something in relation to it in order for it to be, phusis is the en-abling of be-ing, through the permitting of such creation, that is of opposites, to unfold. Phusis en-ables the reciprocity of in-difference to/with itself in Being. Phusis lets being be in-difference. Susan Schoenbaum writes: “What I hear in the German phrase [das aufgehend-verweilende Walten – the emerging-abiding sway] as a whole is something like a dynamic, emerging pulsion of emerging interrelationships among emerging things. The “sway” of phusis is the way in which the coming into being of things determines each thing to be in relation to all the others, so that each has sway or influence over the other.” Does this mean that phusis is what brings about the coming into being of things or that it is the coming into being of things? I think it would mean that phusis is what, in the coming into being of things, allots each thing its relationships through enabling the hen panta. Yet within the one there are differences, or at least we mortals create differences, if even we can create anything at all: this is precisely the reason why, as Schoenbaum continues, “the traditional meanings [full of differences to other beings/things, full of oppositions, ie. techne, nomos, ethos, thesis – with regard to phusis] of both these words [being and phusis] need to be called into question in such a way that the originary – for Heidegger the unitary – meaning of these words is able to emerge.” Time has allowed for difference to invade the sole total encompassing originary word meaning, a word now in difference to itself, a word then indifferent to itself.

The oblivion of the time of fate and the ground for the possibility of givenness

What is forgotten is forgotten.
The Nothing reminds beings of being
as such and as a whole: the difference
that is the oblivion of being;
in oblivion of the oblivion.
To progress would mean to remain oblivious.
Yet it would be the progression of an illusion.
To heed the Nothing would be to clear,
to permit the unconcealing of the appearance
of being, its presence. An unfolding
would re-veal, yet being-given,
the givenness of being, as if for the second time,
as we are behind THE AHEAD of ourselves yet always
already ahead of ourselves, nevertheless behind:
the forturn of fate that we trail in our time's turning
behind fate's time: the oblivion of time.

The oblivion of being does not end with the recognition of the preferance for beings over being, a preference that, phenomenologically, can nevertheless find the being-givenness of being in those beings it prefered: all beings mimic, in their essence, the Being of being, that is, the way in which being is, its nature; this Being, the ultimate goal of metaphysics, remains concealed in beings themselves. Yet it is not true that the Being of beings is equivocal to the Being of being. All we can hope for is that this latter Being shows-itself, somehow, out of the (Being of the) beings we can ground. This would be the ulitimate giving, a giving we cannot suppose will/can ever occur. This is the goal of philosophy, a goal that may never be attained.

If B/being is given, it is not that it always already was and is subsequently discovered, but that fate, ahead of us, creates and chooses to reveal to us, in our turn, behind its turn (in which it has done the creation), what it is that we are allowed to discover or "have". This has been the oblivion of being, the oblivion of the time of fate, of the necessity for our being behind time if it is possible that things are given, if fate is possible. Predetermination means that we are "post" of the determining, that we are behind the time that has come "pre" or before our own. This is the condition for the possibility of givenness.

What has always already been is given to us from out of the future.