| ND Guide Pages 354-400 |
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After Auschwitz 354-358 Reflective people, and artists, not seldom have the feeling of not quite being there, of not playing along; as if they were not at all themselves, but a sort of spectator. In many cases others find this repugnant; Kierkegaard based his polemic against what he called the aesthetic sphere on this. What in the meantime the critique of philosophical personalism speaks to, is that this position towards the immediate, which disavows all existential attitudes, arrives at its objective truth in a moment which leads beyond the delusion of the self-preserving motive. In the "it isn't all that important", which for its part indeed is happy to ally itself with bourgeois coldness, the individual [Individuum] can soonest of all, yet without fear, become conscious of the nullity of existence. That which is inhuman in this, the capacity to distance oneself and rise above things by being a spectator, is in the end precisely what is human, whose ideologues react so vehemently against. It is not entirely implausible, that that part, which conducts itself so, would be the immortal one. The scene in which Shaw on the way to the theater showed his identification to a beggar and hurriedly said "press", hides under the cynicism something of the consciousness of this. It would help to explain the matter-at-hand, which astonished Schopenhauer: that the emotions in sight of the death not only of others but also our own, are many times over so weak. Very likely human beings are without exception under a bane, none capable of love, and for that reason each and every one feels not loved enough. But the attitude of being a spectator expresses at the same time the doubt as to whether this could be all there is, while nonetheless the subject, so relevant in its delusion, has nothing other than that poverty and ephemerality, which is animalistic in its impulses. Under the bane living beings have the alternative between involuntary ataraxy – an aesthetic of weakness – and the animality of the involved. Both are false life. Something of each however belongs to a right désinvolture [off-handedness] and sympathy. |
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Metaphysics and Culture 358-361 All culture after Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, is garbage. By restoring itself after what transpired in its landscape without resistance, it has turned entirely into that ideology which it potentially was, ever since it took it upon itself, in opposition to material existence, to breathe life into this latter with the light, which the separation of the Spirit from manual labor withheld from such. Whoever pleads for the preservation of a radically culpable and shabby culture turns into its accomplice, while those who renounce culture altogether immediately promote the barbarism, which culture reveals itself to be. Not even silence can break out of the circle; it merely rationalizes one's own subjective incapacity with the state of objective truth and debases this once more into a lie. If the Eastern states have, in spite of their twaddle to the contrary, abolished culture and transformed it as a pure means of domination into junk, this is what that culture, which moans about this, only deserves, and to what for its part, in the name of the democratic right of human beings to what already resembles them, it zealously tends. It is only that the administrative barbarism of the functionaries over there [in the East], by praising itself as culture and proclaiming its bad state of affairs as a precious and sacred legacy, convicts its reality, the infrastructure, to be as barbaric for its part as the superstructure they demolish, by taking it under control. In the West, it is at least permitted to say so. |
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Happiness and Waiting in Vain 366-368 What metaphysical experience would be, to those who eschew the reduction of this to presumably religious primal experiences, is closest to how Proust imagined it, in the happiness promised by the names of villages like Otterbach, Watterbach, Reuenthal, Monbrunn. You think that if you go there, you would be in what is fulfilled, as if it really existed. If you really go there, that which is promised recedes like a rainbow. Nevertheless you aren't disappointed; rather, you feel that you are too close, and that's why you don't see it. This is presumably why the difference between landscapes and the districts, which determine the world of images of childhood, is not that great. What Proust experienced at Illiers was something many children of the same social strata shared at different places. But for this generality, what is authentic in Proust's portrayal, to form, one must be enraptured at that one spot, without squinting at the generality. To the child it is obvious that what delights it about its favorite little town is to be found there and only there, and nowhere else; it errs, but its error constitutes the model of experience, that of a concept, which ultimately would be that of the thing itself, not the poverty of that which is shorn away from things. |
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"Nihilism" 369-374 Those to whom despair is not a terminus may ask, as to whether it were better, that there be nothing at all rather than something. Even this admits to no general answer. For a human being in a concentration camp, if someone who had escaped in time could at all judge over this, it would be better if they had not been born. Nevertheless the ideal of nothingness would evaporate before the momentary quiver of an eye, indeed before the feeble tail-wagging of a dog, which one has just given a treat, which it promptly forgets. To the question, as to whether one is a nihilist or not, a thinking person would very likely have to answer with the truth: too little, perhaps out of coldness, because one's sympathy with that which suffers is too slight. In nothingness culminates the abstraction, and the abstract is what is reprehensible. Beckett reacted to the situation of the concentration-camps, which he does not name, as if there were a ban on such like that of the graven image, in the only befitting manner. What is, is like the concentration-camp. Once he speaks of a lifelong death-sentence. The only hope, faintly dawning, is that there would be nothing anymore. This too he rejects. Out of the fissure of inconsistency formed by this, the image-world of nothingness appears as something which tethers his poetry. In the legacy of its treatment, of the apparently stoical carrying-on, what is noiselessly screamed is that things ought to be different. Such nihilism implies the opposite of the identification with nothingness. Gnostically, it regards the world as it has been created as radically evil and its repudiation the possibility of a different, not yet existent one. So long as the world is as it is, then all images of reconciliation, peace and quiet resemble those of death. The smallest difference between nothingness and that which has come to rest, would be the refuge of hope, the no-man's-land between the border-posts of being and nothingness. From that zone needs to be extricated, instead of overcoming, the consciousness of what the alternative would have no power over. |
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Desire of Salvation and Block 377-382 Kant, who frowned upon the precipitate rush into intelligible worlds, equates the subjective side of Newtonian science with cognition, the correspondingly objective one with truth. The question of how metaphysics would be possible as a science is thus to be taken precisely: as to whether it satisfies the criteria of a cognition oriented towards the ideal of mathematics and so-called classical physics. The Kantian posing of the problem, which bears in mind the metaphysics he assumes to be a natural predisposition, refers to the "how" of the generalized and necessarily supposed cognition; but really means its "what", its possibility itself. He repudiates this, according to the measure of that ideal. Science, which is released from any further reservations due to its imposing results, is however the product of bourgeois society. The rigidly dualistic basic structure of Kant's rational-critical model duplicates that of a relation of production, in which commodities fall out of machines like his phenomena fall out of the cognitive mechanism; where the material and its own determinacy are as indifferent in relation to their profit as in Kant, who has it stenciled in. The end-product, which has exchange-value, resembles the Kantian objects, which are subjectively produced and accepted as objectivity. The permanent reductio ad hominem [Latin: reduction to the person] of everything which appears equips cognition for the ends of internal and external domination; its highest expression is the principle of unity, borrowed from that of compartmentalized production, divided into partial acts. What makes the Kantian theory of rationality grandiose is that it is really interested only in the realm of authority of scientific propositions. |
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Mundus Intelligibilis 382-386 The concept of the intelligible is neither one of something real nor one of something imaginary. Rather aporetic. Nothing on earth and nothing in the empty heavens is to be saved, by defending it. The "yes but" retort to the critical argument, which does not wish something to be torn away from it, already has the form of the stubbornly insistent existent, of the clinging, irreconcilable with the idea of salvation, in which the cramp of such prolonged self-preservation would relax. Nothing can be saved untransformed, nothing, which has not made its way through the door of its death. If salvation is the innermost impulse of every Spirit, then is there no hope except that of unreserved abandonment: of what is to be rescued as well as of the Spirit, which hopes. The gestus of hope is that which holds onto nothing of what the subject itself wishes to hold onto, by which the latter promises itself, that it would endure. The intelligible, in the spirit of Kant's setting of boundaries no less than that of the Hegelian method, would be to go beyond these, to think solely negatively. Paradoxically, the intelligible sphere envisaged by Kant would be once more "appearance" [Erscheinung]: what returns to that which is hidden from the finite Spirit, what it is compelled to think and by virtue of its own finitude deforms. The concept of the intelligible is the self-negation of the finite Spirit. |
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Appearance [Schein] of the Other 394-397 The course of the world is not completely conclusive, also not absolute despair; this latter is on the contrary its conclusiveness. As untenable as the traces of the Other are in it; as much as all happiness is distorted by its revocability, the existent is nevertheless shot through, in the gaps which stamp identity as a lie, with the promises, constantly broken again, of that Other. Every happiness is a fragment of the total happiness, which human beings are denied and which they deny themselves. Convergence, the humanly promised Other of history, points unswervingly to what ontology illegitimately resettles before history or exempts from it. The concept is not real, as the ontological proof would have it, but it could not be thought, if something in the thing did not press towards it. Kraus, who, armored against every tangible, imaginatively unimaginative assertion of transcendence, preferred to read this latter longingly rather than cancel it out, was no romantic liberal metaphorist. Though metaphysics is not to be resurrected – the concept of resurrection belongs to creatures, to not something created, and is in intellectual forms the index of its untruth – but perhaps it only originates with the realization of what is thought in its sign. Art anticipates something of this. Nietzsche's work overflows with invective against metaphysics. But no formulation describes the latter more faithfully than that of Zarathustra: pure fool, pure poet. The thinking artist understood the unthought art. The thought, which does not capitulate before the miserably ontic, turns by the latter's criteria into nothing, truth into untruth, philosophy into folly. Nevertheless it cannot abdicate, lest stupidity triumph in realized unreason. Aux sots je préfère les fous [French: To pigs, I prefer fools]. Folly is truth in the form, with which human beings are stricken, as soon as they do not, in the midst of the untrue, let go of truth. Even in its highest achievements art is appearance [Schein]; the appearance [Schein], however, what is irresistible in it, it receives from what does not appear [Scheinlosen]. By refraining from judgement, it says, especially the ones scorned as nihilistic, that everything would not be just nothing. Otherwise, what always is, would be pale, colorless, indifferent. There is no light on human beings and things, in which transcendence is not reflected. Inextinguishable, the resistance against the fungible world of exchange in that of the eye, which does not want the colors of the world to be destroyed. In appearance [Schein] is the promise of what does not appear [Scheinlose]. |
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Self-reflection of Dialectics 397-400 At question is, whether metaphysics, as the knowledge of the absolute, would at all be possible without the construction of absolute knowledge, without that idealism, which lends its title to the last chapter of the Hegelian Phenomenology. Doesn't it say, that whoever deals with the absolute, would necessarily be the thinking organ, capable of doing this, precisely thereby itself the absolute; would not dialectics, on the other hand, in the transition to a metaphysics, which is not simply the same as dialectics, violate its own strict concept of negativity? Dialectics, the epitome of negative knowledge, would like none other beside it; even as the negative kind, it drags along with itself the commandment of exclusivity from the positive kind, from the system. It would have to negate, according to such reasoning, non-dialectical consciousness as finite and fallible. In all its historical forms it has refused to step out of it. It mediated conceptually, whether willed or no, between the unconditional and the finite spirit; this made theology intermittently time and again into its enemy. Although it thinks the absolute, the latter remains, as something mediated by the former, in thrall to conditioned thought. If the Hegelian absolute was the secularization of the deity, then nevertheless precisely that of its secularization; as the totality of the Spirit that absolute remained enchained to its finite human model. If thought however in the undiminished consciousness of this reaches, gropingly, beyond anything of this sort, in that it names the Other as something utterly incommensurable to it, which it nevertheless thinks, then it will find shelter nowhere else than in the dogmatic tradition. Thinking is in such thoughts alien to its content, unreconciled, and newly condemned to two sorts of truth, which would be incompatible with the idea of the true. Metaphysics depends upon whether one can get out of this aporia without underhanded trickery. To do this, dialectics, at once the imprint of the universal context of mystification and its critique, must turn in one last movement against itself. The critique of everything particular, which posits itself absolutely, is that of the shadow of absoluteness over the critique itself, of the fact that it, too, against its tendency, must remain in the medium of the concept. It destroys the identity-claim, by honoring it in its testing. That is why it only reaches so far as this latter. The latter stamps the former as the magic circle with the appearance [Schein] of absolute knowledge. It is up to its self-reflection to cancel it out, exactly therein the negation of the negation, which does not cross over into a position. Dialectics is the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion, not something already escaped from this latter. To break out of the latter from inside, is objectively its goal. The power to break out grows in it from the context of immanence; what would apply to it, once more, is Hegel's dictum, that dialectics would absorb the power of the opponent, turning it against the latter; not only in what is dialectically individual but in the end in the whole. It grasps, with the means of logic, this latter's character of compulsion, hoping that it would yield. The absolute however, as it hovers before metaphysics, would be the non-identical, which would only emerge until after the identity-compulsion dissolved. Without the identity-thesis dialectics is not the whole; but therefore also no cardinal sin, to leave it in a dialectical step. It lies in the determination of negative dialectics, that it does not come to rest within itself, as if it were total; that is its form of hope. Kant indicated something of this in the doctrine of the transcendental thing in itself beyond the mechanism of identification. However stringent the critique of that doctrine by his successors, they regressively reinforced the bane that much more, just like the post-revolutionary bourgeoisie as a whole: they hypostasized the compulsion itself as the absolute. To be sure Kant, for his part, in the determination of the thing in itself as that of an intelligible essence, conceived of transcendence as the non-identical, but equated it with the absolute subject, bowing nonetheless to the identity-principle. The process of cognition, which is supposed to approach the transcendental thing asymptotically, slides it ahead of itself, as it were, and removes it from consciousness. The identifications of the absolute transpose it onto the human beings, from whom the identity-principle derives; they are, as they at times confess and as the enlightenment can strikingly demonstrate to them every time, anthropomorphisms. That is why the absolute, which the Spirit approaches, melts away before it: its approach is a mirage. However the successful elimination of every anthropomorphism, with which the context of delusion would be removed, very likely coincides in the end with this latter, with absolute identity. To deny the secret by identification, by constantly tearing more chunks out of it, does not solve it. Rather, as though in play, it stamps the control of nature as a lie, by means of the memento of the powerlessness of its power. Enlightenment leaves as good as nothing left of metaphysical truth-content, presque rien [French: almost nothing] after a modern musical term. What shrinks back becomes ever smaller, just as Goethe portrayed in the parable of the little box of the New Melusine, which names an extremity; ever more inconspicuous [unscheinbarer]; this is the reason that, in the critique of cognition as much as in the philosophy of history, metaphysics migrates into micrology. This latter is the place of metaphysics as the refuge from what is total. Nothing absolute is to be expressed otherwise than in the subject-matter and categories of immanence, while nevertheless this latter is not to be deified either in its conditionality or as its total summation. Metaphysics is, according to its own concept, not possible as a deductive context of judgements over the existent. Just as little can it be thought according to the model of that which is absolutely divergent, which fearsomely mocks thinking. Consequently it would be possible solely as the legible constellation of the existent. From this latter it would receive its material, without which it would not be, would not however transfigure the existence of its elements, but would bring them instead into a configuration, in which the elements assemble into a script. To that end it must be good at wishing. That the wish would be a bad father to the thought, has been since Xenophanes one of the general theses of the European enlightenment, and still applies undiminished against the ontological attempts at restoration. But thinking, itself a conduct, contains the need – at first the life-and-death necessity – in itself. One thinks out of need, even where "wishful thinking" [in English] is dismissed. The motor of the need is that of the effort, which thinking involves as activity. The object of critique is therefore not the need in thinking but the relationship between both. The need in thinking wishes, however, that there would be thinking. It demands its negation through thinking, it must disappear into thinking, if it is really supposed to be satisfied, and in this negation it lives on, representing in the innermost cells of thought, what is not the same as the latter. The smallest innerworldly markings would be relevant to the absolute, for the micrological glance demolishes the shells of that which is helplessly compartmentalized according to the measure of its subsuming master concept and explodes its identity, the deception, that it would be merely an exemplar. Such thinking is solidaristic with metaphysics in the moment of the latter's fall. |