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لعل أسوأ ظرف خلقه العالم المعاصر بثورته الصناعية أنه أوصلنا مرحلةً عادت لا توجد فيها تلك العقبات والاختبارات و«طقوس الانضمام» الحقيقية التي تصطفي الأفراد وتلزمهم بإثبات أنفسهم كأشخاص لائقين للعيش وذوي كفاية ليشكّلوا جزءًا عضويًّا من الجماعة الصغرى (الأسرة والعشيرة ومجتمع الأتراب من الجنس نفسه) والجماعة الكبرى (المجتمع). فتجد الشريف والنبيل (نَفْسًا وسلوكًا) يعيش على قدم المساواة مع الحقير والذليل، ولا تجد ما قد يمنع هذا الأخير من أن يصير قَوَّامًا وآمرًا على ذاك الشريف، والجميع مخول للعيش. كل هذه الآلاف التي تولد يوميًّا لا تُكوِّن إلا كتلةً عديمة المعالم تمر في مرحلة اختمار لا كي تغدو لائقة للنوع البشري، بل كي تُجَهَّز فتغدو عنصرًا استهلاكيًّا في لوياثان الاقتصاد، أي: عنصرَ عملٍ طيِّعًا، وذلولًا، ومكتفيًا بجزئه الأوسط والسفلي ورغائبه الغليظة، ومعدوم الغرائز الحافظة للنوع، ومدجَّنًا لا يرى أبعد من سياج حظيرته، ويحيا ويموت دون أن يعرف أي جذور حيوية تجيبه عن سؤال «من أنا؟»، عاصِفَةً به حوادث النهار والليل وأخبارهما فلا تترك له لحظة سكون واحدة تسمح له بتأمل موضعه من الحياة.

https://counter-currents.com/2020/12/heidegger-metaphysics-plato/ https://counter-currents.com/2021/01/heidegger-metaphysics-middle-ages/ https://counter-currents.com/2021/02/heideggers-history-of-metaphysics-part-three-the-emergence-of-modernity/ https://counter-currents.com/2021/02/heideggers-metaphysics-4-destruction-of-being/ https://counter-currents.com/2021/03/heidegger-metaphysics-5/ https://counter-currents.com/2021/04/heidegger-metaphysics-6/ https://counter-currents.com/2021/05/heideggers-metaphysics-seven/ https://counter-currents.com/2021/05/heideggers-metaphysics-eight/ https://counter-currents.com/2021/06/heideggers-history-of-metaphysics-9/ https://counter-currents.com/2021/06/heideggers-metaphysics-10/ https://counter-currents.com/2021/06/heideggers-metaphysics-11/

The extreme form of this modern scientific outlook is reached when it comes to be assumed that, for all intents and purposes, the unmeasurable simply does not exist. (A good example of this tendency would be certain forms of “radical behaviorism,” which deny the existence of impossible-to-measure internal mental states.) Here we can see a very clear modern manifestation of what Heideggerean philosophy calls “the metaphysics of presence” (a concept discussed extensively in an earlier essay of this series). The “metaphysics of presence” involves accommodating Being to the human desire for knowledge and control. “What is” is defined in such a way that it is present to human consciousness and available for manipulation. This process begins very early on, in Plato, who defines what is as “form”; i.e., the “look” of a thing that is eternally available to the gaze of the human intellect. Modern physics carries on this tradition, in a way that now becomes much more explicit: to be is to be measurable by human beings; whatever isn’t measurable isn’t important, and may not even exist. However, science has at the ready a very powerful response to this Heideggerean critique. The physicist will say that there is ample evidence that Being really is the measurable, and that evidence consists in the extraordinary success of modern science. When the world is approached in terms of the presuppositions of modern physics, a great wealth of facts is revealed to us and we are able to accomplish new things: we can accurately predict phenomena, identify causal connections that remain constant over time, and manipulate the environment to produce results that affect our lives (for better or worse). At least, this is what the physicist will assert. And this really is a powerful response, because modern science does indeed seem to work. But Heidegger would never deny this. While we can easily see that there is something fundamentally “subjective” about how science achieves its results by projecting its presuppositions upon nature, Heidegger never actually dismisses science as “subjective.” He never declares, for example, that the truth of science is merely “relative” or that its results are somehow false or invalid. No, Heidegger believes that modern science does deliver truths and does deliver results. However, it delivers truths only within, we might say, a “certain bandwidth” – one that is set by its presuppositions. Further, modern science produces certain results, and not others. The results it does produce are judged desirable, and to be the only results that matter, according to a whole other set of presuppositions, those that define the modern conception of the good and of “value.” To see Heidegger’s point more clearly, we might consider a couple of simple analogies. In an earlier installment, when trying to explain Heidegger’s phenomenological orientation, I gave the example of an encounter with an Amazon box on my doorstep. At first, and from a distance, the object presents itself to me as an Orvis box; i.e., I take it as a box from Orvis. On closer inspection, I see that it is an Amazon box. But suppose I never notice this, or suppose I continue to doggedly insist on taking the object as an Orvis box. Up to a point it will allow me to do this: I could use the box to return items to Orvis (even though this might raise some eyebrows at Orvis HQ), or I could use the box to store Orvis items. The reason this is possible is that the Amazon box does have the capacity to be (mis-)taken as an Orvis box.

But suppose I were to argue that because I was able to use the Amazon box as an Orvis box and thereby produce some desirable results, my presupposition is true after all: taking this box as an Orvis box is correct, and moreover tells me everything I need to know about it. A reasonable person would respond as follows: “I won’t deny that your presuppositions produced results – you really did get those items shipped back to Orvis using the box. But there was more to this thing than its capacity to be taken by you as an Orvis box. In fact, it was not an Orvis box at all. It was an Amazon box.” Or consider a second analogy. Suppose I need to pound a nail into the wall, but don’t have a hammer. Instead, I use a platform shoe. When I use the shoe in this fashion, I am taking it as a hammer. And, indeed, by taking it this way I am able to accomplish my task: I successfully use the shoe to knock the nail into the wall, and it is actually quite effective for this purpose. This is possible because the shoe really does have the capacity to present itself as a hammer – i.e., to be used as one. But suppose I then declared that the shoe really is a hammer, on the basis of the fact that taking it is a hammer (i.e., bringing that presupposition to the object) allowed me to produce “real world results.” Again, a reasonable person would say, “I won’t deny that the shoe has some hammerlike qualities, and I won’t deny that you produced some results by taking it as a hammer. But its hammerlike qualities are not all there is to the shoe. Indeed, it’s a shoe and not a hammer at all.” So it is with modern science. Its procedure is to understand bodies entirely in terms of a narrow set of properties – properties they do indeed seem to present to us – and then, once desired results are produced, to declare that all there is to bodies is that narrow set of properties, all else being discountable as unimportant, epiphenomenal, or not even “truly real.” This is how science becomes ideology: when the presuppositions of physics, originally adopted for methodological reasons, are taken as ontological, as defining what is, science becomes “scientism.” But modern scientism rests on a non sequitur: from the fact that certain expected or desired results are produced by acting on our presuppositions about nature, it does not follow that nature is exhausted by those presuppositions. The modern scientific approach thus amounts to a kind of procrustean bed: nature is pared down or stretched to fit the assumptions of the scientist. And Francis Bacon himself turns the crank. Famously, Bacon said, “My only earthly wish is . . . to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds. . . . [Nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.”

Pertaining to this ground-plan [of modern physics], in accordance with its prior specification, are to be found, among others, the following definitions. Motion is change of place. No motion or direction of motion takes precedence over any other. Every point is equal to every other. No point in time has precedence over any other. Every force is defined as – is, that is, nothing but – its consequences as motion within the unity of time; and that means, again, change of place. Every natural event must be viewed in such a way that it fits into this ground-plan of nature. Only within the perspective of this ground-plan does a natural event becomes visible as such. The ground-plan of nature is secured in place in that physical research, in each step of investigation, is obligated to it in advance.[14] As Alan Watts might put it, physics achieves its exactitude by factoring out all that is “wiggly” or “squishy” about the world. The exactness of modern physics is possible precisely because it understands the physical world in terms that are simple, narrow, and artificial. When “nature” is reduced essentially to the interactions of qualitatively identical “units of mass” (the physical equivalent of the “geometrical point”), exchanging positions that are qualitatively identical, via motions that are qualitatively identical, through points of time that are qualitatively identical, the exact measurement of “nature” indeed becomes possible. Note how this would be grist for Guénon’s mill: the qualitative as such drops out and the quantitative alone “reigns.” This quantitative physics will eventually yield a quantitative politics: “society” will be reduced essentially to the interactions of qualitatively identical “individuals,” exchanging opinions that are qualitatively identical (i.e., “relative”), pursuing preferences or “values” that are qualitatively identical (again, “relative”), asserting “rights” that are qualitatively identical. But, one might object, doesn’t modern science achieve an unprecedented exactitude, precisely by focusing upon the quantitative at the expense of the qualitative? Heidegger answers as follows: “Mathematical research into nature is not . . . exact because it calculates precisely; rather it must calculate precisely because the way it is bound to its domain of objects has the character of exactness.”[15] In short, the exactness of modern science is possible only because it chooses to see the world in an exact way: in a way that is governed by certain presuppositions that make exactitude possible, and by factoring out whatever does not lend itself to exactitude. An even simpler way to put Heidegger’s point would be just to say that physics deals with the world only insofar as the world presents aspects that are measurable. But what of the aspects that are not measurable? Here, physicists may frankly admit that their science simply cannot deal with those aspects. The drift of modern thinking, however, has been to actively denigrate whatever cannot be measured, and to denigrate whatever studies the hard-to-measure. Thus, since the objects of biology and psychology can only be very imperfectly measured, at least compared to physics, these sciences are regarded as “soft” (or “softer”). Worse still is the fate of disciplines such as philosophy and literature, which are declared “subjective” because they do not deal with measurement at all. The irony here is that the “objective” approach of modern physics, which insists that measurement is the key to objectivity, is actually deeply subjective. The reader may have already drawn this conclusion from the foregoing. After all, what have we said except that physics achieves its exactitude by means of projecting a certain understanding of “nature” onto nature, one that (conveniently) makes exactitude possible? Physics, in short, can measure exactly only because it has chosen to see only some aspects of what is, and not others.

Aside from its self-conception, what is genuinely new in the “new time” is, as Heidegger puts it, “that mode of human being which occupies the realm of human capacity as the domain of measuring and execution for the purpose of the mastery of beings as a whole.”[11] In other words, mathematics is the means (so it is supposed) for both absolute knowledge of creation, and absolute mastery of it. And why should man not aspire to such mastery? After all, did not God himself say that man should “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26)? However, it is easy to misunderstand what Heidegger means by “mathematics.” In fact, he is not referring to calculation and to the use of number, not fundamentally. “Mathematics” comes from the Greek τα μαθήματα (ta mathēmata), which Heidegger explains as follows: “Τα μαθήματα means . . . that which, in his observation of beings and interaction with things, man knows in advance.”[12] Fundamentally, mathematics is an approach to knowledge of the world that is based in certain presuppositions taken as true in advance of any experience of the world. To borrow the language of Kant, ta mathēmata traffics in the realm of the a priori, that which is known independently of, and prior to experience. Formal mathematics provides us with a paradigm of this knowledge in its axioms and postulates, all of which have the status simply of “presuppositions” brought to our thinking, rather than conclusions derived from experience. To take a simple example, one of Euclid’s postulates is “Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.” This is obviously not a statement about the real world, or about anything that has been done in the world, or could be done. No one has ever “extended” a straight line indefinitely, nor will they. Instead, Euclid is speaking about what can be imagined. Nevertheless, this truth “known in advance” yields practical knowledge of the world when the geometrical system derived from it (and other postulates) is used to “measure” (or “measure out”) physical space. It is useful here to consider the literal meaning of the term “axiom”: from Greek axioma (ἀξῐ́ωμᾰ), “what is fitting,” “what is requisite” (think: prerequisite), “what must be known beforehand.” Geometry is concerned with the “pure intuition of space” (to again borrow Kantian language): how space can, in essence, be divided into shapes or figures that are one, two, or three-dimensional, how these figures can be derived from one another, and how figures are related in terms of size, distance, and relative position. The geometrical approach of conceiving a science as a system derived from self-evident axioms was never applied by the ancients to the “natural sciences.” However, this is precisely the approach that makes modern science “new.” Heidegger writes, When . . . physics assumes an explicitly “mathematical” form, what this means is the following: that through and for it, in an emphatic way, something is specified in advance as that which is already known. This specification concerns nothing less than what, for the sought-after knowledge of nature, is henceforth to count as “nature”: the closed system of spatio-temporally related units of mass.[13] Physics is the most fundamental of modern sciences because all the sciences are understood to study bodies, and physics studies the properties of bodies and their relations as such – i.e. the properties and relations of “spatio-temporally related units of mass.” Further, modern physics is capable of an exactness not achievable by the other sciences. However, this exactness is a function of the basic presuppositions – the “axioms,” if you will – that physics “specifies in advance.” These presuppositions determine, in fact, what counts as “nature.” Heidegger gives several examples of these presuppositions and comments on them as follows:

The Birth of Modern Science, Collin Cleary: Heidegger writes in Introduction to Metaphysics, Because beings have been created by God – that is, have been thought out rationally in advance – then as soon as the relation of creature to creator is dissolved, while at the same time human reason attains predominance, and even posits itself as absolute, the Being of beings must become thinkable in the pure thinking of mathematics. Being as calculable in this way, Being as set into calculation, makes beings into something that can be ruled in modern, mathematically structured technology, which is essentially something different from every previously known use of tools.[7] In his marginalia, Leibniz once wrote, Cum Deus calculat fit mundus: “When God reckons, a world comes to be.”[8] Creation, Leibniz is telling us, was (and is) effected mathematically. The difference between our thought and God’s is that the divine thought is productive: it brings things into being immediately, and without labor. Nonetheless, God’s thought is mathematical. This means that while our own mathematical thought cannot bring a world into being, it can be used to understand the world God has created in the same language according to which he created it. Some decades prior to Leibniz’s marginal note, Galileo famously wrote that “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.” One can find many similar quotations from early modern figures. In “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger tells us that if we wish to understand the essence of modern science, “we must first free ourselves of the habit of comparing modern with older science – from the perspective of progress – merely in terms of degree.”[9] Conventional histories of science offer a narrative that begins with some of the Greeks (principally Aristotle) and purports to exhibit “progress” over time, as new discoveries are made and new “methodologies” are arrived at. For Heidegger, however, the “methodology” of modern science makes it qualitatively different from what gets called, tendentiously, “ancient science.” In fact, these are so different that it is misleading to speak of ancient and modern “science” at all, as if there were some obvious continuity between them. In fact, they are discontinuous, because they are fundamentally different enterprises. (Some of my readers will be familiar with one instance of this error: when alchemy is treated as an older form of “chemistry”; in fact alchemy and chemistry are different enterprises, with entirely different presuppositions and aims.) It is actually somewhat surprising that modern histories of science assert any continuity at all between modern science and ancient thought. As Heidegger points out, not only is the standpoint of modern science new, it “explicitly sets itself up as the new.”[10] “Modern” comes from Latin modernus, from modo, meaning “recently,” “presently,” or “just now.” The modern age, in short, is “what’s new.” The German word for “the modern” or “modernity” is die Neuzeit, literally “the new time” or “new age.” In the new time, time itself is new: it moves in a straight line, not in a circle (as it did for the ancients), stretched between darkness and the light of “progress.” All of my readers will be familiar with this aspect of modernity: the dogged insistence that all is now “new” or must become new; that the “new” is better than what came before, etc. The modern period’s self-understanding is that it is the age that is discontinuous with the past. This is indeed something fundamentally “new” in history.

"ما يختص به العلم الحديث جوهريًا هو إسقاط أرض ثابتة فيما يتعلق بنطاق معيّن لبعض الموجودات في الطبيعة والتاريخ. الكلمة التي استخدمها هايدجر "مخطط أرضي" معناها الألماني: Grundriss. قد يعني الفعل "reissen" "يمزق" أو "يرسم" أو "ينظم"، بينما الاسم من Riss يعني "تمزق" أو "فجوة" أو "تخطيط". يتضمن البحث العلمي الحديث برمته ليس فقط إنشاء رسم تخطيطي للموجودات، أو إسقاط تخطيط عليها، وإنما تمزيق ما هو مُعطى وبناء تصميم في دَاخِله." "كل ظاهرة تؤخذ كموضوع للنظرية العلمية يتم صَقَلها، أو بالأحرى، إعادة تعريفها، بصورة تتوافق مع المخطط الأرضي أو الأطلَس الذي جعل المواضيع قابلة للحساب بشكل تنبؤي بصورة مُسبقة. المخطط الأرضي مصمم بالفعل علي نحو كامن في الأجهزة و آليات التجريب رجاة أن يتم التحكم في الطبيعة مسبقًا وتقييدها لتظهر نفسها علي نحو محدد." ـــــ بروميثيوس وأطلس، جيسون جورجاني

« Nous sommes présentement dans le quatrième âge, le Kali-Yuga ou “âge sombre” [...]. Il semble bien qu’un arrêt à mi-chemin ne soit plus guère possible, et que, d’après toutes les indications fournies par les doctrines traditionnelles, nous soyons entrés vraiment dans la phase finale du Kali-Yuga, dans la période la plus sombre de cet “âge sombre”, dans cet état de dissolution dont il n’est plus possible de sortir que par un cataclysme [...]. » — René Guénon, La Crise du monde moderne (1927) https://www.libertas.co/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Gu%C3%A9non

"أخذ هايدجر ثلاثة أفكار مترابطة من نيتشه. الفكرة الأولي هي أن أي كائن في العالم في حاجة إلي أفق يحدّه. وعلي الرغم من أن هذا الأفق قد يتبدل ويغير شكله، فإن الطريقة التي سيخفي بها دائما جوانب الطبيعة أو الأرض تسمح للكائن بمتابعة اهتماماته الحيوية. الفكرة الثانية هي أن التاريخ العلمي ليس فقط مستحيلا، ولكن محاولة التعامل مع وجودنا التاريخي بطريقة علمية تكشف عن عجز الحقائق التي يظهرها العلم. كل ما هو "حقيقي" يُنتَزع من الاِحتجاب الضروري للأفق المشار إليه آنفا للوجود في العالم، والذي هو الكل المقيّد للوجود التاريخي للشعب. الفكرة الثالثة هي أن التاريخ، إذ فهمناه علي نحو صحيح، ليس موضوعيا ولا حقيقيا بالمعني الذي يفترض أن يكون عليه الموضوع مدار البحث في العلوم الفيزيائية، وإنما هو الميثولوجيا الحية أو الفلكلور الذى خلاله يعكس التراث القديم المتصوّر للشعب مستقبله المرسوم. تصبح أولوية نمط التاريخ التذكاري monumental علي العتيق antiquarian والنقدي critical، عند هايدجر، أولوية النمط المستقبلي لوجودنا بِالزمان. وهذا يعني أنه ما من حقيقة موضوعية في عالمنا ولا ثبات في حال أي كيان. سواء فقدنا عالمنا أو، بعد أن بدا أننا فقدناه، فإننا قادرون على استحضار اِنبِعاثه ويحدد التطور الإبداعي المستمر كمسألة صراع تاريخي. لا شيء "صحيح" لأي أحد خارج هذا الصراع." ـــ بروميثيوس وأطلس، جيسون جورجاني (بتصرف)

The network has an internal normative coherence that is self-reinforcing. There is a feedback loop between the results prompted by the experimental setup and the design of machinery for future experiments. 561 This ongoing research activity of modern science is institutional — it requires institutions to sustain it, and the results it produces are in turn determined by the institutionalized interests. Heidegger’s insight is that it is not just the research methodology that has to adapt itself to its results, but beings also are adapted by the ongoing activity of research as it builds the ground plan into Nature (and History). The consolidation of institutional research science leads, in his view, to nothing less than “the precedence of methodology over whatever is.” In our capacity as artisans, as a species that requires technical development for its very survival, we are also innately geometricians — who, in principle, reject the unforeseeable. Bergson thinks that if we de-condition our minds of rationalistic analysis, we can place ourselves back at “the turn of experience” that is, as it were, the “fork in the road” leading to the development of intellect at the expense of the instinct that drives most other forms of life. It is not the case that the former is an advance over the latter and develops on its basis. Intelligence and instinct are divergent solutions to the same problems. In all actual cases, these two tendencies remain ultimately indivisible, but the distinction between them may be conceptually reified so as to better understand their relationship with one another. If we consider instinct and intelligence each in their most epitomizing cases, we find that instinct is a faculty of using and of constructing organically organized instruments, whereas intelligence is a faculty of crafting instruments from unorganized (inorganic) material and making use of these tools. It follows from this that instinct is necessarily specialized, by contrast with intelligence employed in the construction of tools — which are imperfect instruments admitting of an unlimited reconfiguration of form to improve their functionality with a view to various projects. This intelligence bestows the living being with a proliferation of new powers." — Prometheus and Atlas, Jason Reza Jorjani 5

If, however, our consciousness is actually a filter, which primarily conceals rather than reveals, for the sake of the needs of an organism in order to take practical action, then it makes sense that it would not be commensurate with the natural world — but only a limited perspective on it; an image of what is in our interest rather than of the whole (of which there can be no image). In Creative Evolution, Bergson expands on this idea in a way that brings him closer to Heidegger. There, he treats intellect as a faculty of fabrication. Unlike a pure dialectical speculation that would carve up the world at its joints, its tendency is to disregard the natural forms of all things and treat matter — in general — as a medium that is infinitely malleable and capable of being reshaped to fit any frame. In other words, natural form is viewed as artificial. Like the Cartesian wax, any being is taken to be dissolvable into homogenous, elementary solids that function something like building blocks, each sufficiently lacking in character so as to be suitable for any manner of lawful or systematic construction. One can make anything out of these simple parts by rearranging them. The general framework for this construction is a homogenous space, like 3-D graph paper that extends in every direction and whose smallest units are as small as the simplest parts of things. This is an artifice that is inconceivably outside the experience of extensity open to nonhuman animals. The great problems and paradoxes of philosophy arise when this primarily practical faculty is misdirected towards speculation on the nature of things, and mistakes its functional objectification of things as discontinuous and immobile for those things as they really are, rather than those things schematized by our rational faculty according to our possible action and to our designs on them. We ought to reclassify ourselves Homo faber, or “fabricating man,” instead of Homo sapiens, since intelligence, as we are able to employ it, begins with tool use, and is a faculty for the manufacture of artifice and the indefinite variation of this means of production. Mechanistic science is an outgrowth of our natural geometrical tendencies. Directed in the first place towards carving out a human habitation in a dangerous natural world, these tendencies predominate over the fine artistic appreciation and channeling of the spontaneity of nature in the form of genius. Bergson explains that abstract logic and scientific geometry engender each other on the basis of the natural geometry that we employ when we break material up into solids that are easy to manipulate. All of the operations of our intellect are essentially geometrical. Neither deduction nor induction can function without a geometrical intuition of homogeneous space. Mathematical order is one and the same with inflexible determinism, but the so-called “laws of the physical world” that express determined order by measuring everything as a variable are intellectual projections that have no objective reality. The extraordinary success of a scientific method based on mathematics is really a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy: we read out of the world what we have written into it. Mathematical order is a negative interruption that acts as a sieve to filter the movements of Nature. It is like a planar cross-section cutting “instants” out of the flux. This is basically no different from Heidegger’s understanding of how the framework of Technoscience challenges Nature to present itself in a certain way. In German “the real” is das Wirkliche, which is related to that which works (wirkt). Technoscience, as the “theory of the real,” sets upon (stellen) the real, ordering “the real” to arrange and exhibit itself as “an interacting network.” The German word translated by “network” here is Gewirk, meaning “web, texture, weaving.” Heidegger introduces a hyphen into it, so that it becomes Ge-wirk, an active gathering of that which works and is worked. The “Truth” becomes what works. 4

In Heidegger’s view, our “scientific” interpretation of Being in general on the basis of entities occludes the “worldhood” of the world. He maintains that there is a more primordial, pre-scientific concernful dealing with things in the world that we do not need to put ourselves into the way that we need to be conditioned into the scientific mindset. Heidegger attempts to excavate this originary existential comportment. Bergson is likewise concerned with recollecting a disposition towards beings in the world that has been covered over by the modern scientific interpretation of the self and world. Common to the way in which both Heidegger and Bergson attempt to recover our way of being in the world prior to being conditioned by the Cartesian world picture is a recognition that our primary experience of things is not theoretical, but practical. According to Heidegger’s account in Being and Time, our basic orientation in the world is practical, and our praxis is mediated by Things, which the Greeks called pragmata. These are not “mere Things,” but equipment that is inconspicuously withdrawing within its handiness for-the-sake-of doing certain work. Equipment always signifies a referential totality. Our being at work in the world with our tools is not in the first place mediated by any overlay of theoretical knowledge of their function, as if praxis were blind without it. Tool use has its own pre-scientific knowledge or know-how. According to Heidegger, the shift from the predominance of a practical being in the world to the theoretical knowing of the world occurs on the basis of a disruption in the context of significance that assigns the “towards-this” and “with-which” of tools and other equipment. The heretofore tacit referential context can be explicitly illuminated in three ways: 1) breakdown of equipment; 2) missing equipment; and 3) equipment getting in the way. In all of these examples of a disturbance in the assignment of tools, a break in the referential context of our praxis transforms our experience of the world. We are reduced to a pure observer of mere things, which are uselessly laid before us, stripped down to their bare presence. Tools go from being equipment ready-to-hand for use in some project to being objects that are merely present-at-hand. Our circumspective concern that “lets things be” is frustrated. We may have to rework tools or “improve” things to once again render them serviceable, and if this is not possible, we may even be tempted to smash them into pieces. We wonder what we are doing in this place, this tool shed, which becomes just a space for developing a solution to a problem. Thus begins the modern, scientific mode of Being. Tinkering with equipment that is not experienced as withdrawn into its usefulness precedes the theoretical development of modern mathematical science in the seventeenth century. According to Heidegger, “Machine technology is itself an autonomous transformation of praxis, a type of transformation wherein praxis first demands the employment of mathematical physical science.” Chronologically, modern theoretical science seems to appear first, but ontologically, its manifestation is grounded in the relationship to things that defines the essence of Technology. Rather, modern science is, for Heidegger, always already Technoscience. Bergson reaches much further back in his archeology of how our practical comportment towards things evolves into the modern scientific understanding of the world in terms of Cartesian space and time. This abstract decomposition of our original experience of being in the world first arises as a hypertrophied development of a practically oriented drive to break things up in such a way as to get a better grasp on them for the purposes of survival and growth. “Consciousness” has a practical function. If consciousness — the Cartesian cogitare — were primarily for the sake of knowing, as rationalistic idealists take it to be, it would not make sense for certain things to remain in the shadows outside of its view. 3

What defines the modern age is the very fact that, for the first time, the world can become a picture. This is what is “new” about der Neuzeit — the modern age, or literally “the new age.” In his later essay, “The Thing,” Heidegger identifies the television — which in German is called fernseher, or “far-seer,” as the epitome of this development. Bergson also compares the machinations of our intellectual way of knowing things to a cinematographic device. The Greek idealists saw things as completed figures, eternally abiding as such. Bergson compares the privileged moments in terms of which they thought to those captured by Classical sculptures; they radiate as epitomes of whole movements in the way that single photographs do. “The cinematographical mechanism of the intellect” that comes to the fore in modern science breaks up those Classical figures with its “snapshots” so that they become points extending themselves in space through a succession of instantaneous positions. This proceeds from the Cartesian revolution in geometry, where the elaboration of a curve is no longer seen as describing a static or timeless figure but as a succession of points that, in terms of two or more axes, describes an interval of time. One can see the difference, for example, in the fact that it sufficed for Aristotle to demonstrate that the form of celestial orbits is circular, whereas Galileo was concerned not simply with replacing this circular orbit with an elliptical one, and not merely with correcting the form of the circuit conceived of in its eternal completion, but with determining a law describing the motion of planets conceived as points along this circuit — a law that would allow for the mathematical projection of their future positions. Also, unlike Classical thinkers with their heterogeneous space, Galileo did not privilege any moment in the trajectory of a falling body with a view to determining its velocity. As Bergson sees it, this is what most distinguishes modern science from ancient science. Heidegger could not be more in agreement. Modern science is “mathematical” not in the sense that it employs numerical calculation, but in the sense that it involves that which is known in advance. Ta mathemata, the Greek root of “mathematics,” means “that which man knows in advance,” in other words that which filters every observation of the new and contingent and organizes it with respect to what is known before it. Number is only mathematical because it is the clearest example of the always-already- known. This is what is involved in developing a hypothesis testable by experiment. Like Bergson, Heidegger also notes that, while Aristotelian socalled “science” did employ empeiria, or careful observation and measurement, it totally lacked the modern conception of an experiment wherein the behavior of an object sphere of beings is re-presented or anticipated by an exact ground plan and tested against this under controlled conditions. Bergson realizes that modern science seeks to establish time as an independent variable in terms of which all abstractly reconstructed magnitudes are to be measured. Although the time that becomes allimportant for modern scientists is not our authentic experience of duration, the fact that it breaks up what were supposed to have been eternal forms into even more abstract and homogenous units for the sake of greater utility also cultivates a need for a complementary intuition of duration with respect to non-utilitarian concerns. In other words, by forcing the cinematographic manner of thought to its limits, modern science, especially physics, makes us aware of the limits of its appropriate scope. Whereas Classical Greek thought was a metaphysical justification of common sense ideas imbedded in our language, reflection on modern science allows a return to the primordial. Not a return to the past, but a movement into the future from out of the primordial — a development wherein the vital force of evolution becomes consciously self-directing. 2

Quite insightful "Both Heidegger and Bergson understand the essence of Technology as something revealed in how our interpretation of Being is revised throughout the course of successive historical epochs that unfold a singular destiny. According to Heidegger, every historical epoch is grounded by a metaphysical interpretation of what is, and the essence of modern technology demands more profound reflection than the metaphysical essence of any prior age. Bergson claims that, looking back thousands of years from now, our wars and revolutions will be insignificant compared to the great technological innovations that epitomize our epoch; the age of the steam-engine will be grasped in thought by then in the same way that the Bronze or Stone Age are remembered now. The two thinkers choose essentially the same type of modern technology as an epitomizing metaphor for that which characterizes the peril and promise of such revolutionary technological development in general: the motion picture projector. Each also claims both that this way of grasping the world is new, and that, although it only comes into its own with modernity, it has its inception in Classical Greek thought, and has been germinating ever since. Many Greek thinkers saw ideal concepts or organic forms as what is most real. As Heidegger explains, the hypokeimenon was for them still an aspect of beings — as the subiectum remained for Medieval thinkers. The subject of a thing was “that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself.” In other words, the subject of a thing was that in which its formal properties cohered; it was “subject-matter.” The Greeks could not have framed the thought of the whole world’s reality as needful of verification. When man becomes the only subject, and his representational thinking grounds the certitude of all other beings, this means that “[m]an becomes the relational center of that which is as such.” Modern research science involves a transformation in the conception of truth as veritas, or verification, namely as the accuracy or certainty of a subject’s re-presentation of a being whose presence has become “objective.” Nature is taken account of through a projection that anticipates its future course in a calculative manner, and History, including Natural History, is framed as a rigorous schematization of the past as “fact.” Both Nature and its history are thereby objectified and “set in place” (gestellt). We should hear in this German term gestellt the verb stellen — which means to set in place, and to set upon, in the sense of challenging. In other words, truth as representation is not mere correspondence; it is rather a taking to be true, a setting-upon and securing that does violence to what is objectified. According to Heidegger, the metaphysical revolution that defines the beginning and end of world ages takes place, in our age, in the Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes’ interpretation of truth still moves within the sphere of inquiry determined by the question first posed by Plato and Aristotle; namely, “What is it to be?” (This is what Heidegger sometimes calls the questioning after beings or entities, as contrasted with the Question of Being.) However, Descartes’ answer to this question requires and makes possible a “theory of knowledge” for the first time. Heidegger claims that before this, “the reality of the outer world” as such was never questioned. Heidegger thinks that all subsequent German representational thought (Vorstellungs-philosophie) consists of affirmative modifications of the Cartesian position, and that even Nietzsche failed to overcome modern metaphysics. The framing of the whole world’s reality as needful of verification, this framing of a world (and not just any given beings within the world) as an object present-at-hand (das Vor-handene) for the subject to represent (vorstellen) is the move that Descartes makes that comes to be definitive of our age as that of the “world picture” (Weltbild). 1

صادفت مؤخرًا بعض المنشورات التي تتحدث عن علاقة إيفولا بالإسلام، وكان معظمها أقرب إلي التخريف. دفعني ذلك إلي مشاركة هذه المقالة التي تشرح وجهة نظر الرجل بأكبر قدر ممكن من الدقة. https://islam4europeans.com/2018/09/30/evolas-thoughts-on-islam/

من وجهة نظر تاريخية، تطوّر الليبرالية الفلسفية غير منفصل عن الليبرالية الاقتصادية (رأسمالية "دعه يمرّ، دعه يعمل"). بالنسبة إلى نيتشه فإن سيطرة اقتصاد رأس المال على السياسة تؤدّي إلى تقويض الأساس لحياة أخلاقية جمعية، وبالتالي تستولي على الثقافة نزعة مادية وضيعة. وهكذا يغدو التعبير عن الشخصية الفردية، وتحقيق هذا التفرّد، شبه مستحيل في العالم الحديث. إنّ الليبرالية، بالنسبة لنيتشه، تحرّر "الشخص الخاص" (الممثل للمجتمع البرجوازي)، ولكن ليس "الفرد الحقيقي"؛ ذلك أنها تفتقد مفهوم الثقافة. ― كيث أنسِل-پيرسون، العدميّ الكامل: نيتشه مفكّراً سياسياً.

الحُجّة المقدّمة لتسويغ العروض الرياضية هي أنها تساهم في وقف الحروب من خلال تنظيم نزاعات رمزية وسلمية، فتُحيّد الاندفاعات القوميّة. علي أن تاريخ رياضة ككرة القدم يبيّن الضد من ذلك، إذ أدت الاشتباكات بين المشجعين والمشاغبين إلى مدّ الاندفاع القومي وتأجيجه. فنجد أنه في أوروبا، بعد أن بدت القومية والشوفينية علي وشك الزوال، غدت تتصاعد مجددا من خلال تشجيع فرق كرة القدم الوطنية ... ومن السهل ملاحظة البلادة الذهنية والرِدّة الصبيانيّة الناجمة عن هذا الغضب. إنه لأمر موهن للعزم أن تري الذكور - والآن الإناث أيضًا - يناقشون بشغف أداء فريق من اللاعبين ليس له أي تأثير على حياتهم، ولا علاقة له ببلدهم. هكذا غدت المشاكل الخالية من أي مضمون أو أهمية مهيمنة علي انتباه عامة الناس. كذلك تغذي الرياضة الافتتان الهدّام بالقوة الجسدية البهيمية، وذاك علي الضد من الشجاعة الجسدية (شجاعة الجندي) و "الهيئة الجسدية": جسد عظماء الرياضيين غالبا ما يتضرر بسبب الإفراط في التدريب وتعاطي المنشطات. يعوض مجتمع اليوم فقره في الشجاعة الجسدية من خلال التَمَسَّح في أداء مادي كمي لا طائل من ورائه. إن عبادة الأداء الكمي بهذه الطريقة - ذلك يعد نتيجة ثانوية للمادية الجامحة- لهي نوع من الهوس: من هو الأسرع والأطول والأكثر قوة وثباتًا؟، إلخ. وهذا يتمثل في حقل السجالات الذي يعد غير متنازع عليه. فالرياضي الذي يحطم السجلات المادية يظفر بالنصر: هذه حيّونة حقيقية للإنسان، تؤدي إلي إنكار بعده الذهني. إذ في النهاية، يمكن لأرنب أو كلب صيد أو حصان أو نعامة هزيمة بين جونسون في سباق العدو، ويمكن لأي شمبانزي ان يهزم تايسون بطل العالم في ملاكمة الوزن الثقيل. أما الأرقام في الوثب العالي فمن يمكنه التغلب علي صقر الشاهين الذي يبلغ طوله 5،550 مترًا؟ لربما يقول قائل أنه هناك من الرياضيات ما يتطلب الذكاء والمهارة والشجاعة، كرياضة التنس أو التزلج أو الملاحة الشراعية. وهذا مما لا شك فيه بتاتا: لكن أذلك يستحق أن يكون هناك اهتمام إعلامي بهذا الشكل مركز فقط علي لاعبان يقذفان الكرة؟ أليست عروض لاعبي الأرجوحة ومروضي الأسود في السيرك بنفس القدر من الإعجاب؟ أما الرياضيات المتطرفة - سباقات القوارب عبر الأطلسي، وعبور المحيط الهادي بزوارق التجديف- فهي رياضات يسودها العبث والملل والفراغ، فكأننا نجد أنفسنا فارغي الأيدي فنخترع شيئا جديدا، نبتكر مخاطر محسوبة كميا لتهتم بنا الشركات الراعية ووسائل الإعلام. وليس من العجيب أن الرياضات المثيرة هي التي لا تزال اِثنية الطابع، أي تلك التي لم يتم ترويجها إعلاميا علي نطاق عالمي، كرياضة الكرة الباسكيّة Basque pelota. أيتعين علينا استنكار الرياضة إذن؟ لن يكون الأمر كذلك إذا فهمنا الرياضة علي أنها تمرين بدني للهواة، أو جعلناها أداة لتحسين الأداء الجسدي بطريقة ذكية او إذا صيّرت أداة للتدريب علي القتال. في هذه الحالات، تغدو الرياضة ذات غاية. لم يعتبر أحد الألعاب الأولمبية اليونانية القديمة أحداثا رياضية كما يعدها أهل هذا الزمان بعد أن فرّغت من معاناها الأصلي، وإنما كانت شكلا من أشكال التدريب العسكري. فلم يكن هناك محترفون في الأولمبياد، كانت فقط للهواة. للمشهد الرياضي المعوّلم اليوم وظيفتان: تأجيج الحماسة الزائفة والطفولية لأحداث لا شأن لها فتؤدي بدورها إلي تحييد الوعي السياسي والأيديولوجي؛ إنهم يدفعون قطاعا جديدا من صناعة الترفيه، وذاك يخلق عددا قليلا جدا من الوظائف التي عادة ما تكون مخترقة بواسطة عصابات المافيا، ومنها يحشدون موارد مالية ضخمة. – Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism