Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 17:29:20 +0100
From: Rene de Bakker <rbakker-AT-bs18.bs.uva.nl>
Subject: Re: plans and ends


Gulio,

Thanks, a real Borges story - I remember having read it a long time ago.
Borges visited Juenger shortly before his death, his only visit in
Germany. He thanked him for the overwhelming experience
of the Spanish translation of "Storms of steel". He was writing
"Martin Fierro" at the time.

That one might be in a dream, and that the search for rational certainty
is accompanied by the fear of irrationality or insanity, is already clear
in the metaphysical meditations of Descartes. The absence of ground
only gets dangerous to the one, that still feels the need for ground,
hardly to nowadays man.  
The malignant genius, that makes us take images for real things, might
very well bring one in the deranged position of one, who believes 
his body is of glass. And: who says that the people I look down upon
walking in the streets, are not machines? (Meditations)
Also Nietzsche's shadow in the 'Wandererer und sein Schatten' comes 
to mind, a period in Nietzsche's life, "Also sprach Zarathustra" refers to,
in that night, where "a laughing occurred around me." 

That reality is a dream is his thought since the dionysian and apollinian 
"dream forces" (Traumgewalten). Nietzsche refers in later years to 
Zarathustra as "a mere atheist", at the time that he was interested in the
god-man,
in his parallel foresight of humanisation/deification.
You've read the Nietzsche volumes, so you'll know that Heidegger connects
Nietzsche's concept of WtP back to the will-character of the monad (appetitus)
According to Leibniz and Nietzsche (and Schelling etc.) will is the
fundamental
character of reality, of ALL reality. (this is not human willing)
Leibniz' position is central: one can go back from him to Thomas, and ahead
to Nietzsche. The overman takes the place of the highest monad: visio dei

But to us maybe the whole of metaphysics, as the instance where Sein/Being
and Schein/appearance are discerned, is a dream. And we don't know out or in.
Admitted, that technique is the completion of metaphysics, it is the utmost of
illusion. Contrary to Weber's Entzauberung/disenchantment of the world, 
Heidegger sees in the Contr. the ultimate danger of technique in the complete
Verzauberung/enchantment of Erlebnis (Juenger mentions the three-dimensional
experience) We're moving very fast now.

Still Heidegger says in "The question of technology": there is no demonism
of technique.

---

The other 3 elements all having become suspect, only fire grows stronger.
There is a strange dream of Juenger in the late diaries: Paris on fire.
In the end he escapes underground, the last thing he notices, are
pickaxes. Juenger is a magus. 


---

I remember Borges telling that once he was very much in love, but he was
turned down, that he walked away, completely devastated, but not only he was,
but also the world. In "What is metaphysics" there is a strange remark, in the
context of the 'im Ganzen' and how it only can be experienced when things 
are gliding away. There he suddenly says, that not only Angst and boredom,
but also the joy at the presence of the Dasein - not of the mere person -
of a 
beloved human being manifests being as a whole. (Elaboration of the question,
roughly p. 4)

rene

-----------------------------------
drs. René de Bakker
Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam
Afdeling Catalogisering 
tel. 020-5252368              


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