enowning
Monday, December 04, 2006
 
Hans Ruin's "Moment of Truth", or the flash of lightning in Kairos.
In one of the introductory sections to Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger speaks precisely of the need to actualize the historical moment (Augenblick) that is marked by the consumption of all previous metaphysical efforts. Their common failure is defined as the inability to draw man into the basic relation with beings. Throughout the book this theme is echoed: that the next step in the thinking of being is to disclose the belonging of man and of his thinking to that which he seeks to think. The task is not to add new determinations to being, but to reveal the dependence on being of thinking and language in general, or rather, to enable an experience of this dependency. To perform this task is to step into the Ereignis, a name for being to the extent that it gives itself precisely as that to which the thinker belongs.

This step is not something that can simply be performed according to a specific method. It is something that is granted to the thinker, or poet, who have experienced the need and cultivated the question. In section 255 these qualified situations are also presented as the Augenblick, in which "being flashes forth" and in which truth unfolds. The image of lightning as well as that of need and preparation, belong to what we could call a kairological rhetoric, a rhetoric of urgency and crisis. It dramatizes the situation of knowledge and truth as a situation about to undergo a radical transformation, reversal, or decision.

P. 244-245
The Cure put it succinctly:
Blaze like a
Fire
Flare
Burn like fire
Burn like
Fire in Cairo
Continued; Ruin, not the Cure.
 
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