Rainer was getting clumsy. One should, here, ask oneself about the costs of partisan militancy. You will have noticed, or you could not but have done so, cautions, distances between the events, naked and brutal, and the thinking they will be submitted to before taking sides. When I speak of submitting I am not referring to a tyrannic reason that will judge from within itself and doesn't know how to open itself to nothing. The courage of the Greeks to their possibilities, the opening of temporality was a genuine state of openness. The state of openness allows the unhiddenness of the truth, she unveils (a-letheia) for me, I don't push her; I don't subjugate her to the instrumental guns of reason. Truth is no longer the adaequatio between the subject and the object (intellectus-res). Truth presents itself, it unhides and this unhiddenness reaches me through my state of openness. Modernity has razed this away. It has understood reason as technique for controlling entities. It is abominable techno capitalism.

I know you will read this letter for the first time with barely fourteen years of age. I will try to be desperately clear. I know, on the other hand, that you will continue reading it your whole life. I don't want then, to set aside the difficulties of what is not easy. Wherever you don't understand me, read me again. And again. And once again. And if you don't understand, continue. Sometime you will understand. But don't hate the difficulties or fall wounded by them. They are not for attacking nor disdaining you, nor signaling your limitations. They are there because they need to be. Because philosophy (and it is here, despite its author never having reached the peaks that others did, where Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, reached; definitely yes, this is the letter of a philosopher) claims our intelligence and our will, and also our pride. Don't give up. Don't allow yourself to be defeated by obstacles. There are things that are difficult because they are so. Because a letter like this, in which are scheming history, reflection, passion, individual and collective destiny, the relation between a political Führer and a Führer of thought, or between an atrociously ingenious Master and his flustered disciple, between a father and son, between a father and son to whom that father explains the ultimate reasons of ultimate decisions, a letter written to shine some light on extreme situations, cannot have the transparency of the immediate. Everything immediate is incomplete. Everything that doesn't fold on itself, that doesn't break, doesn't endure any ruptures, doesn't grow. One grows, always, between storms, between irreparable breaks, painfully. There isn't "the bad" like there isn't "the good". The just and unjust are confused. Tragedy is not the struggle of good against evil, or justice against injustice. Antigone and Croesus, Martin: that was tragedy, the confrontation between two true legal systems. You will already recognize Hegel in these tumults, in these seditions against the plain, the mediocre. Listen: "But life is spirit, and not the life that scares itself before death and keeps itself pure form desolation, but that which knows to confront and preserve itself. Spirit only conquers its truth when it is capable of finding itself in the absolute withdrawal."

This letter is the story of an absolute withdrawal, of the unhiding of truth, and of its consequences.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 6:24 AM