Healthy, with the colors and uproar of life (your first shouts, your first cries were like bugles announcing your arrival to the world), you were born in March of 1934. You were born, like great things, in the middle of a storm. To the storm of the times you added your own stridency. I believe the storm, I can't foretell greatness. I'm in agreement with Heidegger's version of Plato: everything great (I believe it because I believe it and I believe it, more than anything, because he said it: and this submission I petulantly call coincidence) stands in the storm. Not everything that is in the storm is great. Greatness will be your task. You must want it. Choose it for yourself. I completely ignore whatever form your historicity claims. I ignore that which you will search within. What storm will test you, because what was born with you in that storm of 1934 was less close to being than to abject biology. To be born is not to be born. They are also born, those men Nietzsche calls "the last ones". The ones who do not carry in their being the chaos, the ones who are not only incapable of creating a star, but they give themselves over to the stupid life, to the flattening, the subaltern. Those troubled beings looking for happiness, fleeing from chance and from risk; from risk, above all, from living in between harshness, hardness. In a world without gods only the men that face up to their chaos, that are never sated, never rest. Those who create, imagine and decide in the middle of and from chaos. Only they are capable of engendering a star. Will you be part of that troop? Will you throw yourself into the assault on the great?[Next]
There is only one way: don't fear your chaos. Don't flee it. Let it grow in you, fill you, drive you crazy. But do not suffocate it with happiness. Men live seeking out happiness, and happiness is a bourgeois invention, it is a little death, certain, that does not hurt nor shame. It is a daily death. It is the abject death of the everyday, that separates you from pain, or from horror, but it sinks you in the nihilism of foolishness. The authentic Dasein, when it dies it doesn't really die, it ceases to be. The Dasein of joy, of inauthentic levity, he who has lived fleeing their chaos, when he dies he doesn't cease to be, because he has never been.
Chaos is not suffering for suffering itself, it is not complaint, the feeble lament. Chaos, your chaos, is the star of your greatness and the density of your joy, that is secret, that is intimate, that is strong because it has tested itself among of all the storms, facing death. Chaos is the creative source of your spirit. There, newly there, happiness, that has embodied the wisdom of pain, will make you great, and you might even offer it to others; never to the fools. Men who have conquered their star only recognize themselves in those they conquered their own or are about to, because they seek out, they do not quench their thirst with artifice, with novelties. With those men, with them, will return to this world, the gods that abandoned it.
It always happens like that.
Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger