What is Reason?

What follows is a reflection concerned with reason. What is reason?

My inclination is to say: reason, a worn out myth that guides the Western psyche. However, the notion of a myth can never measure up to the reality of what reason has been for the West. As though reality was a neutral foundation, and myth something that did not fully reach it. Reason (the conception) points one to the founding interpretation, which is primordial for the West: rational animal. True, this word was already spoken late, long after the Greek Island World had long come to strive in each quarter over the manner of the gods and the human things, under the thinking of this and that region of the Greek world. This bringing to discourse what is sensed by the most radical individuals is always the speaking out of a people, as a gente, or genus, as, e.g., the race of Athens. The race of the Athenians, under Pisistratus, to use the Latinization, and the Pisistratidae, is always keenly aware of the danger of the coming of the wrong gods (this means, as much from the individual arising of the stronger individualities as from the neighboring Greeks, with their own primordially growing ethnoi, ethnos as what is mutational and comes to discourse as battle of “words”). The dameon, or conscience, to speak anachronistically (prior to the specific bringing to thought as the direction of Synderesis, as the time-way of Western being in its eventful arising), of Socrates, is a movement towards the god of reason. However, what is prior is rationality (which is simply, here, the latinate form of the word reason) must first have the principled (the premises as available to ordinary opinion) ideas of Interest and Prejudice. Logos means what is not Intrested, as is the denial that cigarettes cause cancer by the Tobacco company, or prejudiced, as the Mother who puts her own child ahead of the child better qualified and of more value to the Polis. Sweet reason, as logos, as what is measured not be the scale, as is weight, but by speech, is already a part of the primordial “war of words”, that which, according to Achilles “other men win”. Ergo, as in Nietzsche, virtue is in its genealogy, a part of war, arete is related to the English word war, and to aristos. However, under conditions of the Selective Breeding of the modern world, it is a different Thrasymachus (battle) who speaks in Nietzsche. Not of war, but of what is real in what has replaced war, as what is all guiding in reality.

Insofar as reality can never say: yielding up of blood and breath, no more than is reality: as in Feynman, what is given with the furthest string of decimal points as measure, it reads: a sensing of the will (not the human will), and accordingly the saying: Life Giving Lie, is not, as it must needs seem, the thinking of a not truth, but, life giving lie, it is, indeed, Truth! It is, indeed, not perspective: for it speaks out in the essence of man as what reason is under the thinking of the god as what lacks in its swimming amidst the unconscious, as in Freud’s understanding of Nietzsche, or, the region of “bounded rationality” as in the technocratic liberal notion of Nietzsche. What takes no pay, the rational, the guardian, this which is no Tyrant, for a Tyrant is almost the same as a king that is hated by the people and therefor needs a standing payed guard: what is not payed is the rational. It takes no pay, it is time as what is direction which still locks the what has been as what already was. However, reason is also merely: I give reasons rather than gambling. To not give reasons, is to let the god not know in its “titanic” ground, as what is “abyss”, but this thinking in Schelling is never a true perspectivalism.

Hume (using him against his own use of himself in what follows): the most lively sensation is the most real. Thinking is the sensing of direction, as it first lets the gods speak as what is unconcealed, as what is unitary in the field of unconsciousness, as the “Ich bin” is to the body, the god (the conscience), ego arbiter, to the black swelter of anti-rationality. In this, one never reaches the radicality of the text with the name Heidegger, which is the furthest possibility of perspectivilism (and, thereby, quite unlike the Nietzschean thinking).

“The race of the Athenians”

#-o

Good ear, if you are serious.