“The danger is that, within the horizon of metaphysics, the difference leads to representing Being as a being. However, when Aristotle defines being as energeia, or Plato as eidos, energeia and eidos are not beings. Metaphysics struggles against defining being as a being, however tempted it is to do so”1
PHYSIS, ENERGEIA, EN, EIDOS/IDEA, OUSIA, WILL, are not beings. They are terms in the history of philosophy for the way, or ways of Being by which Being is experienced. They are revelations; historically, culturally, personally, and by many other elements conditioned impressions received and worked into by philosophers and visionaries. The beginning of all of is experience; pre-cognitive experience, which by it’s very nature is invulnerable to attempts to translate it as it is into words.
This ‘place’ of beginning is in consciousness, but is such that the distinction between consciousness and what appears to it, between subject and object, self and world and others, is not yet arisen here into the kind of conventional, representational discrimination or calculative conceptualisation that supports our habitual daily activity in the world.
Experience here is Being expressing itself in the barest and purest form as and for the waking human being. The human being is this place where Being opens onto itself, conditioned by the sense-apertures, forms of perception and understanding of the human. From this place arise, life, self, world, time, person, love, pain, tragedy, history, politics, religion, fantasy, philosophy, forgetting.
And back through this place withdraws consciousness, with all the above contents and more. The human is a place of being where there is perception and palpation of Being. With a birth, a place opens within Being wherein Being becomes aware of itself, a region of opening from and onto Being. One could picture a water-lily blossoming on a pool of dark water. Throughout life, there is a constant alteration between opening into waking consciousness and closing again, or, opening into unconsciousness. The pulsating characteristic of this mode of being, the living alternation of consciousness and unconsciousness that is the human being has an analogue too in the drawing in and exhalation of air which itself manifests the entwinment of the human and the place, the self and world.
Whereas all things encountered in experience, once regarded as empirical existence, and hence, with immanent knowledge (knowledge of phenomena as phenomena) , in other words, in terms of appearances and the connections between appearances, are subject to the forms of our perception and understanding, to time, space, and causality, insofar as things are not appearances for another, but presence as or in themselves, they are not subject to such forms. Even this presence (which is what the Greek term for Being as OUSIA originally meant) is not a ‘being’ as in, it is not an object amongst others. It is just presence, just itself. Beyond causation. The principle of causality has it’s application within Being, to the perceptions of relationships and changes of phenomena that are present-at-hand, but Being, or presence itself, is uncaused.
Freedom, in it’s most potent and primal form, is there with the realisation that no human person, including the person we encounter as our own, no matter what other societal, political, economic, physical, intellectual advantages, has any more or less a ground in, is any more or less a phenomenon or expression of, Being in the truly metaphysical, or rather, pre-cognitive, and hence transcendental ‘nature’ of what that term names, than any other. No bullshit penetrates that authentic, and unfathomably dark core of all reality, including of course our own.
Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars
I was reading this while listening to a mix, and exactly as I finished AC/DCs Big Balls started playing.