… the universally equalizing and omni-rationalizing technology that Heidegger calls the enframing (Gestell). Ultimately, the enframing generates such a form of indifference and equivalence that all possibility, even the possibility of a memory of difference, is obliviated. Thus the predominant understanding of what appears as rationalism is precisely that which allows for a universalized “planetary indifference.” This in turn makes true thinking impossible, thereby also rendering impossible any real action. In this way, humanity is cheated out of any understanding of its own being and with that, is cheated out of any understanding of what freedom could mean. The effects produced by this technological equalization—this de- as well as in-differentiation—are superimposed in an obfuscating and obscuring fashion upon what the Greeks called physis, or nature. They cause the loss of any real sense or meaning (or sense of meaning), because there is meaning and sense only where there are differences. And they ultimately destroy the very space in which human beings might even possibly realize their projects—viz., their freedom—the world. Such equivalence of everything existing, because it is simultaneously a uniformity and a conformity, makes everything the same in so dumb and dull a manner that even any idea of real change is forestalled. And if everything perishes in and through such leveling egalitarianism without difference, then freedom is lost, and consequently history, the thinking of history, and the history of thinking are, likewise, lost
For Heidegger, the most profound indifference lies in the oblivion of the
distinction between being and beings. The immense vulgarity of this forgetting consists of the way in which both become so indifferent, so equivalent,
that ultimately only one of them (viz., only beings) counts. Being, thereby, is
understood merely as another of these beings (e.g., as the highest being). Such
indifference installs and erects itself under the supremacy of an understanding that is oblivious of difference—a sort of “thinking” that knows only one
type of difference, namely that between beings, and therefore does not have
any actual concept of difference—and does so under a predominance of
non-thinking, as there is no thinking without difference. In such conditions
ultimately even the thesis about indifference becomes an indifferent thesis, a
thesis that does not introduce any difference, a thesis that is thus meaningless,
since meaning in general is grounded in and upon difference. In this way, and
at this point, as Heidegger will even infer, philosophy encounters its own
performance limit. The only act that remains for philosophy is that it must do
everything in its power to make the admonishment and reminiscence of the
poets heard. But even in this amplificatory gesture philosophy remains peculiarly impotent and powerless, since if one forgets the difference between being and beings, and consequently forgets even the meaning of meaning and
the sense of sense, the sayings of the poets appear meaningless, and philosophy, which points out these sayings to everyone, is reduced to appearing as if
a useless esotericism.
This, then, is nihilism.
Indifference and Repetition; or, Modern Freedom and Its Discontents
Frank Ruda
Нощни плажове 