The Reconciliation Of Objective Truth And Freedom As The Truth And Freedom Appearing Within Self-consciousness

The reconciliation of objective truth and freedom as the truth and freedom appearing within self-consciousness and subjectivity, a reconciliation with the fulfilment of which the principle of the north, the principle of the Germanic peoples, has been entrusted. This principle is first of all inward and abstract; it exists in feeling as faith, love, and hope, the reconciliation and resolution of all contradiction. It then discloses its content, raising it to become actuality and self-conscious rationality, to become a mundane realm proceeding from the heart, fidelity, and comradeship of free men, a realm which in this its subjectivity is equally a realm of crude individual caprice and barbarous manners. This realm it sets over against a world of beyond, an intellectual realm, whose content is indeed the truth of its (the principle’s) mind, but a truth not yet thought and so still veiled in barbarous imagery. This world of beyond, as the power of mind over the mundane heart, acts against the latter as a compulsive and frightful force.

-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right

The Ancient Greeks think with their eyes, i.e., through glances. The λόγος, thinking, is a letting appear of what here has come to appearance from itself, of what is brought into the light from out of the darkness and its sheltering. With this, thinking thus becomes a true thinking, a letting appear that each time in a certain respect discloses and lights up what is concealed. Hereby what is dark is not dissolved in a vain brightness, but rather the dark remains what is concealed and thereby itself first comes to appearance. The light remains invariably a dark light. The basic action of the λόγος is the letting appear of what lies before. This λόγος is the basic act of thinking. If we experience thinking in its logical essence in terms of the λόγος, then it is revealed: Thinking dwells inceptually in the essential space of a dark light. This is the location where the gods were present to the Greeks.

Martin Heidegger, Logic

Wherever man allows himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation, as among Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general to desensualization, decarnalization, contrition, to Puritanical spasms of repentance, to conscience-vivisection and to a Pascalian sacrifizio dell'intelletto, he is secretly lured and urged onward by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrills of cruelty directed against himself.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Being means “synthesis” and the unity (of this synthesis). Non-being means non-synthesis and multiplicity. Specifically, this is the character of the being of those beings that always are what and how they are, the ἀδύνατα ἀλλώς ἔχειν— those which, by the very meaning of their being, cannot be otherwise. Martin Heidegger, Logic

You cannot see in another man any more than you have in yourself; and your own intelligence strictly determines the extent to which he comes within its grasp. If your intelligence is of a very low order, mental qualities in another, even though they be of the highest kind, will have no effect at all upon you; you will see nothing in their possessor except the meanest side of his individuality — in other words, just those parts of his character and disposition which are weak and defective. Your whole estimate of the man will be confined to his defects, and his higher mental qualities will no more exist for you than colors exist for those who cannot see.

-Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

Trench warfare is the bloodiest, wildest, and most brutal of all warfare, yet it too has had its men, men whom the call of the hour has raised up, unknown foolhardy fighters. Of all the nerve- racking moments of war none is so formidable as the meeting of two storm-troop leaders between the narrow walls of the trench. There is no retreat and no mercy then. Blood sounds in the shrill cry that is wrung like a nightmare from the breast. Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel