To Grasp The Riddle Is To Leap, Especially When The Riddle Involves Being As A Whole. Here There Is No

To grasp the riddle is to leap, especially when the riddle involves being as a whole. Here there is no particular being or assortment of beings from which the whole could ever be disclosed. To make surmises on this riddle we must venture a journey into the open region of what in general is concealed, into that untraveled and uncharted region which is unconcealment (aletheia) of what is most concealed. We must venture into truth.

Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche II

If ‘being’ is above all difference and commencement, Being is itself repetition, the recommencement of being. Repetition is the ‘provided’ of the condition which authenticates the imperatives of Being. This is the constant ambiguity of the notion of origin and the reason for our earlier deception: origins are assigned only in a world which challenges the original as much as the copy, and an origins assigns a ground only in a world already precipitated into universal ungrounding.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

“The Muses do not begin their ascent of Olympus before they tell Hesiod what they do and what he is to do. What they do is to tell lies like the truth and, whenever they wish, the truth. What Hesiod is to do is sing of the past and future, celebrate the gods, and begin and end with the Muses. The distinction Hesiod draws between what the Muses do and what he is to do is between direct and indirect speech. Hesiod seems to anticipate the objection of Socrates, who wants the poets in the best city in speech never to assume the guise of anyone but themselves. Hesiod tells us that he could have incorporated what the Muses say into what he says they say; but instead he lets the Muses speak for themselves, or, if we adopt Socrates’ view, he becomes for three lines the Muses. As soon as Hesiod moves from narrative to imitation the issue of imitation emerges in the form of lies like the truth. Either in separating himself off from another or in becoming another, Hesiod reveals that there is a speaking that is mixed up with peculiar form of lying. Whatever else this may mean, it calls attention to the fact that it is only because Hesiod blocks the path of the Muses on their way to the top of Olympus that the Muses must be disclosed as who they are. Without Hesiod the celebration of the might of Zeus would not have included the Muses; and without the Muses there would have been no story of the triumph of Zeus. The disclosure of the Muses through Hesiod forces the celebration of the gods to include the story about the gods. The disclosure of the being of the gods includes the disclosure of the meaning of the gods.”

— Seth Benardete, “The First Crisis in Philosophy”, from The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy

As a consequence of the calculability of spatio-temporal relations of order, space itself, and time itself, together with their unity, are considered to be so clear that any further attempt to undertake to explain them is merely frowned upon, especially since such an “explanation” would yield no useful result. A meditation on the essence of time, for example, accomplishes nothing in terms of improving our apparatus for measuring time, which is why a meditation on the essence of time is rightly counted as one of those things that produces no results. And there are similar grounds pertaining to that stance that says that whatever is not worth inquiring into any further in a calculative manner is simply not worthy of inquiry at all. Thus, the sphere of whatever is intrinsically clear comes to be delimited by that which one has already tacitly unified so as to no longer have to think about it… And yet a single step of thinking is already enough to destroy this semblance of clarity.

Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”

Through the reactualization of his myths, religious man attempts to approach the gods and to participate in being; the imitation of the paradigmatic divine models expresses at once his desire for sanctity and his ontological nostalgia.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane

The strong are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate; if the former unite together, it is only with the aim of an aggressive collective action and collective satisfaction of their will to power, and with much resistance from the individual conscience; the latter, on the contrary, enjoy precisely this coming together—their instinct is just as much satisfied by this as the instinct of the born “masters” (that is, the solitary, beast-of-prey species of man) is fundamentally irritated and disquieted by organization.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil