δῆλον γὰρ ὡς ὑμεῖς μὲν ταῦτα [τί ποτε βούλεσθε σημαίνειν ὁπόταν ὂν φθέγγησθε] πάλαι γιγνώσκετε, ἡμεῖς δὲ πρὸ τοῦ μὲν ᾠόμεθα, νῦν δ’ ἠπορήκαμεν …

This is translated as:

“For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.” (Plato’s Sophist, 244a – quoted at the beginning of Heidegger’s Being and Time)

That passage always reminds me of Heidegger’s lecture course on the Sophist where Heidegger zeroes in on where Plato called Antisthenes’ doctrine “the most laughable (kategolastotata)” because it denies “taking something ‘as’ something else” but assumes a rich ontological framework that is “always already” thought along with every entity like Being, others, in itself, etc.  I encounter the dog “as not me,” for example. For the Greeks there is a metaphysics of presence and that makes me think back to the Greeks, presence being the average everyday interpretation of Being:  And so, in texts like Gorgias and Phaedo, we hear that in the beautiful thing beauty is “present.”  In his text on the Phenomenology of Religious Life Heidegger outlines a number of senses of the relation of entities to Being (e.g., “participation”), and a key one was presence as “parousia (from the Phaedo),” the incarnation of the universal in the particular.  For example, the mansion may appear as houseness incarnate – houseness being “merely present” in the average house – and houseness being deficient in the dilapidated shack.  So, the three main senses of presence I see with the Greeks are presence as along-side (e.g., with the piece of chalk materiality is “always co-present”), presence as appearing (the grades of houseness mentioned above), and then in Heidegger’s later thought luster/warmth as with the gold of pindar (parestios vs deinon).  Parestios means the one in the warmth of the hearth fire, and deinon means longing for the hearth – like an addict craving a narcotic and then being temporarily satiated by the drug only to need a stronger dose/hit the next time. Think cabin fever divorced from our distractions at a rainy cottage as Nietzsche relates this image in a letter to Overbeck.

If I put on the hat of Nietzschean cultural physician for the moment, the current condition of man is one of twofold addiction.  On the one hand, if we divorce ourselves from our distractions, painful cabin fever rises to the surface and takes over.  Beings are narcotic and we are addicted to them. I mean when we are stuck in a rainy cabin with no distractions, cabin fever (shack wacky) emerges as “withdrawal symptoms” in a figurative sense. For example, social media was designed on the model of slot machines:  You throw a comment out into the void and eagerly await a response.  Moreover, we are ever further divorced from our collective being which peaked with polis culture and arete in ancient Greece as the age of individualism took over.  

Heidegger famously said only a God can save us now, and this reflects the pessimism of addiction culture generally.  Faced with the helplessness of the addict, physicians can only prescribe submitting to one’s addiction.  The 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous include:

1 We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. 

2 Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 

3 Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. 

4 Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. 

5 Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. 

6 Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. 

7 Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. 

8 Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. 

9 Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. 

10 Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. 

11 Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. 

12 Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

This 12 step mental abortion killed the last God:  It gave the God of logic an aneurysm.  Modern Life as a whole is the interplay of narcotic and being-addicted, the addiction being the primary factor, not the warmth of the narcotic.  It is in the face of this that the last remnant of philosophy currently makes its stand: a never-ending parade of self-help books and the hope that there is a silver lining.

Of course, there is, which is why I’m a Secularism Advocate.  Secular addicts overcome addiction every day without begging God for help.  Maybe the better tactic for the religious person is to pray to never become addicted in the first place, though if prayer worked mediums would win the lottery and there would be massive faith healer departments in every hospital.