“Heidegger, in his writings on Nietzsche in the 1950s, defined nihilism as the process in the course of which “there is nothing to Being itself.” He was not only thinking of the forgetting of Being (existence) in favor of beings (objects), but also of the future of Europe. And this future, as we have since been able to see, has turned out to be a metaphysical organization of society in which science and power reciprocally sustain themselves through technology”
“According to Heidegger, thought is metaphysical when it tries to determine Being as presence, that is, as a simple set of descriptions of the present state of affairs, thus automatically privileging terms of temporal, spatial, and unified presentness. This is why Heidegger believed that “insofar as the pure relationship of the I-think-unity (basically a tautology) becomes the unconditioned relationship, the present that is present to itself becomes the measure for all beingness.””
“Even though these sets of measurable descriptions took diverse approaches throughout the history of philosophy (from Aristotle’s motionless true substances, to Kant’s transcendental conditions of experience, to John Searle’s ontology of social functions), philosophers were always directed to consider Being as a motionless, nonhistorical, and geometric object or fact. Truth, in this form, became a correspondence that adapts or submits to Being’s descriptions; thought dissolves itself into a science, that is, into the global organization of all beings within a predictable structure of causes and effects.”
“The emergency in Europe is not Syriza, but rather all those who submit “passively” to the Union’s flattening measures: its enforced absence of emergency.”