Quotes

p.57

Once the self-realising new moves to the centre of philosophical concern, the relation of thought and existence is so redefined as to render philosophy problematic from within. In this situation, the later Heidegger does not hesitate to draw the conclusion that, as from its beginnings a matter of con- ceptual determination, the enterprise of philosophical analysis which began with Plato has to be repudiated tout court. In effect retrojecting Lukacs’s analysis of reification back across the entire history of Western thought, he sees philosophy from Plato onwards as essentially anthropocentric in nature, implicitly intent from the start on reducing the world to a con- ceptually determinable, and therefore manipulable, object-for-use. While acknowledging that the event is the achievement of Western metaphysics, which he submits to a massive, retrospective analysis in that light – he also sees the event as in the nature of the case the final outcome of that tradition, and thus announces the ‘completion’ or ‘end (Vollendung) of philosophy’, that is, the closure of any attempt to determine what cannot be determined. As components of the apparatus of ‘representation’, notions such as ‘category’, ‘concept’ and ‘method’ are to be abandoned in favour of a mode of discourse or ‘poetry of thinking’, the language and style of which consistently enacts the negation of its own propositional status, and by thus pointing away from itself, opens up that which cannot be ‘communicated’ or ‘mediated cognitively’ but ‘must be experienced’ – namely, the event.

p.58

It may thus be said that Hegel sees the relation of concept and object, rational and real as a univocal relation in that these terms have an ultimately identical meaning. With that, however, the fate of the new is sealed. […] Hegel’s ‘new’ is already contained in its beginning. […] In contrast to Hegel, it may be said that the later Heidegger sees the relation of concept and object, rational and real, as an equivocal relation in that these terms have different and even mutually exclusive meanings. […] Whitehead develops what can be called an analogical analysis – or, more precisely, an analogical algebra – of the new.