Philosophy by its very nature
is esoteric;
for itself is neither made for the masses
nor is susceptible
of being cooked up for them.
It is philosophy only because
it goes exactly contrary to the understanding
and thus even more so to
“sound common sense,”
the so-called healthy human understanding.

Which actually means
the local and temporary vision
of some limited generation of human beings.

To that generation the world of philosophy is in
and for itself, a topsy-turvy,
and inverted, world.

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology by G. W. F. Hegel, section 3, page 14

Why read material that makes me sweat. “Sweat” inwardly that is. Material which at best, I can grasp only partially. Then at times a passage comes into focus, which causes me to feel dismay. This is that kind of passage.

Continuing to read The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Nishitani Keiji, I am a few pages into the chapter entitled Nihilism as Philosophy: Martin Heidegger. I understand that nihilism is a sense of self wherein life itself means zero. Life includes one’s own existence. Everything adds up to a big, fat nothing, a limitless void. I have never felt such a state of soul, but I can imagine as I remember several years of depression, how my world was painted in the drab colors of the “issues”, or to be more direct, the demons that tormented every waking hour. Yes, I am Ok now. But I can never forget.

Nishitani is my guide, yoda-like pointing out the features of western philosophy that speak to nihilism. The material is challenging. And then the Nishitani guided-tour gets to Heidegger. It is as if I have stepped into a sauna. I know this reading is “good for you”, still I begin to really sweat.

The passage above is found Heidegger’s essay What is Metaphysics?. It is a quote from Hegel. Nishitani writes that philosophy from the get-go is a about a topsy-turvy, and inverted world. 

It’s as if a voice in my head says to me, “What are you doing? All of the work you’ve done to ‘break down’ what philosophers have thought so that you may illuminate the problems, the reason as well as the absurdity of your time, now the 21st century — is a fool’s errand. This project cannot pay a dividend. What can be done to make the inverted world of philosophy accessible to the ordinary guy/gal on the street, my neighbors, each with their local and temporary vision of things?”

I hardly know what if any response to give to those thoughts.

I know that I will keep working, even when the woods are darker, deeper (Heidegger’s metaphysics) than I am accustomed to. I’ll keep going, writing, wrestling with words no matter what we as a society do with/to one another. Is this is what the ancients knew as fate? Our/my activity has been in the cards all along. T. S. Eliot puts it better in Burnt Norton, stanza V:

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.