Yesterday, I revisited the idea that CG Jung, Jacques Lacan, and the Hindus (the Vikings too) agree as regards the fundamental structure of consciousness—the structure being three interlinked elements, with a fourth that playfully runs inside and outside the circuit. I further added that Heidegger’s Being and Time matches this structure too; and, for all I know, there is an analogue in the physical sciences and brain function.
The fourth playful element was symbolically called “Lucifer” by Jung. Lucifer is not the same as Satan, who is simply a deceiver—Lucifer does not deceive; he offers light, the cold light—the antithesis to the divine warm light. As such, Lucifer is not quite straightforwardly “evil”; he is more like a trickster, a playful and charming fellow who piques your interest—he is rather like Loki in Norse mythology. For Jung he was still the darkness, since he offers a false light that needs to be integrated with the other three elements in the interlinked circuit: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The Process Church messed around with Jung’s schema, swapped out the Holy Ghost for Satan—with unpleasant results; they injected too much darkness into the equation.
Heidegger’s chief concern is Dasein (Being) and in his schema Dasein plays the Lucifer role—it travels the circuit on the inside and outside at once. It is often said that the Holy Grail was a shard that fell from Lucifer’s crown—or from his forehead; from his vajra (diamond) of enlightenment, perhaps. To attain the Grail one should engage in wordplay, an idea recapitulated in Lacan’s fourth element—his symptôme (which he uses for multiple puns). Heidegger similarly liked to play around with spellings; eventually, he swapped “Beyng” for “Being”—his wordplay constituted a Grail quest.
He would not have put it in these terms, but since he was oriented towards the fourth element in consciousness Heidegger worshipped Lucifer. This explains his affiliation with Hitlerism, because the Hitlerites saw themselves as Luciferian—for example, Himmler had the SS read a book called Lucifer’s Courtiers about the quest for the Holy Grail.
Lucifer is perfect; he knows everything, sees everything thanks to his cold light—he is a charmer, just like those charmers in the SS. This is why people hate the Hitlerites: it is not that they were evil as such, they were just too perfect—too Luciferian. The downside to perfection is that it self-defeats, just like those child beauty pageants where the mothers dress their twelve-year-olds up Chyna doll perfect—so perfect they become wyrd and uncanny. Hence the Hitlerites were weird and uncanny; they were infused, as with the double lightning flash of the SS, with Lucifer’s lightning light—you cannot look at this light, it is too bright.
Perfection leads to campiness—this is why the Hitlerites always seem “gay”. To be camp is to take the frivolous seriously; so the SS would have to fuss over some unimportant tassel on a uniform to make it perfect. “Oooh, Hans it just doesn’t go.” “I know, très untermensch—we’ll simply have to burn it, m’dear.” Perfection eventually becomes risible; it is also, as with lightning, untouchable and ungraspable—just as the fourth element playfully threads inside and outside the circuit like a devilish cavalier. Beauty, by contrast, requires wholeness: it requires you to become perfect and then slightly feather the throttle, pull back the throttle and reintroduce imperfection into the system (reintroduce the son of man). Hence in wabi-sabi, the potter consciously reintroduces an error to make the piece beautiful; it is only then it is graspable, just as you need a slight hiss on music track to offset a very fine performance—a completely clean track, without any resistance, becomes ungraspable. Failure to reintroduce error will lead to you being “blinded by the light”, the light from the Grail, and nobody will “get it”—they might even say it is “evil”. Heidegger orientated to Lucifer and so became ungraspable; so bright, he is invisible.