Posted by Guest Blogger on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:04 | #

No sweat, mate.  The ball was in the other hand.

I commend you on your perception of the externals of my interest in ontology.  There are two missing factors which are quite important, though, and we can start with them.  The first is contained in that conversation piece you reproduced, like a diamond in the rough:

GW: Everything begins with being. There is nothing prior, and only diffusion of thought after.

RC: Can I take this as an Absolute statement?

GW: Yes, if you recognise that being is a practical experience, a state in Nature we are capable of achieving - indeed, equipped by Nature to achieve.  It is not simply this thing called Life, or some particular way of looking at our general experience of living.  Being is not general.  It is particular.  It is the existential exclusive.  It is a state that is difficult to reach and hard to hold on to, and like all things that take hard human endeavour, it has a high psychological value.

Now, you charge me with mysticism.  But I have found that beyond reportage of thinking ontologically, that is, in reportage of experience, it is not always possible to provide everything at once.  The first line of that conversation is a case in point.  It says something but does not finish saying it until the qualification in answer to your question.

What it says is “Everything that is real in us, that gives right thinking about who we are jointly and individually, and who we are not, and which makes possible all that is vivifying, all that begins in the state of presence-to-being.  It comes from nothing - what was there before is revealed by it to be nothing - and it passes back into nothing, through the taking of thought once again.”

This is the trajectory of human experience of what is.  Of course, one would be a fool to believe this and not find the consequences of “nothing” all around us politically, culturally, in every way.  But this is the third part of the essay I am engaged in, and you did not allow me to finish it.

What I am doing with this is to create an engine of change, and then see what it will do.  An ontology which is not wholly theoretical, not wholly an exercise in thinking, is bound to begin with the core, where the real heat is generated.  The meanings for dualism and the general intellectual consistency will either develop or not.  Perhaps this is something only an untrained thinker could say.  Actually, it’s quite a common fault even among better thinkers.  For example, I was interested to see that you defend “ground” in non-Idealist terms ... actually, in Realist terms!  I’m not going to tackle you over that.  Perhaps some referee will spot the infringement and award me a kick at the posts.

Oh, the second missing factor!  Have to wait now.  Past my bedtime.  See you later.

Posted by anon on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:21 | #

Whew. This will be epic, man.

It is not happening, his prose is hard going, I would not be surprised if he gets into tight lederhosen to write his obscurantism and I suspect he knows the wheels are falling off.

Heidegger has always reminded me of J. de Maistre’s jab at Francis Bacon’s methodology, in the former’s delicious and excellent Examen de la philosophie de Bacon, that what distinguishes Bacon’s philosophy is “the immensity of the apparatus and the nullity of the results”; moreover, that what astonishes one in reading through it is that “a man could assemble so many materials and not be able to build a cabin.”

Heidegger, at least, I believe was his own hüttler. And in that little pun lies what I further believe to be the whole secret of the nationalist’s desire to reclaim Heidegger for his rightful camp, apart from GW’s personal experience: the “encrypted” pro-national or racial elements in his work.

Yes, if you recognise that being is a practical experience, a state in Nature we are capable of achieving - indeed, equipped by Nature to achieve.  It is not simply this thing called Life, or some particular way of looking at our general experience of living.  Being is not general.  It is particular.  It is the existential exclusive.  It is a state that is difficult to reach and hard to hold on to, and like all things that take hard human endeavour, it has a high psychological value.

This is where it is interesting and worth one’s time, for here he intersects with evolutionary psychology. The big lesson is that we must reconnect with our animal ground. GW may disagree with that cavalier simplification, but he has not in the past disagree with simplifications by other commentators who have demonstrated the “Being moment” — the opposite of “absence — in circumstances in which life is threatened or greatly strained. If it is “practical” it can be reduced to real psychological moments of that sort, and a few others (creativity e.g.). Unfortunately this validates a lot of New Age rubbish focused entirely on “self-actualization” and “pushing one’s limits”. Ontology thus seems to be one philosopher’s loquacious groping after Absolute Truths brought home to us in much plainer fashion by evolutionary scientists decades later, while the teleology hangs on as an imperative to realization of extreme or focused moments of attention, or however the “attainment of Being” be expressed in physical terms.

I have always had the sense that metaphysics has been, as Nietzsche informs us, nothing more than a stupid doubling of reality, thus amounting to a philosophy opposed to reality / life. Spengler asserts someplace toward the end of book one of Der Untergang that while Darwin gave to evolution the “Manchester School” style, it was in the heads of all the greatest minds from Hegel to Nietzsche, even before in Rousseau. I have seen this repeatedly myself. Nietzsche’s eternal value is in warning us away from metaphysical overlay of reality. Heidegger’s explicit task as a professional philosopher was to revive the “question of Being” and it seems from what little I can understand of his magnum opus, and the exegesis of intellectuals like Guessedworker, is that indeed he brought to it much that tallies with the current of evolutionary thought that runs unbroken through much of the nineteenth century to our time. The tragedy, I think, is that it serves no real purpose and amounts to a fancy teutono-philosophic garb for much simpler, accessible truths. This may have value in that it can inspire us to strive for the “Being moment” as texts in evolutionary science cannot.

Latching on to existentialism with a being-experience will not help the search for esoteric comparisons and political context.

Precisely that. The Being moment has no political context or extrapolation. If it is an awakening, it is, as you say, a solitary one and cannot be expected of the masses. Here is a major fault-line in his thinking, on one hand concerned with self-actualization (“Being” stripped of contingent properties or however one express it), on the other with spreading this as a political meme.

Racism alone has to do the job of stopping duality.

You’ve just summarized all of Nietzsche’s later thought in a single maxim.

Brilliant essay I will read three or four times.

Posted by anon on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:24 | #

Apologies in advance GW for the meddling of a novice!

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:26 | #

Transcendental Idealism - please NO NO NO…

Transcendental realism a la early Roy Bhaskar YES YES YES!!!

Posted by Grimoire on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 03:23 | #

well I tell ye Mr.Cameron, the’ll be nay butter in hell for ye…

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:52 | #

I don’t understand what teleology is. I’ll look it up before I check back here.

I like the lederhosen part very much. Under normal circumstances, I am unable to imagine what GW looks like, but the instant I visualize him in tight lederhosen, he appears with startling clarity.

Excellent.

Posted by Grimoire on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:14 | #

I have more time to make a few comments

Relativist metaphysics is a joke because metaphysics is about absolutes.

Good.

If you can see the material bit that rank and file Nationalists can get hold of then point it out.

For that they cannot understand, they feel appreciation. This is instructive.

Existentialism is a reaction against G. W. F. Hegel’s Idealist abstractions. Instead of getting into abstractions, existentialists have sought to be concrete and in touch with what it means to be human. They claim to be in touch with life, but the result invariably is subjectivity.

“....the “Idea” is third and final stage of development of the Subjective (Notion), the unity of the Subject and the Object, developing up to the Absolute Idea, which is the unity of the Being and the Notion.
Logic. Hegel

Therefore the Absolute Idea rests equally upon the mature development of existential and subjective, and does not gain objectivity until transforming the principle, or world in which it exists. This totalization, or unity of the Idea, is the concretion of the subject-objective dialectic, and subsumes all culture and science to the unity of the ideal, as Hegel calls it - a unitary conception of knowledge.

Individual existence is opposite to where Nationalists need to go. We need political statements that express identity. Idealist ontology concerns man as a political animal. That is where Nationalists need to be and unavoidably it involves abstractions to make statements about European man as a political animal.

Good, however here, and for the rest of the post, you do not spell out what idealism.

The inference that Idealism is not concrete, hence Idealists are elites “playing silly-buggers”, needs to be challenged.

Very good. Without a reawakening of the consciousness of the ideal, men are just cattle following the asshole in front of them. Only through the ideal are men actors… and the world’ a stage.

The only way to understand the material is via the Ideal….Interestingly, this is an absolute fact, not an absolute Truth, about orientation.

VEry good. I have been waiting for the development of the ‘ontology of the material’ to explain   that every thing materialists think they know of the material is filtered through the hundred thousand machines of the eyes, ears and the states of the cells of the flesh and recomposed after a hundred million permutations between the synapses of the brain into a televisual mirage: THE MATERIAL IS A PRODUCT OF THE IDEAL. We have no way of knowing what we think we know, but against the ideal.
What we think we are seeing is light, what we think we are hearing is sound, but it is only stimuli…this is absolute fact.

I will admit the “tight lederhosen” quip was snide…..

Yes it was…. ignorant Kiwi. I take issue with this recurrent lack of appreciation for lederhosen, and I approve of Gworkers wearing of them, and find it appropriate and ideal. When I am feeling particularly angry with this idiot world, I always put on a especial brawny pair of embroidered stag-hide bundhosen, and I usually find a particularly violent bar to have a drink in, and after a few, the crazy ass pants transform me into one of the most hardcore freedom fighters to ever live, a dude so extreme balls-out in insatiable quest for freedom and vengeance that something as inconsequentially trivial as being fucking decapitated couldn’t stop me from thrashing my enemies to death with my nutsack. ... but I digress…..

This is my Idealist plan of attack against the Establishment. Ontology is the start of a three part attack on dualistic consciousness. The second part is teleology. [GW is aware of the ontology – teleology connection.]

Good. Unity in direction, not dogma. Gworker is coming around to this… the unity of theory and practice, subjectivity and objectivity, is action or deed - the Absolute Idea realized.

Ontology and teleology are dichotomous. It means that when one is doing ontology, one is preparing teleology. It is a constraint, internal to metaphysics that affirms one’s work is coherent. Teleology does not pertain to individuals; it applies to nations. An ontology that does not connect with politics will not connect with teleology. I cannot see these connections in GW’s work, but then, though well acquainted with mysticism, I confess to not being able to read it.

The problem with this from my view is the teleology of the Anglo-Saxon is so warped by false myths that can no longer be sustained.  It is what is killing him inside, destroying from within. This teleology is Britain as an oceanic nation, imperial and supreme over all. But it was a invented myth. Before 1850 it was a collection of adventurers, pirates and oceanic merchants, then it was great, incomparable, perfidious yet honest,  but no empire. It was Disraeli who invented the myth of empire, turned it to white mans burden and a mission of civilization to the savage, which was both hypocrisy and tragic mistake, and everything that has come out of it has led to destruction. How to take it back to the nation of adventurers? The real Anglo-Saxon? Exorcise the jew and the nation of chosen people, with their miserable fate.

shall comment more later….

Posted by danielj on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:28 | #

Jimmy,

He looks like a very large, real life version of Wallace from Wallace and Grommit.

Quintessentially English. Just much larger.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 10:32 | #

The material arises from the ideal - please next you will be telling us why evolutionary biology is bunk. Hegel is, in a famous phrase, a bad case of when language goes on holiday - in this case to cloud-cuckoo land.

Posted by Leon Haller on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 10:56 | #

There you are GW, a translucent presentation of Idealism, ontology, teleology, the Absolute and racism/Nationalism’s role in the grand scheme of Western consciousness. (Rod Cameron)

“translucent”? Actually, c’est le mot juste. This post is as clear as frosted glass.

Here is a suggestion. Why don’t you all write so as to make yourselves understandable to those of us in the commentariat stuck scrimmaging in MR’s mosh pit?

I mean this. The author should try to summarize his entire piece in three short paragraphs with a view to making its core assertions intelligible to an intelligent but philosophically untrained friend.

Frankly, though I recognize that work and thought went into this expostulation, it seems to me less an argument than a lengthy concatenation of unproven assertions, cluttered up with undefined if not specious neologisms. 

(I invite anyone here, not just Mr. Cameron, to try this useful little exercise. Discipline yourself to explain this article in 3 paragraphs, even if that risks over-simplification.)

Posted by Michael on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:03 | #

Pardon my ignorance, but is the point of this discussion simply to justify “European identity and racial consciousness”?

If so, kin preference is a scientific fact, so why can’t you just appeal to a “philosophy” of desire.

Folks prefer to be among their own kind. Desires matter. Ergo, race consciousness is justified.

After all, previous generations weren’t too concerned to rationally justify their race consciousness, they just felt it.

All folks need is peer support to indulge kin preference, they don’t need other reasons.

Posted by Leon Haller on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:08 | #

Michael,

Yes and no. The real issue is not ontology, but ethics; specifically, is it ethical for whites to violate traditional (Christian) norms against violence in order to secure our existence in perpetuity?

More specifically, race survival requires sovereign territory. We have been denied this due to unwanted mass immigration. May we (from some ethical tradition, which for me is Christianity) initiate violence against nonwhites who refuse to exit our territories peacefully (atheists, whatever their metaphysics, can do what they want, ethics only having any relevance in the presence of divine punishment for sins, which is not, however, to say that the ethical is only that which is divinely willed; morality exists quite independently of God, but without God, there is no reason to adhere to any ethical absolutes; ethical existence without God, or without belief in God, is, in other words, simple weakness)? That is the only real philosophical question growing out of nationalist concerns.

Nationalist ontology may have some use (eg, by demonstrating that the nature of reality demands, for maximum human happiness or fulfillment of some kind, that human communities be racially delimited), though I doubt it, and on many levels.

Strictly pragmatically, the only philosophical issues we as nationalists must resolve before moving forward (beyond, that is, such perfectly morally acceptable policies as deporting illegal aliens, and ending legal immigration, affirmative action, multicultural indoctrination in Western schools, etc, all of which we need to get enacted right now) are in the realm of ethics.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:21 | #

“....the “Idea” is third and final stage of development of the Subjective (Notion), the unity of the Subject and the Object, developing up to the Absolute Idea, which is the unity of the Being and the Notion.
Logic. Hegel

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:38 | #

Mr Haller

God enjoys omnipotence and is the ground for all ethics/morality yet morality exists independently of him and not by his will. What strange ideas you have, even for a Catholic.

The Euthyphro dilemma is found in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, in which Socrates asks Euthyphro: “Is the pious loved by the Gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the Gods?” It involves several aspects.

Sovereignty: If there are moral standards independent of God’s will, then there is something over which God is not sovereign. God is bound by the laws of morality instead of being their establisher. Moreover, God depends for his goodness on the extent to which he conforms to an independent moral standard. Thus, God is not absolutely independent.

Omnipotence: These moral standards would limit God’s power: not even God could oppose them by commanding what is evil and thereby making it good. As Richard Swinburne puts the point, this horn “seems to place a restriction on God’s power if he cannot make any action which he chooses obligatory… [and also] it seems to limit what God can command us to do. God, if he is to be God, cannot command us to do what, independently of his will, is wrong.” This point was very influential in Islamic theology: “In relation to God, objective values appeared as a limiting factor to His power to do as He wills… Ash’ari got rid of the whole embarrassing problem by denying the existence of objective values which might act as a standard for God’s action.” Similar concerns drove the medieval voluntarists Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.

Freedom of the will: Moreover, these moral standards would limit God’s freedom of will: God could not command anything opposed to them, and perhaps would have no choice but to command in accordance with them. If moral requirements existed prior to God’s willing them, requirements that an impeccable God could not violate, God’s liberty would be compromised.

Morality without God: If there are moral standards independent of God, then morality would retain its authority even if God did not exist. This conclusion was explicitly (and notoriously) drawn by early modern political theorist Hugo Grotius: “What we have been saying [about the natural law] would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to him.” On such a view, God is no longer a ‘law-giver’ but at most a ‘law-transmitter’ who plays no vital role in the foundations of morality. Nontheists have capitalized on this point, largely as a way of disarming moral arguments for God’s existence: if morality does not depend on God in the first place, such arguments stumble at the starting gate.

Posted by CS on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:50 | #

Leon,

If we carry out the “White Zion” plan, once our numbers relative to the populaton of the country we choose become high enough, the non-whites living there (and there may not be that many to begin with) will find living in said country increasingly unpleasant even without the use of violence. They will be motivated to leave for another white country where the white liberals there will kiss their asses.

As for Christianity, there are strains that promote white racialism.

http://spiritwaterblood.com/

http://thewhitechrist.wordpress.com/

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:53 | #

Hegel and logic are not on the same page. Idealism as a philosophical school is a difficult one to defend. The Australian philosopher David Stove, argued in typical acerbic style, that idealism rested on what he called “the worst argument in the world”. Google it if you like.

And in the OP what conceptual work being done by the word ‘absolute’ as in ‘is that an absolute statement’?  Are there not simply statements which we try to use judgmental rationality (coherence, evidence etc.) to determine they likely truth of said statements?

But here is one ‘absolute’  I am sure of - one life equals one death; the only 100% democratic phenomenon in human history.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:13 | #

Mr Haller

I know there are a lot of active threads at the moment so I didn’t want you to miss my reply/questions.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Mr Haller

Let us argee to disagree on your interpretation of the effects, importance, and value of market mechanisms. I feel we are, at best, to be talking past each other. I could be cheeky and ask for a negative effect of markets from you but it’s not important.

The quote in my post in the Greece thread is of course from Adam Smith.

I’m interested in your thoughts on methodological individualism (does it miss anything about social reality?, Does it have implicit normative assumptions? etc.) and on the sociology of religion.

Is God dead sociologically in these post-modern times? How do you imagine you could enforce such a organising narrative? Crude mythologies don’t stand up well in the bracing cold winds of science, and any sophisticated defence of theism is well about the heads of the average Christian.

On the Christianity point – yes some Christians have been traditionalist or conservative in viewpoint but equally there is the tradition of those facing towards the left as witnessed in the Civil Rights era and the Catholic social gospel (which I would guess you totally dislike). So Christianity can be ‘read’ in many different ways and I am skeptical at a societal level it will every be read in an exclusive ‘catch-all’ way again. 

In post-Christian England many people will, on being asked their religion, answer Anglican (‘we’re Church of England’) but it means practically nothing other than wanting a nice old Church to have a wedding in, and for the middle classes getting one’s children into a half-decent school. Even for the 5-10% of the population in the pews in England their worldview is little more than ‘motherhood and apple pie-ism’ and ‘being nice to people’. There was a documentary series a while ago on the BBC about a year in the life of a regular Anglican parish in England, and at one point the filmmakers asked the vicar if they could ask the worshipers about what they believed. He vicar’s brilliantly and unintentionally funny remarks were along the lines of: ‘please don’t as you will only confuse them’.

What I think you don’t appreciate is that most well-educated people of all outlooks, and especially those in the strata called the intelligentsia, in the West at least, are not generally religious. In the modern academy atheism, methodological naturalism or whatever label you wish to use is the default background assumption for anyone seriously engaging in the natural sciences and the social sciences along with most of the humanities. Now I’m not saying that one cannot be a well-educated, intelligent and articulate theist but it is a minority pursuit.

Posted by Ambitious Outsider on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:34 | #

Trouble seem to follow me.

True story.

In early October of 2010, I waited to board a form of public transport and had to politely nod as a flushed white woman in a floral print mumu described to me her irrefutable eschatological proof that the Day of Judgement was not only approaching, it was known.

“May twenty-first!” she declared, a little too loudly. “Prepare your soul!”

I meekly replied that I would, but the weakness of my case was made plain by the doubt that spread across her broad, poorly-made-up face.

“Heaven,” she said, narrowing her eyes, “doesn’t have room for smart asses.”

I nodded vigorously. She just raised her voice, focusing what was originally a public lecture into a pointed condemnation of my character and person. My purity and faith were openly questioned. Damnation was assured.

I pretended not to hear and slipped, relieved, onto my subway train as she remained rooted to her bench, calling after me and rattling off the various signs of the impending Apocalypse. The doors closed on “boiling oceans” and, free from further distraction, my mind immediately turned to the idiot sheeple that make up Jesusland.

And people want us to genuflect before such fools?

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:40 | #

@Søren Renner

I’m quite a fan of Anthony Kenny - “The Unknown God” is a lovely collection of agnostic essays.

Posted by danielj on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:51 | #

GL,

God is bound by His character and it is Good. God’s will is not free in that strictly logical sense. God cannot change pi or or violate the laws of logic yes, but the fact that you consider this some kind of check upon His omnipotence means you have not read and/or thought enough about the issue. I mean, must God be capable of incoherency or simultaneously existing and not existing to be God? The real question is why and how the non-theist considers these “laws” they are appealing to to sit on the throne of the universe unchallenged? How does the non-theist justify the laws of logic he appeals to in his challenge to the rightful authority of God?

The word moral is of relatively recent origin and only serves to obscure the debate and grant credence to the notion that God achieves a standard rather than being *the* standard.

Michael,

Desires are shifty bastards.

Posted by Grimoire on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:02 | #

@Soren Renner;

If by fact you mean “nonsense”, yes. Otherwise no. As a Gibsonian direct realist (or direct perceptual realist according to T. Ryckman) I must object strongly to this perverse lie, this “Cartesian heresy*”.

“Heaven,” she said, narrowing her eyes, “doesn’t have room for smart asses.”

how is it physical reality contradicts your direct realism? How do you explain what you call ‘direct realism’, when it ignores the evidence of the mechanical procedure of existence?
———————————————————————————-
Graham;

The material arises from the ideal - please next you will be telling us why evolutionary biology is bunk

This should be, ‘the material adheres to the ideal’ - there is no conflict with evolutionary biology. The outlook of idealism is that man makes the world, and does not accept what the world has made of him.
—————————————————————————————-
Leon: You have not yet submitted even the proof of your magnum opus. Perhaps then you would appreciate the difficulties of trying to distill a motive for the Nationalist movement. Also, if you do, you might find a spirit of camaraderie and support is helpful in both explanation and understanding. We don’t have to take the same bus to get somewhere, but it’s helpful if we mutually agree to go in the same general direction.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:26 | #

I was hoping for some response to the video I linked earlier.

Is it just me, or does it really seem like a choreograph of Hegelian dialectics applied to nationalism?

It seems to me that the Fuhrer, marching at the head of the triad, symbolizes the Absolute Ideal of his flanking complements, self awareness and racial awareness.

If I’m right, Mr. Cameron is not the first to see a connection between Hegelian dialectics and nationalism.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:42 | #

No idealism postulates that ‘mental’ events are fundamental - Idealism refers to any philosophy that argues that reality is somehow dependent upon the mind rather than independent of it. More extreme versions will deny that the ‘world’ even exists outside of our minds. Narrow versions argue that our understanding of reality reflects the workings of our mind first and foremost — that the properties of objects have no standing independent of minds perceiving them.

I totally reject the model. I’m a critical realist (see Roy Bhaskar’s “A Realist Theory of Science”). There is an ontologically independent world that is intransitive and independent of humans and our wishes/desires/thoughts. Gravity is not a social/mental construct.

Posted by Ambitious Outsider on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:28 | #

All this God-talk has made me remember that;

Satan Rejected My Soul!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fl5u4Ab1ME

Posted by Paul on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:32 | #

Off topic - important information regarding current leadership challenge here

Andrew Brons facing expulsion lies

Posted by Grimoire on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:13 | #

Jimmy,  no mystery.  British ‘Changing of the Guard’ and ‘Trooping of the Colours’  are like expression. The Roman ‘Cavalcade of the Pantheon’...the Greek Olympiad and the opening of the games based on the events of the battle of Marathon.
Nor is it Hegelian dialectics, which is a philosophic inquiry into expressions of the ideal. Race has expression greater than that of skin.
————————————————-
Graham;

No idealism postulates that ‘mental’ events are fundamental - Idealism refers to any philosophy that argues that reality is somehow dependent upon the mind rather than independent of it. More extreme versions will deny that the ‘world’ even exists outside of our minds. Narrow versions argue that our understanding of reality reflects the workings of our mind first and foremost — that the properties of objects have no standing independent of minds perceiving them.

Disagree all night and day. You can not escape reality or change it without realizing your power to do so.
——————————-

Ambitious Outsider: Morrissey, a genius.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKoS5X4SMrY&feature=related

Irish blood, English heart, this I’m made of
There is no-one on earth I’m afraid of
And no regime can buy or sell me

I’ve been dreaming of a time when
To be English is not to be baneful
To be standing by the flag not feeling
Shameful, racist or partial

Irish blood, English heart, this I’m made of
There is no-one on earth I’m afraid of
And I will die with both my hands untied

I’ve been dreaming of a time when
The English are sick to death of Labour
And Tories, and spit upon the name of Oliver Cromwell
And denounce this royal line that still salute him
And will salute him forever

Posted by Grimoire on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:16 | #

Jimmy; accidently clipped the last part of the line ‘Race has expression greater than that of skin + or philosophy.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 01:03 | #

I see that I did not switch posting accounts when I made that opening comment.  No matter.  I have some replies to make today - many thanks to all for the opportunity.  Informed and reasoned criticism is completely welcome.

I’ll begin by completing my preliminary response to Rod in which I sought to make two clarifications, the first of which was to respond to the charge of mysticism (or, indeed, “epiphany”).  I have never believed that experience of our facticity as beings is other than common to all, and I made that point in my Part 2 essay.  Certainly for me and, I suspect, for everyone else too, speaking of it is an art and cannot be a defining process (I know Badiou has utilised set theory for definitional purposes, but then Alan Sokal has cast a genuine mathematician’s shadow across that).  It is most definitely not the preserve of intellectuals but of all men and all beings.  It cannot be contained by a mental model or a learned paper.  In writing of it, therefore, it does no harm to leave a space open for the reader to complete the proposition.  It is an invitation to exercise his native understanding.

So to Rod’s second charge of subjectivity ... which is linked to that of relativism and the “shallowness” of existentialism.

Rod, of course, can be “absolutely” confident that Man cannot know objective truth from his individual experience in any absolute sense.  After all, organisms are evolved to perceive externality as a matter of fitness, and this is a limiting and therefore relative dispensation.  But if, for example, you watch those helmet-cam videos on YouTube involving Taliban ambushes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiTwlRn6r4o

... you can’t deny that there is not only an impressively high degree of objectivity on display but that it is common to all the soldiers, and requires no explication by authority.  They perceive the need to fight through the same physical, instinctual and emotional perceptions and the production of adrenalin.  The need calls forth the same identity and cooperation by that which is identified.  They fight not for themselves but for eachother.  They fight together.  They know any number of them may die right there together.

Now, what does this tell us about the truth of what is?  On page 57 of my copy of Being and Time Heidegger states:

If, as has become quite customary these days, one defines “truth” as something that “really” pertains to judgement, and if one then invokes the support of Aristotle with this thesis, not only is this unjustified, but, above all, the Greek conception of truth has been misunderstood.  ????????, the sheer sensory perception of something, is true in the Greek sense, and indeed more primordially that the ????? [reason]  which we have been discussing.

One may draw the conclusion that truth, for the purposes of group cohesion and group action - meaning, individuals’ actions in the interests of the group - finds its locus in this primordial state of disclosure. It may not be in the realm of the objective which is, apparently, ameliorable to Rod’s gestures in the direction of metaphysical absolutes, but it suffices quite well for mere life!  It works on Afghanistan’s plains, anyway.  To borrow from the social climber’s bon mot: it is not how you know but who.  Not Hume and Kant but Heidegger.

Now, I do not find this type of engagement with what is in the least shallow, but then I have been familiar with it for four decades.  I find it direct and pertinent and capable of synthesis.  As we go along, that statement will be found reasonable or not.  But today I’m not ready to throw in the towel and give myself up to the Absolute.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 01:22 | #

Grim, I’m kinda pissed off and hurt that you drove within 3 miles of my house when you moved to Canada, and never bothered to look me up.

Adding insult to injury, you’ve safely ensconced yourself in Canada, and now declare a fondness for dressing up in weird outfits and seeking out bar fights. Judy and I could have shown you the promised land, stone cold sober, and had you back on the road before noon.

If you pass by here again, please give us a call. We’ll be happy to help you find an outlet for your bundhosed aggression. Judy has knit me a fine pair of swastika patterned kilt hose, and with mustache tucked in turban, I’d be honored to have your back.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 01:32 | #

Anon writes:

This is where it is interesting and worth one’s time, for here he intersects with evolutionary psychology. The big lesson is that we must reconnect with our animal ground. GW may disagree with that cavalier simplification, but he has not in the past disagreed with simplifications by other commentators who have demonstrated the “Being moment” — the opposite of “absence — in circumstances in which life is threatened or greatly strained. If it is “practical” it can be reduced to real psychological moments of that sort, and a few others (creativity e.g.).

I most certainly do not disagree with the assertion.  There are two very obvious ways in which the organism perceives and acts upon what is hidden to ordinary waking conciousness.  One of those is the movement from absence to presence.  It is rare that it occurs without intention, and it is pretty rare to find people who know what intention/attention actually means in that respect.  The other is the instinctual making of life choices according to the evolutionary standard.  It is universal and it proceeds completely without our conscious participation.

Heidegger also found ways of being in, to quote from my Part 2 essay: environment (Umwelt) where one is “Being-in”, the connective universe (Mitwelt) where one is “Being-with”, and, of course, the inner- or self-world (Eigenwelt).  Of Mitwelt, I am reminded of the life of the crowd - something I recall as a young football fan, perhaps nine or ten years old, when I used travel with by pal and his dad to Selhurst Park to the see the home games of Crystal Palace, and also, sometimes, to Stamford Bridge, Highbury, Craven Cottage, and Upton Park to see first division games.  Crowds do not possess the capacity for inauthenticity.  They ask for nothing.  They are moral baths which pick you up and put you down again in a different place, surrounded by another and greater self.

This, too, is worthy of investigation.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 01:36 | #

Daniel,

Wallace?  Just so you know, when we parted on the walk down to Oxford Street and I jumped into a cab next to where we were standing, the cabbie turned around and said, “Was that your son and his wife you were saying goodbye to?”

And you keep telling everyone here you are a typical underfed Napolitan!

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 01:51 | #

Grim,

I have been waiting for the development of the ‘ontology of the material’ to explain that every thing materialists think they know of the material is filtered through the hundred thousand machines of the eyes, ears and the states of the cells of the flesh and recomposed after a hundred million permutations between the synapses of the brain into a televisual mirage: THE MATERIAL IS A PRODUCT OF THE IDEAL. We have no way of knowing what we think we know, but against the ideal.

What we think we are seeing is light, what we think we are hearing is sound, but it is only stimuli…this is absolute fact.

You know perfectly well that those bullets buzzing through the air from somewhere on the tree-lined bank of the stream are all too material.  The small round holes they make in your thigh and abdomen are material.  Of our three systems of external perception only the intellectual faculty - a slow modelling machine - suffers from the profound divorce you and all Idealists ascribe to the whole system.  But the soles of your feet know the materiality of the insides of your boots, and your emotional faculty, out of which a curious and uninvited bell of silence has fallen as you work the trigger and reload, and look and aim, understands the material reality with a speed and superlative accuracy your lumbering thoughts can never approach.

Don’t be so certain you know the whole story about human perception.

Posted by john on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 02:33 | #

Annon wrote:“The big lesson is that we must reconnect with our animal ground.”
Left In The Dark, by Tony Wright and Graham Gynn has this very purpose.
““The development of our brain became progressively retarded, one side more so than the other, and it has come to dominate our sense of who we are.”
The data predicts that the data will be misinterpreted, best to just see the funny side of it while trying to improve the functioning of the brain.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 02:44 | #

Just because we might not know everything does not mean we know nothing. It would be something of a miracle that the knowledge found by science seems to correspond with the real world well enough to produce trips to the moon and nice LCD TVs if they were fundamentally in error. You know, for only ‘mental’ constructs, scientific concepts seem to track much of the natural phenomena in the world pretty darn well, yes?

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 03:17 | #

I strongly suspect that it takes something more cerebral than the sensation of boot leather against the soles of feet to bring Negro and White together on the dirt roads of Afghanistan where the reality of their visceral perceptions are reconciled by force of equalization.

Posted by Grimoire on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 04:14 | #

Well Jim I may take you up on that in the future. I have no friends with the constabulary here, so I keep my nose clean. They do not have any establishments here to provide that necessary pressure valve ambiance of ultra-violence, alcohol and a slow talking ‘Vern’, ‘Wolf’, ‘Cole’ or ‘Nash’ who will tell you how they shot someone, often a first wife…just to watch her die, often pulling the nickel plated .38 with which they did the deed, out from behind the glove box of the 78 Montego, and sell it to you loaded for $24 for a throw down, as all the nickel has spalded off over the years, and the duct tape on the grip is worn and sticky. I love America. I don’t care why. I know if it goes down, it will go down in flames. I often have reflected that perhaps third world immigrants were invited for reasons other than mowing grass and so on…globalism. Reasons having to do with empirical open-air experimentation with Darwinian theories. What other country can you buy Shabot 12-gauge armour-piercing exploding shotguns shells in a gas-station flea market….outside of Pakistan? You pop one of those babies off into a crowd and in clears a hole you could ride the subway through. Whats the purpose of that? Hunting Jurassic coyotes? I shot one into the side of a Volvo and it blew the bonnet and the engine head 5 metres into the air.

Canada’s quite different. A very sober attempt to create a world without hate, without war, a very perfect world…which i imagine attacking because they would never expect it. Blitzkrieg.
My inner Nietzsche is starting to cause noticeable twitches, like I found myself opening a can of peas with a hatchet… I thought I learned that doesn’t work. Just little things that don’t add up.

Maybe one day we should show some love to the maladjusted in your town. No swastika’s however. No tweaking the straight folk. Always stay on the side of the folk and law and order and they will cut you endless slack…

“Ya’ll realize you can’t be running down our coloured folk in the middle of the sidewalk like this here…I don’t wanna hear no excuses’
“Is it against the law?”
” Hehe….Well yessir it is - the sidewalk is fer walking…im a-going to let you go now with a warning since you don’t know no better. I suggest you git yerself outta here as quick as you can…go on now..skidaddle”
Screech…..
(kidding)

Posted by Grimoire on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 05:32 | #

Gworker:
            You know perfectly well that those bullets buzzing through the air from somewhere on the tree-lined bank of the stream are all too material. 

??? I missed a part of the conversation..anyway, carrying on….my experience is that the mystery of what we are talking about is never so perfectly elucidated as it is by bullets buzzing through the air from some tree lined bank. The small round holes,  piss or blood dripping into the dirt, the dread and euphoria, the timelessness, or all of time. Now my friend that is something all together different that doesn’t at all mean what you think it means. However, different people experience things differently. There are no good examples and it is very hard to explain. I will tell you when you are there and you have command of the situation, no matter what happens, little round holes or your head blown off and you die, it’s glorious beyond anything in this world - and that is why people go to war…and it will be very difficult to stop people from going to war. That is why the world is the way it is, before we were ever here.  They don’t tell you that…they always pull your leg somehow because they don’t want to share it, it is an axiom it is the actors alone and they will not share it.  But it is the vastest, most transcendental, universal experience in this world. Of course there are many who are just scared shitless, or unable to achieve any sort of calmness or acceptance, often because they believe too much in the reality of the material, and it undermines their control. And often these are the causalities, during and after action.
But we could argue, just stop and think realistically. As much you vest into the external reality of those round holes, it is still perception. You will say ‘oh is dying from a perceived external reality a perception?’ Yes it is. You are going to die anyway, it’s certain… understand? Certain. What’s the difference between a tree lined bank among comrades and a dank hospital cot with distant strangers of another uniform? NONE. Except for preferences, having the choice and facing it is all. There is no escape….just the FALSE perception of escape, which is why you think the way you do, and believe in the external reality, as if it was solid and fixed and has meaning you can take from. It has no meaning but what you give it.
You cannot realize the stakes in the game on your own life are zero against infinity - you are as good as dead - the only difference is the choice and facing it - the only real meaning is what you do for and with others, everything else is just in your head and ‘poof’ it’s gone…like it was never there.
And when you know this, you are a breed apart.

It’s very difficult to come at this from philosophy, because of the tendencies for illusion. I tell you ‘it’s all in your head’...I’m not talking of a concept, a philosophy or an ideal. I am talking about a physical fact about which there is no argument. You can build all kinds of drama into three external round holes, blood dripping into the dirt like the sand clock of your life, or jews or whathaveyou. The drama changes nothing. The fact that you are going to die changes nothing. The only thing that matters is the meaning you give to the reality of the world you observe, that you share, which is also giving. There is no meaning in matter, no meaning in three small holes - it all amounts to the same thing - nothing but what you give it.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 05:45 | #

Sounds good, Grim, but if we go on a serious tear, I’d like to have GW along in case we need to explain it all to the cops.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 06:04 | #

If there’s anything GW is not, it’s a tattleteleologist.

Posted by Grimoire on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 07:34 | #

right, and if we are arrested and sent to prison…we’ll steal metal from the machine shops to fashion into shanks for when we start a riot and escape, but until then we’ll give our shanks to Gworker to Heidegger cell.

Posted by Rod on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 07:46 | #

Post

Guys, blogging is not my number. In military terms, blogging is skirmishing and I prefer to plan for the big set-piece battles. One that time and history decree has to be had with the so-called forces of goodness. I did not come to tackle GW but GW had to be tackled. I had to make a case for my tackle and GW kindly acknowledged the merit in my case by posting the above. Those contributors who know some Idealism make the exercise worthwhile.

At the top of the thread GW has explained himself. Let me translate. A man who contemplates suicide confronts his non-being. On balance he sees that from this point forwards life will be an adventure come what may. Hence, “Everything begins with being”. This serious examination of one’s existence is not to be forgotten or derided. He strikes a deal with fate and gets on with it. Note that GW says “It [being] comes from nothing”. The nothing of non-existence gives life. Later GW says, “Of course, one would be a fool to believe this and not find the consequences of “nothing” all around us politically, culturally, in every way.  But this is the third part of the essay I am engaged in, and you did not allow me to finish it.” So the third part is going to happen and we look forward to seeing a change.

In existentialism and Idealism the void is relevant and True. How existentialism gets to politics and history from here I do not know. The third part of the series may explain. For Idealism the void allows life to have the immanent structure I allude to.

After GW’s second comment I see we are talking at different levels. GW’s level is the personal and my Idealism is the trans-personal political and historical. This is not about one person being right and the other wrong. What I see is GW is a cul de sac of personal truths which will not access political and historical Truth. I will take a thumping good tackle if he can prove me wrong about his existentialism breaking out into political and historical Truth and I will admit it if it happens, but at this point I maintain existentialism is the wrong avenue.

Existentialism is the wrong avenue is because the Ideal is only ever achieved with personal relevance on two occasions. One is straight meditation to enlightenment. The other is Tantric sex meditation. The first instance is mind-body transcendence. The second is male – female transcendence through meditative sex. I have identified mind – body and male – female as existential Truths and these are the only two existentials I know of with personal relevance. You may note that GW brings his objective evidence to the forum and I offer my Idealist evidence – different levels.

GW has Grim on about bullets and perception and it is straight forward reasoning. Grim can argue for himself, quite impressively too, but Idealism is not about this level of perception.

Thank you anon on July 01, 2011, 01:21 AM for your comments. This is the kind of dialogue I desire.

Grimoire is a man who has been starved of Idealism and demonstrated his delight as you see. His joy was such that he called an ignorant Kiwi, and it was me who was giving him his jollies. So Grim does not play favourites. Grim has done the hard yards with Hegel. It is his respect for Hegel and the effort it required that makes him such a formidable opponent. Any chance of an Idealist article from you, Grim? Can you elaborate on the relationship of subjective to objective? I would appreciate your thoughts. Can you explain Hegel on the topic?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 13:02 | #

Grim,

One of these days I shall teach you to be still.  Then you will understand the utilitarian difference between “living as if every moment was your last” and “being-towards-death”.

Let’s say for now that neither consuming life voraciously like Jack Nicholson on a good night out nor “giving” via some Bushido of the Latter-Day Moral Absolutists really cuts it.

Of course there is meaning in the material.  There is expression.  There is perdurance.  There is the cheating of Time/Entropy through the act of sex and the action of love.  There is the course of one’s own life, the choices taken, and the consciousness or not of all these things.

Your alternative is not a special ethic, Grim.  It is an illusion.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 21:06 | #

Rod,

After GW’s second comment I see we are talking at different levels. GW’s level is the personal and my Idealism is the trans-personal political and historical.

I don’t believe you have grasped what existentialism actually means in respect to racial preservation at all - because that’s what it’s all about, not political change per se.  We are not anti-liberals before we are pro European lifers.  We want life and so we have to change the politics that is taking life away from us.

You are trying to generate anti-liberal political change, and you haven’t really analysed from the survivalist standpoint.  They are not a single analysis - a continuation of our ethnic and racial specificity is not a direct product of anti-liberalism.  The real product of your analysis would be a religious pursuit.  Accordingly, the movement towards the ideal synthesis you intuit requires a non-relevant religious (not really political) attachment.  You are offering religion.  Grim is offering religion.  The fascisms offered religion, as did traditionalism and revolutionary conservatism.  All these kinds of anti-liberalism sought to enroll Europeans on a journey to a misty and nebulous goal, and that is the reason for their instability as political forms.  That is also the problem with the present-day Judaised form of liberalism, in which its attenuation of personal liberty and social democracy as, respectively, hyper-individualism and radical egalitarianism commits Europeans to an unending journey of atomisation and dispossession, idealised to the point of the direct lie.

Rod, theoretically nationalist teleological “solutions” bear the same damned spot that Christianity does and its secular replacement does.  There is enough of real Europe in us to turn to if we first turn away from the allure of indefinable and essentially religious goals.  It is mete to do so.  Europe is being dissolved genetically.  It is an existential attack.  Our struggle is to be, and to qualify that with “heroic” or “racialist” or “traditional” or “Christian” or anything whatsoever is to fall back into a paradigm of non-reality.

I know you think you are analysing politically and historically but to me you are remaining within the truly historical convention of unconscious thinking.  We must break with that in order to live.

Posted by Rod on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 22:02 | #

GW, I have no doubt that you have something unique to contribute. I want you to be aware that your voice / register / style changes when you get into philosophic mode. Do you copy the style of the man who impressed you? Many do. Your existentialism without political change I suspect will be underpowered, but I look forward to what you have to say, hoping I can read it.

Posted by Ambitious Outsider on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 22:03 | #

GW your mention of the football crowd is apt.

For my sins I’m a fan of Glasgow Rangers (influence of Scottish grandparents).

For those that don’t know Rangers are a Protestant club with a fanatically anti-Catholic fanbase.

Songs with lines like ‘Hang the Pope on an Orange rope, hang the Pope, hang the Pope’ used to ring out from Ibrox in the pre-PC days. What a joy to be part of that crowd.

Oh give me a home,
Where there’s no Pope of Rome
Where there’s nothing but Protestants stay…

No, no Pope of Rome
No chapels to sadden my eyes
No nuns and no priests
No Rosary beads

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq9o96j7mXM

And for all our Irish friends…well don’t they know the famine is over, why don’t they go home? Their evil seeds have been sown because they are not of our own.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-cnzCQDVkA

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 22:50 | #

Ambitious,

Made me smile.  Some of the Americans who read us don’t understand the glee with which we English bash our French and German brothers for being, basically, French or German, or that with which the Scots bash their English brothers, and the Irish bash us both, and so on and so forth.  Perhaps they think it has something to do with brother wars, and maybe it did.  But I like it.  It is a sign of life.  God help us if we all fall to hugging one another one awful, egalitarian day.

As it happens, one of our regulars whom I much admire mailed me today on a folk music topic.  I did some research as a result and unearthed these clowns:

http://www.folkagainstfascism.com/

They describe themelves as “a coalition of traditional musicians and lovers of traditional music, founded in the UK, dedicated to maintaining the welcoming and inclusive nature of the folk music scene”.  Don’t think they would last long on the Copland Stand.

Posted by Grimoire on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 22:56 | #

Gworker:  “Your alternative is not a special ethic, Grim.  It is an illusion.”

  First of all old bean, I haven’t provided an alternative. I may critique, but I allow people to come to their own conclusions. Second, if my view is illusion and subjective ( it is the latter),  your own are intersubjective. A minor difference is that some of the states you use ideas to access, I have lived in this world, and have observed you cannot use subjective ideas or words to access these states. You have no criticism that can apply. You can only use ideas to prepare yourself, and the power of the idea and it understanding determine how and if you return from the journey.
  Mr. Cameron makes a point that your ontological work is existentialism and misguided, which is detrimental because the subject is Nationalism and your people need you now, not after you have attained satori, and may bless others as correct or incorrect and on the path to more blessings. I have told you repeatedly you do not understand Heidegger, whose work was a continuance of Hegel’s Idealism through Husserl. Heidegger used the phenomenology of the ontological as methodology, not as end in itself. There is no value to ontology except as study of first order knowledge. Heidegger butchered language, reducing it to the commonest terms, to strip away proper and improper presentation, not to create new lexicons with the subjectivities of ‘wholes’ and their presentations. He was an adherent of Husserl’s work in Mereology, a formal study of wholes and their parts through first order logic - to axiomatize predicate thinking to logic - not to formalize predicate thinking in of itself. One can use predicate logic to ask about all things in this world, except the question of the questioner - which is how you have been using it. Heideggers ontology asks what unity lies beneath the multiplicity of questions. His answer; the experience which is Dasein - the being in which being itself is a question. ‘Stillness’ is not rest, it is question. ‘Care’ is attempt to define the question. The existential analytic of Dasein has always been only a first step; the next step is ‘Destruktion’ or transformation - the turn. This is why Heidegger never wrote the second book of Being and Time, in his own words. Existential analytic is a limit case study, and was left behind in all of Heideggers later work on Dasein. He understood himself does not conjugate to the collective. The bulk of Heideggers work is not philosophy, about which he only comments, but study.
Now it is time for Gworker to attain Destruktion, ‘the turn’...The Dasein, or ‘mortals’ as Heidegger later calls it, was only a foundational step in the coming-out, or ‘Ereiginis’ of being.

In his later years after the war, Heidegger was trapped by political correctness…his scope of work was dictated and limited to commentary. You will not find a path among Heidegger’s post commentary on Dasein, only that with this work the turn has been taken, and that everything further depends on this ‘openness to being’.  Dasein in terms of collective is impossible but as a marker on the road to intersubjectivity, and will find no purchase.

Why Hegel and Idealism? For one Hegel is not so much Hegel, but the cross-roads for all European philosophy from Heraclitus on,  that regard freedom and self-determination as of the first order in implications for ontological reality. This is why Hegel is a touch stone of all revolutionary movement, whether or not the state is serious in it’s commitments to freedom and its practices.
Hegel’s was to take all previous understanding and distill it to it’s unity, or the ‘absolute idea’, which was not to be properly understood as God or State, but freedom, or ‘absolute knowledge’.
This is why all revolutionary movement takes Hegel as touchstone, and emphasize or turned the parts they needed to their own idea of a ‘absolute idea’, independent of Hegel’s own European Christian view derived from Leibniz. This is where Heidegger is going but was prevented.
And this is where you must go. This is your path, not as Hegelian, but as objective Idealist.  Idealism does not suffer degradations of a great civilization and their people, but distills the return to essence of the collective Dasein in the unity of it’s absolute idea - self-determination and freedom,  and use of this knowledge as a path to freedom and self-determination.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 23:23 | #

“Respect White existence or expect White resistance.”

Posted by Ambitious Outsider on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 23:40 | #

Grimore - take a chill pill.

GW it’s all good natured banter.

Those ‘anti-fascist’ uber PC ‘folk’ people are just awful.

If only they could encounter the infamous Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité and their nightsticks - or even better the hardcore ‘nutter’ element at Ibrox.

Talking of folk music do you think those hypocritical PC types would be happy with these folk songs?

“The Sash My Father Wore”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EDq26OhU5Y

&

“Derry’s Walls”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUCFS50WpQM&

Or even this folk song?

Hullo, Hullo
We are the Billy Boys
Hullo, Hullo
You’ll know us by our noise
We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood
Surrender or you’ll die
For we are
The Brigton Derry Boys

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Boys

Which American sports fans sing about literally wading in the blood of their enemies? None.

NO SURRENDER WAS THE CRY!

Posted by Ambitious Outsider on Sun, 03 Jul 2011 00:25 | #

Just to be fair the Irish also have some great songs both new and old.

‘The Fields Of Athenry’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7M-7sOrmPg

&

‘The Rising of the Moon’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0zBlHlnR4Y

“There beside the singing river that black mass of men was seen,
High above their shining weapons flew their own beloved green.
“Death to every foe and traitor! Forward strike the marching tune.”
And hurrah my boys for freedom; ‘tis the rising of the moon”.
Tis the rising of the moon, tis the rising of the moon
And hurrah my boys for freedom; ‘Tis the rising of the moon”.

Well they fought for poor old Ireland, and full bitter was their fate,
Oh what glorious pride and sorrow, fills the name of ninety-eight!
Yet, thank God, e’en still are beating hearts in manhood burning noon,
Who would follow in their footsteps, at the risin’ of the moon
At the rising of the moon, At the rising of the moon
Who would follow in their footsteps, at the risin’ of the moon.”

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 03 Jul 2011 01:07 | #

As we seem to have go onto musical topics, it may be that I have a very perverse sense of humour, but there is something damn funny about this:

‘Barney With Attitude’

But what precisely do critics actually know?

Posted by Foundation on Sun, 03 Jul 2011 16:53 | #

‘The almost uncontested triumph of the egalitarian ideology has entirely obliterated all other political ideals. The envy-driven masses do not care a whit for what the demagogues call the “bourgeois” concern for freedom of conscience, of thought, of the press, for habeas corpus, trial by jury, and all the rest. They long for the earthly paradise which the socialist leaders promise them. Like these leaders, they are convinced that the “liquidation of the bourgeois” will bring them back into the Garden of Eden. The irony is that nowadays they are calling this program the liberal program.’

Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History (1957)

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 03 Jul 2011 17:32 | #

Grim,

I want to respond to your last comment.  First, I want to refute your, to my mind, wilful and by no means logical refusal to grant that the personal existential is of the collective existential.  This descent is so not simply in kind - insomuch as being is, like everything else in the organism of Nature, multiple and differentiated - but in its characteristics of what is true to and existent in the person, and what is false and non-existent (the falsity arising, of course, solely from the absorption of external, temporalising influences).

This division, in Heidegger-speak, into the authenticity and inauthenticity of the object Dasien provides for the realm of the political.  It situates the political in the culture, and allows for a teleology, if one must use that word, that does not go out to some manufactured, fascistic ideal but comes back from self-estrangement and pathology, back to what is existent, what is of Nature, what is “normal” for and particular to kind.  It conjugates fine, Grim, for this reason: our malaise is peculiar to the time and culture in which we live, and that is so for the person and for the collective.

Methodologically, Heidegger said this in Being and Time, Division 2, Section 75:

Everyday Dasein has been dispersed into many kinds of things which daily “come to pass”.  The opportunities and circumstances which concern keeps “tactically” awaiting in advance, have “fate” as their out-come.  In terms of that with which inauthentically existing Dasien concerns itself, it first computes its history.  In so doing, it is driven about by its “affairs”.  So if it wants to come to itself, it must first pull itself together from the dispersion and disconnectedness of the very things that have “come to pass”, and because of this, it is only that there at last arises from the horizon of the understanding which belongs to inauthentic historicality, the question of how one is to establish a connectedness of Dasein if one does so in the “Experience” of a subject - Experiences which are “also” present-at-hand.

You tell me I do not understand Heidegger.  How many times have I said that you do not understand consciousness, only theory of consciousness perhaps.  For example, I said sometime I would teach you to be still, to which you replied that stillness is a question.  Stillness is not a question but a precondition for pulling together.  Its parallel in a political context might be, a la Bakunin, despair (or whatever form of concentration precedes and generates an intent for “the step back”).

I’ve never been able to muster any interest in Hegel.  I do not find Heidegger mystical.  But Hegel?  That’s another matter.  And useless mystical ... big overblown, un-substantiatable claims about the structure of the universe.  Their adherents disappeared from the world a century and more ago.  Further, as described, his dialectic is an estranging process because sublation does not preserve but expels sufficient oppositional elements for the fitting of the synthesis to the narrow conduit of history.  And synthesis does not arise out of thesis and antithesis alone.  There must be some context or substrate - like despair - by which sublation or reconciling is impelled.  Consider, for example, this statement: Truly conscious life-choices bring together in human presence biology and being.

Posted by Grimoire on Sun, 03 Jul 2011 20:46 | #

Anyway, I knew you would do this beforehand….start up the fog generator…and then tell me I can’t see the fog because of the fog….I don’t have the proper concept of fog - that external ideas of fog cannot describe the fog prior the present experience of fog….I need to accept the fogginess of the fog before I can perceive the sublate and conscious inner fog that has always reconciled fog with what we automatically label fog.
How are we to know that the expression fog means fog where fog means fog means fog where fog means fog? We are in a complete mental fog about the whole business apparently…but how to know it’s a mental fog we’re in? We need to see that we don’t see the mental fog that proscribes seeing the fog which is the cause of the mental fog. We need a illuminated sign that says ‘mental fog’.

If fog could speak - it would not understand itself.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 03 Jul 2011 21:34 | #

@Grimoire

And Hegel is a model of clarity???

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:31 | #

Sorry Grim. Try this:

Stillness is not a question but a precondition for pulling Dasein together from its “dispersion and disconnectedness”.  In other words, becoming still through an act of attention has the effect on consciousness of focus, and the focus is on the existent.

Its parallel in the collective (and political context) might be something like despair, a la Bakunin’s preconditions for revolution.  Or, if not despair precisely, whatever serves to effect a suitable focus on one’s people’s existence (and unjust plight).

And ...

The “sublation” which Hegel claims will preserve thesis and antithesis in synthesis cannot actually do so.  There must be an expulsion of sufficient oppositional elements for the fitting of the synthesis to the narrow conduit of history.  Further, synthesis does not arise out of thesis and antithesis alone.  There must be some context or substrate - like despair - by which sublation or reconciling is impelled.  Consider, for example, this statement: Truly conscious life-choices bring together in human presence biology and being.

Any clearer?

Posted by Grimoire on Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:20 | #

Gworker:

What is clear is you are carrying a mojo-bag of trite continental-philosophy juice box, have an evil brow and think backwards. What interests me is the insanity of it all, and how it connects to British nationalism, and what it means. A quick diagnosis; you have been completely neutralized as an effective actor, and are in a complete state of denial in terms of reality - and have embraced the nebulous idea you are going to restore ‘ontological’ correctness to people who in the majority could care less about babble in the face of what is happening - as a way of hiding from reality.

This is what clear - as in crystal.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:45 | #

Grim,

Are you perhaps reflecting on, sorry speculating for, the good of Germany, and failing to account for the, of course, misguidedly anti-Idealist, scientistic English-speaking world?

Posted by The English sure do love their existentialism, her on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 02:08 | #

Are you perhaps reflecting on, sorry speculating for, the good of Germany, and failing to account for the, of course, misguidedly anti-Idealist, scientistic English-speaking world?

English speakers are falling over themselves to read reams of Heidiggerian drivel?

Learn something new every day.

Posted by ...meneutics, deconstructionism, postmodernism, an on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 02:14 | #

The “sublation” which Hegel claims will preserve thesis and antithesis in synthesis cannot actually do so.

I didn’t know that!

This changes everything!!!

There must be an expulsion of sufficient oppositional elements for the fitting of the synthesis to the narrow conduit of history.

Duh.

There must be some context or substrate - like despair - by which sublation or reconciling is impelled.  Consider, for example, this statement: Truly conscious life-choices bring together in human presence biology and being.

Good point. That meaningless statement brought me such despair that it allowed my achievement of synthesis.

BTW, what evidence do you have that human biology and “human being” aren’t the same thing?

A rock is a rock is a rock, because it is a rock, and it be a rock because it is a rock.

Posted by Grimoire on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 02:54 | #

Gworker:

No I am reflecting on the good of you personally. Why not just say ‘scientific’ instead of ‘scientistic’ ?  Pull yourself together.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 08:37 | #

Formerly anon2,

This changes everything!!!

Not really.  It simply explains that two elements don’t interact.  Don’t tell me you did not know!

Duh.

Therefore, historical movement is not controllable.  Movement without control tends to accident.  For example, world war.  You didn’t know that either?

That meaningless statement brought me such despair that it allowed my achievement of synthesis.

Try harder then.  Our biology is on the line all the time because we make adaptive or maladaptive life choices, choosing by instinct and luck, basically.  That is, ordinary waking consciousness is not “the master” of this choice or anything else.  In ordinary waking consciousness we are separated from the truth of our being ... “sinking in the “they”“, as MH put it.

I have the feeling you know this but you don’t want to acknowledge it.

what evidence do you have that human biology and “human being” aren’t the same thing?

They are related, no question.  But the unique consideration with Man, most tragically European Man in our age, is the consequence of his fallen-ness ... his disassociation or fracture or “theyness”.  The liberalism from which Rod and Grim wish to deliver us is in us and is us.  It’s nowhere else.  Change from the political thought-world which forms comes from change in us, and the change I am commending is to a consciousness of what is formed and a movement away from that to what we truly and naturally are - rather than a quest for some distant and non-attainable mass heroism or whatever.

I think you know enough science to understand which of these is actually doable in this world, and which produces “unexpected consequences” of an undesirable kind.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 15:21 | #

I’ve never read any Hegel, but I have a metaphorical way of dealing with the idea of the Absolute. I think of it as water, and I think of its verbalization as the freezing of the water to make it transportable (communicable).

The freezing process results in frozen verbal entities of differing shapes and sizes which we exchange with each other as tokens of the Absolute.

Some say the Absolute does not exist, but to the extent that ice = water, their saying so disproves itself, so I never let the bastards grind me down.

At other times I feel that Absolute is simply a misspelling of a brand of vodka which will not freeze.

The “unexpected consequence” I’m trying to avoid is that of getting drunk and popping Leon in the head with an ice cube.

And yes, GW, I know water can be transformed into fog, but please not on the 4th of July!

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 16:34 | #

Far be it for me to precipitate on your Independence Day parade, Jimmy.

Independent of what, btw?

Posted by danielj on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 18:00 | #

GW,

I keep telling them I’m a white American but they keep telling me I’m not. Are you quite sure he asked if I was your spook rather than your son-in-law? He didn’t seem to think I was a greasy swarthoid then?

I think another visit is in order. I never got to see Marx’s grave (which I believe is in Oxford), the Wyndham Lewis collection and a bunch of other things I wanted to see.

Don’t worry though Jimmy, you are first on the list to visit as soon as summer is over and work dies down. I’m going like a man possessed right now.

Posted by danielj on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 18:26 | #

Son. Not spook.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:00 | #

OK, GW. Don’t get your lederhosen in twist, mate.

You neither, Ice Man.

Posted by Grimoire on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:59 | #

GWorker:

But the unique consideration with Man, most tragically European Man in our age, is the consequence of his fallen-ness ... his disassociation or fracture or “theyness”. 

Man, specifically European man,  appears fallen, because he always appears just below the ultimate heights. While fallen, he is the highest achievement above all. It is the world we live in, not man, but nature - man’s nature. You cannot fix what is not broken, but only appears to be broken.

The liberalism from which Rod and Grim wish to deliver us is in us and is us.  It’s nowhere else.  Change from the political thought-world which forms comes from change in us, and the change I am commending is to a consciousness of what is formed and a movement away from that to what we truly and naturally are - rather than a quest for some distant and non-attainable mass heroism or whatever.

No where have ascribed to the consensus that liberalism is the root of our troubles. I do not ascribe to over-simplification…such as, “Change from the political thought-world which forms comes from change in us, and the change I am commending is to a consciousness of what is formed and a movement away from that to what we truly and naturally are - rather than a quest for some distant and non-attainable mass heroism or whatever.”
                        There is nothing here but abstract generalization and the assumption we ourselves are broken. We are not broken - it is our world that is broken. And that is what we must change - not ourselves. This is Idealism.

Posted by Grimoire on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 20:24 | #

And our world is broken because of those who ‘fix’ what is not broken…and that is what we must change. Restoration, not revolution, not evolution, not conservatism. This is Idealism.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 20:55 | #

@Grimore

That might your quixotic definition of philosophical Idealism but it bares little relation to standard accounts of philosophical Idealism.

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.”

Posted by Grimoire on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 22:11 | #

@Graham

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things….the rest extraneous.

.....................and ‘bears’ direct relation to my quixotic definition. We are not broken, let the fixers with the fixes disappear. The correct name for your European nationality is British blood, mine is German blood - not multiculturalism - European is European blood. Let names be correct. This is Idealism….not philosophy.

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 23:06 | #

I see that my suggestion that it would be a useful exercise for someone to attempt (at the understood risk of oversimplification) a 3 paragraph summary of the lead post has not been pursued. Neither has any rebuttal been offered to my implied assertion that ethics is a more fruitful philosophical discipline for nationalists than ontology.

I repeat: why, in simple and straightforward language, is it thought that nationalists should seek to reformulate ontology, instead of ethics?

Posted by Grimoire on Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:03 | #

Good question

Posted by Grimoire on Tue, 05 Jul 2011 08:51 | #

I’ve written what will no doubt be a controversial answer to your question Leon, and sent it to Gworker.
Perhaps he will post it sometime.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:20 | #

Grim,

Man, specifically European man, appears fallen, because he always appears just below the ultimate heights. While fallen, he is the highest achievement above all. It is the world we live in, not man, but nature - man’s nature. You cannot fix what is not broken, but only appears to be broken.

You are right in your third sentence.  The rest is wrong and/or reveals that you do not understand what I am saying - my fault, no doubt.

Absence, which is the characteristic of ordinary waking consciousness, does not reveal itself to itself.  It is revealed only in the coming to presence.  The brokenness, however, is not absence per se.  The beginning of it is in the passivity and mechanicity which is rendered by absence, and which allows for the indiscriminate absorption of “external, temporalising influences”, whatever they may be ... ie, “the world we live in”.  We cannot all become present to being.  But we can all discriminate on many levels.  Indeed, it would be perfectly acceptable to call my line of thinking “the ontology of discrimination”.

I will set this argument out in detail later.

Posted by Wandrin on Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:38 | #

Eurocaucasians are the most out-bred population group (on average - some urban east asian populations seem to be more so than some southern europeans).

http://www.consang.net/index.php/Global_prevalence

http://www.consang.net/index.php/Global_prevalence_tables

The differences in this between Eurocaucasians and rural populations in Asia, Africa and South America are huge.

I think exogamy within a national context so that blood-ties still exist but where your relatedness to your close family is not too far from your relatedness to the national average leads to a greater ability and willingness to co-operate at the national scale. This leads to the ability to create large surpluses and generate great power externally.

(However it may require a nationally unifying idealogy to reinforce the relatively weak blood-ties.)

Pretty much all immigrant groups, including Jews of course, have a far higher rate of endogamy. Clannish groups generally have a very low ability to co-operate on a large scale (unless they have particularly strong unifying bonds). However more endogamous groups are stronger at smaller-scale internal conflicts because they naturally stick together more (because that’s what endogamy is) and operate as a separate team within the national borders.

I think exogamy makes people partially ethnically blind to people who actually are within a narrow range e.g. English vs Dutch, or who *look* similar enough, so the separate team effect would be magnified for Jews simply because they can do more without being noticed.

It probably wasn’t always so. The Catholic Church’s ban on cousin-marriage may have been the original driver and it may have taken many centuries to go from the 30-40% consanquinity of rural Asia to the 0.2% of Holland.

Blood is thicker than water. Some blood is thicker than others. National scale exogamy is much more efficient than small-scale clannishness but only if you retain a minimum level of homogeneity and keep more endogamous groups out.

Posted by Wandrin on Thu, 07 Jul 2011 21:02 | #

My previous post was meant to be a reply to Michael’s post

If so, kin preference is a scientific fact, so why can’t you just appeal to a “philosophy” of desire.

Eurocaucasian kin preference is weaker than everybody else’s, especially Nordics and the surrounding semi-nordics. They need an idealogical case for kin-preference to reinforce their actual kin-preference.