Category: Political Philosophy

Liberal Modernity and Nihilism - Alain Badiou on Evil

Alain Badiou’s thoughts on evil and associated matters in an interview from 2001.

Continued...

Posted by Graham Lister on Saturday, May 4, 2013 at 06:38 AM in Political Philosophy
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Christianity As Expression of Authentic European Culture

GW has expressed the constraint:

“It is a pity that Christianity, as flawed as it is from a European racial perspective, is undeniably part of the unity of north and south.  We are stuck with it, for it has been too close for too long to us - and the faithful must have their faith expressions, after all.”

DanielS has expressed the constraint:

“Adding yet another knot in the tangle is the argument that with the Christian texts already being the terms in which many of our people think, the currency for two thousand years now, there must be some ontological basis beneath, and we may as well find the positive logic to it for our purposes. However, with the texts being what they are, the motivations of the texts being as convoluted, Jewish and ambiguous as they were to begin, all that winds-up happening with the deciphering of our “true” logic behind Christianity is a contribution to the mess.”

An approach offered by John Harland is to admit the historicity of Jesus in His essential mythic image as descendant of God evidenced in his own over-ruling of texts with direct bodily connection with God as Father, but to deny the historicity of the extant texts—deny them as yet another means by which dastards attempt to interpose themselves between the God-heritage of individuals and their Father, in spirit and flesh.

Ridicule of Harland’s own editing of the texts to suit his view may be conducted only at the sacrifice of the two constraints establishing the context of this presentation. Offer a superior approach if you don’t like Harland’s—either that or declare folly the entire effort to connect with the spiritual force of Christianity.

Click this link for a pdf document containing part of Harland’s account starting with “The Germans” (in the anthropological sense meaning what many identify as Celtic and Nordic pagans of the pre-Christian era), “The Catholic Church Promotes Judeo-Christianity”, “The First Breaking Apart of the Church Serpent” (regarding Henry VIII and Martin Luther), “A Further Break From the Serpent” (regarding the establishment of America), “The Strange Phenomenon of ‘Money-Mad’ Americans” (regarding the closing of the frontier and replacement of Nature and Nature’s God with money-based “culture”), “The American Dream” (the commodification, by conspirators, of the American spiritual renaissance), “The German Reich” (the parallel processes occurring in what became the nation state known as “Germany” during the 1800s leading up to WW I), “The World Picture After WW I” (the situation leading up to WW II) and the concluding section of this pdf document is “The Second World War”.

The entire book is “Word Controlled Humans” by John Harland, ISBN 0-914752-12-X available from Sovereign Press, 326 Harris Road, Rochester, WA 98579 (with which I have no business or personal relationship).

Posted by James Bowery on Wednesday, March 13, 2013 at 08:37 PM in Anthropology,  Archeology,  Books,  Christianity,  Conservatism,  European culture,  History,  National Socialism,  Political Philosophy,  Psychology,  Revisionism,  Social Sciences,  The Ontology Project,  U.S. Politics
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Las Vegas is a Shining Beacon of Nihilism

What does America mean as a philosophical event? What is the place of America in philosophical discourse? Here is one possible suggestion.

Continued...

Posted by Graham Lister on Thursday, January 24, 2013 at 07:58 PM in Political Philosophy,  The Proposition Nation
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A Brief Introduction to the Ideas of Carl Schmitt

This may be of general interest.

Continued...

Posted by Graham Lister on Thursday, January 10, 2013 at 07:12 PM in Political Philosophy
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The Spirit of America

A celebration of the spirit of America!

Continued...

Posted by Graham Lister on Tuesday, January 8, 2013 at 09:52 PM in Political Philosophy,  The Proposition Nation
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The nature of the beast

In political thought, perhaps the most basic, formative and necessary intellectual task is to adequately define that which one opposes or seeks to change.  This is especially true for us, devotees of an inchoate and wholly natural politic; and true for us, too, given that there is such a variety of opinion about what it is, exactly, nationalism is fighting.  An adequate definition of that lends coherence to our cause, and refines our purpose.

I thought it might be interesting and revealing to invite such definitions from readers.  Here are a couple from an email conversation between Graham Lister and me last February, which I happened across this evening.  I can’t speak for the care which Graham devoted to his.  Maybe he wrote it on the hoof.  Maybe not.  But I recall thinking quite hard about mine, which follows, and which, when I read it today, I must say seems a little formal and lacking in bite.

Anyhow, to get the ball rolling, here is Graham’s:

Liberal humanism treats the human individual subject as an abstract universal; it is premised on the paradoxical idea that all individuals should be treated the same, regardless of who or what they are by virtue of their status as radically differentiated and discrete phenomena. What grounds the reality of the social order is the universality of the ‘unencumbered’ and autonomous self, free to volitionally exert its will upon itself and the world. It offers a deflationary and reductionist ontology of the social and an inflationary account of the status and significance of the free-floating individual subject.

And here was the definition of the foundational “problem”, as I see it, which I wrote in response:

Liberalism is a product of the humanist strand in the Christianity of the high and late Middle Ages and early modern era, and the intellectual flowering of the Renaissance throughout this period.  It treats the human individual subject as an abstract universal which is capable of full autonomy but is ordinarily defined, and thereby restrained and bounded, by the given in Nature and in society.  It seeks, therefore, to liberate the subject from this definition and empower it to differentiate and author itself.  Besides this process of radical liberation, it particularly commends equal treatment, universal respect and fraternity, and continual progress towards its own goals as the chief desiderata of society and politics.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, December 5, 2012 at 06:25 PM in Political Philosophy
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Justice and the Imagination

by Graham Lister

Agents, of both a collective and individual nature, have an interest in some state of affairs if it enables them to achieve their wants. But it is quite another thing to be aware of this interest; that entails both an ideological and imaginative transformation that allows that interest to be fully visible and informs an agent on how to potentially realise its interest. Often within our political discourse a restriction upon the exercise of a given interest or frustration of a want will be expressed in the idiom of injustice.

Precisely what are justice and injustice are obviously both, at least partially, ideologically and imaginatively forged concepts. For the ancients justice typically occupied a primary place in the pantheon of virtues. It was often conceived as the master virtue, the one that orders all the others. Plato tells us in The Republic, a just individual is one in whom the three parts of the soul - reason, spirit, appetite - and the three virtues associated with them -wisdom, courage, moderation - stand in the right relation to one another.

In the just city, a precisely analogous situation prevails each class exercises its own distinctive virtue by performing the task suitable for its nature, and none interferes with the others. Most philosophers have rejected the specifics of Plato’s view. Almost no-one today believes that the just city is one that is rigidly stratified with a permanent ruling class, a permanent military class and a permanent working class, whose lives differ from one another in all major respects. Yet many philosophers have retained the belief that justice is not simply one virtue among others, but enjoys a special status as the master or meta virtue. A version of this conception informed Rawls’ treatise, A Theory of Justice, in which he claimed that “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought”. By this he did not mean that justice is the highest virtue, but rather that it is the fundamental one, the one that secures the basis for developing all of the rest. In principle, socio-political arrangements can display any number of qualities - for example, they might be efficient, orderly, harmonious, caring or ennobling. But the realisation of those possibilities depends on a prior, enabling condition, namely, that the socio-political arrangements in question be just. Justice is thus the first virtue in the following sense: it is only by overcoming institutionalised or systemic injustice that we can create the ground on which other virtues, both societal and individual, can flourish.

If Rawls is right on this general point then when evaluating socio-political arrangements, the first question we should ask is: are they just and more importantly for whom are they just? To answer, we might build on another of his insights: “the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society”. This statement orients our attention from the great variety of immediately accessible features of social life to the deep grammar underlying them, to the institutionalised ground rules which set the basic terms of social interaction. It is only when they are justly ordered that other, more directly experienced aspects of life can also be just. Certainly, Rawls’ specific views of justice - like those of Plato - are problematic. However, it may be useful as a starting point if we endorse his basic idea that the justice is a meta virtue and that our reflections on justice should concern the basic structures of a community. To explore this approach I will examine the Anglo-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro’s thoughtful and beautifully written novel, Never Let Me Go.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, August 4, 2012 at 04:16 AM in Books,  Political Philosophy
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The Ghosts of the Past

by Graham Lister

“Nationalism has no special relationship to political justice; but neither does it have a particular relationship to injustice. The most obvious thing about it is, after all, that it exists…and there are no objective criteria of what is a nation – but its subjective power is compelling. A nation, therefore, said Renan, is a great solidarity founded on a consciousness of sacrifice made in the past and on willingness to make further ones in the future”.

Bernard Crick from In Defence of Politics.

Nationalism has a rancid stench. It has been thought pivotal to some of the worse horrors of recent human history, yet it will not go away. If, as a character from Joyce’s Ulysses suggests, “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” then one of the most persistent phantoms haunting our nightly terrors is nationalism, particularly in the conditions of our freshly constructed ‘global’ village, built primarily through the medium of neoliberalism (the most successful ideology in history).

In the UK thinkers as wildly different as the ‘deep-blue’ conservative Roger Scruton and the Marxian theorist of nationalism (and Scottish nationalist) Tom Nairn both write with perceptive insights into the phenomena of nations and nationalism. Like any other ism, nationalism has its own internal spectrum. And due to its overall plasticity nationalism is hard to place within any conventional political axiality. It can take almost any political form and find support from anywhere in the ideological firmament – witness the radical-chic associated with various decolonization struggles – or indeed the burbling of the blessed Saint Michel (of Foucault) over the exciting new ‘political spirituality’ unleashed by the Iranian revolutionaries. However, some forms of nationalism are generally considered to have been radio-actively toxic.

Approximately eighty years ago, events occurred, which were obscure at the time, from whose dire consequences the world has not yet totally recovered. The location was Munich, capital of the historic Kingdom of Bavaria and second city of the recently formed all-German Reich. The time was five years after the end of World War I, when this new would-be imperial state had been defeated, and then both punished harshly and utterly humbled by the victors. What was to become the most extreme currency inflation in history had begun. By that autumn the Reichsbank would be issuing 100-trillion-mark notes; it took a pocketful of them to buy a US dollar.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, February 27, 2012 at 06:25 PM in Books,  European Nationalism,  Political Philosophy
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The communitarian critique of liberalism left and right

by Graham Lister

For the philosophical communitarian, the Sartrean cogito, spontaneously reinventing itself ex nihilo, permanently free to choose and revise its definition of the good, is a fiction that pervades all modern liberalism. From Hobbes, Locke and Kant, through to Mill and Rawls, the rootless, solitary and “unencumbered self”, as Michael Sandel describes it, prior to and independent of its ends and rationally deliberating on the value of its voluntary attachments, is adopted as the starting point of social analysis.

This conception of the subject, it is argued, precludes from the start the possibility of genuinely communal forms of association, of “constitutive” communities “bound by moral ties antecedent to choice”. This is why communitarians stress the cultural constitution of the subject, the way the individual forms his or her identity, sense of self, and intuitive system of values by inheriting and passing on an unchosen legacy of collective orientations, shared meanings and standards, networks of kinship and pre-contractual forms of solidarity which are a prerequisite for, rather than the outcome of, the subject’s capacity for moral commitment.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Sunday, February 5, 2012 at 06:51 AM in Political Philosophy
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Ethics and morality: the absolute ideal of race

by Grimoire

Recently, in the thread to Mr Rod Cameron’s Idealist Critique, Mr Leon Haller asks:

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?

And I agree with these questions.  The summation I leave as self-evident and up to Mr. Cameron, but the ethics question I thought important.  Also, in discussion with Mr. Cameron this idea came up as a point of disagreement also with GW et al, the result being general disagreement ... I expect no less.

Normally, I wait to make any positive statements except critique, since I am usually in complete disagreement with the general temper.  But Mr Haller has asked an honest and direct question that I feel I should answer regarding the role of Ethics in Nationalism, which I believe are paramount, and an “absolute idea” of our race [viz-a-vis Leon’s own insistence that European Man is Ethical Man - Ed].

The root of my disagreement is deep, and branches into many facets of the problem of the psychology of modern man - particularly that emanating from the problem of predicate thinking, of which I will write later.  But now i want to write briefly as possible, per Mr. Hallers request, on the the role of Ethics in Race.

I have protested to many here that they do not understand the implications of the rhetoric of Darwinist theory in practice on Mankind - or the theories of “Natural Selection” and “Survival Of The Fittest” - and its predicate assumptions regarding evolution, that there is a vast difference between evolutionary psychology and true evolution, and that these are in direct conflict with that which created our Race.  For it is ethics and morals which create race and human evolution, as most of you will vehemently deny.  I will tell you why I think you are wrong.  I already understand most of you will resist this with vigour.  So I will be brief.

“Evolutionary Adaptation”, “Survival of the Fittest” and “Natural Selection” are theories derived from zoology, not anthropology.  In anthropology they are associated only through predication, as these loose catch-all syllogisms are at best folk-wisdom with the imprimateur of science.  Only the most rabid Darwinists support the idea, and most educated people feel, in the words of a historian of culture and ideas:

A modern imagination predisposed to a belief in science ... will generally find that neither creation nor evolution overcomes its profound conviction of ignorance.
- Jacques Barzun

The reason is intuitive sense; theories that apply to animals do not apply to Man.  Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest apply to animals because they live in their natural environment.  Man does not.  In man’s environment, “Natural Selection” and “Survival of the Fittest” kills the courageous, the noble, those who resist injustice and deselects and disadvantages through progeny those who are of advanced intelligence.  Natural Selections favours bestiality and stupidity … and continually selects in a manner devised to return Mankind to animality and a state of nature in coherence with the great apes.

Ethics and Morality are the counter of this, and serve as a method of un-natural selection and adaptation.  Ethics and Morality place un-natural environmental burdens over and above the natural environment ... such as monogamy and enduring, extended family and values that support cohesion and endurance as a social unit.  These accrue to Race.  These create Race.  Race is a result of limits imposed by ethics and morality.  All Race, culture and language arise out of these limits, and distinguishes between the ultimate values of ethics and morality and through this distinguish between peoples.  The result leads to our un-natural civilization.  For Mankind is not natural, as it is understood regarding all other life-forms on this planet.

The Aryan concept of history is of the constant de-evolution of mankind, and is shared with all great classic cultures, and all eastern Aryan derived cultures.  It is the central tenet concerning history.  This tenet also contains the warning that when the values of a Race are discarded, you get Africa to put it succinctly. The Modern idea of the evolution of mankind is in direct contradiction to what you see around you if you walk the streets of any western metropolis.

So in summation:

Ethics and morality are a foundation of Western culture.  And those who propose “evolutionary” or “Darwinist” values are in discord with the values that have preserved the branches of the Aryan race from the dawn of its history.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 08:33 AM in Political Philosophy
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Nationalist axiality

It must be five years ago that there was a rash of interest at MR about creating a political compass to process nationalist political affiliation.  It arose because the standard model, based as it is on conventional social and economic measures and, needless to say, the charming and by no means goy-hostile thoughts of Theodore Adorno and Wilhelm Reich, cannot process ethnocentric political attitudes and values.  So nationalists who take the test find most of the questions irrelevant, and the results puzzling.

For example, I’ve just taken it again and find that:

... I’m a centrist, damn it!  And that’s despite slamming in a string of strongly agree/disagree answers that should have shaken things up.  They didn’t.  My politics just don’t compute.

When we looked at the issue before there was some debate about whether we should be trying to develop a bi-axial compass like this model, a triaxial one that allowed for degrees of awakening, so conventionalists could take the test and get a relevant result, or a simple binning system.  I recall that there was already a test around that could bin nationalist sentiments, but it did not impress.

However, we never progressed beyond the first stumbling block, which was the axiality.  If authoritarian ? libertarian and social ? economic measures describe the liberal paradigm, what describes nationalism?  At least one of the measures has to accord with the reality of the human psyche (the standard compass’s authoritarian ? libertarian axis is recognised by psychologists as doing so).  I’ve argued here that the primary axis of nationalism is being ? becoming, and this seems too fundamental to human life to be anything other than correct.  It’s in metaphysics.  It’s in religion.  It’s good enough.  But that second axis!  That’s the tough one.

In the standard model it’s also the one that relates to purely political concerns: the social left ? the economic right.  Nationalist political concerns do not accord with the liberal value of endless progress.  There is, though, some valuational overlap with the social element, based on the care which flows from kinship.  But that would seem to dictate an opposite in elitism, and indeed the elitism of the aristocracy and of the imperium is an object of regular genuflection among some nationalists.  Norman Lowell, the Eurasianists and our friend Neo-Nietzsche would be pleased, I don’t doubt.  But it doesn’t sit quite right with me.

I confess, I haven’t grasped the whole picture to my own satisfaction.  I know I’m not thinking clearly enough.  Any ideas?

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, December 20, 2010 at 07:00 PM in Political Philosophy
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Logic: our sometime-friend, sometime-enemy

by PF

Dedicated to: the red-headed Spice girl.

I will try to clarify something which GW said to Notus on the Gödelian thread.  Notus asked:

How do you mean that logic can be used to relativise all these things?

This is a critique voiced often by GW and myself which runs along the following lines.

It was really the belief in the susceptibility of complex social realities, and ultimately the reality of our Being, to extremely primitive analytical tools, which formed the basis for social engineering experiments such as have destroyed our Folk.  Marx really perfected this as a tool of destruction - his “scientific” view of history, which was based on a simplistic and in hindsight, very arbitrary analysis of certain historical trends.

Thinkers are obviously obsessed with deconstructing the complex reality that is human experience over time, and finding in it “the central meaning”. This is “the meaning of history”. As a student of Nietzsche (ie, I read and thought about him for a few years), I saw how big N was doing this all over the place. It was for him a way of projecting his likes and dislikes across vast distances of time - and it really was basically that idiosyncratic and subjective. I hope I can belabor this point a little bit without boring everyone because it is one of the central ideas to me, although everyone here probably knows already what I have to say about it.

Nietzsche hated that his mother in Naumburg wanted to force him into the role of soft-hearted Christian do-gooder. He was a radical, adventurous, crazy man - in his own way, and suffered greatly under this constraint. Yet he could never part with his family, in some sense they were almost his only stable social contact throughout his life. So he conjured in his works a vision of Christianity which ridiculed this Naumburg strain of Protestantism, claiming of course that his critique applied to all Xtianity. F Lea, his biographer, has shown how much N’s “Christianity” was actually “Naumburg social constraint” and not the historical Christianity. Nevertheless, he said some things which have stuck, and his critique is in the main, incisive, at least from my anti-Christian perspective.

He likewise held up an ancient ideal of Greece during the time of the Tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) - and I hate to personalize things so much (too bad they are, in fact, so personal), but this had very much to do with the fact that he experienced moments of elation and higher meaning (“am” experiences in my lingo) while reading this at Schulpforta as a young student. His life-long endeavor was to show what ancient Hellas meant and how it could be an alternative model for a reborn Germany and Europe. Wilamowitz, in his critique of N’s philological treatment of ancient Greece in TBOT, basically demolished every substantial assertion of N’s about historical Hellas, showing the extent to which N was being an artist, in his construction of past ages, rather than a scientist.

What remains difficult is the fact that N, being so brilliant, inevitably spoke a great deal of truth when he spoke of these things. But look at how huge the human experience is, how difficult to synthesize - and you will realize that each man can forge his own idiosyncratic view, and many of them - where they depart from specific facts - will become mutually contradictory.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, September 3, 2010 at 05:43 AM in Political Philosophy
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Critique of Palingenesis II: The State of Emergency

by PF

In the first Critique of Palingenesis we considered some aspects of the total phenomenon that is palingenetic nationalism. Some of these included:

- Centralization of social narrative / happy unity, and resulting tendency to groupthink

- Mythicization of concepts relating to national life

- Weaponization/militarisation of national life

- Cretinization of the ‘tough boy’ class by apotheosizing the weaponization of man

In the follow-up piece, The End of Teleology, we named and described the psychological mechanism which has driven so many statesman, philosophers, politicians and military men to don variously-styled masks of greatness, and seek to appear before us and themselves as Geniuses, Heroes, World-Architects, and Philosopher-Kings.

This illustrated the psychological antecedent of palingenetic politics, by showing how multiple interests act in collusion to ‘scale the heights of Olympus’ and win for themselves make-believe laurels, trophies, fame, etc.. The thinker reaches back to Athens and Shakespeare, and becomes a genius; the philosopher of history reaches back with transhistorical ‘decadence’ critique to the thinker and lacsadaisically to the hype surrounding Shakespeare, and becomes a world-architect, creating a vision of epochal changes; the statesman reaches back to the philosopher of history and lacsadaisically to the thinker, and becomes a philosopher-king; the soldier reaches back to a foggy understanding of all of these, elevated by the philosopher-king’s vision, and becomes a hero. Last of all comes the teleological WN blog commentator, who also thinks to clothe his nakedness by reaching back to these men. If you are able to look closely at real instances of this - occuring again and again with great regularity - you can see how these images of greatness conflict with one another and also with the nature of the men who sport them as costume. Time spent in dead earnest study of these men will reveal that a non-insignificant amount of lying went into crafting this charade, as it is hard for a man to become an image of perfection. One might even say it is impossible. 

Now we return to the investigation of one particular psychological aspect of Palingenesis. Not the teleology that precedes its formulation as a philosophical system, but the mechanism that precedes and justifies the uptake of palingenetic memes after they are formulated as a system and put on the political market.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 04:12 AM in Political Philosophy
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RISE

Posted by Søren Renner on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 10:38 AM in Political Philosophy
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Subject and Interrogation: Zizek, Dugin, and the Rough Beast

From Slavoj Zizek’s Interrogating the Real:

Along the lines of this constitutive ‘homelessness’ of philosophy, one should rehabilitate Kant’s idea of the cosmopolitan ‘world-civil-society’ (Weltburgergesellschaft), which is not simply an expansion of the citizenship of a nation state to the citizenship of a global trans-national state; instead, it involves a shift from the principle of identification with one’s ‘organic’ ethnic substance actualized in a particular tradition to a radically different principle of identification.  Recall Deleuze’s notion of universal singularity as opposed to the triad of Individuality-Particularity-Universality - this opposition is precisely the opposition between Kant and Hegel.  For Hegel, ‘world-civil-society’ is an abstract notion without substantial content, lacking the mediation of the particular and thus the force of full actuality, i.e., it involves an abstract identification which does not substantially grasp the subject; the only way for an individual effectively to participate in universal humanity is therefore through a full identification with a particular Nation-State (I am ‘human’ only insofar as I am German, English…).  For Kant, on the contrary, ‘world-civil-society’ designates the paradox of the universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, bypasses the mediation of the particular by directly participating in the Universal.  The identification with the Universal is not the identification with an encompassing global Substance (‘humanity’), but an identification with a universal ethico-political principle - a universal religious collective, a scientific collective, a global revolutionary organization, all of which are in principle accessible to everyone.  This is what Kant, in the famous passage of his ‘What is Enlightenment?’, means by ‘public’ as opposed to ‘private’: ‘private’ is not one’s individuality as opposed to one’s communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification; while ‘public’ is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s Reason.  The paradox is thus that one participates in the universal dimension of the ‘public’ sphere precisely as singular individual extracted from or even opposed to one’s substantial communal identification - one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities.  And what we find at the end of his road is atheism - not the ridiculously pathetic spectacle of the heroic defiance of God, but insight into the irrelevance of the divine, along the lines of Brecht’s Herr Keuner:

Continued...

Posted by Søren Renner on Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 11:17 AM in Political Philosophy
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My latest teleology

by Rod Cameron

I see one of the brothers has recently been writing about the end of teleology. I am a fan of teleology and whatever the brother was on about, it was not teleology. I wish he had found another word for his angst. Speculation about the future is what keeps us on the political margins going, so I thought I would show what it is about. Teleology is about joining a few dots to predict a glorious future. We all do it: take a few premises and cantilever an extrapolation till it crashes and burns. The critics of teleology say it is not within a million miles of being a pseudo-science, and they are right, but it is a lot of fun and I am actually serious, especially since the answer to the first question, “Where are we?” is damn obvious.

We are in a post-ideological age; we are beyond the debates based on political economy – Easy. Next dot, “What does that mean?” It means we are beyond trying to understand the world in terms of good and evil; we are beyond ethics. Dot 3, “Enlarge on that”. Basically ethics was behind ideology and in the end ethics had nothing to do with predicting the eventual answer which is known as liberal democracy or democratic capitalism. Dot 4, “So?” Well, look at our particular situation. Instead of a debate on immigration we get an ethical invective, “Racist!” And do we buy that as a comprehensive response? Does any-[intelligent]-one continue to think politics is applied ethics? Dot 5, “So?” Liberalism and its mate ethics are shagged-out. With their inane reply to the anti-immigrant protest they are begging us to say something really intelligent that will bury their faith in ethics. They are destined to be replaced and we have to get in early with some new Absolutes to replace the worn-out, simplistic one commonly associated with shagged-out Christianity. Dot 6, “You are sure history is against ethics?” All ethical absolutes finish up in the same place – the philosophy dump. Dot 7, “And you no doubt have a few Absolutes handy to fill the vacuum after ethics and thereby predict future developments in the world of ideas?” Yeah. And that is enough dots to get me started. I will have to make a few points before the teleology is launched.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 08:42 PM in Political Philosophy
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The Oldest of the Old in Western Thought

True, as we look through Being itself, through time itself, and look into the destiny of Being and the extending of time-space, we have glimpsed what “Appropriation” means.  But do we by this road arrive at anything else than a mere thought-construct?  Behind this suspicion there lurks the view that Appropriation must after all “be” something.  However:  Appropriation neither is, nor is Appropriation there.  To say the one or to say the other is equally a distortion of the matter, just as if we wanted to derive the source from the river.

What remains to be said?  Only this:  Appropriation appropriates.  Saying this, we say the Same in terms of the Same about the Same.  To all appearances, all this says nothing.  It does indeed say nothing so long as we hear a mere sentence in what was said, and expose that sentence to the cross-examination of logic.  But what if we take what was said and adopt it unceasingly as the guide for our thinking, and consider that this Same is not even anything new, but the oldest of the old in Western thought:  that ancient something which conceals itself in a-letheia?  That which is said before all else by this first source of all the leitmotifs of thinking gives voice to a bond that binds all thinking, providing that thinking submits to the call of what must be thought.

The task of our thinking has been to trace Being to its own from Appropriation—by way of looking through true time without regard to the relation of Being to beings.

To think Being without beings means:  to think Being without regard to metaphysics.  Yet a regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics.  Therefore, our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself.

If overcoming remains necessary, it concerns that thinking that explicitly enters Appropriation in order to say It in terms of It about It.

Our task is unceasingly to overcome the obstacles that tend to render such saying inadequate.

The saying of Appropriation in the form of a lecture remains itself an obstacle of this kind.  The lecture has spoken merely in propositional statements.

Martin Heidegger, “On Time and Being” translated by Joan Stambaugh, ISBN:0-022-32375-7, p 23-24

I present this for discussion by those more familiar with continental philosophy than I because I have a hunch it is as important as it pretends.

Posted by James Bowery on Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 12:46 PM in Political Philosophy
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Prologue to a déjà vu?

Ian Jobling needs little or no introduction.  He’s known as an anti-anti-Semite whose mission is to make WN safe for Jews.  My first direct experience with Jobling was in response to his post on Genetic Similarity Theory.  After publishing some of my comments, he refused to publish another.  I suspect it was either because he was having problems defending his position (which didn’t impress many of the regulars), or he was upset that I made a reference to his avoiding the JQ (which might have made it through moderation because initially he did not seem to understand the point). 

Is it even worth talking about him?  Prozium has recently made a number of excellent posts critiquing the  ‘moderate’ race realists.  Most of us already know why Jobling is wrong.  But Jobling has now made it official that he wants to develop his own version of a political philosophy for the pro-White movement (PWM).  This is a good opportunity to understand exactly what it is that Jobling wants.  Pointing out the flaws in his thinking will also help draw those new to the PWM away from moderate positions that compromise White interests.

Jobling says that he wrote this, what he calls the prologue to a series of essays on pro-White political philosophy, because his attempts to create a manifesto for a new political party earlier in the year were hampered by his not understanding what its foundational political philosophy would be.  He says that the PWM “is mired in confusion, teeming with knotty contradictions, unexamined premises, and dubious logic”.  Is this true?  Certainly there are competing positions (particularly with regards to the role of Jews in the PWM).  Perhaps this is Jobling being honest about contradictions in his own position that he has not addressed adequately.  In this essay, he seeks to outline the issues and questions that will be addressed by a coherent, consistent pro-White political philosophy.

Continued...

Posted by Dasein on Friday, July 10, 2009 at 08:35 AM in Political Philosophy,  That Question Again,  White Nationalism
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False identity

A few thoughts about an imaginary problem

“Identity” is not a word that need ever pass our lips - not if we have zero respect for the liberal analysis, and wish to be free of its formative power.  For this is a word of the left, and like all words of the left it pressages on us a modern conception of Man which is fatally light and relativistic.

How so?  Well, shouldn’t it be a grave and weighty responsibility for a man to define who and what he is?  After all, modernity places the highest possible value on the individual, denying all bonds, all blood their primacy.  To use the Schmittian formulation, “None but the individual shall dispose of the life of the individual.”  Surely, then, that life should be sufficiently valued by its owner to imbue the exercise with a high seriousness and a desire for some specificity.  Yet in practice the reverse is the case.  We live in the Age of the Left.  It is an age when realization of the Self, once the preserve of the religious and Chivalric orders, has been democratized and, in democratization, has been relativised.  When the measure of a life is mere personal taste all claims are equal.  There is salience but there is no depth.  There is “progress” but there is no movement.  Something vital, something authentic and original has fallen out of the equation.

In the sociological sense what remains is the modern us and the meaning of us.  For well over a century nationalist and traditionalist thinkers have judged that meaning in historical terms and found it wanting.  The ineluctable conclusion is that we are moving away from our truth as men, and putting on the cloth of an increasingly artificial self.  And we are doing this, most of us, because we are ignorant of politics and of ourselves, and we are weak and suggestible.

Artificiality in the modern conception of Man (modern in the context of an industrialised and, later, consumerised society) is precisely a sign of lost being.  It seems improbable, somehow, that the men and women of pre-industrial European societies, filled as those societies were with brothers to the ox, with men listed in the Orange and the Blue, and their widows in the pews, and the widows of the sea, would have had any reference point at all to the narcissism of a self-ascribed “identity”.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims assuredly did not define themselves according to their fascinations with the Self.  They were fixed by their relation to kin, to the soil and the seasons or the tides and the wind, to the economy as manor, town or village, to Nature and to God.  These were givers of riches aplenty for all but the high elites of the Court and Barony, of the Church, and of learning.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 07:54 PM in Political Philosophy
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Thoughts on the preface and introduction of The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff

by DanielJ

From the Preface to this work, Rieff quoting two historians’ summary of his work:

“If the dominant character type of the twentieth century is really what Rieff calls ‘psychological man,’ the consequences for western society are quite incalculable.”

This is certainly true. If man is a psychological creature than we must use the weapons of psychology to turn him to toward the defensive weaponry of Christianity, ethnic solidarity, epistemology, etc. Simply concentrating on Van Tillian presuppositionalism will do no good when men are no longer motivated by philosophies, but by psychologies.

From the Introduction:

Literature and sociology have long supplied eloquent and knowing professional mourners at the wake for Christian culture. After Matthew Arnold, much of modern poetry [he quotes Yeats in the very beginning of the Intoduction] constitutes an elegiac farewell ... to the religious culture of the West. After Auguste Comte, much of modern sociology has struggled for diagnostic ideas refined and yet wide enough to encompass the spectacle of a death so great in magnitude and subtlety. Now the dissolution of a unitary system of common belief, accompanied, as it must be, by a certain disorganization of personality, may have run its course.

Rieff seems to be stating in this passage that the central crisis of our time - this dissolution of personhood and entropy of personality - is a culture war where the combatants are fighting to “organize” (this has the faint smell of technocratic and bureaucratic totalitarianism parading itself as scientific management with disinterested and rationalized dispassionate concern only for the psychological well being of mankind) the human psyche.

He goes on to state that the:

...long period of deconversion, which first broke the surface of political history at the time of the French Revolution, appears all but ended.

and that:

several systems of belief (are) competing for primacy in the task of organizing personality in the West.

Hence, the “culture war.” The “cult” is the cult of personality.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 05:32 PM in Political Philosophy
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Winner redux

An interesting debate has sprung up on the BNP election thread, And the winner is ....  I’ve moved the relavent comments here at the request of one of our esteemed commenters.

The debate was/is a response to the notion that the existential threat all European peoples face in the West today is completely new in historical terms, and calls forth new restorative ideas.  In an intellectually free and creative age ... an age not labouring under the weight of the 20th century ... radical thinkers would respond with towering expositions of the European life.  The existential threat would be countered with a flood of vivifying ideologies tailored to the times, and the best and most inspiring of them to all times.

The 20th century fascist ideologies would be properly understood as vigorous but really quite narrow responses to the threats of their time, enlivened in the case of the German model by some rough and ready social darwinism.  They would not be seen as a solution for all times, or for ours.  For now, the revolutionary wave which fascism resisted has washed over us, and the sickly decadence which National Socialism bled out of German society has penetrated us.  Those lines have been breached, and the battle has been carried forward to the final redoubt of our very existence.  A few decades from now we shall be on the Westwall and in Berlin.  We shall be on Senlac Field, and in Stalingrad ... everywhere that men have known their very being is on the line.

It is the clarification of that first verb “to be” which matters now.  Our people must know what it means to be “us” - as a part of subsistent Nature, as men and as Europeans.  They must know what is and is not true of us and in us, and they must know we have the right “to be” ... the right to live sovereign and free, and the right to live with ourselves and with no others, if that is what we choose.

That is my prescription.  It has, so far as I am aware, not been expounded in the past, probably because no man ever thought that we Europeans would ever find ourselves where we are today.  But here we are, nonetheless, and we have no time - none at all - to waste on philosophical distractions which answer the wrong question.

Below the fold are the comments from the “winner” thread.  I hope I’ve not left out any substantive ones.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 at 01:10 PM in Political Philosophy
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A reply to Happy Cracker

HC,

In my own mind I’ve been turning over this problem of European survival for three decades or thereabouts.  Fred has talked of his emergence into the light beginning with an encounter with Steve Sailer’s writings.  I can’t really say for sure how or when I began.  I know how I proceed.  It is a journey that is osmotic in method, like a salmon smelling one molecule from the stream of its birth amid the billions of tonnes of seawater around it, one then another then another.

The molecules, however, are not the stream.  I have never found any source of knowledge that wholly satisfies me or about which I could say, yes, that is the solution that we must all place our shoulder behind.  I have only found signposts.  And, of course, that’s the point.  That’s the tragedy of the European situation.  Even at this perillous moment, there are still only signposts.

The ground is thick with them, in fact.  There’s Alain de Benoist, but he despises analytic materialism and so, naturally enough, finds himself mounting only a cultural defence.  Which is no bloody use.

There’s Alex Linder who visited us one time to press the case for the Single Jewish Cause, castigated me for being “in philosophy” not politics, and then let it be known that he is a libertarian.  More or less.

There’s the popular nationalist movements on the edges of European politics.  Actually, most, like the BNP, are broad churches of nativism - not really nationalist at all.  But image is everything, and you can’t blame them for thinking they are nationalists.  How many, though, could really define the word?

And then there’s Kevin MacDonald.  Let’s look at his prescription in greater detail.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, May 11, 2009 at 08:20 PM in Political Philosophy
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Didacticism and virality: A rant

by Happy Cracker

One thing that I really regret about the philosophical discussions on this website is that they are never distilled into bullet-point form that can be appropriated by the masses. The highest level discussions in any arena always looks like a mess: scattered manuscripts, little ‘chits’ with scribblings on them, and red marker. Yet, at the end of the day, you are supposed to always hand the simple-minded man an index card with the main points underlined. Except we never seem to get around to doing that around here.

Imagine MR were to end tonight. What has the average Englishman profited from its existence? What new memes have we brought him, what aides in his ideological struggle? That is the question you must always be asking yourself if you want to avoid being lead astray by corrupting influences.

Its not philosophical endeavor itself that frustrates me - its the fact that we can’t even really explain what we are talking about to each other. I have contributed many articles to this website, yet when the main writer GW addresses me, I understand only vaguely what he is actually talking about. This makes me quite mad, because it looks as though all this has been in vain. I am supposedly a part of the inner circle and I don’t even get what is being discussed.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, May 11, 2009 at 12:01 PM in Political Philosophy
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Usefulness of a Founding Document?

by Happy Cracker

I was pondering what memetic support we can provide which might concretely help in the establishment of a government that adheres to our philosophy. At some point I came to the consideration of founding documents, and asked myself: what sort of a founding document would we produce to articulate our political philosophy?

What I came up with will be easy to criticize on the grounds that it is obvious, and that it is ultimately just another statement.  But I hope you’ll give the following example a fair hearing.

“Charter of the Existence of the English Nation”.

This would be a document which establishes, in a persuasive and accessible style:

1. The existence of the English nation,

2. What constitutes membership of that nation,

3. The value that the English nation has for its members,

4. The fact that the nation can die, and thus needs to be preserved,

5. The existential threat posed by loss of territory, esp. via mass immigration

6. Calls for the death of the English nation (cite: Steyn, Darby, Derbyshire, others),

7. The right of the English nation to exist into futurity,

8. The right of members of this nation to puts its preservation as foremost priority.

9. Further reading: reference MacDonald’s works and others.

I can imagine a very embellished version, possibly even giving specific genetic data to delineate the boundaries of the nation.

At the very least, a stripped-down and simplified version could be written for distribution to schoolchildren; it might take the form of a pamphlet.

Its my opinion that nationalists and those raised in right-leaning households will view many of these memes as being self-obvious and barely worthy of being stated. I disagree, which is why I wrote this and will proceed to write the document. I think that there is a benefit to be had from stating these things explicitly and on paper.

My reasoning is that, despite the obviousness of this to some, the left has been able to insert so much relativizing logic and uncertainty into discourse, that even while within one’s own four walls nationalism may reign, in the public space, all of these things are regarded as “up in the air”. Basically the left maintains an air of permanent skepticism about all assertions of nationhood. It is perhaps shocking to some that people believe enough in this to actually state it. Put simply: there is value in being explicit.

Suggestions welcome.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, May 9, 2009 at 04:13 PM in Political Philosophy
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‘La Loi’ de Frédéric Bastiat

by Happy Cracker

Frédéric Bastiat was a Frenchmen who lived from 1801 to 1850, in the last decade of his life producing several treatises on free market economics and political economy. He was an enemy of socialism and wrote several books demonstrating the absurdity of socialist economic premises. His writing is notable for its clarity and conciseness; and readers who value their time will no doubt be grateful for his mercifully paired-down writing style, which lets several of his works be read in an afternoon. In addition to these traits, he has value to us for being a non-Jewish voice in the advocacy of economic liberty and against socialism.

I’m going to publish here a smattering - no, make that two smatterings - of various quotes from his work ‘La Loi’ (The Law), a work primarily aimed against socialism and the laws inherited from the government of Robespierre.

Bastiat is credited with the analogy of the Broken Window (sometimes called the Broken Window Fallacy) which basically refutes the idea, common to certain readings of economics, that the breaking of a window as a consequence of a children’s ball game could be seen as causing economic growth, because the glazier has to be paid to put in a new window, thus generating money. He disproves this by showing that the store proprietor has to pay the cost of the broken window; thus while the broken window does lead to increased “economic activity”, it doesn’t in fact result in net wealth creation. Some important statistics frequently used by modern economists have this fallacy built into them, for example, the national GDP - probably the most commonly cited economic indicator in the economic press - would reflect the action of the glazier to repay the window, and could thus be explained by pundits (or any public figure) as signifying economic growth. [Chip in on the comments thread if you know the other reasons why GDP is less useful than commonly supposed.]

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, April 20, 2009 at 07:39 PM in Political Philosophy
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