Category: The Ontology Project

A history of seeking to be

I am writing this very brief post to mark a particularly interesting thread-intervention by Daniel2 - the estimable Daniel Sienkiewicz of VoR - on the seemingly non-serious topic of hippies.

He wrote:

Hippies, as opposed to The Viet Nam War, were about a right below rights for the (White) male of the species to Be - that is, to have the right to exist on the basis of intrinsic, inherited value, as opposed to being allowed to exist merely on the basis of accomplishment, what they do or through proof in overcoming brutal rights of passage up to and including war.

The White male motive to be left alone was different from the Black Male motive which aimed more toward the power of rule.

Moreover, the White male motive was a stance against the military industrial complex - wars had become habit form for generations, and had done the White race no good. It was a movement against inhumane demands made upon White men, and a motive to be, by contrast. With male being is a corollary to the right of the White race to exist on the basis of pre-existent evolution.

I like this kind of historicization of a reactive but ineradicable struggle by white men to be.  It raises the interesting possibility that spontaneous movements such as the levellers, and popular rebellions such as the Peasants Revolt, religious effusions such as the Canterbury pilgrimage, cultural ones such as the opening of the American West, political ones such as the reception of Adolf Hitler by the German people, and so forth, may have had origins and their place in a grand, Manichean struggle between the forces of light and darkness, and of freedom and enslavement.  That the people, or some of them anyway, turned away periodically from the furrow of the plough and the heat of the furnace, from the tyranny of the materialistic and of near concerns, and from harm’s unjust way to seek the conditions necessary for a truly human existence, is a beautiful and encouraging thought.

That living then in a system of such undoubted corruption and emptiness only prompted them onwards to the next cycle of searching, so living now in just such a system will prompt us.  It is only a matter of time and circumstance.  Therein, then, lies a narrative of our liberation - though, of course, reaction is not enough of itself.  A true ontological model of Man must inform and guide the search for it to realise anything useful and permanent.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 08:22 PM in The Ontology Project
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Political economy and the nation

This short essay is a reply, though not a direct one, to a (now deleted) question from GT on the thread to my piece Nationalism and the Money Power:

You would leave “the rest to the market”?  Which market is that?  The capitalist state market controlled by the few?  The state capitalist market controlled by the few?

It is also a response to Leon’s recent commentary with its, for me, non-tractable Austrian presumption.

Since I have tied both arms and legs to the hazy notion of an ontological nationalism - a philosophy which might be described as “a European reality” - I really ought to use it to feel for a nationalist alternative to that sterile, old liberal contest of the free market versus interventionism, as it was used (to PF’s chagrin) in the challenge to our so very free friend Perry.

Economy is the process of exchange, a market the means of exchange, and money the unitary value of exchange.  All forms of politics seek a realisation of some kind through exchange itself, for it is a radically transforming medium.  Nationalism’s realisation - at least, an ontological nationalism’s - is or would be, technically-speaking, the increase of the ethnic genetic interests of a people.  That can be a genetically qualitative or quantitative goal.  But its realisation will plainly require something beyond the conventional economic goals of maximal stability and freedom and a meritocracy of opportunity and prosperity, which are universals to all Western economic models.  To be worthy of the name, a nationalist political economy must be characterised by a small number of other, quite particular and inter-related goals that certainly don’t arise under a 21st century liberal regime.  These include:

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 08:38 PM in The Ontology Project
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The World, Self, & Language – Or Musings upon Mere Apples

by Graham Lister

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Wallace Stevens, 1954

Given that certain philosophical issues (idealism versus materialism) have recently been raised on the blog and are, in my view central to any political practice, I thought I might give my brief and initial views on these topics.

Serious issues are multi-factorial and multi-faceted. Intellectuals, particularly of a certain Enlightenment/liberal type in the so-called social sciences and humanities, tend to want to make a neat division between “facts” and ‘values’. However, values enter into what counts as a “fact”. A large leap is involved in moving from “raw data” to a judgement of fact (even in the hard sciences).

The more complex an historical-cultural event is, and the more important the issues it raises contemporaneously, the less it is possible to sustain a simplified fact-value division. This does not imply that all there is is a conflict of prejudices and biases as data are manipulated to one worldview or another, rather that questions and answers are shaped by experiences, contexts, norms, values, and pre-existing beliefs. All those factors are bound to be relevant in how we judge the issue at hand.

A great deal can, of course, be learnt from those who do not share our presuppositions about both the strength and weakness of our position on a particular philosophical or political subject. For example, there is a whole ecology of anti-liberal positions and arguments, from a wide set of perspectives. Any sophisticated accounting of the problems generated by hyper-liberalism as experienced in our “postmodern” societies requires an appropriate and mature synthesis of these perspectives. One example I have in mind is the excellent critique of the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of the liberally-derived international legal-order by Danillo Zolo (Victors’ Justice: From Nuremberg to Baghdad). It is indeed a vulgar intellectual error to dismiss penetrating and powerful anti-liberal analysis, ipso facto, because one does not share the ultimate values and/or suggested prescriptions of the author.

Yet the image of ecology suggests that plurality and difference do not say all that is required. There are also inter-relationships, coinherence, communication and life-giving forms of unity which need not deny or violate legitimate difference. The outcome of experiencing, understanding, and knowing should be about the wisdom which is concerned for shaping a rich and sustaining individual and collective life; trying to making sense of what these forms of life may look like against a depressing background of continuing inorganic diversity and cultural fragmentation.

It is no accident, as old Marxist hacks used to say, that so much of the post-modern liberal world is profoundly ugly, in both form and spirit, and indeed is proud to be so (for example, in the built environment think of the baleful legacy of the “highbrow” Le Corbusier or the example of the undeniably “lowbrow” contemporary American shopping mall). The fragility of beauty, truth, and goodness – indeed any form of virtue - is aptly demonstrated by both those monstrosities.

Three crucial elements that shape our judgements are the world, self, and language (and the interplay between them). Obviously, this is a very complex subject but I will try to outline a non-reductionist yet materially-grounded account with an everyday ordinary object and demonstrate the multi-faceted phenomenon it actually is.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 08:04 PM in The Ontology Project
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An Idealist critiques GW’s [emergent] existentialism

by Rod Cameron

An Idealist critiques GW’s [emergent] existentialism

Now that GW has made the second instalment of his planned three-part ontology I must urge him to abandon existentialism. His interest in ontology is correct but his ideas are not on the money. GW sees ontology as providing European identity and racial consciousness through his reworking of Heidegger. 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. Hang-on GW, I’m coming. – Too bad Mr Wolf sees your plight.

PART 1: A STROLL OVER THE TERRITORY

It is noted that GW gets little sympathy from the commentariat for ontology. He should be respected but he has made a poor job of explaining his commitment to ontology because ontology is his main argument and it is shallow as I will explain. I am an absolute Idealist and though on the metaphysical side of the line, that standpoint does not make me GW’s ally. There is a remote chance this article could blow-up into a war, which would be a good thing, but I’m planning to shut down that prospect by either deterring GW from existentialism or converting him to Idealism.

GW’s philosophy is an example of the subjectivity wrapped in a technical code [multiplicity, final value] that passes for existentialism. GW had a ‘being’ epiphany. It is the well-spring behind his interest in ontology and Heidegger. It is probably the inspiration for MR and it gives him the energy and conviction to maintain MR. It is not surprising that he finds meaning for the experience in Heidegger. Heidegger is the “go-to man” for a non-religious interpretation of being. However, the ability to empathise with and interpret Heidegger is not a milestone towards any significant success because existentialism is shallow. Take for a start GW’s title, “The ontology of the material”. This means he is doing relativist metaphysics; materialism is immersed in phenomena and phenomena are relative. Relativist metaphysics is a joke because metaphysics is about absolutes.

To quickly determine whether GW’s metaphysics have any validity a professional philosopher might ask whether he had replies for D. Hume and I. Kant. They set metaphysics big challenges to test whether metaphysics deserves to remain within philosophy. Those challenges are beyond the scope of dialectic reasoning and will only be tackled with absolute answers. If answers are not forth-coming then GW will be suspected of having yet another subjective metaphysics. GW has a specific mission and I have made a global criticism. Is that fair? Metaphysics is a vast, syncretic project and something as vital to metaphysics as ontology has ramifications, which must include answers for these two critics. Their challenges are connected and was there ever a more ill-prepared metaphysician than GW? It was too-turgid-to-tell, but did you join something GW? Do GW’s articles on ontology differ from opinion? If you can see the material bit that rank and file Nationalists can get hold of then point it out.

Idealism and Existentialism
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. Individual existence is about awareness of hopes, fears, beliefs, desires, the question of purpose, will power and living authentically. These are aspects of concrete existence for the individual in his space and time, but it will not suffice for Nationalism. 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.

The inference that Idealism is not concrete, hence Idealists are elites “playing silly-buggers”, needs to be challenged. Idealists are prepared to immerse themselves in abstractions in an attempt to arriving at new concepts to facilitate their argument. In other words, from the abstractions hopefully there will emerge ideation. Idealists respect the difficulty of breaking out of dualistic consciousness into absolute consciousness: the consciousness that will be of service to existential concerns.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 07:45 PM in The Ontology Project
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The ontology of the material: part 2, Being and multiplicity

Introduction

Mention ontology to even an educated fellow nationalist, and certainly to an activist, and he will very likely gaze unawares at the ground beneath his feet.  After a few seconds the void of understanding will fill with something very like scorn.  He will level his eyes at you and deliver himself of the opinion that that sort of thing has nothing to do with the world of struggle in Nature and politics that he knows and sees everywhere – the struggle which European Man is so demonstrably losing.  Too detached from reality, too self-absorbing, he will say.  Too many dancing angels.

And then, to set you right, and quite without irony, he will remind you of the great existential plaint, the crisis of the crisis.  While you are engaged in all this intellectual vanity, he will say, we Europeans are growing older and weaker by the day, our lands more lost to us, our family lines more negroidalised, the political class more traitorous (if that is possible), the bankers and corporate scum more rapacious, the Jews more audacious. 

You will see how the collective angst, unspoken by his people, unacknowledged amid the culture of greed and celebrity and political hype, is torrenting through him, defining him politically, driving him.  What do we do?  Now!  Today!  That is the question, de-Barded and anti-intellectual though it is.  That is what he will want you, somehow, to answer.

You will nod, and search for a way to explain that revolutions without founding ideas cannot sustain.  “But supposing,” you say, “you get your call to political arms, or military if you prefer, and the people come to your side.  You win.  What do you do next?  And why?”

Radical liberal, conservative or nationalist, anyone who does not want simply to bring God to us and who looks into ontology in the Western canon for an answer to those two eternal questions has to negotiate a pair of formidable philosophical obstacles which lie across the path. The effect of these is especially disruptive for the nationalist.  In the first case, it diverts his investigation back towards the teleological and, in the second, it provides false witness to who and what we are.

In this second part of my essay I will restrict myself to addressing the first of these two problems, as a way of advancing the concept, seemingly counter-factual to many, of a materialist ontology.

Being and multiplicity

The first problem is that of the finite and the infinite, no less, and the emasculation of identity which proceeds from the common apprehension of the latter.  At a superficial level, this emasculation is the real reason that nationalists complain of ontology’s lack of political agency, and the real reason that nationalist thinking romanticized in the 19th century and vaulted the heavens after myth, glory and heroism in the 20th.  Both were flights from a flawed essential conclusion which militated an appeal to a non-reality.  Let us decide here and now for the material, for experience, and for the definitely real.

It is self-evident that human identity demands to be considered in ways appropriate to individuals and groups - that is, in ways recognising their multiplicity and difference.  The predominant methods of considering, categorising and discriminating humans are, first, biological, then, as externalisation and superficiality take hold, socio-economic, religious, political, etc.  So far so good for nationalists.  But being is near-uniformly considered as the singularity of some unknowable meta-space, a universal substrate that is indivisible, prior, and, for faith-folk, endowing.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 08:45 PM in The Ontology Project
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The ontology of the material: Part 1

The essence of the German Volk—or any of Europe’s nations—is ... not the DNA constituent of its genotype, but the spirit animating it, making it a people with a history, an origin, and a destiny.  In compelling it to experience the world in a way all its own, this spirit is not the cultural superstructure familiar to the anthropologist or sociologist, but “the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk’s existence.”  It is this spirit that nourishes the soul of a people and infuses its blood with a will to destiny.

Very probably, the metaphysical thinking of Martin Heidegger has been claimed in some form or other for every significant line of philosophical enquiry in the later decades of the 20th century.  In his essay Freedom’s Racial Imperative, published in autumn 2006, and from which this quote is drawn, Michael O’Meara followed suit, reclaiming the great man for nationalism.  And, of course, not just nationalism but O’Meara’s preferred continental European genuflection to spirit-of-race-ism (SoRism, for short).

SoRism is religion.  It is to be expected that those who have expressed faith genes, who appear to be the majority, will interpret everything with the tripping point into faith prominently displayed.  It does not matter in the slightest that they may be good readers of the Western philosophical canon, or that they may be noisy agnostics or atheists or just completely, systematically logical in their approach to the rest of life.  When this one subject pops up – this one question of our European type or Northern European type or Irish or German or whatever sub-set of our Northern European type – the foot falls with mechanical accuracy, the wire is tripped, the earnest devotion flows, and the decision for fantasy is taken.

There is no spirit of race.  It is an imaginary concept.  It is alluring.  It is persistent - the default assumption.  But nowhere in Nature or in human nature is there this misty, destined, purposive, elemental entity.  I am not saying that one cannot refer to existent qualities of the human psyche essential to our type, but if it is those aspects one wishes to reference why not simply do so?  Why wrap everything up in a cloak of silver and gold, woven from the threads of a religious conviction?  What is the worth of a philosophical treatise that is not founded in and does not refer to what actually exists?

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, May 30, 2011 at 08:55 AM in The Ontology Project
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Band of Brothers

by Grimoire

I was sitting in the study re-reading Heidegger, preparing notes should I write an article on the subject, and thought, this is going to take too long.  I put Heidegger back on the shelf, and pulled down my beautiful, antique print of Aeschylus’s The Persians.  This is the stuff for me!  Nothing so clear and direct.  Swords close in, man to man.

Forward, sons of the Greeks,
Liberate the fatherland,
Liberate your children, your women,
The altars of the gods of your fathers
And the graves of your forebearers:
Now is the fight for everything.

One of the greatest works of the heroic type, comes to us from England. We all know it. But I think few have really read it on their own. But please take the time to read it. It is not about a battle, nor is it about history or philosophy.  It is about one day, when individual men stood together, and stood as a “band of brothers”:

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 06:04 PM in The Ontology Project
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From the final pages of Heidegger’s “The onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics”

The following is my offering - very brief - of Heidegger’s meaning at the very end of the second of the two lectures published under the title Identity and Difference.  You may consider it of no consequence, for it has little to do with nationalism.  But Heidegger does generally, and this is not as unconnected as it may appear.  It is just a small digression from political thinking.

On page 72 of my copy of the Stambaugh translation Heidegger, having remarked upon the openness of god-less thinking to the divine, proceeds:

This remark may throw a little light on the path to which thinking is on its way, that thinking which accomplishes the step back, back out of metaphysics into the active essence of metaphysics, back out of the oblivion of the difference as such into the destiny of the withdrawing concealment of perdurance.

Thinking here does not mean the unending thought process of the intellectual faculty.  It is broader than that.  Heidegger seems to regard thinking more holistically, as the way the mind in general addresses the reality of the world beyond the human organism.  Thus, the “path” or “way” he is talking about here is the procession of the mind from the ordinary conscious state which we all experience in life, and which is characterised by two things.  The first is a state of self-segregation from the real, a state of loss or immersion à la Bacon in passing things (feelings, events, objects).  The second is a state of “perdurance”, of fracture, of sundering to which we automatically ascribe the word “I”.

This ascription conceals our fractured estate, but in the process of advancement from our ordinary waking consciousness it falls away, and with it the states of fracture and immersion.  And then the road is open, perhaps:

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 07:17 PM in The Ontology Project
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Our superior truths

In the normal course of a day or two’s amicable difference of opinion on two Telegraph threads, I was accused of being a Nazi racial supremacist.  Well, you know, as one is.  But what are the areas in which European Man is demonstrably superior to the other races?  I mean important and influential areas, of course, not sporting prowess in strength events or swimming, both of which I’ve seen offered up over the years and both of which lead to precisely nothing.

Six possibles occur to me: creativity, individuality, enquiry, adventurousness, altruism/empathy, and the capacity for moral abstraction.  These definitely seem to me to capture something of the European essence, and I find it moving and inspiring.  It is often said by radical right thinkers of the continental tradition that men must yearn for the mythic.  Are there not visions of nobility and greatness enough in the truth of what we are?  And if so, is there not also more political utility in this day and age in the acknowledgement of it?

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, February 18, 2011 at 07:12 PM in The Ontology Project
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The Primordial “As”: Gian-Carlo Rota

I must confess, I’m about to blow the bolts on GW’s project given the rapidly evolving situation in the field, but before doing so I must fulfill my promised contribution concerning Heidegger’s “as” structure.  I’ve had a few false starts on writing the related post so I’ve broken it up to get it rolling.  This first installment provides a sense of how fundamental that contribution was to Heidegger’s work as well as to a new paradigm for the philosophy of science.

Continued...

Posted by James Bowery on Monday, November 1, 2010 at 02:33 PM in The Ontology Project
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Adventures in Sympathy pt 1

by PF

There is an interesting paradox involved in human responsibility. On the one hand, asking someone to be responsible is asking them to do something that is nearly impossible in our unconscious waking state. On the other hand, holding people to responsibility is what we do, and it is not entirely clear how an alternative mechanism could take the place of it.

When judging someone, it is very interesting which perspective set you choose to view them through. Take Hitler, for example. There are sympathetic perspectives from which to view every action taken by the Nazis in WWII. You could call to mind their awareness of the Soviet threat, the threat of Communism. You could note the various examples of British malfeasance and provocation - or rather those actions of the British which, you would then note, would necessarily have to be seen this way in the eyes of Germans. You could note the intense humiliation at Versailles and the high jinx of the Weimar governments, and get a good feel for why German man wanted to lash out in various directions at that time period.

Putting yourself into other peoples shoes isn’t a new game for me, so I am utterly underwhelmed when, after going on an Easter egg hunt for all the sympathetic perspectives that can be wielded to reflect favorably on Nazism, they turn out looking quite vindicated. Their position actually makes a great deal of sense, once you adjust your own view for how they were viewing it.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Sunday, October 17, 2010 at 12:20 PM in The Ontology Project
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Heidegger: The West Texas Translation

This entry is meant to be a humorous break from my more ponderous contributions.

There’s been some interesting discussion at MR as of late concerning Heidegger’s ontological account of being and what he calls Dasein.  And although I know precious little about the man and his thought it’s not hard to see the natural attraction he has on far right types given his politics and the promise of esoterica that comes with engaging such a formidable work as Being and Time, which some would say is the most significant Germanic contribution to philosophy in the 20th century.

But, in all seriousness, who can find the time to properly engage this material?  So like any degenerate American I started searching the web for an account of Heidegger’s thought that distills as much as possible in as little time as possible.

And boy did I hit pay dirt with a forty-five minute lecture given by Rick Roderick, which is part of a series of lectures that he delivered for the Teaching Company called, “Self Under Siege - Philosophy in the 20th Century”.  A word of caution, Mr. Roderick is obviously a leftist of some sort and doesn’t hide his unease with Heidegger’s politics, so be prepared.  However, I felt like he succeeded at taking some of Heidegger’s ideas and bringing them down to earth in the kind of colloquial and humorous way that everyone can appreciate.

The reader has my word that most anyone who watches this lecture in full will find it amusing, if for no other reason than Mr. Roderick’s West Texas accent.  The lecture starts to get good somewhere in the vicinity of the third video, so don’t give up on it too easily.

Continued...

Posted by Notus Wind on Monday, September 27, 2010 at 12:12 PM in The Ontology Project
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A consistent mind

“My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you, perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last for ever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.”

Petrarch, from Africa, written in 1343.

The European mind is, in my view, better viewed from the very Anglo-American standpoint of its natural endowment than as a culturally and historically revealed phenomenon, though it is certainly our habit to favour the latter.  I confess that I don’t like the light that culture and history throw on the mind.  I instinctively want to withdraw out of that light, and withhold my agreement to the descriptions and images that appear in it.  What, after all, should we say about the European mind now, in the light of its debilitations in our postmodern age?  Perhaps no more than Petrarch said at the close of his epic poem about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus.

I don’t expect anyone else reading this to be burdened by this argument with temporality.  I don’t expect anyone else to seek a revelation of mind in its consistencies at all times rather than its saliencies in some - its great cathedrals, its epic poetry, its symphonies, its devotion to freedom and charity, and so forth.  I quite expect that my search for consistency went unsuspected by anyone who read this question, addressed to Notus Wind on his latest Ontology of Mind thread:

Notus,

A serious if perhaps leading ontological question, well, three ontological questions, really:

If our own faith had never been replaced by Christianity ...

1) Would an Enlightenment have been necessary and ...

2) if necessary, would it have come, and ...

3) if it would have come, how would it have differed from what we got?

This was an attempt to turn the historical narrative inside out in a few words, and find the mind humming away smoothly inside.  Here is Notus’s reply which I thought too good to be left to gather dust on a mature thread that perhaps not everyone will trouble to keep up with.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, September 24, 2010 at 07:38 PM in The Ontology Project
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The Ontology of Mind: The Free Will Theorem

“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?” - Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet

Previously in this series, I went through a mathematically intensive deductive argument that demonstrated (via reductio ad absurdum) that the mind was not mechanistic.  In this installment I will be detailing what physics has to say about the prospects for determinism in the physical universe and the notion of free will.

[Note:  Before proceeding below the fold I highly recommend that the reader revisit the introductory entry to this series, which has almost been completely rewritten since it was first published]

Continued...

Posted by Notus Wind on Sunday, September 12, 2010 at 07:39 PM in The Ontology Project
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Acquired self as digital signal processing algorithm

by PF

“Being, in order to be true, has to be spontaneous.” - GW

Imagine there is an analog signal that contains frequencies between 100,000 Hz and 25,000 Hz. In this analogy this is our Being.  Practical metaphysics aims at an experience of this wave, and ontological philosophy aims at the intellectualization of it.

However each organ of human perception has a sampling rate below these frequencies. The body might have a sampling rate of 20,000 Hz, in this example. The emotions might have a sampling rate of 10,000 Hz. The mind, which operates by habituation most of the time, has a sampling rate of 5,000 Hz.

The original signal has to be reconstructed from what is picked up by these organs of perception. Needless to say its impossible for a 100,000 Hz wave to be reconstructed from samples taken at 5,000 Hz

However what is not impossible is that, if this device (the brain) continues to grow in size and complexity, and remains obsessively focused during its evolutionary history on a few survival-relevant facets of reality, it will become useful as a feature-detector and pattern-detector for processing this 100 kiloHerz wave.

In order to do this, it will focus primarily on external things, which register merely as impressions on the eye and models in the memory. We could say that these are very low frequency, very superficial modulations in the high frequency carrier wave that is our Being … things like social appearances, the meaning of words, the possible ramifications of an action for self and group, who is mating with whom, threats from outside, possible sources of food and shelter, and ways of keeping oneself alive. Not because these things are important in any deeper sense, but they lead to survival.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, September 6, 2010 at 07:01 PM in The Ontology Project
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The Ontology of Mind: The Gödelian Argument

Dedicated to: Grimoire

“It is my…presumption that the ‘Heidegger epiphany’ is the realization of the inherent weakness in symbolic reasoning structures - and thus an opening up of a gap in the faith in the mind which is our modern western religion - by showing that we don’t know what ‘is’ is, among other things.” - PF

We start off this series by considering what is now called the Gödelian argument, but before I get into the details of how this argument works I would like to first say a few words about the perspective that we’ll be taking.  Our aim in this series will not be to develop a theory of mind from first principles but to isolate certain characteristics of mind and subordinate them to the analytical tools that we have available to us in the Western tradition.  However, the conclusions that come out of this process should inform whatever theory of mind that we seek to develop and should also serve as an imperfect diagnostic through which theories of mind can be evaluated.

In brief, the Gödelian argument endeavors to claim that the mind is essentially non-mechanical by considering Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorem.  At first glance, I would imagine that this approach seems more than a little queer to the uninitiated.  After all, the incompleteness theorem is a statement about first-order logic and would seem, prima facie, to have nothing to do with the mind whatsoever.  Just what kind of philosophical argument can traverse such a yawning theoretical gap!  Out of respect for this sentiment let’s first address this concern from a philosophical bird’s-eye view.

Note: For the dedicated reader, all the concepts that will be touched upon in this article are nicely covered in their technical details here.

[please be sure to check out the introductory entry to this series before proceeding]

Continued...

Posted by Notus Wind on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 03:24 PM in The Ontology Project
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The Molding of Minds

Dedicated to: The Activists

Shortly after my own political awakening I began to wonder, like so many others before me, why have nationalist ideas failed so completely to penetrate the mainstream of Western society.  If you think about it no other political message can rival the potency of ideas and aesthetics that an authentic patriotic nationalism can bring to the table.  If you need to be reminded of this just reflect for a moment on the natural appeal behind the following questions:

Do you want to restore the dignity and integrity of our culture?
Do you want to heal the social fabric and return a level of trust to our society that your grandparents once enjoyed?
Do you want to be able to live in communities made by and for your own without the hassle that comes with pricing out the unwanted in far flung exurbs?
Do you want to continue having your heritage demonized to your face and those of your children and their children in an unending bonfire of shame?
Do you want life?

There are powerful ideas embedded within these questions, and in uncertain times their power only grows.  The libertarians have their abstractions, the liberal-socialists have their bribes, the conservatives have their symbols, but we offer everything.  Never forget that.

Nevertheless, things are what they are, but it certainly hasn’t been for a lack of effort.  The past generation and a half in the United States has seen many talented activist-missionaries who endeavored to get the word out about what was at stake and the promise of what could be, some of these attempts were quite creative.  Yet their message continued to fall on deaf ears, the very people who stood to benefit from it the most rejected it in no uncertain terms.  And though some things are changing for the better, by and large they continue to reject it.  Why?

(the answer below the fold)

Continued...

Posted by Notus Wind on Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 10:17 AM in The Ontology Project
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Announcing a New Series: The Ontology of Mind

“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.” - T. H. Key

The ontology of mind is an important subject because it concerns that aspect of our being that distinguishes mankind from all other forms of life.  How we choose to understand our own mind and its products must inform our politics, metaphysics, worldview, and identity.

Continued...

Posted by Notus Wind on Wednesday, August 4, 2010 at 06:23 PM in The Ontology Project
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Mental models and the historical narrative

by PF

Reality, it turns out, is multi-dimensional. For now that term should be understood loosely, without regard to the precise delineation or number of these ‘dimensions’. As quickly as we can generate tools, thinking, and mental hardware to analyze reality, its observable facets and ‘dimensions’ appear to multiply in front of us: with each newly ground lens we discover that there is more to be discovered.

As human beings, we used to be quite content with the assembling of historical narratives which described a progression of facts: (1) Caesar crossed the Rubicon, (2) this initiated a civil war, (3) in which Caesar was ultimately victorious, until (4) he was assassinated. In creating these narratives it was possible, utilizing a method of ratiocination which Thucydides elucidated, to arrive at a physical description of facts which had incontestably happened. This is still possible.

However as we refine the lens through which we view our lives, more dimensions of experience emerge into view, for which it is not nearly so easy to arrive at any kind of overarching consensus. These include the emotional and probabilistic aspects of reality, which are in some sense even more important to the internal experience of reality than observable facts, yet which we cannot reach a discursive consensus on because our description of these areas cannot approximate the complexity of the things we wish to describe.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 04:05 PM in The Ontology Project
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‘Is’, ‘Am’ and ‘Should’ Modalities

by PF

This is the first part of a primer on PFian perspectivism and theory of mind. Thanks to Rod who provided the impetus to clarify these ideas.

Modality is a fancy word for mood, and it aims to describe the emotional constellation that is attached to specific things. A verb can have different modalities: ‘could’ and ‘should’ and ‘would’ each represent a different mood-relation of the actor to the action. Not limited entirely to emotion, modality also bleeds over into probabilistic concepts: how likely is something? For us, modalities can be seen as representing states of the human nervous system as it reasons - minds frozen in a moment of time. Was he contemplating the future and what is possible? Then he ‘could’ dance the flamenco. Was he contemplating his duties and obligations to others? Then he ‘should’ dance the flamenco. etc. etc. Incidentally modality is also a musical term, and the different scales it refers to also bring forth or convey different moods.

Man’s intellectual efforts are roughly divisible into three ‘modalities’: ‘is’, ‘am’ and ‘should’. These correspond to the state of his mind as he completes whatever mental task he is working at. Most importantly they describe the mood-relation (emotional tenor?), probabilistic aspect, and the method of verification which the process is subject to. The probabilistic aspect is how much imaginative conjecture is required by the thought process.

There are two methods of verification which human beings have access to, and the modalities divide among them. What has become the default position is social verification. This is the verification which takes place in our minds when our symbol system appreciates a consonance between its read-out and observed reality, thus ‘verifying’ the truth content of whatever symbol set is being looked at. At first glance it seems surprising to call this verification method ‘social verification’, but not when one considers that the mind evolved essentially as a social phenomenon and remains that way in spite of its internalization within the individual. In other words, the thought process as it first evolved, was naturally a ‘distributed system’, in terms of control theory. People learned things, and verbally became able to compare notes. The man who is able to synthesize perspectives inside his own mind, and thus carry out this process internally, is performing in his own mind what would have heretofore been the work of all our ancestors sitting together around a fire.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 05:52 PM in The Ontology Project
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You my Heidegger: Dasein vs. The World of They

by PF

The following are quotes from the 1998 Harvard edition of Rüdiger Safranski’s intellectual biographical work, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, originally published in German in 1994.

We already know one moment when “disguises” break up and authentic Being discloses itself - the moment of anxiety. The world loses its significance, it appears as a naked “that” against the background of nothingness, and Dasein experiences itself as homeless, unguarded and unguided by any objective Being.

The breakthrough to authentic Being thus takes place as a contingency shock, as the experience of “there is nothing behind it.” Even more clearly than in Being and Time, Heidegger formulated this initiation experience for a philosophy of authenticity in his Frieburg inaugural lecture of 1929. Philosophy, he then said, only begins when we have the courage to “let nothingness encounter us.” Eye to eye with nothing, we then observe not only that we are “something” real, but also that we are creative creatures, capable of letting something emerge from nothing. The decisive point is that man can experience himself as the place where nothing becomes something and something becomes nothing. Anxiety leads us to this turning point. It confronts us with the “being possible” that we are ourselves.

Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety expressly does not have fear of death as its subject. It would be more correct to say that its subject is fear of life, of a life that one suddenly becomes aware of in its whole contingency. Anxiety reveals that everyday life is fleeing from its contigency. That is the meaning of all attempts to firmly root oneself in life.

One might assume that ‘They’ are only Everyman, [had previously spoken of the fact of self-loss into the ‘World of They’], but ‘They’ are also the philosophers. Because these, as Heidegger remarks critically, firmly root themselves in their grand constructs, their worlds of values and metaphysical backworlds. Philosophy, too, is for the most part busy removing the contingency shock or, better still, not admitting it in the first place.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 07:22 AM in The Ontology Project
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An email to a friend in New Zealand

Ever since this blog launched I seem to have become a serial conversationist.  At present, one of my on-going conversations is with a writer and friend in New Zealand, Rod Cameron.  Rod is talking to me about his ideas and I am talking back, a little unfairly, about mine.  I suppose we shall eventually discover all our areas of agreement and difference.  I know these latter include Jungianism, of which Rod is an advocate.  But they seem also to include the question of an ontological nationalism.  This post is actually a reply to a long email from Rod which arrived yesterday morning, and which was itself a response to a much longer exchange over Skype Chat.

I apologise to everyone who is already tiring fast of angels and pinheads.  But I think this stuff is quite important.

Rod,

Obviously, there are scores of very fine commentaries on Heidegger on the net. They will tell you much more than I can about the man and his thought, and I urge you to search them out if you are seriously intending to incorporate even a passing reference to “the existential” in Chapter Five.  What I will do here is to reply to two issues you raised about my own very callow observations on same in the (possibly forlorn) hope that we can move towards a shared understanding.

You quoted my observation that “Everything begins with being. There is nothing prior, and only diffusion of thought after.”  You ask, “Can I take this as an Absolute statement?”

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 simple 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.

Nevertheless, everything really solid that we can talk about as students of the human begins with it, yes.  All the rest, all that we generally know and understand, and think, feel and do, and all that we are, suffers by comparison to the extent that it might be called unreal or a form of absence or exile.  Or, in the context of our collective European life, it might be called the postmodern life or simply our collective estrangement from ourselves and from one another.

The individual experience in being differs from the collective qualitatively only because of the scale on which the individual life differs from that of the collective.  The alcohol has a higher proof, for sure.  But they are not different in the moment that they reveal.  Being is unity in temporality.

Then you write:

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 09:00 PM in The Ontology Project
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Suggestibility and not-being in modernity

According to a Telegraph article today there is a suicide cluster at the vast Shenzhen plant of electronics sub-contractor, Foxconn:

There was another death at Foxconn yesterday. A 21-year-old man with “several” knife cuts fell out of the seventh-floor window of one of Foxconn’s dormitories in Shenzhen.

Foxconn is the Taiwanese company, also known as Honhai, which manufactures Apple’s iPhone and iPod, as well as goods for just about every major technology company, including Sony, Nintendo, HP and so on.

However, the company has been plagued by a series of suicides at its plants, particularly at the enormous Longhua plant where over 400,000 people work.

... the company says it has prevented a further 30 people from trying to kill themselves in the past three weeks alone. Clearly, something out of the ordinary is going on.

What is happening in Shenzhen has the hallmarks of a “suicide cluster”, when the notion of suicide spreads rapidly through a group of people, often teenagers or young adults. Foxconn says it is at its wits’ end as to how to tackle the problem, and has even drafted in a Buddhist monk to try to purge its factories of evil spirits.

Others have said the current generation of migrant workers, who have opted to move from other parts of China to seek their fortunes in the country’s coastal factories, are not as tough as their forbears.

Usually better educated than their parents, they are prone to existential angst when confronted with seven-day weeks and 15-hour days of repetitive manufacturing. The nine Foxconn workers involved in suicide leaps this year were all aged under 25 and had worked for the company for less than six months.

The journalist goes to the trouble of quoting Marx on alienation.  But the existence of a cluster suggests memetic activity, not the individually-driven rationalisations of the depressed and damaged.

There are three ways the will to suicide, as a group-confined memetic, can be internalised by susceptible individuals, one for each general type of human mind.  The mind in which physicality and sensation predominate requires some pretty blunt instruction.  “Go jump, loser!” would do it, providing the psychological state was one of sufficiently profound absence of the subject.  That is quite conceivable, given a fifteen hour day of the narrow-range, physically repetitive motions of station activity in Far East electronics production.

In quoting an intern who went undercover at Foxconn, the Telegraph journalist describes an employee of just this type:-

“One worker impressed me a great deal,” he wrote. “His name was Wang Kezhu and he often climbed to the highest places to check the storage, or ran the fastest to get the new cargo. He would yell or shout or sing to release the pressure building up in him. He told me that people got promoted if they had skills, and that he was hoping to learn useful skills. He once applied for a job at an education institute, but when they called he could not understand what they were saying.”

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 06:46 PM in The Ontology Project
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Slaves to illusion

by Grimoire

MORPHEUS: At last. Welcome, Neo. As you no doubt have guessed, I am Morpheus.

NEO: It’s an honor to meet you.

MORPHEUS: No. The honor is mine. Please come sit down. I imagine that right now you are feeling a bit like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.

NEO: You could say that.

MORPHEUS: I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees, because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, this is not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?

NEO: No.

MORPHEUS: Why not?

NEO: Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.

MORPHEUS: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know, you can’t explain, but you feel it.  You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?

NEO: The matrix ...

MORPHEUS: Do you want to know what it is? The matrix is everywhere; it is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

NEO: What truth?

MORPHEUS: That you are a slave Neo, like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.

The movie premiered eleven years ago, and most of us will have seen it. Many remember our thoughts as we sat to the end and then walked out onto the street and had a minute to think. What made this movie so intriguing was the idea that the oppression imposed by the matrix … ‘The Powers That Be’ … was so enormous, so persuasive, so seamless, that for most people the oppression, the matrix of lies, had become as invisible and unnoticed as the air we breathe.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 07:35 AM in The Ontology Project
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The End of Teleology

by Potential Frolic

Teleology is the attempt to become an image of greatness, or perfection, or fruition.

Previously, we looked at reasons why Palingenesis has negative aspects attaching to its political program, and how these negative aspects mar its positive aspect, which is unification of a people.

In moving from a discussion of Palingenesis to a discussion of Teleology, we’re moving from the social level to the individual level. Palingenesis regulates how social entities relate to each other, using politics and philosophy as means. Teleology regulates the relation of men to themselves, within the confines of their own minds, using images and rationalization as means. It is thus more intimate, and much more interesting.

Teleology precedes palingenesis. This is because the ideological underpinnings of palingenesis were conceived for the purpose of realizing teleological striving. For example, it was the struggle of individuals to reconnect to historical precedents, a connection to which is only possible in imagination, which begot the political manifestation of same. It was the intelligent individual’s realization of his smallness on the historical stage, and his desire to draw to himself more weight and meaning, that forged the rhetorical connections to ancient Germania and Hellas in germans of the 19th century. This can be seen, for example, in the philological posturing of Friedrich Nietzsche, alledging a special connection to ancient Hellas, discovered uniquely by him in his readings. The actual accuracy of his assertions in The Birth of Tragedy - assertions not less sweeping than those he would make in later books - were demolished in a point-by-point critique by Wilamowitz. Not that this detracts from the philosophical content of his writings. It can be seen however, that the appeal to ancient greek authority is important in 19th century literary personality combat. One finds similar idea content in Evola.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 09:27 PM in The Ontology Project
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