Quisquilia

Posted by exPF on March 06, 2009, 02:16 AM | #

Soren,

I’m trying to integrate your mentioning of Heraclitus, Clausewitz at the New Right Meeting Speech,
with the whole accumulation of ideological concepts in my mind. There is a bundle of ideas here relating
to death, heroism, and significance, which I would like to try to untangle.

Remember Bowden’s speech on Heidegger and the Ontology of Death?

My understanding of that was that Heidegger’s idea was to “put man before death” - i.e. to show him
death, make him confront death, as a means of discovering significance in life.

He asserted that a society that did not incorporate the religious instinct - “however you define it” - gave death no meaning and as a result, life in such a society would have no meaning, hence “shopping and fornication” could be the only human pasttimes in such a society. Bowden says we live in this society.

Another person said “A man who doesn’t have anything to die for, isn’t worthy of life”. It reflects the same thought.

What I understand this to mean: confrontation with death leads to a clearer ordering of one’s priorities because one engages those “survivalist” mechanisms which allow one to get beyond comfortable and fuzzy thinking. It allows a counterposition to life, as Bowden implied - without counterposition its impossible to define a thing. The religious instinct, as Bowden talked about, would be something held in such reverence as to merit personal self-sacrifice. A priority higher than oneself, in our case, our race.

I therefore think that societies who inhabit heroic epoches have very clear ideas of priorities and values - in whatever terminology they define them in. And non-heroic epoches (i.e. those absent the constant threat of death) tend to have a more muddled perception of their own priorities and values the farther removed one is from the “blade” of epic experience, so to speak. I consider any experience to be Epic in which one risks one’s life or is placed in danger.

I also muse that the rush of feelings associated with these epic experiences in some ways contributes to the feeling of having lived a significant life. There is something about an adrenaline rush, when you get one, that feels so supremely right. Having in modern society built a nest where we are free from danger, we are also free from the visitations of epic feeling, which is why our lives appear sometimes paltry and we feel some invisible lack. As evidenced by the fact that being in perfect health and having money in today’s society is not enough to make one happy - people turn to drugs or overstimulation, obviously unable to suck any kind of marrow out of the act of living itself.

People who use certain recreational drugs are probably closer to living epically - at least in terms of the magnitude of their emotions, divorced as they may be from real world causation - than the average person who doesn’t use drugs.

This also explains Nietzsche’s admonition to live dangerously.

Posted by Guessedworker on March 06, 2009, 07:46 AM | #

I also spent some time last evening pulling together the strands visible to me here, and trying to make a logic-string.  My thoughts were diven by that word “coincidences”.  The incidence seems to be the flight from the communal to the individual.  But this is Soren we are talking about here, and almost anything is possible!

That said, the late Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient was about a flight from the communal struggle of the war in North Africa to the personal, the struggle to love, and it ended in death.  Lycophron fled from his murderous father Periander, and that, too, ended in death.  Eumeswil I have not read, but it seems that its central character, Martin Venator, flees from the tyranny of his ruler, the Condor, into a compensatory fiction of personal autonomy.  In each of these instances, escape from tyranny was never achieved.  Why?  Well, perhaps that’s Soren’s riddle.  In which case, the answer may be that tyranny, like war, is universal.  Discourse is war.  War is discourse.  It is always a zero-sum game for someone.

Posted by Guessedworker on March 07, 2009, 06:51 AM | #

Well, no response from Soren.  So, clearly, neither PF nor I am on the right track.

Are you going to enlighten us, Soren?

Posted by Al Ross on March 07, 2009, 08:27 AM | #

Deliberate obscurantism is a Jewish trait. One of its most skilled exponents, Derrida, employed it as a matter of course and anyone who claimed not to understand his nihilistic nonsense was then accused of being unintelligent.

Posted by Guessedworker on March 07, 2009, 10:27 AM | #

If it wasn’t obscure it wouldn’t be the Saturday Riddle, Al.

Posted by Søren Renner on March 07, 2009, 10:48 AM | #

It isn’t the Saturday Riddle Classic! It was just a post! Your comment was excellent. So was PF’s.

The English Patient carried his Herodotus always. The story of Lycophon and Periander is told there. (Book 3, 151-153, or maybe 51-53.) Junger mentions it in Eumeswil, I wrote a play based on it.

Posted by James Bowery on March 07, 2009, 02:52 PM | #

Al’s comment points to something I’ve thought about regarding cyber-identity:

Those who wish to challenge the genetic identity of others in cyberspace do have an option that doesn’t eliminate the pseudonym’s legitimate concerns for cover:

Offer to send money for a DNA test to a mutually-trusted third party who will obtain the sample from the person being questioned, run the DNA test and publish the result for all to see.

The main weakness here, of course, is the tendency for so many Europeans, particularly northern Europeans to become extended phenotypes of other genotypes.

However, with respect to the particular case of SR:  Some of his habits are annoying to some of us but we must bear in mind that his family occupied a coveted niche at the University of Chicago and it may well be that we would be better off if his ilk occupied said niche than others who have now apparently occupied that niche.

Posted by Captainchaos on March 07, 2009, 03:47 PM | #

Soren Renner makes individuality and ethnocentrism work; his way.  How else could it be?

Posted by Karl Fraser on March 17, 2009, 04:54 AM | #

Heiddeger was just another in the continuous string of thinkers throughout the history of religions and philosophy who have proposed that contemplation of death gives meaning to life, puts it in the only context that can exist for it. Buddhist and Christian monks, Hindus saddhus, Sufis - all have incorporated death contemplation as a means of motivating us to make the necessary efforts for salvation in life. Of course, this makes no sense in an atheist and utterly non-transcendent society like ours. Serious contemplation of death in our nihilistic context could only lead to utter desperation, since no model of salvation is provided as solution, as solace, as reason for hope. Or, perhaps, in the case of rare individuals, it could lead “Über die Linie”, over the line, to use the title of Jünger-Heiddeger´s exchange on Nihilism. This in turn could lead to genuine new religious models for the masses.

Another modern magus, Gurdijieff, says at the very end of “Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson” that a new “real-time” (my paraphrase) awareness of the mortality of every individual around us would be the only possibility for humanity to find the compassion and forgiveness needed to save it from its gradual demise into every increasing cruelty and barbarity. This awareness would be immediate and direct, like a new 6th sense that made the mortality of others’ inescapably visible upon simply glancing at the individual. He does not suggest how we might acquire this new sense. But certainly the death contemplations of religions aimed in this direction. (Catastrophe on a global scale might push the same awareness in front of our eyes.)

From another perspective, one could say that as knowledge of history does for a particular society, so knowledge of one’s mortality puts an individual’s unique appearance in time and space into context, gives it its unique value in Stirner’s sense of Der Einziger und sein Eigentum. (The Only one and his property). Jünger´s Anarch, closely related to the Einziger, certainly understands the value of the unique individual. 

Soren, I would be interested in reading your play. I write a hobby blog on the Anarch from Eumeswil and am always interested in others’ understanding of this incomparable book.

Karl Fraser
http://ernst-juenger.blogspot.com