The ontology of the material: Part 1

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, 30 May 2011 13:55.

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?

Let’s discuss what actually exists – at least in brief.  We can do this more easily at the level of a single man, where it is a straightforward matter to maintain one’s grip on reality.  And what is true of a single man is true of a race of men.  The word does not work some kind of magic transfer to a world of different reference points.  When we contemplate the truth of our European kind both our feet remain tethered to this fact-bound universe.  Scale does not introduce new and fabulous mysteries to entertain and seduce us.

We can begin by saying that genotype/phenotype, variously known as Nature, biology and, if you really want to put the shiny, new black leather boot in, the stuff of the materialist mind and even scientism, is the whole of what is real in man and describes all that is the possible in his perception.

Biology – let’s pick that one – contains everything that is there at the beginning of the journey into this world, which, as all intelligent men and women soon realise, is the journey into personality, enculturation, absence, mechanicity and forgetting.  Biology structures Mind and behaviour, and makes possible perception of both the experience which is general to us, and that reality which is not.  In other words, it provides for us an holistic conscious function that is original but is unsustainable because of the effort it requires as personality is cultured, and it provides an ordinary waking consciousness in which our laziness and absence are never troubled.

There is nothing in us that is more than biology, nothing of some finer medium.  We have spiritedness without ever being spirit, but spiritedness multiplied half a billion times is still spiritedeness.  It is never anything else.  No evolutionary environment of adaptiveness rewarded the selection of genes for anything more than spiritedness.

As a biological organism we have being.  Being is the action or product of biological organisms.  And no evolutionary environment of adaptiveness privileged the selection of human genes, uniquely, for being while every other living organism is, frankly, just toothpaste.  O’Meara, however, quotes Heidegger to the contrary:

Even though a man’s body can be the subject of a purely biological analysis, Heidegger argues that it is never simply biological, but “something essentially other than an animal organism.” This other belongs to man’s Dasein and thus has “a fundamentally different way of being to that of nature.”  “Living, our body bodies forth as a wave in the stream of chaos—it is what comes to know, grasp, and take over the world.” Only in this way does biology enter history and become historically signi?cant.  Man’s body as such is not equivalent to a plant or animal organism, but part of man’s Being-in-the-world, situated in that web of meanings, relationships, and histories that make up his world and which no science can successfully or adequately reduce to an empirical representation.

Let’s examine that, with some small modifications.

Even though a man’s body can be the subject of a purely biological analysis ...

The reification here of bodies and minute physical analyses is a strawman.  There is, in addition to the physical phenotype, a psychological phenotype which includes the workings of the brain, which latter include our evolved qualities of consciousness and the perduring ascription of identity.  But O’Meara’s foot has already fallen, the wire has been tripped, the earnest devotion has flowed, and the decision for fantasy has been taken.  That is what his strawman is telling us.

... Heidegger argues that it is never simply biological, but “something essentially other than an animal organism.” This other belongs to man’s Dasein and thus has “a fundamentally different way of being to that of nature.”

So let’s be true to the spirit of the (straw) man and replace the word biological with the words the physical phenotype, and dispense with the word Dasein and, just for now and without trying to be especially fancy or precise, put in its place consciousness to self.  And let’s replace the word nature with cats and dogs.  What we get is this:

... Heidegger argues that it is never simply the physical phenotype, but “something essentially other than an animal organism.” This other belongs to man’s consciousness to self and thus has “a fundamentally different way of being to that of cats and dogs.”

You see how easy it is to de-mystify this subject!  Now let’s be more ambitious with the next sentence, which is a quote from Being and Time:

Living, our body bodies forth as a wave in the stream of chaos—it is what comes to know, grasp, and take over the world.

O’Meara is using this to strengthen his strawman case for religion.  I wonder, though, what he would make of a statement like this:

Our personality is whatever it comes to grasp in the stream of chaos, and as this it takes over our inner world.

Here is the rest of the above quote, duly amended:

Only in this way does human personality enter history and become historically signi?cant.  Human personality is not “true” of us because its parent is the chaos of the external world. Nonetheless, it does enter history and it is of our being in that external world, and it is active in the web of meanings, relationships, and histories that make up our personal world.  No faith object can successfully or adequately explicate the nuances of this peculiarly human dispensation.

Perhaps that is not very clear because it is so compressed.  Nonetheless, I believe it demonstrates that a materialist understanding of man, nature and being is not reductive and, most importantly, not incapable of political agency as nationalism, if indeed the truth of what we are is so capable.

To continue with our ontological investigation ...

Obviously, being, like the physical body, like personality, implies proximity and connection.  In those peculiarly familiar and fleeting moments when we find ourselves, it is there that we are.  And we cannot become something.  We cannot be two things.  We cannot be other than what we are, which is our own being.  We cannot in any direct sense “be” the being of another organism, or of Great Nature.  But we can possibly know our proximity or connection.  This is a path which begins with the return to presence and ends, if mystics are to be believed, in self-annihilation – that is, the temporary cessation of ascription under the barrage of representation (in the form of revelatory myth or symbology) which it is claimed the mind will produce in such a rarified state.

It is, of course, only the return to presence which interests the ontological nationalist.  As O’Meara writes – and this time he is right:

Because Being-in-the-world is a unitary phenomenon (with the world and our Being-in-it making up a constituent whole), its entities are never independent of one another, as Descartes or Kant held.  Everything “present-at-hand” (i.e., objects seen as detached substances) belongs actually to a single humanly constructed totality of relations, just as the individual is not the basic unit of society but its offshoot..  Similarly, Dasein’s ouverture happens only within the existentially constituted nexus of relations formed by the heritage distinct to it, the heritage that lights up the objects of its world and infuses them with meaning.

Part 2 will follow in a few days.

My thanks to Jimmy, by the way, for mailing me the link to Michael O’Meara’s interesting piece.



Comments:


1

Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 30 May 2011 23:04 | #

Sorry about going off topic GW but I found this video about ‘Voodoo’ in which a liberal PC and obviously white pseudo-academic fuckwit gushes about this savage crap. She even wanted to be ‘mounted’ by a spirit. It’s obvious from the breathless tone of this stupid bitch she wanted to be raped by these animals.

I have had to deal with such Africans (very much into Voodoo) in my life. I’m quite proud they feared me, one of them even told me I was the most ‘evil’ man he had encountered, which coming from those savages is a good thing.

Uncritical ‘multiculturalism’ is like catnip to this idiotic liberals.


2

Posted by Bo on Mon, 30 May 2011 23:38 | #

So this is the/a crux of your critique of Michael O’Meara.  Reification here, essentialism there, foundationalism over there, reductionism everywhere.  I’ve seen you write on this matter before, but never this clearly and sharply.  And, as poetic prose goes, it would be hard to beat “...the earnest devotion flows, and the decision for fantasy is taken.”

You may be arriving late at your own party, however.  A few days ago on this web site, a stunning defense of fantasy qua fantasy was rendered that contradicted every word you say above.

The “religious” feeling is, however, everywhere.  A belief that there is something larger than us as individuals is old as time, and Atlantic Islanders are not bereft of such sentiments.  Every royal speech appeals to it, every general before battle appeals to it, and every nationalistic claim appeals to it.

Nevertheless, you are correct in your position, and it can serve as a point of meaningful contact.  Consider the religions created out of nothing…royal descent, empires, economic nirvanas, and so on.  Possibly a better way to approach the subject is to realize, with the Buddhists, that one is unable to understand a truth until one is able to understand that truth.  Not silly at all.  People are relatively easily sorted into classes determined by gullibility, belief in the invisible things, and willful submission to religious awe.

Those of a lesser god require “religious” awe.

Those of a greater god live on the abyss.  That’s pretty much it.


PS:  Watch out that you don’t reify “materialism.”  It’s been known to happen.


3

Posted by Grimoire on Tue, 31 May 2011 00:04 | #

GWorker:
            It tries my patience to debate with ‘materialists’, because without judgement of your purported conclusions… you, if you ‘believe’ what you say… should perform diligence as to logic. Because your argument has none.
Making sweeping assertions regarding the all encompassing nature of materialism and then supporting this assertion with a critique of O’Meara and Hiedegger, where the only proof offered is that their statements contradict your assertions….is not even thinking, it is not arguing… frankly, it is post-modernism… feminine kvetching.
You seem determined to hyper-derationalize in the manner of which you accuse ‘faith-ists’ . It is not a question of materialism vs. numenism - but a question of logic…you do not use it, and are simply projecting. A few weeks of study may perhaps instruct you correlate and construct your propositions in a manner that leads to a supportable conclusion. Various off the cuff critique’s do not constitute support for the materialist worldview - simple noise with no informational value. You must start with correlating propositions.
Generally, it is useless to debate someone who refuses to think rationally, but we are told we must….so taking it on ‘faith’, on to the thankless task.

On one side of the chasm; THE MATERIAL WORLD. In it you find:
Matter?Energy?Basic Physical Laws?Light?Gravity?Chaos
etc.
The other side is: INFORMATION. In it you find:
Symbols?Replication?Purpose?Competition & Evolution?Truth&Falsehood;?Judgment?Codes?Messages?Rules (and the ability to break them)?Language?Instruction?Meaning
—————————————
Material things do not replicate. They obey the laws of physics,  nothing more.  There is no right or wrong, just ‘what is’.  They are acted upon, and not actors. It is a bottom up, or entropic system. All matter breaks down into constituent elements, eventually into formless nothingness. This is the major fault in the Darwinian evolutionary ‘belief’...that it attempts to apply the tenets of evolutionary psychology to the Universe at large. It does not work. Psychology and Material reality are two different things…..  the Universal physical laws lead to entropy.

The other side: Information.
Information replicates and evolves, uses symbols and material as code, is right or wrong (in terms of evolutionary psychology).
It is a ‘top down’ system. The chasm between living and non living things. Living things evolve toward higher information and information. Non living things devolve.

This ‘information’ is the ‘spirit’ .... O’Meara refers to. O’Meara shares the European Nationalist view that the Aryan or European race contains within particular ‘information’ that is essential to evolution, the evolution of mankind.

O’Meara’s comments on Heidegger are correct. There is no possible way of interpreting Heidegger otherwise - he repeatedly makes this clear -  what you deride, pathetically, as ‘faith’ as an impersonal action of matter, (the faith gene), is actually a personal and expanding collective capacity (race and species) of receptivity to information.

Darwinists, usually speaking to the uneducated, will make a case that information ‘accrues’ through matter, (ie) the addition of an energy source such as heat from the sun. They don’t bother understanding their own paradigm, or correlating their flawed logic with what is known from psychics and information theory (which is why they seek to argue with critiques and not information)

The ‘faith’ concept as a derogation is especially ironic coming from a Darwinist materialist, as their whole worldview relies on a faith in a yet undiscovered principal of physics.

Everything we know about information confirms it is a signal system of ‘sender and receiver’. No low value information signal yields high value information.

That is the basis. Which is why we do not look to ‘what is’ or the material/physical, except in terms of order - but higher, to a meta-physical source of order, and information.


4

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 31 May 2011 01:07 | #

No problem, Graham.  Interesting video, and always fascinating in a horror-movie kind of way to witness the repressed exo-eroticism of mentally sick white liberal women.  Mostly, though, it raised this question for me:

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/are_africans_a_different_subspecies/

Bo,

Apparently I am less easily stunned than you are.

It does not matter that two-thirds or so - perhaps more, it’s only my guess - of Europe’s people need an inherently religious motivation.  This is different to actual believers in God, btw:

http://www.gallup-international.com/ContentFiles/millennium15.asp

God does not matter for 64 percent of those questioned in the Czech Republic, 55 percent in Sweden, 52 percent in Norway and 49 percent in Denmark

... which is different again to actual worshippers.

But the vast majority of these faithists are not a problem to us.  They are not constrained by some universalist Christian nonsense and they are not committed anti-racists.  They will go where their leaders take them - just as the great mass of Germans followed Hitler for practical, not faith, reasons (understand, faith has nothing to do with falling under the sway of propaganda).

No, the class which must be moved to action is the cognitively able - those of, say, IQ 124+.  And of these I’d say less than one-third are faithists.  These are the people who make the world, and if we want to make a new world these are the people we have to persuade - not evangelise, not propagandise.  One persuades intelligent men with superior truths, and it is those truths I am, in my inadequate and uneducated way, trying to gesture towards.

Grim,

I am well aware that Heidegger’s Catholic upbringing set him on a tortured path.  I don’t see the need to respect that in interpreting the questions of ontology which his thought addresses. Like CC, who accuses me of moralising when I am trying to purify my enquiry of all ethical consideration, you consistently accuse me of not respecting the conventions of formal thinking when I have repeatedly stated that I am not a trained thinker.  I am merely a creative thinker.

As for material things not replicating, I am sure Graham Lister or our contributor Dasein will correct you more authoritatively than I can.  Or you could try your mum and dad.  Likewise, if PF drops by he will be able to advise you much better than I on neuropsychology, behavioural neurology, biological psychology, etc.

Btw, how do you manage to defend the rules of logic and faith in thinking at the same time?  That’s a neat trick.  It makes you look like a neat trickster.


5

Posted by Bo on Tue, 31 May 2011 02:05 | #

What can I say, my first ancestor to arrive in North America was born in Great Waltham, Essex, in 1595, so we still are stunned in the face of fantasy.  I can barely wait for Part Two.


6

Posted by JRedmond on Tue, 31 May 2011 02:27 | #

No, the class which must be moved to action is the cognitively able - those of, say, IQ 124+.

you consistently accuse me of not respecting the conventions of formal thinking when I have repeatedly stated that I am not a trained thinker.  I am merely a creative thinker.

There is no hope for England.


7

Posted by Grimoire on Tue, 31 May 2011 04:14 | #

Gworker:  I am well aware that Heidegger’s Catholic upbringing set him on a tortured path. I don’t see the need to respect that in interpreting the questions of ontology which his thought addresses.

Especially torturous is being educated in the Catholic system and having to witness this witless idiocy. You have moved beyond post-modern, this is excusing yourself for employing the mental strategy of a woman -  ‘I’m not a trained thinker…..I’m merely a creative thinker ....’

It was not the ‘tortured path’ of his Catholic upbringing, but the product of his research within phenomenology…..it’s in the text..........how could you miss that? Didn’t read it?  Is it any wonder Britain is ruled on behalf of other, by other than the British? It is half that you are incapable of ‘thinking’ any longer…....and half that you refuse to do so.

As for material things not replicating, I am sure Graham Lister or our contributor Dasein will correct you more authoritatively than I can.  Or you could try your mum and dad.  Likewise, if PF drops by he will be able to advise you much better than I on neuropsychology, behavioural neurology, biological psychology, etc.

You defer to PF’s greater knowledge, or his ability for creative writing?  His skill is that he writes with such stupidity it is useless to even bother….like arguing with a monkey. It is impossible to change a monkeys mind by reason, you can only use a banana…. or a pistol. In PF’s case a pistol would be the more suitable restorative for his type of cognitive disorder.


No, the class which must be moved to action is the cognitively able - those of, say, IQ 124+.

You just keep staring in your mirror at your fine IQ of 124+. That will be a consolation for your inability to either think or act.

Btw, how do you manage to defend the rules of logic and faith in thinking at the same time?  That’s a neat trick.

Yes, as a Christian I am able to observe the difference, yet understand how they are not mutually exclusive. However you as a Darwinist are unable to discern the difference, or properly perform either - instead your left with creative writing of ‘fictions’ yet you are unaware that they are fictions - even if the physical and scientific data is staring you in the face.

Creative writing of pretend philosophies are valueless and can serve no political purpose. You cannot compete for value because anything of real value is determined by function alone.

It is not a coincidence that the products of Anglo America’s degraded educational system invariably bloom into feminized and subjective materialists. It is not even a point that you are materialist. The point is that you are unable to see anything else, not even what you think you see.


8

Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 31 May 2011 07:14 | #

Like CC, who accuses me of moralising when I am trying to purify my enquiry of all ethical consideration,

I think you exhort the morality which would tend to increase your inclusive fitness.  It is a secular, bourgeois morality in its more mild instantiations when stripped of talk of decreasing the proportion of the European population that carries the “faith gene” - with the latter addition, or when your preferred morality shows its full and true face if that be the case, it is something more extreme which shades into state sponsored eugenics.  Where you slip into moralism is when you, at least rhetorically, claim the morality you propound as being the morality which is most essentially European.  If, as you say, a majority of European-derived people have a genetic proclivity for faith then how could a morality which is inherently hostile to the life lived as guided by faith (and the very genetic basis of that faith) be the morality which is essential to them?  Obviously, it cannot be.  Nor would your preferred morality benefit the inclusive fitness of the majority of Europeans who are genetically disposed to faith as much as a more faith-friendly morality would.


9

Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 31 May 2011 07:50 | #

Yes, as a Christian I am able to observe the difference, yet understand how they are not mutually exclusive. However you as a Darwinist are unable to discern the difference, or properly perform either

If a trained thinker cannot maintain the logical consistency of his professed beliefs then it would seem his training as a thinker is not all it is cracked up to be.

You say you are a Christian, yet the balk of what you advocate seems to be a Graeco-Roman paganism which claims the spoils justly go to the winner of deadly combat.  Might makes right.  The last man standing wins.  This seems decidedly more “Darwinian” than “Christian” to my eye. 

Whatever became of turning the other cheek in Gmoire’s version of “Christianity”?  Perhaps yours is a religion as yet only professed by one man - yourself.  LOL!


10

Posted by anon on Tue, 31 May 2011 08:29 | #

[...] It is a secular, bourgeois morality in its more mild instantiations [...]  Where you slip into moralism is when you, at least rhetorically, claim the morality you propound as being the morality which is most essentially European.

Oh shit. Guessedworker is Bri’ish.


11

Posted by Grimoire on Tue, 31 May 2011 10:44 | #

Chaos:

You confuse me with Bowery. Trial by combat is Teutonic tradition, yet at no time did the right, or personal honour supersede collective order….as Bowery suggests. Men without honour do not partake in the privilege of personal combat, but are freely killed by anyone as common bandits.

Graeco-Roman culture is an unbroken thread within European Christianity. In this tradition one does not care if one is a Christian or not. One’s thoughts, faith, beliefs or whatever you wish to term it, are a private matter. One only cares if another is a good European, or a honourable Man of any race….(who is not an invader or immigrant) Otherwise I see them as bandits….and that goes for the majority of so-called Christians.

I am not commenting to evangelize. I could care less what you think or believe. Christianity is just the strawman in this article. A strawman that puts a boot up your ass.

I have considered impartially the merits of the above article. Judged the logical consistency of the argument, this ‘Ontology of the Material’, as MacD might put it, is a lonely orphaned mutant bastard of the ‘Culture of Critique’. In my Pretentious Fascist Literary analysis Chaos….it is more genetically regressive than a radioactive, freaked-out faith gene….this disaster was still-born with 4 dwarf assholes and asphyxiated by it’s own metastasized, floor-length vagina….. By what exploding meth lab, cubicle-farm, synthetic-chemical pipedream does this have to do with European Nationalism?

Lovecraft if you recall Chaos,  would call this, an ‘Eldridge Abomination’. And the most ‘Eldritch of Abominations’...... If it wasn’t for the fact of its’ deep, congenital stupidity… it’s grotesque absurdity of unnatural laws - no words can encompass such disgusting foulness…not in English, German or any European language…this is Alien beyond comprehension….the sole fact of it’s existence is an affront to the sanity and reason on which we depend.

Recall Lovecrafts description:

...painfully dissonant noises and nauseous colours of no physical hue, ichor-dripping vermiform tentacles and abyssal yonic voids, all structured and characterized with complex despicable mathematics…, 


Does this not describe the “Ontology of the Material”? Or are those mere superfluities? Just the commoner symptoms of it’s underlying wrongness?

How about alien madness-inducing reality-warpers horrible on a cosmic scale? A defiance of natural law reducing the reader to ghibbering madness? A mile-high soul consuming monstrosity and cause for worldwide pandemonium? Oversized locust Mind-rapers descended from Stygian abysses?

Cannot imagine what brain breaking evil this villain WitchKing has in store for us in part2. Can you?


12

Posted by Graham_Lister on Tue, 31 May 2011 13:19 | #

Look is it actually important to declare oneself as a materialist or not?

Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. Of course, physicalists don’t deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don’t seem physical — items of a psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are either physical or supervene on the physical. Importantly one can also be a non-reductionist materialist/physicalist.

I did used to be a little obsessed with thinking about materialism and what it meant, how to defend it and so on. Now I’m quite agnostic about physicalism. In the sense that perhaps information is ontologically prior and perhaps something akin to God might be real. I don’t think if God is real he can be said to exist in the ordinary sense that birds, bees and tables exist. However, whatever the ultimate nature of that possible reality is, its precise description is not of the first importance to the possible crisis facing Europeans.

I doubt anyone sane seriously thinks the world is entirely non-physical or that empirical science is bunk. What does the long-term crisis of Europeans arise from? At the most reductive/simple level (1) biology/genetics; (2) the ideological/cultural worldview that has emerged in modernity. Now there is an AWFUL lot of detailed thinking required to get to the complete understanding of how these mechanisms have put Europeans at long term risk and how to reverse and nullify that threat. And understanding the precise limits of physicalism or the possible philosophical status of information is not very helpful in that task.

For what it’s worth I think the biology is a lot easier to grasp than how we collectively came to such an insane social cosmology. As to my own intellectual tastes I quite like the broad approach outlined in the ‘Critical Realism’ school, especially the account of ‘Transcendental Realism’ given by Roy Bhaskar in his early work upon understanding why and how the possibility of science exists and the return to ontological questions in the philosophy of science (see his “A Realist Theory of Science”). What is interesting about critical realism is that it both rejects naive Positivism and also rejects all the Post-modern gibberish very robustly and with great plausibility (in my view). GW I would suggest that if ontological questions are of interest to you perhaps you might like to read the early Bhaskar? Alternatively there is a short introduction to Bhaskar and Critical Realism called “Critical Realism: A Brief Introduction” by Bhaskar himself).  John Searle is also quite interesting on how social reality is constructed yet objectively real (i.e. not post-modern) see “The Construction of Social Reality” even if his account is incomplete in many ways. And Searle of course famously directly took on Derrida (which is in his favour).

And not to leave out our religiously minded friends I found “Transcendence: Critical Realism & God” to be quite an interesting read. However I tend to agree with the position of Anthony Kenny that all sides of the debate on theism do not really have the first clue as to what the word ‘God’ actually is meant to represent or correspond with (see “The Unknown God: Agnostic Essays”), so are on rather shaky ground in either positively asserting or negatively denying the humanly unknowable ‘reality/non-reality’ behind the word. To me agnosticism is really the only intellectually honest position to take (many people that claim to know that God exists/does not exist are simply overstating their own emotional responses to such a question rather than making an asymptotically 100% robust statement of fact/knowledge).  I mean I might be 99% sure that God is not real (or 99% sure he is real) but we are in the realm of a somewhat subjective guesswork on both ends of the spectrum, as opposed to the much more robust (and ordinary) knowledge claim that in 2011 a nation called the United Kingdom is real and exists etc,.

Having said that if religious people are making more than a very general, hypothetical claim, about the ultimate nature of reality (i.e. God is real or is a logical possibility) such as highly specific empirical claims along the lines that all biological organism where created within seven days etc., then they are simply 100% WRONG based on all the relevant and available evidence. However people’s emotional and psychological needs are very different – 99% of religious people seemingly have no deep interest in philosophical and theological matters, religion at the level of lived experience is for most a non-intellectual phenomenon. Personally I have no issue with that, per se, except when the lunatic/cynical elements push awful agendas in the public square using religion (Christian Zionism, Creationism, ultra-liberalism, Islamo-terrioism etc.).

OK so the basic religious claim that there might be more to the ontological reality that we can directly perceive and this unknown entity at the base of reality is called God, is to me, not a terribly important claim by itself with regard to how our social world has been shaped. Rather it is in how this basic religious assertion has developed secondary interpretations, meanings, and values and is both shaped by and in turn shapes our social reality that is important to understand.

And this returns me to my second issue of understanding the social, economic and cultural forces that produced the likely existential crisis upcoming for Europeans.  Certainly the animating ideological force driving modernity is liberalism. It is crucial to understanding the genesis of liberalism and it’s development into today’s ultra-liberalism (of which both most of the right and left of today are simply secondarily differentiated versions of liberalism). Liberalism is based on both very odd premises and interpretations of the human subject and the human condition, yet has enormous power in shaping the contours of our collective Weltanschauung.  Any serious critique of liberalism as bankrupt/false/incomplete is worthy of study. And this is why Heidegger is important, in that he strikes me as being a profoundly non-liberal thinker.  I’m open minded as to if his thoughts are in themselves important and robust but dissecting liberal modernity requires considering all the possible lines of attack, including undermining both the implicit and explicit philosophical premises of liberalism.


13

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 31 May 2011 16:17 | #

Grim,

You have moved beyond post-modern ...

In my simple scribblings the “modern”, with which you have such difficulty, lies in recognising that a propositional system (Western philosophy) does not satisfactorily encompass the non-ordinary and transcendent yet, obviously, normal operation of consciousness to being.  Of the modes of thinking (in a general sense) employed to this end, I would, in no particular order, rank eastern metaphysics, psychology and science ahead of art, religion, and Western philosophy. If I was able to do mathematics I suspect that, too, would be in the first group, but it is a closed book to me.  The difference here is the capacity for fantasy.

It was not the ‘tortured path’ of his Catholic upbringing, but the product of his research within phenomenology ...

Heidegger’s own words (from Besinnung (1938), published as volume 66 of the Gesamtausgabe)

And who would not want to recognize that a confrontation with Christianity reticently accompanied my path hitherto, a confrontation that was not and is not a “problem” that one “takes up” to address, but a preservation of and at the same time, a painful separation from, one’s ownmost provenance: the parental home, homeland, and youth. Only one who was so rooted in an actually lived Catholic world may be able to have an inkling of the necessities that like subterranean quakes have been at work in the pathway of my inquiry hitherto. Moreover, the Marburg period offered a profound experience of a Protestant Christianity—all of which as what had to be overcome from the ground up but not destroyed.

It is not proper to speak of these most inward confrontations since they do not revolve around issues that concern the dogma of Christianity and articles of faith, but rather only around the sole question: whether God is fleeing from us or not, and whether we, as creating ones, still experience this flight genuinely.


14

Posted by Rusty on Tue, 31 May 2011 17:20 | #

Thankyou, GW, I was thinking similar thoughts about this nebulous SoR concept while re-reading Julius Evola last week.


15

Posted by Lee John Barnes on Tue, 31 May 2011 18:48 | #

So then - have we reached agreement yet on just how many angels are dancing on the head of this particular pin ?

Spare us this tedious, pseudo- intellect wank.

Write some fucking articles that allow nationalists to communicate nationalists ideas to normal people - not more of this student wanker drivel that appeals only to about six fucking people on the whole fucking planet.


16

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 31 May 2011 21:35 | #

Graham,

Thanks for the links, all of which I will check out.  However, from a quick perusal it does seem that Bhaskar is addressing a different issue.

I’m not attacking faith or theism here, btw - as Rusty clearly realises.  I am attacking the spillover into non-theistic causes.  Ontology inhabits the borderlands, obviously, and it is necessary to discriminate with care.  The vital consideration is that human presence is not a religious issue.  It can journey into religious issues, but in itself it is not one.  One does not require belief for it.  It can be explored by anyone with the intent to do so, for exploration begins with intent and proceeds with attention.  It is a practical, not spiritual, matter.  This is the reason I insist on the “material” label.

But also, unless one stands one’s ground the SoRists will have it all their own way.  There “must” be a spirit of race because, well, there must.  The Greco-Aryan destiny proves it.  All fall down!  If one demurs one is automatically ignorant, feeble or morally illegitimate, etc, etc.  Where have we heard that before?  Yes, from faithists spilling over into anti-racism - more offset religion.


17

Posted by Foundation on Tue, 31 May 2011 22:42 | #

Steady on Lee, I don’t know me metaphysics from me metacarpal but folk like GW do and, it does them good to exercise the old grey matter. Their hearts are in the right place else you and I wouldn’t keep coming back here, now would we?

Humankind splintered into racial form some 20,000 years ago. Don’t ask me how I know that because you wouldn’t like the answer. To those who know anything about geology it was the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum when the ice sheets covered most of North America and Eurasia. So, how could something like that produce our race? I’ll ask you to bear in mind we are the most developed of all the races for the environment we entered: slightly larger brain cavities for individuality, blue/green eyes for low light acuity, pale skin to absorb sunlight (vitamin D), which is essential for growth.

You create the environment then you experience it. We humans are reality sensors and our folks worked the edge of the reality to see if they (as a race) could survive. Man lives to cast a shadow at his heels but broken pots is not the story. The Earth she is all on this side of reality.


18

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 31 May 2011 23:58 | #

CC,

Where you slip into moralism is when you, at least rhetorically, claim the morality you propound as being the morality which is most essentially European.

But it is rhetoric and nothing more.  I really only argue morality - specifically, the morality of survival - with liberals because their moral stature matters to them so very much.

It is a good question how essential morality is.  Not very, one would have to say, judging from the quantity of immorality in the world.  Individualism and altruism are closer to the centre ... grabbing Nature by the scruff of the neck closer still.  Is there anything more European than that?

If, as you say, a majority of European-derived people have a genetic proclivity for faith then how could a morality which is inherently hostile to the life lived as guided by faith (and the very genetic basis of that faith) be the morality which is essential to them?  Obviously, it cannot be.

Well, one of the regular ports of call in discussion of religion here is the loss of our own naturally arising, ancient belief system consequent upon the violent imposition of Christianity.  The effects of that imposition were certainly extreme - destroying tradition, destroying the old basis of authority, taking off so many of Europe’s most able thinkers into celibacy, forcing belief in an abstract ideal upon a people viscerally tied to the soil, imposing the notion of sin, etc.  The consequences must have extended to privileging certain gene characteristics.  Europe was changed.

So, do we say that Europe was changed genetically by that process, and is now the only Europe we can accept?  I will admit that, as someone who finds faith mysterious, to say the least, I don’t think it is important or fixed enough, essential enough, for us to conclude that.

Nor would your preferred morality benefit the inclusive fitness of the majority of Europeans who are genetically disposed to faith as much as a more faith-friendly morality would.

Correct.  But would that be wrong?  And why?


19

Posted by GT on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 01:22 | #

Opportunity is here.  Where is white nationalism? 


Why the white working class is alienated, pessimistic

By National Journal national Journal Tue May 31, 10:17 am ET

By Ronald Brownstein
National Journal

Almost no one noticed, but around George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, the nation crossed a demographic milestone.

From Revolutionary days through 2004, a majority of Americans fit two criteria. They were white. And they concluded their education before obtaining a four-year college degree. In the American mosaic, that vast white working class was the largest piece, from the yeoman farmer to the welder on the assembly line. Even as late as the 1990 census, whites without a college degree represented more than three-fifths of adults.

But as the country grew more diverse and better educated, the white working-class share of the adult population slipped to just under 50 percent in the Census Bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey. That number has since fallen below 48 percent.

The demographic eclipse of the white working class is likely an irreversible trend as the United States reconfigures itself yet again as a “world nation” reinvigorated by rising education levels and kaleidoscopic diversity. That emerging America will create opportunities (such as the links that our new immigrants will provide to emerging markets around the globe) and face challenges (including improving high school and college graduation rates for the minority young people who will provide tomorrow’s workforce).

Still, amid all of this change, whites without a four-year college degree remain the largest demographic bloc in the workforce. College-educated whites make up about one-fifth of the adult population, while minorities account for a little under one-third. The picture is changing, but whites who have not completed college remain the backbone of many, if not most, communities and workplaces across the country.

They are also, polls consistently tell us, the most pessimistic and alienated group in American society.

The latest measure of this discontent came in a thoughtful national survey on economic opportunity released last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project. If numbers could scream, they would probably sound like the poll’s results among working-class whites.

One question asked respondents whether they expected to be better off economically in 10 years than they are today. Two-thirds of blacks and Hispanics said yes, as did 55 percent of college-educated whites; just 44 percent of noncollege whites agreed. Asked if they were better off than their parents were at the same age, about three-fifths of college-educated whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics said they were. But blue-collar whites divided narrowly, with 52 percent saying yes and a head-turning 43 percent saying no. (The survey, conducted from March 24 through 29, surveyed 2,000 adults and has a margin of error of ±3.4 percent.)

What makes these results especially striking is that minorities were as likely as blue-collar whites to report that they have been hurt by the recession. The actual unemployment rate is considerably higher among blacks and Hispanics than among blue-collar whites, much less college-educated whites.

Yet, minorities were more optimistic about the next generation than either group of whites, the survey found. In the most telling result, 63 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children to exceed their standard of living. Even college-educated whites are less optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the noncollege whites are the gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live better than they do; an equal number think their children won’t even match their living standard. No other group is nearly that negative.

This worry is hardly irrational. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Frank Levy and Tom Kochan report in a new paper, the average high-school-educated, middle-aged man earns almost 10 percent less than his counterpart did in 1980. Minorities haven’t been exempt from that trend: In fact, high-school-educated minority men have experienced even slower wage growth than their white counterparts over the past two decades, calculates Larry Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

But for minorities, that squeeze has been partially offset by the sense that possibilities closed to their parents are becoming available to them as discrimination wanes. “The distinction is, these blue-collar whites see opportunities for people like them shrinking, whereas the African-Americans [and Hispanics] feel there are a set of long-term opportunities that are opening to them that were previously closed on the basis of race or ethnicity,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who helped conduct the Pew survey.

By contrast, although it is difficult to precisely quantify, the sense of being eclipsed demographically is almost certainly compounding the white working class’s fear of losing ground economically. That huge bloc of Americans increasingly feels itself left behind—and lacks faith that either government or business cares much about its plight. Under these pressures, noncollege whites are now experiencing rates of out-of-wedlock birth and single parenthood approaching the levels that triggered worries about the black family a generation ago. Alarm bells should be ringing now about the social and economic trends in the battered white working class and the piercing cry of distress rising from this latest survey.


20

Posted by Desmond Jones on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 04:14 | #

compelling it to experience the world in a way all its own

This makes sense in reference to men and women, so why not between races? Recent research claims that a women avoids “social interactions with male kin during periods of high fertility,” without actually being conscious of the change in her behaviour. In this manner it appears that the constituent components encoded upon her DNA “compels her to experience the world in a way all its own”. This, then, would be a component of the spirit of woman, although she can never be conscious of it. The problem for Heidegger, is the restriction of language that Guessedworker touched upon earlier. He is limited to representational or analogous thinking in the form of metaphor. How is this compulsion in a women, that is entirely unconscious, to be expressed, except metaphorically? She might say she has a feeling, but actually, she feels nothing. In the end her genetic coding directs her in a manner probably otherwise abhorrent to her. Her genes tell her not to trust her father when she is most fertile, a sentiment she would, in the main, never consciously embrace.


21

Posted by Lee John Barnes on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:39 | #

Morality is simply the product of a full belly.

Religion is the merely the mid point between man the animal and man transcending nature via genetic engineering.

Man will become God to Man when man uses creative self evolution via genetic engineering to transcend his animal nature.

Man will then become God.

When Man transcends man he will then also develop a higher morality for a higher humanity.

Man is not the end product - man is just a bridge to the higher humanity.


22

Posted by GT on Thu, 02 Jun 2011 01:23 | #

Regarding this, my previous post…

The article is the perspective that a jew wants to propagate inside Washington, DC.  The National Journal is a sort of trade publication for the Congressional-lobbyist complex.


“From Revolutionary days through 2004, a majority of Americans fit two criteria. They were white. And they concluded their education before obtaining a four-year college degree. In the American mosaic, that vast white working class was the largest piece, from the yeoman farmer to the welder on the assembly line. Even as late as the 1990 census, whites without a college degree represented more than three-fifths of adults.”


And the dominant political theme for that entire era was keeping this group politically divided against itself.  The original WASP Freemasons made a deal with the devil in the late 19th Century by allying with immigrant Jews to reinforce these divisions.


The undercurrent of this article is how to prevent this group (working-class whites) from coalescing in self-awareness of group interests before it is finally too late for them.


That emerging America will create opportunities (such as the links that our new immigrants will provide to emerging markets around the globe)


Here’s the street level translation.  You are history in Main Street USA retailing unless you have direct links to manufacturers in these “Emerging Markets” to purchase low cost product.  Let’s take one data point, Simon’s Malls Edison Mall in Fort Myers. 


There are two main groups of stores.  The first group is the big corporate chains.  These include anchor stores like Sears and JC Penney, and extend down to The GAP, Old Navy, and Radio Shack.  These corporations all have their own mega buyers in the major Chinese and SE Asia manufacturing centers.  They often purchase the full output of entire factory complexes.


The second group is the “ethnic independent store owners”.  Migrant Israelis are dominant among this group.  There are others, such as Pakistani clothing store owners and Peruvian vendors of native handicraft leather and silver trinket jewelry.  These people also interface directly with relatives back in the “Emerging Market” homelands.  In the case of the Israelis we can see the real utility of all the tiny Diaspora communities littered around the globe.


The semi-exception is the many ethnic cell phone retailers, convenience store owners, and UPS Store type pack and ship operators.  These have 2-3 generations of family working the same store.  In this case the “owner” is able to pay Metro PCS, Verizon and AT&T;their commissions while still making a profit.


The independent white American retailer is an endangered species.  There simply is not enough margin for the gringo to pay an onshore middleman (guess who!) for product to resell while also paying non-relative employees, family health insurance for non-relatives, and workman’s compensation.


“But for minorities, that squeeze has been partially offset by the sense that possibilities closed to their parents are becoming available to them as discrimination wanes. ” The distinction is, these blue-collar whites see opportunities for people like them shrinking, whereas the African-Americans [and Hispanics] feel there are a set of long-term opportunities that are opening to them that were previously closed on the basis of race or ethnicity,” said Mark Mellman, (another Jew) a Democratic pollster who helped conduct the Pew survey.”


This is another statement of the jew’s eternal belief in the Power of Spin.  “Feel” or perception among a goy group is paramount - not reality.


“That huge bloc of Americans increasingly feels itself left behind—and lacks faith that either government (i.e. the Republican Party) or business cares much about its plight.


Brownstein’s implicit conclusion is the economic stranglehold has to be relaxed very slightly.  But not by much.  Just enough and just long enough to rupture any embryonic mass white movement.  You and I think Brownstein is worrying excessively.  But that’s what Jews do.  And this kind of careful management assists them in maintaining their now dominant position.


If one were to be so Napoleonic as to propose doing something about this, then a primary goal is clear: it is necessary to regain group control of entire production-marketing chains. This idea, however, is decisively rejected by the White Internet Literary Movement, Tea Partying Libertarians, and the Conservative Free Traders of the GOP.  The idea that profitable retailing can be divided from production and wholesale distribution is almost as central to their belief system as it is to Zionism.


23

Posted by CL on Thu, 02 Jun 2011 21:33 | #

Nor would your preferred morality benefit the inclusive fitness of the majority of Europeans who are genetically disposed to faith as much as a more faith-friendly morality would.

Correct.  But would that be wrong?  And why?

Acting against the inclusive fitness of the majority of Europeans isn’t wrong?

Then what would’ve been wrong with German Nazis soldiers taking over England, killing the men, and breeding with all the English women?

That would’ve only went against the inclusive fitness of a small minority of Europeans, and thus would’ve been even more “not wrong” by your lights than going against the inclusive fitness of the majority of Europeans.

Leaving aside the question of morality, possibly a fruitless subject with someone who avers that he only discusses morality for the sake of persuasion, what about the fact that going against the inclusive fitness of the majority of Europeans will likely alienate the majority of Europeans?

They’ll especially resent the thought that there would be this minority of non-faith gene having Europeans seeing their inclusive fitness improved.

Is there some scheme you have for breeding out the faith gene which you think wouldn’t get the dander up of the majority of Europeans slated to have their inclusive fitness harmed?

I can’t imagine any such scheme, but given that you’ve probably devoted more time to thinking about this go ahead an share whatever you’ve come up with.



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