Majorityrights Central > Category: The Ontology Project

I came upon the work of Frederick Parker-Rhodes in my quest for the ideal computer language, which I have elsewhere on MR discussed in relation to Heidegger’s “as” structure and GW’s ontology project.  Recent work in theoretical physics has provided empirical validation to his “wildly eccentric” views—which managed to provide a priori derivations of the dimensionless scaling constants of physics from his ontology detailed in his book “The Theory of Indistinguishables”.  To be brief, there is his “combinatorial hierarchy” that derives from FRP’s attempt to find the underlying mathematical structure of what he called “wholesight”.

Below the fold is an excerpt from “Wholesight: The Spirit Quest” by Frederick Parker-Rodes…

READ MORE...

James has introduced the concept of foundation from nowhere, based on something Husserl brought into his own work once and only fleetingly.  I am not sure how central it really is to the Husserlian approach to Mind, consiousness, self, and the object .  In any case, there was a certain immanent development (basically, authenticity of Dasein) in Heidegger which was not in Husserl’s (late and defensive) championing of reason and the transcendent ego, and which heads in the opposite direction to foundation.  It is the exploration of this which would benefit James, as it has benefitted many others, and which explains, for example, why Heidegger is revolutionary today as well as why he was foundational to postmodernism during its revolutionary period of inception.  To me at least, the Husserlian approach seems oddly dead and anthropological by contrast.  I will try to explain this further.

Kant said that you cannot demonstrate being.  But you can experience it, under certain psychological conditions.  Otherwise you can only infer it, only gesture roughly in its presumed direction.  Strictly speaking, Heidegger’s project in Being and Time was to explain why, in the West, our inferred sense of being is so different to the sense we think it should have, and which philosophers and spiritual leaders have told us for millenia that it can have.  Heidegger used the phenomenological method to give an account of this “everydayness” ... the life that is ordinarily lived.  But his essentially spiritual quest constituted a complete break with Husserl and a challenge to the study of Mind as pure function.  As such, it was intimately wrapped up with the meaning for us all of a lived life in which Being was rarely consciously experienced, and in which the inference was everywhere employed without thought for qualitative distinctions.  Where no such distinctions apply, the road is open to nihilism and destruction.  Thus seven years later, in his lecture Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger made the following remarkable and much quoted statement:

READ MORE...

The foremost living phenomenologist, Robert Sokolowski, starts the introduction to his book “Introduction to Phenomenology” published in 2000 thus:

Introduction

ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF THE BOOK

The project of writing this book began in a conversation I had with Gian-Carlo Rota in the spring of 1996.  He was then lecturing as visiting professor of mathematics and philosophy at The Catholic University of America.

Rota had often drawn attention to a difference between mathematicians and philosophers.  Mathematicians, he said, tend to absorb the writings of their predecessors directly into their own work.  They do not comment on the writings of earlier mathematicians, even if they have been very much influenced by them.  They simply make use (emphasis JAB) of the material that they find in the authors they read.  When advances are made in mathematics, later thinkers condense the findings and move on.  Few mathematicians study works from past centuries; compared with contemporary mathematics, such older writings seem to them almost like the work of children.

In philosophy, by contrast, classical works often become enshrined as objects of exegesis rather than resources to be exploited.  Philosophers, Rota observed, tend not to ask, “Where do we go from here?”  Instead, they inform us about the doctrines of major thinkers.  They are prone to comment on earlier works rather than paraphrase them.  Rota acknowledged the value of commentaries but thought that philosophers ought to do more.  Besides offering exposition, they should abridge earlier writings and directly address issues, speaking in their own voice and incorporating into their own work what their predecessors have done.  They should extract as well as annotate.

It was against this background that Rota said to me, after one of my classes, as we were having coffee in the cafeteria of the university’s Columbus School of Law, “You should write an introduction to phenomenology.  Just write it.  Don’t say what Husserl or Heidegger thought, just tell people what phenomenology is.  No fancy title, call it an introduction to phenomenology.

This struck me as very good advice…

Although there are references to philosophers scattered throughout his book, Sokolowski rarely, if ever, resorts to arcane argot such as Husserl’s “Fundierung” preferring, instead, plain English words like “founding” and “founded” with appropriate context to refine meaning. 

This sort of “populist” approach to philosophy is, of course, a grave insult to those who have poured over the texts of the ages and we should expect them to respond with commensurate scorn.  Meanwhile, there is work to be done…

READ MORE...

For the esoterically adventurous in the ontology project only, read on for a disquisition on the question of ontology without reference to existence involving Hilbert, Husserl and Heidegger leading to a syntactic and semantic approach for rigorous philosophical method.

READ MORE...

Notwithstanding the vast amount of straitening post-election commentary that has appeared across the right-wing media, I thought it might be in order to offer one or two thoughts of my own.  Apologies now to anyone who doesn’t mind if they never read another word about this sorry issue!

As every politically-minded person has surely realised, the impressive block-voting of non-whites has put demographics at the centre of political calculation. The GOP in its current form is already electorally obsolete.  Two-thirds of a static white electorate will never again be sufficient to command an electoral majority.  The one-third of white Americans, particularly single women, voting Democrat were already gestured towards by the GOP’s rejection of Bachman, Cain, Santorum, Gingrich, and the libertarian Constitutionalist Ron Paul.  Romney was supposed a flip-flopper, a RINO, and therefore electable to all those Republican voters lost in 2008.  Now he is the point from which the party has to migrate to find a majority.  It has to reach out to blacks and Hispanics, and it cannot even rely any more on conservative minorities like Alan West.

For mainstream political observers the interesting question is how the GOP will adapt to this new reality and retain its present constituencies.  Nationalists, however, already know that the constant pursuit of conservative movements is not principle but relevance.  Ultimately, it’s about power, and nothing is likely to change this time.  The party managers will take the Christian Right for granted.  After all, where can it go without entirely marginalising itself?  The new party line will say little that is critical of illegal migrants, abortion, or homosexual politics.  It will trumpet a more anti-statist and economically liberal platform.  This, in turn, will redefine the political centre, and narrow the national debate even further, and that will generate a new bout of radicalism on the left.

Now let’s look for a few aspects in this of particular interest to nationalists.

READ MORE...

This essay consists of some unfinished philosophical ramblings and some related historical interpretations.  If the philosophy is too rambling, I hope at least that the history holds some interest.

Reaction has a bad name but a rather long and complex history.  For the sake of brevity, as well as relevance to us, we can place an age limit on it and date it from the onset of modernity.  So, for example, a reactionary’s history might commence with the aesthetic of romanticism, that emotionally freeing and humanising response to the encroachment upon nature and the transcendent of industrialisation and urbanisation, materialism, the beginnings of mass consumption, and everything that was “modern”, say, when Beethoven composed his Symphony No. 3 in E flat major Op.55, the Eroica, between August 1804 and April 1805.

No rabble but a nation in the making

However, nationalism did not begin in reaction, and for most of its existence it has not been reactionary.  Its intellectual history is usually traced to the thought of Johan Gottfried Herder, who invented the word and, in acknowledging the place of the national community, was the first thinker to challenge the distinction of sovereign and subject, replacing both within a Volk who were in no wise the eponymous common rabble.  Apparently, up to this time people who could think actually thought there was only their gilded selves and the civilisationally incompetent Platonic masses.  Which makes one wonder what William Shakespeare was describing nearly two centuries earlier when he wrote in King Richard II, Act 2 scene 1 of “This happy breed of men, this little world”.  But, then again, there were the tribunes and the commoners of The Tragedy of Coriolanus, written c. 1605:

Sicinius Velutus: Assemble presently the people hither;
And when they bear me say ‘It shall be so
I’ the right and strength o’ the commons,’ be it either
For death, for fine, or banishment, then let them
If I say fine, cry ‘Fine;’ if death, cry ‘Death.’
Insisting on the old prerogative
And power i’ the truth o’ the cause.
Aedile: I shall inform them.
Junius Brutus: And when such time they have begun to cry,
Let them not cease, but with a din confused
Enforce the present execution
Of what we chance to sentence.
Act III 3, scene 1

... sentiments appropriate to any modern media moghul pondering democracy and his own self.  But what were the sentiments and the real will of the people themselves?

In settled times, of course, European peoples (who we might, after the modern globalist practise, term “the post-tribe”) do not require a constant expression of national community.  It retires to its abode in the instincts of the people and in the personnification of the sovereign.  The collective will to be ... to be secure in the possession of all that is necessary for life ... makes its settlement with the world and turns to smaller things, attenuating to a will to increase and, finally, to live collectively in a way that satisfies the intellect, the senses and the heart, and leaves no collective need unmet and no wrongdoing undone.  And part of that latter, it would seem, is a Heideggerian care of altruism for suffering humanity, regardless of tribe, regardless even of race.

I think this progressive retirement of ethnocentrism is particularly condign to Europeans.  With us, the imperative to be does not begin (or end) in tribal competition.  It begins in the struggle against climatic circumstances under which human existence is parlous at best.  The audacious European response is the act of challenging Nature herself.  That is what nationalists mean when they speak of the restless creativity and prometheanism of the European race.

That does not, by the way, imply some bracing movement towards a state of, say, “greatness” or “triumph”, but a return to our one state of truth, which is great enough and which is in us always and requires that the people be healthy and whole, and their identity authentic (that is, detached from artifice, from the acquired).

In other words, of herself Nature is subsistent, not purposive.  She does not destin beyond her struggle to be.  Notwithstanding European creativity, then, our struggle is the endless struggle of all life, and such purposivity as may enter it is always party to that.  To be precise, teleology roams the space between existence and subsistence, and never goes beyond, though to the eyes of all believers it will certainly appear to.

READ MORE...

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.

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:

READ MORE...