Majorityrights Central > Category: The Ontology Project

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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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