Majorityrights Central > Category: The Ontology Project

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being and multiplicity

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

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

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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?

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by Grimoire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by PF

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

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

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

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

Petrarch, from Africa, written in 1343.

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

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

Notus,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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