Majorityrights Central > Category: The Ontology Project

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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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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