Majorityrights Central > Category: The Ontology Project

This essay is a wee bit outside of my usual stamping ground, but it is in the nature of lighting the blue touch-paper - just in case anyone wants to address this subject properly!  I’m going to begin with a quote from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, division 2, section 75 (Blackwell translation), published in 1927:

Everyday Dasein has been dispersed into many kinds of things which daily “come to pass”.  The opportunities and circumstances which concern keeps “tactically” awaiting in advance, have “fate” as their out-come.  In terms of that with which inauthentically existing Dasien concerns itself, it first computes its history.  In so doing, it is driven about by its “affairs”.  So if it wants to come to itself, it must first pull itself together from the dispersion and disconnectedness of the very things that have “come to pass”, and because of this, it is only that there at last arises from the horizon of the understanding which belongs to inauthentic historicality, the question of how one is to establish a connectedness of Dasein if one does so in the “Experience” of a subject - Experiences which are “also” present-at-hand.

To my mind, this short passage describes, in Heidegger’s difficult and relentlessly particular terminology, the fractured and scattered state of our ordinary inner life, a scattering effected through the tendency of ordinary waking consciousness to elide into and attach itself to externalities, psychologically speaking.  The nett result is a profound absence which many reading this will recognise in their own experience.  We still ascribe qualities of self-hood to it, of course.  We can never cease doing that.  But it is a self-hood with a history rather than a presence in the moment (though that takes us further towards the metaphysical than Heidegger intended - all Dasein is historical in his formulation).

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by Potential Frolic

I want to explain my struggle with the idea of Palingenesis and what it has taught me about nationalism and myself.  The desire to do this flows from frequent encounters here and elsewhere with “the Palingenetic Necessity”, which I define as the conviction that no other model of political action can support white survival in our times.

Understanding the problem

Seeing the destructive forces working upon our peoples presently, and fearing very much for his own survival and that of his people, the (folkish) nationalist turns his eye to Palingenesis, which presents itself as the opposite to today’s politics of ethnic suicide. The goal of Palingenesis is to renew the values of a supposed heroic and glorious past, these values being assumed to be real and contingent even if the past in question is only a myth, and to venture towards heroism and glory in the present. 

GW has argued that advocates of Palingenesis are not necessarily good psychologists. They do not take account of the fact that the man is of the time in which he is born, decadent or otherwise, and carries only two possibilities within himself:

(i) to belong to that time and have no truck with, or even knowledge of, the truth of his Self, or

(ii) to seek out truth even at the cost of turning away - if someone tells him how - from time and place and artifice.

There is no special third option for the rebirth of the spirit as heroism and glory, according to GW.  Heroism and glory are not characteristics of the true Self but of immersion in violence.  They can only appear in time and place, therefore, and cannot be different to or better than the rest of the artifice.  They are a beautiful deception - in fact, a bastardization for the purpose of reifying political violence.

As psychology, then, Palingenesis as it appears in fascism and revolutionary conservatism is a sham, albeit an alluring one.  It answers the following two wholly utilitarian questions in the positive:

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Now I am returning to the issue of consciousness and the absence of self with which I began Part 1 of this post.  It is only my own view, and it isn’t original.  It is also entirely open to challenge by anybody who understands these matters better than I do - and there must be many.

It is usual in Western thought for the question of the self to be treated as an epistemological issue.  But what I am really setting out to do in this series is to recover from the sloppy psychological models of the past - all that couch-talk about the unconscious, the subconscious, the collective unconscious, and so on, for those workings of the mind which proceed in us quite without our assistance, and over which we presume sovereignty.  I’ll begin with a thumbnail sketch of the hardware, so to speak, of the mind.  Some observations about the much more interesting and altogether too, too fallible software will follow in the next post.

Neurologically, all sentient organisms have one or more systems which project the consciousness of self, insomuch as that hologrammatic thing can be said to exist.  These are not coterminous with the divisions in the human brain and nervous systems but, largely excepting thought it seems, are distributed across them.  They activate different areas of the brain.  They are separate from the visceral nervous system.  I contend that they have evolved out of the most nascent awareness of sexual division, selection and self-maintenance.  In other words, the survival strategy of sensing, to borrow the old German Idealist term, “the thing that is” beyond the organism itself is the only reason for human self-awareness and self-interest.

The “hardware”

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OK, I said I wouldn’t do this.  But, well … you know.  This is the first of two posts on an alternative to the politics of spiritual regeneration - always assuming that the reader understands (a) that some systemic replacement for liberalism is necessary, and (b) that the current American empirical offerings lack motive power.

The second part will carry forward some of the arguments here and sketch out a model of Mind as a contribution, I hope, to the search for a new and syncretic founding theory.

Instead of the old metaphor of individuals as discrete entities like billiard balls, we need to think instead of them as nodes in a relationship network.

With these words Madeleine Bunting, the occasionally sensible but mostly Moslem-mad Guardian Woman, signposts the left’s remaining recourse in a world made hostile by neuroscience.

Moslem Maddie’s problem, you see, is that she has heard the rumours that the eponymous self of liberal self-authorship fame does not, in fact, exist.  “This”, she says, “is the kind of stuff which challenges almost everything you’re used to thinking about yourself.”  And about your politics, if you are a radical individualist as she is.

She writes:

… the point about this new explosion of interest in research into our brains is that it exposes as illusions much of these guiding principles of what it is to be a mature adult. They are a profound misunderstanding of how we think, and how our brains work. They are fairytales, about as fanciful and as implausible as goblins.

That’s a rather dramatic way of putting it, of course.  The constant flow of affirmations of self are wholly legitimate from an evolutionary standpoint.  The illusion of self exists even if self does not, and it is no less a product of evolution for that.  Genes for “self-ishness” and self-preservation are privileged for the fitness gain they offer.

So, what now for the left?  Cue the decampment, perhaps, from the half of the liberal project that pursues the unfettered will into the egalitarian and social democratic half?  Well, that may not be necessary.  A strange and unnerving synthesis of the two halves, of a self-authorship and a state-mandated compassion that were never entirely reconciled in the past, may just be coming down the turnpike:

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by Happy Cracker

Ontology is the study of being, and the reason why such a simple concept is gifted such lofty Greek-derived nomenclature is to underscore the need for sufficient circumspection in this endeavor.

We are just now recovering from a period where a flowering of scientific methodology, and the resulting accumulation of knowledge, have lead to a breakdown in our ontological models of the world. The adoption, implementation and breakdown of ontological models due to accumulation of contradictory scientific knowledge, can be visualized as a series of parabolic figures on a coordinate plane. The x-axis represents historical time and the y-axis represents certainty of ontological knowledge. The parabola thus represents the adoption, implementation and breakdown of the ontological model - consistent with a rise, peak and fall in the certainty or belief in this knowledge. Some parabolas are in series, such as Rousseau’s “Natural Man” and Robespierre’s terror-as-virtue Republicanism:

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Decades later, the nature of man had changed; Robespierre needed to use the state to enforce terror in order to create a virtuous order:

“We wish that order of things where all the low and cruel passions are enchained, all the beneficent and generous passions awakened by the laws; where ambition subsists in a desire to deserve glory and serve the country: where distinctions grow out of the system of equality, where the citizen submits to the authority of the magistrate, the magistrate obeys that of the people, and the people are governed by a love of justice.”

Arrest of Robespierre on 19 March 1794. He went to the guillotine five days later.

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It appears to be the season for lecture series.  BBC Radio 3 has been hosting its Free Thinking 2008 series, involving approximations to wisdom and originality by a colourful variety of folk.  One of these is the smooth-mover of the MultiCult, Trevor Phillips, who has discerned six questions, no less, which liberal democracy cannot answer.  Sadly, when he last had a proper job is unlikely to be one of them.  The BBC has a 7-day storage system for its radio output.  So I will listen to Trevor tomorrow and, if he is remotely interesting, I will post accordingly.

But now I want to focus on last night’s speech by the only slightly wierd writer, broadcaster and lecturer in psychology, Susan Blackmore.  Her subject was one close to my own heart: The myth of Free Will.

In my last post on it I explained the significance of an absence of free will in humans thus:-

Now, there is no small difference between the self equipped with free will and the self bereft of it.  It is the difference between consciousness and mechanicity, between “I” and “it”.  What emerges from John-Dylan Haynes study is a model of Man in whom Mind, in its ordinary waking state at least, weaves the story of a decisive self over the endless blizzard of electro-chemical impulses in the brain?

And from that, if we are honest, there emerge only questions for which we never have more than an inadequate answer.

For example, if “I” am only a dream of self, a piece of artifice made in the moment and remade in another, is there really any sense in which “I” can be said to exist at all?  In a mechanistic sense only, perhaps.  If one is prepared to dispense with the usual dignifications, the mechanicity of Man is not so great an affront.  It is what it is, and there are a fair number of reflective people who have always known it.  None of them are radical liberals, of course.  The notion of the “fully-human” director of a free and unfettered will absolutely does not fly.  It never could.  Liberal political philosophy is a flightless bird.

Susan Blackmore is a lot closer to the action than I am, and these are the significant passages from her lecture:-

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