Majorityrights Central > Category: The Ontology Project

This essay must serve as my reply to Daniel’s recent critique.  Down the years I have been attacked for word or deed by a fair few here.  Generally I will not respond.  We have all observed how pulling apart instead of pulling together seems to be a characteristic, perhaps the defining characteristic, of the renegade kind which, because it alone can withstand the relentless moral attack from every direction, is left to uphold the true interests of our race and peoples today.  There is quite enough ideological schism and personal in-fighting in our movement without creating more.

So in this case, rather than respond directly to Daniel’s comments I will respond to some criticism levelled against the Ontology Project by James Bowery four long years ago in an unresolved thread discussion about the mathematician Gian Carlo Rota’s conclusion that, ultimately, all ontological investigation is made folly by the sheer indeterminacy of being.  It might not seem a very fair or logical way to respond to the criticisms of my friend Daniel.  But dig a little, and the logic might become clearer.

James’s own summation of his argument was stated thus:

Just as measurement is the raw material of science—its “ground” if you will, so philosophy’s “ground” is in the ineffability of Being—ineffability giving rise to necessary precision in the expressions and even thoughts.  Just as the rigor of science is to ruthlessly dethrone theory with measurement, so the rigor of philosophy is to ruthlessly dethrone mere expression and even mere thought with ineffable Being.

Ostensibly, James was demanding that this ineffable slipperiness be dispelled by an unremitting (but, in the event, not bowreyesque) intellectual rigour.  It is, of course, disappointing that he did not hurl himself into the creative fray and resolve the matter for us.  But I don’t think his interest in it extended beyond criticism.  What he was really saying was: In its lack of a properly expressible, qualitatively certain foundation, none of this (ie, the pursuit of an existentialist and identitarian philosophy of Man and nation) has enough solidity to stand in the world.

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This essay, which is long (sorry about that) and quite detailed, picks up certain themes that were first introduced at MR five years ago.  It is, more or less, a summation of my present understanding, as someone pondering the crisis of identity, power, and existence which we Europeans are facing everywhere in the West today.  But it is also a contribution to MR’s Ontology Project.  As such, it is a modest step towards a firm proposal for a politics for the true European life.

One of the beautiful characteristics of existentialist thought is that an investigation of specific phenomena in the mind or in the lived life can begin with anything, and profitably so.  This is because relatedness is inherent to it.  All things, even opposites, are related, whereas fracture is the natural estate of non-existential thought.  This is a particular theme of this post, in which I am trying to cohere the freedom, unity and Life which should, in my opinion, be the very meaning of nationalism in its 21st century struggle.  Let us, then, take as our beginning this idea of struggle, and work from there.

In what struggle are nationalists truly engaged?  Well, yes, the struggle for the future of our people: a struggle for survival, a struggle for autonomy, a struggle for homeland, a struggle to live unburdened by the racial Other.  That is clear.  A process of deliverance, of salvation, then.  But also deliverance and salvation from the entire political, social, and economic form of the modern world, meaning from its economism, its egalitarianism, its “liberty” and “progress”, its “tolerance” and universalism … even, for some, its democratism because that, too, is a modernist massifying ideology.

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Continuing my ramblings about motoring...

If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.

I do not know the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche well, and have not read a single one of his published works from cover to cover for the best part of forty years.  I do know there is a grand vision of human meaning and a narrow one of human freedom, and there is rampant purposivity as well as progressivism, and naturalism but also anti-Darwinism.  There is anti-socialism, anti-militarism, anti-democratism, anti-statism in parts.  There is much more than the vulgar moral framework of “god-killing” and “aristocratic radicalism”.  For example, there is life affirmation.  If someone asked me for an interpretation of the above quote, without telling me that it is from The Will to Power, I would say that it is about emotion in human presence and its positive perspective on the lost life that went before.  Read in that way, the first and last thoughts, especially, are possessed of the same sublimity and make the same tangential approach to Truth as any metaphysical fragment in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.  It is hard to believe that someone could write in that way without knowing everything.  And yet, for most thinking nationalists he might as well have never conceived of more than the “higher man” and the teleology of greatness, the life lived for glory, the life of Homo heroicas.

Here, for example, is Jonathan Bowden enunciating what amounts to the default or, a least, dominant nationalist credo:

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I have been pondering for some time how to respond to James’s complaint about his contest with Graham Lister, and his subsequent withdrawal from the blog.  I do not want to explore Graham’s stinging criticism of theories which he sees as irredeemably liberalistic, yet worse, religious in kind, and of terminologies incorrectly applied from the biological sciences.  If he is right (and I think, broadly, he is) Graham is also caustically dismissive and that is unhelpful to his own argument and not in the peer spirit which intelligent researchers of the questions which preoccupy us owe one another.

For his part, James is understandably protective of his own intellectual project, the component parts of which – the contractualism, the commentary on ecology and eusociality, the commentary on Jewish dominance and virulence, the reification of the duel, the search for foundation in mathematics, etc – look more sign than sein to me at this point. But these are early days and rather than fall to non-mortal combat over whether these constitute an incomplete collection of parts because they are the wrong parts, let us return to reflection on the problem we are all trying to solve.  And I do mean all of us – all who come here, whether they are politically nationalist, conservative, traditionalist, or communitarian.

I once read long ago in a memoir by some misguided Russian fatalist that none of us ever really rests from trying to solve the great, glowering problem of mortality.  We may think we are pleasantly immersed in the flow of life’s petty concerns, but somewhere in our mental processes we keep returning to this problem.  Even in our moments of greatest happiness and triumph, or on the rare occasions we are sucked into some big, adrenalin-charging, Sein-zum-Tode event – perhaps a pairwise duel - the diversion is fleeting and we quickly return to trying to decipher the silence and unknowableness of death’s void.  We sense it all around us, in the great rush of our children to grow up, in our wry regret for our own advancing age, in our tenderness for the object of our love, in the way that the fairy-gold of sex slips through the fingers of memory, in memories themselves, in long friendships, in loss, in faith, in hope, in the very processes which stubbornly maintain our bodily existence.

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I’ve always been a bit of a petrol-head, and I thought I would write something about motoring.

A short while ago I came across an arresting photograph of a 1940’s Dodge Delivery Panel Van sitting sphinx-like in some late-spring North American field.  Time and the irresistible will of Nature had turned it into an inverted flower-pot.  It invited interpretation (some of which could even turn out to be relevant to Daniel’s recent exploration of new religious potentials, you never know).

Discounting the usual romantic allusions to decay and the fragility of Man’s design, what I saw there is a statement about mediation.  At the most obvious level, the image could be taken to represent the will of Nature to establish herself and remain established in a world of constant disorganisation, pushing through all obstruction, all negation, but having to be opportunistic, having to adapt to do so.  As such, it is a figure for all that we can say for sure – that is, free of religious creation myths and other speculative theories - about Source and subsistence.

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A colleague of mine passed away yesterday.  My relationship with him began while he was at Interval Research circa 1996.  This link is to a paper of his written shortly after we met on the basis of my interest in relational over functional description.

When we speak of what oneself or any particular person or kin-group is in any real or permanent sense, we are speaking of what is of our, his or her, or their being.  To speak of what is in us which is not of our being is to speak of that which is acquired from time and place.  That is a distinction, ontologically speaking, between the content of the present and the absent, and between the conscious in any intentionally holistic sense and the mechanistic, and also between authentic Dasien and false Dasein - all just perspectives on the same truth (and not the only ones).

Now, taking this distinction as the essential field of ontology, preceding and underlying all philosophy and also all esoteric religious practise, we must conclude that it is, therefore, the essential field of a nationalist ontology as well.  Indeed it is clearly so, since nationalist critique of the liberal ontology is very much that “what is acquired” from liberal modernity - from the kind of life we in the West live today - is a reduced and debased condition of the self.  Precisely because of this, nationalists have used political power, when they have had it, to curtail freedom, democracy and egalitarianism, and thereby sweep away as much of liberalism as possible.

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GW has expressed the constraint:

“It is a pity that Christianity, as flawed as it is from a European racial perspective, is undeniably part of the unity of north and south.  We are stuck with it, for it has been too close for too long to us - and the faithful must have their faith expressions, after all.”

DanielS has expressed the constraint:

“Adding yet another knot in the tangle is the argument that with the Christian texts already being the terms in which many of our people think, the currency for two thousand years now, there must be some ontological basis beneath, and we may as well find the positive logic to it for our purposes. However, with the texts being what they are, the motivations of the texts being as convoluted, Jewish and ambiguous as they were to begin, all that winds-up happening with the deciphering of our “true” logic behind Christianity is a contribution to the mess.”

An approach offered by John Harland is to admit the historicity of Jesus in His essential mythic image as descendant of God evidenced in his own over-ruling of texts with direct bodily connection with God as Father, but to deny the historicity of the extant texts—deny them as yet another means by which dastards attempt to interpose themselves between the God-heritage of individuals and their Father, in spirit and flesh.

Ridicule of Harland’s own editing of the texts to suit his view may be conducted only at the sacrifice of the two constraints establishing the context of this presentation. Offer a superior approach if you don’t like Harland’s—either that or declare folly the entire effort to connect with the spiritual force of Christianity.

Click this link for a pdf document containing part of Harland’s account starting with “The Germans” (in the anthropological sense meaning what many identify as Celtic and Nordic pagans of the pre-Christian era), “The Catholic Church Promotes Judeo-Christianity”, “The First Breaking Apart of the Church Serpent” (regarding Henry VIII and Martin Luther), “A Further Break From the Serpent” (regarding the establishment of America), “The Strange Phenomenon of ‘Money-Mad’ Americans” (regarding the closing of the frontier and replacement of Nature and Nature’s God with money-based “culture”), “The American Dream” (the commodification, by conspirators, of the American spiritual renaissance), “The German Reich” (the parallel processes occurring in what became the nation state known as “Germany” during the 1800s leading up to WW I), “The World Picture After WW I” (the situation leading up to WW II) and the concluding section of this pdf document is “The Second World War”.

The entire book is “Word Controlled Humans” by John Harland, ISBN 0-914752-12-X available from Sovereign Press, 326 Harris Road, Rochester, WA 98579 (with which I have no business or personal relationship).