Before returning (in Part 3) to the compound structure of Being on which I concluded Part 1, I am going to introduce the beginnings of the identitarian exegesis to an otherwise ethnic nationalist essay.

Broadly, ethnic nationalism belongs to being and, therefore, to an ontological analysis.  Its cry of the heart is for “The Being of my people”, and it is therefore a cry for the freedom to subsist.  It is already a general organising principle of sorts, a pulse in the background of the life of all peoples.  But other than in times of extremis (Heidegger’s “Being towards death”), it is not a straightforward matter to bring it into the foreground as a positive, life-affirming force.  That was never more true than in our time, when the material comforts and alienations of our age, together with the gradual, indeed, generational unfolding of extremis, counsel for action another day … always another day … and make ethnic nationalism a less than reliable organising principle.

Add to that the ease with which our people’s many enemies, within and without, can de-legitimise any form of engagement with the race issue which is reactive and, therefore, negative, and the limitations of ethnic nationalist discourse become all too apparent.

Identitarianism, on the other hand, belongs to consciousness and, therefore, to a psychological analysis.  Its cry of the heart is or should be “This people is mine”, and it is a cry of a much more open kind, leading easily to the positive demand that, as “mine”, the people must freely and jointly destine.  Identitarianism, as they say, has legs in a way that ethnic nationalism does not.  Of course, we need both, to which end we shouldn’t be defeated by the idea that Being and Mind are contrary and exclusive ... or, indeed, that, notwithstanding Heidegger’s rejection of Descartes and Kant, ontology and psychology are such.  There is a coherence and compatibility, even if there is no perfect synthesis; and one of my basic aims in all these scribblings is to try to bring this out in a methodical way.

From “Being there” to “I am”

If, for some reason, one wished to draw a distinguishing line between ontology and phenomenology it would surely have to be in the tending of the former to the nature and, perhaps, even the origin of the Being of beings while the latter tends to the meaning of the being of things, as it appears in the consciousness.  Accordingly, when ontologists speak of Dasein (but let’s stick to Being there, which avoids an English-speaker’s confusion about whether it is a person or a thing or a mystery of the German imagination) they do so in consideration more of the human estate than the eternal problem of epistemology: how do we know what, if anything, is real?  Phenomenologists, however, will happily concern themselves with such matters as the uniform perception of a particular colour, or how we cannot will the perception of, say, blue instead of red.  They have constructed an impressively detailed set of narratives along these lines (the great preponderance of which will one day surely be rendered obsolete, or substantially so, by neurology and emergentist thinking).

Heidegger resolved for a Being there which, as ontology, does not address the sensory perception of things and non-human beings, but, as a human issue, discloses and channels human Being-as-fact both within and without the subject … the Being within and the beings without.  As anti-traditionalist metaphysics rejecting a Kantian approach to consciousness, his interpretation allows the necessary claim on objectivity and universal truth while reclaiming for Western thought, with its focus on beings, the subject matter of Being itself.

In consequence of these things, a certain literalism in the categorisaton of Being there prevails: it is firmly said to be a site (there) of disclosure (being) of the meaning of beings.

In fairness , in this same sense even the word presence has a locative implication … present where taking precedence over present to.  But the real turn (a much abused word) to identity, in the practik of consciousness, is not like that.  There is no truck with a locative ordering, not even something closer to the personal such as Being here.  The relevant descriptive was articulated long, long ago, and is, and will always be, simply and directly I am - not a site for meaning’s disclosure at all, but a piercing, ecstatic statement of self-being … a positive state of self-witness.  The locative, while satisfying the requirement for objectivity, bleeds away the vitality and directness of this formulation.  Perhaps an analytic address of human Being cannot be purged of consciousness and psychology after all, for in those alone resides some kind of agency in the physical world.

That said, any attempt to found a line of general (ie, exoteric) philosophical thinking on a definitionally subjective and emotionally-grounded or “qualiatic” experience immediately runs into two separate but related challenges, namely:

(i) the challenge of making truths disclosed in this state of human presence relevant to, and tractable in, the broad perceptual norms of human experience, and amid all the deceptions of our ordinary waking consciousness;

(ii) the challenge of scale ... of generalising from the personal to the group.

These are, basically, problems of ordering rather than of logic, and in this Part 2 essay we shall take the first of them and resolve it.

The turn from the ordinary to the normal

Even at this preliminary level of abstraction a commonplace term like “the self”, as in “self-being”, is already insufficient.  Questions abound, some of them rather large.  For example, what is it in this self which witnesses, and what is it of the self which it witnesses?  What happens in the act of witness?  Is it the same witness within the self and without?

So we find ourselves excavating for other mechanisms and other, more exact terms of reference.  At the very beginning of his essay Ontology: the Hermeneutics of Facticity, which is assembled from his lecture course of 1923, Heidegger sets out his terms including the following:

”Facticity” is the designation we will use for the character of “our” “own” Dasein

He then launches into a series of definitional statements, one tripping over another until this:

“Our own” is rather a how of being, an indication which points to a possible path of being-wakeful.”

This is different to Heidegger’s handling of consciousness in Being and Time.  It is less phenomenological, and more focussed on how human Being may become manifest in a broader existential context in which it otherwise appears as in some way reduced.  This is practik, and it has energy.  The thirty-four year-old Heidegger is indicating that this lit moment of realisation, in which “I” suddenly abides as Fact, is not only in possession of its own self but stands upright in a state of wakefulness and on a path which stretches back into the dark of the self lost and unknown to itself.  This is the path I have tried to represent in whole under the title of the Ontological Transit.

Readers may tire of seeing again the following scheme of the range of consciousness, to which I have referred several times over the years.  But it remains an evolving idea; and, if nothing else, it has the virtue of attempting, at least, to synthesise something of the Eastern and Western metaphysical traditions, the religious beatific experience, and the psychology of consciousness – something in which the Heidegger of 1923, freed from his Catholic upbringing, might have had some interest, but which was firmly excluded four years later in the sixty-three page introduction (in my paperback edition) to Being and Time.

(Such a synthesis, in my view, is perfectly legitimate subject of intellectual enquiry.  For we are in the business of radical renewal, and we do not place boundaries upon its extent.  Our European kind needs not just a new and nationalist political dispensation or even a new whole system of philosophically nationalist thought, but a new expression for our trait of faith.  The way has to be open to that … to the founding by hitherto unknown means of a faith which is not a gentile cult of death masquerading as ever-lasting life.  We can say with certitude that for centuries - arguably a thousand years and more in the case of Christianity - the ideational foundation of our life has not contained the truth of our being.  We are dying of many causes, but the corrective for all of them is the uncovering of a life true to our nature, which is also a sovereign and free life.  Without that we can never be whole even if we avoid the Maori-style genetic obliteration which awaits us now.  In the present day, reaction colours the edges of politics, and that is encouraging.  But on the historical scale, political reaction, and reaction generally, is just not enough.  Matters have come to such a pass now that one curative alone - a vast, uncontainable process of regenerative change – will impact on the scale requisite to light a new dawn in the long life of the European kind.)

So to continue ... the present version of my small scheme for Heidegger’s “possible path” is:

ABSENCE ◄ habituality (mechanicity) ◄ immersion ◄ negation ◄ reverie ◄ sloth ◄ passive attention ◄INTENT► active attention ► stillness ► detachment ► affirmation ► appropriation ► PRESENCE ► non-ascription of identity ► self-annihilation ► unalloyed Being

This is not really a path (“path” is locative, again) or a 17-note scale, or anything so abstract, but a sequence of practical events in the mind, each with its own character, via which consciousness is qualitatively ordered.  There is a layering effect to the downward shift from intent to absence and another upwards from intent to presence, whereby each event becomes contained in the next and does not cease to give its meaning.

For the very great part of our waking lives (or our “everydayness”, to use Heidegger’s phrase), absence is our general condition, and is such irrespective of intelligence or character or mental well-being.  It is manifestly not the entirety of Man’s natural estate.  But it is the inevitable and universal existential fate of us all, as if it is decreed by the Norns.

Yet there can be this seminal, practical form of the Heideggerian turn.  A life in the real is possible, if only for fleeting moments.  The events of the Transit from intent to presence constitute a process of building towards the burning declaration “I am”.  It is rarely undertaken and requires decision, real psychological effort and knowledge.  The effort always burns out, and what was built quickly collapses.  It might be weeks or months or more before the next decision to turn away from the ordinary and re-kindle the acquaintance with a consciousness we can properly term “normal”.

This quality of waking consciousness is intentional in that usual sense of the word, and not only in the sense which phenomenology dictates, ie, as a constant mechanical directed-ness towards its object – for example, when Mr Ordinary happens upon a dime dropped on the platform of a railway station.  The intention of which I speak is the decision for an active mode of attention (classically, active in the sense of a willed focus on some part of Mind or some event within the organism).  It is a change-agent.  It consumes energy sufficient to overcome the gravitational pull of absence, at least for as long as energy is available.  It seeds stillness, quelling the mechanistic operations of the three perceptual systems (intellect, emotion, motor) which constitute ordinary waking consciousness … and with that comes detachment from same, creating the opening (Heidegger’s Lichtung) to the affirmation of the sovereign self or identity, and its possession of the kingdom.

Of course, you may not know what presence is, in which case you will not know what absence is either.  You will not know that absence is the optimum condition for suggestibility and confusion, out of which our existential difficulties proliferate.  You will not know your own general cognitive state for what it is.  You will be living by your received wisdom, and you will certainly think that’s the whole of it.  But that is the common belief, about which we should be not at all surprised.  Our existential condition … the human condition ... is ordinarily, habitually unseen.  None of us are ordinarily self-aware in any whole sense, yet all of us unfailingly consider ourselves so.  The view we carry within ourselves, which is that we are singular beings, self-conscious and agentive, is illusory (as all who have studied the great religions should know).

Beyond telling you that … telling you that there is a sub-optimal state of wakefulness which is not being present, and it is yours and mine and everybody’s, I cannot help you - though in the longer run philosophy can.  By its world-making power, it can lift us all, and leave none behind.

If, of course, you are comfortable with my (perfectly standard) analysis, we can progress in an unforced way to the further understanding that our illusion, in all its comfortable, persuasive habituality, is the meaning of that Being disclosed or mediated by Heidegger’s False Dasein … by Being not “there”, as it were … by Being absent.  It is a meaning I have endeavoured to explicate as the generic of personality.  In an earlier essay I defined it thus:

personality is the expression of neurological data generated by influences external to the organism, and laid down associatively in the three perceptual systems (intellectual, emotional, motor).  This data constitutes every acquired principle, ideal, belief, value, taste, attitude, ambition, prejudice, vanity, presumption, impression, impulse, accent and inflexion, action and reaction, fad and fashion … everything behavioural that is nurtured, everything that is habituated, everything that is prescribed, everything that is not native.

This, which is neither singular nor self-conscious nor agentive, is illusion.  But it is illusion over which the brain automatically pronounces the word “I”, a primordial and wholesale appropriation done quite without consideration for authenticity.  The appropriation includes that of memory.  Indeed, I would say that it goes back into memory after the initial event, papering over the cracks.  It reifies the most fundamental and the most brilliantly convincing of all our lies: that that which does not belong to us but to the world distinguishes us from that world.

On this note, and with a hat-tip to James Bowery for his alarmingly literal but helpful comment to my Part 1 of this essay, I reproduce here a couple of short paragraphs from Wikipedia’s entry on the psychiatric condition of confabulation:

Confabulation is distinguished from lying as there is no intent to deceive and the person is unaware the information is false.[4] Although individuals can present blatantly false information, confabulation can also seem to be coherent, internally consistent, and relatively normal.[4]

Most known cases of confabulation are symptomatic of brain damage or dementias, such as aneurysm, Alzheimer’s disease, or Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome (a common manifestation of thiamine deficiency caused by alcoholism).[5] Additionally confabulation often occurs in people who are suffering from anticholinergic toxidrome when interrogated about bizarre or irrational behaviour.[6][7]

Confabulated memories of all types most often occur in autobiographical memory and are indicative of a complicated and intricate process that can be led astray at any point during encoding, storage, or recall of a memory.

… On rare occasions, confabulation can also be seen in normal subjects.[19] It is currently unclear how completely healthy individuals produce confabulations. It is possible that these individuals are in the process of developing some type of organic condition that is causing their confabulation symptoms. It is not uncommon, however, for the general population to display some very mild symptoms of provoked confabulations. Subtle distortions and intrusions in memory are commonly produced by normal subjects when they remember something poorly.

The first and last paragraphs are particularly apt to the condition, though I would take issue with the direction of events.  We are Confabulating Man, but, to repeat, first Mind quite mechanically ascribes self-hood to whatever action in the perceptual systems happens to be in focus, and only then carries it across memory, ascribing relentlessly, confabulating and laying claim to everything.  This is how the mind continues to operate in sub-optimal conditions.  This is a very different process to the affirmatory, appropriating action that gives of that sense of “I am” (and, indeed, “we are”).  But that is in the positive life, while this is the life of absence.  As such, it collectivises as Heidegger’s “the They”.  So what we are saying here, really, is that “the They” is also all of us.  It is how we ordinarily see ourselves in others.  It is the most eloquent commentary on personality.  Still, we - or “They” - can function as a living organism called a kin-group well enough in our ordinary, passive state until some external influence – usually large and sociological - impacts upon us negatively.  Then our passivity and confusion make servants of us.  To live at the turn is to banish even the possibility of such servitude, and to hold to oneself the power of decision (as is only “normal” for human beings).

Just to give one example: as a sociological force, modernity’s tendency to alienation perspectivises the close, particular ethnic “us” as a universal and other “They”.  “My people” fades to “people”.  It isn’t good.  But the debilitation of natural characteristics such as ethnic identity and ethnic self-preference does not necessarily show up until “the They” is multiracialised.  Certainly, the European sense of kind survived urbanisation and industrialisation for 250 years, buttressed by the proxies of patriotism, national culture, Christian belief, and perhaps even by the Romantic idea of nation.  But in the second half of the 20th century, in the wake of two brother wars of incalculable detriment, additional modernist elements were brought to bear upon European peoples alongside the phenomenon of mass immigration, some of these passably philosophical, some not even that, some simply commercial.  Very soon the proxies’ power to bind was found wanting.

The disease has since rapidly advanced, atomising, alienating, and always perspectivising for a “They” of a crowd in whom it will one day no longer be possible to acknowledge or even see a shared identity and know belonging, and towards whom it will no longer be possible to feel empathy, love, and responsibility.  It will be the age of anti-identity.  Accordingly, the expression of a “normal” and authentic group consciousness is, in methodological terms, the gold standard for every nationalist in the West, even if he or she has no current understanding of that fact.

It follows that if modernity’s trend to anti-identity, to name but one of the maladies afflicting our race, is collective in its impact, then the turn to a normal consciousness and to identity has a powerful collective aspect also.  In the third and final part of this essay I will examine the prompts and proxies which arise in the life of absence and work through the relational qualities of Being which can give those prompts energy and direction.  For readers who have struggled through this technical intermediate offering I can promise a slightly more stylish and accessible finale.